Pepin the Short
Pepin the Short asked the pope whether the man who held the power or the man who held the title ought to be king, was told the man with the power, and deposed the last Merovingian; the anointing that followed made the Carolingians a dynasty and the papacy a kingmaker, and his gift of the lands he took from the Lombards made the pope a prince. He was born about 714, the younger son of Charles Martel, and shared the office of mayor of the palace with his brother Carloman from 741, the two of them governing the Franks in the name of a king they had fetched from a monastery. Carloman retired to Monte Cassino in 747 and Pepin had everything. In 750 he sent Pope Zachary the question. In 751 the Franks elected him at Soissons and the bishop Boniface anointed him with oil as no Frankish king had been, and Childeric III was shorn of the long hair that was the mark of his house and put in a monastery. The pope needed the bargain more than Pepin did. The Lombard king Aistulf had taken Ravenna and was at the gates of Rome, and in 754 Stephen II crossed the Alps in winter, the first pope to do so, anointed Pepin and his sons Charles and Carloman at Saint-Denis, forbade the Franks on pain of excommunication ever to choose a king from another family, and named him Patrician of the Romans. Pepin went to Italy in 754 and again in 756, besieged Aistulf in Pavia both times, and gave the exarchate of Ravenna and the cities of the Pentapolis not to the emperor at Constantinople, who claimed them, but to St Peter, which is the origin of the Papal States. At home he took Narbonne and Septimania from the Arabs in 759 after a seven-year siege, and spent his last eight years reducing Aquitaine, which submitted the year he died. He died at Saint-Denis in September 768 and divided the kingdom between the sons the pope had anointed; Carloman died in 771 and the other son was Charlemagne.
- Lived: 714 CE – 768 CE
- Nationality: Frankish
- Roles: king, monarch
