At the head of the Franks as mayor of the palace from 741, and as king from 752, Pepin had completed in France and extended in Italy the work which his father, Charles Martel, had begun and carried on, from 714 to 741, in State and Church.  He left France reunited in one and placed at the head of Christian Europe.  He died at the monastery of St. Denis, September 18, 768, leaving his kingdom and his dynasty thus ready to the hands of his son, whom history has dubbed Charlemagne.

CHAPTER X——­CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS WARS.

The most judicious minds are sometimes led blindly by tradition and habit, rather than enlightened by reflection and experience.  Pepin the Short committed at his death the same mistake that his father, Charles Martel, had committed:  he divided his dominions between his two sons, Charles and Carloman, thus destroying again that unity of the Gallo-Frankish monarchy which his father and he had been at so much pains to establish.  But, just as had already happened in 746 through the abdication of Pepin’s brother, events discharged the duty of repairing the mistake of men.  After the death of Pepin, and notwithstanding that of Duke Waifre, insurrection broke out once more in Aquitaine; and the old duke, Hunald, issued from his monastery in the island of Rhe to try and recover power and independence.  Charles and Carloman marched against him; but, on the march, Carloman, who was jealous and thoughtless, fell out with his brother, and suddenly quitted the expedition, taking away his troops.  Charles was obliged to continue it alone, which he did with complete success.  At the end of this first campaign, Pepin’s widow, the Queen-mother Bertha, reconciled her two sons; but an unexpected incident, the death of Carloman two years afterwards in 771, re-established unity more surely than the reconciliation had re-established harmony.  For, although Carloman left sons, the grandees of his dominions, whether laic or ecclesiastical, assembled at Corbeny, between Laon and Rheims, and proclaimed in his stead his brother Charles, who thus became sole king of the Gallo-Franco-Germanic monarchy.  And as ambition and manners had become less tinged with ferocity than they had been under the Merovingians, the sons of Carloman were not killed or shorn or even shut up in a monastery:  they retired with their mother, Gerberge, to the court of Didier, king of the Lombards.  “King Charles,” says Eginhard, “took their departure patiently, regarding it as of no importance.”  Thus commenced the reign of Charlemagne.