PIPPIN THE SHORT—WARS OF THE FRANKS AND LOMBARDS
741-768
Mayoralty of Pippin and Carloman—Their successful wars—Boniface reforms
the Frankish church—Abdication of Carloman—Pippin dethrones
Childebert III. and assumes the royal title—Quarrel of Aistulf and
Pope Stephen—The Pope calls the Franks into Italy—Pippin twice
subdues Aistulf—The Exarchate given to the Papacy—Martyrdom of St.
Boniface—Conquest of Narbonne—Long struggle with the dukes of
Aquitaine—Death of Pippin.
The events which immediately followed the death of Charles Martel showed
clearly enough that the house of St. Arnulf must still depend on the
power of the sword to guard its ascendency, and that it could only
continue to rule by continuing to produce a series of able chiefs. It
was fortunate for the Frankish realm that Pippin and Carloman were both
men of sense and vigour, though perhaps they did not attain to the full
stature of their father’s greatness. Not less fortunate was it that,
unlike the kings of the Merovingian house, they dwelt together in amity
and brotherly love, and undertook every scheme in common.
The moment that Charles was dead troubles broke out on every hand.
Grifo, the younger brother of the two mayors, declared himself wronged
in the partition of the kingdoms, seized Laon, and began to gather an
army of Neustrian malcontents. Theudebald, the brother of the duke of
Suabia, who had been overthrown in 730, raised the Alamanni in revolt in
Elsass and the Black Forest. Hunold, duke of Aquitaine, disclaimed the
suzerainty of the Frankish crown, while the Saxons refused the tribute
which had been laid upon them, and invaded Hesse.
The whole of 742 was spent by Pippin and Carloman in dealing with the
storm which had burst upon them. They began with crushing their unruly
brother, captured him, and sent him captive to a fortress in the
Ardennes. Next they marched against Hunold of Aquitaine, and harried the
southern bank of the Loire, but the duke retreated southward without
fighting, and other duties called away the two mayors before he was
subdued. It was now the dangerous rising in Suabia, in the very midst of
their realm, which demanded their attention. [Sidenote: Early campaigns
of Pippin.] They descended upon the Alamanni with irresistible force,
and soon subdued the whole land as far as the Bavarian frontier. But
there was yet more fighting to be done, and, ere they finished their
task, the two mayors had determined to legalise their somewhat anomalous
position as regents for a non-existent sovereign. They sought out and
crowned Childerich III., the last of the Merovingians, as feeble a
shadow as his long-deceased kinsman, Theuderich IV. So, after an
interregnum of six years, the Franks had once more a king.
It was three years before the authority of Carloman and Pippin had been
vindicated in every corner of the realm, but at last Aquitaine had
acknowledged once more its vassal obligations, the Saxons had been
chastised, and an attempt of Bavaria to make itself independent had been
crushed. The struggle had not been without its difficulties, and the two
mayors had been so hard pressed for resources, that they had followed in
their father’s steps by laying hands on Church property, compelling
bishops and abbeys to devote a certain portion of their landed estates
to the support of the war-expenses of the crown. Other dealings with the
Church had been as unpopular though less unorthodox; the Frankish clergy
were often irregular in their lives, lax in their spiritual duties, and
given over to all manner of secular pursuits. [Sidenote: St. Boniface
reforms the Church.] The mayors set the stern missionary enthusiast
Boniface to reform these evils. At the great synod of 745, to which all
the prelates of both Frankish realms were bidden, the great archbishop
entered into a campaign against clerical abuses of all sorts. At his
behest canons were passed against immoral life, pluralities, the
granting of benefices to unordained persons, the disobedience of bishops
to their metropolitans, the light assumption and rejection of the
monastic habit and vow, and the favouring of heresy. Boniface had also
much trouble with those who, headed by the Irish missionary bishop
Clement, refused obedience to the Roman See, a fault which the great
archbishop regarded as no less heinous than the open profession of
unorthodoxy. In all his doings he received the zealous support of
Carloman and Pippin. Ecclesiastical reform within was not unaccompanied
by ecclesiastical extension without. In these troubled years of the two
mayors, Boniface portioned out the newly-converted lands of central
Germany into the three bishoprics of Würzburg, Erfurt, and Buraburg, to
serve respectively as sees for Franconia, Thuringia, and Hesse. At the
same time was founded his great abbey of Fulda, the centre of piety and
learning in Transrhenane Germany during the succeeding age.
