Leo III was pope from 795 to 816. Beaten and nearly mutilated by Roman opponents in 799, he fled to Charlemagne at Paderborn, cleared himself by oath in December 800, and two days later crowned Charlemagne emperor in Saint Peter's.
Leo III was pope from 26 December 795 until his death on 12 June 816, a Roman churchman who rose through the papal treasury rather than the city's aristocracy. His pontificate is remembered for one scene, the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor in Saint Peter's on Christmas Day 800, but that scene closed a crisis that had nearly destroyed him.
On 25 April 799 men led by Paschal and Campulus, Lateran officials from the family of his predecessor Adrian I, dragged him from his horse during a procession and tried to put out his eyes and cut out his tongue. He escaped to Charlemagne at Paderborn, returned to Rome under Frankish escort, and on 23 December 800 swore on the Gospels that the charges of adultery and perjury against him were false. Two days later he crowned the king.
The rest of his long reign shows a pope who depended on Frankish protection without always doing what the Franks wanted. He refused Charlemagne's demand to add the filioque to the Creed, intervened in English church politics from Canterbury to Northumbria, and after Charlemagne's death executed Roman conspirators on his own authority in 815.
Leo was born in Rome, probably about 750; no source gives the year. The Liber Pontificalis, the series of papal lives kept at the Lateran, calls him a Roman and names his father Atzuppius, and the Chronicon Anianense, a chronicle compiled at the abbey of Aniane, adds that his mother was called Elizabeth. The father's name is unusual in Rome and has led historians to suggest a Greek or eastern family background, and Leo seems to have known Greek.
He did not come from the Roman nobility. His biography says he was brought up from childhood in the vestiarium, the office that kept the papal treasury, and he stayed in its service after he was ordained subdeacon and then cardinal priest of the church of Santa Susanna. By the time Adrian I died he was head of that office and one of the pope's chief administrators. Paolo Delogu notes that some of the church restorations the biography credits to Leo were probably carried out in these years, and the biography praises the energy with which he collected alms and bequests for the treasury, officially for the poor.
Almost everything written about Leo in his lifetime was written for or against him in the crisis of 799–800, and the picture depends on which side the writer took. His life in the Liber Pontificalis, composed at the Lateran, presents a devout and generous pope, lists his gifts to Roman churches pound by pound, and treats his survival in 799 as a miracle in which God restored the eyes and tongue his attackers had torn out. The Paderborn poem Karolus magnus et Leo papa, written by a poet at Charlemagne's court, mentions the mutilation five times and the healing seven, because a pope healed by God could hardly be the adulterer his enemies described.
The Frankish evidence is cooler. When Leo was elected, Charlemagne's letter of congratulation, carried by his counsellor Angilbert, told him to keep the canons, live honestly and fight simony, which reads more like a warning than a welcome. After Leo's return to Rome, Arn of Salzburg, one of the Frankish envoys, wrote to Alcuin about the pope's way of life in terms so damaging that Alcuin burned the letter. Alcuin still insisted that no one could judge the apostolic see, and it was that principle, not a verdict of innocence, that saved Leo in 800.
His own actions show a harder and more independent man than either portrait. He governed Rome as its ruler: calling the papal chair a throne rather than a seat probably began with him, and he kept founding domuscultae, estates farmed directly for the Church, against the resentment of Roman landowners. In 810 he faced down Charlemagne's theologians over the wording of the Creed, and when a second plot against him was uncovered in 815 he had the conspirators put to death under Roman law without asking the emperor.
Modern judgements divide along the same line. Some accounts treat him as a modest figure who lacked Adrian I's firmness and lived in Charlemagne's shadow, while Delogu reads his reign as a steady attempt to make the pope a sovereign in Rome beside, not beneath, the Frankish ruler. The accusations of 799 were never proved in any forum, and no surviving source allows a reader to decide whether they had any basis.
Leo was elected on 26 December 795, the day Adrian I was buried, and consecrated the next day; the haste may have been meant to leave the Franks no opening to influence the choice. He then went further than Adrian had. With the news of his election he sent Charlemagne the keys of the confessio of Saint Peter and the banner of the city of Rome, and asked him to send envoys to receive the Romans' oath of loyalty, openly treating the Frankish king, who held the title of patrician of the Romans, as the city's protector.
Charlemagne replied with advice on how a pope should live and with a large share of the treasure his armies had just taken from the Avars. Leo spent it on Rome. His biography credits him with restoring churches across the city, rebuilding his own Santa Susanna and the church of Saints Nereus and Achilleus, and giving plate and furnishings amounting to more than 22,000 pounds of silver and 1,400 pounds of gold; in 807 alone he gave silver lamps to 119 churches, probably every church then in use. In 798, at Charlemagne's request, he also made Salzburg the archbishopric of Bavaria under Arn.
