And now the growing connection with the
Papacy acquired a new character. Since the beginning of the eighth century the
Eastern Empire had forfeited the last claim to Italian allegiance by embracing
the Iconoclastic heresy, a protest at once belated and premature against the growing
materialism and polytheism of Catholic Christianity. Pope and Lombards made
common cause to protect the images in imperial Italy. Gregory III
excommunicated the iconoclasts (731); the Lombard King Aistulf seized Ravenna,
the last important stronghold of the Byzantines in the peninsula (751). Too
late the Papacy realised that the orthodox Lombard was a greater menace than
the Greek heretic. Aistulf regarded Rome, in common with the other territories
of the Empire, as his rightful spoil. For the first time the issue was raised
between secular statesmanship scheming for Italian unity and a Roman bishop
claiming sovereign power as the historical and indispensable adjunct of his office.
Pope Stephen II visited the Frankish court to urge, not in vain, the claims of
religion and of gratitude. By two raids across the Alps Pepin forced the
Lombard to withdraw the claim on Rome, and furthermore to restore what had been
conquered from the Empire. These territories, lying in Romagna and the Marches,
the Frankish King conferred on the Pope, as the legitimate representative of
imperial power (756). Pepin's Donation, made in defiance of Byzantine protests,
greatly extended the temporal power which the predecessors of Stephen had long
exercised in Rome and the neighbourhood. A shrewd expedient for crippling the
most formidable rival of the Franks, it was to be the rock on which ideals then
undreamed of were to founder. For it was the temporal power which provoked the
last and mortal struggle of the Holy Roman Empire with the Papacy, which
presented the most stubborn obstacle to the leaders of the Risorgimento.
