Thus the Pope laid Pippin under a great obligation; it now remained for Pippin to discharge that obligation. It was not long before the time came.
The Lombard king felt that his opportunity was slipping by, and acted with some vigour. He captured Ravenna and threatened Rome. The Pope hurried across the Alps. He anointed and crowned Pippin; he likewise anointed and blessed his son Charles (Charlemagne), and forbade the Franks under pain of excommunication ever to choose their king from any other family. These three great favours, the transfer of the royal title, the coronation rite, and the perpetual confirmation of the Carlovingian sovereignty, called for a great return. Pippin promised that the Adriatic provinces, taken by the Lombards from the Byzantines, should be ceded by the Lombards to the Pope. This promise Pippin fulfilled. He crossed the Alps, defeated the Lombard king, and forced him to cede the Exarchate of Ravenna and the five cities below it on the coast, to the Pope, who thereby became an actual sovereign. Thus Pippin discharged his obligation to the Papacy.
This beginning of the Papal monarchy is so important that the theoretic origin may as well be mentioned here. There was a legend, universally believed, that an early Pope, Silvester (314-335) healed the Emperor Constantine of leprosy, and that the Emperor, in gratitude, made a great grant of territory to the Pope. The fact appears to have been that Constantine, although not cured of the leprosy, did give to Silvester the Lateran palace and a plot of ground around it. This little donation grew in legend like a grain of mustard seed, and served the purpose of the Roman clergy. No good Roman would have been content with a title derived from the Lombards or the Franks. In Roman eyes these Barbarians never had any title to Italian territory; they could give none. The only possible source of legal title was the Empire. In the gift by Constantine to Silvester papal adherents had a foundation of fact. That was enough. It is quite unnecessary to imagine false dealing. People in those days believed that what they wished true was true. This legend was accepted and embodied in concrete form in a document known as the Donation of Constantine, which is so important in explaining the attitude of the Papacy throughout the Middle Ages, that it may be quoted:—
"In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Emperor Cæsar Flavius Constantine ... to the most holy and blessed Father of Fathers, Silvester, bishop of Rome and Pope, and to all his successors in the seat of St. Peter to the end of the world...." Here comes, interspersed with snatches of Christian dogma, a rambling narrative of his leprosy, of the advice of his physicians to bathe in a font on the Capitol filled with the warm blood of babies; how he refused, how Peter and Paul appeared in a dream and sent him to Silvester, how he then abjured paganism, accepted the creed, was baptized and healed, and how he then recognized that heathen gods were demons and that Peter and his successors had all power on earth and in heaven. After this long preamble comes the grant:
"We, together with all our Satraps and the whole Senate, Nobles and People ... have thought it desirable that even as St. Peter is on earth the appointed Vicar of God, so also the Pontiffs his viceregents should receive from us and from our Empire, power and principality greater than belongs to us ... and to the extent of our earthly Imperial power we decree that the Sacrosanct Church of Rome shall be honoured and venerated, and that higher than our terrestrial throne shall the most sacred seat of St. Peter be gloriously exalted.
"Let him who for the time shall be pontiff over the holy Church of Rome ... be sovereign of all the priests in the whole world; and by his judgment let all things which pertain to the worship of God or the faith of Christians be regulated.... We hand over and relinquish our palace, the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places, and cities of Italy and the western regions, to the most blessed Pontiff and universal Pope, Silvester; and we ordain by our pragmatic constitution that they shall be governed by him and his successors, and we grant that they shall remain under the authority of the holy Roman Church."[5]
The date of this document and many statements in it are anachronisms and errors. It was composed about the time of Pippin's Donation, probably by somebody connected with the papal chancery, and may be considered to be a pious forgery representing the facts as the writer deemed they were or else should be. It was officially referred to for the first time in 777, but did not receive its full celebrity until the eleventh century, when the relations of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire became the centre of European history.
FOOTNOTE:
[5] Italy and her Invaders, T. Hodgkin, vol. vii, pp. 149-151; Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages, Ernest F. Henderson, pp. 319-329.