On Christmas day in 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. At the ceremony, which took place in Rome, the king was presented with the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and a banner of Jerusalem. Charlemagne’s decision to be crowned on this date may have been motivated by widespread apocalyptic expectations that the year 800 would usher in a new epoch in human history. And it was against this background that Charlemagne established intensive contacts with Harun al-Rashid, the Abbasid caliph whose empire included the province of Greater Syria. The ties between Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid were due, at least in part, to shared interests—the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. For Charlemagne, the Abbasids helped keep the Byzantine Empire in check, while for Harun al-Rashid, the Frankish king was a buffer against the threat posed by the remaining Umayyads—the previous regional Islamic dynasty—in Spain.
In the decades prior, Christians in Jerusalem had begun to seek the financial assistance and protection of Christian rulers in Europe. These contacts intensified under Charlemagne, who exchanged several delegations with the patriarch of Jerusalem and Harun al-Rashid. Charlemagne’s first delegation to the Abbasid caliph, sent in 797, consisted of two Frankish representatives named Lantfrid and Sigismund, neither of whom survived the mission, and a Jewish interpreter named Isaac. A few weeks after Charlemagne’s coronation, a delegation sent by Harun al-Rashid arrived and announced that a gift of an African elephant was on its way. In 801, Isaac arrived at Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen) with the elephant, named Abul Abaz, who died nine years later.
In 799, a delegation sent by the patriarch of Jerusalem to Aix-la-Chapelle brought gifts to Charlemagne, who dispatched his own delegation to Jerusalem led by the palace priest Zacharias. Zacharias returned to Rome on December 23, 800, with the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the banner of Jerusalem. These delegations are described in the Royal Annals of Charlemagne’s court, where the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre are linked to the king’s coronation:
AD 800 The king released the monk of Jerusalem [sent to Charlemagne by the patriarch of Jerusalem the previous year] and set him on his journey home, sending with him Zacharias, a priest of his palace, to take his gifts to the holy places. . . . On the same day Zacharias came to Rome on his way back from the East, along with two monks, one from the Mount of Olives and one from the monastery of St. Sabas, whom the patriarch of Jerusalem had sent to the king with Zacharias, to bring to him for blessing the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and of Calvary, and also those of the city itself and Mount Sion, along with a standard. . . . And the number of the years changed to 801.
AD 801 On the holy day of Christmas itself [i.e., AD 800 in the Julian calendar], at a mass before the tomb of St Peter the apostle, Pope Leo placed a crown upon the king’s head as he rose from prayer . . . and setting aside the title of patrician [Charlemagne] was named emperor and Augustus.
While Charlemagne designed his capital at Aix-la-Chapelle as a “new Rome” and modeled his palace (which has disappeared) after that of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, he also cultivated an image as heir to David and Solomon through his patronage of the Christians and churches of Jerusalem. Jerusalem’s influence is evident in the design of the Palatine Chapel at the heart of Charlemagne’s palace: an inner octagon surrounded by a sixteen-sided ambulatory, which still stands today. Although it was modeled after the Church of San Vitale in Ravenna, the chapel was intended to recall the Rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as well as the Dome of the Rock, which, perhaps by this time and certainly by the Crusades, was identified by Christians as Solomon’s temple. The master builder of the chapel, Odo of Metz, might be the same courtier nicknamed in some sources “Hiram”—the name of the king of Tyre who supplied cedars of Lebanon and skilled craftsmen for Solomon’s temple. And Charlemagne’s court biographer Einhard, who wrote the Life of Charles in the early 830s, was nicknamed Bezalel, the figure in Exodus said to have designed the biblical tabernacle.
The expectation that Charlemagne’s investiture in the year 800 would usher in a new epoch in human history focused attention on Jerusalem—the site of the return of the messiah and the Last Judgement. These apocalyptic and eschatological expectations are expressed in the layout and decoration of the Palatine Chapel. For example, the octagonal plan alludes to Christ’s resurrection eight days after Palm Sunday, and the image of Christ enthroned in judgement in the cupola was inspired by the description of the apocalypse in Revelation. The total length of the octagon and the sixteen-sided ambulatory is one hundred forty-four feet—three times the octagon’s diameter and height of forty-eight feet—corresponding to the number of cubits mentioned in Revelation 21:17 as the length of Jerusalem’s walls. One hundred forty-four stars surround the figure of Christ in the cupola, symbolizing the one hundred forty-four thousand souls saved at the apocalypse. These correspondences might even indicate that Charlemagne intended the Palatine Chapel to be a symbol of Jerusalem.
