Zachary

By the middle of the eighth century, the Merovingian dynasty that had ruled the Franks for nearly three hundred years survived in name only. Real power had passed generations earlier to the Mayors of the Palace, and by 751 Pepin the Short held every function of a king, commanding the army, dispensing justice, and controlling the treasury, while Childeric III, the reigning Merovingian, held the title alone. Pepin, unwilling simply to seize the crown without any higher sanction, sent envoys to Pope Zachary in Rome with a carefully framed question, whether it was proper for the man who held no royal power to bear the title of king, rather than the man who exercised it.

Zachary's answer, that it was better for the one with the power to hold the name of king, gave Pepin the sanction he needed. Childeric III was deposed and sent to a monastery, and Pepin was elected and anointed king of the Franks by the assembled nobility, with Boniface, the missionary archbishop working under papal authority in Frankish territory, playing a leading role in the anointing according to most accounts of the events.

The ruling had consequences neither Zachary nor Pepin could have fully foreseen. Pepin's son Charlemagne would build the Frankish kingdom into an empire crowned by Zachary's own eventual successors, and the precedent that a pope could pronounce on the legitimacy of a European throne became one of the medieval papacy's most consequential political tools, invoked and contested for centuries afterward.

For most of his pontificate, Zachary's more pressing concern than distant Frankish politics was the Lombard kingdom pressing on Rome's own doorstep from the north. The Lombard king Liutprand had already conquered large parts of the Byzantine exarchate of Ravenna and repeatedly threatened Rome itself, and rather than relying on Byzantine military help that rarely arrived in time or in force, Zachary chose direct personal diplomacy, traveling to meet Liutprand and negotiating with him face to face on more than one occasion.

The approach worked with real success. Zachary persuaded Liutprand to restore territory the Lombards had seized from the church, including the cities of Amelia, Orte, Bomarzo and Blera, and separately convinced him to hold back from finishing the conquest of Ravenna, preserving the exarchate for a further period. He achieved similar results with Liutprand's successor Rachis, whom Zachary is said to have persuaded to abandon a siege of Perugia and, according to later tradition, ultimately to abdicate and enter a monastery.

Zachary's Lombard diplomacy bought Rome roughly a decade without the destruction that would follow only a few years after his death, when a later Lombard king, Aistulf, broke the truce his predecessors had kept and seized Ravenna outright, provoking Pope Stephen II to call on the same Frankish king Zachary had helped make legitimate, Pepin the Short, for the military intervention that permanently reshaped papal territory into what became the Papal States.