Charlemagne Is Crowned Emperor in Rome
A Frankish king becomes the first Western emperor in three centuries, the ancestor claim every later German Reich would invoke
Quick facts
- Location
- St. Peter's Basilica, Rome
- Crowned by
- Pope Leo III
- Title
- Imperator Romanorum (Emperor of the Romans)
- Prior conquest
- Saxon Wars (772-804), forced conversion of the Saxons
What happened
On Christmas Day in the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned the Frankish king Charlemagne emperor at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Charlemagne's kingdom already stretched across most of what is now France, Germany, the Low Countries, and northern Italy, built up over three decades of campaigns including a long, brutal war to conquer and forcibly convert the Saxons in northern Germany. The coronation made him the first person to hold the title of Roman emperor in the West since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, though the title's meaning and Charlemagne's own foreknowledge of the ceremony remain debated among historians.
Why it matters
Charlemagne's empire fractured among his grandsons within a few decades, but the idea he embodied, a Christian Roman emperor ruling the Germanic and Frankish lands with the pope's blessing, became the template that Otto I revived in 962 to found the Holy Roman Empire. Later German nationalists and the Nazi regime itself would both invoke Charlemagne as the founder of a specifically German imperial tradition, a claim historians treat with caution since his empire was Frankish, not German in any modern sense.
How we know
The coronation is described in near-contemporary Frankish sources, including Einhard's biography of Charlemagne and the Royal Frankish Annals, though these sources differ on how much Charlemagne knew in advance and give somewhat different accounts of the ceremony.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Charlemagne · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Medievalists.net. The Significance of the Coronation of Charlemagne · Reputable sourcemedievalists.net · The domain "medievalists.net" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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