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Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
that Austrasia could find. This was Pippin the Young, nephew of
Mayor Grimoald, son of Ansegisel and Begga, and grandson both of
St. Arnulf and Pippin the Old.

THE GREAT MAYORS OF THE PALACE.

Ebroin, however, was strong enough to overbear the resistance of

Pippin: at Lafaux, near Laon, he defeated the last Austrasian army in
the open field, and compelled all the Franks, from Meuse to Rhine,
to acknowledge his protégé Theuderich as king. He himself became
mayor both of Neustria, Burgundy, and Austrasia, and might well
have aspired to assume the royal title. But a private enemy, whose
death he had been plotting, secretly murdered him in 681, and with
Rise of his death the ascendency of Neustria came to an end.
Pippin II. The Austrasians once more took up arms under Pippin
the Young, and after seven more weary years of civil war, a decisive
battle at Testry near St. Quentin settled the fate of the Frankish
realms (687). Pippin with the men of the East was completely
victorious, and Theuderich and the Neustrians were compelled to
take what terms he chose to give them. He claimed to be what
Ebroin had been, mayor both in East and West, but he chose to
dwell himself at Metz, the home of his grandfather, and from thence
administered Austrasia almost as an independent ruler; while
regents named by him guided the steps of king Theuderich in
Neustria. By the fight of Testry the question of precedence between
Austrasia and Neustria was finally settled in favour of the former.
From this moment onward, the East-Frankish house of the
descendants of Arnulf and Pippin is of far more importance in
Frankish history than the effete royal family. Warned by the fate of
Grimoald, they did not again demand the crown for a space of eighty
years, and were content with a practical domination without any
regal name. Henceforth we shall find the Franks more Teutonic and
less Gallo-Roman than they had hitherto been: the central point of
the realm is for the future to be found about Austrasian Metz,
Aachen and Köln, not around Neustrian Soissons, Paris, or Laon.
Pippin, the son of Ansegisel, was Mayor of the Palace for twenty-
six years (688-714), a period in which he did much to rescue the
Frankish realm from the dilapidation and evil governance which it
Dilapidatio had experienced for the last fifty years. His first task
n of the was to endeavour to restore the ancient boundaries of
realm. the kingdom; for during the reigns of the sons and
grandsons of Dagobert I., the old limits of the realm had fallen back
on every side. On the eastern border the homage which the
Bavarian dukes owed to the Merovings had been completely
forgotten; for all practical purposes they were now independent.
Farther north, the Thuringians were in much the same condition;
they had been saved from the Slavonic hordes of Samo by their own
chiefs, not by their Frankish suzerain, and since they had repulsed
the Slavs had gone on their own way, caring nought who ruled at
Metz or Köln. The Frisians of the Rhine-mouth, a race whom the
Merovings had never subdued, were pushing their raids into the
valleys of the Scheldt and Meuse. These were all comparatively
outlying tribes, whose freedom is easily explained by their distance
from the centre of government. But it is more surprising to find that
even the Suabians or Alamanni, on the very threshold of Austrasia,
along the Rhine and Neckar and in the Black Forest, had of late
refused the homage which for two hundred years they had been
accustomed to render to the Merovings, and paid no obedience to
any one save their own local dukes. In the south also the Gallo-
Romans of Aquitaine had achieved practical independence under a
duke named Eudo, who was said to be descended from Charibert,
king of Aquitaine, the brother of Dagobert I.
For fifty years Pippin and his son Charles were to work at the
restoration of the ancient frontier of the Frankish realm, beating
down by constant hard fighting the various vassal tribes who had
slipped away from beneath the Frankish yoke. Pippin’s chief wars
were with the Frisians and the Suabians, against both of whom he
Frisia obtained great successes. After a long struggle he
subdued. compelled Radbod, the duke of the Frisians, to do
homage to king Theuderich, and cede to the Franks West-Frisia, the
group of marshy islands between the Scheldt-mouth and the Zuider
Zee, which is now called Zealand and South Holland. To protect this
new conquest Pippin set up or restored castles at Utrecht and
Dorstadt, new towns destined to become, the one the ecclesiastical,
and the other the commercial, centre of the lands by the Rhine-
mouth. Duke Radbod was also compelled to give his daughter in
marriage to Pippin’s eldest son, Grimoald.
Another series of campaigns were directed against the Suabians.
Pippin followed them into the depths of their forests, and compelled
their duke Godfrid to acknowledge himself, as his fathers had done,
the vassal of the Franks.
It is very noticeable that under Pippin’s rule and by his aid the
conversion of Germany to Christianity was begun. The descendants
of St. Arnulf were, as befitted the issue of such a holy man, zealous
friends of the Church and patrons of missionary enterprise. The
Merovingian kings had been, almost without exception, a godless
race, Christian in name alone. They had taken no pains to favour the
spread of Christianity among their vassals: it was sufficient in their
eyes if their own people, the ruling race, conformed to the Catholic
faith; for the souls of Suabians, Frisians, or Bavarians, they had no
care. Such missionaries as had hitherto been seen in the German
forests, along the shores of the Bodensee, or the upper reaches of
the Danube and Main, had been, almost without exception, Irish
monks, drawn from the Isle of Saints by their own fervent zeal for
the spread of the Gospel, not by any encouragement from the
Frankish kings. In the sixth and seventh centuries these holy men
overran the whole Continent, seeking for heathen to convert, or
planting their humble monasteries in the wildest recesses of the
mountains or the primeval forest. They wandered as far as Italy and
Switzerland, where two of the greatest of them fixed their homes,
St. Fridian at Lucca, St. Gall in the hills above the Bodensee.
Conversio But till the time of Pippin no systematic attempt had
n of been made to convert those among the German races
Germany. who still lay in the darkness of Paganism. It was
Pippin who first saw that this duty was incumbent on the Frankish
government. He sent to England for St. Willibrord, the first apostle of
the Frisians, who with his twelve companions wandered over the
newly-conquered West Friesland, preaching to the wild heathen. It
was by Pippin’s encouragement also that the Englishman Suidbert
laboured among the Hessians, till he and his converts were driven
away by the invasion of the pagan Saxons. At the same time St.
