From Charles the Great, by Thomas Hodgkin, D.C.L., London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1897; pp. 48-82.
CHAPTER IV
Pippin, King Of The Franks
The unity of the Frankish State, so dearly purchased by the heroic labours of Charles Martel, was as usual placed in jeopardy by the dying ruler’s arrangements for the succession to that which was now openly spoken of as his “principatus.”
He left two sons, Carloman and Pippin, by his first wife Hrotrudis, and one, Grifo, by a Bavarian princess named Swanahild, who he had married after an invasion of her country, and whose sister was the wife of the Lombard king Liutprand.
This was the manner in which Charles Martel divided his dominions among his sons. To the eldest, Carloman, he gave the greater part of Austrasia, Alamannia, and Thuringia; to Pippin, the younger, Neustria, Burgundy and Provence. Apparently both Aquitaine in the south-west, and Bavaria in the south-east were too nearly independent to be thus disposed of by a ruler who, after all, was still in theory only the chief adviser of a Merovingian king, though that king’s royalty was for the present in abeyance.
To Grifo, whose turbulent attempts at insurrection, 49 aided by his mother Swanahild, had troubled the last years of Charles, was assigned a small central state carved out of all the three realms, Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy, at their point of meeting. “As to this third portion,” says the chronicler, “which the dying prince had assigned to the young man Grifo, the Franks were sorely displeased that by the advice of a wicked woman they should be cut up and separated from the lawful heirs. Taking counsel together and joining with them the princes Carloman and Pippin, they collected an army for the capture of Grifo, who, hearing of their intent, took to flight, together with his mother Swanahild and all who were willing to follow him, and all shut themselves up in Lugdunum Clavatum (Laon). But Grifo, seeing that he could not possibly escape, surrendered himself to the keeping of his brothers. Carloman receiving the captive sent him to be kept in safe custody at the New Castle (Neuf Château in the Ardennes): and they placed Swanahild in the monastery of Cala (Chelles near Paris).”
We shall rapidly pass in review the events which led to the concentration of the whole power of the State in the hands of Pippin alone, but first we must notice that for some unexplained reason, possibly in order to give them a better title to the obedience of Aquitaine and Bavaria, the princely brothers decided to bring the kingless period to an end. In 743 Childeric III. was placed on the throne. He was probably about twenty years of age, but the date of his birth, and even his place in the royal pedigree are doubtful. Of his character, of course, we know nothing. He is but the shadow of a shadow, this last Merovingian king.
50Very different from shadows were the two Arnulfing brothers, as they warred with Hunald, Duke of Aquitaine (son of their father’s old troubler Eudo), with Odilo, Duke of Bavaria, with the heathen Saxons, with the restless and disloyal Alamanni. Of the two brothers, Pippin seems to have been somewhat the gentler. It was Carloman the strong and stern warrior, who, infuriated by the faithlessness of the Alamanni, entered their territory, called a muster of their warriors at Cannstadt (near Stuttgart), and then surrounding them by his Franks, disarmed them, and slew many of their leaders. The accounts of this assembly at Cannstadt are dark and perplexing, but on comparing them it certainly seems probable that there was great severity on the part of Carloman, probably treachery and possibly widespread slaughter.
Was it remorse for this bloody deed which changed the character and career of Carloman? It is not expressly so said by any of the chroniclers, yet the statement seems a probable inference from their meagre notices. For it was in the same year (746) in which the strange transaction with the Alamanni had taken place at Cannstadt that Carloman began to talk to his brother Pippin concerning his desire to relinquish the world and devote himself to the service of Almighty God: “Therefore both the brothers made their preparations, Carloman that he might go to the threshold of the apostles Peter and Paul, and Pippin that his brother might make the journey with all honour and splendid gifts.”
Carloman’s decision to embrace the monastic life was not an unexampled sacrifice for a ruler in that day. 51 Sixty years before, Ceadwalla, King of the West Saxons, and twenty years before, his royal kinsman Ine had left their palaces and come to live and die as tonsured monks in Rome. Two years before Carloman’s abdication, Hunald of Aquitaine, and three years after it, Ratchis the Lombard took the same step. Still, the splendid position which Carloman abandoned, and the lowliness of his demeanour after this abdication, touched and awed the heart of his contemporaries.
