recommending that he should have the title to whom the power belonged
(751). So ended the line of Clovis, and with it the barbarian period of
Frankish history. For the next sixty years the history of Europe is that
of Carolingian conquests and essays in political reconstruction.

And now the growing connection with the Papacy acquired a new character.
Since the beginning of the eighth century the Eastern Empire had
forfeited the last claim to Italian allegiance by embracing the
Iconoclastic heresy, a protest at once belated and premature against the
growing materialism and polytheism of Catholic Christianity. Pope and
Lombards made common cause to protect the images in imperial Italy.
Gregory III excommunicated the iconoclasts (731); the Lombard King
Aistulf seized Ravenna, the last important stronghold of the Byzantines
in the peninsula (751). Too late the Papacy realised that the orthodox
Lombard was a greater menace than the Greek heretic. Aistulf regarded
Rome, in common with the other territories of the Empire, as his
rightful spoil. For the first time the issue was raised between secular
statesmanship scheming for Italian unity and a Roman bishop claiming
sovereign power as the historical and indispensable adjunct of his
office. Pope Stephen II visited the Frankish court to urge, not in vain,
the claims of religion and of gratitude. By two raids across the Alps
Pepin forced the Lombard to withdraw the claim on Rome, and furthermore
to restore what had been conquered from the Empire. These territories,
lying in Romagna and the Marches, the Frankish King conferred on the
Pope, as the legitimate representative of imperial power (756). Pepin's
Donation, made in defiance of Byzantine protests, greatly extended the
temporal power which the predecessors of Stephen had long exercised in
Rome and the neighbourhood. A shrewd expedient for crippling the most
formidable rival of the Franks, it was to be the rock on which ideals
then undreamed of were to founder. For it was the temporal power which