750s to drive the Arabs out of Septimania, and to persuade the Goths of Septimania that Frankish rule was preferable to that of the Arabs. But Aquitaine was the severest test of Frankish power. Charles Martel campaigned against Eudo, Pippin fought against Eudo's son Hunald, and, throughout the 760s, with Hunald's son. It was only in the first years of the reign of Pippin's son Charlemagne that the Aquitanians were finally subdued. In 781 Charlemagne recognized their persistence, and their sense of identity, by granting them his own son Louis as king of Aquitaine.
The early Carolingians were fighting on other fronts as well, in Brittany, Saxony, Alamannia. Some of the funds they needed for this constant warfare could come from booty or conquered lands, but clearly that could not pay, for instance, for the often fruitless skirmishes on the borders of Aquitaine. No doubt the Carolingians rewarded their close followers with land from the extensive estates of the Carolingians themselves. And, as later generations would recall with distaste, Charles Martel often rewarded his followers with church land. Later generations had probably forgotten that much church land and, indeed, bishoprics and abbacies, had been held by lay aristocrats before Charles Martel came along. The confiscation of church land by Charles Martel and his successors was an unavoidable part of the elimination of local aristocratic opposition, and an equally unavoidable aspect of church reform.
The first agent of Carolingian reform was St Boniface, as we have seen. He supported Pippin III in his attempts to get rid of worldly bishops and to restore proper monastic rule to houses which had become mere pawns in secular politics. The church councils held in the early 740s at the instigation of Pippin's brother Carloman called for the restoration of correct rules of clerical life, regular synods, and the elimination of pagan practices from every diocese. Boniface's work was continued by Franks, notably by Chrodegang, who was made bishop of Metz in 742 and succeeded to the title of archbishop on Boniface's death in 754. Chrodegang began the drive for uniformity in liturgy and religious practice, with Rome as its model, which was to characterize the Carolingian Church. He
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