On Christmas day 800 AD King Charles was crowned in Rome by Pope Leo III as Emperor of the West.
The crowning of King Charles was significant.
Charlemagne was the name King Charles was to be known and he was the son of Pepin the Short, a petty chief of the Franks, who rose to acclaim through havoc, plunder, war and the shedding of tremendous quantities of human blood, and where corpses were left strewn across the landscape, as he was marauding like a bull across the immediate human settlements.
The reign of Charlemagne was to follow along that same bloody and brutish path. There was no philosophy or positive motivation guiding them, only petty rulership of people was the motivation.
The rise of Pepin the Short came after the fall of the Roman Empire, that elegant universal government established through long years of the application of Stoicism as a way of governing and a way of life. In general the Roman Empire years was the years of peace and stability. There was relative peace and nations of people traded in peace and prosperity increased.
The fall of Roman Empire ushered in the period we call the Middle Ages or the Medieval period. Marc Bloch the great French writer wrote extensively about this period. And so with the fall of Roman Empire by the barbarians like Pepin the Short brutishness replaced elegance and sophistication.
This was an era of war as the Roman Empire disintegrated leaving a universal vacuum of power that the barbarian chiefs exploited while colliding with each other. And because of their lack of sophistication and coherent philosophy the barbariabs went on destroying the glory and great order that was established through the long years of Roman rule.
The Roman Empire period was a great time to live in. Nations lived in peace as they traded and made business with each other. The Empire was in its zenith and shining glory during the Pax Romana (the reign of Augustus Caesar). Pax Romana is a term which means the peace that Rome established.
Remember that the Roman Empire began with Augustus Caesar around 26 BC. This was a great time when Rome built routes and established trade among different nations, forming a universal solid league of nations. In actual fact when Woodrow Wilson established the League of Nations (which was to be renamed the United Nations) after the First World War in Geneva he had in mind what the Roman Empire did by extending its reach far and wide and allowing nations of the world to self rule and respect each other thus establishing universal peace. But Woodrow Wilson failed. After the Geneva conference, back home in America, Woodrow Wilson collapsed. This was 1919. He suffered a severe stroke that left him incapacitated until the end of his presidency in 1921. And the League of Nations as his brain child became undeveloped like a child with no father. So the United Nations as it is now has no power at all.
Woodrow Wilson was a great president in the mold of some of the Greek and Roman Emperors like Augustus Caesar and Alexander the Great. The problem with Wilson was that he seemed to have placed the weight of the whole world on his shoulders.
Rome rose to universal power through Augustus Caesar. Augustus Caesar was a stoic philosopher. Stoicism philosophy is a powerful approach to life. This is a philosophy that have elevated even slaves like Demosthenes and Epictetus from dirt poverty to supreme positions of grandeur.
It was through Stoicism that Greece through Athens conquered the surrounding countries and became great. It was through Stoicism the Greeks came up with military innovations that led to the establishment of the most powerful military formation and military strategy of that time. This military formation and military strategy was called the Hoplite. And the soldiers were called hoplites. It was a heavy military formation anchored by genius to attack like a swarm of bees. Its genius laid in its rectangles formation called the phalanx.
Aristotle as a student of Plato was to rise in stature and became a philosopher in his own right, breaking away from Plato’s view of the world, he developed a separate view. He was appointed as a tutor by King Philip of Macedon and became a personal trainer of King Philip’s son Alexander. Alexander went on to become Alexander the Great. He conquered the whole known world and was thought to be more God than man.
Alexander started when he was nineteen years of age and by the time he died of a fever at age thirty two or thirty three he had unified the whole world as one universal empire guided by Stoicism, or the philosophy that preceded Stoicism. I say this because some will have us believe that Stoicism as a philosophy is the brain child of Zeno. That may be correct but it gives a false impression. Zeno adapted and packaged fragments of different but interwoven ideas that were already there. Zeno’s job was much more like a news editor or news anchor who take on several news reports from news reporters and out of that create a news program in the case of radio or television, and in the case of a newspaper create an issue for the day.
The period following Alexander the Great was called the Hellenistic Age. That was three hundred years before Christ. The period was unified not by politics or rulership but by the ideas of progress, stoicism. This was the time when Zeno wad born and was to become a philosopher. Because Zeno was teaching openly in public while other philosophers were teaching privately in private gardens with small groups of people, Zeno became popular. He would stand in public in a stoa and teach great multitudes of people. And from there in that stoa where large crowds of people came to be educated developed what has come to us as Stoicism or Stoic philosophy, from the word stoa.
What Zeno did was not a discovery. He only developed what was already there and made it popular. In other words, Zeno adapted a profound education that was reserved for the upper classes and taught it to the masses. From there on society at large was transformed by stoicism.
People embraced stoicism and were beginning to find true being and internality of life, there were becoming, to use the word that was used in those days, autonomous. Which only meant that they were self reliant and believed in themselves more than they believed in chiefs or kings or queens. They started to be driven from within and develop personal power.
Back to Charlemagne. Around the time that Charlemagne was rising to power, Stoicism was pretty much down and under. And the Roman Catholic Church has taken over. Most Roman Emperors were Stoics but Constatine shifted from that position and organized Christians and fought his enemy Marcus Aurelius Valerius Maxentius and he won to become Emperor.
That’s how a switch was made in history. From there on we have the Christian Church ruling and was to be called the Holy Roman Empire. The West is simply Christianity, or it originated as Christianity.
Charlemagne was more warlike and for him to be crowned by the Church as the Holy Roman Emperor or Emperor of the West was remarkable. The motivations for the crowning of Charlemagne were personal and selfish, and mutual. Pope Leo was disrespected and tossed around like a football in Rome and his title meant nothing. Charlemagne being a powerful rising figure full of blood, and having killed many people and having a lot of bastard children all over, wanted to cool himself from his bloody and evil ways. He wanted to wash his stench. Being crowned by a holy Pope was to achieve just that. And Pope Leo was going to be protected and respected because now he is friend of a great feared king.
With that act, the prestige and power of the Bishop of Rome, that is the Pope, was restored. Even today, the Bishop of Rome as the Pope towers above all political powers in the world. The Pope has great universal power and that power is exercised in silent through influence. There is no authority in the world that is respected and bowed to like the Pope.
