Pippin, as a loyal churchman, followed the Pope’s counsel, but he seems to have done so with distinct reservations. The traditional Frankish policy had been the complete subordination of the Church to the State. It is no wonder then that many of the Frankish nobles disapproved of Pippin’s act, which reduced their monarchy to a gift from the hands of the Pope. Pippin did all he could during the rest of his lifetime to keep clear of further Italian complications. He never crossed the Alps again, and he was very careful not to depress the Lombard power in Northern Italy and so give Stephen an excuse for demanding additional territory. As a temporal ruler the Pope’s authority had been substantially increased by the cession of lands which he had claimed from him on the basis of the so-called Donation of Constantine—a fictitious instrument which Stephen appealed to when there arose the question of the disposition of the territory once belonging to the Exarchate of Ravenna. According to the legend, Pope Sylvester, the contemporary of Constantine, when the capital of the Empire had been removed to Constantinople, had received from the Emperor extensive donations of Italian territory, both on the Peninsula and on the adjacent islands, over which he was to rule with the power of a temporal sovereign. To Pippin, this legendary Donation, because of its presumed sanction at the hands of a revered Emperor and Pope, was sacred. He was willing to be an instrument in carrying out the terms of the sacrosanct compact, but he refused to go farther than this, and for the rest of his life he maintained an attitude of reserve in according additional favors to the Holy See.

Pippin’s reign came to an end as calmly as though the line of descent had been unbroken. Even the evil traditions of the Frankish monarchy with respect to the inheritance of the crown were not cast aside. Just as Cromwell and Napoleon felt the weight of custom in their relations with the members of their families, when they were arranging to perpetuate the power of their own creation, so Pippin, the diplomat, the cautious statesman, could do, or at least did nothing to alter the bad and impracticable tribal custom of division of patrimony. This practice caused the downfall of the Merovingian line, and had started the revolution by which the fortunes of the House of Heristal had been assured. This is only one of many anomalies which followed the breaking up of the administration of the Roman Empire, and which testified to the absence of initiative on the part of the Germanic peoples when they were called upon to solve problems of government, for which they had had no preparation. Rulers who did not hesitate to show their individuality in other ways proved fearful of violating tribal customs on questions of divisions of property and family precedence.

The new line of Frankish rulers had apparently learned nothing from the vicissitudes of the elder house. At the death of Charles Martel, the division of the kingdom between his two sons would have certainly endangered the sovereignty of his family had not the difficulty been averted by the abdication of Carloman the elder. Yet Pippin, on his deathbed, had not scrupled to make the same blunder of dividing the realm between his two sons, Charles and Carloman. Almost immediately after their father’s death the heirs, apparently mutually suspicious, separated from each other, and had themselves separately proclaimed kings by the Frankish nobles, and received anointment at the hands of the bishops, Charles at Noyon, Carloman at Soissons.

The diplomacy of the dead ruler was revealed in the kind of disposal he made of his realm. It was an equal division only on paper; for the arrangement of the shares was such that the elder son was left with such manifest superior advantages as to territory that the younger brother could not venture to compete with him. As his share Charles had the part of his father’s kingdom from which the Frankish hosts derived their chief military strength, viz.: the lands from the Main to the English Channel. Besides this, he received the western portion of Aquitaine, the province whose conquest had cost Pippin a hard struggle of seven years, and which, therefore, might become a dangerous center of warlike enterprise if it were placed entirely in the hands of the younger brother. Carloman had as his share the Suabian lands on both sides of the upper Rhine, and the entire Mediterranean coast from the Maritime Alps to the frontier of Spain. In addition to this there came to him the eastern half of the territory adjacent to such towns as Clermont, Rodez, Albi, and Toulouse.

In geographical extent there was but little advantage on the part of the elder brother, but the territory of the younger from a military point of view was far inferior. Carloman in case of war would have against him, under the command of Charles, the whole military power of the Franks. There was no pretense of friendship between the two new rulers; it seems they had never been friendly. The reason of the alienation may have been because the birth of Charles preceded the formal transfer of the Frankish crown to his father. He was, therefore, the son of a Mayor of the Palace, while Carloman, though younger, was son of the King of the Franks.

The question of the duration of external harmony between the brothers was of especial importance in its effect on the situation in the Italian peninsula. Some of the Frankish nobles had by no means approved of Pippin’s policy of opposition to the Lombard kings, and had criticised his willingness to protect the integrity of the dominions of the Pope, whenever he was appealed to from Rome for aid. The efforts of the Queen Mother Bertrada were evidently intended to promote a better feeling between the Franks and the Lombards, for she personally arranged a marriage between Charles and the daughter of Desiderius, the Lombard king. The protests of the Pope were unavailing when he urged, from a decidedly interested point of view, that Charles should marry a wife from his own people; although he recalled the oaths taken, when the two Frankish rulers were children, that they would have the same friends and the same enemies as the Church.

The whole situation, political as well as personal, was suddenly changed by the death of Carloman in 771, and by domestic difficulties in Charles’ own household which led to an alienation from his mother and caused the repudiation of his Lombard wife. Immediately after his brother’s death Charles was acknowledged as sole king throughout the Frankish territories, and the alliance with the Lombard party in Italy was brought to an end. Gerberga, Carloman’s widow, and her sons betook themselves to the court of Desiderius, which now became a natural refuge for all who were discontented with the new ruler of the Franks.

II
CONSOLIDATION OF RULE

In the meantime, Pope Stephen, the man who had made the Frankish alliance the cornerstone of papal diplomacy, had died. (772.) He was succeeded by Hadrian, who proclaimed his purpose to follow the rule of peacemaker in the complexities of Italian politics, and so to induce Romans, Franks, and Lombards to live in mutual harmony. Despite his pacific intentions, he was unable to tolerate the military aggression of the Lombards on the cities in the Patrimony which had been turned over to the Pope by Pippin, including Ravenna itself.

Papal protests against this invasion proved useless. Desiderius threatened to appear with his army before the walls of Rome itself, and he actually approached as close to the city as Viterbo, having in his army the young heirs of Carloman, whose claims to their father’s inheritance he wished to have legitimatized by having them anointed by the Pope. He was deterred from carrying out his plan, and the Pope met the daring of the Lombard leader with a formal warning, that the king and all his host would be placed under the ban of anathema if they entered the territory of Rome. Desiderius therefore withdrew.