AD 756

Donation of Pepin

Pepin's second Italian campaign and the Donation to St Peter

A Byzantine envoy reached Pepin mid-campaign and asked for the provinces back. Pepin refused, and gave them to St Peter instead.

Three months outside Rome

At the beginning of 756 the Lombard king Aistulf broke his previous agreement and besieged Rome for three months, encircling the city and devastating property, churches, cemeteries and the territory outside the walls.

The papal biography says his troops dug into the suburban cemeteries and carried away saints' bodies.

Pope Stephen II sent urgent appeals to Pepin and the Franks by sea, because Aistulf had blocked the land routes; one of them was written in the voice of St Peter himself, addressing the Franks as the apostle's adopted sons.

Pavia again

Pepin led a second expedition into Italy in May, broke the Lombard defenses near the Susa passes and besieged Aistulf in Pavia once more, forcing his surrender under harsher conditions.

Those terms took one third of Aistulf's royal treasury.

A Byzantine envoy, George the protoasecretis, asked that the former imperial territories be restored to Constantinople. Pepin rejected the demand and declared that the recovered cities would be transferred to the Roman Church.

Keys laid on the shrine

Pepin commissioned Abbot Fulrad of Saint-Denis to receive the surrendered cities. Fulrad collected their keys, hostages and leading inhabitants, then deposited the keys and the grant at the shrine of St Peter in Rome.

The transfer covered Ravenna and cities in the exarchate, Emilia and the Pentapolis — 21 cities and castles, in addition to their territories.

Pepin's original grant document is lost. The papal biography says it was kept in the Roman Church's archive, and Treccani notes that it is unclear whether the transfer gave the papacy the exarchate and Pentapolis in their complete territorial extent.

Sources

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What the sources leave uncertain

Pepin’s original grant document is lost. The papal biography says it was preserved in the Roman Church’s archive but does not reproduce it.
Treccani notes that it is unclear whether the transfer actually gave the papacy the exarchate and Pentapolis in their complete territorial extent.
The sources are strongly shaped by the papal viewpoint; the Liber Pontificalis biography is particularly hostile to Aistulf.
Stephen is called Stephen II in modern lists that exclude a pope-elect who died before consecration, but Stephen III in some older scholarship.