No More Learning

His style is exactly the opposite to that of Aldhelm. It has no
eccentricities or affectations, but is always direct, sincere, and simple.
Year by year for forty years he worked industriously, producing in turn
commentaries on the Scriptures and works on natural history, grammar,
and history. For us his historical works are the most important, and
of these the greatest and best is the Ecclesiastical History of the English
Nation. This contains five books. The first is introductory and deals
briefly with Christianity in Britain before the advent of Augustine; the
other four books deal each with a period of about 83 years, or one
generation, and bring the story down to 731. The success of this history
was immediate, and copies of it quickly spread over the Continent, so
that at his death Bede had secured a European reputation.
Bede's most important pupil was Ecgbert, already mentioned as the
first Archbishop of York. To him Bede wrote his last extant letter,
dated 5 Nov. 734, pleading for ecclesiastical reforms in Northumbria
and denouncing pseudo-monasteries. Ecgbert partly answered this
appeal by developing his cathedral school, forming it on the Canterbury
model, and here was educated Alcuin, the second English scholar to
gain a European reputation in the eighth century. His work, though
it throws great lustre on York, was not done in England, but at the
court of Charles the Great, with whom he took service. It is a sufficient
proof, however, that England in Offa's day had attained to a literary
pre-eminence in the West that the great Frankish ruler should have
looked to England for a scholar to set over his palace school.
Besides these Latin scholars, there is good evidence that throughout
the seventh and eighth centuries there were also many court bards in
England who cultivated the art of poetry in English, handing on from
generation to generation traditional lays which told of the deeds of the
heathen heroes of the past and perhaps composing fresh ones in honour
of the English kings and their ancestors. These lays have much in
common with the Homeric poems and like them are highly elaborated.
Both Aldhelm and Alcuin refer to their existence, but only fragments of
them still survive modified to suit Christian ears. The most important
example is the Song of Beowulf already referred to. This deals with
Danish and Swedish heroes and extends to 3000 lines. English poetry
was also cultivated in ruder forms by the common people; for Bede tells
us that wherever villagers met for amusement it was customary for the
harp to be handed round among the company and for English songs to
be sung. A tale is also told of Aldhelm which points in the same
direction, how it was his wont to stand on a bridge near Malmesbury
and sing songs to the peasants to attract them to church. The best
known maker of English Sacred Songs was Caedmon of Whitby.


## p. 575 (#607) ############################################

575
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE CARLOVINGIAN REVOLUTION AND FRANKISH
INTERVENTION IN ITALY.
The eighth century had hardly entered on its second half when the
last of the long-haired Merovingians was thrust from the throne of the
Franks, and Pepin the mayor of the palace hailed as king. The change
seemed slight, for the new dynasty had served a long apprenticeship.
For more than a century the descendants of Clovis had been mere puppets
in a king's seat, while the descendants of St Arnulf, though called
only Mayors of the Palace or Dukes and Princes of the Franks, had
managed, and with vigour and success, the affairs of the realm. Their
neighbours, the scoffing Greeks, marvelled at the strange ways of the
Franks, whose lord the king needed no quality save birth alone, and all
the year through had nothing to do or plan, but only to eat and drink
and sleep and stay shut up at home except on one spring day, when
he must sit at gaze before his people, while his head servant ruled the
State to suit himself. But it was one thing to rule the State and quite
another to lay hand upon those sacred titles and prerogatives which the
reverence of centuries had reserved for the race of the Salian sea-god; and
the house of Arnulf was little likely to forget their kinsman Grimoald
who in the seventh century had outraged that reverence by setting his own
son upon the throne, and had paid the forfeit with his life and with his
child's. Charles Martel (the Hammer), in the last years of his long rule,
had found it possible, indeed, to get on with no king at all, dating his docu-
ments from the death of the latest do-nothing; but, if he hoped that
thus the two sons between whom at his own death he divided Francia
like a private farm might enter peacefully upon the fact of kingship
without its name, a year of turbulence was enough to teach the sons
that to rule the Franks a kingly title must back the kingly power. The
shadowy Merovingian whom they dragged forth from obscurity to lend
a royal sanction to their acts was doubtless from the first a makeshift.
Through their surviving charters, especially those of Pepin, the younger
and more statesmanly, who not only appended to his name the proud
phrase "to whom the Lord hath entrusted the care of government" but
used always the "we" and "our" employed hitherto by royalty alone,


## p. 576 (#608) ############################################

676 Pepin [751
there glimmers already another purpose. But not Pepin himself, even
after his brother's abdication left him sole ruler, and when, all tur-
bulence subdued, two years eventless in the annals had confirmed his
sway, ventured the final step of revolution without a sanction from a
higher power.
To one reared, like Pepin, by the monks of St Denis, and to the
prelates who were his advisers, it could hardly be doubtful where such a
sanction should be sought. Whatever veneration still attached to ancient
blood or custom, Jesus Christ was now the national god of the Franks.
"Long live Christ, who loves the Franks," ran the prologue of their
Salic Law; "may he guard their realm and fill their princes with the
light of his grace. 11 And, if the public law of the Franks knew no pro-
cedure for a change of dynasty, the story of another chosen people,
grown more familiar than the sagas of German or Roman or Trojan
ancestors, told how, when a king once proved unworthy, the God of
heaven himself sent his prophet to anoint with oil the subject who should
take his throne. Nor could any Frank be at a loss whither to look for
such a message from the skies. From the days of Clovis the glory of
the Franks had been their Catholic orthodoxy; and to Catholic ortho-
doxy the mouthpiece of heaven, the vicar of Christ on earth, was the
successor of Peter, the bishop of Rome. Since the time when Pope
Gregory the Great had by his letters guided the religious policy of
Brunhild and her wards there had come, it is true, long interruption to
the intimacy of Frankish rulers with the Roman bishop; but, with the
rise of the mayors of the palace of the pious line of Arnulf, that in-
timacy had been resumed. Already to Charles Martel the Pope could
plead the gifts of his ancestors and his own to Roman altars; and it
was that rude warrior, however unchurchly at times his use of church
preferment and church property, who had made possible a reform of the
Frankish Church through which it was now, beyond even the dreams of a
Gregory the Great, becoming a province of Rome. What, backed by
his strong arm, the English zeal of the papal legate Boniface had
begun, the sons of Charles had made their personal task. From the
first they had turned for guidance to the Pope himself; and when, in
747, Carloman, the elder, laying down all earthly rule for the loftier
service of heaven, had with lavish gifts betaken him to the tomb of
Peter and under its shadow had chosen for his monastic home the cave
which once had sheltered that saintly Pope to whom the despairing
Constantine, as men believed, had turned for healing and for baptism,
the Frankish pilgrims whose multitude disturbed his peace must have
learned afresh the proper oracle for princes in doubt.
It can never be quite certain, indeed, so close were now the relations
of the Franks with Rome, that the scruple of conscience which in the
autumn of 751 two envoys of Pepin laid before Pope Zacharias—the
question whether it were good or no that one man should bear the name


