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 Early camdemanded their attention. They descended paigns of upon the Alamanni with irresistible force, and Pippin. 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 warexpenses of the crown. Other dealings with the Church had

St. Boniface reforms the Church.

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. 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.

To the great surprise of all his contemporaries, the mayor Carloman, on the completion of his task of re-establishing Carloman order in Austrasia, laid down his sword, and asabdicates, 747. sumed 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 puppetprinces 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?' The pontiff, whose chief desire was to win aid thrones Childeagainst the Lombards by flattering the ambition rich III. of Pippin, made the answer that was expected of him. 'It

Pippin de

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. Raised on the shield by the Austrasian counts and dukes, anointed by the Apostle of Germany, Pippin as king, 752-768. 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. The old Lombard king Liutprand had died in 744, The Lombards and his nephew Hildebrand, who succeeded him, and the had held the throne for no more than a few Papacy. 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- Aistulf takes coveted Ravenna. When he attacked the shrunken Ravenna, 752. 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