Pepin the Short, mayor of the palace turned king (751–768), deposed the last Merovingian with papal blessing, founded the Carolingian monarchy, and created the Papal States by his Italian wars.
Pepin completed what his father Charles Martel had made possible: in 751, armed with Pope Zacharias's famous answer — that he who held the power ought to hold the name of king — he deposed the puppet Childeric III, took the crown by election and anointment, and founded the Carolingian monarchy.
The papal alliance was paid for in Italy: twice he crossed the Alps against the Lombards, and the "Donation of Pepin" (756) handed the conquered exarchate to St Peter — the legal birth of the Papal States and of the Frankish-papal axis on which Charlemagne's empire would stand.
Born about 714, the year his grandfather Pepin of Herstal died, Pepin was raised at Saint-Denis while his father Charles Martel fought his way to mastery of Francia. On Charles's death in 741 the mayoral office was divided: Carloman took the east, Pepin the west, with a Merovingian figurehead — Childeric III — dusted off in 743 to quiet legitimists.
The brothers crushed the risings of Aquitanians, Alemans, and Bavarians together until 747, when Carloman, in one of the age's genuine surprises, renounced the world for Monte Cassino — leaving Pepin sole master of Francia and free to ask Rome his famous question.
The nickname "the Short" is late and possibly a mistranslation; the contemporary record shows nothing small. Einhard, writing under his grandson, preserved the emblematic story: taunted about his stature, Pepin loosed a lion and a bull in the arena, then leapt down and beheaded both — theatre, but theatre remembered because it matched the man's decisiveness.
His revolution's method reveals the politician: every step — the papal consultation, the election at Soissons, the anointment by bishops (repeated in 754 by Pope Stephen himself, who also anointed his sons and forbade the Franks ever to choose a king from another family) — wrapped naked usurpation in every sanctity available. He invented, in effect, the medieval theory of sacral kingship by needing it.
The Italian interventions answered Pope Stephen II's personal journey across the Alps in 753–754 — the first papal visit to Francia — begging protection from the Lombard king Aistulf. Pepin's campaigns of 754 and 756 broke Aistulf, and the keys of the exarchate's cities were laid on St Peter's tomb: the Donation that made the pope a territorial prince and the Frankish king Rome's protector, with all that both would mean.
Elsewhere he governed as conqueror-reformer: Septimania taken from the Umayyads with Narbonne's fall in 759; the church councils continued from Carloman's day, with Boniface's reforms institutionalised; the coinage reformed on the silver denier that would rule Western Europe for five centuries; and the last eight years spent breaking Aquitaine in the brutal annual campaigns he completed weeks before his death.
Pepin died at Saint-Denis on 24 September 768, and was buried — at his own humble instruction, face-down at the threshold, tradition says — in the abbey that had raised him. Francia was divided between Charles and Carloman in the customary way, with the customary fraternal hatred; Carloman's death in 771 spared the kingdom the war.
His reign built every platform Charlemagne stood on: the sanctified dynasty, the papal axis, the Lombard question half-answered, the reformed church and coinage, Aquitaine subdued. Founders who are also fathers of geniuses are doomed to the shadow; historians have spent two centuries pointing out that the "first Carolingian" was among the most effective kings the Franks ever had.