Northern Italy United to His Empire
We must now see what Charlemagne did in Italy. At this period the Lombards were very troublesome to the Pope, and frequently assailed the Roman territory. Accordingly, when Pope Adrian I. called on Charlemagne for aid, the Frankish monarch crossed the Alps, defeated the Lombards, shut up their king in a monastery, and himself assuming the famous “iron crown” of Lombardy, united the whole of Upper Italy to the kingdom of the Franks (A.D. 773). At the same time he confirmed the gifts made by Pepin to the Pope.
The general result of all the wars and conquests which we have described was that by the year 800 Charlemagne, who had inherited from Pepin a kingdom scarcely equal to all Gaul, found himself lord of a dominion as large as the ancient Roman Empire of the West, and extending from the Ebro (in Spain) on the west to the Elbe in the northeast, the Theiss (Hungary) in the southeast, and including [409] half of Italy, with Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Isles. He fell heir to a kingdom; he was now master of an empire.