established a school for teaching Roman, so-called Gregorian, plainchant, and under his influence the 'Roman' monastic rule, that of St Benedict, began to be recommended as a model for monastic living.

The close rapport with Rome which Boniface and Chrodegang worked to establish was achieved also on the political front. When Pippin's brother Carloman retired from political life, he went to live in a monastery in Rome. Three years later Pippin III, who still called himself 'duke' or 'prince', sent an embassy to Pope Zacharias to ask if it was just that he who held power should not have the title of 'king'. Zacharias sent back the correct answer, and in 751 Pippin III packed Childeric III, the last Merovingian king, into a monastery and had himself inaugurated king at Soissons. This ceremony was the first in Francia to incorporate anointing with holy oil, and perhaps the first in Europe to emphasize the act of crowning by a bishop. Pippin, now King Pippin I, wanted to take no chances that anyone would object to the legitimacy of his revolutionary move. The role which the Church was thus given in royal inauguration was to have important consequences later in European history: Pippin's grandson was to be deposed by bishops, who felt that if they could make kings, they could unmake them as well. Equally crucial was the visit which Pope Stephen II made to Francia in 753. He came to appeal for Frankish help in Italy to restore those territories taken from the Roman Church by the Lombards. Stephen reanointed Pippin and his sons, and the Carolingians were established as the new protectors of the papacy, replacing the increasingly ineffective Byzantine emperor. Pippin set off for Italy, and forced the Lombards to sue for peace and to restore territory to Rome.

Pippin is much less well known than his son Karolus, called 'Magnus' (the Elder) to distinguish him from his own son Charles; Charles has become known as Charles the Great or Charlemagne for very good reasons. His long reign changed the face of Europe politically and culturally, and he himself would remain fixed in the minds of people in the Middle Ages as the ideal king. In more recent times, many historians have taken his reign to be the beginning of the Middle Ages 'proper'. Yet

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