accept the ruling, there is no evidence that he managed to get the decision overturned. Carolingian quarrels In 817, by a solemn deed, confirmed by Paschal I, Louis had made a division of the empire in favour of his three sons from his first marriage: the future emperor Lothair I, Pepin I of Aquitaine, and Louis the German. Over time, papal dependence on the Carolingian emperor was loosened through the quarrels of Louis the Pious and his sons. Louis’ decision to jettison the agreement of 817 regarding the division of the empire by assigning a kingdom to his youngest son, Charles the Bald, in 829 was criticized by Gregory in a letter to the Frankish bishops. The following year (October 830), after a brief rebellion and reconciliation between Louis and his sons, Gregory declared that Louis’ second wife, Judith, was to be released from the convent where she had been forced to take the veil, and to be returned to Louis. When the war between father and sons resumed in Easter 833, Gregory was approached by Lothair, seeking his intervention to bring about reconciliation between Lothair and his father. He was convinced to leave Rome and travel up to join Lothair, in hopes that his intervention would promote peace, but in practice this action annoyed the Frankish bishops who followed Louis, who believed that Gregory was actively supporting Lothair. Suspicious of Gregory’s intent, they refused to obey the pope, and threatened to excommunicate him, were he to excommunicate them, and even to depose him as pope. Annoyed by their actions, Gregory's response was to insist upon the papal supremacy, the papacy being superior to the emperor. He stated: ”You professed to have felt delighted when you heard of my arrival, thinking that it would have been of great advantage for the emperor and the people; you added that you would have obeyed my summons had not a previous intimation of the emperor prevented you. But you ought to have regarded an order from the Apostolic See as not less weighty than one from the emperor. ...The government of souls, which belongs to bishops, is more important than the imperial, which is only concerned with the temporal. Your assertion that I have only come to blindly excommunicate is shameless, and your offer to give me an honourable reception if I should have come exactly in the way the emperor wanted me