In 747 Carloman formally renounced his share of power, and went with a long train of nobles and with costly presents in his hand to Rome, “to the threshold of the apostle Peter.” There he submitted to the tonsure and received the clerical habit from Pope Zacharias. After a time, by the pope’s advice, he withdrew to the mountain solitude of Soracte, twenty-eight miles from Rome, where he erected a monastery in honour of St. Sylvester. This saint was the Bishop of Rome who, according to an ecclesiastical fable which was just at this time obtaining wide currency, received from the Emperor Constantine the celebrated “Donation” of Rome and the larger part of Italy. The fable also related that Sylvester had previously sought a refuge in Mount Soracte from the persecution ordained by Constantine while still a Pagan, and had afterwards cured that emperor of leprosy by directing him to a pool on the mountain in which he was to perform a threefold immersion. It need hardly be said that all this is utterly valueless as history, but as it was in that uncritical age accepted as unquestioned truth, the fact that the enthusiast Carloman sought the solitudes of Soracte for the place of his retirement and there dedicated his monastery to St. 52 Sylvester is important as showing what was passing in the minds of men, and especially of devout Frankish princes in that age. Later on, he left his mountain home in Soracte and sought the far-famed monastery of St. Benedict on Monte Cassino. Tradition said that he fled thither by night with one faithful squire, his companion from infancy, and with no sign of his once high dignity. Knocking at the door of the convent he desired speech with the abbot, and when that dignitary appeared, threw himself on the ground before him, confessing that he was a murderer and praying to be allowed to expiate his crime by repentance in the monastery. The abbot, seeing that he was a foreigner asked him of his race and country. “I am a Frank,” said Carloman, “and for my crime I have left my native land of Francia. I heed not exile if only I may not fail of the heavenly fatherland.” He was received into the cell of the novices with his companions and was subjected to severe discipline, as became a man of barbarous race and unknown name, for the abbot was mindful of the apostolic precept, “Try the spirits whether they are of God.” To all these hardships and humiliations Carloman submitted with exemplary patience. It chanced at last that it fell to his lot as a novice to take a week’s turn in the kitchen of the convent. He did his work zealously but made many blunders, for which the head cook, heated with wine, rewarded him with a slap on the face. Meekly the princely scullion replied, “Is that how you ought to serve the brethren? May God pardon you, my brother, and Carloman too.” The last words were perhaps uttered under his breath, for he had not yet revealed his name 53 to anyone. A second and a third time this incident was repeated, and on the last occasion the cook’s blows were cruel and brutal. His faithful squire could then bear the sight no longer. He snatched up the pestle with which the bread was being pounded for the brethren’s soup, and struck the head cook with all his might, saying, “Neither may God spare thee, vile slave, nor may Carloman forgive thee.” Then followed uproar, indignation at the foreigner’s presumption, arrest, imprisonment. Next day the squire was set in the midst of the assembled monks and asked why he had dared to stretch forth his hand against a serving brother “Because,” he answered, “I was indignant at seeing a slave, the meanest of mankind, not only flout and jeer, but actually strike a man, the best and noblest of all that I have ever met with on the earth.” The angry monks demanded who this man whom he, a foreigner, dared to rank before all others, not even excepting the abbot himself. Thus was the truth forced out of him, since it was the will of God that it should no longer be concealed. “That man is Carloman, formerly ruler of the Franks, who, for the love of Christ hath left his kingdom and the glory of the world: who from such high estate has so humbled himself as to be subject not only to the insults but even to the blows of the vilest of men.” Then the monks rose from their seats in terror and prostrated themselves at the feet of Carloman, imploring his forgiveness for aught that they might have done to him in ignorance of his rank. Vainly did he in turn grovel on the earth before them and try to assure them that his comrade had lied and that he was not Carloman. He was recognised by all, held in the highest reverence, and as we 54 shall afterwards see, was selected by the abbot for an important mission.
On the abdication of Carloman, Grifo was liberated by Pippin from his imprisonment which had lasted six years, received by him in his palace with every mark of honour and affection, and invested with several countships and high revenues. This was not enough, however, for Grifo, who probably aspired to an equal share of his late father’s dominions. He allied himself with the Saxons and shared their defeat in battle (748); he sought refuge in Bavaria, and for a time made himself duke of that country (749); expelled from thence by Pippin he betook himself first to Aquitaine and then to the King of Lombards, but was met at Maurienne by Count Theodowin, who was guarding the passes of the Alps in the Frankish interest. A skirmish followed, in which many Frankish nobles fell, Grifo himself and Theodowin among them (753). There was no further obstacle raised by any member of the Arnulfing family to the sole domination of Pippin.
Fateful for all the after-history of Europe were the middle years of the eighth century, upon which we have now entered. The time had at last come when Pippin, virtual sovereign of Gaul and Western Germany, could venture to take the step which had proved fatal to his kinsman Grimwald, and to bring names and facts into accord by proclaiming himself King of the Franks. But in taking this step it behoved him to be sure of two things, the consent of the nation and the sanction of the Church. By the advice and with the consent of all the Franks, expressed no doubt by some assembly of the chief men of the nation, two great ecclesiastics, Fulrad, 55 Abbot of St. Denis representing Neustria, and Burchard, Bishop of Würzburg representing Austrasia, were sent to Rome to ask the opinion of the pope on the great problem. It will be well to state their commission in the words of a contemporary chronicler:
“In the year 750 [it should be 751] from the incarnation of our Lord, Pippin sends ambassadors to Rome to Zacharias the Pope to ask concerning the Kings of the Franks who were of the royal race and were called kings, but had no power in the kingdom except only that grants and charters were drawn up in their names, but they had absolutely no royal power; but what the major domus of the Franks willed, that they did. But on the [first] day of March in the Campus [Martis] according to ancient custom gifts were offered to those kings by the people, and the king himself sat on the royal throne with the army standing round him and the major domus close by, and on that day he gave forth as his orders whatever had been decreed by the Franks, but on every other day thenceforward he sat quietly at home. Pope Zacharias thereupon answered their question according to his apostolic authority, that it seemed better and more expedient to him that he should be called and be king who had power in the kingdom rather than he who was falsely called king. Therefore the aforesaid pope commanded the king and people of the Franks that Pippin who exercised the royal power should be called king and be placed on the royal seat; which was accordingly done by the anointing of the holy archbishop Boniface in the city of Soissons. Pippin is called king, and Childeric who falsely bore that title receives the tonsure and is sent into a monastery.”
56So at length was the great change accomplished towards which Frankish history had been tending for more than a century. What happened was undoubtedly a revolution, though of a peaceful kind. The papal sanction, the archiepiscopal unction might impress the minds of the multitude; this new Christian consecration might partly compensate for the missing glamour of a descent from gods and heroes which had surrounded the dynasty of the Merovings; but in strict right, of course, the Bishop of Rome had no title to command the change, no power to absolve the Salian and Ripuarian Franks from their plighted faith to the descendants of Clovis. It was well thought of to put the scene of the consecration of the new dynasty at Soissons, that place so memorable in the history of the older race. It was also important, if the pope himself could not be induced to cross the Alps to perform the ceremony of anointing, to have it performed by Boniface the Apostle of the Germans, and the most conspicuous ecclesiastical figure in Europe.
