Francia or ‘Frankland’, the largest of the successor states to the western Roman Empire, had been ruled for 300 years by the descendants of Merovech (d. 458), grandfather of Clovis I. It stretched from the Pyrenees to the Weser. Of its three constituent parts, Neustria, centred on Paris, and Burgundy on the Rhone were still essentially Gallo-Roman, whilst Austrasia in the East, centred on Rheims, was the original Frankish homeland and predominantly Germanic. Over the generations it had frequently been partitioned and reunited. In the eighth century the Merovingian monarchy had lost all but nominal control to Austrasia’s hereditary ‘mayors of the palace’, the Arnulfings, who exercised effective rule over the whole country. In 751 it was the Mayor, Peppin III, Charles Martel’s grandson, who had sent envoys to Patriarch Zacharias to ask ‘whether it was just for one to reign and for another to rule’. On receiving the desired answer, he had deposed his king, Childeric III, and seized the throne. (See Appendix III, p. 1246.)
As the travellers toiled to the top of the pass, the state of the road amidst the grandiose rigours of the mountains must have made a deep impression. The once smooth pavement was cracked, jagged, overgrown, and in places completely washed away. Its great stone slabs had been left unrepaired for longer than anyone remembered. The imperial posts had ceased to function. In a hollow below the barren, mist-strewn summit, the ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Poeninus stood forlorn beside the frozen lake. Having lived all his life within sight of the decaying Forum, Stephen did not need to be reminded about the passing of Roman glory. But the desolation of the pass must have matched his mood. He cannot have ignored the fact that he was embarking on something that none of his predecessors had risked. Though Gregory II had once prepared a similar journey, it was called off. No bishop of Rome had ever crossed the Alps. When
Stephen started the long descent to St Maurice he must have pondered the implications. He was not acting on impulse. He had sent for assistance to Constantinople, but in vain. He had visited Pavia, and had appealed to King Aistulf in person, but to no effect. He was turning to the Franks in a final, calculated step to avert disaster. If an anachronistic phrase is permitted, he was ‘calling in the New World to redress the balance of the Old’.
The Christendom in which the Roman Patriarch was seeking to establish a more central role was smaller than it had been in the past, or was destined to be in the future. It had been greatly diminished by the Arab conquests of the previous century, and had not yet spread to the lands in the centre and east of the Peninsula. The Byzantine Empire had withstood the Arab siege of 718, but was hemmed into the Balkans and Asia Minor. The Muslims had recently won the whole of the western Mediterranean and most of Iberia. Though driven back from the Loire some twenty years before, they still held much of southern Gaul, where the Gothic cities of Nîmes and Beziers were in a state of revolt. If Stephen had crossed the neighbouring pass of the Alpis Graia, some twenty miles to the west, he would have found himself descending into Muslim territory.
At that juncture, Latin Christendom was confined to a narrow corridor running from the British Isles to central Italy. Half-way between the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, the Celtic art of illumination was at its peak. In England, the Venerable Bede had died just eighteen years back. His mantle in Anglo-Saxon scholarship had passed to Alcuin, who was to make his name in France. The central part of Germany had only just been converted. Its patron, St Boniface, had passed away only two years before, leaving the Abbey of Fulda and its choir-school in its infancy. The Lombard rulers of Italy had been Catholics since the previous century, but they looked with suspicion on the liberties of Rome. They smelled treason whenever the Patriarchs had sided with the citizens against Pavia. Their control of central and southern Italy, through the duchies of Tuscany, Spoleto, and Benevento, was contested by the Byzantines, whose themes (or provinces) of Sicily, of Calabria, and of Naples were still intact.
By far the greatest part of the European Peninsula was still held by heathen tribes. Scandinavia was fast approaching the point of explosion when its wild Viking raiders would pour out over the northern seas. The heathen Frisians and Saxons had been repeatedly ravaged by the Franks, but had not been finally subdued. At this very moment, the Frankish ruler whom Stephen was going to meet, Peppin the Short (r. 751–68), was resting at Bonn, having just completed the latest of his punitive campaigns into Saxony. Further east, the heathen Slavs held all the lands from the mouth of the Elbe to the Aegean. In addition to the Elbe, they commanded almost all the great rivers—the Oder, the Vistula, the middle Danube, and the Dnieper. Kiev had recently been recorded as a staging-post on the river route from the Baltic to the Black Sea and Mesopotamia.
