During the seventh and eighth centuries the Merovingian line of Frankish kings degenerated to a condition of weakness both pitiable and ridiculous. As the royal family became less worthy, the powers of government gradually slipped from its hands into those of a series of ministers commonly known by the title of Mayor of the Palace (_Maior Domus_). The most illustrious of these uncrowned sovereigns was Charles Martel, the victor over the Saracens near Poitiers, in whose time the Frankish throne for four years had no occupant at all. Martel contrived to make his peculiar office hereditary, and at his death in 741 left it to be filled jointly by his two elder sons, Karlmann and Pepin the Short. They decided that it would be to their interest to keep up the show of Merovingian royalty a little longer and in 743 allowed Childeric III. to mount the throne--a weakling destined to be the last of his family to wear the Frankish crown. Four years later Karlmann renounced his office and withdrew to the monastery of Monte Cassino, southeast of Rome, leaving Pepin sole "mayor" and the only real ruler of the Franks. Before many more years had passed, the utter uselessness of keeping up a royal line whose members were notoriously unfit to govern had impressed itself upon the nation to such an extent that when Pepin proceeded to put young Childeric in a monastery and take the title of king for himself, nobody offered the slightest objection. The sanction of the Pope was obtained for the act because Pepin thought that his course would thus be made to appear less like an outright usurpation. The Pope's reward came four years later when Pepin bestowed upon him the lands in northern and central Italy which eventually constituted, in the main, the so-called States of the Church. In later times, after the reign of Pepin's famous son Charlemagne, the new dynasty established by Pepin's elevation to the throne came to be known as the Carolingian (from _Karolus_, or Charles). The following account of the change from the Merovingian to the Carolingian line is taken from the so-called _Lesser Annals of Lorsch_. At the monastery of Lorsch, as at nearly every other such place in the Middle Ages, records or "annals" of one sort or another were pretty regularly kept. They were often very inaccurate and their writers had a curious way of filling up space with matters of little importance, but sometimes, as in the present instance, we can get from them some very interesting information. The monastery of Lorsch was about twelve miles distant from Heidelberg, in southern Germany. Source--_Annales Laurissenses Minores_ ["Lesser Annals of Lorsch"]. Text in _Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores_ (Pertz ed.), Vol. I., p. 116.