ment is confirmed by a letter of Stephen himself, addressed to Bertha, the mother of the Frankish kings, and to Charlemagne. The biographer of Pope Stephen gives an opposite version. The hostility of Desiderius to Christopher and Sergius arose from their zeal in enforcing the papal demands on the Lombard kings. He denounces the Lombards as still the enemies of the Pope, and accuses Paul, the Pope's chamberlain, their ally, of the basest treachery. At all events this transitory connexion between the Pope and the Lombards soon gave way to the old implacable animosity. Whatever might be the claim of Desiderius on the gratitude of Stephen, the intelligence of a proposed intimate alliance between his faithful protectors the Franks, and his irreconcileable enemies the Lombards, struck the Pope with amazement and dismay. supposed to have been written under "Unde (Christophorus et Sergius, cum Dodone Carlomanni regis misso) in basilicam domni Theodori papæ, ubi sedebamus, introierunt, sicque ipsi maligni homines insidiabantur nos interficere."-Cenni, Monument. i. 267. Jaffè, p. 201. This letter is by some gius. CHAPTER XII. Charlemagne on the Throne. THE jealousies of Carloman and Charles, the sons of Pepin, who had divided his monarchy, were Carloman and Charles. a for a time appeased. Bertha, their mother, seized the opportunity of strengthening and uniting her divided house by intermarriages with the family of the Lombard sovereign. Desiderius was equally desirous of this connexion with the powerful Transalpine kings. His unmarried son, Adelchis, was affianced to Gisela, the sister of Charlemagne; his daughter Hermingard proposed as the wife of one of the royal brothers. Both Carloman and Charles were already married; Carloman was attached to his wife Gisberta, by whom he had children. The ambition of Charles was less scrupulous; he at once divorced his wife (an obscure person, whose name has not been preserved by history), and wedded the daughter of Desiderius. this union the Pope saw the whole policy of his predecessors threatened with destruction: their mighty protector was become the ally, the brother of their deadly enemy. Already the splendid donation of Pepin seemed wrested from his unresisting hands. Who should now interpose to prevent the Lombards from becoming masters of the Exarchate, of Rome, of Italy? The - Pope lost all self-command; he gave vent to the full a Or Desiderata. Gisela became a nun.-Eginh., v. k. 1. xviii. In Pope Ste bitterness of Roman, of Papal hatred to the Lombards and to the agony of his terror, in a remon- Letter of strance so unmeasured in its language, so un- phen. papal, it might be said unchristian, in its spirit, as hardly to be equalled in the pontifical diplomacy.b "The devil alone could have suggested such a connexion. That the noble, the generous race of the Franks, the most ancient in the world, should ally itself with the foetid brood of the Lombards, a brood hardly reckoned human, and who have introduced the leprosy into the land. What could be worse than this abominable and detestable contagion? Light could not be more opposite to darkness, faith to infidelity." The Pope does not take his firm stand on the high moral and religious ground of the French princes' actual marriage. He reminds them of the consummate beauty of the women in their own land; that their father Pepin had been prevented by the remonstrances of the Pope from divorcing their mother; then briefly enjoins them not to dare to dismiss their present wives. Again he urges the evil of contaminating their blood by any foreign admixture (they had already declined an alliance with the Greek emperor), and then insists on the absolute impossibility of their maintaining their fidelity to the papal see, "that fidelity so solemnly sworn by b Muratori faintly hints a doubt of its authenticity; a doubt which he is too honest to assert. c Manzoni has pointed out with great sagacity, that in the 170th law of Rotharis there is a clause prescribing the course to be pursued with lepers; thus showing that the nation was really subject to the disease. Stephen might thus be expressing a common notion, that from the Lom bards, at least in Italy, "came the race of the lepers." Thus this expression, instead of throwing suspicion, as Muratori supposes, on the letter, confirms its authenticity.- Discorso Storico, subjoined to the tragedy Adelchi,' p. 199. d"Nec vestras quodammodo conjuges audeatis demittere." But it is the guilt of the alliance, not of the divorce, on which he dwells. their father, so ratified on his death bed, so confirmed by their own oaths," if they should thus marry into the perfidious house of Lombardy. "The enmity of the Lombards to the papal see is implacable. Wherefore St. Peter himself solemnly adjures them, he, the Pope, the whole clergy, and people of Rome adjure them by all which is awful and commanding, by the living and true God, by the tremendous day of judgement, by all the holy mysteries, and by the most sacred body of St. Peter, that neither of the brothers presume to wed the daughter of Desiderius, or to give the lovely Gisela in wedlock to his son. But if either (which he cannot imagine) should act contrary to this adjuration, by the authority of St. Peter he is under the most terrible anathema, an alien from the kingdom of God, and condemned with the devil and his most wicked ministers and with all impious men, to be burned in the eternal fire; but he who shall obey shall be rewarded with everlasting glory." But Pope Stephen spoke to obdurate ears. Already Charlemagne began to show that, however highly he might prize the alliance of the hierarchy, he was not its humble minister. Lofty as were his notions of religion, he would rarely sacrifice objects of worldly policy. Sovereign as yet of but one-half the dominions of his father Pepin, he had not now by the death of his brother and the dispossession of his brother's children consolidated the kingdom of the Franks into one great monarchy. It was to his advantage, in case of hostilities with his brother (already they had once broken out), to connect himself with the Lombard kingdom. He married the daughter of Desiderius; and his own irregular passions, not the dread of papal censure, dissolved, only a year after, the inhibited union. The acts and the formal documents of the earlier Popes rarely betray traces of individual character. The pontificate of Stephen III. was short-about a year and a half. Yet in him there appears a peculiar passionate feebleness in his relation to the heads of the different Roman factions and to the King of the Lombards, no less than in his invective against the marriage of the French princes into the race of Desiderius. Feb. 1. His successors, Hadrian I. and Leo III., not only оссиру the papal throne at one of the great AD. 768-772, epochs of its aggrandisement, but their pon- Hadrian I. tificates were of much longer duration than usual. Hadrian entered on the 23rd, Leo on the 21st year of his papacy, and Hadrian at least, a Roman by birth, appears admirably fitted to cope with the exigencies of the times;-times pregnant with great events, the total and final disruption of the last links which connected the Byzantine and Western empires, the extinction of the Lombard Kingdom, the creation of the Empire of the West. If the progress of the younger son of Pepin, Charles the Great, to almost universal empire now occupied the attention of the West, it was watched by the Pope with the profoundest interest. If Stephen III. had trembled at the matrimonial alliance which he had vainly attempted to prevent, between the King of the Franks and the daughter of Desiderius, which threatened to strengthen the closer political relations of those once hostile powers, his fears were soon allayed by the sudden disruption of that short-lived connexion. After one year of wedlock, Charles, apparently without alleging any cause, divorced Hermingard, threw back upon her father his repudiated daughter, and embittered the insult by an immediate marriage with Hildegard, a |