Pepin the Short

Royal in power long before he was royal in title, Pepin the Short was the first Carolingian to take the Frankish crown, converting his family's control of the kingdom into kingship with papal sanction. Born in 714, he was the younger son of Charles Martel. He and his brother Carloman divided their father's authority as mayors of the palace in 741, suppressed revolts in Aquitaine, Alemannia and Bavaria, and in 743 restored a Merovingian figurehead, Childeric III, to the long-vacant throne. When Carloman withdrew to monastic life in 747, eventually settling at Monte Cassino, Pepin became sole effective ruler of the Franks.

In 751, having obtained from Pope Zachary the judgment that the man who exercised royal power ought to bear the royal title, Pepin had Childeric III deposed and tonsured and was elected king at Soissons, where he was anointed — a rite then new to Frankish kingship. Three years later Pope Stephen II, who had crossed the Alps to seek protection against the Lombards, anointed Pepin a second time at Saint-Denis together with his sons Charles and Carloman, and forbade the Franks ever to choose a king from another family.

Pepin repaid the papacy in arms. He campaigned in Italy in 755 and 756, forcing the Lombard king Aistulf to surrender Ravenna and other territories, which Pepin conferred on the pope. This grant, known as the Donation of Pepin, laid the foundation of the Papal States. Elsewhere he completed the expulsion of Muslim forces from Septimania with the capture of Narbonne in 759, and from 760 he waged a long, grinding war to subdue the duchy of Aquitaine, which ended only shortly before his death.

He married Bertrada of Laon, the mother of his sons Charlemagne and Carloman. Falling ill on his return from the Aquitanian campaign, Pepin died at Saint-Denis in September 768 and was buried there. Following Frankish custom the kingdom was divided between his two sons, a partition that lasted only until Carloman's death in 771 left Charlemagne sole ruler.