👑 Part I: Coronation of Charlemagne | Rome, AD 800 Who were the Franks? A confederation of Germanic peoples who settled in Gaul after Rome’s fall, forming the roots of medieval France and Germany. How did the Carolingians come to power? They rose from mayors of the palace under the Merovingians (an earlier Frankish dynasty descended from Clovis, ruling c. 5th–8th centuries). Charles Martel (Tours, 732) and his line built a unified Frankish realm. Why was the pope involved? After the Western Empire fell in AD 476, authority shifted east to Constantinople, seat of the Byzantine emperors. For centuries the popes were their subjects—but by the 700s, the Byzantines were preoccupied with wars in the East and could no longer defend Italy. The Lombards (a Germanic people who migrated into Italy in the late 6th century and established a kingdom in the north, often pressuring Rome and the papacy) seized much of the peninsula and even threatened Rome. With Byzantium unable to intervene, the ...