external protection, and papal elections had degenerated into disorderly faction fights, In 799,
local enemies seized the Pope, imprisoned him, and threatened to blind him. During Charles's
lifetime, it seemed as if a new order would be inaugurated; but after his death little survived
except a theory.
The gains of the Church, and more particularly of the papacy, were more solid than those of the
Western Empire. England had been converted by a monastic mission under the orders of Gregory
the Great, and remained much more subjectto Rome than were the countries with bishops
accustomed to local autonomy. The conversion of Germany was largely the work of Saint
Boniface ( 680-754), an English missionary, who was a friend of Charles Martel and Pepin, and
completely faithful to the Pope. Boniface founded many monasteries in Germany; his friend Saint
Gall founded the Swiss monastery which bears his name. According to some authorities, Boniface
anointed Pepin as king with a ritual taken from the First Book of Kings.
Saint Boniface was a native of Devonshire, educated at Exeter and Winchester. He went to Frisia
in 716, but soon had to return. In 717 he went to Rome, and in 719 Pope Gregory II sent him to
Germany to convert the Germans and to combat the influence of the Irish missionaries (who, it
will be remembered, erred as to the date of Easter and the shape of the tonsure). After
considerable successes, he returned to Rome in 722, where he was made bishop by Gregory II, to
whom he took an oath of obedience. The Pope gave him a letter to Charles Marcel, and charged
him to suppress heresy in addition to converting the heathen. In 732 he became archbishop; in 738
he visited Rome a third time. In 741 Pope Zacharias made him legate, and charged him to reform
the Frankish Church. He founded the abbey of Fulda, to which he gave a rule stricter than the
Benedictine. Then he had a controversy with an Irish bishop of Salzburg, named Virgil, who
maintained that there are other worlds than ours, but was nevertheless canonized. In 754, after
returning to Frisia, Boniface and his companions were massacred by the heathen. It was owing to
him that German Christianity was papal, not Irish.
English monasteries, particularly those of Yorkshire, were of great importance at this time. Such
civilization as had existed in Roman Britain had disappeared, and the new civilization introduced
by Christian missionaries centred almost entirely round the Benedictine