We may pause for a moment to notice the remarkable share taken by this man and others of our fellow-countryman in bringing about the conversion of large portions of the German nation to Christianity, and indirectly in founding the Teutonic “Holy Roman Empire” of the Middle Ages. Scarcely had the Anglo-Saxon peoples been won over to the Christian Church, when they began with missionary zeal to preach the faith among their still heathen kinsmen on the Continent. The mission of St. Augustine to Britain took place in the year 596. In 634 was born the Northumbrian Wilfrid, and in 658 his countryman Willibrord, both of 57 whom laboured with zeal and success for the conversion of the heathens of Friesland. A generation later the young Devonian Winifried, born at Crediton, appeared on the banks of the Lower Rhine, to profit by the experience of the aged Willibrord, and to catch his falling mantle. Three times he visited Rome to confer with those great popes, the second and the third Gregory, and to receive their orders for the conversion of fresh tribes in Germany, or for the consolidation of spiritual conquests already achieved. On one of these visits, probably, he received that name of Boniface by which he is best known in history, together with a sort of roving commission as archbishop, and authority to act as legate in the churches of Germany. Armed with this power he set up bishoprics in Bavaria, revived the dying Christianity of Thuringia, and chastised heretics in Gaul. Wherever the armies of Charles Martel marched, in Friesland, in Saxony, Hesse, Archbishop Boniface followed, smashing idols, felling sacred oaks, and baptizing half-unwilling converts. Towards the end of his life his roving commission was changed into the more stationary office of Archbishop of Mainz, and he sometimes retired for repose to the great monastery of Fulda, which he had founded in the Hessian land near the source of the Weser. But the old war-horse was still stirred by the sound of the trumpet. Three years after his consecration of Pippin, Boniface went forth on a last expedition for the conversion of the Frisians. When he reached Dockum (in the north of the present province of Friesland) he found there, instead of the expected catechumens, a multitude of heathens, zealous for the honour of their idols which Boniface had so often 58 destroyed, and eager for the spoil of the ecclesiastical invader. From their hands he received the crown of martyrdom for which he longed.
The career of Boniface is of especial importance, because of his absolute devotion to the see of Rome. It was observed that the recently converted nations, as is so often the case with new converts, surpassed their older brethren in the fervour of their faith. While the bishops of Gaul were lukewarm, sometimes almost insubordinate, the Anglo-Saxon bishops were the devoted adherents of the papacy. Boniface especially professed the most unbounded reverence for the chair of St. Peter, and took with alacrity an oath of implicit obedience, substantially the same which was exacted from the “suburbicarian” bishops of the sees in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome. This was the spirit in which the infant churches were trained, and this no doubt was the tenour of the advice which the zealous Archbishop of Mainz gave to the new King of the Franks on the day of his coronation.
A traveller through the pleasant valleys of Devonshire when he comes to the little town, scarcely more than a village, of Crediton between its two overhanging hills, may reflect with interest that he beholds the birthplace of the man who, more than any other, brought about the entrance of the German nation into the family of Christian Europe.
The coronation of Pippin took place probably about November 751. In four months from that time Pope Zacharias died, doubtless without any presentiment of the abiding importance of the event in which by his answer to the Frankish messengers he had borne a part, 59 but which is not even mentioned by his biographer in the Liber Pontificalis. After a short interval, an ecclesiastic of Roman parentage, who figures in the annals of the papacy as Stephen II., was raised to the papal see. His pontificate was short; it lasted but five years, but they were years full of import for the destinies of Europe.
In order to concentrate our attention on the transformation of the Arnulfing mayors of the palace into Frankish kings, I have hitherto said as little as possible about the affairs of Italy, but this silence can be kept no longer, now that a Roman pope is about to cross the Alps and ask for Frankish aid to enable him to smite down his foes.
The Lombards had invaded Italy in the year 568, and for nearly two centuries from that time there had been waged a kind of triangular contest which, to compare great things with small, was like the litigation which might go on in an English parish between an absentee landlord, a big Nonconformist farmer, and a cultured but acquisitive parson.
The Emperor was the great absentee. Though still always spoken of as Emperor of Rome, he had been in fact for some centuries an absolutely Oriental Sovereign. Since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus in 476, no Roman Emperor had touched the soil of Italy save for one brief and most unwelcome visit paid by Constans II. in 663. The Imperial dominion in the peninsula was by this time limited to the Venetian islands, two provinces on the Adriatic coast called the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis, the city of Hydruntum (Otranto), the province of Bruttii at the very end of the peninsula, 60 Paestum, Naples and the duchy of Rome, which included the city of Rome, the present province of Latium and a little bit of Etruria. This scattered and fragmentary dominion, which as will be seen was almost entirely confined to the sea-coast, and embraced only a part of that, was ruled by an imperial lieutenant who bore the title of Exarch, and whose seat of government was the strong, almost impregnable city of Ravenna.
Far the largest part of Italy, including all the fertile valley of the Po, all the central chain of the Apennines and the valleys leading from them, the greater part of Tuscany and almost the whole of Apulia, was in the possession of the rough and masterful Lombards, who had been fierce savages when they entered Italy, but who had lost most of their savagery and some of their warlike vigour by long residence in the delightful land and by contact with the vestiges of Roman civilisation. Arians for the most part, and even with some heathens among them at the time of their first invasion, they had now embraced the Catholic faith, were generous benefactors of the Church, and desired to be considered her dutiful sons. But still the remembrance of their old heresies continued, and whenever the political interests of the King of the Lombards clashed with those of the Pope of Rome — and they did clash as often and as irreconcilably as do those of pope and king at the present day — the old epithets “unspeakable,” “sacrilegious,” “diabolical,” flowed from the pens of the scribes in the papal chancery as freely as they had flowed when the Lombards were yet idolaters.
