II.

Background

The Holy Roman Empire was an attempt to revive the Western Roman Empire, whose legal and political structure had deteriorated during the 5th and 6th centuries and had been replaced by independent kingdoms ruled by Germanic nobles. The Roman imperial office had been vacant after Romulus Augustulus was deposed in ad 476. But, during the turbulent early Middle Ages, the popes had kept alive the traditional concept of a temporal realm coextensive with a spiritual realm of the church. The Byzantine Empire, which controlled the Eastern Roman Empire from its capital, Constantinople (now İstanbul, Turkey), retained nominal sovereignty over the territories formerly controlled by the Western Empire, and many of the Germanic tribes that had seized these territories formally recognized the Byzantine emperor as overlord. Partly because of this and also because the popes depended on Byzantine protection against the Lombards, a Germanic tribe in northern Italy, they continued to recognize the sovereignty of the Eastern Empire.

As the political bonds that had held western Europe together gradually gave way to a variety of successor states, the idea of a universal and eternal Roman Empire did not die out, but was transformed among recently converted barbarian peoples into the ideal of a Christian Empire. The Western Christian, or Roman Catholic, church, had been the one institution that remained unified throughout the former empire.

By the beginning of the 8th century, two developments set the stage for a revived Western empire. First, the Byzantine Empire lost much of its territory as the Muslims expanded during the 7th century. As the political prestige and power of the Byzantine Empire declined, the popes grew increasingly resentful of Byzantine interference in the affairs of the Western church. Byzantine emperors then further increased tensions with Popes Gregory II and Gregory III by increasing taxes and by banning the worship of religious icons (see Iconoclasm). From 726 to 757 Byzantine emperors prohibited all religious statues and paintings, while they continued to be used in the West.

The Eastern emperors were not the only threat to the pope’s power; the Lombards, who went unchecked by any Byzantine presence in northern Italy, also threatened Rome. In seeking protection against the Lombards, the popes turned to the Franks, a tribe that controlled a large amount of territory in what is now France. The Frankish king Pepin the Short first took the battlefield against the Lombards, but it was his son Charlemagne who ultimately established papal sovereignty in what is now Italy. Charlemagne brought the idea of a revived Western empire to life, and became its first emperor.