Usurpation and successful wars of Grimoald—Reigns of Berthari and Cunibert—Quarrels of the Papacy and the empire—The exile of Pope Martin I.—Gradual alienation of Italy from the empire—Civil wars of Aribert II. and Ansprand—Successful reign of Liutprand—Leo the Isaurian and Gregory II.—Italy rebels against the Iconoclasts—Liutprand conquers most of the Exarchate.

After the death of Rothari the law-giver the Lombard kingdom entered into its second stage: it had now almost reached the full growth of its territorial extension, and had settled down into its final shape. For nearly a hundred years the main events of its political history are civil wars, or defensive campaigns against its two neighbours, the Roman exarch and the Chagan of the Avars. There is no sustained effort either to expel the Imperialists from Italy, or to extend the boundary of the Lombard realm to the north. It was only in the middle of the eighth century that the estrangement between Constantinople and its Roman subjects in Italy led to such a weakening of the Imperial authority, that the Lombard kings were able to seize the long-coveted Exarchate. The history of the cutting short of the dominions of the eastern Caesar beyond the Adriatic turns much more on the growth of the Papal power, and on the quarrel on the subject of Iconoclasm, which sundered the churches of Rome and Constantinople, than on the ambition or ability of the rulers of Lombardy.

On the murder of Rothari’s short-lived son in 653, the Lombards elected as their king Aribert, a nephew of the sainted queen Theodelinda, whose name was still held in kindly memory all over the land. "Aribert I. 653-62." Count Gundoald, Aribert’s father, had long been settled in Italy: he had crossed the Alps with his pious sister more than half a century before, so that Aribert himself was counted a Lombard, and not a Bavarian. The new king reigned obscurely for nine years (653-62): he waged no wars and was mainly noted as a friend of the clergy and a builder of churches. He was a fervent Catholic, and did his best to root out the few traces of Arianism yet remaining in Lombardy. The land had peace under his sway, but ere he died he sowed the seeds of future troubles by the unhappy inspiration which led him to induce the Lombard Witan to elect his two sons, Godebert and Berthari, as joint heirs to the kingship.

When their father was dead, Godebert, the elder brother, dwelt as king at Pavia, while Berthari took possession of Milan. Before they had been reigning a year the inevitable civil war broke out, ‘because evil-minded men sowed discord and suspicion between them.’ "Grimoald king of the Lombards, 662-71." They were mustering their followers for a decisive campaign, when Godebert was treacherously murdered by the chief of his own supporters, Grimoald, duke of Benevento, who had left his duchy in the south, and led his men-at-arms to Pavia, under the pretence of helping his suzerain against his unruly younger brother. Grimoald took possession of the crown, and married his victim’s sister, in order to connect himself with the house of the holy Theodelinda. He chased Berthari out of Milan, and forced him to take refuge with the Chagan of the Avars, in the far east, by the shores of the Danube.

The unscrupulous usurper reigned for nine years (662-71) over the whole Lombard realm, holding his own court at Pavia, while Romuald, the son of his first marriage, ruled for him at Benevento. This was the only period in the whole history of the Lombards when the king’s mandate was as well obeyed in the southern Apennines as in the valley of the Po. It was, therefore, fortunate for the Lombard race that the attack on Italy of the vigorous emperor Constantinus (Constans II.) fell within the years of Grimoald’s reign. Though he overran much of the duchy of Benevento, the energy of Constantinus failed before the advent of king Grimoald, and the danger passed away (663).^[42]

His successes against the emperor were not the only triumphs of king Grimoald: he repelled an irruption of the Avars into Venetia, and repulsed a Frankish army which the Mayor Ebroin, who ruled in behalf of king Chlothar III., sent across the Western Alps. His only territorial gain, however, was the capture from the Imperialists of the little town of Forimpopoli, near Rimini, which he stormed by surprise on Easter Day, and harried most cruelly, ‘slaying the worshippers at the altar, and the deacons at the baptismal font, while all were engaged in celebrating the Holy Feast.’ We might have supposed that the Romans in central Italy would have fared worse after the repulse of Constantinus: but no other city was lost. In the south, however, Grimoald’s son Romuald captured Taranto and Brindisi, two of the chief remaining strongholds of the Imperialists in Apulia. But this was after the death of Constantinus, during the troubles caused by the rebellion of Mezecius in Sicily (668-9?).

