Cristo Raul.org

Reading Hall The Doors of Wisdom

BOOK III.

THE CAROLINGIAN EMPIRE, OR THE ATTEMPT TO ORGANIZE GERMAN AND CHRISTIAN EUROPE (687-814).

CHAPTER VIII.

THE MAYORS OF AUSTRASIA AND THE PAPACY, OR THE EFFORTS TO INFUSE UNITY INTO THE STATE AND THE CHURCH (687-768).

Pippin of Heristal (687-714).—Charles Martel (714-741); The Carolingian Family Reorganizes the State and its Authority.—Formation of Ecclesiastical Society ; Elections ; Hierarchy ; The Power of the Bishops.—Monks ; Monasteries ; the Rule of St. Benedict.—The Pope ; St. Leo ; Gregory the Great.—The Papacy breaks away from the Supremacy of Constantinople (726), Invokes the aid of Charles Martel.—Pippin the Short (741-768).

WE left the history of the Franks at the year 681, when Ebroin’s attempt to put the ruling power into the hands of royalty and of Neustria had been frustrated by his death. The mayors who succeeded him in the western kingdom were not strong enough to maintain the great struggle begun by him. They continued by their persecutions to enlarge the ranks of the Austrasian army, and that army finally reached the point when it was able to conquer, for its position on the banks of the Rhine and in the neighborhood of the barbarians had made it necessary that they should retain the courageous vigor which Neustria had lost, and which would have given the Austrasians victory much sooner had it not been for the genius of Ebroin. Pippin of Heristal by the decisive battle of Testry (687) became master over the three kingdoms, though he allowed Theodoric III to remain on the throne. Just as Ebroin had taken up arms against the nobles and Austrasia, for the sake of royal authority and Roman France, as Neustria was called, so Pippin of Heristal resisted this attempt, and menaced, in a way, the conquest of Clovis in behalf of the ancient Ripuarians, and at first, as will readily be believed, equally in behalf of the old German customs. That this event was considered a serious revolution, even at the time of its occurrence, is shown by the fact that all the surrounding nations over which the Frankish power extended, the Britons, Aquitanians, Gascons, Frisians, and Alemanni, believed that power to be shattered and that the time had come to free themselves. But Pippin let them see that, far from having lost, it had gained in strength. “He waged many wars”, said the chronicles, “against Radbod, duke of the Frisians, and other princes, against the Flemings and many other nations. In these wars he was always victorious”.

Pippin did not set up the throne again in Austrasia, but kept it in Neustria, which he wished to treat with consideration, and three kings successively reigned there who were mere puppets in his hands. At his death (714), the hereditary right of his family to the mayoralty of the palace was evidently already regarded as a matter of course, for he left the title to his grandson, a child of six years of age, under the guardianship of his widow, Plectrude.

The Neustrians sought to profit by this minority to free themselves from Austrasian power. They defeated the Austrasians, and made Chilperic I their king and Raganfred their mayor. The Austrasian, who were not content to submit to a child and to a woman, recognized another son of Pippin as their chief, Karl or Charles, who was called a bastard by those who strictly regarded the law. The Neustrians had allied themselves with the Frisians, in order to place Austrasia between two hostile countries, and Charles was defeated at first in 716. But a year later he surprised the conquerors and defeated them at Vincy near Courtray (717). Instead of stopping to celebrate his victory according to the barbarian custom, he pursued the Neustrians to the very walls of Paris; their army was almost annihilated. As their alliance with the Frisians had not succeeded, the Neustrians turned to the Aquitainians, who were ruled by Duke Eudes, and who, through hatred of barbarian authority, joyfully seized the opportunity of repulsing the new set of Frankish invaders. But the second league failed like the first. Charles defeated them near Soissons (718), and pursued them as far as Orleans. Later he induced Eudes to deliver to him Chilperic II whom he recognized as king (720).

This victory completed the work begun at Testry, and marked the final victory of Austrasia and the beginning of a new era in the history of the Franks. Until then, all the old institutions had been falling to pieces, and nothing new had taken definite shape. The territory had been loosely held together and badly organized; its outlying provinces were wavering between submission and independence. Saxons, Thuringians, Bavarians, Alemanni, and Aquitanians were placed in an uncertain position, and no one could give the exact limits of the Frankish Empire. Within, Neustria and Austrasia were divided by what was really the antagonism between Roman and barbarian ideas; the free men were more and more degraded, on the one hand, and on the other the aristocracy of the leudes became more and more powerful. Royalty existed, but without power; the Mayors of the Palace had the power but not the rights of kings. All the elements of the state were in confusion.