[Sidenote: Carloman abdicates, 747.] To the great surprise of all his
contemporaries, the mayor Carloman, on the completion of his task of
re-establishing order in Austrasia, laid down his sword, and assumed the
monk’s gown, in the year 747. ‘The causes no man knew, but it would seem
that he was truly moved by a desire for the contemplative life and for
the love of God.’ It was certainly no weakness or desire for inglorious
ease that led him to follow the example of his ancestor St. Arnulf, and
seek out a hermitage. He passed into Italy, obtained the blessing of
Pope Zacharias, and built himself a cell on Mount Soracte, in the Sabine
hills. We shall hear of his name but once again, seven years after his
abdication.
By his brother’s retirement Pippin became mayor of Austrasia as well as
of Neustria. He had one more struggle to wage ere all things were fully
beneath his hand. In 747 his brother Grifo escaped from prison, and fled
to Saxony, from whence he tried to stir up trouble. When Odilo duke of
Bavaria died, he seized that duchy, claiming it in right of his mother,
Swanhildis, who was of the ducal stock. Pippin soon drove him out, and
he was constrained to flee to Aquitaine. Bavaria fell to Tassilo, the
son of the late duke.
After the rebellion of Grifo we read in the Frankish annals the unusual
entry, that ‘the whole land had peace for two years’ (749-50). Being now
in complete possession of the Frankish realm, and fearing no foe from
within or from without, Pippin took the step which must always have been
present in the brains of his ancestors, since the day when the
over-hasty Grimoald had endeavoured to seize the royal power in 656.
Warned by Grimoald’s fate, Pippin the Younger and Charles Martel had
scrupulously refrained from claiming the title of king, and had
religiously kept up the series of puppet-princes of the old Merovingian
stock. Their descendant was now determined to bring the farce to its
end, and would not even wait for the death of the imbecile Childerich
III., whose vain name had for the last ten years served to head Frankish
charters and rescripts. Early in 751 the national council of the whole
realm was summoned, and eagerly approved of the removal of Childerich
and the election of Pippin as king. To bestow a still greater show of
legal authority on the change, Pippin then sent an embassy to Rome to
obtain the approval of the Pope. Its leader, Burkhard, bishop of
Würzburg, demanded of pope Zacharias ‘Whether it was well or not to keep
to kings who had no royal power?’ [Sidenote: Pippin dethrones Childerich
III.] The pontiff, whose chief desire was to win aid against the
Lombards by flattering the ambition of Pippin, made the answer that was
expected of him. ‘It is better,’ he said, ‘that the man who has the real
power should also have the title of king, rather than the man who has
the mere title and no real power.’ On the receipt of the Pope’s
encouraging message, which he regarded as freeing him from any religious
obligation resting on oaths sworn to the unfortunate Childerich, Pippin
once more summoned the Great Council of the Franks to meet. It assembled
at Soissons in October or November 751, and, in the ancient royal city
of Neustria, Pippin was first acclaimed as king, and lifted on the
shield, after the ancient Teutonic custom, by the unanimous voice of the
whole nation, and then anointed, as befitted a Christian sovereign, by
the great Austrasian archbishop Boniface. Childerich was shorn of his
regal locks, and sent to spend the remainder of his days in an obscure
monastery, instead of the hardly less obscure royal manor in which he
had hitherto dwelt.
Thus had the house of St. Arnulf at last reached the summit of its
ambition, and the Frankish race once more obtained a king whose busy
brain and strong right hand could make a reality of the title which for
four generations had been but a vain name, while borne by the last
effete Merovings. [Sidenote: Pippin as king, 752-768.] Raised on the
shield by the Austrasian counts and dukes, anointed by the Apostle of
Germany, blessed by the Roman pontiff, Pippin went forth conquering and
to conquer, into lands where the Frankish banner had not been seen for
many generations. Charles Martel vindicated the old frontier of the
realm, his son was destined to extend its bounds into regions where no
Frankish king had ever obtained a permanent footing.
The doings of Pippin the Short during the seventeen years of his kingly
rule fall into three main heads. First and most important are his
dealings with the popes and the kings of the Lombards, leading to his
two great campaigns in Italy. Of secondary moment are his conquests from
the Saracens and the Aquitanian dukes in the south of Gaul. His wars
against the Saxons are of minor importance only.
In giving his blessing to the accession of king Pippin pope Zacharias
had kept in view the aid which the Franks might grant him in his
quarrels with his Lombard neighbours. Zacharias died ere he had time to
demand a return for his complaisance, but his successor Stephen soon
claimed the gratitude of the newly-crowned monarch of the Franks.
