Though the descendant of the sainted Arnulf though the champion of Christendom against the Saracens, and the strong protector of the “apostles” who, relying on the sharpness of the Frankish battle-axe, went forth to convert the heathen Frisians and Saxons, Charles Martel was looked upon with no favor by the ecclesiastics of his time. By the grants of _fainéant_ kings and honorable women, the possessions of the Church in Gaul had grown so enormously as to weaken the resources of the kingdom, and Charles found himself, or believed himself, compelled to lay his hand upon some of all this accumulated wealth for the defence of Gaul and Christendom. He did it in the most dangerous way for the Church, not by revoking grants or imposing taxes on ecclesiastical property, but by conferring prelacies and abbacies on trusty friends and followers of his own, men who were without any pretensions to the spiritual character, but upon whom he might rely to use the Church’s wealth on the right side. Thus, we find already emerging the question which three or four centuries later in the days of Hildebrand and the Franconian Emperors, took peace from the earth. It is easy to see how such a manner of disposing of ecclesiastical property would rouse the opposition of all that was highest as well as of all that was lowest in the Gaulish Church, of genuine zeal for holiness as well as of mere greed and worldly ambition. Thus it came to pass, that while the rest of the Arnulfing line were venerated as friends and patrons of the Church, Charles Martel fared more hardly at her hands, and the superstition of the times-- “Doomed him to the Zealot’s ready hell, Which” pleads the Church’s claims “so eloquently well.” In the next century a libellous vision was forged by a famous archbishop,[22] according to which a prelate saw Charles Martel suffering the torments of hell, and, on asking the cause, was told that it was his allotted penalty for seizing on the domains of the Church. The dreaming prelate, on awaking, went, so it was said, to the abbey of St. Denis and opened Charles’s tomb, but found no corpse therein, only a blackened shell, out of which a winged dragon rushed and flew rapidly away. CHAPTER IV. PIPPIN, KING OF THE FRANKS. The unity of the Frankish State, so dearly purchased by the heroic labors of Charles Martel, was as usual placed in jeopardy by the dying ruler’s arrangements for the succession to that which was now openly spoken of as his “principatus.” He left two sons, Carloman and Pippin, by his first wife Hrotrudis, and one, Grifo, by a Bavarian princess named Swanahild, whom he had married after an invasion of her country, and whose sister was the wife of the Lombard king Liutprand.