## p. 577 (#609) ############################################

751] The Pope's position 577
of king while another really ruled—was not of Roman suggestion, or
that the answer had not, in any case, been made sure in advance.
But there were reasons enough why, without prearrangement, the papal
verdict might be safely guessed. It was not Pepin the Frank alone
who ruled while another reigned. For a century that had been as true
of the bishop of Rome; and the Pope not less than the mayor of the
palace needed an ally. Though the nominal sovereign at Rome was
still the Byzantine monarch who called himself Emperor of the Romans,
and though from Constantinople still came imperial edicts and imperial
messengers, the actual control, now that the Lombards had narrowed to
a thread the road from the Exarchate by the Adriatic to the Roman
Duchy by the Mediterranean and now that the Saracens were not only
tasking all the Empire's resources in the East but making hazardous the
sea route to the West, had passed ever more and more into the hands of
the Roman bishop. Even under the law of the Empire his civil functions
were large—the nomination of local officers, the care of public works,
the oversight of administration and of justice, the protection of the poor
and the weak—and what survives of his official correspondence shews how
vigorously these functions were exercised. But the growing poverty of
the public purse, drained by the needs of the imperial court or the greed
of the imperial agents, and on the other hand the vast estates of the
Roman Church, scattered throughout Italy and beyond, whose revenues
made the Roman bishop the richest proprietor in all the West, had
little by little turned his oversight into control. From his own resources
he at need had filled the storehouses, repaired the aqueducts, rebuilt the
walls, salaried the magistrates, paid off the soldiery. At his own instance
he had provisioned the people, ransomed captives, levied troops, bought
off invaders, negotiated with the encroaching Lombards.
This beneficent activity the imperial government had welcomed.
Making the Pope its own banker, it had formally entrusted him with
the supply of the city, with the maintenance of the militia. To him,
as to a Roman magistrate, it addressed its instructions. Meanwhile
the needless civil magnates gradually vanished or became his creatures.
The Roman senate quietly ceased to exist or existed so obscurely that
for a century and a half it ceases to be heard of. The praefect of the
city was the bishop's nominee. Even the military hierarchy, which
elsewhere in Italy was now supplanting the civil, at Rome grew sub-
ordinate. The city and its district, separating from the Exarchate, had
indeed become a duchy, and a duke still led its army; but before the
middle of the eighth century the duke was taking his cue, if not his
orders, from the Pope. So long as there remained that slender thread
of road connecting Rome with Ravenna, the Exarch, as imperial
governor of Italy, asserted a shadowy authority over both duke and
Pope; but year by year the Exarch's Adriatic lands narrowed before the
Lombards, and with them his resources and prestige. In 751, a few
C. MED. H. VOL. U. CB. XVIII. 37


## p. 578 (#610) ############################################

578 Breach between Pope and Emperor [725-751
months earlier than Pepin's embassy, the Lombards occupied Ravenna
itself, and the Exarch was no more. The Roman pontiff was now the
unquestioned head of what remained to the Empire in Italy.
Why should there be any question? Who could serve the Empire
better than this unsalaried functionary whose duties to heaven seemed
an abiding guarantee against the ambitions of earth? And what could
the vicar of Peter more desire than thus unhampered to administer his
province on behalf of that imperial Rome whose eternal dominion he so
often had proclaimed? But imperial Rome did not leave unhampered
that spiritual headship for whose sake he had proclaimed her eternal
dominion. Neither the rising prestige of the Roman see nor the waning
of imperial resources had restrained the emperors from asserting in the
West that authority over religious belief and religious practice which
they exercised unquestioned in the East. Upon the Roman bishop they
had heaped honours and privileges, they had even recognised his primacy
in the Church; yet at their will they still convened councils and promul-
gated or proscribed dogmas, and, when the bishop of Rome presumed to
discredit what they declared orthodox, they did not scruple, while their
power was adequate, to arrest and depose him or to drag him off to
Constantinople for trial and punishment. Their purpose may have been
the political one of silencing religious dissension and so ending the
quarrels which hazarded the unity of the Empire; but to the successor
of Peter the peace and unity of the Empire had worth only for the
maintenance and the diffusion of that divinely revealed truth whose
responsible custodian he knew himself to be.
When, therefore, in the year 725, the Emperor Leo, having beaten
off the besieging Saracens and restored order in his realm, addressed him-
self to religious reform, and, waiting for no consultation of the Church,
forbade the use in worship of pictures and images of the Christ, the
Virgin, and the saints—nay, began at once on their destruction—Pope
Gregory the Second not only refused obedience, but rallied Italy to
his defence against what he proclaimed to Christendom the Emperor's
impiety and heresy. And now, after a quarter of a century, though
Gregory the Second had been followed in 731 by Gregory the Third,
and ten years later he by Zacharias, while on Leo's throne since 740
sat Constantine the Fifth, his son, the schism was still unhealed. The
Emperor, after the shipwreck of a fleet sent for the humbling of
the rebels, had indeed contented himself with the transfer of Sicily and
southern Italy from the jurisdiction of the Pope to that of the Patriarch
of Constantinople; and, having thus begun that severance of the Greek
south from the Latin north which (helped soon by the unintended
flooding of south Italy with religious fugitives from the East) was to
endure for centuries, he did not disturb the authority of Rome in the
rest of the peninsula. The Pope, on his side, though he laid all Icono-
clasts under the Church's ban, opposed the treasonous design to put


