whom he thought more capable than himself of winning the independence of Aquitaine, and went and shut himself up in a monastery in the island of Rhe, where was the tomb of his father Eudes.  In the course of divers attempts at conspiracy and insurrection, the Frankish princes’ young brother, Grippo, was killed in combat whilst crossing the Alps.  The furious internal dissensions amongst the Arabs of Spain and their incessant wars with the Berbers did not allow them to pursue any great enterprise in Gaul.  Thanks to all these circumstances, Pepin found himself, in 747, sole master of the heritage of Clovis and with the sole charge of pursuing, in State and Church, his father’s work, which was the unity and grandeur of Christian France.

Pepin, less enterprising than his father, but judicious, persevering, and capable of discerning what was at the same time necessary and possible, was well fitted to continue and consolidate what he would, probably, never have begun and created.

Like his father, he, on arriving at power, showed pretensions to moderation, or, it might be said, modesty.  He did not take the title of king; and, in concert with his brother Carloman, he went to seek, Heaven knows in what obscure asylum, a forgotten Merovingian, son of Chilperic II., the last but one of the sluggard kings, and made him king, the last of his line, with the title of Childeric III., himself, as well as his brother, taking only the style of mayor of the palace.  But at the end of ten years, and when he saw himself alone at the head of the Frankish dominion, Pepin considered the moment arrived for putting an end to this fiction.  In 751, he sent to Pope Zachary at Rome, Burchard, bishop of Wurtzhurg, and Fulrad, abbot of St. Denis, “to consult the Pontiff,” says Eginhard, “on the subject of the kings then existing amongst the Franks, and who bore only the name of king without enjoying a tittle of royal authority.”  The Pope, whom St. Boniface, the great missionary of Germany, had prepared for the question, answered that “it was better to give the title of king to him who exercised the sovereign power;” and next year, in March, 752, in the presence and with the assent of the general assembly of “leudes” and bishops gathered together at Soissons, Pepin was proclaimed king of the Franks, and received from the hand of St. Boniface the sacred anointment.  They cut off the hair of the last Merovingian phantom, Childeric III., and put him away in the monastery of St. Sithiu, at St. Omer.  Two years later, July 28, 754, Pope Stephen II., having come to France to claim Pepin’s support against the Lombards, after receiving from him assurance of it, “anointed him afresh with the holy oil in the church of St. Denis to do honor in his person to the dignity of royalty,” and conferred the same honor on the king’s two sons, Charles and Carloman.  The new Gallo-Frankish kingship and the Papacy, in the name of their common faith and common interests, thus contracted an intimate alliance.  The young Charles was hereafter to become Charlemagne.