Page:The history of medieval Europe.djvu/238

198 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE tine, the first Christian emperor, had been cured of leprosy and converted to Christianity by Pope Sylvester. Th< Donation purports to be the resultant expression of impe rial gratitude. In it Constantine is represented as endow ing the Church with his Lateran Palace and with land; scattered over the Empire, as showering honors and in signia upon the clergy, and as finally declaring that he wil transfer his empire to the East and leave Italy and Rome tc the government of the pope. " For where the supremacy o priests and the head of the Christian religion has been estab lished by a heavenly ruler, it is not right that there ar earthly ruler have jurisdiction." Such was the document by which the popes traced their claim to temporal sovereignty back to the fourth century. It was attacked as a forger} as early as the twelfth, but was not generally recognized a* spurious until the fifteenth, century. Pepin continued the expeditions of his predecessors against the Saxons to the northeast, but his chief achievement Pepin's sub- as ^ e from hi s grasping the royal title, found- j ugation of ing a dynasty, and interfering in Italy, was his careful and thorough subjection of Aquitaine tc Frankish rule, a task which occupied him for eight or nine successive years. The inhabitants of Aquitaine, south of the Loire, were still looked on by the Franks as Romans" and had remained a people pretty much apart. In Neustria too, of course, the bulk of the population was "Roman," but there the Franks had long formed a considerable fraction; and were the ruling class. Before his death in 768, Pepin had attained a position of considerable international impor- tance. The Abbassid caliph at Bagdad sought his alliance against Ommiad Spain, and the Byzantine emperor sent several embassies to his court. For the period of the three Pepins and Charles Martel the sources are very scanty, leaving us in doubt concerning Sources for many questions which we should like to solve. gbn^riod" 0n the other hand ' concerning Pepin's son, Charles the Great, or Charlemagne, as he was called in the medieval romances, we are better informed