As for the pope, how describe in few words his 61 anomalous and fast-changing position? Undoubted Patriarch of the Western Church, he nevertheless had many a struggle with the Patriarch of Constantinople as to his claim to rule the Church Universal. The missionaries whom he had sent forth to convert the Teutonic tribes of England and Germany were, as has been said, zealous asserters of his spiritual pre-eminence, and, like the Jesuits of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the great champions of the rights of Rome. Herein also they were vigorously supported by the monks who had spread widely over all Christian lands, and who at this time were almost without exception followers of the Italian saint, Benedict. Some of the bishops, however, especially some of the Gaulish bishops, were, as has been said, by no means equally prompt in their obedience to the papal see. The pope’s relation to the distant emperor at Constantinople during these centuries of transition is one of the hardest things to describe with accuracy. A subject, and yet in a certain sense a rival, often severely snubbed by the emperor’s representative at Rome, almost adored on one or two occasions when he set foot in Constantinople; elected by the clergy and people of Old Rome, yet for many generations not venturing to assume the title of pope till he received the imperial confirmation from New Rome; a mere ecclesiastic without as yet any pretension to temporal sovereignty, and yet under the stress of circumstances ordering campaigns against the Lombards, installing dukes and displacing tribunes — such in the time of Gregory the Great and for more than a century afterwards had been the anomalous relation of the beatissimus Papa or sanctissimus Pontifex, to his 62 serenissimus Dominus, Christianissimus principum, the man who at Constantinople wore the diadem of Diocletian. The relation was strained and difficult, and one would have said that it could not long endure; and yet (as anomalies, especially in the relations of Church and State, are apt to do), it lasted long, for at least six generations of mankind. During this time the popes had certainly often to complain of harsh and overbearing treatment on the part of their imperial masters. One pope was dragged from the altar to a dungeon; another was banished to the Crimea, and died in that remote place of exile; the life of another was conspired against by murderers in the pay of the emperor’s Italian representative, and those were only the more striking passages in a long history of estrangement and mutual suspicion. Through all, the hold of the pope on the affections of the Roman people was steadily increasing, since he was looked upon as the representative of Roman nationality and Roman orthodoxy against the often schismatical Greek and the always domineering Lombard.
Of late — that is to say, during the greater part of the mayoralty of Charles Martel — the antagonism between pope and emperor had been increased by the dispute about the worship of images. In 726 Leo III., the great Isaurian emperor who had successfully repelled the Saracens from the walls of Constantinople, put forth his edicts for the destruction of the sacred images throughout the empire. These decrees, which roused some of the Greeks to actual insurrection, were met by sullen disobedience on the part of the Italians. The authority of the Exarch of Ravenna was set at naught; the local government was vested in dukes chosen by the 63 enraged image-worshippers; it seemed as though the empire would utterly lose even the vestiges of its dominion in Italy. But at this crisis the pope (Gregory II.), though he had been in strong opposition to the emperor, and had sharply denounced his iconoclastic edicts, restrained the Italians from actual revolt and from the election of a counter-emperor, “hoping for the conversion of the sovereign.” It is difficult to say how the matter ended. Apparently the decrees were not enforced in Italy, nor did the movement of insurrection gather head. The exarch still ruled in Ravenna; the pope still considered himself the subject of the eastern emperor; but there was no cordiality between them, and more and more the popes looked across the Alps to the new Austrasian potentate, rather than to the old Augustus by the Bosphorus, for defence, patronage, and endowment.
The question of the pope’s position is somewhat complicated by the fact that he was probably the largest landowner in Italy. The “Patrimony of St. Peter,” as it was called, comprised great estates in the Campagna, in Samnium, on the Adriatic coast, besides a considerable portion of Sicily. Any estimate of their extent and value can be only guess-work, but it is conjectured that in the time of Gregory the Great they would, if all massed together, have formed a district as large as Lancashire, and that the yearly revenue derived from them amounted to £420,000. It is to be observed that we are here dealing not with sovereignty but with ownership, and that the wide domains thus actually owned by the Bishop of Rome had probably been increased rather than diminished in the century 64 and a half that had elapsed since the death of Gregory.
As to the purposes to which this vast wealth was applied, even a severe critic of the mediæval papacy must admit that they were, in the main, right and noble ones. We have no hint now of that nepotism which was the disgrace of the Roman see in much later ages. None of these early popes, as far as we know, ever “founded a family.” The maintenance of the large and brilliant papal household was doubtless a first charge on the revenues of the see. The costly and somewhat ostentatious gifts of plate to St. Peter’s Church, which are punctually recorded in the Liber Pontificalis, were perhaps a second charge up them. But after all, a large proportion of these revenues must have gone towards the relief of poverty, sickness, and distress. The pope was now what the emperor had once been, the great relieving officer of Rome; not only in the Eternal City, but all over Italy, at any rate while such a pope as the first Gregory sat in St. Peter’s chair, whenever a bishop brought a case of distress under his notice, there was a strong probability that he would receive a grant in aid from the papal revenues.
It is needless to point out what enormous power the ownership of such vast estates and the distribution of such princely revenues must have placed in the hands of the elderly ecclesiastic who was acclaimed as pope by the assembled multitude in the basilica of St. Peter. In the year 751 he was not yet a sovereign, but he was that kind of territorial magnate out of whom a sovereign might easily be made.
The curious and difficult relation which had subsisted 65 for so long between the three great powers in Italy was ended in 751, the year of Pippin’s coronation, when Aistulf, King of the Lombards, captured the city of Ravenna and terminated the exarch’s rule in Italy. Believing evidently that the time had come for the long postponed consolidation of Italy under the Lombard rule, he drew nigh to the city of Rome, and in some way or other threatened its independence. What he actually did it is difficult to discover from the verbose and passionate declamation of the papal biographer, but it seems clear that his soldiers committed some depredations on the “Patrimony of St. Peter,” and it is probable that without laying formal siege to the city he threatened it with war unless the citizens would consent to pay him a poll-tax in acknowledgment of his sovereignty over them.
