The epoch-making victory of Charles of the Hammer over the Arabs at Tours had drawn the eyes of all men to France, and to a mighty race of princes destined to change the face of Europe. The restless Lombards in 752 had reoccupied Ravenna and the Pentapolis, and the Pope turned to the new Carlovingian dynasty for help against them. Pepin answered to the call, wrested the cities from their hands, and gave them to the Pope, who thus became a temporal sovereign. Twenty years later the papacy was again constrained to summon help. Charlemagne, Pepin’s son, crossed the Alps by the Great St Bernard pass, fell like a thunderbolt of war on the Lombards, and in 774 their dominion was finally crushed by the capture of Desiderio, their King, and Pavia, their royal city. Romanin argues from the silence of the chroniclers that the Venetians took no active part in the siege of Pavia, but from an old inscription in Venetian, on a thin plate of hammered lead,[4] preserved in the British Museum, we learn that on the invitation of Charlemagne, the Venetians sent a fleet of twenty-four galleys, with four nobles who knew the art of war (_saveva far la guara_) up the Po to the siege, and had the honour of guarding the captive King. Venice had indeed watched every phase of the struggle, seizing, as was her wont, any opportunity that offered for extending the trading privileges so vital to her existence. By secret information to the Church from her merchants at Constantinople, she had nipped a plot to recover the Exarchate, now for ever lost to the Greek Emperors. But in 781 Pepin, son of Charlemagne, had been crowned King of Italy by the Pope; the power of the Franks was growing apace, and their alliance with a territorial Pope alarmed the Heraclean party. They believed a wiser policy was to form an alliance with the weaker Empire far in the east against the Franks. In 778 Doge Maurizio Galbaio was permitted, on the plea of infirmity, to associate his son Giovanni with him, and on the death of Maurizio, the son stepped into his father’s office, thus effecting a subtle change in the nature of the Dogeship, by no means pleasing to the democratic party. The Franks were not long in making their power felt. Venetian merchants had acquired some territory near Ravenna, and many trading centres in the neighbouring cities. They were incorrigible slave traders. Pope Zacharias, a generation before, had been moved to compassion on seeing in Rome groups of Christian slaves,[5] men and women, belonging to Venetian merchants, destined to be sold to the pagans in Africa. He paid their price and set them at liberty. Charlemagne had recently published an edict against the traffic in slaves, and now called on Pope Hadrian to take action. The Venetians were expelled from Ravenna and the Pentapolis. In 797 the new see of Olivolo which had been created a few years before to meet the growing needs of the population, became vacant,