The Carolingian family, with its illustrious origin and victories, with its power and riches, was the only one in a position high enough, and with talents great enough, to infuse order into the barbarian world. The three great men belonging to it, Charles Martel, Pippin the Short, and Charlemagne, were workers in the same cause and followed the same policy, both in war and in peace; what was begun by the first of them was continued by the second, and accomplished by the third.

The quick blows, felt at the extreme limits of the kingdom, the expeditions alternating between the north and south, which, later, were the characteristic features of Charlemagne's wars, were already seen in those of Charles Martel. First there was a series of campaigns against the Bavarians; then another against the Frisians; then still another against the Saxons. All these nations, except the last, were subdued for a time, at least, if not forever (720­729). The wars were renewed in the south; all along the Rhone the Burgundian lords who had gained their independence returned to their allegiance, as well as Provence and Marseilles, whose governor Maurontus was banished (739). Eudes, the duke of Aquitania, was likewise forced to submit, and when he died Charles gave the duchy to his son Hunold only on the condition of his rendering homage to himself and his sons Pippin and Karlmann.

But the most famous military achievement of Charles, and that which gave him in after times his popular name of Martel, was his great victory over the Saracens in 732. Hardly a century had passed since Mohammedanism came into being in the deserts of Arabia, and its votaries had already reached the farthest limits of the West; by the year 711 they had invaded Spain, by 720 they had crossed the Pyrenees, and conquered Narbonne. In 732, the Emin Abderrahman invaded Aquitania, captured Bordeaux, and marched upon Tours, tempted by the wealth of the abbey in that town. Charles, summoned by Eudes, went to meet the infidels and gained a great victory between Tours and Poi­tiers, which stopped the movement of Mussulman invasion.

Thus he consolidated his territory on every side, preventing a division and protecting the frontiers from new invasions. The same sword that accomplished this great work had, at the same time, the glory of saving Christianity.

The Middle Ages acknowledged two masters, the Pope and the Emperor, and these two powers came, the one from Rome, and the other from Austrasian France. We have seen how the mayors of Austrasia, Pippin of Heristal, and Charles Martel, rebuilt the Frankish monarchy and prepared the way for the empire of Charlemagne; we now pass to the Roman pontiffs and see how they gathered around them all the churches of the West, and placed themselves at the head of the great Catholic society, over which one day Gregory VII and Innocent III should claim to have sole dominion.

The Roman Empire had perished, and the barbarians had built upon its ruins many slight structures that were soon overthrown. Not even had the Franks, who were destined to be perpetuated as a nation, as yet succeeded in founding a social state of any strength; their lack of experience led them from one attempt to another, all equally vain; even the attempt of Charlemagne met with no more permanent success. In the midst of these successive failures one institution alone, developing slowly, and steadily through the centuries following out the spirit of its principles, continued to grow and gain in power, in extent, and in unity.

The preaching of the apostles and their disciples had spread the Gospel throughout the Roman world, and as early as the third century the Christians formed a kind of vast society by themselves in the heart of the Empire. From Britain to the banks of the Euphrates, a Christian, traveling with a letter from his bishop, found aid and protection all along his route. Everywhere that he went he met with brothers, who assisted him if poor, and cared for him if sick; a sign served in the place of words, and the Christians all understood each other no matter of what language or country they might be—for they were all of one family. This society had organized itself under the stress of persecution; it had a rigid discipline and a strictly regulated hierarchy. The cities of the Roman provinces had grown into dioceses governed by supervisors or bishops (episcopi); below them in authority were the elders or priests (presbyteri). The bishop, who had first been appointed by the apostles and consecrated by the laying on of hands, afterwards when the number of conversions necessitated the formation of a church in every city, was chosen by the faithful, installed by the other bishops of the province, and con­firmed in his powers by the metropolitan (Canon XIV of the Nicene Council). The letters of Sidonius Apollinaris show that at Châlons and Bruges in the fifth century, the elections of bishops were by popular vote. Later the clergy took a larger part in ecclesiastical elections and inclined to the exclusion of the laity; but what the laymen lost in this respect they gained by the encroachment of the royal power upon the church, which power often gave the bishoprics to nobles. The clergy struggled against this usurpation and succeeded in establishing the principle of election by the clergy and the people, with the submission of the election to the king for his consent; this was the arrangement made by the canons of the councils of Orleans, in 549, and by the perpetual constitution of 615.