These depredations, or these schemes of conquest, were not needed to arouse the fierce and passionate hostility of the pope to the all-absorbing Lombard. So long as there had been three great powers in Italy there had been an equilibrium of a certain kind between them. In fact, the pope had more than once invoked the help of the Lombard, “unspeakable” as he called him, against his “most Christian” sovereign in Constantinople, when the latter pressed him too hard. But now the pope and the Lombard king stood face to face with no other rival to their greatness, and each of them probably felt, dimly but certainly, that it would be a duel to the death between them.
It was probably in the year 752, some months after the conquest of Ravenna, and when the hostile intentions of King Aistulf against Rome had been sufficiently 66 indicated, that Pope Stephen II. sent a secret message by a pilgrim who had visited Rome, imploring the King of the Franks to give him a formal invitation to his court. In the spring of 753 the envoys of Pippin brought the desired invitation, and a letter, in which there was probably some promise of protection against the Lombards. Just about the same time a messenger, the silentarius John, arrived from the Emperor Constantine V., desiring the pope to repair to the court of Pavia and solicit King Aistulf to grant the restoration of Ravenna to the empire. The pope had sent more than one urgent message to the emperor imploring his protection, and this futile commission was the only reply. The form of the despatch showed that the emperor still regarded the pope as his subject, but its substance was certainly some justification to Stephen for that transfer of his allegiance from Constantine to Pippin, which had now begun to present itself to his mind as a possible way of escape from his difficulties. In itself the Imperial Commission was not unwelcome, since it necessitated a safe conduct from Aistulf for the journey to Pavia.
On the 13th of October, 753, Pope Stephen set forth from Rome. Many of the Romans followed him out of the gates, weeping and wailing, and striving in vain to prevent him from undertaking the journey. But, though weak in body, he had a stout heart, and was not to be turned from his purpose. When he reached Pavia he was met by the envoys of Aistulf, who brought him the king’s command not to mention the word restitution in connection with Ravenna or the exarchate. He answered boldly that no intimidation should procure his silence on that subject. When admitted to the 67 royal presence he exhibited the gifts which he had brought for the king, and, with many tears, implored him to restore the captured cities to the empire. The request was utterly vain; probably even the imperial silentarius, who was standing by, hardly expected that it would be anything else. But then came another request of much more serious import. Bishop Chrodegang and Duke Autchar, the high-born and powerful representatives of the King of the Franks, asked, in no obsequious tones, that the pope should be allowed to visit their master. The pope was summoned to the royal presence, and questioned as to his desire to cross the Alps. Several of the officers of the court had been sent to Stephen to warn him that he would incur the severe displeasure of the king if he persisted in his project; but when questioned by Aistulf himself, he boldly answered, “If it be your will to relax my bonds, it is altogether my will to undertake the journey.” King Aistulf, we are told, “gnashed his teeth like a lion.” He knew too well what danger this journey foreboded to himself and the whole Lombard state, but the request, so made and so supported, was one that he dared not refuse, and he reluctantly gave his consent. On the 15th of November the pope started from Pavia, and travelled rapidly lest Aistulf should after all seek to detain him. When he reached Aosta he was already in Frankish territory, though on the Italian side of the Alps. The dangers which after that point terrified the pope and his long train of trembling ecclesiastics were only the dangers of nature’s contriving, the steep cliffs and impending avalanches of the Great St. Bernard; henceforth they were safe from the fear of man. Having 68 arrived at the great monastery of St. Maurice, in the valley of the Rhone, the pope and his followers rested there certain days. That had been the appointed place of meeting with the Frankish king, but apparently the impetuous old pope had reached it before he was expected.
“But the king,” says the papal biographer, “hearing of the pope’s arrival, went with great speed to meet him, together with his wife, his sons, and his chief nobles. For which purpose also he directed his son, named Carolus, to meet that quasi-angelic pope, together with some of his nobles. Then he himself, starting from his palace at Ponticum [Ponthieu], dismounted from his horse, and going three miles to meet him, with great humility prostrated himself before him on the ground, and so, together with his wife, sons, and nobles, received that most holy pope, to whom also he served the office of a groom, running for some distance by his stirrup. Then the aforesaid health-bringing man, with all his train, in a loud voice giving glory and ceaseless praises to Almighty God, marched to the palace, together with the king, with hymns and spiritual songs. This befell on the 6th day of January (754), on the most holy festival of the Epiphany.”
This journey of the pope across the Alps is not only the first of a long and fateful series, but affords us our first glance at that young lad who was then only “the king’s son Carolus,” but who was one day to deal with popes on his own account, and was to be known, the world over, as Carolus Magnus. The date, as well as the place of his birth, is uncertain, but it is probable that he was born in 742, the year after his father’s accession to the mayoralty, and was therefore under twelve years of age 69 when he was sent by his father to accompany Stephen II. on his journey of not less than 200 miles from St. Maurice in Switzerland, to Ponthieu in Champagne.
At the entry of the pope, the Frankish king had humbled himself before him. On the next day the parts were reversed. “The pope appeared, together with his clerical companions, in the presence of Pippin. Clothed in sackcloth, and with ashes on his head, he cast himself on the ground, and besought the king, by the mercies of Almighty God, and by the merits of the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, that he would free himself and the Roman people from the hand of the Lombards, and from slavery to the proud king Aistulf; nor would he arise until King Pippin, together with his sons and the nobles of the Franks, stretched forth their hands and lifted him from the ground as a sign of their future support and a pledge of his liberation.”