Charlemagne’s ties to Jerusalem and his patronage of its churches would have bolstered his claim to have ushered in a new era as ruler of a revived Christian Roman empire. These ties were solidified not only by Charlemagne’s benefactions to Jerusalem but by the sacred relics enshrined in the Palatine Chapel, including, perhaps, a splinter from the Holy Cross and an ancient marble throne as well as the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The altar in the center of the octagon, with the figure of Christ seated in judgement above, was consecrated to the Trinity, an expression of Charlemagne’s commitment to defending Catholic orthodoxy against heresies. One of these was adoptionism, a doctrine that considers Jesus to be God’s “adopted son” instead of his “only begotten son.” Another controversy concerned the filioque (“and of the son”), a phrase that was added to the Nicene Creed by the Western church but was rejected by the Greeks, which states that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from God but from his son Jesus: “And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque).” The controversy over the filioque was a major cause of the schism between the Eastern Orthodox and Western churches.
To determine how much money to send, Charlemagne sent a delegation to visit the churches and Christians in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Holy Land. The delegation compiled a list of churches and monasteries detailing the numbers of clerical and monastic personnel and the dimensions of the buildings in a group of documents written circa 808. The report is titled the Commemoratorium de Casis Dei vel Monasteriis. The measurements are recorded in dexters, which are approximately five feet each. The Commemoratorium provides valuable information about the Christian population of Jerusalem and its churches and monasteries around 800, as illustrated by this excerpt:
The book of the inventory of those houses of God and monasteries, which exist in the Holy City of Jerusalem, and in the surrounding country; and of the bishops, priests, deacons, monks, and all clergy, serving in those holy places of God; and of the convents of nuns.
In the first place, there are at the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord, 9 priests, 14 deacons, 6 sub-deacons, 23 canons, 13 guardians, who are called fragelites, 41 monks, 12 persons, who walk before the patriarch with tapers, 17 servants of the patriarch, 2 overseers (praepositi), 2 accountants (computarii), 2 notaries, 2 priests, who diligently watch over the Sepulchre of the Lord.
There is one priest at Holy Calvary; at the place of the Cup of the Lord, 2 priests; at the place of the Holy Cross and of the Napkin, 2 priests and one deacon.
There is a seneschal (syncellus) who keeps all things in order under the patriarch, 2 stewards (cellaria), one treasurer, one guardian of the cisterns (fontes), 9 porters. The total number is one hundred fifty, three hospitallers (hospitalibus) being excepted.
The data in the Commemoratorium indicate that the number of clergy in the Jerusalem patriarchate had declined since its height in the sixth and seventh centuries, although Jerusalem still had more than thirty churches and more than seven hundred monks and priests in its environs.
Bernard the Wise, a Frankish monk who visited the Holy Land in 867, refers to the charitable foundations established by Charlemagne in Jerusalem:
Then we went to the holy city of Jerusalem, where we were received in the hostel founded there by the glorious Emperor Charles, in which are received all pilgrims who speak the Latin tongue; adjoining to which is a church in honor of St. Mary, with a most noble library founded by the same emperor, with twelve dwellings, fields, vineyards and a garden in the Valley of Jehosaphat. In front of the hostel is a market, for which every one trading there pays yearly to him who provides it two gold pieces.
The buildings mentioned by Bernard—including a church dedicated to Saint Mary la Latine (Saint Mary of the Latins, so named because of the use of Latin in the liturgy), a hostel for pilgrims, a monastery, a convent, and a library, and a marketplace—were in the Muristan Quarter, just south of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Apparently, there was also a church dedicated to John the Baptist. The Muristan, which means “hospital” in Kurdish, is so called because, in the twelfth century, the area was allocated to the Knights of the Order of Hospitallers. Charlemagne’s buildings in the Muristan were destroyed in 1009 by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, whose order to raze the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ignited the Crusader quest to take the Holy Land.
Unfortunately, the cordial relations between East and West fostered by Harun al-Rashid and Charlemagne did not last long after them. Indeed, al-Hakim’s order to dismantle the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ignited one of the bloodiest epochs in Jerusalem’s history, and outbreaks of war and violence continue to the present day. But the basic layout of the walled city is largely unchanged since Charlemagne’s time. The Dome of the Rock remains Jerusalem’s most iconic monument, and the Temple Mount continues to be a bone of contention for those who seek to use it to legitimize religious or political claims. Control of the thirty-seven-acre esplanade lies at the heart of the current conflict, which cannot be resolved without understanding its roots in Jerusalem’s long and complex history. As the dwelling place of the God of Israel and the site of the Last Judgement, the very thing that makes Jerusalem special also divides the followers of the three Abrahamic faiths.
This essay is adapted from Jerusalem Through the Ages: From Its Beginnings to the Crusades (Oxford, 2024).