In spite of the treachery by which he had attained the throne, Grimoald’s victories made him very popular among the Lombards, and many tales survive bearing witness to his generosity and clemency, no less than to his strong hand and cunning. But when he died it was seen that his power rested purely upon his own personal merit: the Lombards did not elect as king either his elder son Romuald, the duke of Benevento, or his younger son, Garibald, whom the daughter of Aribert had borne him. They recalled from exile king Berthari, the son of Aribert, whom Grimoald had driven out of Milan ten years before. This prince had spent an unhappy life in wandering from land to land, from the Danube to the British seas, and was sailing to England when the news of the usurper’s death reached him. He returned to Italy, and was received with submission by the whole Lombard race, and solemnly crowned at Pavia.

Berthari reigned for seventeen years (672-88) in peace and quietness, for he loved not war. He was ‘a man of religion, a true Catholic, tenacious of justice, a nourisher of the poor; he built the famous nunnery of St. Agatha, and the great Church of the Virgin outside the walls of Pavia.’ The kings of this type, whom the monastic chroniclers delighted most to honour, were not those who made history. Berthari never attempted to conquer Rome or the Exarchate, and only took arms once in his reign, when he was assaulted by a rebellious duke, Alahis of Trent, whom he subdued and then pardoned,—as a Christian man should—a pardon which was to cost Lombardy much blood in the next reign.

The reign of his son Cunibert (688-700) was far more disturbed. This king was a man of mixed qualities, brave, generous, and popular, but careless, incautious, and given over to the wine-cup. He was caught unprepared and driven from Pavia by duke Alahis, who now rebelled again, in spite of the fact that his life had once been spared by Cunibert’s father. Cunibert was driven for a time from all his realm, save a single castle in the lake of Como, where he stood a long siege. But Alahis, by his tyranny, made himself unbearable to the Lombards, and ere many months had elapsed the lawful king was able to issue from his stronghold and face the usurper in battle. They met at Coronate on the Adda, not far from Lodi, Alahis backed by the ‘Austrians’ of Venetia, Cunibert by the ‘Neustrians’ of Piedmont. The men of the West had the better, Alahis was slain, and the son of Berthari resumed his kingship over the whole Lombard realm. This was not the last rebellion that Cunibert had to crush: all through his reign we hear of risings of the unruly dukes, and of the punishments which were inflicted on them when they fell into their master’s hands.

There is nothing of first-rate historical importance to relate of the doings of the Lombard kings in this last quarter of the seventh century. But while Berthari was building churches, or Cunibert striving with his rebels, the course of events in the city of Rome was growing more and more important. "The Papacy in the seventh century. " The papacy and the empire were gradually working up to a pitch of estrangement and mutual repulsion, which was in the next generation to lead to open war between them. We have sketched in an earlier chapter the work of pope Gregory the Great, in raising the papacy to a condition of unprecedented spiritual importance in the Christian world, and no less in building up a position of high secular importance for the Pope in the governance of Rome. For half a century after Gregory’s death this state of affairs remained unaltered. The Pope was now firmly established as patriarch of the West, and sent missions to Britain, Gaul, and Spain without let or hindrance. Nor was his secular authority much interfered with, either by the exarch or by the home government at Constantinople. But friction and struggling began under the reign of the stern and ruthless Constantinus (Constans II.) and the hot-headed pope Martin I. We have mentioned elsewhere^[43] how the emperor published his ‘Type’ or edict of Comprehension, forbidding further discussions on the question of the Monothelite heresy. Martin not merely refused to acquiesce in letting the discussion sleep, but summoned a council which declared the ‘Type’ to be blasphemous and irreverent. Martin wrote to the same effect to the kings of the Franks, Visigoths, and English, thus calling in foreign sovereigns to participate in a dispute between himself and his master. Relying on his remoteness from Byzantium, and on the grandeur of his position as Patriarch of the West, he attempted to defy Constantinus. The emperor’s proceedings show that he was determined to assert his power, but that he was fully conscious of the danger and difficulty of dealing with such an important personage as the bishop of Rome had now become. "Fate of Pope Martin, 655." He had to wait for a favourable opportunity for punishing Martin, and it was not by openly arresting him in the face of the people, but by secretly kidnapping him, that he got him into his power. But when once shipped to Constantinople the Pope felt his sovereign’s wrath: insulted, loaded with chains, imprisoned, and banished to the remote Crimea, Martin learnt that the emperor’s arm was still strong enough to reach out to Rome (655).

