[Sidenote: Lewis recrowned, 816.] Another sign of Lewis’ extreme regard for the Church was given at the very commencement of his reign. When pope Leo III., the aged pontiff, who had crowned Charles the Great, died in 816 the Romans elected, in great haste, Stephen IV. as his successor. The new Pope was consecrated without the imperial sanction being sought, but Lewis made no objection, and showed no wrath at this disregard of his prerogative. So far was he from resentment that he allowed Stephen to represent to him that his coronation at Aachen had lacked the Church’s blessing, inasmuch as he had taken the crown from the altar with his own hands. To render Lewis’ position more like that of his great father, the Pope proposed to cross the Alps and recrown his master. Lewis took no offence at the slur thrown on the form of his election to the empire, but received Stephen in great state at Rheims, and was there crowned for the second time (816). Thus he loosened his own grasp on the Papacy in one year, and allowed the Pope to tighten his grasp on the empire in the next. In 817 happened an accident which was to have the gravest consequences on the emperor’s character and fate. He was passing with all his train over a wooden gallery which connected the cathedral and the palace at Aachen, when the whole structure came crashing to the ground. Many of the courtiers were killed, and the emperor himself received injuries which confined him to his bed for many weeks. The shock and the narrow escape from death set Lewis meditating on the instability of life and the necessity for being always prepared for the grave. He had never been anything but sober and self-contained, but he now fell into a morbid and lugubrious frame of mind, which never left him till his dying day. If he had only hitherto been a daring sinner he might have salved his conscience by turning to a new manner of life: but being already a man of blameless and virtuous habits, his conversion only led him into an exaggerated asceticism. He abandoned the study of profane literature, which had hitherto soothed his leisure hours, and would for the rest of his life read nothing but theology. We are even told that he destroyed the collection of Old Frankish heroic poems which his father had made, because of the many traces of heathenism which he found in them. It was with difficulty that his councillors prevented him two years later from laying down his crown and retiring to a monastery.