“It being winter, he then caused the Pope with all his retinue to take up his abode in the abbey of St. Denys, near Paris. King Pipin, going to Quiersy and there assembling all the nobles of his royal power, inflamed them with the words of so great a father, and ordained with them to fulfil what, under favour of Christ, he had decreed with the most blessed Pope.” By this solemn compact between the Frank realm and the Holy See, the king bound himself, should he be victorious, to give over to St. Peter, and in him to Pope Stephen, and his successors, all the places of the exarchate, and of those lands which had belonged to the empire, of which the Lombards had taken possession. If we are to follow the text of the contemporaneous statements and later references, Pipin considered this act not as a donation, but a restitution. Those for whom this restitution ensued were so blended together in the view which results from Pipin’s subsequent declarations that to separate them seems impossible.(189) The one party is the Roman Commonwealth, which here takes the place of the empire, without, in its essence, containing any other idea, for empire is but one form of commonwealth; the other party is the Roman Church. There is no reference here to the duchy of Rome, the territory belonging to the city according to the Byzantine departmental administration. The Pope conferred on the king the title of Roman Patricius, a title which Pipin accepted simply in its true meaning, understanding by it protection of the Church, as he afterwards named himself merely Defensor or Protector of the Church. Stephen, in the meantime, was staying at the Abbey of St. Denys, near Paris, for a long time dangerously ill, in consequence of his sufferings during his journey, and also of his great anxiety. On the 28th July, 754, he anointed in this abbey Church, afterwards the resting-place of the kings of France, Pipin and his wife, Bertrada, with their sons, Charles and Carloman. So, for the first time, the hand of a Pope touched the youthful head of that Charles, who, in riper age, was destined to act with such force on the fortunes of the western Church.