Rupert, bishop of Worms, completed the conversion of Bavaria, and
founded there the great bishopric of Salzburg (696). Much about the
same date the Irish monk Killian passed up the Main and along the
skirts of the Thüringerwald, to preach to the Thuringians, till he met
with a martyr’s death at Würzburg. Everywhere the ascendency of
the grandson of Arnulf was followed by the arrival of zealous
missionary workers, Franks, Irish or English, who strove to bear the
standard of the Cross into the German woodlands, where Woden
and Thunor alone had hitherto been adored. What Pippin began, his
greater son, Charles the Hammer, and his still mightier great-
grandson, Charles the Emperor, were destined to complete. By this
work alone the house of the great Austrasian mayors did more to
justify their existence in three generations than the wicked
Merovings had done in eight.
The years during which Pippin governed the Franks were marked
in their regal annals by four obscure names. Theuderich, the weak
king who had been drawn from the cloister to sit on his brother’s
throne,[41] died in 691: he was followed by his two infant sons,
Chlodovech III. (691-5), and Childebert III. (695-711), both of whom
were recognised alike in Neustria and Austrasia, but had no real
authority. Chlodovech died while yet a boy: Childebert survived to
early manhood, begat a son, and then hastened to the grave.
Apparently the vices of their ancestors had sapped the vital energy
of the later Merovings; scarce one of them survived to reach the age
of thirty, and each long minority made the kingly power more and
more shadowy, and the authority of the great mayor more and more
real. Childebert III. was followed by one more young boy, his son
Dagobert III. (711-16), the last of the four puppet kings in whose
names the great Pippin swayed the Frankish sceptre.
41. See page 259.
Pippin lived to a great age, and had the misfortune to lose in his
declining years his two legitimate sons, Grimoald and Drogo, whom
he had destined to succeed him. The heirs then remaining to him
were Theudoald, a young boy, the son of Grimoald, and Carl
[Charles Martel], an illegitimate son whom he had by a concubine
named Alphaida. The former was only eight years of age, the latter
twenty-five, but the old man designated the boy Theudoald as his
successor, hoping that he might be spared to see him grow up to
Death of manhood. He died, however, within a few months,
Pippin, and a strange problem was put before the Franks,
715.
whether they would tolerate a child-mayor ruling in
the name of a child-king. Pippin’s widow Plectrudis tried to seize the
reins of government in behalf of her little grandson, and some of the
Austrasians adhered to her cause. As a precautionary measure she
cast her husband’s natural son Charles into prison, knowing that
many men regarded him as the only possible heir to Pippin’s
position, since the idea of a child-mayor was preposterous.
Plectrudis’ endeavour to rule in the name of her grandson proved,
as might have been expected, a complete failure. The counts and
dukes of Neustria hastened to take the opportunity of shaking off
the domination of the Austrasians. They mustered in arms, chose a
certain Raginfred, one of themselves, as Neustrian Mayor of the
Palace, and raised an army to invade Austrasia in the name of the
young Dagobert III. They did not shrink from allying themselves with
the enemies of the state, the Frisians and Saxons, who attacked
Austrasia from the rear, while they themselves, advancing through
the Ardennes, wasted all the lands between Meuse and Rhine with
fire and sword. Plectrudis and her grandson shut themselves up
within the walls of Köln.
Rise of Before the end of the year, however, two important
Charles events occurred to give a new turn to the war.
Martel. Charles, the son of Pippin, escaped from his
stepmother’s prison, and was at once saluted as chief by the
majority of the Austrasians, who had been driven to wild rage by the
ravages of the Neustrian army, and yearned for a leader capable of
commanding in the field. Shortly after the young king, whom East
and West had both acknowledged, died, as did all his ancestors, just
when he had attained manhood, and immediately after the birth of
his first child. Like the Grand Lamas of Thibet, these wretched
Merovings expired, with hardly an exception, just as they grew old
enough to interfere in politics. As with the Lamas, so with the
Franks, we cannot help suspecting that there was more in these
sudden deaths than appears on the surface: it certainly was not to
the interest of those about the persons of the kings that they should
ever live long enough to assert their regal power.
On the death of Dagobert, the Neustrians drew out from the
monastery, where he had been placed in earliest infancy, the son of
Chilperich Childerich I., the king whom Bodolin had slain in 678.
II., 716. The monk Daniel was saluted by the royal name of
Chilperich, and raised on the shield: he was the first Meroving for
eighty years who had reached manhood at the moment of his
accession, being in his thirty-eighth year. Chilperich, in spite of his
monastic rearing—or perhaps in virtue of it—turned out a far more
vigorous personage than any of his relatives, and cannot be called
one of the ‘rois fainéants.’ He continually took the field at the head
of his Neustrians, and did his best to become their national
champion. Unfortunately the times were against him.
In 716 the Neustrian king and mayor marched together into
Austrasia to make an end of the resistance alike of Plectrudis and of
Charles. At the same time Radbod, the Frisian duke, pushed up the
Rhine towards Köln. Charles offered battle to the invaders near that
city, but was defeated, and forced to take refuge in the mountains of
the Eifel. Chilperich then laid siege to Köln, and compelled Plectrudis
and her party to acknowledge him as king, give up the royal
treasure-hoard of Austrasia, and withdraw the boy Theudoald’s claim
to the mayoralty. But while the Neustrian army was returning in
triumph to its own land, Charles, who had assembled a new force,
fell upon it near Malmédy, on the skirts of the Ardennes. At the
battle of Amblève all the work of Chilperich’s vigorous campaign was
undone, for his army was routed, and he and his mayor, Raginfred,
barely escaped with their lives (716).
Battle of This was the first blow of Charles the Hammer
Vincy, [Martel], as after generations named him. From
717. henceforth his career was to be one of uninterrupted
success against every foe who dared withstand him. Early in the
spring he followed up his first stroke by invading Neustria, and
defeating Chilperich for a second time at Vincy, near Cambray.
Pressing on after his victory he pursued the Neustrians up to the
gates of Paris, and when resistance ceased, turned back in triumph
to Austrasia. There he compelled his stepmother Plectrudis to give
up Köln to him, and dispersed her partisans. Being now undisputed
master of the Eastern kingdom, he proclaimed a certain Chlothar
king, and named himself Mayor of the Palace. Chlothar IV., whose
descent is not certain, but who was perhaps grandson of the Irish
exile Dagobert II., was of course a mere puppet in his mayor’s
hands. After securing for himself a legitimate position in the state,
Charles started forth to humble all the enemies who had vexed
Austrasia in its time of trouble. He drove the Saxons over the Weser,
compelled Radbod the Frisian to surrender West Friesland for the
second time, and then turned against Neustria. It was in vain that
king Chilperich, who fought hard to maintain his independence,
joined forces with Eudo, who in the late troubles had made himself
independent duke of Aquitaine. Charles beat them both at a battle
near Soissons, and chased king and duke beyond the Loire. This
battle of Soissons was the last effort alike of the Merovingian house
and the Neustrian realm. After it had been lost they both bowed
before the Austrasian sword, and humbly took their orders from the
great Mayor of the Palace (718).
At this conjuncture Charles’s puppet, king Chlothar IV. died. The
victor of Soissons might perchance have chosen to proclaim himself
king of Austrasia, but remembering the fate of his grandfather
Grimoald, preferred to offer terms to the exiled king Chilperich. On
recognising Charles as mayor of East and West alike, the vanquished
Meroving was allowed to return to Neustria, and proclaimed King of
all the Franks (719). He had deserved a better fate than to sink into
a mere name and shadow, and if he had been born eighty years
earlier might perchance by his courage and persistence have given a
longer lease of power to the Merovingian house. But the times were
now too late for his energy to avail.
Chilperich II. died only a year after his submission to Charles.
There remain only two more names to chronicle in the ancient royal
house, Theuderich IV. and Childerich II. These obscure persons—so
obscure that the chroniclers do not even give us the date of
Theuderich’s death—were too weak even to be used as tools by the
enemies of the great mayor. A well-known passage in Einhard
describes their wretched position:—‘For many years the house of the
Merovings was destitute of vigour and had nothing illustrious about
it save the empty name of king. For the rulers of their palace
possessed both the wealth and the power of the kingdom, bearing
the name of mayor, and had charge of all high matters of state.
There was nothing for the king to do save to content himself with his
title, and sit with his long hair and long beard on the throne, like the
effigy of a ruler, to hear foreign ambassadors harangue him and
answer them in words put into his mouth as if speaking for himself.
Effeteness His royal name was profitless and his allowance of
of the last revenue was at the discretion of the mayor, nor was
Merovings. there anything he could really call his own save one
royal manor of moderate value (Montmacq). There he
kept his family and his little establishment of servants. When he had
to travel he set out in a covered carriage drawn by oxen, and driven
by a rustic retainer. Thus he used to travel up to his palace, or to the
national gathering, which met once a year to settle the affairs of the
realm, and thus he would return. But the administration of the
kingdom, and everything that had to be done either at home or
abroad was cared for by the Mayor of the Palace.’ Theuderich’s name
covers the years 720-737, Childerich’s the years 742-752. Between
the one’s death and the other’s accession there was a period of six
years, in which the great mayor did not even trouble to provide
himself with a nominal king, but ruled on his own authority.
The twenty-two years of Charles Martel’s rule as mayor of Neustria
and Austrasia are the turning-point in the history of Western and
Central Europe (719-41). Continuing the policy of his father Pippin
the Younger, both at home and abroad, he devoted all his energies
to restoring the old boundaries of the Frankish realm, taming its
heathen neighbours, spreading Christianity among the more distant
German tribes, and restoring law and order among the unruly counts
and dukes within the empire. His strong hand was as valuable in
ending anarchy at home as in winning victory abroad.
Rise of the The six years of civil war which followed the death
mayoralty. of Pippin the Younger had undone most of the work of
that great man, and Charles had to commence once
more the task which had busied his father. He was, however, in a
position of greater firmness and strength than Pippin had enjoyed,
and was able to make his will felt all over the Frankish realms in a
much more thorough fashion. It was his task to make the arm of the
central government feared all over the kingdom, as much as it had
been in the days of the earliest Merovingian kings. The task was
hard, because a century and a half of feeble administration had
taught the local counts and dukes all the arts of insubordination,
more especially the trick of utilising the annual meetings of the great
national council—what England would have called the Witan—for the
purpose of overawing their ruler. They appeared at the ‘March-field,’
followed by great hosts of armed followers, and bound themselves
together by family or party confederacies to withstand the central
government. In this they succeeded as long as the feeble Merovings
continued, and were able to elect the officers of state at their
pleasure or to distribute the local governorships among each other.
The great mayors put an end to this. The house of St. Arnulf had
gathered such a great following of faithful partisans in Austrasia
that, by their aid, it could face any combination of discontented
counts. The other great houses of Austrasia seem to have gradually
disappeared, and all the smaller nobility and freemen of the land
between Meuse and Rhine had become the enthusiastic followers of
Pippin and Charles. In return the great mayors planted Austrasians
in office all over the kingdom, and trusted mainly to their aid in all
crises. Their system was a domination of the Austrasians over the
Neustrians, Burgundians, Aquitanians, and East Germans: their
empire reposed on the fact that their own countrymen were loyal,
united, and self-confident, while the other races were jealous,
divided, and humbled by recent defeat. Yet the struggle was no easy
one. It needed the repeated blows of Amblève, Vincy, and Soissons
to crush the Neustrian spirit of separatism. Aquitaine was only kept
down by campaign after campaign directed against its disloyal
dukes. Neither south Gaul nor south Germany (Suabia and Bavaria)
were really tamed till they had been deprived of their native dukes,
and cut up into countships or gaus, administered by Austrasian
chiefs. But the house of St. Arnulf continued to produce great men
for generation after generation, and the taming was finally
accomplished.
 The work of the great mayors without was no less arduous than
within. To subdue those indomitable tribes of northern Germany,
from whose pathless woodlands even the iron legions of Augustus
had drawn back in despair, was a great work for the tumultuary
armies of Austrasia to accomplish. But they carried out the struggle
to the bitter end, till they had conquered the very easternmost
Teuton, and had looked upon the Baltic and the unknown boundaries
of the Slavs. Bavaria and Frisia took many a hard blow ere they were
incorporated with the Frankish realm; but at last they relinquished,
with a sigh, their heathen independence. Even the Italian kingdom
of the gallant Lombards, protected by the great Roman fortresses of
Pavia, Verona, and Ravenna could not withstand the Austrasian
sword.
Approach But of all the military achievements of the East
of the Franks under the house of St. Arnulf, the grandest, as
Saracens. well as the most enduring in effect, was to be won
over a foe unknown to their ancestors, a new enemy who
threatened not merely to ravage the borders of the realm like Frisian
or Lombard, but to dismember it by lopping away Aquitaine from
Western Christendom. Great as were their other feats, the most
important of all was the turning back of the wave of Mussulman
fanaticism at the battle of Poictiers. For that crowning mercy, if for
nothing else, Europe owes an eternal debt of gratitude to the great
mayors of the eighth century and the indomitable hosts of Austrasia.
Three years before the death of Pippin the Younger, king Roderic
the Visigoth had fallen at the battle of the Guadalete, and Spain had
been overrun by the infidel. In 720,—the first year of the complete
domination of Charles over the two Frankish kingdoms,—the
Saracens had pushed beyond the bounds of the Iberian peninsula,
crossed the Pyrenees, and entered Aquitaine, where they laid siege
to Toulouse. Their first blow fell on Eudo, duke of Aquitaine, who
had just acknowledged himself the vassal of the Frankish king, and
given up his claim to reign as an independent prince. The duke
obtained aid from the Frankish governors on his borders, attacked
the Saracens in their camp at Toulouse, and put them to rout with
the loss of their leader El-Samah. But though beaten in battle, the
Moslems kept a foothold north of the Pyrenees, by holding to the old
Visigothic capital of Narbonne. The danger from them was but
postponed, not finally warded off. Ere long Charles himself was to be
obliged to take the field, to defend the southern borders of the
Frankish realm against expeditions far more formidable than that
which duke Eudo had turned back in 721.
 CHAPTER XVI

THE LOMBARDS AND THE PAPACY

653-743

Usurpation and successful wars of Grimoald—Reigns of Berthari and Cunibert—

Quarrels of the Papacy and the empire—The exile of Pope Martin I.—Gradual
alienation of Italy from the empire—Civil wars of Aribert II. and Ansprand—
Successful reign of Liutprand—Leo the Isaurian and Gregory II.—Italy rebels
against the Iconoclasts—Liutprand conquers most of the Exarchate.

After the death of Rothari the law-giver the Lombard kingdom

entered into its second stage: it had now almost reached the full
growth of its territorial extension, and had settled down into its final
shape. For nearly a hundred years the main events of its political
history are civil wars, or defensive campaigns against its two
neighbours, the Roman exarch and the Chagan of the Avars. There
is no sustained effort either to expel the Imperialists from Italy, or to
extend the boundary of the Lombard realm to the north. It was only
in the middle of the eighth century that the estrangement between
Constantinople and its Roman subjects in Italy led to such a
weakening of the Imperial authority, that the Lombard kings were
able to seize the long-coveted Exarchate. The history of the cutting
short of the dominions of the eastern Caesar beyond the Adriatic
turns much more on the growth of the Papal power, and on the
quarrel on the subject of Iconoclasm, which sundered the churches
of Rome and Constantinople, than on the ambition or ability of the
rulers of Lombardy.
On the murder of Rothari’s short-lived son in 653, the Lombards
elected as their king Aribert, a nephew of the sainted queen
Theodelinda, whose name was still held in kindly memory all over
Aribert I. the land. Count Gundoald, Aribert’s father, had long
653-62. been settled in Italy: he had crossed the Alps with his
pious sister more than half a century before, so that Aribert himself
was counted a Lombard, and not a Bavarian. The new king reigned
obscurely for nine years (653-62): he waged no wars and was
mainly noted as a friend of the clergy and a builder of churches. He
was a fervent Catholic, and did his best to root out the few traces of
Arianism yet remaining in Lombardy. The land had peace under his
sway, but ere he died he sowed the seeds of future troubles by the
unhappy inspiration which led him to induce the Lombard Witan to
elect his two sons, Godebert and Berthari, as joint heirs to the
kingship.
When their father was dead, Godebert, the elder brother, dwelt as
king at Pavia, while Berthari took possession of Milan. Before they
had been reigning a year the inevitable civil war broke out, ‘because
evil-minded men sowed discord and suspicion between them.’ They
Grimoald were mustering their followers for a decisive
king of the campaign, when Godebert was treacherously
Lombards, murdered by the chief of his own supporters,
662-71.
Grimoald, duke of Benevento, who had left his duchy
in the south, and led his men-at-arms to Pavia, under the pretence
of helping his suzerain against his unruly younger brother. Grimoald
took possession of the crown, and married his victim’s sister, in order
to connect himself with the house of the holy Theodelinda. He
chased Berthari out of Milan, and forced him to take refuge with the
Chagan of the Avars, in the far east, by the shores of the Danube.
The unscrupulous usurper reigned for nine years (662-71) over
the whole Lombard realm, holding his own court at Pavia, while
Romuald, the son of his first marriage, ruled for him at Benevento.
This was the only period in the whole history of the Lombards when
the king’s mandate was as well obeyed in the southern Apennines as
in the valley of the Po. It was, therefore, fortunate for the Lombard
race that the attack on Italy of the vigorous emperor Constantinus
(Constans II.) fell within the years of Grimoald’s reign. Though he
overran much of the duchy of Benevento, the energy of
Constantinus failed before the advent of king Grimoald, and the
danger passed away (663).[42]
42. See page 245.
His successes against the emperor were not the only triumphs of
king Grimoald: he repelled an irruption of the Avars into Venetia, and
repulsed a Frankish army which the Mayor Ebroin, who ruled in
behalf of king Chlothar III., sent across the Western Alps. His only
territorial gain, however, was the capture from the Imperialists of the
little town of Forimpopoli, near Rimini, which he stormed by surprise
on Easter Day, and harried most cruelly, ‘slaying the worshippers at
the altar, and the deacons at the baptismal font, while all were
engaged in celebrating the Holy Feast.’ We might have supposed
that the Romans in central Italy would have fared worse after the
repulse of Constantinus: but no other city was lost. In the south,
however, Grimoald’s son Romuald captured Taranto and Brindisi, two
of the chief remaining strongholds of the Imperialists in Apulia. But
this was after the death of Constantinus, during the troubles caused
by the rebellion of Mezecius in Sicily (668-9?).
In spite of the treachery by which he had attained the throne,
Grimoald’s victories made him very popular among the Lombards,
and many tales survive bearing witness to his generosity and
clemency, no less than to his strong hand and cunning. But when he
died it was seen that his power rested purely upon his own personal
merit: the Lombards did not elect as king either his elder son
Romuald, the duke of Benevento, or his younger son, Garibald,
whom the daughter of Aribert had borne him. They recalled from
exile king Berthari, the son of Aribert, whom Grimoald had driven
out of Milan ten years before. This prince had spent an unhappy life
in wandering from land to land, from the Danube to the British seas,
and was sailing to England when the news of the usurper’s death
reached him. He returned to Italy, and was received with submission
by the whole Lombard race, and solemnly crowned at Pavia.
Berthari reigned for seventeen years (672-88) in peace and
quietness, for he loved not war. He was ‘a man of religion, a true
Catholic, tenacious of justice, a nourisher of the poor; he built the
famous nunnery of St. Agatha, and the great Church of the Virgin
outside the walls of Pavia.’ The kings of this type, whom the
monastic chroniclers delighted most to honour, were not those who
made history. Berthari never attempted to conquer Rome or the
Exarchate, and only took arms once in his reign, when he was
assaulted by a rebellious duke, Alahis of Trent, whom he subdued
and then pardoned,—as a Christian man should—a pardon which
was to cost Lombardy much blood in the next reign.
The reign of his son Cunibert (688-700) was far more disturbed.
This king was a man of mixed qualities, brave, generous, and
popular, but careless, incautious, and given over to the wine-cup. He
was caught unprepared and driven from Pavia by duke Alahis, who
now rebelled again, in spite of the fact that his life had once been
spared by Cunibert’s father. Cunibert was driven for a time from all
his realm, save a single castle in the lake of Como, where he stood a
long siege. But Alahis, by his tyranny, made himself unbearable to
the Lombards, and ere many months had elapsed the lawful king
was able to issue from his stronghold and face the usurper in battle.
They met at Coronate on the Adda, not far from Lodi, Alahis backed
by the ‘Austrians’ of Venetia, Cunibert by the ‘Neustrians’ of
Piedmont. The men of the West had the better, Alahis was slain, and
the son of Berthari resumed his kingship over the whole Lombard
realm. This was not the last rebellion that Cunibert had to crush: all
through his reign we hear of risings of the unruly dukes, and of the
punishments which were inflicted on them when they fell into their
master’s hands.
 There is nothing of first-rate historical importance to relate of the
doings of the Lombard kings in this last quarter of the seventh
century. But while Berthari was building churches, or Cunibert
striving with his rebels, the course of events in the city of Rome was
The growing more and more important. The papacy and
Papacy in the empire were gradually working up to a pitch of
the seventh estrangement and mutual repulsion, which was in the
century.
next generation to lead to open war between them.
We have sketched in an earlier chapter the work of pope Gregory
the Great, in raising the papacy to a condition of unprecedented
spiritual importance in the Christian world, and no less in building up
a position of high secular importance for the Pope in the governance
of Rome. For half a century after Gregory’s death this state of affairs
remained unaltered. The Pope was now firmly established as
patriarch of the West, and sent missions to Britain, Gaul, and Spain
without let or hindrance. Nor was his secular authority much
interfered with, either by the exarch or by the home government at
Constantinople. But friction and struggling began under the reign of
the stern and ruthless Constantinus (Constans II.) and the hot-
headed pope Martin I. We have mentioned elsewhere[43] how the
emperor published his ‘Type’ or edict of Comprehension, forbidding
further discussions on the question of the Monothelite heresy. Martin
not merely refused to acquiesce in letting the discussion sleep, but
summoned a council which declared the ‘Type’ to be blasphemous
and irreverent. Martin wrote to the same effect to the kings of the
Franks, Visigoths, and English, thus calling in foreign sovereigns to
participate in a dispute between himself and his master. Relying on
his remoteness from Byzantium, and on the grandeur of his position
as Patriarch of the West, he attempted to defy Constantinus. The
emperor’s proceedings show that he was determined to assert his
power, but that he was fully conscious of the danger and difficulty of
dealing with such an important personage as the bishop of Rome
Fate of had now become. He had to wait for a favourable
Pope opportunity for punishing Martin, and it was not by
Martin, openly arresting him in the face of the people, but by
655.
secretly kidnapping him, that he got him into his
power. But when once shipped to Constantinople the Pope felt his
sovereign’s wrath: insulted, loaded with chains, imprisoned, and
banished to the remote Crimea, Martin learnt that the emperor’s arm
was still strong enough to reach out to Rome (655).
43. See page 244.
But all Italy regarded Martin as a martyr to orthodoxy, and his fate
did much to estrange the Romans from their loyalty to the empire.
Nor was their wrath diminished by the sacrilegious plunder of the
Pantheon and other Roman churches, which Constantinus carried
out, when in 663 he deigned to visit his Western dominions. It would
seem that Constantinus himself was fully conscious that the Roman
see was growing too strong, and deliberately strove to sap its
resources, for at this time he granted to the archbishop of Ravenna
a formal exemption from any duty of spiritual obedience to the Pope
as patriarch of the West, and constituted him an independent
authority in the exarchate. For twenty years this schism of Rome and
Ravenna continued, but in the end the old traditional prestige of the
see of St. Peter triumphed over the ambition of the Ravennese
archbishops.
If there had been a strong pontiff at this moment, it is probable
that an open rupture might have taken place between the papacy
and the empire. But pope Vitalian was a weak man, the fate of his
predecessor Martin had cowed him, and the idea of cutting Rome
away from the respublica Romana, as the empire was still habitually
called, had not yet entered into the minds of the Italian subjects of
Byzantium. To disown the Imperial supremacy would have been
tantamount to throwing Rome into the hands of king Grimoald the
Lombard, and neither Pope nor people contemplated such a
prospect with equanimity.