The election system was only used for one degree of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, for the bishopric. The lower dignitaries were chosen by the bishop. They were divided into two categories of orders—the higher and the lower orders. There were three higher orders, namely, the priests, the deacons, and the sub-deacons, and four lower orders, the acolytes, the doorkeepers, the exorcists, and the readers. The latter orders were not regarded as an integral part of the clergy, as their members were the servants of the others.

As regards the territorial divisions, the bishop governed the diocese, which at a much later date was divided into parishes, whose spiritual welfare was in the hands of the parish priest or curate (curio). The parishes, taken together, constituted the diocese; the united dioceses, or suffragan bishoprics, constituted the ecclesiastical province, at whose head stood the metropolitan or archbishop. When a provincial council was held, it met in the metropolis and was presided over by the metropolitan. Above the metropoli­tans were the Patriarchs, in the East, and the Primates, in the West, bishops who held the great capitals or the apostolic sees, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Rome, Jerusalem, Caesarea in Cappadocia, Carthage in Africa, and Heraclius in Thrace; among them Rome ranked higher by one degree, and from this supreme position exercised a supreme authority acknowledged by all the Church.

The organization of the hierarchy did not reach this point at once, but after a long process which separated and determined the originally confused elements and fixed by more exact lines and greater distances the different degrees of power. The authority which was at first shared by the mass of the faithful, the foundation of every religious structure, rose step by step as it was withdrawn from the lower orders, and was finally vested almost entirely in the supreme point, the Pope. This gradual ascent of authority from point to point sums up the whole of Church history till the time of Boniface VIII; about half the course had been run at the time to which we have now come.

In the fifth and sixth centuries, under the barbarian kings, the bishops kept and extended the influence which they had possessed under the Roman Empire in the cities which they often preserved from ruin during invasion, by their intercessions with the German chiefs. Chilperic complained of it; “The bishops alone”, he said, “reign in the cities”. They ruled as sovereigns, each one his diocese, and all together they managed the affairs of the province by means of the councils. The king, indeed, called the council together, but he did so at the suggestion of the bishops. The kings were not even admitted to it; priests and abbots were allowed to be present, but only a small number of them. There were twenty-five of these assemblies held in Gaul in the fifth century, and fifty-four in the sixth. It was then that the bishops had most influence, as the lay authority was still very weak on account of the prevailing confusion, and as the education of the bishops gave them great weight with the barbarian sovereigns. It declined, however, in the seventh century, and we hear of only twenty councils, while in the eighth century there were no more than seven in a period of fifty years. In fact, the introduction of nobles, rough barbarians, into the bishoprics had spread among the clergy ignorance and vices, worldly tastes and temporal ambitions, which ill accorded with the cares of ecclesiastical government.

The aim of the monastic system had originally been a purer and more ascetic life than that led not only by the faithful in general, but even by ecclesiastics. The monks, at first, were not members of the clergy, nor did they wish to be; they were common laymen, who aspired to carry virtue to its extreme limits; they were the stoics of Christianity, but they carried their stoicism to excess. In the deserts of Syria and Egypt they gave themselves over to so severe a life of fasting and penitence that finally, as St. Jerome bears witness, “it unsettled their minds, so that they no longer knew what they were doing or what they were saying”. Simeon of Antioch passed his life standing upon a column, whence his surname Stylites. In this state of absolute isolation they were called hermits (inhabitants of the desert), and anchorites (those who live in retreat); those who held any intercourse with each other, without, indeed, ceasing to live alone, were call monks (men of solitude), and this name is the one most commonly used. The name of cenobites (those who live in common) marked a third class, those who approved of union and a common life. This form of monasticism prevailed in the West.

