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the defeat of Odilo and a man of considerable intellectual independence. He even speculated on the plurality of worlds and the antipodes. For this the pope condemned him, though without apparent effect as he was later duly consecrated bishop. The pope had supported him however in an appeal against the contention of Boniface that grammatical errors in the baptismal formula would invalidate the sacrament. Toward Sidonius the pope counselled Boniface to use more patience. The letters from now on begin to show some discouragement, excusable in old age, the more so as conditions were still unsatisfactory. He finds among the clergy runaway slaves, men who elude all episcopal supervision, field-preachers, grotesquely ignorant, confusing Christian and heathen rites. All this was, no doubt, inevitable. The hierarchy could be changed more rapidly than the rural clergy or the people. But he was grieved. He consoled himself with study and extended his English correspondence.

The last synod at which Boniface presided seems to have been held, separately from the assembly of notables, at Duria in 747. There is no evidence that the majordomos were present or that they promulgated its decrees. This synod, as Boniface tells Archbishop Cuthbert of Canterbury, solemnly professed" to the body of Peter, chief of the Apostles" the unity of the Catholic faith and their subordination to "St. Peter and his vicar." These phrases were usual in synodal addresses and that no change in the relations to the papacy was intended appears from the terms in which Zacharias acknowledged the receipt of their profession. Of course it was Of course it was "joyfully accepted." The synod also resolved to ask pallia for their archbishops, to meet annually and to take steps to regulate and improve parochial and monastic organization, probably on lines suggested in answers of Zacharias to Pipin's queries. The synod, however, seems to have conceived papal power as subject to limitations not in accord with a literal construction of the curial acknowledgment. In their minds papal intervention was to be invited on occasion, not to be looked for habitually or unasked. The Roman Church was to declare apostolic tradition if appealed to rather than to speak of itself. There is no explicit statement by Boniface of his own

position but his acts accord best with such a view. Many of the resolutions of 747 remained in abeyance, probably because they lacked legal sanction. Up to 751, at least, no pallia had been sought by the Neustrian archbishops; relations with the curia remained in the hands of the majordomos and as appears from the acts of the synod of 755 Boniface died with the archiepiscopal organization still incomplete, though the way to a provincial constitution of the Church had been plainly shown.

It was probably about this time that Boniface was given Mayence, though he did not receive a papal confirmation for the see till 751. Even then it was, so far as appears, unsought. Curiously enough while the pope here places in his jurisdiction Lüttich, Cologne, Worms, Spires and Utrecht, Boniface in writing to Pope Stephen, not earlier than 752, of negotiations with Cologne about Utrecht, appeals not to this document but to a decree of Karlman. The appointment seems to have been not altogether welcome. He would have preferred" because of age and weakness" to turn over the whole archidiocesan administration to a chorepiscopus. Against this Zacharias counselled strongly, but he did not forbid it, and Boniface, after about a year, decided to follow his own bent rather than the pope's consilium. In the five years since the first synod papal prestige had very greatly increased in the Frank realm but as yet there had been very little change in the recognition of a direct papal authority.

Growing dissatisfaction with conditions at court and in the Frankish Church now begins to mark the correspondence. Boniface is dissatisfied, too, with himself. He was probably suffering from illness for we lose sight of him altogether in 749 and 750, and in 751 Zacharias' reply to a valetudinarian letter expresses joy that Boniface is still alive. Meantime Pipin had been preparing the coup d'état that was to dethrone Childeric III and make the actual ruler king in name as well. To secure for his act a moral justification to match the political, Pipin naturally turned to Rome whose judgment Western Europe united in regarding as the highest moral sanction. Cautious negotiations with the curia had by 750 or 751 reached a point where Pipin

could send Abbot Fulrad of St. Denis and Bishop Burchard of Würzburg to Rome with a definite question assured of a favorable answer. At an assembly in Soissons in 751 Pipin took the crown. He was also anointed, with consequences far-reaching for Europe for centuries. What part had Boniface in this? The earliest records imply, none. It is not till the time of Charlemagne that anyone says he anointed the king, as he would naturally have done if asked, and it is a fair inference that he was not at Soissons because he was too ill to be there. Moreover had the legate performed the act the pope would hardly have discredited his own representative by repeating it in 754. In what had gone before there had been no occasion for his intervention. The secreta quaedam which Lul took from him to Zacharias in 751 had, as is clear from the pope's answer, nothing to do with politics, from which indeed Boniface always kept aloof. That Pipin and the pope should make common cause was too obviously in the interest of both to need his mediation. The pope wanted political independence from the Byzantine emperors and defence against Aistulf and the Lombards. Nobody but Pipin could give this, and he could give it more effectively as king. Why look for Boniface's hand here?