## p. 579 (#611) ############################################

Italian Feeling 579
a rival emperor on the throne, and scrupulously continued to date all
his official acts by the sovereign's regnal years. But clearly this was no
more than armed neutrality. No emperor could feel safe while religious
rebellion had such an example and such a nucleus; and the Pope well
knew that it was all over with his own safety and that of Roman
orthodoxy the moment they could be attacked without danger of the
loss of Italy.
Italian loyalty to Roman leadership there was no room to doubt.
The alienation of the Latins from their Byzantine master had grounds
older and deeper than their veneration for the pictures of the saints.
Their consciousness of different blood and speech had for ages been
increased by administrative separateness and by the favoured place of
Italy in the imperial system; and, when division of the Empire had
brought to her Hellenic neighbours equality of privilege and of prestige,
there still remained to Italy the headship of the West. She had
welcomed those who in the honoured name of Rome freed her from the
Ostrogoth barbarians and heretics; but, when in their hands she found
herself sunk to a mere frontier province, the officials of her absentee
ruler had soon become unpopular. The growing extortion of the tax-
gatherer was sweetened by no pride in the splendours it nourished. The
one public boast of Italy, her one surviving claim to leadership, was now
the religious pre-eminence of her Roman bishop. His patriarchate over
all the West made Rome and Italy still a capital of nations. His
primacy, if realised, meant for her a wider queenship. To Italy he was
a natural leader. Directly or through her other bishops—nearly all
confirmed and consecrated by him and bound to him by oaths of ortho-
doxy and of loyalty—he was the patron of all municipal liberties, the
defender against all fiscal oppression. And when the imperial court, in
its militant Hellenism, used its political power to dictate religious inno-
vation, the Roman pontiff became yet more popular as the spokesman of
Western conservatism. More than once before the iconoclastic schism
had the sympathies of the Italians ranged themselves on the side of the
Pope against the Emperor. When that quarrel came it found Italy
already in a ferment. Imperial officials on every hand were driven out
or put to death, and—what was more significant—their places filled by
popular election.
But if, thus sure of popular support, Pope Gregory the Third, as
there is reason to believe, already harboured the thought of breaking
with the Byzantine authority, a nearer danger stared him in the face.
The Empire's Italy was, in fact, but a precarious remnant. There were
the Lombards. Already masters of most of the peninsula, they were
clearly minded to be masters of it all. The Lombards, of course, were
Christians. They had long ceased to be heretics. Against the Icono-
clasts they had even lent the Pope their aid. For the vicar of Peter
they professed the deepest respect, and their bishops were suffragans of
ch. xvui. 37—2


## p. 580 (#612) ############################################

580 Pope and Lombards [730-751
his see. There was no reason to suppose, should they even occupy
Rome itself, that they would hamper or abridge the ecclesiastical
functions of the Pope. But the Pope well knew what difference lay
between a mere Lombard bishop, however venerated, and the all but
independent sovereign of the capital of the Christian world. Already
the temporal power had cast its spell. . Should the Lombard king win
(Rome, there was much reason to fear that he would make ft Tils own
/ capital. Though orthodox now and deferential, he might not always be
/ ^deferential or orthodox; and how short the step was from a deferential
^* protector to a dictatorial master papal experience had amply shewn.
At Constantinople such a master was quite near enough. The Pope
had no mind to exchange King Log for King Stork.
Against the Lombards, therefore, Pope and Emperor made common
cause. The Emperor, needing every soldier against his Eastern foes,
was only too glad to make the Pope his envoy. The Pope, needing
every plea against the eager Lombard, was only too glad to urge the
claims of the Empire. But, in spite of papal pleading and imperial
claims, the Lombards took town after town. The desperate Pope
intrigued with Lombard dukes against the Lombard king. Liutprand
turned his arms on Rome itself. Then it was, in 739, that Gregory
appealed to Charles the Frank.
It was by no means the first time the Frankish champions of
orthodoxy had been called to the aid of Italy against the barbarian; not
the first time a Pope was their petitioner. As sons of the Church and
allies of the Empire they had crossed the Alps in the sixth century and
in the seventh to fight Ostrogoth and Lombard. But the appeal of
Gregory was couched in novel terms. Not for the Empire nor for the
faith did he now implore protection, but for " the Church of St Peter"
and "us his peculiar people11; and as return the Frankish chroniclers
record that puzzling offer of allegiance.
The great Frankish "under-king "—so the Pope entitled him—did
not lead his host against the Lombard king, his kinsman and ally; but
he answered courteously by embassy and gift, he treasured carefully
the papal letters, the earliest in that precious file preserved us by his
grandson, and it is not impossible that he interceded with the Lombards.
In any case, they did not novTpfess-oniJJwardTlome; and the mild and
tactful Zacharias, who soon succeeded to the papal chair, not only won
back by his prayers, for " the blessed Peter, prince of the apostles,11 the
towns seized from the Roman duchy, but staved off the advance of the
Lombards upon Ravenna, and before long, when the pious Ratchis suc-
ceeded to the throne, he made with him a truce for twenty years. But the
persistent Lombards would not so long be cheated of a manifest destiny.
/Ratchis in 749, retiring like Carloman into monastic life, gave place to
the tempestuous Aistulf. By 751, as we have seen, Ravenna was his and
the Exarchate had ceased to be. Then came Pepin's conundrum.


## p. 581 (#613) ############################################

751-755] Pepin King 681
The precise terms of Zacharias' reply are not preserved. What is left
is only the oral tradition as to its substance. No letter of his can be
found among the papal epistles to the Carolings. Errands so momentous
often went then by word of mouth; and Pepin's were trusty messengers.
One, Bishop Burchard of Wiirzburg, the new Franconian see so richly
endowed by Pepin and by Carloman, was a loyal lieutenant of the legate
Boniface, English like him by birth and as his messenger already known
at Rome. The other, the Austrasian Fulrad, abbot of St Denis and
arch-chaplain of the realm, owed to Pepin both those high preferments
and was throughout his life his master's intimate and the Pope's. If
their message must in part be guessed at, its outcome is well known. The
Merovingian and his son, rejected like Saul and Jonathan, went shorn
into the cloister. The aged Boniface, in St Peter's name, anointed king
the new David chosen by the Franks.
King Pepin was not ungrateful. That same November of 751 which
saw his elevation to the throne saw the capstone put to the organising
work of Boniface by the lifting of his see of Mainz to metropolitan
authority throughout all Germany, from the mountains to the coast.
It saw, too, by papal grant soon royally confirmed (if we may trust two
much-disputed documents), his beloved Fulda, his favourite home, the
abbey of his heart, raised to a dignity elsewhere unknown in Francia by
exemption from all ecclesiastical supervision save the Pope's alone. As
coadjutor in the heavy duties of his primacy Pepin gave the old man
Lul, best loved of the disciples brought from his English home, and
when, even thus stayed, he presently sighed beneath his task, the king
released him from his functions to seek among the heathen Frisians the
martyr's crown for which he yearned. And Abbot Fulrad, now as royal
chaplain the king's minister of public worship, was not forgotten. The
earliest of Pepin's surviving royal charters (1 March 752) awards
St Denis at Fulrad's prayer a domain long unlawfully withheld; and
many another from that year and those which follow bears witness to
his constant zeal in the defence of churchly property and rights.
Even as king, indeed, Pepin never gave back into full ownership all
those church lands appropriated by his father to the maintenance of a
mounted soldiery; but the Church was assured her rents, and the right
of the State to make such grants of church lands, though maintained,
was carefully restricted. It was doubtless the growing importance of the
mounted force, and its dependence on the pasturage of summer, which
prompted Pepin early in his reign (755) to change, "for the advantage
of the Franks," the time-honoured assembly and muster of the host, the
"Field of March," into a "Field of May. " The faith itself had still
need of swift champions. The Saracens yet had a foothold in Gaul.
Septimania, the rich though narrow coastland stretching from Rhone
to Pyrenees between the Mediterranean and the Cevennes—the Low
Languedoc of later days—was not yet a possession of the Franks. A


