Gaul, named Pippin
Patrician of Rome, and invited him to the conquest of Italy. In the war
that followed, the Franks subdued the Lombards, and Charles the Great
was invested with their kingdom and crowned Emperor in 800 by Leo III.
at Rome.

The famous compact between Charles the Great and the Pope was in effect
a ratification of the existing state of things. The new Emperor took for
himself and converted into a Frankish Kingdom all the provinces that had
been wrested from the Lombards. He relinquished to the Papacy Rome with
its patrimony, the portions of Spoleto and Benevento that had already
yielded to the See of S. Peter, the southern provinces that owned the
nominal ascendency of Byzantium, the islands and the cities of the
Exarchate and Pentapolis which formed no part of the Lombard conquest.
By this stipulation no real temporal power was accorded to the Papacy,
nor did the new Empire surrender its paramount rights over the peninsula
at large. The Italian kingdom, transferred to the Franks in 800, was the
kingdom founded by the Lombards; while the outlying and unconquered
districts were placed beneath the protectorate of the power which had
guided their emancipation. Thus the dualism introduced into Italy by
Theodoric's veneration for Rome, and confirmed by the failure of the
Lombard conquest, was ratified in the settlement whereby the Pope gave a
new Empire to Western Christendom. Venice, Pisa, Genoa, and the maritime
Republics of the south, excluded from the kingdom, were left to pursue
their own course of independence; and this is the chief among many
reasons why they rose so early into prominence. Rome consolidated her
ancient patrimonies and extended her rectorship in the center, while the
Frankish kings, who succeeded each other through eight reigns, developed
the Regno upon feudal principles by parceling the land among their
Counts. New marches were formed, traversing the previous Lombard fabric
and introducing divisions that decentralized the kingdom. Thus the great
vassals of Ivrea, Verona, Tuscany, and Spoleto raised themselves against
Pavia. The monarchs, placed between the Papacy and their ambitious
nobles, were unable to consolidate the realm; and when Berengar, the
last independent sovereign strove to enforce the declining authority of
Pavia, he was met with the resistance and the hatred of the nation.

The kingdom Berengar attempted to maintain against his vassals and the
Church was virtually abrog