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It was now more than a century since any of the descendants of Clovis
had actually reigned. Since the death of Dagobert (638) the kings had
merely succeeded. The power was entirely in the hands of their chief
subjects, and since 687 in the hands of the family of Pepin. It was
they, the Mayors of the Palace, who ruled, the Merovingian kings only
appearing in public once or twice in the course of their reign. So real
was the power of the Carolingians that, within half a century, of their
first laying hold of it Charles Martel was able to leave the kingship
vacant for thirteen years. Pepin, when he succeeded his father, filled
it once more, but in 751, flushed with a series of new victories, and,
since the retirement of Carloman his brother to an Italian monastery,
sole ruler of the Franks like his father before him, he determined to
end the anomaly once for all. The Merovingian should be deposed and
himself, with the reality of power, have the title also. He set the
problem before the pope as a case of conscience. The pope agreed to the
abstract case that whoever really ruled should be called king, and
Pepin, strong in this ratification, assumed the succession for himself
and his family in a general assembly of the nation. The last of the
Merovingians was tonsured, with his son, and Pepin was consecrated king
by St. Boniface.
This consecration, a solemn anointing with holy oil, already in use
among the Visigoths and the Anglo-Saxons, [ ] was a novelty in Gaul. It
gave the new monarchy, from the beginning, something of a sacred
character; and in the eyes of the new kings also, it may be, warranted
that control in Church matters which they took over from the
Merovingians and which they were to develop very strikingly in the next
hundred years until it reached to the nomination of the popes
themselves. Three years later the anointing was repeated with even
greater solemnity. This time, in 754, it was the pope himself who
conferred it, and on Pepin's sons as well -- Carloman and the future
Charlemagne -- announcing, "It is the Lord who through our lowliness
consecrates you as king."
It was not merely to ratify the act of Boniface that, in 753, Stephen
II had made the long journey from Rome to Quierzy. Between the first
and second consecrations of Pepin a revolution in Italy had altered the
whole temporal status of the papacy, and in that revolution the
Frankish king's action had been the decisive factor. It has already
been noted how, in the time of St. Gregory the Great, the Roman popes
found themselves faced with the insoluble problem of being the loyal
subjects of an emperor who would not come to terms with the Lombard
invaders and who yet could not defeat them. As the seventh century wore
on this problem grew even more acute. The Lombards increased their
conquests until -- outside Calabria -- Aquileia, Venice, Rome, Naples,
and their neighbouring countrysides were all that was left of
Justinian's Italy. The Lombards, meanwhile, had abandoned their
Arianism; they were now devout Catholics. The emperors, on the other
hand, were the leaders and chief promoters of new heresies, of
Monothelism in the seventh century, of Iconoclasm in the eighth. They
showed themselves as ready to tyrannise in matters of religion, as
willing to harry and even to murder the popes, as they were incompetent
to defend their inheritance against the Lombards. Their representative
at Ravenna lost his hold on all except the actual territory round that
city; and while the duchies of Naples and Venice tended to become
autonomous, the duchy of Rome, thanks to the popes, not only remained
loyal but, more than once, helped by the circumstance that it was papal
territory no less than imperial, it came to the assistance of the
beleaguered exarch in Ravenna. It was a curious situation when the
pope, whose properties the emperor had confiscated, whose arrest he had
ordered, and against whom he had fitted out a great fleet, was the
solitary defence in Italy of the emperor's representative.
But during the reigns of the popes who were the patrons of St. Boniface
-- Gregory II, Gregory III and Zachary -- events occurred that brought
this anomaly to an end. The Lombard chiefs were, by this time (c. 715),
three in number; there was the king of the Lombards, whose capital was
Pavia; there were the two dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, nominally his
subjects, but actually more than half independent. The king
contemporary with these three popes was Liutprand (712-744), the
greatest of all the Lombard kings and, as events were to show, an
excellent Catholic.
It was the new religious policy of the Emperor Leo III that occasioned
the beginnings of change. When Gregory II denounced the imperial laws
that forbade the veneration of images and banished them from the
churches, the creaking imperial machinery was set in motion to reduce
him to submission, as it had been set in motion against his
predecessors, Sergius I in 695 and St. Martin I in 654. As in 695, the
Roman people and the Roman division of the imperial army stood by the
pope. The Lombards too joined with them, and it was their army that
halted the exarch as he marched from Ravenna to execute the imperial
will against St. Gregory. The exarch retreated to his capital, his
troops mutinied and in the riot he lost his life. His successor
preferred the ways of negotiation and, as a preliminary to reducing the
pope, was bidden to break the new, unheard-of, papal alliance with the
Lombards. The involved diplomacy, in which the mutual rivalry of the
Lombard king and dukes played its part, ended curiously enough in a
three-cornered pact between pope, exarch, and the Lombard king. This
was in 730. The next year Gregory II died.
