A strange fortune, which in the old Greek mythologies would have been looked on as a fate, overshadowing the blood-stained house of Clovis, had befallen his descendants through all their generations for more than a hundred years. Feeble in mind, and even degenerated in body, the kings of that royal line had been a sight of grief and humiliation to their nominal subjects. Married at fifteen, they had all sunk into premature old age, or died before they were thirty. Too listless for work, and too ignorant for council, they had accepted the restricted sphere within which their duties were confined, and showed themselves, on solemn occasions, at the festivals of the Church, and other great anniversaries, bearing, like their ancestors, the long flowing locks which were the natural sign of their crowned supremacy, seated in a wagon drawn by oxen, and driven by a wagoner with a goad--a primitive relic of vanished times, and as much out of place in Paris in the eighth century as the state carriage of the Queen or the Lord-Mayor's coach of the present day among ourselves Strange thoughts must have passed through the minds of the spectators as they saw the successors of the rough leader of the Franks degraded to this condition; but the change had been gradual; the public sentiment had become reconciled to the apparent uselessness of the highest offices of the State; for under another title, and with much inferior rank, there was a man who held the reins of government with a hand of iron, and whose power was perhaps strengthened by the fiction which called him the servant and minister of the _fainéant_ or do-nothing king. A succession of men arose in the family of the mayors of the palace, as remarkable for policy and talent as the representatives of the royal line were for the want of these qualities. The origin of their office was conveniently forgotten, or converted by the flattery of their dependants into an equality with the monarchs. Chosen, they said, by the same elective body which nominated the king, they were as much entitled to the command of the army and the administration of the law as their nominal masters to the possession of the palace and royal name. And when for a long period this claim was allowed, who was there to stand up in opposition, either legal or forcible, to a man who appointed all the judges and commanded all the troops? The office at last became hereditary. The successive mayors left their dignity to their sons by will; and time might have been slow in bringing power and title into harmony with each by giving the name of king to the man who already exercised all the kingly power and fulfilled all the kingly duties, if Charles Martel, the mayor, had not, in 732, established such claims to the gratitude of Europe by his defeat of the Saracens, who were about to overrun the whole of Christendom, that it was impossible to refuse either to himself or his successor the highest dignity which Europe had to bestow. When other rulers and princes were willing to acknowledge his superiority, not only in power, but in rank and dignity, it was necessary that their submission should be offered, not to a mere Major-domo, or chief domestic of a court, but to a free sovereign and anointed king. The two most amazing fictions, therefore, which ever flourished on the contemptuous forbearance of mankind, were both about to expire beneath the breath of reality at this time--the kingship of the descendants of Clovis, and the pretensions of the successors of Constantine. The Saracens appeared upon the scene, and those gibbering and unsubstantial ghosts, as if they scented the morning air, immediately disappeared. The Emperors of the East, by a self-deluding process, which preserved their dignity and flattered their pride, professed still to consider themselves the lords of the Roman Empire, and took particular pains to acknowledge the kings and potentates, who established themselves in the various portions of it, as their representatives and lieutenants. They lost no time in sending the title of Patrician and the ensigns of royal rank to the successful founders of a new dynasty, and had gained their object if they received the new ruler's thanks in return. At Rome, as we have said, they protected the bishop, and gave him the investiture of his office. They retained also the territories called the Exarchate of Ravenna, but with no power of vindicating their authority if it was disputed, or of exacting revenue, except what the gratitude of the bishop or the Exarch might induce them to present to their patron on their nomination or instalment.