After this episode of the intervention of Carloman, his sons were shorn and sent to a convent. Grifo also, as we have seen, perished a little before this time. There now remained only Pippin and his sons visibly before the world as representatives of the great Arnulfing House.
At last all negotiations were ended, and in the late summer Pippin with his whole army marched against Aistulf. He had reached S. Jean de Maurienne: the pass of Mont Cenis rose before him, by which he must make his way into Italy. He was still, however, on Frankish ground, for, as the result of the wars between Lombards and Franks two centuries previously, both Mont Cenis and (as has been already said) the Great St. Bernard with their adjacent towns of Susa and Aosta formed part of the Frankish kingdom. The Lombard king had come as far as Susa and had there accumulated great store of warlike machines, “for the nefarious defence of his kingdom against the republic and the Roman Apostolic see.” He had, however, neglected the obvious precaution of sending soldiers forward to secure the heights and harass the Frankish army in their passage over the mountain. Thus it came to pass that a small but brave body of men, the advance-guard of Pippin’s army, emerged unhindered into the valley of Susa. Thinking to win an easy victory Aistulf launched the Lombard host upon them. But the Franks, strong in their pious faith in God and St. Peter, and fighting also in a narrow valley, where the superior numbers of the enemy gave them no advantage, bravely repelled the Lombard onset. After Aistulf had seen many of his dukes and counts fall around him he turned to flee, and halted not till with few followers he had reached his capital of Pavia. Now was the path clear before the Frankish king, who without difficulty crossed the mountains, sacked the rich Lombard camp, laid waste the valley of the Po with fire and sword, and appeared with all his host under the walls of Pavia. After some days Aistulf sounded the trumpet for parley, and sought terms of peace. This was granted to him on condition of his paying 30,000 soldi (£18,000) to Pippin and promising to restore to the papacy all the estates which he had torn from the papal patrimony and to live henceforth at peace with the successor of St. Peter, who had by this time returned to Rome. Possibly there was also included in the terms of this peace the far more important condition that he should surrender to the pope the Pentapolis and the cities of Ceccano and Narni in the neighborhood of Rome, as well as pay a yearly tribute of 5,000 soldi (£3000) to the Frankish king.
Though hostages had been given and solemn oaths sworn for the performance of these conditions, the Lombard king did not keep, perhaps had never intended to keep them. Narni indeed was handed over to the pope, but apparently none of the other cities or lands which Aistulf had promised to restore; and on New Year’s day, 756, he appeared with a large army before the gates of Rome. The men of Tuscany blockaded the gate of St. Peter’s; the Beneventans, the gates of St. Paul and St. John Lateran; while Aistulf himself, like another Alaric, appeared before the Salarian gate and called upon the citizens as they valued their lives, to open the gate and hand over the pontiff to his tender mercies. For nearly two months had the siege lasted when Stephen II. contrived, through the agency of the abbot Warnehar, to make audible to Pippin his piteous cries for help. In the last and most urgent of these letters the pope associates St. Peter with himself, represents the Apostle as praying Pippin to hasten his aid, “lest you should allow this city of Rome to perish in which the Lord has appointed that my body should rest, and which He has commended to my protection and made the foundation of the faith.” This letter is certainly a very daring rhetorical artifice, but it is probable that it was understood to be that and nothing more, both by the sender and the receiver.
