Pepin the Short

A window, not a date

At some point after 20 June 751 and before 1 March 752, Pepin ceased styling himself mayor of the palace and began appearing in legal records as king of the Franks. Those two charters are the firmest evidence for the transition.

November 751 is the conventional date for the Frankish assembly at Soissons, but it comes from a traditional reconstruction rather than from contemporary documentation.

The tonsured king

Later Frankish narratives place Pepin’s elevation at Soissons, where the Franks selected or raised him as king, and say Childeric III was tonsured and sent to a monastery — removing him from Frankish kingship without a recorded battle or execution.

The traditional reconstruction identifies Saint-Bertin as that monastery. Both details are less secure than the dynastic transfer itself.

The papal blessing may be retrospective

The Royal Frankish Annals say Fulrad and Burchard carried Pepin’s question about powerless kingship to Pope Zachary, who approved the principle that the possessor of royal power should bear the royal title. Contemporary Roman records are silent, and modern source criticism cautions that this may be retrospective legitimation.

Whether Pepin was anointed at all in 751 is now disputed. Conor O’Brien concludes that Boniface certainly did not perform such an anointing; the first securely evidenced anointing was Pope Stephen II’s ceremony in 754.

Almost all the narrative accounts of the transfer were composed after Pepin’s death, when his sons had an interest in presenting his accession as orderly and legitimate.