As soon as Hadrian assumed the pontifical robe it was manifest to all men that the unnatural friendship between pope and Lombard king had come to an end. The prison doors were opened for the anti-Lombard partizans, the civil and military officers who had been driven into exile were recalled. Paulus Afiarta himself was tried and put to death by the Archbishop of Ravenna. Hadrian indeed seems to have exerted himself that the sentence might be commuted to banishment, but there is no doubt that he thoroughly approved of criminal proceedings of some kind being taken against the great unscrupulous Lombard partizan.
The action of Desiderius at this eventful crisis of his nation’s history is not easy to understand: it is only possible here to describe its general course without entering into details. He seems to have recognized that he had an enemy in the new pope and one of a more determined kind than either Paul I. or Stephen III., whose demands for a further cession of territory he had been for the last fifteen years successfully evading. Apparently, however, he cherished the hope that by a judicious mixture of threats and entreaties he might draw the pope over to his side and induce him to anoint the infant sons of Carloman as Kings of the Franks. For to this desperate act of defiance to Charles was he now impelled both by the memory of his daughter’s wrongs and by the conviction that, sooner or later, war must again break out between the Frank and the Lombard. In this frame of mind he despatched alternately embassies to sue for the pope’s friendship and armies to invade his territory. The rapid changes of his attitude probably irritated the pontiff then as much as they perplex the historian to-day. First Faenza, Ferrara, and Comacchio, the latest acquisitions of the papacy, were occupied; then Ravenna was closely pressed; Urbino and the greater part of the Pentapolis were invaded; Blera and Otriculum, not a day’s journey from Rome, were entered by the Lombard troops, who in the former city are said to have perpetrated a cruel massacre of the unresisting inhabitants. But all these violent measures failed to shake the resolution of Hadrian or induce him to consent to an interview with Desiderius. His uniform answer to the Lombard ambassadors was, “First let your master restore the possessions of which he has unjustly despoiled St. Peter; and then, but not till then, will I grant him an interview.”
At last, when the Lombard king was evidently preparing to tighten his grip on Rome itself, Pope Hadrian sent a messenger named Peter to beg for the help of the great King of the Franks. At the same time he did what he could to put the city in a state of defence, gathering in soldiers from Tuscany, Campania, and the Pentapolis, removing the most precious adornments of the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul to safer custody within the walls of the city, and barring up all the doors of St. Peter’s so that the Lombard king, without some violent act of sacrilege, should not be able to enter.
At last, in February or March 773, Peter the papal messenger (having travelled by sea to Marseilles, as all the land routes were beset by Lombard soldiers) arrived at Theodo’s villa where Charles was holding his court. This is the place which the Neustrian citizens of the French Republic still call Thionville, while the Austrasian subjects of Kaiser Wilhelm, who have wrested it from the Neustrians, speak of it as Diedenhofen. It is now a strong border fortress on the Moselle, sixteen miles north of Metz. Hither, then, came the papal messenger to utter his master’s piteous cry for help. Probably the ambassadors of Desiderius appeared there also to deny the charges brought against him, or to declare that whatever he had forcibly taken from the papal see he had already surrendered. Charles resolved on war if war was needful, but, even as his father Pippin had done, he tried diplomacy first. Three messengers, a bishop, an abbot, and a courtier, were sent to Italy to inquire into the rights of the quarrel, and on their return and report that the cities violently taken from St. Peter were not restored, Charles, still treading in his father’s footsteps, sent one more embassy to Desiderius, offering the Lombard 14,000 golden solidi (£8000) if he would restore the conquered cities, and fully satisfy all the Papal demands. The offer was refused, and Charles having summoned the Frankish host to his standard, set forward for Italy.
According to a plan which he frequently adopted, and one reason for which was probably the desire to lessen the difficulties of commissariat, Charles, after mustering his troops at Geneva, divided his host into two parts—one of which under his uncle Bernard was to cross by the Great St. Bernard and to descend upon Aosta, while the other which he himself commanded, crossing the Mont Cenis, was to take the road to Susa. Both divisions, as in his father’s time, traversed the highest points of their respective passes without hindrance, but when Charles descended into the long and narrow valley of the Dora Susa, he found his further progress barred by the fortifications and the army of Desiderius. He renewed his offers of a money payment in return for the papal cities, he even expressed his willingness to be satisfied with a mere promise to surrender those cities, if three Lombard nobles were handed over to him as hostages; but all was in vain. Strong in the impregnability of his fortifications Desiderius refused every offer of accommodation, until a sudden panic seized his host, the fortresses were abandoned, and again, as in Pippin’s time, all the Lombard army retreated down the valley and shut itself up behind the walls of Pavia.
So sudden and scarce hoped for a termination to what looked like an evenly balanced game was naturally attributed by the papal biographer to a divinely inspired terror; but a Frankish chronicler tells us of a picked squadron of troops which Charles had sent over an unguarded pass, and later local tradition spoke of a certain Lombard minstrel who for a brilliant reward guided the Frankish troops by untrodden ways to the rear of his countrymen’s position. We know from other evidence that there were Lombards who were disaffected to Desiderius, and had opened negotiations with the Frankish king; but the story of treachery in this case is not well vouched for. It is possible that Bernard’s successful transit over the pass which preserves the memory of his namesake saint, may have turned the rear of the Lombard position, and compelled Desiderius to seek safety in flight.
