The Council of Frankfurt, traditionally also the Council of Frankfort, in 794 was called by Charlemagne, as a meeting of the important churchmen of the Frankish realm. Bishops and priests from Francia, Aquitaine, Italy, and Provence gathered in Franconofurd (now known as Frankfurt am Main). The synod, held in June 794, allowed the discussion and resolution of many central religious and political questions. The chief concerns of the council were the Frankish response to the Adoptionist movement in Spain and the Second Council of Nicaea (787), which had been held by the Byzantine Empress Irene of Athens and had dealt with iconoclasm and with which Charlemagne took issue because no Frankish churchmen had been invited. Ultimately, the council condemned the Adoptionist heresy and revoked the Nicene Council's decrees regarding holy icons, condemning both iconodulism (veneration of icons) and iconoclasm (destruction of icons), "allowing that images could be useful educational devices, but denying that they were worthy of veneration."

Participants

The participants in the Frankfurt synod included, among others, Paulinus II the Patriarch of Aquileia, Peter, Archbishop of Milan, the Benedictine Abbot Benedict of Aniane, the Abbot Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel, as well as many bishops of England, Gaul, Aquitaine, the Spanish March, the County of Roussillon, and the lower Languedoc. Theophylactus and Stephen of Rome took part as representatives of Pope Hadrian I and bearers of his epistula dogmatica. The French church historian Émile Amann counts the Council of Frankfurt among the "crucial synods of the whole church"

Topics and outcomes of the Council

The topics and items of discussion at the Council of Frankfurt were gathered together in 56 chapters, covering a number of points of varying theological, political and legal significance. The first five points of this agenda have been granted the greatest historical significance in historical research: Because the Pope had to take account of Byzantium as well as the Franks in his decisions, he had allowed the rulings of Nicaea to be accepted but only with reservations. In the capitulary summarising the conclusions of the Council of Frankfurt, the rejection of image worship was formulated as "complete" and "unanimous". The fifty one chapters following these first five dealt, among other things, with synodal decrees for several Spanish bishops on various topics, with a ban on collecting money for entrance to monasteries and other decisions pertaining to ecclesiastical law, as well as with minutiae of tax regulations relating to the collection of the tithe. The rulings of the Council of 794 were compiled by hand and published in the form of a capitulary written in Medieval Latin. This Capitulary of the Council (also known as the Frankfurt Capitulary) does not survive in the original manuscript, but handwritten copies from the late ninth century as well as the tenth and eleventh centuries are preserved to this day. Two of these are kept in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. They are written in Carolingian minuscule, the script which was developed at the end of the eighth century and in use in the time of Charlemagne. Whether the original manuscript of the Capitulary was also written in this script is not certain; on the basis of the historical development of this script and its use in the Frankish realm, its use in the Capitulary seems likely.

Miscellaneous