Pope
preferred, in the face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations
on destroying each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem.

The bribe offered to the Frank was significant--the title of Roman
Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter's chains, and
the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil.

Charles would not come. Frank though he was, he was too honourable to
march at a priest's bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in arms,
to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand might take him
on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become his father-in-arms,
after the good old Teuton fashion; Luitprand, who with his Lombards had
helped him to save Christendom a second time from the Mussulman in 737.
The Pope, one would think, should have remembered that good deed of the
good Lombard's whereof his epitaph sings,

'Deinceps tremuere feroces
Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos
Cum premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.'

So Charles Martel took the title of Patrician from the Pope, but sent him
no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the measure
of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul which his
sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is now, as St.
Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing therefore in the
lowest abyss of hell.

So one generation more passes by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to
manhood, is less scrupulous than his father. He is bound to the Pope by
gratitude. The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to depose
the royal house of the Merovingians, and so assumed the right of making
kings.--A right which future popes will not forget.

Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a
monastery. Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna. The Pope
succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome,
threatening to assault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by a
poll-tax.

Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help: and so awful
has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to do it;
allowed to pass safely and unarmed through the very land upon which he is
going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare.

It is a strange, and instructive figure, that. The dread of the unseen,
the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons; on F