would be friends to his friends and enemies to his enemies, as we have promised to you the like and do firmly continue therein. How, then, can you escape the guilt of perjury if you ally yourselves with that perjured nation of the Lombards, who, forever attacking the Church of God and invading this our province of the Romans, are proved to be our deadliest foes?” This passionate, almost insolent letter of dissuasion was of no avail. Carloman indeed kept his wedded wife Gerberga, but Charles, some time in the year 770, put away his wife, a noble Frankish lady, named Himiltruda, and married the daughter of Desiderius, whom his mother Bertrada, a friend of the Lombard alliance, had brought back with her from Italy after a pilgrimage to the tombs of the Apostles. The tie of kinship between Frank and Lombard, thus formed, was soon and rudely broken. After a year of wedlock the daughter of Desiderius was back again in her father’s court a divorced and rejected wife (771). What were the motives of her husband for such insulting treatment of his young queen none of his contemporaries have told us. The monk of St. Gall,[33] writing a century after the event, tells us that the lady was a delicate invalid, unlikely ever to become a mother, and that for this reason Charles, acting by the advice of his most saintly bishops, put her away as if she were dead. It is a plausible conjecture that the king, remembering the passionate endeavor of the pope to dissuade him from this marriage, may have recognized a Divine judgment in its threatened sterility, and may for that reason have decided on ending it. This harsh termination of an alliance on which Queen Bertrada had set her heart, and which she had been the chief agent in bringing to pass, caused, for the time, an estrangement between mother and son, the only one, we are told, that ever took place between them. The repudiation of the Lombard princess of course did not improve the relations between Desiderius and Charles. Still more strained did those relations become when, on the death of Carloman, a few months later, his widow, with her infant children and some trusty adherents crossed the Alps and placed herself under the protection of the Lombard king. Charles, we are told, considered this proceeding on the part of his sister-in-law to be “superfluous,” but nevertheless bore it patiently. The year 772 was fully occupied with the first of those great campaigns against the Saxons which will form the subject of a later chapter; and Charles had no time or energy to spare for the complicated affairs of Italy.