There are some indications that the nobles and warriors of the Frankish Court were averse to undertaking the risks and hardships of a Transalpine campaign, and it was probably for the sake of winning their concurrence that this scene was enacted. The king, though not perhaps very eager in the cause, was sufficiently bound to the pope by memory of past favours, and the hope of favours to come, in the shape of papal blessings on his newly-assumed royalty.
The winter months of 754 were passed in embassies between the two kings. Pippin called upon Aistulf to cease from his impious presumption, and to leave unmolested the city of St. Peter and St. Paul. His ambassadors brought back naught but words of pride 70 and obstinacy from the Lombard. War was resolved on, but before it began, Pippin, mindful of the chances of war, and determined to secure the succession in his family, resolved to have another confirmation of his doubtful title from the hands of his venerable guest. Pope Stephen, who had passed the winter at the wealthy convent of St. Denis, “anointed the most pious Prince Pippin King of the Franks and Patrician of the Romans with the oil of holy anointing, according to the custom of the ancients, and at the same time crowned his two sons, who stood next him, in happy succession, namely, Charles and Carloman, with the same honour.”
This passage is an important one, and we must pause upon it for a few minutes.
First, as to the rite of anointing. The writers who have most carefully enquired into the matter, are clear that this rite, though it had been practised upon the later Visigothic kings of Spain, and upon some of the British kings in Wales, was new to the Frankish monarchy, when performed first by Boniface and then by Stephen on the head of Pippin. It really rested upon Old Testament precedents, such as the anointings of Saul and of David: and it was possibly intended, as already hinted, to replace in some degree the religious sanction which in old heathen days royal families, such as the Merovingians, had possessed in their fabled descent from gods and demi-gods.
Secondly: as to the bestowal on Pippin of the title “Patrician of the Romans.” Long ago, before the series of Western emperors came to an end, the word patrician had ceased to denote an aristocratic class, and had been used of a single powerful individual, otherwise called 71 “the Father of the Emperor,” who in fact bore to the sovereign a reaction not unlike that which the Frankish mayor of the palace bore to the Merovingian king. Thus, in the fifth century, Aetius and Ricimer had successively borne the dignity of patrician, and in the sixth, the Ostrogothic king Theodoric, speaking by the mouth of his minister Cassiodorus, had said, “The great distinction of the patriciate is that it is a rank held for life, like that of the priesthood from which it sprang. The patrician takes precedence of all other dignities save one, the consulship, and that is one which we ourselves sometimes assume.” Since then, the imperial lieutenant in Italy had apparently always assumed the title of patrician at Rome, in addition to that of exarch by which he was best known at Ravenna. Now that the exarchs were gone, the sonorous and imposing title might perhaps be said to be nobody’s property. If any one had a right to bestow it the emperor at Constantinople was the man: but he was far off and unpopular. There was an obvious temptation to the Bishop of Rome to pick the shining bauble out of the dust and present it to his powerful friend on the other side of the Alps. It is not likely that it included any definite functions of government, but it probably carried with it, in a somewhat ill-defined and shadowy form, the right and the duty of defending from external attacks the people and city of Rome.
Thirdly: the pope included in his coronation service the two boyish sons of Pippin, Charles and Carloman, and at the same time (if we may trust a curious memorandum, the Clausula de Pippino, which professes to have been written in 767 and which is now generally considered 72 authentic) the pope “blessed the Queen Bertrada and the nobles of the Frankish nation, and while confirming them in the grace of the Holy Spirit, he bound them under penalty of interdict and excommunication never to presume to elect a king who should come forth from the loins of any other than these persons whom Divine Providence had raised to the throne, and who through the intercession of the holy Apostles had been consecrated and confirmed by the hands of their vicar, the pope.” Even so: that which had been done in the case of the last Merovingian was never to be repeated in the case of any Arnulfing however inefficient. The ruler who four years ago was only king de facto must now claim to the uttermost all the rights of a king de jure descended from a long line of regal ancestors.
This solemn coronation of Pippin took place, we are told, on the 28th of July 754. We naturally ask what had so long delayed the intended expedition into Italy. There had been a dangerous illness of the pope, the result of the hardships of his journey and of the unaccustomed rigours of a Gaulish winter. There had also been more embassies: apparently Pippin would exhaust all the resources of negotiation before he proceeded to war. And lastly there had appeared at the royal villa of Carisiacum an unexpected advocate to plead for the Lombard king. This was none other than Pippin’s brother Carloman, lately ruler of Austrasia, and the senior partner in the semi-royal firm, now a tonsured monk, humbly though earnestly advocating the cause of peace. The papal biographer sees in him only a dupe tempted forth from his monastery by the “devilish persuasions of the unspeakable tyrant, Aistulf,” and “striving 73 vehemently with all his might to subvert the cause of God’s Holy Church.” Certainly this intervention of the newly-made monk against the great Head and Patron of all monks, is one of the strangest incidents in his strange career: but it may be permitted us to conjecture that during his seven years’ residence in Italy he had acquired somewhat of an Italian heart and had learnt to dread the ravages of
“the arméd torrent poured
Down the steep Alps.”
Possibly too in the silence of his convent he had learned to estimate at their true value the papal claims to wealth and wide dominion, and with prophetic soul foresaw that the armed interference of the Franks in the quarrels of pope and Lombard king would in the end bring good neither to the Church nor to his father’s house.
But whatever Carloman’s motives might be, his interposition on behalf of Aistulf was firmly, perhaps ungraciously, repelled. He was not allowed to return to Italy, but was confined in a monastery in France, “where after certain days,” says the biographer, “at the call of God he migrated from light of day.” He died on the 17th August 754. There is no suggestion of foul play, and indeed Pippin's character, as far as we know it, is too noble to warrant any such suggestion. It seems probable that Carloman died broken-hearted at the discovery that he had renounced the honest worldliness of the palace for the baser and more hypocritical worldliness of the cloister and the cathedral.
