Old Rome, New Rome, and Future Rome

Abstract

Eastern Roman control of central Italy became increasingly tenuous as the eighth century progressed. The result was a series of popes gradually exercising greater independence from Constantinople. By the middle of the century, popes had begun using the rhetoric of Roman restoration to provide grounds for papal assumption of territorial control over stretches of central Italy taken from the Lombards by the Franks. Papal temporal authority then rested on a forged document called the Donation of Constantine, a document whose claims underpinned Leo IIl’s crowning of Charlemagne as Roman emperor in 800. Although Charlemagne’s Roman imperial title was manufactured, his new Western Roman Empire was framed as a restoration of traditional Western Roman prerogatives that had fallen away—and his new capital at Aachen embodied this transition with buildings constructed from old Roman materials taken from Italy.