For more than twenty years the popes or bishops of Rome had been in the habit of opposing the kings of France to the monarchs of Lombardy, who were odious to them, at first as pagans, and afterwards as heretics. Chief of the clergy of the ancient capital, where the power of the emperors of Constantinople had been nominally established but never felt, they confounded their pretensions with those of the empire; and the Lombards having recently conquered the exarchate of Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, they demanded that these provinces should be restored to Rome. The Frankish kings made themselves the champions of this quarrel, which gave them an opportunity of conquering the Lombard monarchy; but Charles, the king who accomplished this conquest, and who was the greatest man that barbarism ever produced, in treating with Rome, in subjugating Italy, comprehended all the beauty of a civilisation which his predecessors had seen only to destroy; he conceived the lofty idea of profiting by the barbarian force at his disposal to put himself at the head of the civilisation which he laboured to restore. Instead of considering himself as the king of the conquerors, occupied only in enriching a barbarous army with the spoils of the vanquished, he made it his duty and his glory to govern the country for its best interests, and for the common good. He did more: in concert with Pope Leo III, he re-established the monarchy of the conquered as a western Roman empire, which he considered the representative of right, in opposition to barbaric force; he received from the same pope, and from the Roman people, on Christmas Day in the year 800, the title of Roman emperor, and the name of Charlemagne, or Charles the Great, which no one before had ever so well deserved. CHARLEMAGNE AND HIS SUCCESSORS [Sidenote: [814-1039 A.D.]] As king, and afterwards as emperor, he governed Italy, together with his other vast states, forty years; he pursued with constancy, and with increasing ability, the end he proposed to himself, _viz._, establishing the reign of the laws, and a flourishing civilisation: but barbarism was too strong for him; and when he died in 814 it was re-established throughout the empire. Italy had eight kings of the family of Charlemagne, reckoning his son and grandson, who reigned under him, and were, properly speaking, his lieutenants. Charles the Fat, great-grandson of Charlemagne, was deposed in 888; after which ten sovereigns, either Italian or Burgundian, but allied to the race of the Franks, disputed for seventy years more the crown of Italy and the empire. In 951 Otto I of Saxony, king of Germany, forced Berenger II, who then reigned, to acknowledge himself his vassal; in 961 Otto entered Italy a second time with his Germans, was crowned at Rome with the title of emperor, and sent Berenger II to end his days in a fortress in Germany.