Fortunately for Christendom, the Muslim world was in turmoil. The Abbasid caliphate was in the early stages of moving its centre of gravity from Arabia to Persia. Al-Mansur was on the march. His son, Harun-al-Rashid, who would be known to
history as the hero of the
Thousand and One Nights
, was a young boy. The last of the defeated Umayyads was on his way to Spain to found the emirate of Cordoba.
The events of Patriarch Stephen’s journey have to be reconstructed from two main sources—one Roman, the other Frankish. The
Vita Stephani
forms part of the huge compilation known as the
Liber Pontificalis
, which is made up from a long series of biographies and decretals dating from the sixth to the ninth centuries.
24
It is at pains to present the episode from the papal point of view. In contrast, the third continuation of the Chronicle of the Pseudo-Fredegar forms an appendix to the main Frankish record of the Merovingian era.
25
It is confined to the reign of Peppin III, and was written on the orders of Peppin’s relative Nibelung. It is at pains to present the Carolingian point of view. The emphases and omissions of the two sources have given historians a broad range of interpretation.
The sources say little directly about the political bargain which inspired Stephen’s journey; yet the outline is clear. Although Peppin had taken the precaution of seeking papal advice before his
coup d’état
, and had probably been consecrated by St Boniface, his right to rule was obviously open to question. Equally, although Stephen II had consulted both the Emperor and the Lombard King, his appeal to the Franks must have been unsettling to both of them. The essence of the deal that was brewing, therefore, was that Rome should provide what Peppin lacked in legitimacy if the Franks would supply what Rome was lacking in force of arms. Stephen II was willing to give his religious sanction to Peppin’s rule in return for Peppin restoring political order in Italy.
Later tradition assumed that a sovereign Roman papacy had every right to act without reference to the Byzantine Emperor. But that was to read history backwards. Formally, the Patriarch of Rome
did
owe allegiance to the Empire. His virtual immunity in the Eternal City had been gained without legal sanction. Not that there is reason to suppose that he was deliberately seeking to damage the Empire’s interests. After all, he had started out in the company of the imperial ambassador, who accompanied him to Pavia for the interview with Aistulf. In recommending his plan to Peppin he was to use the phrase ‘for the cause of St Peter and the Roman Republic’. Prior to the formation of the Papal State,
respublica romanorum
could only have referred to the Byzantine Empire. Calling in one barbarian chief to fight off another was one of the Empire’s oldest tactics. So it has to be argued that calling in the Franks was not in itself an act of disloyalty. Stephen II did not breach his faith with the Empire until the end of the story.
The Patriarch’s initial progress is recorded in the
Liber Pontificalis
. He leaves Rome on 15 October, and travels to Pavia. The
malignus rex langobardorum
, ‘the evil king of the Lombards’, hears him out but fails to deflect him from his purpose. He leaves Pavia on 15 November:
Unde et cum nimia celeritate, Deo praevio, ad Francorum coniunxit clusas. Quas ingres-sus cum his qui cum eo erant, confestim laudes omnipotenti Deo reddidit; et coeptum gradiens iter, ad venerabile monasterium sancti Christi martyris Mauricii … sospes hisdem beatissimus pontifex… advenit.
(From Pavia, with God’s aid, he reached the gates of the Frankish Kingdom with tremendous speed. Having crossed [the pass] with his entourage, he gladly rendered praise to Almighty God. The start of the journey was steep, but the blessed pontifex [came through] unhurt to the venerable monastery of St Maurice, a martyr of Christ.)
26
He was travelling in the company of a dozen high-ranking priests, and was escorted by the Frankish envoys Duke Aitchar (Ogier) and the Chancellor, Bishop Chrodegang of Metz.
At St Maurice the Patriarch was welcomed into the Frankish realm by Peppin’s personal representative, Abbot Fulrad of St Denis. The monastery was built on the site of Agaunum, where five centuries before the Roman centurion Mauricius had met his death, having urged the soldiers of the Theban legion to disobey orders rather than fight their fellow Christians. From there, a message was sent to Peppin to arrange the rendezvous at Ponthion. The messengers found the King in the Ardennes, on his way back from Bonn. Peppin sent instructions for his young son Charles to ride out and meet the visitor on the road. After leaving St Maurice, Patriarch Stephen rounded Lake Lemanus and crossed the Jura. His encounter with the King’s son took place somewhere in Burgundy in late December. The twelve-year-old Charles had made a hundred miles south from Ponthion.
