Roman books and Carolingian renovatio

Abstract

Jean Mabillon’s incidental treatment in his De re diplomatica of the lead bulla of an emperor Charles with the reverse legend Renovatio Roman. Imp. gives no inkling of the reputation it was to acquire in later historiography of the Carolingian empire. Mabillon himself favoured an attribution to Charles the Fat, although between the publication of the first and supplementary volumes of his epoch-making work it had been correctly attributed to the first Charles by the numismatist François Le Blanc. Without these early publications, modern discussion of early Carolingian imperial and renaissance ideology might have been deprived of one of its key texts: for the bull was already in a much damaged condition in the late-nineteenth century and both sides are now almost completely illegible. Its uniqueness, and the great rarity of the ‘imperial bust’ coins which are icono-graphically linked with it, invite us to consider whether the slogans and images of a ‘renewed Roman empire’ were known to more than a privileged few in Charlemagne’s lifetime: even so, if the Annales Mettenses, completed in 805, have been rightly interpreted, someone in the court circle had felt the need to appease critics by emphasising the strictly-Frankish roots of his imperial authority at the same time as the dies of the new coins were being prepared.