## p. 582 (#614) ############################################

582 Aistulfs Claims [752-753
remnant of the old realm of the Visigoths and still peopled by their
descendants, it had been overrun by the Arab conquerors of Spain, who
remained its masters and made it a base for their raids. But in 752 a
rising of the Gothic townsmen expelled them from Nimes and Mague-
lonne, Agde and Be"ziers, and offered their land to Pepin. Narbonne
alone held out still against the Franks. Gaul thus all but redeemed
to Christendom, Pepin in 758 led his host against the rebellious
heathen of the north. Crossing the Rhine into the territory of the
Saxons and laying it waste to the Weser, he subjected them once more
to tribute and this time compelled them to open their doors to the
missionaries of Christianity.
But while Pepin had thus been proving in Francia his worth to
Church as well as State, there had not been wanting signs that the
Church's head might need from him a more personal service. Since
early in 752 the soft-spoken Zacharias was no more, and in his place sat
Stephen II, a Roman born and of good Roman blood. An orphan,
reared from boyhood in the Lateran itself, he was no stranger to its
aims and policies. There was need at Rome of Roman pride and
Roman self-assertion. Aistulf the Lombard was no man to be wheedled,
and his eye was now upon the Roman duchy. From the Alps to the
Vulturnus all was now Lombard except this stretch along the western
coast. Rome was clearly at his mercy. Already in June the Pope had
sent envoys—his brother Paul (later to succeed him as Pope) and
another cleric—who made with the Lombard king, as they supposed, a
forty years' peace. But it was soon clear that Aistulf counted this no
bar to the assertion of his sovereignty. Scarce four months later,
claiming jurisdiction over Rome and the towns about it, he demanded
an annual poll-tax from their inhabitants. What could it matter to
the Roman bishop who was his temporal lord? Stephen, protesting
against the breach of faith, shewed his ecclesiastical power by sending
as intercessors the abbots of the two most venerated of Lombard
monasteries, Monte Cassino and San Vincenzo. The king, in turn,
vindicated the royal authority by contumeliously sending them back to
their convents. Again and again the Pope had begged for help from
Constantinople, and now there appeared, not the soldiery for which he
had asked, but, Byzantine-fashion, an imperial envoy—the silentiarim
John—with letters of instruction for both Pope and king. The Pope
obediently sent on the envoy to the king, escorted by a spokesman of
his own—again his brother Paul. Aistulf listened to the imperial
exhortations, but there his barbarian patience had an end. Yielding
nothing, he packed off home the Byzantine functionary, and with him
sent a Lombard with counter-propositions of his own; he then turned
in rage on Rome, vowing to put every Roman to the sword unless his
orders were forthwith obeyed. The Pope went through the idle form
of sending by the returning Greek a fresh appeal to the Emperor to


## p. 583 (#615) ############################################

753] Negotiations with Pepin 583
come himself with an army and rescue Italy; he calmed the panic-stricken
Romans by public prayers and processions, himself marching barefoot in
the ranks and carrying on his shoulder the sacred portrait of the Christ
painted by St Luke and the angels; but he had not grown up in the
household of the Gregories without learning of another source of help.
By a returning pilgrim he sent a message to the new king of the
Franks.
That unceasing stream of pilgrims—prelate and prince and humble
sinner—which now from England and the farther isles as well as from
all parts of Francia thronged the roads to the threshold of the apostles
(Carloman to escape their visits had fled from his refuge on Mount
Soracte to the remoter seclusion of Monte Cassino) must have kept
Pepin and his advisers well informed of what was passing in Italy, and
many messages lost to us had doubtless been exchanged by Pope and
king; but what Stephen had next to offer and to ask was to be trusted
to no go-between, not even to his diplomat brother. By the mouth of
the unnamed pilgrim who early in 758 appeared at the court of Pepin
he begged that envoys be sent to summon himself to the Frankish king.
Two other pilgrims—one was this time the abbot of Jumieges—bore
back to the Pope an urgent invitation, assuring him that the requested
envoys should be sent. From the tenor of the Pope's still extant letter
of reply it would appear that by word of mouth a more confidential
message was returned through the abbot and his colleague. The written
one briefly contents itself with pious wishes and with the assurance that
"he who perseveres to the end shall be saved" and shall "receive an
hundred fold and possess eternal life"; and a companion letter which the
Pope, perhaps not unprompted, addressed to "all the leaders of the
Frankish nation" adjures them, without defining what they are wished
to do, to let nothing hinder them from aiding the king to further the
interests of their patron, St Peter, that thus their sins may be wiped out
and the key-bearer of heaven may admit them to eternal life. For the
formal invitation of the Pope and for the sending of the escort the
concurrence of the Frankish folk had been awaited, and it was autumn
before the embassy reached Rome. Meanwhile Aistulf had shewn his
seriousness by taking steps to cut off Rome from southern Italy, and the
Emperor had sent, not troops, but once more the silentiary John, this
time insisting that the Pope himself go with him to beseech the Lombard
for the restoration of the Exarchate. Happily, with the arrival of the
safe-conduct sought from Aistulf, arrived also the Frankish envoys—
Duke Autchar (the Ogier of later legend) and the royal chancellor,
Bishop Chrodegang of Metz, after Boniface the foremost prelate of the
realm.
It was mid-October of 753 when, thus escorted, and in company
with the imperial ambassador, Pope Stephen and a handful of his
official household set out—ostensibly for- the Lombard court. King