His successor Gregory III, a Syrian, was just as resolute in his
opposition to the Iconoclast emperor and in his defence of Leo's
victims. The emperor confiscated the papal estates in Sicily and
southern Italy. He cut the communications between the pope and the
bishops of these provinces. But against the pope himself he was
powerless, thanks to the growing autonomy of the duchies now separated
from Ravenna by intervening Lombard territories, and thanks to the
Lombard reduction of the exarch's power. The ten years of Gregory III's
rule (731-741) were years of Lombard conquest, and the Romans were
sufficiently ill-advised to assist the Duke of Spoleto against the
king, and so to give Liutprand every excuse he needed to capture Rome
itself. Rome the king did not indeed attack, but he had captured four
towns in the north of the duchy when Gregory III died. The next pope,
Zachary -- yet another oriental -- was more diplomatic. As Liutprand
marched on Rome the papal policy changed. The cause of the rebel Duke
of Spoleto was abandoned. The king promised to evacuate the Roman
territory, and to restore the captured towns; and the Roman army joined
with his to attack Spoleto. Two years later it was the turn of Ravenna
to feel the weight of the Lombard power. Liutprand, master of Bologna,
and of Cesena, had Ravenna in his hands when Zachary besought him to
spare it. Once more the papal diplomacy, because it was papal, was
successful.
In the following year (744) Liutprand died. The new king, Ratchis, was
equally warlike, and equally docile to the voice of St. Peter. As
Liutprand had abandoned his campaign against Ravenna, so Ratchis now
gave up the siege of Perugia. He did more, for in 749 he abdicated, and
buried himself in the monastery of Monte Cassino -- an ill event for
the fortunes of the imperial rule. Aistulf who succeeded him was of
quite another stamp. Before Pope Zachary died (March, 752) Aistulf had
taken Ravenna and its duchy, bringing the imperial rule to an end once
and for all. He then turned to the towns that lay between his new
territories and Rome -- Perugia, Todi, Amelia -- and to the conquest of
Rome itself. The new pope, Stephen II (752-757), set himself to
negotiate, and secured a peace of forty years. That was in June, 752.
By the autumn the treaty was in pieces, and Aistulf demanding tribute
from the Romans as the price of his "protection." Once more the pope
negotiated, but this time in vain-Aistulf was inflexible. The papal
ambassadors were both of them his own subjects, and the king sent them
back to their respective monasteries.
The winter passed with the Romans anxiously awaiting the descent of
Aistulf's army with the first good days of spring From the emperor --
Constantine V -- all that came was an order to the pope to negotiate
with Aistulf for the restoration of Ravenna. The Romans evidently must
save themselves; the pope must somehow defeat the Lombards -- and he
had no resources-or become their subject, losing the de facto
independence he had enjoyed for half a century, and submitting to a
barbarian master: unless he could find an ally who would deal
effectively with the Lombards and disinterestedly with himself. The
pope turned to the Franks, with whose princes, very largely because of
St. Boniface, the papacy had been in close relation for thirty years
and more.
That the Franks should be called in to defend Rome against the Lombards
was in keeping with Roman political tradition. Its last appearance had
been so recently as the time of Pope Stephen's own predecessor Gregory
III, who had made a great appeal to Charles Martel in 739, but
fruitlessly. The Frank was then the ally of Liutprand, and saw no good
reason why he should make war on his friend to restore Byzantinism at
Rome. Thirteen years later the situation was very different.
Byzantinism was dead, in Rome and even in Ravenna. Nor was the pope
appealing now for its restoration. It was protection for St. Peter
himself, his shrine, his people, his city that was the motive of the
appeal. Charles Martel, too, was dead. In his place the pious Pepin
reigned, and as recently as a matter of months ago Pepin had sought,
and obtained, from St. Peter that ratification which consecrated as a
religious act the coup d’etat by which he and his family had succeeded
to the heritage of Clovis.