After this episode of the intervention of Carloman, his sons were shorn and sent to a convent. Grifo also, 74 as we have seen, perished a little before this time. There now remained only Pippin and his sons visibly before the world as representatives of the great Arnulfing House.
At last all the negotiations were ended, and in the late summer Pippin with his whole army marched against Aistulf. He had reached S. Jean de Maurienne: the pass of Mont Cenis rose before him, by which he must make his way into Italy. He was still, however, on Frankish ground, for, as the result of the war between Lombards and Franks centuries previously, both Mont Cenis and (as has already been said) the Great St. Bernard with their adjacent towns of Susa and Aosta formed part of the Frankish kingdom. The Lombard king had come as far as Susa and had there accumulated great store of warlike machines, “for the nefarious defence of his kingdom against the republic and the Roman Apostolic see.” He had, however, neglected the obvious precaution of sending soldiers forward to secure the heights and harass the Frankish army in their passage over the mountain. Thus it came to pass that a small but brave body of men, the advance-guard of Pippin's army, emerged unhindered into the valley of Susa. Thinking to win an easy victory Aistulf launched the Lombard host upon them. But the Franks, strong in their pious faith in God and St. Peter, and fighting also in a narrow valley, where the superior numbers of the enemy gave them no advantage, bravely repelled the Lombard onset. After Aistulf had seen many of his dukes and counts fall around him he turned to flee, and halted not till with few followers he had reached his capital of Pavia. Now was the path clear before the 75 Frankish king, who without difficulty crossed the mountains, sacked the rich Lombard camp, laid waste the valley of the Po with fire and sword, and appeared with all his host under the walls of Pavia. After some days Aistulf sounded the trumpet for parley, and sought terms of peace. This was granted to him on condition of his paying 30,000 solidi (£18,000) to Pippin and promising to restore to the papacy all the estates which he had torn from the papal patrimony and to live henceforth at peace with the successor of St. Peter, who had by this time returned to Rome. Possibly there was also included in the terms of this peace the far more important condition that he should surrender to the pope the Pentapolis and the cities of Ceccano and Narni in the neighbourhood of Rome, as well as pay a yearly tribute of 5000 solidi (£3000) to the Frankish king.
Though hostages had been given and solemn oaths sworn for the performance of these conditions, the Lombard king did not keep, perhaps had never intended to keep them. Narni indeed was handed over to the pope, but apparently none of the other cities or lands which Aistulf had promised to restore; and on New Year’s day 756 he appeared with a large army before the gates of Rome. The men of Tuscany blockaded the gate of St. Peter’s; the Beneventans, the gates of St. Paul and St. John Lateran; while Aistulf himself, like another Alaric, appeared before the Salarian gate and called upon the citizens as they valued their lives, to open the gate and hand over the pontiff to his tender mercies. For nearly two months had the siege lasted when Stephen II. contrived, through the agency of the abbot Warnehar, to make audible to Pippin his piteous 76 cries for help. In the last and most urgent of these letters the pope associates St. Peter with himself, represents the Apostle as praying Pippin to hasten his aid, “lest you should allow this city of Rome to perish, in which the Lord has appointed that my body should rest, and which He has commended to my protection and made the foundation of the faith.” This letter is certainly a very daring rhetorical artifice, but it is probable that it was understood to be that and nothing more, both by the sender and the receiver.
This time the Frankish king required but little persuasion. The flagrant breach of the treaty made with himself, as well as with the pope, was an insult which called for vengeance. In the spring of 756 he put his army in motion, and after a rapid march by way of Chalons and Geneva he was once more under the snows of Mont Cenis. The Lombard soldiers again failed to prevent his passage over the crest of the pass, and when he had descended into the higher valleys where they were stationed, the Franks, who had evidently among them many trained mountaineers (no doubt from the regions now known as Dauphiné, Savoy, and Switzerland) turned the position of the Lombards by mountain tracks which they had left unguarded, and descending upon them with that furia Francese of which in a later day Italy was to have so many and such fatal examples, slew a multitude of the enemy and put the rest to flight. Again was all the upper valley of the Po devastated by the Frankish troops, and again did Pippin pitch his tents on either side of the Ticino under the walls of Pavia. At the sight thereof, Aistulf, abandoning all hope of successful resistance, obtained the mediation of 77 the nobles and bishops in the invading army, and, imploring pardon for his broken promises, submitted to the conditions, hard as they were, imposed by the conqueror. These were, the surrender to Pippin of one third of the royal hoard stored up through many generations at Pavia, the bestowal of large presents on the nobles of the Frankish court, the payment of long arrears of tribute, and, now at length in very deed, the cession of the cities of the exarchate and the Pentapolis.
But to whom were these cities, wrested as they had been by the Lombards from the representative of the Eastern Emperor, to be ceded? That was a question which, though it had probably been discussed and decided by the Pope and the King of the Franks, had not received a definite answer in the face of Europe till this summer of 756. It happened that at the very time when Pippin was opening his campaign, there arrived in Rome, George and John, Chief Secretary and Captain of the Guard, from the Emperor Constantine V. on a mission to the Frankish king. Journeying by sea to Marseilles, and then crossing the Alps, the Secretary found Pippin under the walls of Pavia, and entreated him with much earnestness and with the promise of many gifts from the emperor, to hand over the city of Ravenna and the other cities of the exarchate to the imperial rule. “But not thus,” says the papal biographer, “did he avail to bend the strong will of that most Christian and most benign man, so loyal to God and such a lover of St. Peter, King Pippin, to hand over those cities to the imperial dominion; for that devout and most mild-mannered king declared that never should those cities be alienated from the power of St. Peter, and the rights 78 of the Roman Church and the pontiff of the Apostolic see: affirming with an oath that not to win the favour of any mortal man had he twice addressed himself to the fight, but solely for the love of St. Peter and for the pardon of his sins: and vowing too that no amount of money should induce him to take away what he had once given to St. Peter. With this answer he gave the imperial messenger leave to return to his country by another way, and he having failed in his commission returned to Rome.”
