Let us look at the extent of the territories which according to the papal biographer were thus conveyed to the Roman Pontiff. The island of Corsica: that is clear though introduced in a curious connection. Then the line starts from the coast of Italy, just at the point where the Genoese and Tuscan territory join: it crosses the Apennines and strikes the Po a little north of Parma. From Mantua it works round to the head of the Adriatic and includes the peninsula of Istria. The exarchate of Ravenna, “as it was of old time,” reached inland to the Apennines and probably is here to be taken as including the Pentapolis. The extent of the two great Lombard duchies of Spoleto and Benevento is perfectly well known; they included the whole of Italy south of Ancona except the duchy of Rome, a little territory round Naples and the district which is now called Calabria in the extreme south, the toe of Italy.
Instead, therefore, of asking what this donation included, it is more to the purpose to inquire what it excluded. As the duchy of Rome is apparently treated as already an undoubted part of the papal dominions, we may say, using modern geographical terms, that if this donation had ever been carried into effect the popes would have become sovereigns of the whole of Italy except the Riviera, Piedmont, part of Lombardy north of the Po, the city of Naples and Calabria.
It is almost impossible to believe that Charles, even in the fervor caused by his first visit to Rome, his meeting with St. Peter’s vicar, and his prayers in the great Roman basilicas, can have meant to convey such vast territories as these to an ecclesiastic, however eminent, whose pretensions to rank as a civil ruler of any territory, however small, were only twenty years old. It is absolutely impossible to believe that his father can (as is here implied) have promised to endow the pope with territories such as those of Venetia and Istria, which were in no sense Lombard, and were still in close connection with the Eastern Empire. The whole subsequent course of history shows that Charles, with all his lavish generosity to the Holy See, never seriously contemplated making its occupant the virtual lord of Italy.
What solution of the enigma is possible? The idea of an absolute fabrication of the document naturally occurs to the mind, especially to the mind of a student who is constantly confronted with charters forged in the interests of some church or monastery. This is the view taken by many modern inquirers, amongst others by Malfatti (the careful author of “Imperatori e Papi”), who inclines to assign the fabrication of the document to the ninth century, “famous for so many other fictions of that kind.”
On the other hand, Abbé Duchesne, the learned and impartial editor of the Liber Pontificalis, declares that he looks upon this passage as the work of an absolutely contemporary author, and that he cannot accept the theory of a later fabrication. At the same time he fully admits that this vast cession of territory to the pope never took practical effect, and he suggests that somewhere about 781 the pope, finding that there was no chance of realizing the splendid dream of sovereignty over the whole of Italy in which he had indulged at the interview of 774, liberated Charles from the promises then made, in consideration of some important addition to the duchy of Rome over which his rule was undisputed. In point of fact we find at that time the pope unable to maintain himself even in the territory of the exarchate, which was wrested from him by the ambitious Archbishop of Ravenna. Prudence may therefore have suggested to him the expediency of concentrating his attention on the duchy of Rome, and at least strengthening the frontiers of that possession.
Another theory for which some good arguments may be adduced, is that in this promised gift we are still dealing not with a grant of sovereignty but with a restitution of property; that for instance when Spoleto and Benevento are mentioned, all that Charles undertook, or at least meant to undertake, was that any “patrimonies” in either of those duchies of which the see of St. Peter had been unjustly despoiled by the Lombards should be restored to it.
It is not for the present author to pretend to decide a question on which so many able scholars are at issue, and to which so many special treatises have been devoted; but the impression produced on his mind is that at least the hand of the interpolator, if not that of the wholesale fabricator, must have been at work in the passage which he has quoted from the Liber Pontificalis.
Having finished his conferences with the Pope, in which he discussed with him many matters ecclesiastical as well as civil, Charles returned to his camp under the walls of Pavia. It was now the tenth month of the siege: disease and probably famine were pressing the defenders hard: and Desiderius, who had never been a popular sovereign, heard on every side of the defection of his countrymen. At length on a certain Tuesday in June (774) the city opened her gates to her conqueror. The great hoard was handed over, the nobles and chief men from all the cities of northern Italy came to Charles seated in the royal palace of Pavia, and acknowledged him as their lord: the dominion of the Lombards in Italy was at an end.[34]
To Desiderius and his family Charles showed himself merciful in his triumph. The fallen king was carried across the Alps, accompanied by his wife and one daughter (whether this was the divorced wife of Charles we know not), and was invited to enter the seclusion of a monastery, in Austrasia, where, if any faith is to be placed in the stories that were current a century or two after his death, he devoted himself with assiduity to the duties of the cloister, and even declared that he would not desire to resume his crown, having entered the service of the King of Kings.
Very soon after the capture of Pavia, Charles was back again on the Rhine, as the affairs of North Germany required his immediate attention. It was perhaps in part from the scantiness of his leisure, but it was surely in part also from his statesmanlike insight into the conditions of the problem before him, that he made so little change in the internal constitution of his new kingdom. There was no attempt to amalgamate the regions north and south of the Alps: Italy did not become a part of “Francia,” but Charles took his place as successor of the long line of kings from Alboin to Desiderius who had reigned over Lombard Italy. “Rex Francorum et Langobardorum atque Patricius Romanorum”: that was now his full title. As King of the Franks he ruled the wide regions north of the Alps: as King of the Lombards he ruled all of Italy that the Lombards had once held: as Patrician of the Romans he seems to have been recognized as supreme ruler of all the rest of Italy except the little fragments on the coast which still held by their allegiance to the eastern emperor.