for ever to the advance of the Arabians, overflooding Gaul after the conquest of Spain. He threw them back upon the uttermost south of Gaul, from which, after many a battle, they were forced to recross the Pyrenees. To Charles Martell, shining in the lustre of that great victory which saved the West from Mohammed, as Leo III. prevented his entrance into Constantinople, the beleagured Pope turned from the cruel yet impotent tyranny of Leo, and the pretension of the encroaching Lombard. And his own words, at the moment of trial, will better express his situation than any others which can be put in his mouth:—(182) “We have thought it necessary to write again to your Excellency for the excessive grief which is in our heart, and for our tears, confiding that you are a loving son of St. Peter, prince of the apostles, and ours also, and that from reverence to him you will listen to our charge for the defence of God’s Church, and his own peculiar people: we, who can no longer endure the persecution and oppression of the Lombard race. They have taken from us all the lights in St. Peter’s Church, which were given by your relations or yourself. Next to God, we take refuge in you: for this the Lombards oppress and make a mock of us. St. Peter’s Church is stripped, and reduced to utter desolation. But we have rather confided the details of our sorrows to your liegeman, the bearer of this, which he may present by word of mouth. O my son, may the Prince of the Apostles deal with thee now and in the future life before our Almighty God, as thou disposest and contendest with all speed for his Church and our defence, that all nations may know your fidelity, your pure intention, the love which you bear to the Prince of the Apostles, to us, and to his peculiar people, by your zeal and your defence of us. And by it you will also gain eternal life.” Either with this letter, or before it, the Pope had sent to Charles Martell the keys of St. Peter’s Confession, together with rich presents. His messengers were received with great honour, but no actual help in soldiers came. It is supposed that Charles Martell was then engaged, together with Eudo, Duke of Aquitania, in expelling the Saracens from Southern France. The acts of Leo III., as an open enemy of the Pope’s spiritual power, by his completion of the Byzantine patriarch’s usurped jurisdiction in the year 733, as above described, thus precede, by about five years, the appeal made to Charles Martell, by Gregory III., in the face of the advancing Lombard king, Liutprand, on the one hand, and the absence of any protection by the emperor on the other. Such was the uncertain position of things when, in the year 741, the three great actors were withdrawn from this life, Leo III., on the 18th June, Charles Martell, on the 24th October, Gregory III., on the 27th November.