Page "Carloman I" Paragraph 6

In 770, his mother Bertrada began implementing her great strategy.

After spending the Easter with Charlemagne at Liege, she visited Carloman at Seltz: her motives for visiting him are unknown, although it is suggested that she was trying to allay his fears of his brother, or persuade him to be more co-operative with Charlemagne, or even secure his agreement and collusion in her plans.

However it was, by the end of the year Bertrada and Charlemagne had successfully encircled Carloman: Charlemagne had married Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king Desiderius, Carloman's immediate eastern neighbor, and the marriage created an alliance between Charlemagne and the Lombards ; Bertrada had also secured for Charlemagne the friendship of Tassilo, Duke of Bavaria, her husband's nephew ; she had even attempted to secure Papal support for the marriage by arranging for Desiderius to cede to Rome certain territories to which the Papacy laid claim, although Pope Stephen III remained in theory hostile to an alliance between his allies the Franks and his enemies the Lombards, and in reality deeply conflicted between the threat the Lombards posed to him and the chance to dispose of the anti-Lombard Christopher the Primicerius, the dominant figure at the Papal court.