## p. 584 (#616) ############################################

584 The Pope in Francia [754
Aistulf, though notified, did not come to meet them. As they
approached Pavia they met only his messengers, who forbade the Pope
to plead before their master the cause of the conquered provinces.
Defiant of this prohibition, he implored Aistulf to "give back the Lord's
sheep," and the silentiary again laid before him an imperial letter; but
to all appeals the barbarian was deaf. Then it was that the Frankish
ambassadors asked his leave for the Pope to go on with them to Francia,
and the pontiff added his own prayer to theirs. In vain the Lombard,
gnashing his teeth, sought to dissuade him. A grudging permission
was granted and promptly used.
The Pope and his escort, leaving
a portion of their party to return with the Greek to Rome, were
before the end of November safe on Frankish soil. As they issued from
the Alps they were met by another duke and by Abbot Fulrad, who
guided them across Burgundy to a royal villa near the Marne. While
yet many miles away there met them a retinue of nobles headed by the
son of Pepin, the young prince Charles, who thus, a lad of eleven, first
appears in history. Pepin himself, with all his court, came three miles
to receive them. Dismounting and prostrating himself before the Pope,
he for some distance humbly marched beside him, leading by the bridle
the pontiffs horse (6 Jan. 754).
Such, in brief, is what is told by our one informant, the contemporary
biographer of Pope Stephen, of that transalpine journey whose outcome
was the temporal sovereignty of the popes, the severance of Latin
Christendom from Greek, the Frankish conquest of Italy, the Holy-
Roman Empire. With the Pope's arrival the Frankish sources, too, take
up the tale. Yet only by clever patching can all these together be made
to yield a connected story of what was done during the long months of
that papal visit—of the Pope's appeal for Frankish aid against the
Lombard, of his sojourn through the winter as the guest of Fulrad at
St Denis, of the futile embassies for the dissuasion of the Lombard king,
of the appearance in Francia of the monk Carloman, sent by his abbot
to intercede for the Lombard against the Pope, of a springtide assembly
of the Franks and of reluctant consent to a campaign against the
Lombard, of an Easter conference of king and Pope and Frankish
leaders at the royal villa of Carisiacum (Kiersy, Quierzy), of a great
midsummer gathering at St Denis, where in the abbey church Pope
Stephen himself in the name of the holy Trinity anointed Pepin afresh,
and with him his two sons Charles and Carloman, forbidding under pain
of excommunication and interdict that henceforward forever any not
sprung from the loins of these thus consecrated by God through the
vicar of his apostles be chosen king of the Franks.
Our most explicit account of this coronation, a memorandum jotted
down a dozen years later at St Denis by a monkish copyist, adds a
detail. Pepin and his sons were anointed not only kings of the Franks
but " Patricians of the Romans. " Certain it is that this title, though


## p. 585 (#617) ############################################

Pepin Patrician of the Romans 585
Pepin himself seems never to have used it, is thenceforward invariably
appended to his name and those of his sons in the letters of the Popes.
Now, "Patrician" was a Byzantine title—a somewhat nondescript
decoration, or title of courtesy, applied by the imperial court to sundry
dignitaries (as to the Exarch of Italy and to the Duke of Rome) and
not infrequently conferred upon barbarian princes—and there have not
been wanting modern scholars who divine from its use that the Pope was
in all this the envoy of the Emperor. No intimation of such a thing
appears elsewhere in the sources1. It is not hard to believe that the
Pope may have persuaded the imperial government that his journey into
Francia was an expedition in its interest, or that he may even have
sought its authority for the gift of the patricial title; it is easy to see
that the papal biographer might suppress a fact which by the time he wrote
had grown uncomfortable; but, had the Pope in Francia posed as the
representative of the Emperor, it is incomprehensible that a function so
flattering both to him and to his Frankish hosts should escape all memory.
And the title conferred on Pepin was not the familiar one of "Patrician,"
but the else unknown one "Patrician of the Romans. '1 Precisely what
that may have meant has long been a problem ; but it could hardly have
been aught pleasing to Constantine Copronymus, who had just alienated
anew his Italian subjects by an iconoclastic council, whose deference to
the religious dictation of the Emperor might excuse almost any treason
on the part of Western orthodoxy.
Nor are we at a loss to guess what may have obscured for Pepin the
Empire's claim to Italy. For more than two centuries there had been
growing current in the West a legend which strangely distorted the
history of Church and Empire. Constantine, earliest and greatest of
Christian emperors, while yet a pagan and at Rome—so ran the tale
in that life of Pope Sylvester which gave it widest vogue—persecuted so
cruelly the Christians that indignant Heaven smote him with leprosy.
Physicians were in vain. The pagan priests in desperation prescribed a
bath in the blood of new-born babes. The babes were brought; but,
moved to pity by the mothers' cries, the Emperor preferred to suffer,
whereat relenting Heaven, sending in a dream St Peter and St Paul,
revealed to him Sylvester as his healer. The Pope was brought from his
1 One document, indeed, were it trustworthy, would more than prove this true:
the strange scrap known as the "Pactum Pipini" or "Fragmentum Fantuzzianum. "
It purports to be the written promise given to the Pope during his visit by Pepin,
and opens with an account of the Lombard peril and of the Pope's winning imperial
consent and authority for an appeal to the Franks. Unfortunately it exists only in
a fifteenth or sixteenth century transcript of a twelfth century copy, and, even if
derived from a genuine original, as few critics have believed, is so corrupt in its
text and so suspicious in its form that all use of it is hazardous. Even its latest
editors (Schniirer and Ulivi, Das Fragmentum Fantuzzianum, Freiburg, 1906),
though they give a better text and explain away many difficulties, leave ample
room for scepticism.


## p. 586 (#618) ############################################

586 The Donation of Constantine
hiding-place on Mount Soracte, disclosed the identity of the gods seen
in his dream, and not only cured but converted and baptised him.
Thereupon the grateful monarch, proclaiming throughout the Empire
his new faith, provided by edict for its safety and support, made all
bishops subject to the Pope, even as are all magistrates to the Emperor,
and, setting forth to found elsewhere a capital, first laid with his own
hands the foundations of St Peter's and the Lateran.
It was doubtless faith in this wild tale which led the rueful
Carloman, fain to atone for his own deeds of violence, to choose
Sylvester's cave for his retreat and dedicate his convent to that saint.
The legend must thereby have gained a wider currency among the
Franks; and none could know this better than the papal court. Was
it for use with them, and was it now, that there came into existence a
document which made the myth a cornerstone of papal power—the
so-called Donation of Constantine?
No extant manuscript of that famous forgery is older than the early
ninth century, and what most scholars have believed a quotation from it
by Pope Hadrian in 778 can possibly be otherwise explained; but
minute study of the strange charter's diction seems now to have made
sure its origin in the papal chancellery during the third quarter of the
eighth century, and startling coincidences of phrase connect it in particular
with the documents of Stephen II and of Paul, while to an ever-growing
proportion of the students of this period the historical setting in which
alone it can be made to fit is that of Stephen's visit to the Franks or of
the years which closely follow it1.
The document makes Constantine first narrate at length the story of
his healing, embodying in it an elaborate creed taught him by Pope
Sylvester. Then, declaring St Peter and his successors worthy, as
Christ's vicars on earth, of power more than imperial, he chooses them
as his patrons before God, decrees their supremacy over all the Christian
church, relates his building of the Lateran and of St Peter's and St Paul's,
and his endowing them "for the enkindling of the lights" with vast
1 The scholars to whom this demonstration is chiefly due are Hauck, Friedrich,
and, above all, Scheffer-Boichorst. The first two ascribe it (at least in its final
form) to the time of Stephen's visit, the last would connect it rather with Paul; but
these two papacies were too continuous to make discrimination easy. Grauert, who
ably began this textual criticism, reached a different result; but he has not maintained
his position against later students. Whether the Pope was author, accomplice, or
victim of the fraud cannot be guessed. Of historical scholarship there is no ground
to suspect either Stephen or Paul, and there is reason to believe both dominated by
that Christopher who accompanied Stephen into Francia and who soon, and under
both Popes, as Primicerius, or chief of the notaries, headed the papal chancellery.
During Paul's pontificate Christopher was expressly accused by the Emperor to
Pepin of falsifying documents. The latest critics of the Donation—Bohmer,
Hartmann, Mayer—all assign it to this period. It is perhaps not without signi-
ficance that our oldest copy of it is found in a formula-book of St Denis, where it
occurs between a letter of Pope Zacharias and one of Pope Stephen.


