Ratchis was succeeded by his brother Aistulf, an ambitious and restless monarch, who raised the Lombard kingdom to its widest territorial extent by conquering the long-coveted Ravenna. [Sidenote: Aistulf takes Ravenna, 752.] When he attacked the shrunken Exarchate it received no help from Constantine Copronymus, who detested his Italian subjects as obstinate image-worshippers, and was much occupied at the moment by his Saracen war. Ravenna fell with hardly any resistance, and Eutychius, the last exarch, fled to Sicily. Aistulf then busied himself in reducing the independent duchy of Benevento to vassalage. His next project was to annex the towns of the ‘ducatus Romanus’—the valley of the lower Tiber—and to make the Pope his liegeman. Although he had concluded a forty-years’ peace with the Papacy, yet, in 752-53, he was hovering about the neighbourhood of Rome, and occupying the Umbrian and Sabine borders of the ‘patrimony of St. Peter.’ At last his ambassadors appeared before Stephen II. to demand the homage of Rome, and the payment of an annual tribute. After trying in vain to scare off Aistulf, first by the terrors of excommunication, and then by empty menaces of applying for aid to Constantinople, which the Lombard derided, Stephen bethought himself of the debt of gratitude which the Frankish king owed to the Holy See. After ascertaining that his presence and demands would not be unacceptable to king Pippin, he left Rome in October 753, and, after making one more appeal to the Lombard king to grant him peace and independence, crossed the Alps, and appeared before the Frankish Court at Ponthion, near Bar-le-Duc.