Saint Zachary

Zachary, a Greek from Calabria and the last of the Greek popes, was consecrated on 3 December 741 without asking anyone's leave; he told Constantinople afterward. He inherited Gregory III's wars and ended them in person. In 742 he rode to Terni to meet Liutprand and came back with the four towns, the Sabine patrimony the Lombards had held for thirty years, and a twenty-year peace for the duchy of Rome; in 743 he went to Pavia and talked the king out of besieging Ravenna. When Ratchis broke the peace at Perugia in 749, Zachary went to him too, and the king abdicated to become a monk at Monte Cassino. His brother Aistulf was harder: in 751 he took Ravenna and ended the exarchate that had governed Italy since Justinian, and Zachary had run out of kings to persuade.

North of the Alps he had a better partner. Boniface held the reforming councils of the Frankish church from 742 with Zachary's letters in hand, and the Frankish bishops swore obedience to Rome; Carloman, mayor of the eastern Franks, retired in 747 to become a monk. In 751 his brother Pepin sent envoys to ask whether it was right that the Franks had a king with the name and no power while the man with the power had no name.

He died on 15 March 752 and was buried in Saint Peter's. His feast is that day, and the papacy he left had a Frankish king in its debt.