Pope Stephen II

In 751, the Lombard king Aistulf captured the Exarchate of Ravenna, and turned his attention to the Duchy of Rome.[1] Stephen, a Roman aristocrat,[2] was selected on 26 March 752 to succeed Pope Zachary following the recent death of Pope-elect Stephen.

Relations were very strained in the mid-8th century between the papacy and the Eastern Roman emperors over the support of the Isaurian dynasty for iconoclasm. Likewise, maintaining political control over Rome became untenable as the Eastern Roman Empire itself was beset by the Abbasid Caliphate to the south and Bulgars to the northwest. Constantinople could send no troops, and Emperor Constantine V Copronymus, in answer to the repeated requests for help of the new pope, Stephen II, could only offer him the advice to act in accordance with the ancient policy of Rome, to pit some other Germanic tribe against the Lombards.[3]

Stephen turned to Pepin the Younger, the king of the Franks who had recently defeated the Muslim Umayyad invasion of Gaul.[4] He traveled to Paris to plead for help in person against the surrounding Lombard and Muslim threats.[5] On 6 January 754, Stephen re-consecrated Pepin as king. In return, Pepin assumed the role of ordained protector of the Church and set his sights on the Lombards, as well as addressing the threat of Islamic Al-Andalus.[6] Pepin invaded Italy twice to settle the Lombard problem and delivered the territory between Rome and Ravenna to the papacy, but left the Lombard kings in possession of their kingdom.

Prior to Stephen II's alliance with Pepin, Rome had constituted the central city of the Duchy of Rome, which composed one of two districts within the Exarchate of Ravenna, along with Ravenna itself. At Quiercy the Frankish nobles finally gave their consent to a campaign in Lombardy.[1] Catholic tradition asserts that then and there Pepin executed in writing a promise to give to the Church certain territories that were to be wrested from the Lombards, and which would be referred to later as the Papal States. Known as the Donation of Pepin, no actual document has been preserved, but later 8th century sources quote from it.

Stephen anointed Pepin as king of the Franks[1] at Saint-Denis in a memorable ceremony that was evoked in the coronation rites of French kings until the end of the ancien régime in 1789. In return, in 756, Pepin and his Frankish army forced the Lombard king to surrender his conquests, and Pepin officially conferred upon the pope the territories belonging to Ravenna, even cities such as Forlì with their hinterlands, laying the Donation of Pepin upon the tomb of Saint Peter, according to traditional later accounts. The gift included Lombard conquests in the Romagna and in the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, and the Pentapolis in the Marche (the "five cities" of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Senigallia and Ancona). For the first time, the Donation made the pope a temporal ruler over a strip of territory that extended diagonally across Italy from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic. Over these extensive and mountainous territories the medieval popes were unable to exercise effective sovereignty, given the pressures of the times, and the new Papal States preserved the old Lombard heritage of many small counties and marquisates, each centered upon a fortified rocca.

Pepin confirmed his Donation in Rome in 756, and in 774 Charlemagne confirmed the donation of his father.[7] Stephen II died on 26 April 757 and was succeeded by his brother Paul I.[8]

• Annales laureshamenses
• List of Catholic saints
• List of popes

• Paolo Delogu: Stefano II. In: Massimo Bray (ed.): Enciclopedia dei Papi, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Vol. 1  (Pietro, santo. Anastasio bibliotecario, antipapa), Rome, 2000, OCLC 313504669, pp. 660–665.
• Ekkart Sauser (1995). "Stephan II. (III.)". In Bautz, Traugott (ed.). Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL) (in German). 10. Herzberg: Bautz. cols. 1351–1354. ISBN 3-88309-062-X.
• Rudolf Schieffer (1997). "Stephan II". Lexikon des Mittelalters, VIII: Stadt (Byzantinisches Reich) bis Werl (in German). Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler. col. 116–117. ISBN 3-89659-908-9.

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• Catholic Encyclopedia: Papal States, section 3: Collapse of the Byzantine Power in Central Italy
• Medieval Sourcebook: