700

Donation of Pepin

[757-768

forth what territories were to be given to the Pope. This is the "donation of Pepin." Twice did the Frankish army invade Italy — on the first occasion at the Pope's personal request and on the second owing to the receipt of the letter which St Peter himself was believed to have addressed to the king of the Franks. In the end twenty-three cities including Ravenna were surrendered by Aistulf to Stephen III, who, at the time of his death in April, 757, had become a sovereign prince. But in gaining territory the Papacy lost independence by becoming too great a prize for any man to win without a struggle. The rest of the history of the eighth century shews that in order to enjoy that which Pepin had bestowed the popes must become dependents of the Franks, who were thus compelled to invade Italy as conquerors to maintain the Papacy which they had enriched.

Paul I, the successor of Stephen, enjoyed a somewhat peaceful pontificate of ten years, A.D. 757-767; but we are able to see that the acquisition of the imperial territory on the shores of the Adriatic had further relaxed the feeble tie which still held the Papacy to Constantinople. Paul had to deal with Constantine V, the most formidable of the Iconoclasts; and he had to protect alike the holy images and the possessions of the Roman Church. In his correspondence with Pepin, the Greeks are styled nefandissimi. Once the Church had obtained Ravenna and the cities of Emilia and the Pentapolis there could be no restoration of the exarchate. The political connexion between Rome and Constantinople was practically severed by the donation of Pepin. The king of the Franks died in 768, a year later than Paul; and we enter upon one of the most critical eras of papal history. All on which this chapter has hitherto dwelt: the severance from the imperial authority at Constantinople, the disputes with the Lombards, the alliance with the Franks, the work of Gregory II, Boniface, and Stephen III, culminates in Charles the Great. With his accession we stand at the opening of a new epoch in the history of Western Europe, fraught with important consequences. The theological breach between East and West, the medieval theory of Papacy and Empire, the great strife of secular and spiritual powers, are traceable to the years immediately before us.

In considering the relations between the popes and the Franks during the long reign of Charles the Great it is necessary to bear in mind that, though Pepin by his donation had made the popes into priest-kings, their position was precarious in the extreme. Italy under Lombard rule was in a state of anarchy; and Rome itself was the centre of a barbarism which was intensified by being concealed under the specious name of ecclesiastical government and claimed to represent not only the piety but the civilisation of the West. When we read of kings, dukes, pontiffs, cardinals (first mentioned in the Liber Pontificalis at this time of the senate, of the exercitus or militia; when modern terms like

768-772]

Anarchy in Italy

701

that of the "unification of Italy" are applied to the policy of a ruler like the Lombard Desiderius, we may lose sight of the fact that under this specious veneer there lay an utterly disintegrated society, characterised by a savagery which could hardly be paralleled by the acknowledged barbarism of many countries north of the Alps. The pontificate of Stephen IV (768-772) is, as has been already hinted, a period of violence and bloodshed: and the events which characterised it are repeated almost exactly not thirty years later in the days of Leo III: for centuries not even the person of a pope was safe in Rome without the protecting hand of some external authority. It is only possible here to allude to the strange story of Stephen IV as related in the Liber Pontificalis; and to proceed to a hasty summary of the main events of the reign of Charles the Great.

On Pepin's death the Frankish dominions were divided between his two sons Charles and Carloman. The two brothers speedily became rivals, and the scene of their machinations was Italy. Their mother Bertrada had brought about a nominal reconciliation between her two sons Charles king in Austrasia, and Carloman king in Neustria, and in the interests of peace sought to contract matrimonial alliances with the Lombard monarch Desiderius. With this end in view she visited Italy and persuaded Charles to give up the lady whom he had perhaps irregularly married and to take Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king. These projects alarmed Stephen IV, and his letter to Charles and Carloman warning them against an alliance with the detestable Lombards, a race infected with leprosy and naturally repulsive to noble Franks, is one of the most extraordinary in the papal correspondence with the Carlovingian family; and confirms us in the idea that Stephen's passionate weakness of character was one cause of the misfortunes of that unhappy pontiff. But the alliance was short-lived. Charles repudiated his Lombard wife, and on Carloman's death in 771 the widow Gerberga placed herself and her children under the protection of Desiderius - a proof that the two brothers regarded the Lombard as the determining factor in their rivalry for the possession of the whole Frankish realm. The Pope sided with Charles against Gerberga and her children; for Desiderius, no doubt hoping that the Franks were sufficiently divided to leave him alone, had ravaged the newly acquired papal dominions in the exarchate and the Pentapolis.

