Then the Franks came forward to save Rome from the Lombards. The last act of the romantic life of Carloman was to plead for justice to Aistulf,--that what he had won should not be taken from him,--and to be refused. Twice Pippin came south and saved the pope: and then the cities he had won he refused to give up to the envoys of the distant emperor and declared that "never should those cities be alienated from the power of S. Peter and the rights of the Roman Church and the pontiff of the Apostolic See." From this dates the Roman pope's independence of the Roman emperor, the definite political severance of Italy from the East, and therefore a great stop towards the schism of the Church. Iconoclasm and the independence of the popes alike worked against the unity of Christendom. [Sidenote: The papal power.] Pope Stephen, thanks to Pippin, had become the arbitrator of Italy. The keys of Ravenna and of the twenty-two cities which "stretched along the Adriatic coast from the mouths of the Po to within a few miles of Ancona and inland as far as the Apennines" were laid on the tomb of S. Peter. The "States of the Church" began their long history, the history of "the temporal power." And this new power was seen outside Italy as well {150} as within. From the eighth century, at least, the popes are found continually intervening in the affairs of the churches among the Franks and the Germans, granting privileges, giving indulgence, writing with explicit claim to the authority which Christ gave to S. Peter. Into the recesses of Gaul, among Normans at Rouen, among Lotharingians at Metz, to Amiens, or Venice, or Limoges, the papal letters penetrated; and their tone is that of confidence that advice will be respected or commands obeyed. And this is, in small matters especially, rather than in great. The popes at least claimed to interfere everywhere in Christian Europe and in everything.[2] Within Italy events moved quickly.