expand his hold on Frankish territories. His death in 714 precipitated a period of friction
within the kingdom, as a power struggle opposed his sole surviving yet illegitimate son,
Charles (later Martel), to Pepin’s widow, Plectrude. It was only after defeating the forces
of Plectrude and other opponents that Charles attained the political authority of his father.
Charles Martel proved a forceful leader of the Franks, strengthening their territorial
claims through victories over other Germanic groups as well as over Muslims from
Spain. Above all, his military prowess is epitomized by his defeat of a Muslim advance
near Poitiers, in October 732. Although scholars debate the significance of that episode—
subsequent engagements were necessary in the 8th and early 9th centuries before Muslim
raids into the Frankish realm ended—it came to be viewed among western writers as the
turning point in the West’s struggle against Islam. This was the battle for which Charles
received the nickname Martel (“the Hammer”) in the 9th century.
The rudimentary administrative machine available to Charles allowed him to maintain
only a loose control of the Frankish territories, and it was largely to preserve his grip on
them that, as had Pepin II, he lent his support to the church and to its missionary work in
the eastern regions. Like his father, Charles considered the church an instrument to
further his own ends. He secularized ecclesiastical property to remunerate his supporters,
appointed laymen to head abbeys and sees, and otherwise exercised his power, as he saw
it, to name and to depose bishops. Such measures made for an incoherence in
ecclesiastical organization that would be rectified only through the reforms of Charles’s
successors.
Upon Charles’s death in 741, the kingdom was divided between his legitimate sons,
Carloman (d. 754), the eldest, and Pepin III. The two brothers cooperated closely in
governing the area left to them. In 743, they placed another Merovingian, Childeric III,
on the royal throne, vacant since 737, as a measure to suppress rebellious sentiment
among noble factions. In 747, Carloman felt called to the religious life and abdicated in
Pepin’s favor, leaving him mayor of a reunited realm. By 751, Pepin had asked Pope
Zachary I to support his decision to depose Childeric and take the crown for himself, a
move accomplished in November of that year. The new king, his wife, and sons, the first-
born Charles (later Charlemagne) and a second Carloman, were anointed by Pope
Stephen II in 754, who acclaimed Pepin and his sons “patricians of the Romans” in
recognition of their special role in protecting Rome, and, at the same time, of the Holy
See’s new political orientation away from the East and toward northwestern Europe.
As mayor of the palace and king, Pepin supported, if only to a limited extent,
Boniface’s program to reform the Frankish church along Roman lines, which included
efforts to improve clerical discipline and training. This was of fundamental importance to
the surge in cultural and intellectual activity after Pepin’s death, the Carolingian
renaissance.
When Pepin III died in 768, his kingdom was shared between Charles and Carloman;
the territories of the former encircled those of the latter. Friction existed between the two
brothers, but Carloman died in 771, leaving Charles the sole monarch. Charlemagne’s
reign, first as king and from 800 as emperor in the West, witnessed a dramatic increase in
the lands under Frankish control, the evolution of an administrative machine to govern
this territory, and the cultural and intellectual developments that marked the Carolingian
renaissance. During the first thirty years of his rule, Charles was involved in almost
constant warfare: in 774, he defeated the Lombards; in 787, Duke Tassilo of Bavaria was
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