The pope approached Pepin with the utmost secrecy, using a pilgrim as
his agent. Pepin, in return, sent to Rome the Abbot of Jumieges. The
reply which the abbot carried back to France was to the effect that the
pope wished to treat personally of the important matter and besought
Pepin to provide a suitable escort for his protection. Pepin agreed,
and in the September of 753 the escort arrived in Rome.
It found the pope prepared for his momentous journey, and it found with
him yet another ambassador from the emperor. In the very hour when the
pope, determined to end at last the dangerous futility of his nominal
dependence on Constantinople, was setting out to meet his new
protector, Byzantinism had again intervened. The pope was ordered to
seek out Aistulf and to induce him to restore Ravenna to the empire.
It was then a curiously mixed caravan, where the last of one age and
the first of another met, that set out from Rome on October 14, 753,
the pope, the imperial ambassador, the Franks. At Pavia they met the
Lombard king. The pope made his appeal, the imperial ambassador
supplemented it with his own eloquence and a letter from Constantine V.
Aistulf, of course, remained unmoved. Whereupon the convoy split up.
The Greeks returned to Constantinople; the pope, despite Aistulf's
efforts to detain him, made his way to Aosta and the pass of the St.
Bernard. At St. Moritz envoys from Pepin met him; at Langres, Pepin's
son, the future Charlemagne. By the feast of the Epiphany 754 the pope
had reached the royal palace at Ponthieu. Pepin with his court had gone
out to meet him, had prostrated himself before the pope and in the
procession walked beside him holding his stirrup.
The next day the fateful interview took place. The pope and his court
appeared before the Frankish king clad in sackcloth, ashes on their
heads. They besought him to bring about a peaceful settlement of the
cause of St. Peter and of the Roman State. Pepin consented, and pledged
himself to restore the exarchate with all its rights and territories.
Negotiations with Aistulf were opened forthwith. Pepin began by
demanding a pledge that the Lombards, out of reverence for St. Peter
and St. Paul, would for the future abstain from all hostilities against
their city. Aistulf refused, and in two great assemblies of the Franks
(at Braisne on March 1 and at Kiersy-sur-Oise on April 14, 754) it was
agreed-not without opposition -- that the Lombards should be compelled
by force of arms. Pepin marched his army across the Alps and laid siege
to Pavia. Aistulf consented to treat. He agreed to surrender Ravenna
and his other conquests and even Narni, a Roman town taken years before
by Liutprand. In October, 754, the pope returned to Rome.
Aistulf made over Narni to Pepin's representatives, and waited until
Pepin and his army were safely over the Alps. Then he went back on his
word. He refused to complete the surrender, and returned to the war of
raid and pillage against Rome which had driven Pope Stephen to call in
the Franks. On January 1, 756, he laid siege to Rome itself. The pope
had already urged Pepin to return and complete the work of his first
campaign. Now he managed to send a further embassy from the beleaguered
city. The envoys took with them, among other letters, one addressed to
the whole Frankish nation, written in the name of St. Peter, "I, Peter
the Apostle."
Pepin did not delay. As the Frankish army moved south Aistulf abandoned
the siege of Rome and marched to meet it. He was defeated and locked
himself up in Pavia. Pepin followed and as he prepared to lay siege to
the town, once more the ghost of Byzantine Italy appeared. The same
high official from Constantinople who had accompanied the pope in the
mission of 753 now returned, to demand, of Pepin this time, that the
disputed territories should, when he had reconquered them, be made over
to the imperial government. Pepin refused. He had gone to war, he
explained, for love of St. Peter, hoping by delivering the apostle to
win pardon for his sins. The ambassador retired, this time finally. It
was the old empire's definitive abandonment of its claim to the city
whence it had sprung. Rome was to begin its history anew, independent
of the empire which still continued to bear its name.
The holy war continued. Aistulf was once more compelled to plead. This
time the terms were more severe, and Pepin installed an army of
occupation until they had been executed. Frankish officials went from
town to town receiving the surrenders and the keys of the gates and
then, making their way to Rome, they laid the collection before the
tomb of the apostle. The pope was now, through the Frankish king's
devotion to St. Peter, independent of any temporal ruler, was himself
ruler, in name as in fact, of the city and State in which his see was
fixed. A new and immense complication was thereby added to the
development of Catholicism in the lands once ruled by the Roman Emperor
of the West.
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