in 739, and were hotly opposed by Pope Gregory III, who turned to the Franks for aid. The
Merovingian kings, the descendants of Clovis, had lost all real power in the Frankish kingdom,
which was governed by the "Mayors of the Palace." At this time the Mayor of the Palace was an
exceptionally vigorous and able man, Charles Martel, like William the Conqueror a bastard. In
732 he had won the decisive battle of Tours against the Moors, thereby saving France for
Christendom. This should have won him the gratitude of the Church, but financial necessity led
him to seize some Church lands, which much diminished ecclesiastical appreciation of his merits.
However, he and Gregory III both died in 741, and his successor Pepin was wholly satisfactory to
the Church. Pope Stephen III, in 754, to escape the Lombards, crossed the Alps and visited Pepin,
when a bargain was struck which proved highly advantageous to both parties. The Pope needed
military protection, but Pepin needed something that only the Pope could bestow: the
legitimization of his title as king in place of the last of the Merovingians. In return for this, Pepin
bestowed on the Pope Ravenna and all the territory of the former Exarchate in Italy. Since it could
not be expected that Constantinople would recognize such a gift, this involved a political
severance from the Eastern Empire.
If the popes had remained subject to the Greek emperors, the development of the Catholic Church
would have been very different. In the Eastern Church, the patriarch of Constantinople never
acquired either that independence of secular authority or that superiority to other ecclesiastics that
was achieved by the Pope. Originally all bishops were considered equal, and to a considerable
extent this view persisted in the East. Moreover, there were other Eastern patriarchs, at
Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, whereas the Pope was the only patriarch in the West. (This
fact, however, lost its importance after the Mohammedan conquest.) In the West, but not in the
East, the laity were mostly illiterate for many centuries, and this gave the Church an advantage in
the West which it did not possess in the East. The prestige of Rome surpassed that of any Eastern
city, for it combined the imperial tradition with legends of the martyrdom of Peter and Paul, and
of Peter as first Pope. The Emperor's prestige might have sufficed to cope with that of the Pope,
but no Western monarch's could. The Holy Roman emperors were often destitute of real