Stephen died in 772, and was succeeded by two pontiffs who held the Papacy for no less than forty-four years. Hadrian I from 772 to 795 and Leo III from 795 to 816. Never till our own days have two successive pontificates occupied so long a period. Till the days of Pius IX no pope so nearly attained to the traditional years of Peter as Hadrian.

Judged by his actions Hadrian was a man of vigour and ability; and if he shews himself querulous and apprehensive in his correspondence with Charles, it only reveals the extreme difficulty of the situation in

702

Fall of the Lombard Kingdom

[772-774 which he was often placed. His first act on succeeding Stephen was successfully to repress disorder in Rome. Paulus Afiarta, the evil genius of the late Pope, who had brought about the ruin of Christophorus and Sergius, was sent under arrest to Ravenna, where the archbishop Leo, to Hadrian's indignation, put the unfortunate prisoner to death. In the following year, 773, Charles invaded Italy, defeated Desiderius, and invested his capital of Pavia. In 774 the Frankish king paid his first memorable visit to Rome, and was received with due honour by the Pope and the Roman clergy. Touched by his reception and deeply impressed by his visit to the tomb of the Apostle and to the holy churches of Rome, Charles bestowed on Hadrian all that Pepin had given to the Holy See, and, if we may believe the Roman account, something more. The documentary evidence for the donation of Charles needs separate treatment; but the king is said to have included in his magnificent gift all Italy south of the Po which the Lombards occupied. Charles returned to Pavia after his visit to Rome and completed the conquest of the Lombards. Desiderius was forced to retire into a monastery, to make way for the victorious Frank who was now king of the Lombards and Patrician of Rome.

Thus fell the Lombard kingdom after two centuries of rule in Italy; and it may here be observed that none of the nations which had occupied the territory of the Empire had been able to survive the baneful atmosphere of the ruined Roman world. The Visigoths of Spain, the Vandals in Africa, the Ostrogoths in Italy, the Merovingians of Gaul, had all like the Lombards rapidly degenerated in contact with the ancient civilisation. It was beyond the limits of the Empire that a new and more vigorous life was coming into being. Among the Franks in Austrasia, in the monasteries of Ireland, in Britain-from which all traces of Roman dominion had been swept by the conquering Angles and Saxons, arose the makers of a new world. Columbanus the Keltic monk, Wilfrid the English bishop, Boniface the missionary from Devon, Charles Martel and his illustrious sons and grandson, Alcuin the Yorkshire scholar- nearly all of these hailed from lands which Tertullian had described as Romanis inaccessa, Christo vero subdita.

When Charles departed from Italy in 774, Hadrian was left alone to assert his authority over the splendid principality he had acquired from his Frankish benefactors. But only by a strong hand could rights be maintained in those unsettled days; and the Pope was hard pressed on all sides. Not only did the unconquered Lombard duchy of Benevento encroach on his territory in the south; his tenure of the exarchate was threatened by Leo, the ambitious archbishop of Ravenna, who sought independence, and was resolved to seize the cities in his neighbourhood over which the Pope claimed jurisdiction. Hadrian, one of the ablest of the popes, did his best to maintain his authority. His troops defended his frontiers against the Beneventans and even captured

774-799]

Outrage on Pope Leo III

703

Terracina. But his correspondence with Charles reveals the weakness of his position. That Hadrian was a great man is certain; and Charles seems to have recognised in him somewhat of a kindred spirit to his own; and at the Pope's death the Frankish monarch mourned as for a lost brother. But in this case his position was less assured than his ability, and he needed the support of the arms and influence of Charles in order to maintain it. How truly Hadrian deserves to be classed among the greatest rulers of the Roman Church, and how precarious was the situation of a pope in the eighth century, is shewn when we come to the disastrous commencement of the pontificate of his successor Leo III.