But all Italy regarded Martin as a martyr to orthodoxy, and his fate did much to estrange the Romans from their loyalty to the empire. Nor was their wrath diminished by the sacrilegious plunder of the Pantheon and other Roman churches, which Constantinus carried out, when in 663 he deigned to visit his Western dominions. It would seem that Constantinus himself was fully conscious that the Roman see was growing too strong, and deliberately strove to sap its resources, for at this time he granted to the archbishop of Ravenna a formal exemption from any duty of spiritual obedience to the Pope as patriarch of the West, and constituted him an independent authority in the exarchate. For twenty years this schism of Rome and Ravenna continued, but in the end the old traditional prestige of the see of St. Peter triumphed over the ambition of the Ravennese archbishops.

If there had been a strong pontiff at this moment, it is probable that an open rupture might have taken place between the papacy and the empire. But pope Vitalian was a weak man, the fate of his predecessor Martin had cowed him, and the idea of cutting Rome away from the respublica Romana, as the empire was still habitually called, had not yet entered into the minds of the Italian subjects of Byzantium. To disown the Imperial supremacy would have been tantamount to throwing Rome into the hands of king Grimoald the Lombard, and neither Pope nor people contemplated such a prospect with equanimity.

Accordingly the breach between Rome and Byzantium was deferred for another generation. After Constantinus was dead, more friendly relations reigned for a space, for his son Constantine V. was impeccably orthodox. He held the Council of Constantinople in 681 with the high approval of pope Agatho, whose representatives duly appeared at it, to join in the final crushing of the Monothelite heretics. Constantine, in the fulness of his friendship to the papacy, even granted to the Roman see the dangerous privilege that when at papal elections the suffrages of the clergy, the people, and the soldiery,—the garrison of Rome—were unanimously fixed on any one person, that individual might be at once consecrated bishop of Rome, without having to wait for an imperial mandate of approval from Constantinople. As a matter of fact, however, unanimous elections were very rare, and the exarchs of Ravenna are still found interfering to decide between the claims of rival candidates.

Signs of a breach became evident once again in the days of the tyrant Justinian II. When pope Sergius refused obedience to his behests, the emperor bade the exarch seize him and send him to Constantinople. But not only the Roman mob, but the soldiers of the imperial garrison took up arms to resist Justinian’s officials when they tried to lay hands on Sergius: the ties of military obedience had already come to be weaker than those of spiritual respect, and the Pope triumphed, for Justinian was deposed, mutilated, and sent to Cherson by his rebellious subjects, ere he had time to punish the Romans.

The twenty-two years of anarchy and dissolution at Constantinople which followed the deposition of Justinian (695-717) were fraught with important consequences in Italy. The ephemeral emperors of those days were unable to assert their authority over the West, and we once more find the popes assuming secular functions, after the fashion of Gregory the Great in the preceding century. John VI. levied taxes in Rome, made treaties with the Lombard duke of Benevento, and even protected and restored the exarch Theophylactus when he had been expelled from Ravenna by a military revolt. "Quarrel of Gregory II. and Philippicus." Gregory II. went so far in his independence as to refuse to acknowledge the usurping emperor Philippicus; by his advice ‘the Roman people determined that state-documents should not bear the name of a heretical Caesar, nor the money be struck with his effigy. So the portrait of Philippicus was not set up in the Church, nor his name introduced in the prayers at Mass.’ Gregory only consented to recognise Philippicus’ successor Anastasius II. when he heard that the new emperor was a man of unimpeachable orthodoxy. The independent position of the popes had now grown so marked that the next quarrel with Constantinople was destined to lead to the final rupture of relations between the papacy and the empire. It was impossible that things should remain as they were: the breach was inevitable. Its cause was to be the accession of the stern Iconoclast, Leo the Isaurian, and his attempt to enforce his own religious views on the western, no less than the eastern provinces of his empire. The protagonists in the final struggle are Leo, pope Gregory II., and the Lombard king Liutprand, whose position and power we must now proceed to explain.

