60 CHARLEMAGNE, Sylvester Hassell The Mohammedans, or Saracens, after conquering Spain and southern France, were repulsed with immense slaughter by Charles Martel at Tours, in France, A.D. 732, just one hundred years after the death of Mohammed, and were driven back into Spain. Pepin the Short, the son of Charles Martel (encouraged by Pope Zachary, in order to increase the papal influence over France), dethroned in 752,
Childeric III., the last of the Merovingian kings of France, and assumed the French
crown, thus founding the Carlovingian dynasty, the champions of Roman Catholicism.
The Exarchate of Ravenna, with its inseparable dependency of the Pentapolis, in Central Italy, having belonged to the Eastern Roman Empire since the time of Justinian, was, in 751, conquered by Astolphus, king of the Lombards, who also threatened Rome.
Pope Stephen III. addressed a letter to Pepin, pretendedly “in the name and person of the Apostle Peter himself,” and urged him under the penalty of eternal damnation if he refused, and upon the promise of paradise if he consented, to undertake the defeat of Astolphus and the deliverance of Rome. Pepin complied and succeeded, and, as he says, “for the remission of his sins and the salvation of his soul,” conferred on the Roman Pontiff the Exarchate of Ravenna and the Pentapolis, A.D. 754, and this grant was confirmed and enlarged by Pepin’s son and successor, Charlemagne.
The Donation of Pepin founded the temporal power of the pope, which lasted eleven hundred and fifteen years, until, in 1870, at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, Napoleon III. Withdrew all his soldiers from Italy, and Victor Emmanuel II. took possession of Rome. “The mutual obligations of the popes and the Carlovingian family,” says Gibbon, “form the important link of ancient and modern, of civil and ecclesiastical history.”
Charlemagne reigned forty-six years (768-814). He made the first and last successful attempt to consolidate the Teutonic and Roman races in one great empire. December 25th, A.D. 800, Pope Leo III. Crowned and anointed him in Rome, as Caesar Augustus, the Emperor of the Romans. He reigned in France, in Spain as far as the Ebro, in Germany, in Hungary, and in the greatest part of Italy. His dominion was called the “Holy Roman Empire,” because allied with the pope, and, with varying boundaries, lasted a thousand and six years, until, in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte compelled Francis of Austria to abdicate the title, and himself claimed, by his own military prowess, to be the true successor of Charlemagne.
Charlemagne, the pope’s new lord, whose figure stands at one end, as that of Constantine, a similar churchman, stands at the other end, of the stately porch of St. Peter’s at Rome, was an illiterate barbarian, though a professed patron of learning, a very licentious and ambitious man, a vigorous ruler and a bloody warrior.
He had nine wives or concubines, and a number of dissolute daughters; he fought, in thirty-three bloody campaigns, during as many years, with the Saxons, Bohemians, and Huns, professedly to civilize and Christianize them, compelling thousands of them to be baptized or to suffer death. He once slew forty-five hundred Saxon prisoners in cold blood; and finally effected the conquest of the Saxons by deporting them in France. He was, says Milman, “the Mohammedan Apostle of the Gospel.” He is said to have restored 3,700 “church” buildings; and he ordered tithes to be paid to the ‘clergy. (Hassell’s History ppg 419-420)