It is true that instances of this anchorite fanaticism were occasionally seen in Europe, a result of the impetuosity of the barbarian character. Even in the Vosges there was a stylite who had taken his stand on a column, from which he had thrown down a statue of Diana, and who stayed there until the nails froze off from, his hands and feet; but in general the monks of the West did something better than abandoning themselves to useless maceration. In the midst of the confusion caused by invasion, they opened asylums where they would gather together and find the repose that was banished from every other place. Such were, in the fifth century, the monasteries of Saint Victor at Marseilles, and of Lerins on one of the islands near Hyeres, not to mention those of Milan, Verona, Aquileia, and Marmoutiers, near Tours, all of earlier date, where, instead of the ecstatic idleness of the anchorites, great intellectual activity was found, and where most of the controversies on the famous subjects of free will, predestination, grace, and original sin were started. The strictness of ascetic rule was moderated there to the nature and requirements of the climate, according to the wise saying of Sulpicius Severus, that “it is gluttony for the Greeks to eat heartily, but a necessity for the Gauls”.

At the beginning of the sixth century St. Benedict of Nursia, whom ardent piety had early drawn into retirement, and who had seen flocking around him a herd of monks attracted by his virtues, published for the monastery of Monte Cassino, which he had founded, his famous Rule of the monastic life, thereby giving definite-shape to the institution in the West. These wise rules portioned off the monks’ time, hour by hour, between manual and intellectual labor: agriculture, reading, and the copying of manuscripts were to occupy their time. The last mentioned occupation, so useful to civilization, was regarded as a work of great piety. Cassiodorus, who retired toward the year 540 to a monastery and there passed the rest of his life, was in the habit of copying manuscripts; he often repeated the saying, “that you stab the devil with as many blows as you trace letters on your paper”.

St. Benedict of Aniane, in Aquitania, in the time of Charlemagne, marks a new era of reformation in monastic life. A question that had early aroused a great deal of discussion was what place should be assigned to monks in the religious society. They had wished to be answerable only to their abbots, but the tendency toward organization, which showed itself everywhere, obliged them to submit to the bishops. This was necessary for the maintenance of good order and for the repression of the bad or false monks who overran the country. As early as 451, the ecumenical council of Chalcedon prescribed the subordination of the monks to the bishops, and the councils of Agde (506), and of Orleans (511 and 553) confirmed this law. In 787, a canon of the second Nicene Council granted to the abbots the right of conferring the lesser orders on the monks of their houses, and soon there was no monk 'who was not also a priest.

Above the aristocracy of the bishops rose the pontifical monarchy' by slow degrees. From the first, the word of the successor of St. Peter and of the bishop of the Eternal City had enjoyed a superior authority; he was often consulted on doubtful questions, and he was early regarded as the representative of Catholic unity. The second general council, convoked by Theodosius at Constantinople in 381, solemnly recognized this supremacy by giving to the bishop of Constantinople only a secondary rank. The name of pope, which originally belonged to all the bishops, was finally reserved for him alone; a change which was already perceptible in the time of Leo the Great, though it was not completed until a much later time.

The bishop of Rome had possessed a great deal of property as early as the time of the Empire, in the capital and in the rest of Italy. He even acquired some beyond the Alps, for instance in the province of Arles, upon whose bishop he laid the duty of administering his affairs. He occupied, moreover, in Rome itself, in the most famous city of the world, the influential position which had been granted to bishops during the municipal regime at the end of the Empire.

The part that St. Leo (440-461) took in public affairs, and the success of his intercession with Attila, did much to enhance the dignity of his office. He obtained an edict from Valentinian III, in which the Emperor pledged the whole Church to recognize her spiritual director, in order to preserve peace everywhere, and at the same time he is seen reinstating in his see a bishop of Gaul, who had been banished from it, and transferring the metropolitan dignity from Arles to Vienne.

Though kindly treated, the Church of Rome did not make any progress under the Ostrogoths. But when their power had been broken (553), and Rome had been placed again under the authority of the Emperor of Constantinople, the very remoteness of her new master insured to the Church a more prosperous future. The invasion of the Lombards drove a great many refugees into her territory, and the Roman population showed a slight return of its old energy in its double hatred toward them, as barbarians and as Arians. As to the exarch, whom the Emperor of the East had entrusted with the government of his Italian provinces and invested with direct power over the military dukes and counts of Naples, Rome, Genoa, etc., he could no longer enforce his authority on the western shore of Italy, confined as he was to Ravenna and separated from Rome by the Lombard power which had seized Spoleto.