Accordingly the breach between Rome and Byzantium was
deferred for another generation. After Constantinus was dead, more
friendly relations reigned for a space, for his son Constantine V. was
impeccably orthodox. He held the Council of Constantinople in 681
with the high approval of pope Agatho, whose representatives duly
appeared at it, to join in the final crushing of the Monothelite
heretics. Constantine, in the fulness of his friendship to the papacy,
even granted to the Roman see the dangerous privilege that when at
papal elections the suffrages of the clergy, the people, and the
soldiery,—the garrison of Rome—were unanimously fixed on any one
person, that individual might be at once consecrated bishop of
Rome, without having to wait for an imperial mandate of approval
from Constantinople. As a matter of fact, however, unanimous
elections were very rare, and the exarchs of Ravenna are still found
interfering to decide between the claims of rival candidates.
Signs of a breach became evident once again in the days of the
tyrant Justinian II. When pope Sergius refused obedience to his
behests, the emperor bade the exarch seize him and send him to
Constantinople. But not only the Roman mob, but the soldiers of the
imperial garrison took up arms to resist Justinian’s officials when
they tried to lay hands on Sergius: the ties of military obedience had
already come to be weaker than those of spiritual respect, and the
Pope triumphed, for Justinian was deposed, mutilated, and sent to
Cherson by his rebellious subjects, ere he had time to punish the
Romans.
The twenty-two years of anarchy and dissolution at Constantinople
which followed the deposition of Justinian (695-717) were fraught
with important consequences in Italy. The ephemeral emperors of
those days were unable to assert their authority over the West, and
we once more find the popes assuming secular functions, after the
fashion of Gregory the Great in the preceding century. John VI. levied
taxes in Rome, made treaties with the Lombard duke of Benevento,
and even protected and restored the exarch Theophylactus when he
Quarrel of had been expelled from Ravenna by a military revolt.
Gregory II. Gregory II. went so far in his independence as to
and refuse to acknowledge the usurping emperor
Philippicus.
Philippicus; by his advice ‘the Roman people
determined that state-documents should not bear the
name of a heretical Caesar, nor the money be struck with his effigy.
So the portrait of Philippicus was not set up in the Church, nor his
name introduced in the prayers at Mass.’ Gregory only consented to
recognise Philippicus’ successor Anastasius II. when he heard that
the new emperor was a man of unimpeachable orthodoxy. The
independent position of the popes had now grown so marked that
the next quarrel with Constantinople was destined to lead to the
final rupture of relations between the papacy and the empire. It was
impossible that things should remain as they were: the breach was
inevitable. Its cause was to be the accession of the stern Iconoclast,
Leo the Isaurian, and his attempt to enforce his own religious views
on the western, no less than the eastern provinces of his empire.
The protagonists in the final struggle are Leo, pope Gregory II., and
the Lombard king Liutprand, whose position and power we must
now proceed to explain.
When king Cunibert died in the year 700, he left his throne to his
young son Liutbert, a mere boy, whose realm was to be
administered by a regent-guardian, count Ansprand, the wisest of
the Lombards. A minority was always fatal to one of the early
Rebellion Teutonic kingdoms. Only eight months after Liutbert
of had been proclaimed king, his nearest adult kinsmen
Reginbert rose in arms against him, to claim the crown. These
of Turin.
were Reginbert, duke of Turin, and his son Aribert, the
child and grandchild of king Godebert, and the cousins of the boy-
king’s father.
Reginbert was followed by all the Neustrian Lombards, and was
able to defeat the regent Ansprand at Novara. He died immediately
after his victory, but his son Aribert followed up the success by
winning a second battle in front of Pavia, and taking prisoner the
Civil wars boy Liutbert. The victor seized the capital, and was
of the hailed as king by his followers, under the name of
Lombards. Aribert II. The regent Ansprand, who had escaped
from Pavia, tried to keep up the civil war in the name of his ward:
but the new king put an end to this attempt by ordering the boy
Liutbert to be strangled in his bath. Ansprand then fled over the Alps
and took refuge with the duke of Bavaria.
 Aribert II. reigned over the Lombards for ten troubled years (701-
11), fully occupied by the tasks of putting down rebellious dukes,
driving back raids of the Carinthian Slavs from Venetia, and
endeavouring to assert his power over Spoleto and Benevento. The
time was opportune for attacking the imperial possessions in Italy,
but Aribert refrained from making the attempt. He was friendly to
the papacy, and made over to pope John VI. a great gift of estates in
the Cottian Alps: nor did he assist his vassal Faroald, duke of
Spoleto, when the latter in 703 made an attempt on the Exarchate.
Aribert preferred to live in peace both with the Pope and the
Emperor.
Aribert II. had gained his kingdom by the sword, and by the sword
he was destined to lose it. In 711 the exile Ansprand, once the
regent for the boy Liutbert, invaded Italy at the head of a Bavarian
army, lent to him by duke Teutbert. Many of the Lombards still loved
the house of Berthari and hated Aribert as a murderer and usurper.
The army of Ansprand was ere long increased by many thousands of
the ‘Austrian’ Lombards, and he was soon able to face the king in
the open field near Pavia. The battle was indecisive, but when it was
over Aribert retired within the walls of the city. His retreat
discouraged his army, which began to fall away from him: thereupon
Aribert determined to take with him the royal treasure, and flee to
Gaul to buy aid of the Franks. While endeavouring to cross the
Ticino by night with all his hoard, he was accidentally drowned, and
left the throne vacant for his rival Ansprand (712).
The ex-regent was now proclaimed king, but only survived his
triumph a few months: on his deathbed he prevailed on the
Lombards to elect as his colleague his son Liutprand, who therefore
became sole ruler when his father died a few days later.
Liutprand, Liutprand was the most able and energetic king
king of the who ever ruled the Lombard realm, and his long reign
Lombards, of thirty-one years (712-43) saw the completion of the
712-43.
long-delayed process of the eviction of the East-
Romans from Central Italy, and the rise of the Lombards to the
highest pitch of success which they ever knew—a rise which was to
be closely followed by the extinction of their kingdom.
When Leo the Isaurian commenced his crusade against image-
worship, Liutprand had been on the throne for fourteen years. In
these earlier years of his reign he was occupied in strengthening his
position, and made no attack on the Imperial dominions in Italy,
though he is found making war on the Bavarians, and capturing
some of their castles on the upper Adige.