When king Cunibert died in the year 700, he left his throne to his young son Liutbert, a mere boy, whose realm was to be administered by a regent-guardian, count Ansprand, the wisest of the Lombards. A minority was always fatal to one of the early Teutonic kingdoms. "Rebellion of Reginbert of Turin." Only eight months after Liutbert had been proclaimed king, his nearest adult kinsmen rose in arms against him, to claim the crown. These were Reginbert, duke of Turin, and his son Aribert, the child and grandchild of king Godebert, and the cousins of the boy-king’s father.

Reginbert was followed by all the Neustrian Lombards, and was able to defeat the regent Ansprand at Novara. He died immediately after his victory, but his son Aribert followed up the success by winning a second battle in front of Pavia, and taking prisoner the boy Liutbert. "Civil wars of the Lombards." The victor seized the capital, and was hailed as king by his followers, under the name of Aribert II. The regent Ansprand, who had escaped from Pavia, tried to keep up the civil war in the name of his ward: but the new king put an end to this attempt by ordering the boy Liutbert to be strangled in his bath. Ansprand then fled over the Alps and took refuge with the duke of Bavaria.

Aribert II. reigned over the Lombards for ten troubled years (701-11), fully occupied by the tasks of putting down rebellious dukes, driving back raids of the Carinthian Slavs from Venetia, and endeavouring to assert his power over Spoleto and Benevento. The time was opportune for attacking the imperial possessions in Italy, but Aribert refrained from making the attempt. He was friendly to the papacy, and made over to pope John VI. a great gift of estates in the Cottian Alps: nor did he assist his vassal Faroald, duke of Spoleto, when the latter in 703 made an attempt on the Exarchate. Aribert preferred to live in peace both with the Pope and the Emperor.

Aribert II. had gained his kingdom by the sword, and by the sword he was destined to lose it. In 711 the exile Ansprand, once the regent for the boy Liutbert, invaded Italy at the head of a Bavarian army, lent to him by duke Teutbert. Many of the Lombards still loved the house of Berthari and hated Aribert as a murderer and usurper. The army of Ansprand was ere long increased by many thousands of the ‘Austrian’ Lombards, and he was soon able to face the king in the open field near Pavia. The battle was indecisive, but when it was over Aribert retired within the walls of the city. His retreat discouraged his army, which began to fall away from him: thereupon Aribert determined to take with him the royal treasure, and flee to Gaul to buy aid of the Franks. While endeavouring to cross the Ticino by night with all his hoard, he was accidentally drowned, and left the throne vacant for his rival Ansprand (712).

The ex-regent was now proclaimed king, but only survived his triumph a few months: on his deathbed he prevailed on the Lombards to elect as his colleague his son Liutprand, who therefore became sole ruler when his father died a few days later.

"Liutprand, king of the Lombards, 712-43." Liutprand was the most able and energetic king who ever ruled the Lombard realm, and his long reign of thirty-one years (712-43) saw the completion of the long-delayed process of the eviction of the East-Romans from Central Italy, and the rise of the Lombards to the highest pitch of success which they ever knew—a rise which was to be closely followed by the extinction of their kingdom.

When Leo the Isaurian commenced his crusade against image-worship, Liutprand had been on the throne for fourteen years. In these earlier years of his reign he was occupied in strengthening his position, and made no attack on the Imperial dominions in Italy, though he is found making war on the Bavarians, and capturing some of their castles on the upper Adige.