It was at this favorable point in the state of affairs, though critical in some respects, that Gregory the Great made his appearance (590-604). He was a descendant of the noble Anicia family, and added to his advantages of birth and position the advantages of a well-endowed body and mind. He was prefect of Rome when less than thirty years old, but after holding this office a few months he abandoned the honors and cares of worldly things for the retirement of the cloister. His reputation did not allow him to remain in the obscurity of that life. Toward 579 he was sent to Constantinople by Pope Pelagius II as secretary or papal nuncio, and he rendered distinguished services to the Holy See in its relations with the Empire and in its struggles against the Lombards. In 590 the clergy, the senate, and the people raised him with one accord to the sovereign pontificate, to succeed Pelagius. As it was still necessary for every election to be confirmed by the Emperor at Constantinople, Gregory wrote to him to beg him not to sanction this one; but the letter was intercepted and soon orders arrived from Maurice ratifying the election. Gregory hid himself, but he was discovered and led back to Rome.

When once Pope, though against his will, he used his power to strengthen the papacy, to propagate Christianity, and to improve the discipline and organization of the Church. Although he complained that the episcopates, and especially his own, were less "the office of a shepherd of souls than of a temporal prince," yet he did not neglect the temporal powers of the Holy See. And it is well that he did assume these powers, for the Emperor did so little for the protection of Italy, that the soldiers entrusted with the defense of Rome against the Lombards were without pay. Gregory gave them their pay, took part himself in the work of defense, and armed the clergy. When Agilulf, whose advance had called for these preparations, had drawn back, Gregory entered into negotiations with him in the name of Rome, in spite of the protests of the exarch.

Strengthened thus by his own efforts, he undertook the propagation of Christianity and orthodoxy both within and without the limits of the old Roman Empire. Within those limits there were some who still clung to paganism, in Sicily, Sardinia, and even at the very gates of Rome, at Terracina, and doubtless also in Gaul, as there is a constitution of Childebert still extant dated 554, and entitled : “For the abolition of the remains of idolatry”. There were Arians very near to Rome—namely, the Lombards; but through the intervention of Theudalinda, their queen, Gregory succeeded in having Adelwald, the heir to the throne, brought up in the Catholic faith; as early as 587 the Visigoths in Spain, under Reccared, were converted.

England was still pagan throughout; and thither Gregory sent the monk Augustine with forty Roman missionaries (596). They landed on the island of Thanet, went from there to the king of Kent, Ethelberht, who allowed them to preach their doctrines at Canterbury. Christianity spread rapidly from that center to the north and west, and, in 627, it was solemnly recognized in Northumberland. St. Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, had been appointed primate of Great Britain by Gregory the Great, with whom he carried on an active correspondence which has come down to us.

Ireland, the isle of Saints, was already converted, and monks were going out from her to join in the conquest of the barbarians. It was at this time that St. Columban, the monk who so boldly reproved Brunhilda for her crimes, went to preach the gospel among the mountains of Helvetia, and to establish abbeys there surrounded by cultivated lands. St. Rupert afterwards made his way into Bavaria and founded there the bishopric of Salzburg.

Christianity thus renewed its ardor for proselytism, and Gregory contributed to its success most wisely by enjoining precepts of moderation upon his missionaries, and by the skillful manner in which he made the transition to Catholicism easy to the pagans; he wrote to Augustine : “Be careful not to destroy the pagan temples; it is only necessary to destroy the idols, then to sprinkle the edifice with holy water, and to build altars and place relics there. If the temples are well built, it is a wise and useful thing for them to pass from the worship of demons to the worship of the true God; for while the nation sees its old places of worship still standing, it will be the more ready to go there, by force of habit, to worship the true God”.

In the interior Gregory succeeded in arranging the different degrees of power in the Church, and in forcing the recognition of the supreme power of the Holy See. We find him granting the title of Vicar of Gaul to the bishop of Aries, and corresponding with Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, in regard to Great Britain, with the archbishop of Seville in regard to Spain, with the archbishop of Thessalonica in regard to Greece, and, finally, sending legates a latere to Constantinople. In his Pastoral, which he wrote on the occasion of his election, and which became an established precedent in the West, he prescribed to the bishops their several duties, following the decisions of many councils. He strengthened the hierarchy by preventing the encroachments of the bishops upon one another: “I have given to you the spiritual direction of Britain”, he wrote to the ambitious Augustine, “and not that of the Gauls”. He rearranged the monasteries, made discipline the object of his vigilant care, reformed church music, and substituted the chant that bears his name for the Ambrosian chant, “which resembled”, according to a contemporary, “the far-off noise of a chariot rumbling over pebbles”.

