An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

For more than a century after the death of Gregory the Great his successors continued to remain respectful subjects of the emperor. They looked to him for occasional help against the Lombards in northern Italy, who showed a disposition to add Rome to their possessions. In 725, however, the emperor Leo III aroused the bitter opposition of the pope by issuing a decree forbidding the usual veneration of the images of Christ and the saints. The emperor was a thoughtful Christian and felt keenly the taunts of the Mohammedans, who held all images in abhorrence and regarded the Christians as idolaters. He therefore ordered all sacred images throughout his empire to be removed from the churches, and all figures on the church walls to be whitewashed over. This aroused serious opposition even in Constantinople, and the farther west one went, the more obstinate became the resistance. The pope refused to obey the edict, for he held that the emperor had no right to interfere with practices hallowed by the Church. He called a council which declared all persons excommunicated who should "throw down, destroy, profane or blaspheme the holy images." The opposition of the West was successful, and the images kept their places.[38]

The popes and the Lombards.

The pope turns to the Franks for aid.

In spite of their abhorrence of the iconoclastic Leo and his successors, the popes did not give up all hope that the emperors might aid them in keeping the Lombards out of Rome. At last a Lombard ruler arose, Aistulf, a "son of iniquity," who refused to consider the prayers or threats of the head of the Church. In 751 Aistulf took Ravenna and threatened Rome. He proposed to substitute his supremacy for that of the eastern emperor and make of Italy a single state, with Rome as its capital. This was a critical moment for the peninsula. Was Italy, like Gaul, to be united under a single German people and to develop, as France has done, a characteristic civilization? The Lombards had progressed so far that they were not unfitted to organize a state that should grow into a nation. But the head of the Church could not consent to endanger his independence by becoming the subject of an Italian king. It was therefore the pope who prevented the establishment of an Italian kingdom at this time and who continued for the same reason to stand in the way of the unification of Italy for more than a thousand years, until he was dispossessed of his realms not many decades ago by Victor Emmanuel. After vainly turning in his distress to his natural protector, the emperor, the pope had no resource but to appeal to Pippin, upon whose fidelity he had every reason to rely. He crossed the Alps and was received with the greatest cordiality and respect by the Frankish monarch, who returned to Italy with him and relieved Rome (754).

Pippin subdues the Lombards.

No sooner had Pippin recrossed the Alps than the Lombard king, ever anxious to add Rome to his possessions, again invested the Eternal City. Pope Stephen's letters to the king of the Franks at this juncture are characteristic of the time. The pope warmly argues that Pippin owes all his victories to St. Peter and should now hasten to the relief of his successor. If the king permits the city of the prince of the apostles to be lacerated and tormented by the Lombards, his own soul will be lacerated and tormented in hell by the devil and his pestilential angels. These arguments proved effective; Pippin immediately undertook a second expedition to Italy, from which he did not return until the kingdom of the Lombards had become tributary to his own, as Bavaria and Aquitaine already were.

Donation of Pippin.

Pippin, instead of restoring to the eastern emperor the lands which the Lombards had recently occupied, handed them over to the pope,—on exactly what terms we do not know, since the deed of cession has disappeared. In consequence of these important additions to the former territories of St. Peter, the popes were thereafter the nominal rulers of a large district in central Italy, extending across the peninsula from Ravenna to a point well south of Rome. If, as many writers have maintained, Pippin recognized the pope as the sovereign of this district, we find here the first state that was destined to endure into the nineteenth century delimited on the map of Europe. A map of Italy as late as the year 1860 shows the same region still marked "States of the Church."

Significance of Pippin's reign.

The reign of Pippin is remarkable in several ways. It witnessed the strengthening of the kingly power in the Frankish state, which was soon to embrace most of western Europe and form the starting point for the development of the modern countries of France, Germany, and Austria. It furnishes the first instance of the interference of a northern prince in the affairs of Italy, which was destined to become the stumbling-block of many a later French and German king. Lastly, the pope had now a state of his own, which, in spite of its small size, proved one of the most important and permanent in Europe.