In spite of Carloman’s denial of help during the war in the south, Charles was ere long persuaded by his mother to be reconciled to his brother. But he took measures to keep him in check for the future by making alliance with the neighbours of Carloman to north and south. He concluded a treaty with Tassilo, duke of Bavaria, whose dependence on the Frankish realm had of late grown very loose, and allied himself yet more closely with Desiderius, the king of the Lombards, by wedding his daughter Desiderata. This marriage was concluded in spite of the most undignified shrieks of wrath on the part of the Pope, who besought Charles ‘not to mix the famous Frankish blood with the perfidious, foul, and leprous Lombard stock—a truly diabolical coupling, which no true man could call a marriage.’ The Papacy had learnt so well how to utilise the distant monarch of the Gauls against the neighbouring lord of Pavia, that Stephen III. looked upon an alliance between Frank and Lombard as high treason against the Holy See. The marriage, however, was consummated in spite of Stephen’s threats, whereupon, with more prudence than consistency, he suddenly forgot his fundamental objections to the Lombard race, and made his peace with king Desiderius, lest he should be left unaided to feel the weight of the Lombard arm. Within a year, however, Charles suddenly repudiated his wife, alleging that she was sickly and barren. Whether this was his real motive, or whether political causes also influenced his action, we cannot tell; but as Charles wedded immediately after his divorce a fair Suabian lady, named Hildegarde, we may suspect that his motives were possibly those which guided Henry VIII. of England in a similar circumstance. Be this as it may, he won by this divorce the unrelenting and not unjustifiable hatred of Desiderata’s father, the king of the Lombards. Trouble was soon in the air. There was again a rumour that war was about to break out between Charles and Carloman, in which Desiderius would have taken part. [Sidenote: Death of Carloman.] Just in time to prevent such an outbreak, king Carloman died (December 771). He left an infant son, but the nobles and bishops of Burgundy and Alamannia made no attempt to set the child on his father’s throne. Wisely suppressing any particularist yearnings, they betook themselves to Charles at Corbeny-sur-Aisne, and there did homage to him as king of all the Frankish realms. Gerberga, the widow of Carloman, fled with her child and a handful of followers to Lombardy, where Desiderius was now in a state of mind which made him glad to receive any enemy of Charles’s, and more especially one who had such a plausible claim to a share in the Frankish kingdom.