Rome, victorious again with the help of Gregory the Great, continued to push her conquests to distant countries after his death. Two Anglo-Saxon monks, St. Wilfrid, bishop of York, and St. Willibrord undertook the conversion of the savage fishermen of Friesland and Holland at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century; they were followed by another Englishman, the most renowned of all these missionaries, Winfrith, whose name was changed to Boniface, perhaps by the Pope, in recognition of his active and beneficent apostleship. When Gregory II appointed him bishop of Germany (723), he went through Bavaria and established there the dioceses of Frisingen, Passau, and Ratisbon. When Pope Zacharias bestowed the rank of metropolitan upon the Church of Mainz in 748, he entrusted its direction to St. Boniface, who from that time was primate, as it were, of all Germany, under the authority of the Holy See. St. Boniface was assassinated by the Pagans of Friesland in 755.

The Pope had now become, in truth, the ruler of Christendom. He was, however, still a subject of the Emperor; but a rupture was inevitable, as his authority, on the one hand, was growing day by day and the emperor's, on the contrary, was declining. As early as the end of the seventh century, when Pope Sergius II refused to recognize the canons of the council in Trullo, the Emperor Justinian II wished to have him forcibly removed from Rome; but the soldiers refused to obey, Rome rose in rebellion, there was insurrection throughout the exarchate, and the Venetians formed themselves into an independent duchy. This was an entering wedge. In 726 the Isaurian Emperor Leo sided with the Iconoclasts (image breakers), who looked upon the worship of images as idolatry. He published an edict in their favor which he wished to enforce in his Italian provinces. But the images of the saints were already very dear to the Italians; and Rome again rebelled. Gregory II (713-731), upheld as he was by public opinion, and enjoying great popularity by reason of his wealth and good deeds, wrote a letter to the Isaurian Leo, which has a certain flavor of Gregory VII about it : “The civil powers and the ecclesiastical powers are things distinct; the body is subject to the former, the soul to the latter; the sword of justice is in the hands of the magistrate; but a more formidable sword—that of excommunication—belongs to the clergy. O tyrant, you come in arms to attack us; we, all unprotected as we are, can but call upon Jesus Christ, the prince of the heavenly army, and beg him to send out a devil against you who shall destroy your body and the salvation of your soul. The barbarians have bowed beneath the Gospel's yoke, and you, alone, are deaf to the voice of the shepherd. These godly barbarians are filled with rage; they burn to avenge the persecution suffered by the Church in the East. Give up your audacious and disastrous enterprise, reflect, tremble, and repent”.

Gregory II followed up these letters with an appeal to the Venetians, to the Italians of the exarchate, and even to the Lombards. The Romans banished their imperial prefect. At the same time Luitprand, king of the Lombards, invaded the exarchate and put an end for the moment to the dominion of the eastern Empire in the northern part of Italy.

But the Pope did not intend this revolution to result for the Roman Church in a simple exchange of masters. Gregory II stopped Luitprand by conciliating the court of Byzantium, and succeeded in driving him away when he came to besiege Rome. The same danger reappeared under his successor Gregory III (731-741), who appealed to those godly barbarians with whom Gregory II had threatened the Greek Empire —namely, the Franks.

The Carolingians and the Popes had met in an enemy’s country, in a field of battle, where the one party were seeking conquest with the sword, the other with the cross. The missionaries who went out under Roman auspices to convert the pagans of Germany sought the protection of Charles Martel's army, and they in turn helped him to victory. It was then that the alliance between the two supreme powers of the West was first formed. Pope Gregory III conveyed to Charles the keys of the tomb of St. Peter with other presents, and the titles of Consul and Patrician. Gregory conjured him to come and deliver him from Luitprand, the king of the Lombards, who was fiercely threatening Rome. Charles did not have time to accomplish this distant expedition himself, but it was done by his successor.

