Charles would not come. Frank though he was, he was too honourable to march at a priest’s bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in arms, to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand might take him on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become his father-in-arms, after the good old Teuton fashion; Luitprand, who with his Lombards had helped him to save Christendom a second time from the Mussulman in 737. The Pope, one would think, should have remembered that good deed of the good Lombard’s whereof his epitaph sings,
‘Deinceps tremuere feroces
Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos
Cum premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.’
So Charles Martel took the title of Patrician from the Pope, but sent him no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the measure of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul which his sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is now, as St. Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing therefore in the lowest abyss of hell.
So one generation more passes by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to manhood, is less scrupulous than his father. He is bound to the Pope by gratitude. The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to depose the royal house of the Merovingians, and so assumed the right of making kings.—A right which future popes will not forget.
Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a monastery. Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna. The Pope succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome, threatening to assault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by a poll-tax.
Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help: and so awful has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to do it; allowed to pass safely and unarmed through the very land upon which he is going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare.
It is a strange, and instructive figure, that. The dread of the unseen, the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons; on Frank and on Lombard alike. The Pope and his clergy are to them magicians, against whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal the sick and blast the sound; who can call to their aid out of the clouds that pantheon of demi-gods, with which, under the name of saints, they have peopled heaven; who can let loose on them the legions of fiends who dwell in every cave, every forest, every ruin, every cloud; who can, by the sentence of excommunication, destroy both body and soul in hell. They were very loth to fear God, these wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men have who will not fear God, to fear the devil.
So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church. He promises to come with all his Franks. Stephen’s conscience seems to have been touched: he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation: but it is too late now. Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps over the Alps, and at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to the Lombards. The old Lombard spirit seems to have past away.
Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises. The Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which this lecture commenced.
Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying the land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated vessels, insulting the sacrament of the altar. The Lombards have violated nuns; and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they had really tried, one cannot see why they should not have succeeded. In fact, Pope Stephen’s hysterical orations to Pepin must be received with extreme caution. No Catholic historian of that age cares to examine the truth of a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad to say of an enemy: and really the man who would forge a letter from St. Peter might dare to tell a few lesser falsehoods into the bargain. Pepin cannot but obey so august a summons; and again he is in Italy, and the Lombards dare not resist him. He seizes not only all that Astolf had taken from the Pope, but the Pentapolis and Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the Greek Emperors, and bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and ‘the holy Roman Republic.’