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Updated: June 2, 2025
During this century the power of the Roman Pontiff swelled to an enormous degree, and his sway extended into civil and political affairs: so supreme an authority had he become that, in A.D. 751, the Frankish states of the realm convoked by Pepin to sanction his design of seizing on the French throne, then occupied by Childeric III. directed that an embassy should be sent to the Pope Zachary, to ask whether it was not right that a weak monarch should be dethroned; and on the answer of the Pope in the affirmative being received, Childeric was dethroned without opposition, and Pepin was crowned in his stead.
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.
It was besieged by Childeric I. In 508, Clovis declared it the capital of his kingdom. The long stay which that prince made in it, contributed to its embellishment. Charlemagne founded in it a celebrated school. A little time after, another was established in the abbey of St. Germain-des-Pres. In the course of the ninth century, it was besieged and pillaged three times by the Normans.
One day, returning from Choisy, Louis XV found under a cushion of his coach a slip of paper on which was transcribed this prediction of the monk Aimonius, the savant who could read all things from the vast book of the stars: "As soon as Childeric had returned from Thuringia, he was crowned King of France And no sooner was he King than he espoused Basine, wife of the King of Thuringia.
Under his strong hand the various tribes were gradually brought under his sole rule. When Clovis, at the age of fifteen, succeeded his father, Childeric, as king of the Salian tribe, his people were mainly pagans; the Salian domain was very limited, the treasury empty, and there was no store of either grain or wine.
The Franks, who had punished with exile the youthful follies of Childeric, elected the Roman general for their king: his vanity, rather than his ambition, was gratified by that singular honor; and when the nation, at the end of four years, repented of the injury which they had offered to the Merovingian family, he patiently acquiesced in the restoration of the lawful prince.
In a manuscript work, still preserved in the King's library at Paris, it is imputed to the disorders which prevailed after the expulsion of Childeric, father of Clovis, when such as were sufficiently powerful took advantage of the anarchy in which the nation was involved, to establish independent monarchies of their own.
Meroveus, whose name was perpetuated in his line, was one of the principal chieftains of the Salian Franks; and his son Childeric, who resided at Tournay, where his tomb was discovered in 1655, was the father of Clovis, who succeeded him in 481, and with whom really commenced the kingdom and history of France.
Then Pepin jumped from his seat, rushed into the arena, and with a thrust of his sword killed the lion. In the early years of Pepin's rule as mayor of the palace the throne was occupied by a king named Chil'der-ic III. Like his father and the other "do-nothing" kings, Childeric cared more for pleasures and amusements than for affairs of government.
His successors built several others round about the city, but they appear to have been all of small size until, in the fifth century, Perpetus, Bishop of Tours in the reign of Childeric, caused to be built a more splendid church to replace that which Briceius had erected over the tomb of St. Martin.
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