The siege of Pavia, which was now formed by Charles, began probably about the end of September, 773, and lasted for ten months. The other great focus of Lombard resistance was the city of Verona, where Adelchis, son of Desiderius, commanded the garrison, and where those important guests Gerberga, widow of Carloman, her children and her trusty counsellor Autchar had taken refuge. Thither, Charles proceeded at an early period of the siege of Pavia. The resistance seems to have been slight, perhaps the garrison was half-hearted. Very soon after Charles’s arrival, Gerberga and her train came forth from the city and surrendered themselves to his will. The city itself was probably surrendered at the same time; and the young prince Adelchis made his escape to Constantinople. After this point the widow and children of Carloman vanish from the scene. We should certainly have been informed if any of them had been put to death, and we may therefore safely assume that Charles was merciful. There are faint and doubtful traces of one of the sons as holding the bishopric of Nice.
Charles appears to have spent his Christmas under canvas before the walls of Pavia, or else in one of the numerous expeditions by which he brought the cities on the left bank of the Po into his obedience. But as the siege still dragged on, though there could be little doubt of its final event, when Easter approached, Charles, with a brilliant train of dukes and counts, of bishops and abbots, journeyed through Tuscany to Rome. Never had his father, King Pippin, though he had twice crossed the Alps, visited the Eternal City, and this was Charles’s first visit to that Rome with which his name was to be inseparably linked in after ages. He went by forced marches, hastening to be in Rome on the eve of Easter Sunday. At thirty miles from the city, Pope Hadrian ordered that he should be met by the nobles of the Ducatus Romae, displaying the banner of St. Peter. At one mile from the city the various squadrons of the Roman militia with their officers and the boys out of the schools met him, all bearing palm-branches and olive-branches and crosses, and singing loud his praises, for Hadrian had ordered that in all things the reception of the King of the Franks should do him as great honor as ever had been done of old to the patrician and exarch arriving from Ravenna. When Charles saw the crosses and the banners he dismounted from his horse and went on foot with all his nobles to the church of St. Peter. There on the top of the steps stood Pope Hadrian, with all the clergy and people of Rome who had arisen at dawn to be ready to welcome the victorious king. As he ascended each step, Charles knelt down and kissed the venerable stones; and so he reached the summit where, in the long atrium outside the doors of the church the pope stood waiting to receive him. King and pontiff were clasped in mutual embrace (we hear nothing of the abject prostrations performed by later emperors before later popes), and then holding Hadrian’s right hand Charles entered the great basilica, while all the clergy and all the monks shouted with loud voices, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” Then the king and all the Frankish nobles and churchmen in his train knelt at the tomb of St. Peter, thanking God for the great victories already wrought through the intervention of the Prince of the Apostles. On the three following days, at Sta. Maria Maggiore, at St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, the king, after humbly imploring the papal permission, offered up his prayers to God, and on Easter Sunday there was a great banquet at the Lateran. Thus we come to the Wednesday on which an important piece of business was transacted between the two potentates. So much here turns on a few words that it will be well to give a literal translation of the passage in the Liber Pontificalis (our only authority), which describes this memorable interview.
“On the fourth day of the week, the pope, with his staff of officers, both civil and ecclesiastical, went forth to the church of St. Peter, and there meeting the king in conference, earnestly prayed him, and with paternal affection exhorted him, to fulfil in its entirety that promise which his father, the late King Pippin of blessed memory, had made, and which he himself with his brother Carloman and all the nobles of France had confirmed to St. Peter and his vicar Pope Stephen II., when he visited Frankland, that they would grant divers cities and territories in that province of Italy to St. Peter and his vicars for a perpetual possession. And when he (Charles) had caused that promise which was made in Frankland in a place called Carisiacum to be read over to him, all its contents were approved by himself and his nobles. And of his own accord, with good and willing mind, that most excellent and most Christian King Charles caused another promise of gift like the first to be drawn up by Etherius his chaplain and notary, and in this he granted the same cities and territories to St. Peter and promised that they should be conveyed to the pope with their boundaries set forth as is contained in the aforesaid donation, to wit: From Luna with the island of Corsica, thence to Surianum thence to Mons Bardonis (that is Vercetum), thence to Parma, thence to Rhegium, and from thence to Mantua and Mons Silicis, and moreover the whole exarchate of Ravenna such as it was of old time, and the provinces of Venetia and Istria: moreover the whole duchies of Spoletium and Beneventum.”
The papal biographer then goes on to describe the signing of this donation by Charles himself with all his bishops, abbots, dukes, and counts, its being laid upon the altar of St. Peter, and afterwards placed within his tomb, and the “terrible oath” which was sworn by all the signers, promising to St. Peter and Pope Hadrian that they would keep all the promises contained in the document.