Pope Stephen played a bold stroke of genius when he crossed the Alps to ask the ruler of the Franks to save the religious capital of Western Christianity from capture at the hands of the Lombard kings. Nor was his political sagacity yet exhausted, for he persuaded the Mayor of the Palace to regularize his own position by taking the title of king under the sanction of the Holy See. This was an ambitious design, unprecedented in the earlier pages of Papal history. Even Gregory the Great had no thought of bestowing the royal crown on any Teutonic tribal chieftain. The action was evidently suggested by the plan prepared some years before, when, with the coöperation of the Pope, it was proposed to revive in Italy a native Italian emperor to lead the people of the Peninsula against the church policy of Constantinople. This scheme was from the beginning a forlorn hope, and it had turned out to be a failure. There was not sufficient military strength in Italy, apart from the Lombards, to back up a revived Emperor of the West, and it is clear that the Lombards would have made short work of any such ruler, even if there had not been among the Italians a party who looked up to the Exarch of Ravenna as the natural head of their civil government. The negotiations with Pippin ended successfully. The Pope’s prestige was enormously increased. Instead of looking forward to becoming the captive of a Lombard king, he became himself the bestower of royal dignity on a man who had at his disposal such vast military power that the passage of his army across the Alps into Lombard territory brought about the reduction of the Lombard kingdom to a status of dependency on a Frankish ruler.