United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was a man, like his father, well fitted to rule over a warlike and rude people. What was most admired in a king at that period was personal courage, and, what was most needed, strength of will. Pepin had both; but he had one defect which, though to us it may seem a trifle, to men who prized the body far more than soul or mind, was a serious matter.
In Guizot's History of Civilization in France there is a list of the names and works of twenty-three men of the eighth and ninth centuries who have escaped oblivion, and they are all found grouped about Charlemagne as his own habitual advisers, or assigned by him as advisers to his sons Pépin and Louis in Italy and Aquitaine, or sent by him to all points of his empire as his commissioners, or charged in his name with important negotiations.
The two other sons, Pépin and Louis, entered, notwithstanding their childhood, upon immediate possession, the one of Aquitaine and the other of Bavaria, under the superior authority of their father and their brother, the joint emperors.
A Benedictine abbey was founded here in the reign of Dagobert I., and, under the Carlovingian dynasty, immediately took on political as well as devout significance. The Abbot of St. Denis journeyed to Rome in 751 A. D. and secured for Pepin the papal confirmation of his kingship.
They passed the ruined house where Martin Luther lay concealed after the Diet of Worms, and through the village of Handschuhsheimer, as old as the days of King Pepin the Short, a hamlet, lying under the hills, half-buried in blossoms and green leaves. Close on the right rose the mountains of the mysterious Odenwald; and on the left lay the Neckar, like a steel bow in the meadow.
And this, known as the Donation of Pepin, was the beginning of the temporal power of the popes in Italy. So when Pepin resolved to assume the crown, Pope Zacharias in gratitude sanctioned the audacious act, by sending his representative to place the symbol of power upon the head of this faithful son and usurper! But this was only the stepping-stone for a greater elevation.
Charles Martel endangered these results by falling back into the groove of those Merovingian kings whose shadow he had allowed to remain on the throne. He divided between his two legitimate sons, Pepin, called the Short, from his small stature, and Carloman, this sole dominion which he had with so much toil reconstituted and defended.
He staged an elaborate ceremony at which Boniface, the great missionary of the European northwest, anointed him and made him a "King by the grace of God." It was easy to slip those words, "Del gratia," into the coronation service. It took almost fifteen hundred years to get them out again. Pepin was sincerely grateful for this kindness on the part of the church.
The Merovingian kings, if not devout, were faithful sons of the Church, and when the pope appealed to the last Merovingian king to protect him from the Lombards, near the end of the eighth century, Pepin, then Maire du Palais, but holding supreme power, twice crossed the Alps with an army, wrested five cities and a large extent of territory from the enemies of the pope, which, upon parting, he tossed as a gift into the lap of the Church.
The progress of the one, however, went along with that of the other; and just as the Pope had extended his temporal dominions by encroachments of his own, and by gifts like those of Pepin and Charlemagne, the Exarchate and Pentapolis, uniting the patrimony of St.
Word Of The Day