At once clergy and people proceeded to a new choice, but the Stephen whom they chose lived but three days, and died before consecration. “Then,” says Anastasius, “the whole people of God met in the basilica of St. Mary at the Crib, and beseeching the mercy of our Lord God, and with the good will of our Lady, the holy ever-virgin Mary, Mother of God, they elected, with one mind, another Stephen, a man preserving the tradition of the Church with inviolable constancy, swift to help the poor, a firm preacher, a most valiant defender of the fold in the strength of God.” Immediately a great persecution against the city of Rome and its adjoining cities broke out from the savage king Aistulf. Three months after his consecration, the Pope sent two legates, his brother, Paul, and another, with large gifts to move the Lombard king to a treaty of peace. The king made a peace for forty years, but in four months, treading oath and treaty under foot, he pretended that the city of Rome, with all its province, was subject to him, and that all the inhabitants should pay him yearly a capitation tax of a gold solidus. The Pope sent to [pg 353] him two fresh legates, whom the king received, but refused all conditions, and ordered them to return to their monasteries without seeing the Pope.
At the end of this year, an imperial legate came to Rome with two sacred letters[184] from the emperor, one for the Pope, the other for Aistulf. In it he asked the Lombard king to restore the lands of the Commonwealth, unjustly taken by him. The Pope immediately sent on his brother, Paul, with the imperial Silentiarius, to Aistulf at Ravenna. The king scorned to listen either to emperor or Pope, but he added a messenger of his own, to go to Constantinople, and make some proposition to the emperor. The two legates, John the Silentiarius, and Paul, the deacon, returned to Rome, and reported to the Pope that they could do nothing. Then the Pope, convinced of the evil purpose of the king, sent to the imperial city his own messengers, in company with John the Silentiarius, “beseeching the imperial clemency that, as he had already often written to him, he would come with an army to defend by every means all this part of Italy, and would deliver this city of Rome and the whole Italian province from the fangs of the son of iniquity”.[185]
In the meantime, “that most atrocious king of the Lombards burst into fury, threatening that he would slay all the Romans with one sword if they did not submit to his sovereignty”. The Holy Father called [pg 354] all the Roman people together, and walked in procession with them with naked feet, hearing in his arms the image of our Lord still venerated in the chapel sancta sanctorum. This he carried from the Lateran Church to Santa Maria Maggiore, the clergy and people chanting litanies and intercessions; and Aistulf's broken treaty of peace was affixed to a lofty cross, and formed part of the procession.
This legation from Pope Stephen II. took place in the year 753. The emperor Constantino Kopronymus was not the man to save Italy from the Lombards. To the repeated requests of the Pope he sent no other help than imperial letters, charging him to induce Aistulf to restore the provinces he had taken from the empire, and to Aistulf in the same sense, calling him to undo his diabolical aggression.
The emperor also left the Pope free to unite himself with any one who could defend him. It was a natural right in such a case: but the imperial sanction made it more easy of success.
“Then,” says Anastasius,[186] “the most holy man having, in vain, sought, by innumerable presents, to conciliate that pestilent king for the flocks committed to him by God, that is, for the whole army at Ravenna and all the people of that province of Italy, of which he was in possession, and seeing especially that there was no help from the imperial power, as his predecessors of blessed memory, the second and third Gregories and Zacharias, begged help from the king of the Franks [pg 355] against the oppressions and invasions which they had suffered in this Roman province from the abominable Lombard race; so he in like manner, by the inspiration of divine grace, sent in his deep sorrow a letter by a foreign hand to Pipin, king of the Franks.” Thus from 726, the beginning of the Iconoclastic heresy and tyranny of the emperors Leo III. and Kopronymus, the Popes acknowledged the Byzantine sovereignty until in 753 the direct attack of the Lombard king Aistulf upon Rome, and the attempt to make himself sovereign of the Popes of Rome and of the territory called its duchy, together with the impotence of the Byzantine emperor to defend his own subjects, and the Pope himself vainly entreating succour from him, compelled Stephen II. “to turn his thoughts from the East to the West”.[187]
While the Lombards were pressing Rome and all its fortified places, Pipin replied to Stephen's entreaty for succour by sending the Bishop of Metz and the Duke Autchar to accompany him in his journey to France. “Then the same most blessed Pope, trusting in the mercy of our almighty God, went out of this city of Rome to St. Peter's on the 14th October, and many Romans followed him and people of the neighbouring cities, and weeping and crying, they would hardly let him go on. But he, trusting in the strength of God and the protection of the holy Mother of God and the chief apostles for the safety of all, weak as he was in body, began that laborious journey, commending all the Lord's flock to Peter, our Lord, the good shepherd and blessed [pg 356] Prince of the Apostles.” As he drew near to Pavia that most wicked king Aistulf sent him messengers, ordering that he should on no account ask for the restoration of Ravenna and its exarchate or the other places of the commonwealth which Aistulf or his predecessors had invaded. The Pope replied that nothing should induce him not to ask it. When he reached Pavia and was received by the king he made him many presents, and ceased not with many tears to ask him for the restitution of what he had taken. He could obtain nothing. The Frank legates pressed that he might be allowed to go on to France. The king asked the Pope if he desired it. The Pope avowed it, and the king gnashed his teeth, and sent his satellites repeatedly in secret to turn him from it. The Frank legates at last succeeded in obtaining permission for him to go forward.
On the 15th November, attended by the bishop of Ostia and a large train of clergy, he left Pavia, and continued his journey. He reached the valley of the Rhone by Aosta and the Mons Jovis, where about two hundred years later Bernard of Menthon founded the monastery which has given its new name to the mountain, and he rested at length at the abbey of St. Maurice, now one of the oldest existing monasteries.[188]
Stephen II. was the first Pope who crossed the Alps. The few Popes who had up to that time travelled outside Italy had been banished, as St. Clement by Trajan to the Crimea, or St. Liberius confined by Constantius I. at Berea in Thrace, or St. Silverius banished by [pg 357] Belisarius to Patara; St. John I., St. Agapetus, and Vigilius had by royal orders gone to Constantinople. St. Martin had been taken thither a prisoner by Constans II., and Pope Constantine, ordered by Justinian II. to go thither, had been courteously received by him.
Now at the call of duty, but with his own free consent, Stephen II. crossed the Alps and took refuge in France, to consolidate an alliance with the most potent kingdom of the West, full of importance for that Christendom which the see of St. Peter, and that alone, was creating. As the eastern emperor had nothing for him but to impose heresy and execute tyranny, the king of the Franks, hearing news of his approach, sent a splendid train under his eldest son Charles to convoy him. That was a memorable day when Stephen and Pipin met at the royal villa of Pontigny, near Chalons, on the Marne, not far from the field of battle where Attila three hundred years before failed to make Europe a Mongol empire. Now the union of Stephen and Pipin saved it from a Mohammedan enthralment.