At the Lateran he built a great ceremonial hall, the triclinium, modelled on the halls of the imperial palace in Constantinople. Its apse mosaic showed Christ sending the apostles out to preach. On the arch to the left Christ gave a banner to Constantine and a symbol of office to a figure read as Saint Peter or Pope Sylvester; on the right Saint Peter gave the pallium to Leo and a banner to Charlemagne, still called king, with an inscription asking Peter for life for Pope Leo and victory for King Charles. The hall is gone, and the mosaic in the piazza of San Giovanni in Laterano is a remake of 1743 from seventeenth-century drawings.
On 25 April 799, the day of the Greater Litany, Leo was riding to San Lorenzo in Lucina when armed men attacked him near the monastery of San Silvestro in Capite. They were led by Paschal, the primicerius, and Campulus, senior Lateran officials who had been Leo's colleagues there and belonged to Adrian I's family. They pulled him from his horse, tore his vestments and tried to gouge out his eyes and cut out his tongue, then dragged him into the church, beat him, locked him in the monastery and moved him by night to Sant'Erasmo on the Caelian Hill. That same night the papal official Albinus broke in with loyal men and carried him to Saint Peter's, and Winigis, Duke of Spoleto, whom Charlemagne had charged with watching Rome, took him to Spoleto.
How badly he was hurt is the most disputed fact of his life. Einhard, writing after Charlemagne's death, says flatly that the Romans tore out his eyes and cut out his tongue. The Liber Pontificalis and the Paderborn poem describe the same mutilation and add that God healed him. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes wrote that he was blinded but kept some sight because the men blinding him took pity on him. The papal biography itself has Albinus's men find him able to see and speak on the night of the attack, which suggests the attempt failed and that the miracle answered the charge that a maimed man was unfit to be pope.
Leo decided he needed Charlemagne in person. Escorted by Frankish officers he crossed the Alps and in the summer of 799 reached Paderborn in Saxony, where the king was campaigning, and consecrated an altar in the palace chapel. Envoys from his enemies followed, accusing him of adultery and perjury and demanding that he retire to a monastery or clear himself by oath. Charlemagne decided nothing there and sent him back with Frankish bishops and counts led by Hildebald of Cologne and Arn of Salzburg. On 29 November 799 the clergy, nobles and foreign communities of Rome met him at the Milvian Bridge, and when the envoys opened their inquiry no accuser would stand by the charges. Paschal and Campulus were sent north as prisoners.
Charlemagne came to Italy in 800 to settle the case himself. On 23 November Leo rode out to meet him at Mentana, twelve miles from Rome, the distance at which Roman ceremony received an emperor, and the next day waited for him at the top of the steps of Saint Peter's. On 1 December the king opened an assembly of Frankish and Roman clergy and nobles in the basilica. The accusers could not prove their charges, and the bishops declared that they had no right to judge the apostolic see, which by a principle found in texts falsely attributed to Pope Symmachus could be judged by no one.
That left Leo under suspicion but untried, and he cleared himself the way his accusers had proposed at Paderborn. On 23 December he climbed the ambo of Saint Peter's holding the Gospels and swore before Charlemagne and the assembly that he had no part in the crimes charged against him. The papal and Frankish accounts present the oath as his free choice; Delogu points out that an oath of purgation was a heavy loss of dignity that a pope accepted only because the alternative was a trial. The text of the oath preserved in canon-law collections has itself been questioned as a later version.
Two days later, at Christmas mass in Saint Peter's, Charlemagne knelt before the tomb of the apostle and Leo placed a crown on his head; the Romans then acclaimed him: 'To Charles, most pious Augustus, crowned by God, great and peaceful emperor, life and victory.' In the same ceremony Charlemagne's son Charles the Younger was anointed king. The order of the rite mattered. In Constantinople the acclamation made an emperor and the patriarch crowned him afterwards; by crowning first, Leo made the imperial title look like a papal gift. Einhard later wrote that Charlemagne would not have entered the church had he known what the pope intended, but moving the Christmas station to Saint Peter's and preparing a crown cannot have escaped him, and Delogu suggests his anger was at the order of the rite rather than at the title.
Byzantine writers saw a bargain. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, writing in the 810s, says that Leo crowned Charles 'repaying his debt' after the king took vengeance on his enemies, and that he anointed him with oil from head to foot, a detail the papal and Frankish accounts do not give. Within days Charlemagne, now able to act as judge in Rome, had Paschal, Campulus and their associates condemned to death for treason under Roman law; at Leo's request the sentences were commuted to exile in Francia.