It is one of the ironies of fate that the pontiff to whose lot it fell to inaugurate the Middle Ages in Western Europe, by an act second to none in dramatic circumstances and in its far-reaching consequences, was not a great ruler like Hadrian, but a man in almost every respect his inferior. Leo III, the son of Atzuppius and Elizabeth, is described as a Roman priest of blameless character and abounding charity; but there is a certain mystery overhanging the early days of his pontificate. If we may judge from the names of his parents he had not the advantage of being of noble birth, a matter of the utmost importance in his age; as, not only was it regarded as one of the chief recommendations for a bishop, but it gave a man the almost indispensable support of powerful kinsmen. Hadrian, perhaps the earliest example of papal nepotism, had given the highest positions in the Roman Church to his relatives, committing to them the administration of its great wealth and extensive patrimony. The government of the apostolic Church was vested at this time in seven officials, who though only in deacon's orders took the highest rank in the hierarchy under the Pope. The chief of these, the primicerius notariorum, Paschalis, a nephew of Hadrian, who is also called the consiliarius of the Holy See, with Campulus the sacellarius or treasurer, another relative of the late Pope, evidently cherished deep resentment against Leo; and on the occasion of the procession of the greater Litany on 25 April 799 (St Mark's day) they determined to wreak their vengeance. Joining the procession from the Lateran at the church of St Laurence, the conspirators took their places beside the Pope, apologising for not wearing their official planetae on the plea of illhealth. When the procession reached the monastery of SS. Stephen and Sylvester, a band of ruffians dashed forth and threw Leo to the ground. Then, with Paschalis standing at his head and Campulus at his feet, an attempt was made to blind the pontiff and to cut out his tongue. The wretched Pope was left for a while bleeding in the street, then dragged into the church of St Sylvester, and imprisoned in the Greek monastery of St Erasmus on the Coelian Hill.

Strange to say, the outrage seems to have produced no great effect on the Roman people, and Leo remained a prisoner till he had recovered

704

Carolus Augustus

[798-800 from his wounds. Then his partisans rescued him, and though he is said to have been welcomed with enthusiasm in St Peter's he did not again enter the city; but placing himself under the charge of Winichis, duke of Spoleto, retired thither. Thence he betook himself to Charles at Paderborn, was received by the king and assured of his protection, under which he was able to re-enter Rome on 29 Nov. 799. Charles himself was fully occupied the greater part of the following year. In the spring we find him in Neustria looking after the defences of the shores of the Channel, in the summer he is at Tours, visiting Alcuin and bewailing the loss of Queen Liutgardis, in August he is holding a great placitum at Mainz; and not till autumn was well advanced did he undertake his memorable expedition to Italy, arriving at Rome on 24 Nov. 800.

He came not so much as a defender of the rights of the Pope as in the capacity of his judge. Leo's fair fame as well as his person had suffered at the hands of his adversaries, and grave though to us mysterious charges were spread abroad concerning him. Alcuin had received from his friend Arno, archbishop of Salzburg, so serious an account of affairs in Rome and of Leo III that he thought it advisable to burn it; and Charles himself does not seem to have held the same opinion of Leo as he had of Hadrian. At any rate on 3 Dec., in the presence of the king, the Roman clergy, and the Frankish nobles, Leo solemnly exculpated himself and took an oath on the gospels that he was guiltless of the crimes laid to his charge. It is particularly important in view of his subsequent action to remember that three weeks before Leo had been in the humiliating position of having publicly to profess his innocence.

Charles was now at the height of his glory; master of Italy and northern Europe, he was regarded as the representative of Christendom. A woman who had sinned foully against her own son occupied the throne of the Eastern Caesars, and the eyes of all men turned to the gigantic Frank whose wars with the surrounding barbarians had been for the defence and propagation of the gospel. The day after Leo had professed his innocence the priest Zacharias arrived from Jerusalem with the Keys of Calvary and of the Holy Sepulchre and the banner of Jerusalem. Leo had already sent him the keys of the tomb of St Peter, and Rome recognised him as its Patrician.

On Christmas day Charles clothed himself in the Patrician's robe and went, not as a barbarian king but as the greatest of the nobility of Rome, to the already venerable church of St Peter. Then he knelt in prayer before the "confession" of the Prince of the Apostles, and the Mass began. After the reading of the gospel the Pope took from the altar a most precious crown and placed it upon the head of the kneeling monarch. With one voice the assembled multitude, Frank and Roman, ecclesiastic and warrior, shouted "Carolo piissimo Augusto a Deo coronato magno et pacifico Imperatori Vita et Victoria." The