[Sidenote: The Lombards and the Papacy.] The old Lombard king Liutprand
had died in 744, and his nephew Hildebrand, who succeeded him, had held
the throne for no more than a few months. The Great Council of the
Lombards deposed him for vicious incompetency, and elected in his place
Ratchis, duke of Friuli. The new king, a man of mild and pious
disposition, kept the peace which Liutprand had made with the Papacy
till 749, when, for reasons to us unknown, he advanced to attack
Perugia, one of the few places in Italy which still adhered to the
empire. Pope Zacharias visited his camp to plead with him in behalf of
peace, with the unexpected result that Ratchis not only raised the
siege, but laid down his crown and retired into a monastery, stricken,
like his contemporary Carloman, with the sudden horror of secular things
which occasionally fell upon the Teutonic monarchs of the seventh and
eighth century.
Ratchis was succeeded by his brother Aistulf, an ambitious and restless
monarch, who raised the Lombard kingdom to its widest territorial extent
by conquering the long-coveted Ravenna. [Sidenote: Aistulf takes
Ravenna, 752.] When he attacked the shrunken Exarchate it received no
help from Constantine Copronymus, who detested his Italian subjects as
obstinate image-worshippers, and was much occupied at the moment by his
Saracen war. Ravenna fell with hardly any resistance, and Eutychius, the
last exarch, fled to Sicily. Aistulf then busied himself in reducing the
independent duchy of Benevento to vassalage. His next project was to
annex the towns of the ‘ducatus Romanus’—the valley of the lower
Tiber—and to make the Pope his liegeman. Although he had concluded a
forty-years’ peace with the Papacy, yet, in 752-53, he was hovering
about the neighbourhood of Rome, and occupying the Umbrian and Sabine
borders of the ‘patrimony of St. Peter.’ At last his ambassadors
appeared before Stephen II. to demand the homage of Rome, and the
payment of an annual tribute. After trying in vain to scare off Aistulf,
first by the terrors of excommunication, and then by empty menaces of
applying for aid to Constantinople, which the Lombard derided, Stephen
bethought himself of the debt of gratitude which the Frankish king owed
to the Holy See. After ascertaining that his presence and demands would
not be unacceptable to king Pippin, he left Rome in October 753, and,
after making one more appeal to the Lombard king to grant him peace and
independence, crossed the Alps, and appeared before the Frankish Court
at Ponthion, near Bar-le-Duc.
His reception was all that he could have wished. [Sidenote: Pope Stephen
invites Pippin to Italy.] Pippin met him three miles from the town,
knelt before him on the roadside, and walked beside his stirrup to the
palace gate, leading his palfrey by the bridle, though the month was
January, and the snow lay on the ground. In the royal chapel, when the
court was assembled, Stephen, ‘with many tears and groans,’ laid before
the king the lamentable state of the Church, and besought him to bring
peace and salvation to the cause of St. Peter and the Roman State.
Whereupon Pippin swore an oath that he would grant him all he asked, and
use every endeavour to put him in possession of the exarchate of
Ravenna, as well as all the cities which belonged by right to the Roman
republic. It was to no purpose that an unexpected guest appeared in Gaul
to beg Pippin to swerve from his purpose. This was his brother Carloman,
who left his Sabine monastery to pray Pippin not to bring down the
horrors of war upon Italy—a request which seemed so strange to the
Church historians of the day, that they could only suppose that his mind
had been overpowered by diabolic delusions, or that he was yielding to
dread of the wrath of Aistulf. Pippin refused to listen to him, and bade
him quit the court, and take up his residence at Vienne, where he soon
afterwards died.
Meanwhile the Great Council of the Frankish realms was summoned to meet
at Cérisy-sur-Oise, and there the king announced to his assembled counts
and dukes that he proposed to make war on the Lombards, in order to
vindicate the rights of the Holy See. Won over by their king’s zeal, and
by the great gifts which Stephen II. distributed among them, the Franks
eagerly clamoured for war. In return for their goodwill the Pope
solemnly crowned Pippin, his wife Bertha, and his young sons, Charles
and Carloman, and pronounced a curse on any one who should ever remove
the house of Pippin from the Frankish throne.
In the summer of 754 the hosts of the Franks choked the Savoyard passes
with their multitudes, and prepared to force their way down into Italy.
