The Papacy and the Carolingians

Boniface’s reform of the Frankish church unfolded against the greatest political transformation of the age: the displacement of the worn-out Merovingian dynasty by the Carolingians, sealed in 751 when Pepin was made king with the sanction of Pope Zacharias. Boniface, the pope’s legate and the realm’s leading churchman, stood close to this event — but exactly how close is one of the genuinely disputed questions of his career. This file examines his role in the Roman–Carolingian alliance, presents the contested question of whether he anointed Pepin king in 751 with both scholarly positions named and cited, and insists that the whole be read in its pre-Schism setting, without anachronism.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Apostle of the Germans; martyr)

The Roman–Carolingian Convergence

The deep current of eighth-century Western politics was the drawing-together of two powers: the papacy, increasingly menaced by the Lombards in Italy and looking for a protector beyond the failing Byzantine exarchate, and the Carolingian mayors of the palace, who held real power in the Frankish realm but lacked the royal title, which still belonged to the figurehead Merovingian kings (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009). Each had something the other needed: the Carolingians could offer the popes military protection against the Lombards; the popes could offer the Carolingians the legitimacy to make their de facto power into de jure kingship. The alliance that resulted would reshape Europe — it produced the Frankish protectorate over Rome, the Papal States, and ultimately the imperial coronation of Charlemagne in 800.

Boniface stood within this convergence. As the pope’s legate in the Frankish realm and the sponsor of the reforming councils, he was a principal channel of Roman influence at the Carolingian court, and the reform he led — which bound the Frankish church more closely to Rome — served the larger alliance (Wood 2001). His personal relationships ran deep on both sides: he corresponded intimately with three popes and worked closely with Carloman and, more warily, with Pepin (see The Correspondence).

The Question of 751

In 751 the alliance bore its decisive fruit. Pepin, having consolidated power after his brother Carloman withdrew to monastic life, sent to Pope Zacharias the famous question — who ought to be king, the one who held the power or the one who merely held the title? — and Zacharias replied that it was better that he who held the power should be called king (this exchange is reported in the Frankish royal annals; Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 749/751; Wood 2001). With this sanction the last Merovingian, Childeric III, was deposed and tonsured into a monastery, and Pepin was raised to the kingship and anointed — the first Frankish king to be consecrated by ecclesiastical unction, a momentous innovation that grounded Carolingian kingship in a sacral, biblical idiom (the anointing of Saul and David) and bound it to the church (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009).

The question for Boniface’s biography is: did Boniface perform the anointing of Pepin? Later tradition, and many older accounts, say he did — that the Apostle of the Germans, as the leading churchman and papal legate, anointed the first Carolingian king at Soissons in 751, a fittingly climactic role for his career. But the matter is genuinely disputed, and the disposition demanded by this collection’s methodology is to present both positions with their sources rather than to assert either (METHODOLOGY §4).

[Disputed: Boniface's role in the anointing of Pepin in 751 is contested. The later *Clausula de unctione Pippini* (a near-contemporary or somewhat later note) and a strand of Frankish tradition associate the anointing with Boniface, and older scholarship often stated flatly that Boniface anointed Pepin (so, e.g., the traditional account followed in many older histories); but the contemporary *Annales regni Francorum* and the earliest sources do not name Boniface as the consecrator, and modern scholars — notably Josef Semmler and, in the Anglophone literature, Ian Wood (2001) and others — argue that there is no secure contemporary evidence that Boniface performed the anointing, that his relations with Pepin were in fact cool in this period, and that the attribution may be a later assumption or an honorific tradition. The matter cannot be resolved from the surviving evidence; the cautious modern position is that Boniface's personal performance of the 751 anointing is unproven and probably unlikely, while his general involvement in the Roman–Carolingian alliance is certain.]

Why the Doubt

Several considerations underlie the modern skepticism. First, the earliest and most authoritative source for the events of 751, the Frankish royal annals, records the deposition of Childeric and the elevation of Pepin “according to the custom of the Franks” and with the pope’s sanction, but does not say that Boniface anointed him; the explicit attribution to Boniface appears in later or less secure texts (Wood 2001; the Annales regni Francorum, s.a. 750/751). Second, Boniface’s own letters from these years suggest a relationship with Pepin that was respectful but strained — Boniface complains of obstacles to his reform and of insufficient support, hardly the tone of a man at the center of Pepin’s coronation (Tangl 86–87 / Emerton, Letters 78, 86; Emerton 1940; Wood 2001). Third, Boniface was by 751 an old man, increasingly disengaged from the Frankish court and turning his attention back to the mission field; within three years he would resign his see and go to die in Frisia. The picture of the aged, partly sidelined reformer crowning the new king sits awkwardly with the documentary record (Wood 2001; Palmer 2009).

On the other side, the defenders of the traditional attribution point to the Clausula de unctione Pippini and to the inherent plausibility that the realm’s senior churchman and papal legate would officiate at so solemn an act; and they note that the absence of a name in the terse royal annals is not proof that Boniface was not involved (Levison 1946, who treats the question with caution; and the older biographical tradition). The honest conclusion is the one stated in the Disputed note: Boniface’s involvement in the alliance is certain, his performance of the 751 anointing is unproven and now widely doubted, and the sources do not allow a firm verdict.

Reading It Without Anachronism

Whatever the truth of 751, the larger significance of Boniface’s place in the Roman–Carolingian alliance must be read in its own eighth-century terms and not through the lens of later controversies (METHODOLOGY §4). It is tempting, from a much later vantage, to see in the papal sanction of Pepin’s kingship and the binding of the Frankish church to Rome the seeds of the medieval papal monarchy and of the eventual estrangement of Western and Eastern Christendom. But that is to read backward. In 751 the Church was undivided; the pope was the senior apostolic patriarch of the West, and the Carolingian turn to him was the turn of a Western people to their own first see, not yet entangled in the doctrinal and jurisdictional disputes that would divide East and West three centuries later (see A Roman Loyalist and the Undivided Church). Boniface’s part in the alliance — like his loyalty to Rome generally — belongs to the history of the undivided Church, and it is anachronistic to enlist it on one side of a schism that had not yet happened and that he could not have imagined.

What can be said plainly is this: Boniface helped knit the Frankish church and the papacy together, and that knitting was one of the formative events of European history. Whether or not his hand poured the oil on Pepin’s head, his life’s work — the Roman-aligned, reformed, organized church he built in Germany and pressed upon Francia — was part of the foundation on which the Carolingian order, and the Latin Christendom that followed, was raised.

References

The Letters of Saint Boniface. Trans. Ephraim Emerton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. (Boniface’s strained relations with Pepin and frustrations of his last years, Letters 78, 86.)
Annales regni Francorum (The Royal Frankish Annals). Trans. Bernhard Walter Scholz, in Carolingian Chronicles. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. (The deposition of Childeric III and the elevation of Pepin, s.a. 749–751, without naming Boniface as consecrator.)
Levison, Wilhelm. England and the Continent in the Eighth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946. (The Roman–Carolingian alliance; cautious treatment of the anointing question.)
Wood, Ian. The Missionary Life: Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050. Harlow: Longman, 2001. (The skeptical case against Boniface’s performance of the 751 anointing; his cool relations with Pepin.)
Palmer, James T. Anglo-Saxons in a Frankish World, 690–900. Turnhout: Brepols, 2009. (The Roman–Carolingian convergence and its European significance.)