## p. 587 (#619) ############################################

Pepins difficulties 587
estates in East and West, grants to the Pope the rank and trappings of
an Emperor and to the Roman clergy those of senators, tells how, when
Sylvester had refused the Emperor's own crown of gold, Constantine
placed upon his head the white tiara and in reverence for St Peter led
his horse by the bridle as his groom, and now transfers to him, that the
papal headship may forever keep its more than earthly glory, his Roman
palace and city and all the provinces and towns of Italy. If this
document or the traditions on which it rests were through Fulrad or
Chrodegang or the Roman guests familiar to the Frankish king, neither
his policy nor his phrases need longer puzzle us.
Even in this life Pepin, like Constantine, needed St Peter's help.
The dethroned Merovingians, indeed, had sunk without a ripple, and
even while the Pope was on his way to Gaul that turbulent half-brother,
Grifo, who had made for Carloman and Pepin such incessant trouble,
met death at loyal hands as he was escaping through the Alps from his
plotting-place in Aquitaine to a more disquieting plotting-place among
the Lombards. But there still was Carloman himself—a gallant prince
whose renunciation and monastic vows need bind no longer than the
Church should will. There were still his growing sons, committed by
him to Pepin's care, but with no rights renounced. Was it in part,
perhaps, to vindicate, for himself or for his sons, these rights of the
elder line that Carloman had now appeared in Francia as advocate of
the Lombard cause? Was his reward, perchance, to be the Lombard's
backing of his own princely claims? In any case, what troubled waters
these for Lombard fishing! Was the Pope himself only a timelier
fisher, and may the reluctance of the Frankish nobles have been due in
some part to friends of Carloman and of the Lombard alliance? All
this is mere conjecture. But certain it is that Pepin made effective
terms with Heaven's spokesman and that the outcome was the papal
unction for himself and for his house. Carloman, sick, perhaps with
disappointment or chagrin, was detained in a Burgundian monastery,
where soon he died. His sons were, like the Merovingians, shorn as
monks. Even the fellow-monks whom he had brought with him from
Italy were held for years in Frankish durance.
And what did Pepin in return assure the Pope? Stephen's
biographer speaks only of an oral promise to obey the Pope and to
restore according to his wish the rights and territories of the Roman
State1. But, when twenty years later the son of Pepin, leaving his
1 "Omnibus eras mandatis et ammonitionibus sese totis nisibus oboedire, et ut
illi placitum fuerit exarchatum Ravennae et reipublicae iura sea loca reddere modis
omnibus. " "Respublica," "respublica Romana," had in Roman usage meant the
Empire in general; but the term, which in the papal letters becomes from this time
forward "respublica Romanorum," was doubtless vague enough to Frankish ears.
Its happy ambiguities and clever use during this period are studied most carefully
by Gundlach, in his Die Entstehung des Kirchentiaates (Breslau, 1899).


## p. 588 (#620) ############################################

588 Donation of Pepin [ru
siege of the Lombard capital, went down to Rome for Easter, there was
laid before him for confirmation, if we may trust the papal biographer
of that later day, a written document, signed at Quierzy during Pope
Stephen's visit by Pepin, his sons, and all the Frankish leaders, which
pledged to St Peter and to the Pope the whole peninsula of Italy from
Parma and Mantua to the borders of Apulia, defining in detail the
northern frontier of the tract, and including by express stipulation, not
only all the Exarchate "as it was of old time" and the provinces of
Venice and Istria, but the island of Corsica and the Lombard duchies
of Spoleto and Benevento1. May we trust this passage of the Vita
Hadriani—not only for the fact of a written promise by Pepin and
of its confirmation by Charles, but for all the startling contents? This
is that "Roman question" about which seas of ink have flowed and
still are flowing. For long it was the wont of ultramontane writers to
assume both the reality of such a promise and confirmation and the
accuracy of this account of it, while with almost equal unanimity those
unfriendly to the Papacy or to its temporal power dismissed the one as
myth, the other as forgery. But in these later years, now that the
temporal power is but a memory, scholars have drawn together1. It
seems established that the passage, however corrupt, is no interpolation,
and that it was written at Rome in 774; and there is a growing faith in
its accuracy, even as to the details of Pepin's promise*. But how to
explain so strange a pact is still a puzzle. Was it, as some have thought,
not the main compact between Pope and king, but a scheme of partition
for use only in case the Frank invasion should perhaps result in the fall
of the Lombard power4? Schemes such as this may well have filled the
Pope's long Gaulish visit; but for aught but guesswork our sources are
1 "Civitates et territoria. . . a Lunis cum insula Corsica, deinde in Suriano, deinde
in moute Bardone, id est in Verceto, deinde in Parma, deinde in Regio; et exinde
in Mantua atque Monte Silicis, simulque et universum exarchatum Ravennantium,
sicut antiquitus erat, atque provincias Venetiarum et Istria; necuon et cunctura
ducatum Spolitinum seu Beneventanum. " It must of course be remembered that
to this barbarous age "seu" meant and quite as often as or, and that, in general, its
Latin is not classical.
2 Especially since, in 1883, Sickel, reinforcing the earlier arguments of Ficker,
established the genuineness of the Pactum Ludovicianum of 817, the oldest surviving
confirmation of the gift, and since, in 1884, SchefFer-Boichorst and Duchesne
demonstrated the contemporaneity of the passage in the Vita Hadriani. Duchesne
two years later made this demonstration more effective by publishing the first
volume of a critical edition of the lAber Pontificals, of which the Vita is of course a
part.
3 The Fragmentum Fantuzzianum, which purports to be Pepin's Promissio itself,
has already been described (see p. 585, note). Its list of the territories promised
differs in several points from that of the Vita Hadriani, though agreeing substantially
as to their extent.
4 This is the solution of Kehr, a scholar long busied with the documents of
the popes, and has met with much acceptance. It has been ably supported by
Hubert.