But in 726 things came to a head, when Leo issued his famous edict against images, forbidding all worship of statues and paintings. "Quarrel of Gregory II. and Leo the Isaurian." Pope Gregory II. was not in a mood to listen to such a command from Constantinople. He was already in great disfavour with the emperor for having advised the Italians to resist some extraordinary taxation which Leo had imposed to maintain the Saracen war. When he received Leo’s rescript, and a letter addressed to himself requesting him to carry out the imperial orders, and destroy the images of Rome, he burst out into open contumacy, and the Romans, with all the other Italians, followed his lead. Exhilaratus, duke of Naples, who tried to carry out the edict in his duchy, was slain by a mob, and many other imperial officials were maltreated or driven off by those whom they governed. The cites elected new rulers over themselves, and would have chosen and proclaimed an Emperor of the West, if Gregory II. had not kept them from this final step. "Liutprand conquers the Exarchate, 727." Meanwhile, all the imperial provinces of Italy being in open sedition, and quite cut off from Constantinople, king Liutprand thought the moment had at last come for rounding off the Lombard dominions by seizing the long-coveted Exarchate. He crossed the Po, took Bologna, with most of the other cities of Æmilia, and then conquered Osimo, Rimini, Ancona, and all the Pentapolis. Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, fell before him, but the exarch Paul succeeded in preserving the great City of the Marshes for a short time longer, till he was murdered by rioters (727). The Lombard king’s conquests were made with astonishing ease, for in each city the anti-imperialist faction betrayed the gates to him without fighting.

Soon after, the triumph of Liutprand was completed by the surrender of Ravenna itself: the exarch Eutychius fled to Venice, already a semi-independent city, but one which still preserved a nominal allegiance to the empire. "Gregory II. rebels against Leo II." Meanwhile, pope Gregory II. was occupied in writing lengthy manifestos setting forth the atrocious conduct of Leo, and the intrinsic rationality of reverencing images. His letters to the emperor were couched in language of studied insolence. ‘I must use coarse and rude arguments,’ he wrote, ‘to suit a coarse and rude mind such as yours,’ and then proceeded to say that ‘if you were to go into a boys’ school and announce yourself as a destroyer of images, the smallest children would throw their writing tablets at your head, for even babes and sucklings might teach you, though you refuse to listen to the wise.’ After completely confusing king Uzziah with king Hezekiah in an argument drawn from the Old Testament, Gregory then proceeded to quote apocryphal anecdotes from early church history. He wound up by asserting that in virtue of the power that he inherited from St. Peter, he might consign the emperor to eternal damnation, but that Leo was so thoroughly damned by his own crimes that there was no need to inflict any further curse on him. A more practical threat was that if the emperor sent an army against Rome, he would retire into Campania and take refuge with the Lombards (729).

"Position of Gregory II." As a matter of fact, however, to throw himself into the hands of the Lombards was the last thing that pope Gregory desired to do. He had the greatest dread of falling under the direct authority of Liutprand, for the occupation of Rome by a powerful and strong-handed Italian king would have been fatal to the secular power of the papacy. It was easy to disobey a powerless exarch and a distant emperor, but if Liutprand had become ruler of all Italy, the popes would have been forced to be his humble subjects. Gregory wished to rid himself of the domination of Leo, without falling into the clutches of Liutprand. While disclaiming his allegiance to the emperor, he pretended to adhere to the empire.

Meanwhile an unexpected turn of events had checked the career of victory of king Liutprand. While he was absent at Pavia, the exarch Eutychius had collected some troops at Venice, and aided by the forces of the semi-independent citizens of the lagoon-city had landed near Ravenna. The place was betrayed to him by the imperialist party within the walls, and became once more the seat of imperial power in Italy. At the same time the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento took arms against their suzerain, and allied themselves with pope Gregory (729).

