THE FRANKS | AdventAI

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 25, 1886

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 12, No. 45.

THE FRANKS.

We must now resume the narrative of the triple division of the dominions of Clovis—Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy. Before the end of the sixth century we may mark the rise of a new character, the Mayor of the Palace, which finally developed the glorious era of Charlemagne. The last of the line of Clovis—the Merovingians—who possessed or displayed any of the characteristics of a king, was Dagobert. After his death in A. D. 638, the kings dwindled into insignificance, if not idiocy, and the Mayors of the Palace assumed sole authority, yet always in the name of the "do-nothing" kings; and the struggle for supremacy was kept up between the Mayors, as it had been before by the kings. Finally, in A. D. 687, Pepin of Heristal, Mayor of the Palace, of Austrasia, defeated Berthar, Mayor of Neustria, at the battle of Testry, and so brought the contest virtually to an end. "From that time to the end of his life, in A. D. 714, Pepin of Heristal was unquestioned master of all Franks, the kings under him being utterly insignificant." Pepin of Heristal was succeeded by his son Charles, who in A. D. 732 won the name of Martel—the Hammer—by the crushing defeat which he gave the Saracens under Abdel-Rahman at the battle of Tours.

Charles Martel died October 22, 741, and left his dominions divided between his two sons, Pepin the Short, and Carloman. Pepin had Neustria, Burgundy, Provence and the suzerainty of Aquitaine. Carloman had Austrasia, Thuringia, and Allemania. Each, however, with only the title of Mayor of the Palace. In 746 Carloman abdicated his power, left his dominions to Pepin, had Pope Zachary to make him a monk, and shut himself up in the monastery of Monte Cassino. In 747 Pepin the Short found himself sole master of all the heritage of Clovis, but still with the title of Mayor of the Palace. At last in 751 he decided to put an end to the fiction. He sent an embassy to the Pope to consult him "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, who had been already posted on the matter, answered that "it was better to give the title of king to him who exercised the sovereign power." Accordingly the next year in March, 752, "in the presence and with the assent of the general assembly" at Soissons, Pepin was proclaimed king of the Franks, and received from the hand of St. Boniface the sacred anointment. "At the head of the Franks, as Mayor of the Palace from 741, and as king from 752, Pepin had completed in France and extended in Italy the work which his father Charles Martel had begun and carried on from 714 to 741 in State and church. He left France reunited in one and placed at the head of Christian Europe." He died at the monastery of St. Denis, September 18, 768.—Guizot's France, chap. 9.

Pepin, like his father, left his dominions to two sons, Charles and Carloman; but in 771 Carloman died, leaving Charles sole king, who, by his remarkable ability, became Charles the Great—CHARLEMAGNE.

(To be continued.)