Aistulf had mustered his army, and was ready to meet them. In the narrow
gorge of the Dora, hard by Susa, he fell on the Frankish vanguard; but
he suffered such a crushing defeat that he had to fall back on Pavia
without striking a second blow. Pippin followed, wasting Piedmont with
fire and sword, and soon beleaguered Aistulf in his royal stronghold.
[Sidenote: Pippin subdues Aistulf, 754.] Then, with an alacrity which
his conqueror should have found somewhat suspicious, Aistulf offered
terms of peace. He would do personal homage to Pippin, give him
hostages, and engage to restore to the Roman See all that was its due.
So a treaty was signed, Stephen was reconducted in triumph to Rome, and
Pippin returned beyond the Alps, proud that he had added Lombardy to the
list of states dependent on the Frankish crown.
On his homeward journey the king heard of the death of the great
archbishop of Mainz, the apostle of Transrhenane Germany. Zealous even
in extreme old age for the conversion of every subject of the Frankish
realm, Boniface had started on a missionary journey to East Friesland,
where paganism still held sway. As he lay encamped at Dokkum a great
multitude of wild heathen, indignant at the invasion of their last
retreat, fell upon him and slew him with all his companions. [Sidenote:
Martyrdom of St. Boniface.] His death was not long unavenged; the
Christian majority of the Frisians took arms, put down their pagan
brethren, slew many thousands of them and compelled the rest to submit
to baptism. By his martyr-death the great archbishop completed the
conversion of the land for which he had striven so much during his
lifetime. He was buried at Fulda in Hesse, where a great abbey was
reared over his shrine and became the centre of Christian life in the
Hessian lands whose apostle he had been. It would have afforded the
keenest pleasure to Boniface if he could have witnessed the zeal with
which his patron Pippin went forward with the task of reducing the
Frankish clergy to canonical discipline. In the year which followed his
martyrdom the Synod of Verneuil passed the most stringent laws against
evil-living, simony, the practice of secular avocations, and the other
failings of the clergy against which the archbishop had raged in his
lifetime.
The easy promises which king Aistulf had made when he was beleaguered in
Pavia had never been intended for keeping. When the Franks had withdrawn
from Italy the king found pretexts for delay, and did not restore to
Stephen II. a single one of the Sabine or Latin cities which he had
occupied in 753, still less the Exarchate of Ravenna, which the Pope had
impudently asked and fondly hoped to receive. [Sidenote: Aistulf attacks
Rome.] In the winter of 755-6 he took still more unmistakeable steps of
hostility; descending the valley of the Tiber he suddenly laid siege to
Rome. The walls of Aurelian were still too strong to be stormed, but
three months of blockade brought the citizens near to yielding. The news
that king Pippin had once more taken arms restored courage to Pope and
people, and ere long Aistulf was forced to raise the siege and hasten
north to defend Lombardy. Once more the Franks forced the defiles of the
Cenis, and cut to pieces a Lombard force which strove to stop the way.
For the second time Aistulf was forced into Pavia, beleaguered, and
compelled to sue for peace. This time he was given harder terms. Pippin
demanded one-third of the royal hoard of the Lombards, an annual
tribute, a larger body of hostages, and the instant surrender of the
Exarchate. The unwilling Lombard was forced to concede everything;
Frankish envoys received and handed over to the Pope, the cities of
Ravenna, Rimini, Pesaro, Forli, Urbino, and Sinigaglia, with all their
dependencies. [Sidenote: Pippin gives the Exarchate to the Pope.] Their
keys were brought to Rome and laid in triumph on the sepulchre of St.
Peter. Thus did the Pope become an important secular prince, by taking
over the old Byzantine dominions in central Italy. It would seem that
the theory by which he justified this usurpation was that the guard of
the possessions of the ‘Roman Republic’ in Italy was incumbent on the
emperor, but that Constantine Copronymus being an obstinate heretic his
rights fell into abeyance. The Pope then stepped forward as the
representative of the ‘Roman Republic’ in default of a Caesar, and
claimed possession of all that the Lombards had lately usurped.
Apparently he considered himself as ‘Patrician’ in the Exarchate, but as
a Patrician owing no duty or obedience to a heterodox emperor.
