The Historians' History of the World 07

During these same twenty years, in which Pepin was playing the important and brilliant part assigned to him by providence, the pale and bloodless shadows of four Merovingian kings flit gloomily across the scene. We know little or nothing of them except their names, and the order in which they followed each other. Thierry III died in 691 A.D., and was succeeded by Clovis III, who reigned till 695 A.D. and was followed by Childebert III. On the death of Childebert in 711 A.D., Pepin raised Dagobert III to the nominal throne, where he left him when he himself departed from the scene of his labours and triumphs; and this is really all that we feel called upon to say of the descendants of the conquerors of Gaul and founders of the Western Empire; inclitum et notum olim, nunc tantum auditur!

[714 A.D.]

Clovis III

(From a French print of 1832)

The extraordinary power which Pepin exercised at a period when law was weak, and authority extended no further than the sword could reach; when the struggles of the rising feudal aristocracy for independence had convulsed the empire and brought it to the verge of anarchy, sufficiently attests the ability and courage, the wisdom and moderation, with which he ruled. His triumphs over the ancient dynasty, and the Neustrian faction, were far from being the most difficult of his achievements. He had to control the very class to which he himself belonged; to curb the turbulent spirits of the very men who had raised him to his proud pre-eminence; and to establish regal authority over those by whose aid he had humbled the ancient kings: and all this he succeeded in doing by the extraordinary influence of his personal character. So firmly indeed had he established his government, and subdued the wills of the envious seigneurs by whom he was surrounded, that even when he showed his intention of making his power hereditary in his family, they dared not, at the time, oppose his will. On the death of Norbert, major-domus at the court of Childebert III, Pepin—in all probability without even consulting the seigneurs, in whom the right of election rested—appointed his second son Grimwald to the vacant office. To his eldest son Drogo he had already given the mayoralty of Burgundy, with the title of duke of Campania. But though they dared not make any opposition at the time, it is evident from what followed that the fear of Pepin alone restrained the rage they felt at this open usurpation. In 714 A.D., when Pepin’s life was drawing to a close, and he lay at Jupille near Liège upon a bed of sickness, awaiting patiently his approaching end, the great vassals took heart, and conspired to deprive his descendants of the mayoralty. They employed the usual means for effecting their purpose—treachery and murder. Grimwald was assassinated, while praying in the church of St. Lambert at Jupille, by a Frisian of the name of Rantgar, who relied, no doubt, on the complicity of the seigneurs and the weakness of Pepin for impunity. But the conspirators had miscalculated the waning sands of the old warrior’s life, and little knew the effect which the sight of his son’s blood would have upon him. He suddenly recovered from the sickness to which he seemed to be succumbing. Like another Priam, he once more seized his unaccustomed arms, though, unlike the royal Trojan, he used them with terrible effect. After taking an ample revenge upon the murderers of his son, and quenching the spirit of resistance in the blood of the conspirators, he was so far from giving up his purpose, or manifesting any consciousness of weakness, that he nominated the infant and illegitimate son of Grimwald, as if by hereditary right, to the joint mayoralty of Burgundy and Neustria—an office which the highest persons in the land would have been proud to exercise. By his very last act, therefore, he showed the absolute mastery he had obtained, not only over the “do-nothing” kings, but over the factious seigneurs, who shrank in terror before the wrath of one, who had, as it were, repassed the gates of death, to hurl destruction on their heads. His actual demise took place in the same year, on the 16th of December, 714 A.D.

Pepin had two wives, the first of whom, Plectrudis, bore him two sons, Drogo and Grimwald, neither of whom survived their father. In 688 A.D. he married a second wife, the “noble and elegant” Alpaida, though Plectrudis was still alive. From this second marriage sprang the real successor of the Pepins, whom his father named in his own language Karl, and who is renowned in history as Charles Martel, the bulwark of Christendom, the father of kings and emperors.