Stephen reached Ponthion on 6 January 754. According to the Roman account, the King came to greet him outside the town, dismounted, prostrated himself, and personally held the Patriarch’s bridle. At which point, in tears, the Patriarch beseeched the King’s aid:
‘Beatissimus papa praefatum Christianissimum regem lacrimabiliter deprecatus est, ut per pacis foedera causam beati Petri et republicae Romanorum disponeret.
(The blessed pope tearfully begged the supreme and most Christian king that he would reach agreements in the cause of peace, of St Peter, and of the Roman Republic.)
27
According to the Frankish account, ‘the Pope of Rome came into the King’s presence … showered rich gifts upon him and his Franks, and asked for his help against the Lombards and their king on account of their double dealing’.
28
Peppin then handed Stephen to the care of Abbot Fulrad, to winter at St Denis.
In the following weeks Peppin exchanged embassies with Aistulf. A Frankish envoy was sent to Pavia, enjoining the Lombards to desist from their seizures of territory and their ‘heretical demands’. Aistulf countered by sending Peppin’s younger brother, Carloman, as his envoy to the Franks. (Carloman had retired to a monastery in Rome, and was thus a resident of the Lombard realm.) On 1 March the Franks held their annual parade, the Champ de Mars, at Bernacus (Berny-Rivière, Aisne). Then at Cariascum (Quercy), at Easter, on 14 April, they assembled to discuss the destination of the season’s campaign. Not without dissent, they decided to march against the Lombards.
Here the sources diverge. The continuator of Fredegard’s Chronicle relates how the Frankish army crossed the Alps at Mont Cenis and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Lombards in the Val de Susa. The
Liber Pontificalis
, in contrast, relates how at midsummer Stephen reconsecrated Peppin and his Queen Bertrada at St Denis,
anointing them with holy oil and granting them the title of ‘Patricians of the Romans’. Peppin’s sons and heirs were given the papal blessing to rule in perpetuity. The historicity of these proceedings is confirmed in another contemporary document, apparently an eyewitness account, the
Clausula de Unctione Peppini
. One may surmise that Frankish commentators were embarrassed by the fact that Peppin’s desire for reconsecration underlined the impropriety of his earlier coronation.
The consequences took a couple of years to clarify. After the first Frankish victory, Aistulf submitted to Peppin and the Bishop was restored to Rome. Within months, however, the Lombards broke their oath and returned to their attacks. In 756, therefore, Peppin mounted a second campaign against Lombardy, capturing Pavia and crushing all resistance. On this occasion, if not before, the Franks took the former Exarchate of Ravenna away from the Lombards and donated it to the Patriarch. By doing so they created the territorial basis for the Papal State. By accepting it as part of the patrimony of St Peter, in defiance of Byzantine claims, the Bishop revealed that his allegiance to the Emperor had been renounced.
Yet several items remain confused. It seems that many important details were written into the sources after the event. In this kind of operation the papal chancery was specially expert. The
Liber Pontificate
states, for example, that the ‘Donation of Peppin’ was made not in 756 but in 753 at Quercy. What is more, it insists that Peppin was merely returning a property to which Rome possessed ancient title. As is now known, the papal chancery was concocting the spurious Donation of Constantine at this very time. Until the forgery was unmasked in the fifteenth century, all loyal Catholics were misled into believing that the Roman Church had received the Exarchate of Ravenna from the hands of the first Christian emperor 400 years before Peppin. It would appear, therefore, that the false ‘Donation of Constantine’ may have been concocted in order to reinforce the genuine Donation of Peppin. It also appears, in the midst of his chastisement of the Lombards, that Peppin established friendly relations with the Byzantines. The Frankish continuator says that he doesn’t know what happened to this friendship except that it didn’t flourish.
29
What happened, of course, was that the Byzantines asked for the return of their Exarchate, only to be told that it had recently been given to the Pope. Betrayed by Rome and powerless against the Franks, the Byzantines were left trying to make common cause with the Lombards.