In giving his blessing to the accession of king Pippin pope Zacharias had kept in view the aid which the Franks might grant him in his quarrels with his Lombard neighbours. Zacharias died ere he had time to demand a return for his complaisance, but his successor Stephen soon claimed the gratitude of the newly-crowned monarch of the Franks. |The Lombards and the Papacy.| The old Lombard king Liutprand had died in 744, and his nephew Hildebrand, who succeeded him, had held the throne for no more than a few months. The Great Council of the Lombards deposed him for vicious incompetency, and elected in his place Ratchis, duke of Friuli. The new king, a man of mild and pious disposition, kept the peace which Liutprand had made with the Papacy till 749, when, for reasons to us unknown, he advanced to attack Perugia, one of the few places in Italy which still adhered to the empire. Pope Zacharias visited his camp to plead with him in behalf of peace, with the unexpected result that Ratchis not only raised the siege, but laid down his crown and retired into a monastery, stricken, like his contemporary Carloman, with the sudden horror of secular things which occasionally fell upon the Teutonic monarchs of the seventh and eighth century.
Ratchis was succeeded by his brother Aistulf, an ambitious and restless monarch, who raised the Lombard kingdom to its widest territorial extent by conquering the long-coveted Ravenna. |Aistulf takes Ravenna, 752.| When he attacked the shrunken Exarchate it received no help from Constantine Copronymus, who detested his Italian subjects as obstinate image-worshippers, and was much occupied at the moment by his Saracen war. Ravenna fell with hardly any resistance, and Eutychius, the last exarch, fled to Sicily. Aistulf then busied himself in reducing the independent duchy of Benevento to vassalage. His next project was to annex the towns of the ‘ducatus Romanus’—the valley of the lower Tiber—and to make the Pope his liegeman. Although he had concluded a forty-years’ peace with the Papacy, yet, in 752-53, he was hovering about the neighbourhood of Rome, and occupying the Umbrian and Sabine borders of the ‘patrimony of St. Peter.’ At last his ambassadors appeared before Stephen II. to demand the homage of Rome, and the payment of an annual tribute. After trying in vain to scare off Aistulf, first by the terrors of excommunication, and then by empty menaces of applying for aid to Constantinople, which the Lombard derided, Stephen bethought himself of the debt of gratitude which the Frankish king owed to the Holy See. After ascertaining that his presence and demands would not be unacceptable to king Pippin, he left Rome in October 753, and, after making one more appeal to the Lombard king to grant him peace and independence, crossed the Alps, and appeared before the Frankish Court at Ponthion, near Bar-le-Duc.
His reception was all that he could have wished. |Pope Stephen invites Pippin to Italy.| Pippin met him three miles from the town, knelt before him on the roadside, and walked beside his stirrup to the palace gate, leading his palfrey by the bridle, though the month was January, and the snow lay on the ground. In the royal chapel, when the court was assembled, Stephen, ‘with many tears and groans,’ laid before the king the lamentable state of the Church, and besought him to bring peace and salvation to the cause of St. Peter and the Roman State. Whereupon Pippin swore an oath that he would grant him all he asked, and use every endeavour to put him in possession of the exarchate of Ravenna, as well as all the cities which belonged by right to the Roman republic. It was to no purpose that an unexpected guest appeared in Gaul to beg Pippin to swerve from his purpose. This was his brother Carloman, who left his Sabine monastery to pray Pippin not to bring down the horrors of war upon Italy—a request which seemed so strange to the Church historians of the day, that they could only suppose that his mind had been overpowered by diabolic delusions, or that he was yielding to dread of the wrath of Aistulf. Pippin refused to listen to him, and bade him quit the court, and take up his residence at Vienne, where he soon afterwards died.
Meanwhile the Great Council of the Frankish realms was summoned to meet at Cérisy-sur-Oise, and there the king announced to his assembled counts and dukes that he proposed to make war on the Lombards, in order to vindicate the rights of the Holy See. Won over by their king’s zeal, and by the great gifts which Stephen II. distributed among them, the Franks eagerly clamoured for war. In return for their goodwill the Pope solemnly crowned Pippin, his wife Bertha, and his young sons, Charles and Carloman, and pronounced a curse on any one who should ever remove the house of Pippin from the Frankish throne.
In the summer of 754 the hosts of the Franks choked the Savoyard passes with their multitudes, and prepared to force their way down into Italy. Aistulf had mustered his army, and was ready to meet them. In the narrow gorge of the Dora, hard by Susa, he fell on the Frankish vanguard; but he suffered such a crushing defeat that he had to fall back on Pavia without striking a second blow. Pippin followed, wasting Piedmont with fire and sword, and soon beleaguered Aistulf in his royal stronghold. |Pippin subdues Aistulf, 754.| Then, with an alacrity which his conqueror should have found somewhat suspicious, Aistulf offered terms of peace. He would do personal homage to Pippin, give him hostages, and engage to restore to the Roman See all that was its due. So a treaty was signed, Stephen was reconducted in triumph to Rome, and Pippin returned beyond the Alps, proud that he had added Lombardy to the list of states dependent on the Frankish crown.