## p. 589 (#621) ############################################

764-756] The Franks in Italy 589
too scanty and too crude. The clerics who meagrely penned the deeds of
king and Pope were only official scribes, inspired and inspected, who of
the deeper planning of their lords perhaps knew little and betray yet less.
The papal letters, a more solid support, are mute, of course, during
Stephen's visit; and, when they reappear, imperfectly preserved and
uncertainly dated, are often but the mask for a wilier diplomacy by oral
message. And in this day of the eclipse of culture, when the best
trained clerk of convent or of curia groped helplessly for words and for
inflections, one can never be quite sure whether what is written is what
seemed best worth writing or only what seemed possible to write. Nor
may it be forgotten that from the side of Greek or Lombard, great
though their stake in the affairs of Italy, we have in all this period not
a word.
The Frankish host at last, in the late summer of 754 (possibly the
spring of 755), set forth for Italy, taking with it the Pope. Before its
start and yet again during the march a fresh attempt was made to scare
off or buy off the Lombard from his prey. But neither gold nor threats
could move Aistulf from his purpose. Happily for the Franks, the
Alpine passes and their Italian approaches had long been in their hands,
and now, ere their main army began to climb the Mont Cenis, they
learned with joy that Aistulf, routed by their vanguard, whom he had
rashly attacked in the mountain defiles, had abandoned his entrenchments
in the vale of Susa and sought shelter within the walls of his capital.
The Franks, rejoicing in the manifest favour of Heaven, were soon before
Pavia; and Aistulf, disheartened, speedily consented to a peace "between
the Romans, the Franks, and the Lombards. " He acknowledged Pepin
as his overlord, and promised to surrender to the Pope Ravenna with
all his other conquests. The Pope was sent on, under escort, to Rome;
and Pepin, taking hostages, returned to Francia.
But Aistulf soon rued his concessions. Only a single town did
he actually give up, and by midwinter of 755-756 he was again
ravaging before the gates of Rome. The Pope in panic appealed
frantically to his ally. Nay, so great was the emergency that, when the
Franks delayed, St Peter himself addressed to Pepin, Charles, and
Carloman, and to the clergy, the nobles, and all the armies and people
of Francia a startling letter. "I, Peter, apostle of God, who have
adopted you as my sons,11 so runs this strange epistle, duly delivered by
messengers from Rome, "do call and exhort you to the defence of this
Roman city and the people committed to me by God and the home where
after the flesh I repose And with us our Lady, the mother of God, Mary
ever virgin,. . . doth most solemnly adjure, admonish, and command you
Give help, then, with all your might, to your brothers, my Roman
people,. . . that, in turn, I, Peter, apostle called of God, granting you my
protection in this life and in the day of future judgment, may prepare
for you in the kingdom of God tabernacles most bright and glorious and
CH. XVIII.


## p. 590 (#622) ############################################

590 Second Frankish Intervention [756
may reward you with the infinite joys of paradise. . . . Suffer not this my
Roman city and the people therein dwelling to be longer torn by the
Lombard race : so may your bodies and souls not be torn and tortured in
everlasting and unquenchable hell fire Lo, sons most dear, I have
warned you: if ye shall swiftly obey, great shall be your reward, and,
aided by me, ye shall in this life vanquish all your foes and to old age
eat the good things of earth, and shall beyond a doubt enjoy eternal
life; but if, as we will not believe, ye shall delay,. . . know that we, by
authority of the holy Trinity and in virtue of the apostolate given me
by Christ the Lord, do cut you off, for transgression of our appeal, from
the kingdom of God and life eternal1. 1'
The Franks delayed no longer. In May they were again upon the
march. Aistulf hastened from Rome to meet them; but again he
failed to bar their path, and again was shut up in Pavia. It was now,
as Pepin drew near the town, that a Greek envoy, who had tried to
intercept him on his way, at last came up with him. In honeyed words
he claimed for the Empire Ravenna and its Exarchate. But Pepin
answered that for no treasure in the world would he rob St Peter of a
gift once offered, swearing that for no man's favour had he plunged thus
once and again into war, but for love of St Peter and the pardon of his
sins. It is the papal biographer who reports his words.
The siege was short. Aistulf, now a convicted rebel, was glad to
escape with life and realm by payment of a third of his royal hoard,
with pledge of yearly tribute, and by immediate surrender of his
conquests. To Abbot Fulrad, as Pepin's deputy, these forthwith were
handed over, one by one, from Ravenna, with Comacchio, down the
coast to Sinigaglia and over the mountains to Narni; and their keys the
abbot bore to Rome, where with the written deed of their donation by
his king he laid them on St Peter's tomb.
When the Franks went home, the Exarchate, as Aistulf had found
it, was the Pope's. Rome and its duchy, though unnamed by Pepin,
were as surely his. But not contentment. Though his lands now
stretched from Po to Liris and from sea to sea, the redemption of Italy
was but begun. AistulFs robberies won back, why not Liutprand's?
Occasion offered soon. Aistulf was killed by accident while hunting,
and his brother Ratchis, without asking leave of the Pope, left the
monastery to assume the crown. The outraged Stephen stirred
Benevento and Spoleto to revolt, and aided Desiderius, duke of Tuscany,
in a struggle for the throne. But this aid had its price: a sworn
1 To count this letter mere rhetoric, as have some, is much to overrate the
literary spirit of the age, and—what is more serious—to ignore both the pious
fraud so characteristic of the time and the pious credulity on which it safely built
Few scholars now doubt that St Peter's letter was meant to be taken by the Franks
as sober revelation. It is by no means improbable that it was penned by the same
hand as the Donation of Constantino.


