views, also abdicated
in favor of his son Waifre, whom he thought more capable than himself of
winning the independence of Aquitaine, and went and shut himself up in a
monastery in the island of Rhe, where was the tomb of his father Eudes.
In the course of divers attempts at conspiracy and insurrection, the
Frankish princes' young brother, Grippo, was killed in combat while
crossing the Alps. The furious internal dissensions among the Arabs of
Spain, and their incessant wars with the Berbers, did not allow them to
pursue any great enterprise in Gaul. Thanks to all these circumstances,
Pepin found himself, in 747, sole master of the heritage of Clovis, and
with the sole charge of pursuing, in state and church, his father's
work, which was the unity and grandeur of Christian France.

Pepin, less enterprising than his father, but judicious, persevering,
and capable of discerning what was at the same time necessary and
possible, was well fitted to continue and consolidate what he would,
probably, never have begun and created. Like his father, he, on arriving
at power, showed pretensions to moderation or, it might be said,
modesty. He did not take the title of king; and, in concert with his
brother Carloman, he went to seek, heaven knows in what obscure asylum,
a forgotten Merovingian, son of Childeric II, the last but one of the
sluggard kings, and made him king, the last of his line, with the title
of Childeric III, himself, as well as his brother, taking only the style
of mayor of the palace. But at the end of ten years, and when he saw
himself alone at the head of the Frankish dominion, Pepin considered the
moment arrived for putting an end to this fiction. In 751 he sent to
Pope Zachary at Rome Burchard, bishop of Wuerzburg, and Fulrad, abbot of
St. Denis, "to consult the pontiff," says Eginhard, "on the subject of
the kings then existing among the Franks, and who bore only the name of
king without enjoying a tittle of royal authority."

The Pope, whom St. Boniface, the great missionary of Germany, had
prepared for the question, answered that "it was better to give the
title of king to him who exercised the sovereign power "; and next year,
in March, 752, in the presence and with the assent of the general
assembly of "leudes" and bishops gathered together at Soissons, Pepin
was proclaimed king of the Franks, and received from the hand of St.
Boniface the sacred anointment. They cut off the hair of the last
Merovingian