But in 726 things came to a head, when Leo issued his famous
edict against images, forbidding all worship of statues and paintings.
Quarrel of Pope Gregory II. was not in a mood to listen to such a
Gregory II. command from Constantinople. He was already in
and Leo the great disfavour with the emperor for having advised
Isaurian.
the Italians to resist some extraordinary taxation
which Leo had imposed to maintain the Saracen war. When he
received Leo’s rescript, and a letter addressed to himself requesting
him to carry out the imperial orders, and destroy the images of
Rome, he burst out into open contumacy, and the Romans, with all
the other Italians, followed his lead. Exhilaratus, duke of Naples,
who tried to carry out the edict in his duchy, was slain by a mob,
and many other imperial officials were maltreated or driven off by
those whom they governed. The cites elected new rulers over
themselves, and would have chosen and proclaimed an Emperor of
the West, if Gregory II. had not kept them from this final step.
Liutprand Meanwhile, all the imperial provinces of Italy being in
conquers open sedition, and quite cut off from Constantinople,
the king Liutprand thought the moment had at last come
Exarchate,
727. for rounding off the Lombard dominions by seizing the
long-coveted Exarchate. He crossed the Po, took
Bologna, with most of the other cities of Æmilia, and then conquered
Osimo, Rimini, Ancona, and all the Pentapolis. Classis, the seaport of
Ravenna, fell before him, but the exarch Paul succeeded in
preserving the great City of the Marshes for a short time longer, till
he was murdered by rioters (727). The Lombard king’s conquests
were made with astonishing ease, for in each city the anti-imperialist
faction betrayed the gates to him without fighting.
Soon after, the triumph of Liutprand was completed by the
surrender of Ravenna itself: the exarch Eutychius fled to Venice,
already a semi-independent city, but one which still preserved a
Gregory II. nominal allegiance to the empire. Meanwhile, pope
rebels Gregory II. was occupied in writing lengthy manifestos
against Leo setting forth the atrocious conduct of Leo, and the
II.
intrinsic rationality of reverencing images. His letters
to the emperor were couched in language of studied insolence. ‘I
must use coarse and rude arguments,’ he wrote, ‘to suit a coarse
and rude mind such as yours,’ and then proceeded to say that ‘if you
were to go into a boys’ school and announce yourself as a destroyer
of images, the smallest children would throw their writing tablets at
your head, for even babes and sucklings might teach you, though
you refuse to listen to the wise.’ After completely confusing king
Uzziah with king Hezekiah in an argument drawn from the Old
Testament, Gregory then proceeded to quote apocryphal anecdotes
from early church history. He wound up by asserting that in virtue of
the power that he inherited from St. Peter, he might consign the
emperor to eternal damnation, but that Leo was so thoroughly
damned by his own crimes that there was no need to inflict any
further curse on him. A more practical threat was that if the emperor
sent an army against Rome, he would retire into Campania and take
refuge with the Lombards (729).
Position of As a matter of fact, however, to throw himself into
Gregory II. the hands of the Lombards was the last thing that
pope Gregory desired to do. He had the greatest dread of falling
under the direct authority of Liutprand, for the occupation of Rome
by a powerful and strong-handed Italian king would have been fatal
to the secular power of the papacy. It was easy to disobey a
powerless exarch and a distant emperor, but if Liutprand had
become ruler of all Italy, the popes would have been forced to be his
humble subjects. Gregory wished to rid himself of the domination of
Leo, without falling into the clutches of Liutprand. While disclaiming
his allegiance to the emperor, he pretended to adhere to the empire.
Meanwhile an unexpected turn of events had checked the career
of victory of king Liutprand. While he was absent at Pavia, the
exarch Eutychius had collected some troops at Venice, and aided by
the forces of the semi-independent citizens of the lagoon-city had
landed near Ravenna. The place was betrayed to him by the
imperialist party within the walls, and became once more the seat of
imperial power in Italy. At the same time the dukes of Spoleto and
Benevento took arms against their suzerain, and allied themselves
with pope Gregory (729).
Liutprand determined to conquer the Lombard rebels before
resuming the hard task of retaking Ravenna. He even made a truce
with the exarch, by which it was stipulated that they should mutually
aid each other, the one in subduing the revolted dukes, the other in
compelling the Pope to return to his allegiance. Accordingly
Eutychius marched against Rome, and Liutprand against Spoleto. On
the king’s approach the two dukes submitted to him, and swore to
Liutprand be his faithful vassals. He then moved toward Rome,
pacifies which the exarch was already besieging. But he had
Italy, 730. no wish that the imperial power should be
strengthened by the recovery of Rome, and, encamping his army in
the Field of Nero, outside the city, proceeded to claim to act as
arbitrator between Gregory and Eutychius. They were too weak to
resist him, and the Pope at least gladly acquiesced in the pacification
of Italy which Liutprand proposed. The exarch was to return to
Ravenna, leaving Rome unmolested, and to be content with the
possession of Ravenna only, all his other lost dominions in the
Pentapolis and Æmilia remaining in the hands of the Lombards.
Gregory, in consideration of being left unmolested in Rome,
professed to return to his allegiance, but in reality remained in an
independent position. He did not withdraw his opposition to
Iconoclasm, and took advantage of the peace to call together a
great council of Italian bishops, ninety-three in number, who
solemnly anathematised all who refused to reverence images,
though they did not curse the emperor by name (730).
Two months later pope Gregory II. died, and was succeeded by
Gregory III., as great an enemy of Iconoclasm as his namesake. He
had no sooner displayed his views, than the emperor, discontented
with the peace which the exarch had concluded, and much irritated
by the anathema of the Council of Rome, revenged himself on the
papacy by issuing an edict which removed from the jurisdiction of
the Pope, as Patriarch of the West, the Illyrian and south Italian
dioceses which had hitherto paid spiritual obedience to Rome. For
the future, not only Epirus and Sicily, but even Apulia and Calabria,
were to look to the Patriarch of Constantinople as their head and
chief (731).