Early in 752 Zacharias died. Stephen II succeeded him. Zacharias had been primarily a Churchman, Stephen was an ecclesiastical politician. Boniface wrote to him, as seems probable, soon after his accession. There is no trace of an answer nor of a meeting between them during the six months that Stephen passed at the court of Pipin, his refuge from Lombard aggression. Boniface's letters to the new pope show no swerving in loyalty attested by long service. He speaks of thirty-six years, going back in memory to his first visit to Frisia. He has been busy, he says, in restoring churches of which some thirty had been destroyed probably by the Saxon raids of 751. There is a legend that he visited about this time St. Pirmin at Hornbach. From Mayence he writes to Abbot Fulrad," It seems that I must soon finish my course," and he wishes that the king might be moved to make provision for his mission helpers, almost all foreigners," some priests scattered over the coun

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tryside, some monks and nuns and some infantes ad legendas litteras ordinati, which seems to mean children committed to the cloisters for education. At the same time he asks Pipin to appoint (componere) Lul, his suffragan since 752, his successor at Mayence, and emphasizes the daily needs of his frontier missionaries. Later he thanks Pipin for "comforting his age and weakness" and hopes he is so far recovered as "to be of further service to the king." He may have thought he had still strength to inaugurate on the Frisian frontier a work of reorganization and reform. In any case events presently turned his thoughts northward. The see of Utrecht was vacant in May, 753. Cologne had advanced a claim to it and Boniface would not be behind. In the spring of 753 Lul was formally appointed Bishop of Mayence. In June," with the assent of Pipin," as we are expressly told in the Life of Abbot Sturm, Boniface started down the Rhine, taking formal farewell of friends from far and near and bearing with him a shroud. The winter of 753-4 was spent in Utrecht. In the spring, either not yet hearing or hearing too late of Stephen's coming to Pipin, which was in January, he went again to Frisia where Radbod II was reasserting independence and favoring pagan reaction. Here on June 5 he met his death at pagan hands, his sole defence, as a woman eyewitness told, a book of the Gospels.1

Chrodegang of Metz succeeded Boniface in his archiepiscopal functions. The legation, being personal, ceased with him. A curious story was told in the eleventh century of Chrodegang's promotion, which is significant though it can hardly be true. Chrodegang was for many reasons persona grata to Stephen. In 753 he had helped him in negotiations with the Lombards and had escorted him in the following winter to the court of Pipin who received him in honorable state and presently avenged him on the Lombards, with momentous consequences both to papacy and empire. The story is that when the pope undertook to make Chrodegang bishop, which he had been for years before 754, Boniface withstood him to his face, saying that it was not

1 The year is disputed but there are several legal documents of June and July, 754, that note or assume his death, the latest also his burial at Fulda.

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lawful for him to go beyond the bounds of his see and without the consent of the bishop to whose diocese the place, whatever it is, belongs [in this case, Treves] to consecrate anyone bishop.' The pope, according to the narrative, rested on his " apostolic authority." Pipin is said to have reconciled them by an appeal to the proprieties, with no attempt to enter on the merits of the question. Here is evidence at least of what some in the eleventh century thought Boniface would have done had encroachment been attempted on his archiepiscopal jurisdiction. Its assumption is that the pope is head of the church, but not master, that his function is not to command but to represent.

Not without forebodings Boniface went to an end unsought, yet not unwelcome. Premonitions of death can be seen in his letters and his acts. As has been said, he took with him a shroud, and gave Lul instructions for his burial. "I saw him grey and weak with age," writes Gregory of Utrecht, as he returned to the field of his first conquests for the Cross in the days which he now recalled perhaps with the most unalloyed satisfaction. His greater work of organization and reform had been attended with continual vexations. The fruit of his labors matured too slowly for the impatience of his old age. It was all too plain to him that his work in Austrasia and even in Thuringia was passing to younger and other hands. The leaders of the coming generation would be the Chrodegangs and Fulrads, not the men of his training and tradition. One last gift he had for the Church, a martyr's death. By this he set up a standard and made his name a rallying cry, with fortune in so far happier than that of Theodore, his exemplar.

Loyalty was the dominant trait in Boniface's character, loyalty to friends, to country, above all to his vows as missionary representative of the Church in what seemed to him its supreme expression, the successors of Peter. There was something peculiarly personal in his feeling. He had taken an oath, he was the scrupulously conscientious vassal of an over-lord. But he showed an equal loyalty to the majordomos, so that he would not even seek to carry out a Roman plan of organization without

1 Monumenta Moguntina, p. 478.

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