Liutprand determined to conquer the Lombard rebels before resuming the hard task of retaking Ravenna. He even made a truce with the exarch, by which it was stipulated that they should mutually aid each other, the one in subduing the revolted dukes, the other in compelling the Pope to return to his allegiance. Accordingly Eutychius marched against Rome, and Liutprand against Spoleto. On the king’s approach the two dukes submitted to him, and swore to be his faithful vassals. "Liutprand pacifies Italy, 730." He then moved toward Rome, which the exarch was already besieging. But he had no wish that the imperial power should be strengthened by the recovery of Rome, and, encamping his army in the Field of Nero, outside the city, proceeded to claim to act as arbitrator between Gregory and Eutychius. They were too weak to resist him, and the Pope at least gladly acquiesced in the pacification of Italy which Liutprand proposed. The exarch was to return to Ravenna, leaving Rome unmolested, and to be content with the possession of Ravenna only, all his other lost dominions in the Pentapolis and Æmilia remaining in the hands of the Lombards. Gregory, in consideration of being left unmolested in Rome, professed to return to his allegiance, but in reality remained in an independent position. He did not withdraw his opposition to Iconoclasm, and took advantage of the peace to call together a great council of Italian bishops, ninety-three in number, who solemnly anathematised all who refused to reverence images, though they did not curse the emperor by name (730).

Two months later pope Gregory II. died, and was succeeded by Gregory III., as great an enemy of Iconoclasm as his namesake. He had no sooner displayed his views, than the emperor, discontented with the peace which the exarch had concluded, and much irritated by the anathema of the Council of Rome, revenged himself on the papacy by issuing an edict which removed from the jurisdiction of the Pope, as Patriarch of the West, the Illyrian and south Italian dioceses which had hitherto paid spiritual obedience to Rome. For the future, not only Epirus and Sicily, but even Apulia and Calabria, were to look to the Patriarch of Constantinople as their head and chief (731).

In 732 Leo took a more practical step for reducing the Pope to obedience. He fitted out a great armament in the ports of Asia Minor, which was to sail to Italy, to recover by force of arms the lost regions of the Exarchate, and to arrest Gregory III. and send him in chains to Constantinople. But the fates were against the restoration of imperial authority in the West: the fleet was completely wrecked by a storm in the Adriatic, and the fragments of it which reached Ravenna effected nothing. This was the last serious attempt of the empire to recover central Italy. "Last effort of Leo to reconquer Italy, 732." Henceforth the Popes went their own way, while the exarch, penned up in the single fortress of Ravenna, awaited with trembling the outbreak of the next Lombard war—a war which would certainly sweep away him and his shrunken Exarchate.

But for eight years after the treaty of 730, king Liutprand maintained peace over all Italy. He was a pious prince, and a respecter of the papacy, to which he had even made a grant of territory, ceding the town of Sutri in Tuscany, which he had captured from the exarch in the war of 728-30. His reign was a time of prosperity for Lombardy: the southern dukes were compelled to obey orders from Pavia: the Slav and Avar were kept back from the northern marches, Liutprand also kept up his friendly relations with Charles Martel, the great Mayor of the Palace in Gaul. When Charles was looking about for a neighbour sovereign who should, according to old Teutonic custom, gird with arms and clip the hair of his son Pippin on his arrival at manhood, he chose Liutprand to discharge this friendly office. On the invasion of Provence by the Saracens in 736-7, Charles asked the Lombard for the aid of his host, and Liutprand crossed the Alps and joined in expelling the infidels from Aix and Arles.

The peace of Italy was not broken till 738 when Transimund duke of Spoleto rebelled, not for the first time, against Liutprand. The king crushed the revolt with his accustomed vigour, and the duke was compelled to fly: he took refuge at Rome with pope Gregory III. "Liutprand attacks Rome, 738." Liutprand promptly demanded his surrender: Gregory refused, and the Lombard army at once marched into the duchy of Rome. The king captured Orte, Bomazo, and two other towns in south Tuscany, and menaced Rome with a siege. Gregory III. could hope for neither help nor sympathy from his master the emperor Leo, whom he had so grievously insulted. Accordingly he determined to seek aid from the one other power which might be able to succour him, the great Mayor of the Franks. He sent to Charles Martel the golden keys of the tomb of Saint Peter, and besought him to defend the holy city against the impious Lombard. "Gregory III. asks aid from the Franks." He conferred on the Mayor the high-sounding title of Roman Patrician, which was not legally his to give, for only the emperor could confer it. He even offered to transfer to the ruler of the Franks the shadowy allegiance which Rome still paid to the emperor.