King Aistulf died in the next year, killed by a fall from his horse, and
the affairs of Italy troubled Pippin no more, Desiderius, duke of
Istria, the new Lombard king, being occupied with strengthening himself
against an attempt of the ex-king Ratchis to leave his cloister and
resume the crown. The rest of Pippin’s reign was mainly devoted to the
completion of the Frankish dominion in southern Gaul. Soon after his
proclamation as king his officers had recovered for him all the Saracen
towns in Septimania north of Narbonne. In 759 Pippin marched in person
to lay siege to that city, the last bulwark of Islam beyond the
Pyrenees. [Sidenote: Pippin takes Narbonne, 759.] The Christian
inhabitants of the place rose at his approach, slew the Arab garrison,
and opened their gates to the Frank. No help came from Spain, where
civil war was—as usual—raging, and the boundaries of the realm of Pippin
were advanced to the Pyrenees.
Of far greater difficulty was the conquest of Aquitaine, the last
achievement of Pippin. The old duke Hunold, the adversary of Charles
Martel, had retired into a cloister, and had been succeeded by his false
and restless son Waifer. On being summoned to give up some Frankish
refugees, and surrender certain church lands, the new duke took up arms
against his suzerain in 760; when Pippin appeared with all the host of
Austrasia and ravaged Berri and Auvergne, Waifer asked for peace, and
did homage. But the moment that his liege lord had departed home, he
flung his fealty to the winds and began to ravage Burgundy. Next year
the king returned in force and conquered Clermont and the rest of
Auvergne, to which in 762 he added Bourges and the land of Berri. Waifer
held out with the greatest obstinacy, and was confirmed in his
resistance by learning of the revolt of Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, who
judged the time favourable for freeing his duchy from the Franks.
[Sidenote: Conquest of Aquitaine, 767.] This gave Aquitaine a certain
respite, but by 766 Waifer had been driven beyond the Garonne, and saw
all his subjects except the Gascons compelled to do homage to Pippin. In
767 his capital Toulouse fell, and soon after his despairing followers
ended the war by murdering him and laying down their arms. Aquitaine was
now annexed to the Frankish crown, and divided up into counties after
the manner of the rest of the realm.
During the seven years of the war of Aquitaine king Pippin had found
time to put down Tassilo’s rebellion, and to chastise some sporadic
raids of the Saxons against whom he had at an earlier date (755)
undertaken a more serious expedition, which resulted in all the
Westphalian tribes doing homage to him. But the full subjection of this
wild race, whose obstinate paganism and unconquerable courage had
baffled ten generations of Frankish missionaries and kings, was reserved
for Pippin’s greater son.
[Sidenote: Importance of Pippin in Europe.] In the last years of his
reign Pippin occupied a central place in the affairs of Europe such as
no prince had held since the days of Theodoric the Great. Even the
Abbaside Caliph of Bagdad sent to solicit his alliance: troubled by the
revolt of Spain under the Ommeyad prince Abderahman, he endeavoured to
enlist the aid of Pippin for the driving out of the rebel. The Frank
wisely allowed the infidels to tear each other to pieces without helping
either party. The Eastern emperor Constantine Copronymus sent frequent
embassies to Gaul. One was designed to cajole Pippin into restoring the
Exarchate to the Byzantine realm. Another brought a proposal for wedding
Constantine’s eldest son to Gisela, Pippin’s only daughter. On a third
occasion the communication was on religious subjects, the East-Roman
envoys being clerics who were to endeavour to interest the Franks in the
Iconoclastic controversy, and induce them to join in the destruction of
images. The Byzantines held a discussion with some legates of the Pope
in Pippin’s presence, but got no assistance from the great king of the
West, in whose eyes the dispute was far from having the same importance
that it possessed in those of Constantine.
[Sidenote: Death of Pippin, 768.] In the fulness of years and honours
Pippin passed away on September 24th, 768, at St. Denis near Paris,
after a long illness which gave him time to divide the kingdom between
his two sons before he died. His character is somewhat difficult to
fathom: he possessed all the distinguishing traits of the great men of
the house of St. Arnulf, courage, ambition, energy, administrative
skill, but showed few special characteristics of his own. It is not easy
to detect any ruling passion or foible in his character, but his
interference in Italy and his assumption of the royal title show that he
lacked the extreme caution of his father. On the other hand his piety is
praised by contemporaries not in the half-hearted way in which that of
Charles was described, but in the most unqualified terms of laudation.
There are indications that he possessed somewhat of that taste for
literature which we find so well marked in his son Charles the Great.
But it is impossible to draw any complete picture of his personality:
even his nickname ‘the Short’ was given him not by his own
contemporaries but by the chroniclers of the eleventh century, who speak
from tradition and not from knowledge. Our idea of him must be
constructed solely from what we know of his life and actions.
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