## p. 591 (#623) ############################################

757-768] Desiderius King of the Lombards 591
contract bound Desiderius to the surrender of the rest of the towns
seized by the Lombards. Abbot Fulrad, who lingered still at Rome,
was not only witness to the pact, but with his little troop of Franks
took a hand in the enthronement of Desiderius. Perhaps he thought
thereby to plight his royal master to enforce the contract; but, though
the Lombard, once on his throne, yielded only Faenza and Ferrara, and
though Pope Paul, who in that same year (757) succeeded his brother,
could extort no more, and filled the ten years of his pontificate with
piteous appeals to the "patrician of the Romans" for help against
dangers, real or fancied, from Lombard and from Greek, the Frank
refrained from further meddling.
Nor was there need of it. Though Desiderius quelled with firm hand the
rebels in Spoleto and in Benevento and was not to be cajoled into further
"restitutions" to the Pope, and though the Emperor tried intrigue both
with Lombard and with Frank, neither assailed Pope Paul with arms.
Not even the fiercely contested papal election which in 767 followed his
death disturbed the integrity of the Papal State. Pope Stephen III,
who in 768 emerged from the turmoil, however he might date his
charters by the Emperor's regnal years and report his elevation to the
Frank patrician, "his defender next to God," was to all intent as
sovereign as they. That so vigorous a ruler and so capable a soldier
as Constantine V made no armed attempt to save to his Empire the
fair peninsula that gave it birth must doubtless be explained not only
by the nearer cares which kept him busy, but by the potent shadow of
the Frank; and to that shadow was clearly due the inaction of the
Lombard. But the Frank himself, beyond St Peter's gratitude here and
hereafter, asked no other meed.
Yet Francia was not without reward. Through the door which
war had left ajar culture crept in. "I send you," writes Pope Paul,
"all the books which could be found "—and he names the hymn-books
and the school-books of his packet, "all written in the Greek tongue,"
an antiphonal and a responsal, treatises on grammar, geometry, ortho-
graphy, works of Aristotle and of Dionysius. "I send, too," he adds,
"the night-clock "—doubtless an alarm-clock, such as waked the monks
to their matins1. It is but a glimpse at a traffic which must mainly
have found humbler channels. The improving calligraphy of Frankish
scribes shews already Roman influence. Bishop Remedius of Rouen
1 Mr Hodgkin thinks "horologium nocturnum" may mean a clock with an
illuminated face. The suggestion is tempting, and we remember King Alfred's
graduated candles and horn lantern; but the phrase seems to imply something
familiar, while illuminated clocks, as Alfred's invention reminds us, were a thing
as yet unknown. Bilfinger, the most careful student of the history of time-reckoning
and time-pieces, interprets as an alarm-clock the "horologium nocturnum" invented
in the ninth century by a Frankish cleric; and Professor Erben of Innsbruck has
already suggested this explanation for Pepin's night-clock.


## p. 592 (#624) ############################################

592 Pepin's Wars [759-760
imported from Rome a singing-master for his clergy; and, when the
master was called back to head the Roman training-school, sent his
monks thither to complete their musical education. Chrodegang of
Metz, ever in close touch with Rome, inaugurated the most notable
church reform of his day by organising under a discipline akin to the
monastic the clergy of his cathedral city. Among the imperial gifts
from Constantinople came an organ, the first seen in the West. A more
questionable blessing was the advent of Greek theologians: Byzantine
envoys debated with papal, before the king and his synod, as to the
Trinity and the use of images; and, though they lost the verdict, they
must have quickened thought. Nor was the new horizon bounded by
Christian lands. The lord of Barcelona and Gerona, Muslim governor of
north-eastern Spain, strengthened himself against his Moorish sovereign
by acknowledging the Frankish overlordship; and a more distant foe of
the Umayyad court of Cordova, the great Caliph Mansur, from his
new capital of Bagdad, exchanged with Pepin embassies and gifts. It
was the beginning of that connexion between the leading power of the
Christian West and the leading power of the Muslim East which has
proved so perennial, and to the powers of Christian East and Muslim
West so costly.
But all this interest in the world at large meant no sacrifice of
energy at home. It was precisely the years that fell between or
followed the Italian expeditions which saw Pepin most active as a
legislator. In four successive synods of his clergy he perfected the work
begun by Boniface, but made it clear that in the Frankish Church the
crown was still to be supreme. Every spring henceforward all the
bishops should gather to the king for synod, and every autumn at his
seat in Soissons those clad with metropolitan authority should meet
again. Inspection and stern churchly discipline should keep at home
and at religious duties priest and monk and nun. All Christians must
observe the Sunday rest and worship, and all marriage must be public
"Though at the moment our power does not suffice for everything,'" runs
an introductory clause full of significance for the king's whole character,
"yet in some points at least we wish to better what, as we perceive,
impedes the Church of God; if later God shall grant us days of peace
and leisure, we hope then to restore in all their scope the standards of
the saints. '1
Days of peace proved rare. In 759, having freshly scourged the
Saxons to tribute and submission, he "made no campaign, that he
might reform domestic affairs within his realm. " But in 760 began the
task which busied his remaining years—the subjection of Aquitaine.
The broad south-west of Gaul, cut off from Neustria by the wide stream
of the Loire, from Burgundy by the escarpment of the Cevennes, had not
since Roman days fully cast in its fortunes with the rest. When Clovis
won it from the Goths he had not sown it with his Franks; and the


## p. 593 (#625) ############################################

762-768] Conquest of Aquitaine 593
Goths, withdrawing into Spain, had left its folk less touched than any
other in the west of Europe by Germanic blood and ways. To the
chroniclers and even to the laws of Pepin's time they still are "Romans. "
The race of native dukes which under the later Merovingians had made
them almost independent acknowledged Pepin as a suzerain only; and
their boldness in harbouring fugitives from his authority and in taxing
the Aquitanian estates of Prankish churches had already caused friction
and protest when the Frank occupation of Septimania gave rise to war.
That this district, so closely knit to Aquitaine before and since, its
doorway to the Mediterranean and the highway of its commerce, should
pass into the keeping of the Frank was indeed a knell to all their hopes.
Duke Waifar had as early as 752 begun to wrest the region from the
failing grasp of the Moor, and it was perhaps only to escape his clutches
that the Goths of its eastern towns offered themselves to Pepin. This
could be borne; but when, in 759, the taking of Narbonne carried to
the Pyrenees the Frank frontier, the speedy sequel was the war with
Aquitaine.
Pepin did not underrate his foe. Year after year, from 760 to
768, he led against Waifar the whole Prankish host; and, though a
brief peace closed the first campaign, the struggle thereafter was to the
death. With thoroughness and system, wasting no time in raids, from
fortress to fortress, district to district, through Berri, Auvergne, the
Limousin, garrisoning and organising as he went, the king relentlessly
pushed on. Once desertion and famine forced him to a pause; but there
followed a fruitful year—for whose blessings the king, like some
American governor or president of modern days, ordained in the autumn
a general thanksgiving—and the war went on. By the early summer of
768 the land was wholly overrun, and the death of Waifar ended the
brave but hopeless fight. Pepin, himself worn out by the struggle,
lived only long enough to enact the statute which should govern the
new-won province. By this he fused it with the rest of his kingdom, but
left to its people their ancestral laws, guarded them against the extortion
of the royal officials, and provided for a local assembly of their magnates
which in conference with the deputies of the Crown should have final
authority as to all matters, civil and ecclesiastical.
In the palace reared by his son at Ingelheim the fresco devoted to
the memory of Pepin pictured him "granting laws to the Aquitanians. "
It was, indeed, his most lasting work. Though the whole history of
Aquitaine betrays her separateness of blood and speech, though still
"there is no Frenchman south of Loire,'" she has never ceased to form
with Neustria a single realm. All else—the absorption of Brittany, the
conquest of the Saxons, the humbling of Bavaria, whose young duke's
desertion had for a moment crippled the war on Aquitaine—Pepin left
unfinished to his sons. Between the two, after the bad old fashion of
the Franks, he now parted the kingdom. To Charles, the elder, grown
C MED. H. VOL II. CH. XVIII.