Thus did Gregory III., first of all the Roman pontiffs, endeavour to bring down upon Italy the curse of foreign invasion. He had drawn upon himself the wrath of Liutprand by his secular policy: the war arose purely from the fact that he had favoured the rebellion of the duke of Spoleto, and sheltered him when he fled. Yet he made the Lombard invasion a matter of sacrilege, complaining to Charles that Liutprand’s attack was an impious invasion of the rights of the Church, and a deliberate insult to the majesty of St. Peter. Considering that the king had saved him from destruction eight years before, Gregory must be accused of gross ingratitude, as well as of deliberate misrepresentation and hypocrisy. But the Pope had imbibed a bitter and quite irrational hatred for the Lombard race: the danger that he might lose his secular power, by Rome being annexed to the realm of Liutprand, caused Gregory to view the pious, peaceable, and orthodox king of the Lombards with as much dislike as he felt for the heretical Iconoclast at Constantinople. Considering the amiable character of Liutprand, and the respectable national record of the Lombards when they are compared with their contemporaries beyond the Alps, it is astonishing to read of the terms in which Gregory and his successors spoke of them. No epithet applied to the heathen in the Scriptures was too severe to heap upon the ‘fetid, perjured, impious, plundering, murderous race of the Lombards.’ And all this indignation and abuse was produced by the rational desire of Liutprand to punish the Pope for harbouring his rebels! It is impossible not to wish that the great king had succeeded in taking Rome, and unifying Italy, a contingency which would have spared the peninsula the curses of the Frankish invasion, of its long and unnatural connection with the Western Empire, and of that still greater disaster, the permanent establishment of the temporal power of the papacy.

Charles Martel did not accept Gregory’s offers, or carry out the Pope’s plans: he would not quarrel with his old friend Liutprand on such inadequate grounds as the Pope alleged. He chose instead to endeavour to mediate between Gregory and the Lombard king. He accepted the title of Patrician, and received the Roman ambassadors with great pomp and honour, sending them home with many rich presents. But his own delegates who accompanied them were charged to reconcile the Pope and the king, not to promise aid to the one against the other. Both Charles and Gregory, as it happened, were at this moment on the edge of the grave: both died in the next year (741), and it was some time before the first active interference of the Franks in behalf of the papacy was destined to take place.

How uncalled for was the action of pope Gregory is shown by the fact that in the next year Liutprand came to terms with the Roman See. "Liutprand grants peace to the Pope, 742." On the accession of pope Zachariah, who promised to give no more aid to the rebel duke of Spoleto, Liutprand restored the cities he had taken from the Roman duchy, and granted a peace for twenty years. He even presented great offerings to the Roman Churches and made a present of some valuable estates to Zachariah. Yet the anger of the popes was in no way appeased: in their hearts they hated the Lombards as if they were still Arians or heathen, and only awaited another opportunity for conspiring against them.

Meanwhile Liutprand died in peace in 743, after a reign of thirty-one years, in which he had added the greater part of the Exarchate to his kingdom, had extended the boundaries of Italy to north and east against the Bavarian and Slav, and had reduced the Beneventan and Spoletan dukes to an unwonted state of subservience. No one, save his enemies the popes, ever laid a charge of any sort against his character, and he appears to have been the best-loved and best-served king of his day. We read with pleasure that he died in peace, ere the terrible invasion of the Franks began to afflict the land he had guarded so well. It would have been better perhaps for Italy if he had been a less virtuous and pious sovereign: a less temperate ruler would have finished his career of conquest by taking Rome, and so would have staved off the countless ills that Rome was about to bring on the whole Italian peninsula.