And after a fashion another broad-ranging pact between Roman popes and Frankish kings was thrashed out. The pope would turn to the Franks as his secular defenders and throw his legitimizing influence behind the new Carolingian monarchy—if in return Pippin would incur vast costs and take considerable military risk by riding south over the Alps to deliver the papacy from its enemies. It was a high-stakes deal on both sides. But in retrospect it has come to represent a moment of seminal importance in western history: the moment at which the bishops of Rome no longer looked east to Constantinople
...more