This is apparently the critical point from which we must date the pope’s independence of the Eastern, or as we ought still to call him, the Roman Emperor. Up to this time, whatever divergencies there may have been in doctrine or in policy, the Bishop of Rome has always been in theory the subject of the Emperor of Rome. Now he distinctly asserts, by the mouth of his powerful friend from over the Alps, that certain broad domains which have been conquered from the empire, shall be handed over not to the emperor but to himself. He shakes himself loose from his old subjection and becomes by the same act a sovereign prince, not only — and this is an important point — in the newly-acquired territory of the exarchate, but also in his old home of the Ducatus Romae.
The cities now handed over to the see of Rome were twenty-two in number, and stretched along the Adriatic coast from the mouths of the Po to within a few miles of Ancona and inland as far as the Apennines. The plenipotentiary of the Frankish king, Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis, travelled through the Pentapolis, and the exarchate, together with Aistulf’s commissioner, entered 79 each city, received its keys and was introduced to the chief magistrates, who journeyed onward in his train. All these arrived at Rome. The local magistrates were doubtless presented to their new sovereign. The keys of Ravenna and all the other cities were laid on St. Peter’s tomb along with the donation by which King Pippin granted them for ever to St. Peter and the pope. This done Abbot Fulrad returned to Paris, having accomplished his world-historical mission. Stephen II., 94th Bishop of Rome, was now in fact not only pope but king, and a beginning was made of those “States of the Church” which with one brief interval have down to our own day intersected the map of Italy.
I have dwelt at considerable length on Pippin’s relations with the papacy, because they are inseparably connected with the most important event in the history of his son. His other achievements, though remarkable, and though they were very evidently much nearer to his heart (for his intervention in Italian affairs was done grudgingly and almost against his will), must be dismissed in a few words.
In the first place, in the year 759 a Frankish army besieged Narbonne. A solemn oath was sworn to the Goths, that if they would surrender the city to Pippin they should be allowed to keep their own separate laws, and on this the Goths rose, slew the Saracens who held the city for the Caliph of Cordova, and handed it over to the Frankish generals. With this capture ended the Moslem domination in Southern Gaul, though it was not the last time that the turbans of the Moors were to be seen north of the Pyrenees.
The conditions upon which the Christian inhabitants 80 of Narbonne consented to help the Frankish host against the Saracens, show how strong was still the spirit of separate Gothic nationality in that part of Gaul. Something of the same spirit, blended with other elements, tended to make all that great region south and west of the Loire, which went by the name of Aquitaine, seek for independence from the Franks whom she still looked upon as strangers and foreigners. We have seen how this spirit of independence was working when Eudo was Duke of Aquitaine and Charles Martel major domus of Francia, and how it was only the pressure of a terrible danger which caused Eudo to seek the help of Charles before the battle of Poitiers. Eudo was succeeded (735) by his son Hunold, who seven years after, on the death of Charles Martel, strove to throw off the Frankish yoke, but soon found that what the father had won his two sons were well able to maintain. In 744 Hunold, by false oaths, enticed into his power his brother Hatto, who apparently aspired to share his dominion, put out his eyes and thrust him into prison. Then, apparently in penitence for this crime, he, like Carloman, retired into a monastery and was succeeded in his duchy by his son Waifar.
This Waifar, Duke of Aquitaine, is a man of whom we would gladly know more, but of whose deeds no song or saga has preserved the memory. Only a few dry sentences in chronicles, written by the flatterers of his foe, tell us that for nine years (760-768) King Pippin carried on with him a war which, beginning with complaints about the withholding of the revenues of some Frankish churches, was more and more embittered as time went on, and in the end became nothing less than 81 a struggle for the absolute subjugation of Aquitaine and the destruction of the dynasty of Eudo. In 768 the Frankish king took the mother, sister, and nieces of Waifar prisoners in the town of Saintes. Still the chief fugitive escaped him. In the forests of Perigord, among the mountain-caves of the Dordogne where, ages before, neolithic man had graven the likeness of the reindeer and the bear, the grandson of Eudo made his ever-changing hiding-places. At length the warriors of Pippin dividing themselves into four bands ran him to earth somewhere in Saintonge. He was at once put to death, and the dream of an independent Aquitaine vanished.
While Pippin was labouring over the work, so necessary from his point of view, of the subjugation of Aquitaine, Bavaria, which held a somewhat similar position of semi-independence on the south-east of the kingdom, was escaping from his grasp. The work of the reconquest of this great duchy had to be left to his sons, and I must postpone to a future chapter the story of the changing fortunes of Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria.
It was while tarrying at Saintes and celebrating his triumph over Waifar that Pippin was attacked by his last and fatal sickness. In vain did he visit the shrines of St. Martin of Tours and St. Denis at Paris. The hand of death was upon him, and having convoked all the nobles, dukes, and counts of the Franks, and all the bishops and chief ecclesiastics of the kingdom to an assembly at Paris, he there solemnly, “with the consent of his chiefs,” divided his dominions between his two sons, Charles and Carloman. He then after a few days died (24th September 768) and was buried at St. Denis 82 with great pomp. He had governed the people of the Franks either as major domus or as king for twenty-six years, and he had probably reached about the 54th year of his age. The princes of the Arnulfing line, though not like the debauched and short-lived Merovings, seldom saw the end of their sixth decade of life.
What Pippin did for the foundation of the monarchy which was to be the basis of the new settlement of Europe, was in its way quite as important and even more enduring than that which was done by his more illustrious son, upon whose reign we now enter.