The acts which followed by Pope and by emperor agreed with their several principles. Gregory III. on his accession at once endeavoured to bring the emperor to a better mind. But Leo had already deposed Germanus, and put Anastasius, a docile instrument, in his stead. The Pope called a council at Rome, which entirely supported the freedom of the Church. Leo turned to brute force. He sent out a great fleet with the commission to destroy his own metropolis, Ravenna, then to advance upon Rome, seize the Pope, and carry him away captive, as eighty years before St. Martin had been taken. Five years after this violent act of despotism, which the winds and seas had frustrated, Pope Gregory III., pressed hard by the advancing arms of the Lombard king, Liutprand, besought the great conqueror, Charles Martell, to take up his defence. He appealed to the piety of the Frank leader in behalf of St. Peter, a piety extinct in the Roman emperor’s breast. Two years later Pipin had succeeded to the power of Charles Martell, and intimated in the strongest manner the veneration for the Apostolic See felt by the Frank people, in asking Pope Zacharias to pronounce as Pope that Pipin might duly be elected king of the Franks. Zacharias gave his decision: and the diet of the kingdom at Soissons bore out to the full the sentence of Pope Gregory II. in his letter to Leo III., that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as a god upon earth. Pipin became king of the Franks by the diet of the Franks accepting the decision of Pope Zacharias in 752, when in 733 the rough Isaurian soldier thought only of subduing the predecessor of Zacharias, Gregory III., by a dungeon in Byzantium after the mode of Constans II. with St. Martin. But even yet the contrast is not complete.