On his homeward journey the king heard of the death of the great archbishop of Mainz, the apostle of Transrhenane Germany. Zealous even in extreme old age for the conversion of every subject of the Frankish realm, Boniface had started on a missionary journey to East Friesland, where paganism still held sway. As he lay encamped at Dokkum a great multitude of wild heathen, indignant at the invasion of their last retreat, fell upon him and slew him with all his companions. |Martyrdom of St. Boniface.| His death was not long unavenged; the Christian majority of the Frisians took arms, put down their pagan brethren, slew many thousands of them and compelled the rest to submit to baptism. By his martyr-death the great archbishop completed the conversion of the land for which he had striven so much during his lifetime. He was buried at Fulda in Hesse, where a great abbey was reared over his shrine and became the centre of Christian life in the Hessian lands whose apostle he had been. It would have afforded the keenest pleasure to Boniface if he could have witnessed the zeal with which his patron Pippin went forward with the task of reducing the Frankish clergy to canonical discipline. In the year which followed his martyrdom the Synod of Verneuil passed the most stringent laws against evil-living, simony, the practice of secular avocations, and the other failings of the clergy against which the archbishop had raged in his lifetime.
The easy promises which king Aistulf had made when he was beleaguered in Pavia had never been intended for keeping. When the Franks had withdrawn from Italy the king found pretexts for delay, and did not restore to Stephen II. a single one of the Sabine or Latin cities which he had occupied in 753, still less the Exarchate of Ravenna, which the Pope had impudently asked and fondly hoped to receive. |Aistulf attacks Rome.| In the winter of 755-6 he took still more unmistakeable steps of hostility; descending the valley of the Tiber he suddenly laid siege to Rome. The walls of Aurelian were still too strong to be stormed, but three months of blockade brought the citizens near to yielding. The news that king Pippin had once more taken arms restored courage to Pope and people, and ere long Aistulf was forced to raise the siege and hasten north to defend Lombardy. Once more the Franks forced the defiles of the Cenis, and cut to pieces a Lombard force which strove to stop the way. For the second time Aistulf was forced into Pavia, beleaguered, and compelled to sue for peace. This time he was given harder terms. Pippin demanded one-third of the royal hoard of the Lombards, an annual tribute, a larger body of hostages, and the instant surrender of the Exarchate. The unwilling Lombard was forced to concede everything; Frankish envoys received and handed over to the Pope, the cities of Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Forli, Urbino, and Sinigaglia, with all their dependencies. |Pippin gives the Exarchate to the Pope.| Their keys were brought to Rome and laid in triumph on the sepulchre of St. Peter. Thus did the Pope become an important secular prince, by taking over the old Byzantine dominions in central Italy. It would seem that the theory by which he justified this usurpation was that the guard of the possessions of the ‘Roman Republic’ in Italy was incumbent on the emperor, but that Constantine Copronymus being an obstinate heretic his rights fell into abeyance. The Pope then stepped forward as the representative of the ‘Roman Republic’ in default of a Caesar, and claimed possession of all that the Lombards had lately usurped. Apparently he considered himself as ‘Patrician’ in the Exarchate, but as a Patrician owing no duty or obedience to a heterodox emperor.
King Aistulf died in the next year, killed by a fall from his horse, and the affairs of Italy troubled Pippin no more, Desiderius, duke of Istria, the new Lombard king, being occupied with strengthening himself against an attempt of the ex-king Ratchis to leave his cloister and resume the crown. The rest of Pippin’s reign was mainly devoted to the completion of the Frankish dominion in southern Gaul. Soon after his proclamation as king his officers had recovered for him all the Saracen towns in Septimania north of Narbonne. In 759 Pippin marched in person to lay siege to that city, the last bulwark of Islam beyond the Pyrenees. |Pippin takes Narbonne, 759.| The Christian inhabitants of the place rose at his approach, slew the Arab garrison, and opened their gates to the Frank. No help came from Spain, where civil war was—as usual—raging, and the boundaries of the realm of Pippin were advanced to the Pyrenees.
Of far greater difficulty was the conquest of Aquitaine, the last achievement of Pippin. The old duke Hunold, the adversary of Charles Martel, had retired into a cloister, and had been succeeded by his false and restless son Waifer. On being summoned to give up some Frankish refugees, and surrender certain church lands, the new duke took up arms against his suzerain in 760; when Pippin appeared with all the host of Austrasia and ravaged Berri and Auvergne, Waifer asked for peace, and did homage. But the moment that his liege lord had departed home, he flung his fealty to the winds and began to ravage Burgundy. Next year the king returned in force and conquered Clermont and the rest of Auvergne, to which in 762 he added Bourges and the land of Berri. Waifer held out with the greatest obstinacy, and was confirmed in his resistance by learning of the revolt of Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, who judged the time favourable for freeing his duchy from the Franks. |Conquest of Aquitaine, 767.| This gave Aquitaine a certain respite, but by 766 Waifer had been driven beyond the Garonne, and saw all his subjects except the Gascons compelled to do homage to Pippin. In 767 his capital Toulouse fell, and soon after his despairing followers ended the war by murdering him and laying down their arms. Aquitaine was now annexed to the Frankish crown, and divided up into counties after the manner of the rest of the realm.
During the seven years of the war of Aquitaine king Pippin had found time to put down Tassilo’s rebellion, and to chastise some sporadic raids of the Saxons against whom he had at an earlier date (755) undertaken a more serious expedition, which resulted in all the Westphalian tribes doing homage to him. But the full subjection of this wild race, whose obstinate paganism and unconquerable courage had baffled ten generations of Frankish missionaries and kings, was reserved for Pippin’s greater son.