When Charles thus became sole ruler of the Frankish state he was probably a little under thirty years of age. He was a man of commanding presence, more than six feet high, with large and lustrous eyes, a rather long nose, a bright and cheerful countenance and a fine head of hair, which we may suppose to have been now yellow like that of his Teutonic forefathers, though when his biographer Einhard knew him best it had the beautiful whiteness of age.
Already in the three years of the joint kingship he had had some experience of war. Though his father seemed to have thoroughly subdued Aquitaine, the embers of disaffection were still smouldering there, and on the appearance of a certain Hunold, probably of the family of the well-remembered Eudo, they broke out into a flame (769). Charles, having vainly called on his brother Carloman for aid, marched to Angoulême, where he concentrated his forces. On his appearance the insurrection collapsed and Hunold had a narrow escape of capture. By his superior knowledge of the country he succeeded in baffling his pursuers and made his way into Gascony. Lupus, duke of that region, was minded to give him shelter, but on receiving a message from Charles that if the fugitive were not surrendered he would march his army into Gascony and not depart thence till he had thoroughly subdued it to his obedience, the Gascon duke lost heart and surrendered Hunold and his wife to their conqueror. We hear nothing more of their fate. Gascony, unlike Aquitaine, kept its duke, and though it must have vaguely recognized the over-lordship of Charles, it was probably the least thoroughly subdued and assimilated of all the regions of that which we now call France.
But meanwhile the whole current of events—marriages, deaths, worldly ambition and ghostly counsel—was sweeping Charles onward to the great exploit of his reign, the conquest of Italy. When we last glanced at Italian affairs we saw Abbot Fulrad, together with the commissioner of the Lombard king Aistulf, gathering up the keys of the cities of the exarchate and bringing them to lay at the feet of Pope Stephen II.[32] That important event, the beginning of the temporal dominion of the pope, occurred in 756, twelve years before the accession of Charles. In the interval many changes had occurred, and several new actors had appeared upon the scene.
In the first place, only a month or two after he had performed the long-delayed surrender of the exarchate, Aistulf died. His death was due to an accident in the hunting-field, but as he had been so often at war with the Church, of course the papal biographer sees in it “a blow from the Divine hand.” Desiderius, Duke of Tuscany, now aimed at the Lombard crown; but Ratchis, the long since dethroned king emerged from his convent and succeeded in reigning once more for three months as King of the Lombards. Desiderius, however, sought the intervention of the pope—probably the return of the monk Ratchis to secular life was disapproved of on religious grounds—and by the promise of adding yet more cities to the new papal dominions succeeded in procuring his powerful interference on his behalf. Abbot Fulrad, too, that able chargé d’affaires of the Frankish king, exerted himself on the same side, probably threatening his master’s intervention. The result of the negotiations was that the matter was settled, apparently without bloodshed. Ratchis stepped back into his convent, Desiderius surrendered the cities for which the pope had bargained, and became King—as it proved the last native king—of the Lombards (March, 757). In the following month Pope Stephen II. died, and was succeeded by his brother Paul I. The ten years of this prelate’s pontificate seem to have been a time of comparative peace between pope and Lombard king. Then came a stormy interregnum, the invasion of the papal see by an intrusive Tuscan nobleman, his expulsion after thirteen months, and the elevation to the papal chair of the Sicilian, Stephen III. We need not here enter into the history of these obscure revolutions in which two parties, a Lombard and a Frankish, are dimly seen struggling for the mastery. We note only that Stephen III.’s elevation (7th August, 768) happened but a few months before the death of Pippin. About two years after, we find him addressing an extraordinary letter full of passionate animosity against the Lombards, to the two young Frankish kings. He has heard that Desiderius King of the Lombards is seeking to persuade one or other of the royal brothers to dismiss his lawfully wedded wife and marry a Lombard princess, his daughter. Perish the thought! To say nothing of the impiety of putting away a wedded wife to marry another woman, what folly, what madness it would be in the kings of so noble and illustrious a nation as the Franks to pollute themselves by marrying a woman of the stinking Lombard race, which is not counted in the number of the nations, and from which it is certain that the brood of lepers has sprung! “Remember and consider that ye have been anointed with holy oil with celestial benediction by the hands of the vicar of St. Peter, and take care that you do not become entangled in such crimes. Remember, too, that you have promised the blessed Peter, his vicar [Pope Stephen II.] and his successors that you would be friends to his friends and enemies to his enemies, as we have promised to you the like and do firmly continue therein. How, then, can you escape the guilt of perjury if you ally yourselves with that perjured nation of the Lombards, who, forever attacking the Church of God and invading this our province of the Romans, are proved to be our deadliest foes?”
This passionate, almost insolent letter of dissuasion was of no avail. Carloman indeed kept his wedded wife Gerberga, but Charles, some time in the year 770, put away his wife, a noble Frankish lady, named Himiltruda, and married the daughter of Desiderius, whom his mother Bertrada, a friend of the Lombard alliance, had brought back with her from Italy after a pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles.
The tie of kinship between Frank and Lombard, thus formed, was soon and rudely broken. After a year of wedlock the daughter of Desiderius was back again in her father’s court a divorced and rejected wife (771). What were the motives of her husband for such insulting treatment of his young queen none of his contemporaries have told us. The monk of St. Gall,[33] writing a century after the event, tells us that the lady was a delicate invalid, unlikely ever to become a mother, and that for this reason Charles, acting by the advice of his most saintly bishops, put her away as if she were dead. It is a plausible conjecture that the king, remembering the passionate endeavor of the pope to dissuade him from this marriage, may have recognized a Divine judgment in its threatened sterility, and may for that reason have decided on ending it.
This harsh termination of an alliance on which Queen Bertrada had set her heart, and which she had been the chief agent in bringing to pass, caused, for the time, an estrangement between mother and son, the only one, we are told, that ever took place between them.
The repudiation of the Lombard princess of course did not improve the relations between Desiderius and Charles. Still more strained did those relations become when, on the death of Carloman, a few months later, his widow, with her infant children and some trusty adherents crossed the Alps and placed herself under the protection of the Lombard king. Charles, we are told, considered this proceeding on the part of his sister-in-law to be “superfluous,” but nevertheless bore it patiently. The year 772 was fully occupied with the first of those great campaigns against the Saxons which will form the subject of a later chapter; and Charles had no time or energy to spare for the complicated affairs of Italy.
But during that year (772) these Italian complications were rapidly increasing. At the end of January came the death of Pope Stephen III., the Sicilian, a weak and ineffectual man, who during all his short pontificate had been pulled this way and that by the two factions, the Lombard and the Frankish, which divided the nobility of Rome. When his insolent letter to Charles failed to divert him from the Lombard alliance, he had thrown himself into the arms of Desiderius, and allowed the Lombard faction, headed by a certain Paulus Afiarta, to work their lawless will in Rome, banishing, blinding, imprisoning, putting to death the chiefs of the opposite party.
Now, however, on the death of the Sicilian, a very different man was raised to the vacant papal chair. This was Hadrian I., a man of Roman birth, of spotless if somewhat ambitious character, capable of forming and executing large and statesmanlike plans, a man not altogether unworthy in point of intellect to be compared to the great Emperor whose name he bore. His pontificate, one of the longest in the papal annals, lasted very nearly twenty-four years (772–795), so that he narrowly missed “seeing the years of St. Peter,” and during this long space of time, common hopes, common dangers, common enterprises drew him and Charles sometimes very close together, and though there were also some sharp disputes between them, the king, we are told, “regarded the pope as his chief friend, and when he received the tidings of his death wept for him as for a much loved son or brother.”