The peace of Italy was not broken till 738 when Transimund duke of Spoleto rebelled, not for the first time, against Liutprand. The king crushed the revolt with his accustomed vigour, and the duke was compelled to fly: he took refuge at Rome with pope Gregory III. |Liutprand attacks Rome, 738.| Liutprand promptly demanded his surrender: Gregory refused, and the Lombard army at once marched into the duchy of Rome. The king captured Orte, Bomazo, and two other towns in south Tuscany, and menaced Rome with a siege. Gregory III. could hope for neither help nor sympathy from his master the emperor Leo, whom he had so grievously insulted. Accordingly he determined to seek aid from the one other power which might be able to succour him, the great Mayor of the Franks. He sent to Charles Martel the golden keys of the tomb of Saint Peter, and besought him to defend the holy city against the impious Lombard. |Gregory III. asks aid from the Franks.| He conferred on the Mayor the high-sounding title of Roman Patrician, which was not legally his to give, for only the emperor could confer it. He even offered to transfer to the ruler of the Franks the shadowy allegiance which Rome still paid to the emperor.
Thus did Gregory III., first of all the Roman pontiffs, endeavour to bring down upon Italy the curse of foreign invasion. He had drawn upon himself the wrath of Liutprand by his secular policy: the war arose purely from the fact that he had favoured the rebellion of the duke of Spoleto, and sheltered him when he fled. Yet he made the Lombard invasion a matter of sacrilege, complaining to Charles that Liutprand’s attack was an impious invasion of the rights of the Church, and a deliberate insult to the majesty of St. Peter. Considering that the king had saved him from destruction eight years before, Gregory must be accused of gross ingratitude, as well as of deliberate misrepresentation and hypocrisy. But the Pope had imbibed a bitter and quite irrational hatred for the Lombard race: the danger that he might lose his secular power, by Rome being annexed to the realm of Liutprand, caused Gregory to view the pious, peaceable, and orthodox king of the Lombards with as much dislike as he felt for the heretical Iconoclast at Constantinople. Considering the amiable character of Liutprand, and the respectable national record of the Lombards when they are compared with their contemporaries beyond the Alps, it is astonishing to read of the terms in which Gregory and his successors spoke of them. No epithet applied to the heathen in the Scriptures was too severe to heap upon the ‘fetid, perjured, impious, plundering, murderous race of the Lombards.’ And all this indignation and abuse was produced by the rational desire of Liutprand to punish the Pope for harbouring his rebels! It is impossible not to wish that the great king had succeeded in taking Rome, and unifying Italy, a contingency which would have spared the peninsula the curses of the Frankish invasion, of its long and unnatural connection with the Western Empire, and of that still greater disaster, the permanent establishment of the temporal power of the papacy.
Charles Martel did not accept Gregory’s offers, or carry out the Pope’s plans: he would not quarrel with his old friend Liutprand on such inadequate grounds as the Pope alleged. He chose instead to endeavour to mediate between Gregory and the Lombard king. He accepted the title of Patrician, and received the Roman ambassadors with great pomp and honour, sending them home with many rich presents. But his own delegates who accompanied them were charged to reconcile the Pope and the king, not to promise aid to the one against the other. Both Charles and Gregory, as it happened, were at this moment on the edge of the grave: both died in the next year (741), and it was some time before the first active interference of the Franks in behalf of the papacy was destined to take place.
How uncalled for was the action of pope Gregory is shown by the fact that in the next year Liutprand came to terms with the Roman See. |Liutprand grants peace to the Pope, 742.| On the accession of pope Zachariah, who promised to give no more aid to the rebel duke of Spoleto, Liutprand restored the cities he had taken from the Roman duchy, and granted a peace for twenty years. He even presented great offerings to the Roman Churches and made a present of some valuable estates to Zachariah. Yet the anger of the popes was in no way appeased: in their hearts they hated the Lombards as if they were still Arians or heathen, and only awaited another opportunity for conspiring against them.
Meanwhile Liutprand died in peace in 743, after a reign of thirty-one years, in which he had added the greater part of the Exarchate to his kingdom, had extended the boundaries of Italy to north and east against the Bavarian and Slav, and had reduced the Beneventan and Spoletan dukes to an unwonted state of subservience. No one, save his enemies the popes, ever laid a charge of any sort against his character, and he appears to have been the best-loved and best-served king of his day. We read with pleasure that he died in peace, ere the terrible invasion of the Franks began to afflict the land he had guarded so well. It would have been better perhaps for Italy if he had been a less virtuous and pious sovereign: a less temperate ruler would have finished his career of conquest by taking Rome, and so would have staved off the countless ills that Rome was about to bring on the whole Italian peninsula.
CHAPTER XVII
CHARLES MARTEL AND HIS WARS
720-41
Wars with the Saxons and Frisians—Missionary enterprises of St. Boniface—The Saracens in Septimania and Aquitaine—Charles wins the battle of Poictiers—Revolt and subjection of duke Hunold of Aquitaine—Charles and the Papacy.
The name of Charles Martel is generally remembered as that of the victor of Poictiers, but although the defeat of the invasion of the Saracens of Spain was destined to be the greatest of his achievements, his struggle with them was but one of a long series of wars waged against all the races of infidels who surrounded the Frankish realm. It was not till the twelfth year of his mayoralty that he himself took the field to face the invader from the south. Up to that year he had been far more concerned with the heathen neighbours of his own Austrasia, and must have spared comparatively few thoughts for the danger of distant Aquitaine, and its half-independent duke.
Charles had first to deal with the Saxons. To punish them for their interference in the Frankish civil war of 714-20 he led several expeditions into the valley of the Weser, and pushed the Frankish frontier up to the Teutoburgerwald and the head waters of the Lippe and the Ruhr. The Frisians had already submitted to him, but he had come to the conclusion that their homage was worth little until they should have adopted Christianity, and he therefore employed all his influence to make their duke Aldgisl co-operate in the conversion of his subjects. |Wars of Charles in Germany, 730.| The duke, a just and peace-loving prince, was not averse to the scheme, and under his guarantee missionaries were despatched by bishop Willibrord of Utrecht over all the Frisian districts. In the course of a generation they had christianised the greater part of the country, but the East Frisians were far behind the rest in accepting the gospel, and their conversion was to be reserved till the reign of Charles’s son.