This time the Frankish king required but little persuasion. The flagrant breach of the treaty made with himself, as well as with the pope, was an insult which called for vengeance. In the spring of 756 he put his army in motion, and after a rapid march by way of Chalons and Geneva he was once more under the snows of Mont Cenis. The Lombard soldiers again failed to prevent his passage over the crest of the pass, and when he had descended into the higher valleys where they were stationed, the Franks, who had evidently among them many trained mountaineers (no doubt from the regions now known as Dauphiné, Savoy, and Switzerland) turned the position of the Lombards by mountain tracks which they had left unguarded, and descending upon them with that furia Francese of which in a later day Italy was to have so many and such fatal examples, slew a multitude of the enemy and put the rest to flight. Again was all the upper valley of the Po devastated by the Frankish troops, and again did Pippin pitch his tents on either side of the Ticino under the walls of Pavia. At the sight thereof, Aistulf, abandoning all hope of successful resistance, obtained the mediation of the nobles and bishops in the invading army, and, imploring pardon for his broken promises, submitted to the conditions, hard as they were, imposed by the conqueror. These were, the surrender to Pippin of one third of the royal hoard stored up through many generations at Pavia, the bestowal of large presents on the nobles of the Frankish court, the payment of long arrears of tribute, and, now at length in very deed, the cession of the cities of the exarchate[29] and the Pentapolis.[30]
But to whom were these cities, wrested as they had been by the Lombards from the representative of the Eastern Emperor, to be ceded? That was a question which, though it had probably been discussed and decided by the Pope and the King of the Franks, had not received a definite answer in the face of Europe till this summer of 756. It happened that at the very time when Pippin was opening his campaign, there arrived in Rome, George and John, Chief Secretary and Captain of the Guard, from the Emperor Constantine V. on a mission to the Frankish king. Journeying by sea to Marseilles, and then crossing the Alps, the Secretary found Pippin under the walls of Pavia, and entreated him with much earnestness and with the promise of many gifts from the emperor, to hand over the city of Ravenna and the other cities of the exarchate to the imperial rule. “But not thus,” says the papal biographer, “did he avail to bend the strong will of that most Christian and most benign man, so loyal to God and such a lover of St. Peter, King Pippin, to hand over those cities to the imperial dominion; for that devout and most mild-mannered king declared that never should those cities be alienated from the power of St. Peter, and the rights of the Roman Church and the pontiff of the Apostolic see: affirming with an oath that not to win the favor of any mortal man had he twice addressed himself to the fight, but solely for love of St. Peter and for the pardon of his sins: and vowing too that no amount of money should induce him to take away what he had once given to St. Peter. With this answer he gave the imperial messenger leave to return to his country by another way, and he having failed in his commission returned to Rome.”
This is apparently the critical point from which we must date the pope’s independence of the Eastern, or as we ought still to call him, the Roman Emperor. Up to this time, whatever divergencies there may have been in doctrine or in policy, the Bishop of Rome has always been in theory the subject of the Emperor of Rome. Now he distinctly asserts, by the mouth of his powerful friend from over the Alps, that certain broad domains which have been conquered from the empire, shall be handed over not to the emperor but to himself. He shakes himself loose from his old subjection and becomes by the same act a sovereign prince, not only—and this is an important point—in the newly-acquired territory of the exarchate, but also in his old home of the Ducatus Romae.
The cities now handed over to the see of Rome were twenty-two in number, and stretched along the Adriatic coast from the mouths of the Po to within a few miles of Ancona and inland as far as the Apennines. The plenipotentiary of the Frankish king, Fulrad, Abbot of St. Denis, travelled through the Pentapolis, and the exarchate, together with Aistulf’s commissioner, entered each city, received its keys and was introduced to the chief magistrates, who journeyed onward in his train. All these arrived at Rome. The local magistrates were doubtless presented to their new sovereign. The keys of Ravenna and all the other cities were laid on St. Peter’s tomb along with the donation by which King Pippin granted them for ever to St. Peter and the pope. This done Abbot Fulrad returned to Paris having accomplished his world-historical mission. Stephen II., 94th Bishop of Rome, was now in fact not only pope but king, and a beginning was made of those “States of the Church” which with one brief interval have down to our own day intersected the map of Italy.
I have dwelt at considerable length on Pippin’s relations with the papacy, because they are inseparably connected with the most important event in the history of his son. His other achievements, though remarkable, and though they were evidently much nearer to his heart (for his intervention in Italian affairs was done grudgingly and almost against his will), must be dismissed in a few words.
In the first place, in the year 759 a Frankish army besieged Narbonne. A solemn oath was sworn to the Goths, that if they would surrender the city to Pippin they should be allowed to keep their own separate laws, and on this the Goths rose, slew the Saracens who held the city for the Caliph of Cordova, and handed it over to the Frankish generals. With this capture ended the Moslem domination in Southern Gaul, though it was not the last time that the turbans of the Moors were to be seen north of the Pyrenees.
The conditions upon which the Christian inhabitants of Narbonne consented to help the Frankish host against the Saracens, show how strong was still the spirit of separate Gothic nationality in that part of Gaul. Something of the same spirit, blended with other elements, tended to make all that great region south and west of the Loire, which went by the name of Aquitaine, seek for independence from the Franks whom she still looked upon as strangers and foreigners. We have seen how this spirit of independence was working when Eudo was Duke of Aquitaine and Charles Martel major domus of Francia, and how it was only the pressure of a terrible danger which caused Eudo to seek the help of Charles before the battle of Poitiers. Eudo was succeeded (735) by his son Hunold, who seven years after, on the death of Charles Martel, strove to throw off the Frankish yoke, but soon found that what the father had won his two sons were well able to maintain. In 744 Hunold, by false oaths, enticed into his power his brother Hatto, who apparently aspired to share his dominion, put out his eyes and thrust him into prison. Then, apparently in penitence for this crime, he, like Carloman, retired into a monastery and was succeeded in his duchy by his son Waifar.