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THE DECLINE AND FALL
citizen; and the sword of destruction was unsheathed to exact the penalty of her disobedience. The Romans hesitated; they entreated; they complained; and the threatening barbarians were checked by arms and negotiations, till the popes had engaged the friendship of an ally and avenger beyond the Alps.[1]
Her deliverance by Pepin. A.D. 754 In his distress, the first[2] Gregory had implored the aid of the hero of the age, of Charles Martel, who governed the French monarchy with the humble title of mayor or duke; and who, by his signal victory over the Saracens, had saved his country, and perhaps Europe, from the Mahometan yoke. The ambassadors of the pope were received by Charles with decent reverence; but the greatness of his occupations and the shortness of his life prevented his interference in the affairs of Italy, except by a friendly and ineffectual mediation. His son Pepin, the heir of his power and virtues, assumed the office of champion of the Roman church; and the zeal of the French prince appears to have been prompted by the love of glory and religion. But the danger was on the banks of the Tiber, the succour on those of the Seine; and our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery. Amidst the tears of the city, Stephen the Third embraced the generous resolution of visiting in person the courts of Lombardy and France, to deprecate the injustice of his enemy, or to excite the pity and indignation of his friend. After soothing the public despair by litanies and orations, he undertook this laborious journey with the ambassadors of the French monarch and the Greek emperor. The king of the Lombards was inexorable; but his threats could not silence the complaints, nor retard the speed, of the Roman pontiff, [A.D. 753] who traversed the Pennine Alps, reposed in the abbey of St. Maurice, and hastened to grasp the right hand of his protector, a hand which was never lifted in vain, either in war or friendship. Stephen was entertained as the visible successor of the apostle; [at Quierzy. A.D. 754] at the next assembly, the field of March or of May, his injuries were exposed to a devout and warlike nation, and he repassed the Alps, not as a suppliant, but as a conqueror, at the head of a French army, which was led by the king in person. [A.D. 754] The Lombards, after a weak resistance, obtained an- ↑ The Codex Carolinus is a collection of the epistles of the Popes to Charles Martel (whom they style Subregulus), Pepin and Charlemagne, as far as the year 791, when it was formed by the last of these princes. His original and authentic Ms. (Bibliothecæ Cubicularis) is now in the Imperial library of Vienna [No. 449], and has been published by Lambecius and Muratori (Script. Rerum Ital. tom. iii. pars ii. p. 75, &c.). [Ed. Jaffé, 1867; and Gundlach, in M.G.H., Epp. iii., 1892.]
- ↑ [Read third.]