In 732 Leo took a more practical step for reducing the Pope to
obedience. He fitted out a great armament in the ports of Asia Minor,
which was to sail to Italy, to recover by force of arms the lost
regions of the Exarchate, and to arrest Gregory III. and send him in
chains to Constantinople. But the fates were against the restoration
of imperial authority in the West: the fleet was completely wrecked
by a storm in the Adriatic, and the fragments of it which reached
Ravenna effected nothing. This was the last serious attempt of the
Last effort empire to recover central Italy. Henceforth the Popes
of Leo to went their own way, while the exarch, penned up in
reconquer the single fortress of Ravenna, awaited with trembling
Italy, 732.
the outbreak of the next Lombard war—a war which
would certainly sweep away him and his shrunken Exarchate.
But for eight years after the treaty of 730, king Liutprand
maintained peace over all Italy. He was a pious prince, and a
respecter of the papacy, to which he had even made a grant of
territory, ceding the town of Sutri in Tuscany, which he had captured
from the exarch in the war of 728-30. His reign was a time of
prosperity for Lombardy: the southern dukes were compelled to
obey orders from Pavia: the Slav and Avar were kept back from the
northern marches, Liutprand also kept up his friendly relations with
Charles Martel, the great Mayor of the Palace in Gaul. When Charles
was looking about for a neighbour sovereign who should, according
to old Teutonic custom, gird with arms and clip the hair of his son
Pippin on his arrival at manhood, he chose Liutprand to discharge
this friendly office. On the invasion of Provence by the Saracens in
736-7, Charles asked the Lombard for the aid of his host, and
Liutprand crossed the Alps and joined in expelling the infidels from
Aix and Arles.
The peace of Italy was not broken till 738 when Transimund duke
of Spoleto rebelled, not for the first time, against Liutprand. The king
crushed the revolt with his accustomed vigour, and the duke was
compelled to fly: he took refuge at Rome with pope Gregory III.
Liutprand Liutprand promptly demanded his surrender: Gregory
attacks refused, and the Lombard army at once marched into
Rome, the duchy of Rome. The king captured Orte, Bomazo,
738.
and two other towns in south Tuscany, and menaced
Rome with a siege. Gregory III. could hope for neither help nor
sympathy from his master the emperor Leo, whom he had so
grievously insulted. Accordingly he determined to seek aid from the
one other power which might be able to succour him, the great
Mayor of the Franks. He sent to Charles Martel the golden keys of
the tomb of Saint Peter, and besought him to defend the holy city
Gregory against the impious Lombard. He conferred on the
III. asks aid Mayor the high-sounding title of Roman Patrician,
from the which was not legally his to give, for only the emperor
Franks.
could confer it. He even offered to transfer to the
ruler of the Franks the shadowy allegiance which Rome still paid to
the emperor.
Thus did Gregory III., first of all the Roman pontiffs, endeavour to
bring down upon Italy the curse of foreign invasion. He had drawn
upon himself the wrath of Liutprand by his secular policy: the war
arose purely from the fact that he had favoured the rebellion of the
duke of Spoleto, and sheltered him when he fled. Yet he made the
Lombard invasion a matter of sacrilege, complaining to Charles that
Liutprand’s attack was an impious invasion of the rights of the
Church, and a deliberate insult to the majesty of St. Peter.
Considering that the king had saved him from destruction eight
years before, Gregory must be accused of gross ingratitude, as well
as of deliberate misrepresentation and hypocrisy. But the Pope had
imbibed a bitter and quite irrational hatred for the Lombard race: the
danger that he might lose his secular power, by Rome being
annexed to the realm of Liutprand, caused Gregory to view the
pious, peaceable, and orthodox king of the Lombards with as much
dislike as he felt for the heretical Iconoclast at Constantinople.
Considering the amiable character of Liutprand, and the respectable
national record of the Lombards when they are compared with their
contemporaries beyond the Alps, it is astonishing to read of the
terms in which Gregory and his successors spoke of them. No
epithet applied to the heathen in the Scriptures was too severe to
heap upon the ‘fetid, perjured, impious, plundering, murderous race
of the Lombards.’ And all this indignation and abuse was produced
by the rational desire of Liutprand to punish the Pope for harbouring
his rebels! It is impossible not to wish that the great king had
succeeded in taking Rome, and unifying Italy, a contingency which
would have spared the peninsula the curses of the Frankish invasion,
of its long and unnatural connection with the Western Empire, and
of that still greater disaster, the permanent establishment of the
temporal power of the papacy.
Charles Martel did not accept Gregory’s offers, or carry out the
Pope’s plans: he would not quarrel with his old friend Liutprand on
such inadequate grounds as the Pope alleged. He chose instead to
endeavour to mediate between Gregory and the Lombard king. He
accepted the title of Patrician, and received the Roman ambassadors
with great pomp and honour, sending them home with many rich
presents. But his own delegates who accompanied them were
charged to reconcile the Pope and the king, not to promise aid to the
one against the other. Both Charles and Gregory, as it happened,
were at this moment on the edge of the grave: both died in the next
year (741), and it was some time before the first active interference
of the Franks in behalf of the papacy was destined to take place.
 How uncalled for was the action of pope Gregory is shown by the
fact that in the next year Liutprand came to terms with the Roman
Liutprand See. On the accession of pope Zachariah, who
grants promised to give no more aid to the rebel duke of
peace to Spoleto, Liutprand restored the cities he had taken
the Pope,
742. from the Roman duchy, and granted a peace for
twenty years. He even presented great offerings to
the Roman Churches and made a present of some valuable estates
to Zachariah. Yet the anger of the popes was in no way appeased: in
their hearts they hated the Lombards as if they were still Arians or
heathen, and only awaited another opportunity for conspiring
against them.
Meanwhile Liutprand died in peace in 743, after a reign of thirty-
one years, in which he had added the greater part of the Exarchate
to his kingdom, had extended the boundaries of Italy to north and
east against the Bavarian and Slav, and had reduced the Beneventan
and Spoletan dukes to an unwonted state of subservience. No one,
save his enemies the popes, ever laid a charge of any sort against
his character, and he appears to have been the best-loved and best-
served king of his day. We read with pleasure that he died in peace,
ere the terrible invasion of the Franks began to afflict the land he
had guarded so well. It would have been better perhaps for Italy if
he had been a less virtuous and pious sovereign: a less temperate
ruler would have finished his career of conquest by taking Rome,
and so would have staved off the countless ills that Rome was about
to bring on the whole Italian peninsula.
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