Charles Martel was succeeded (741) by his sons Karlmann and Pippin. His youngest son, Gripho, he first excluded from any share in the inheritance, but afterwards, on his death-bed, allotted him a certain portion. Gripho was despoiled of his share by his brothers, who pursued him whithersoever he went in search of an armed force to sustain his claims, among the Bavarians, the Saxons, and the Aquitanians, until at the end of ten years he died on his way to seek help among the Lombards. Karlmann had Austrasia, Pippin Neustria.

They made many expeditions to the north, the east, and the south, as their father had done before them; expeditions against the Bavarians, the Alemanni, and the Saxons, many of whom they forced to submit to the rite of baptism. They also marched against the Aquitanians, who were led by Waifar, as Hunold, his father, had retired to a monastery whence we shall shortly see him emerging.

Both Karlmann and Pippin tried to reform certain abuses that had crept into the Church. Two councils, convoked by Karlmann, the one in Germany (742), the other in the following year at Lestines (near Charleroi, in Belgium), drew up decrees which abolished superstitious rites and certain Pagan ceremonies, still remaining in force; they also authorized grants of Church lands by the "Prince" for military purposes on condition of the payment of an annual rent to the Church; they reformed the ecclesiastical life, forbade the priests to hunt or to ride through the woods with dogs, falcons, or sparrow-hawks; and, finally, made all priests subordinate to their diocesan bishops, to whom they were obliged to give account each year of their faith and their ministry—all of which were necessary provisions for the organization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and for the regulation of church government. Similar measures were taken by the Council of Soissons, convoked by Pippin in 744. In 747, Karlmann renounced the world and retired to the celebrated Italian monastery of Monte Cassino. As he left he intrusted his children to the care of their uncle, Pippin, who robbed them of their inheritance and ruled alone over the whole Frankish Empire.

It was then that Pippin contemplated assuming the crown. Charles Martel had left the throne vacant on the death of Theodoric IV (737), possibly in order to accustom the Franks to do without their Merovingian kings. In 742 Pippin had crowned Childeric III, no doubt because he did not feel himself so strong as his father had been. Everybody must have been impressed by the contrast between the imbecility of the throne and the genius of the Carolingians, and it naturally gave rise to the question laid before Pope Zacharias by Pippin himself, namely: “Who should be called king, he who has the name or he who has the power?” When, at the solicitation of his envoys, the title of king was offered him by the chiefs of the nation, he seemed inclined to refuse it, and pretended that he wished to leave the question entirely in the hands of the sovereign pontiff. Accordingly Burchard, bishop of Wirzburg, and Fulrad, abbot of Saint Denis, were sent to Rome to consult the oracle, whose reply was such as Pippin desired. In November of the year 751, an assembly gathered at Soissons proclaimed him king. Childeric was deposed at the same time, and his head was shaved and he was shut up in the monastery of Sithieu, where he died in the year 755. He left one son named Theodoric, who was sent to the monastery of Fontenelle and brought up in obscurity. This ending of the first Frank dynasty did not excite even a protest or a murmur of regret.

Pippin was at first consecrated by Boniface, archbishop of Mainz, and again, two years later, by Pope Stephen II in person, who anointed him and his two sons with holy oil, at the same time pronouncing the sentence of excommunication against any who should thereafter choose a king from any other family of the Franks.

Pippin reaped the fruits of the Carolingian alliance with the popes, in this sanction given to his temporal authority by the spiritual authority. He soon repaid the Pope, who was hard pressed by Aistulf, king of the Lombards. To induce him to cross the Alps, Stephen II bestowed upon him the title of Patrician of Rome—the highest possible title of the Empire, but one which brought no power with it. He made two expeditions against the Lombards, occupied the Pentapolis together with the exarchate of Ravenna, and presented it, in spite of protestations from the Emperor of the East, to St. Peter, thus putting temporal power into the hands of the Roman pontiffs (754-6).

Pippin was the first sovereign ruler of the West. Constantine V (Copronymus) the emperor at Constantinople, sent ambassadors to him, who brought him the first organ with several stops that had been seen in France, and asked of him the hand of his daughter Gisela for the emperor’s son: they suggested the exarchate of Ravenna as her dowry, hoping by this means to recover it from the Pope ; and that was doubtless the real cause of their embassage. Pippin refused.

In the meantime he proceeded with his military measures; he conquered the