that of the "unification of Italy" are applied to the policy of a ruler like the Lombard Desiderius, we may lose sight of the fact that under this specious veneer there lay an utterly disintegrated society, characterised by a savagery which could hardly be paralleled by the acknowledged barbarism of many countries north of the Alps, The pontificate of Stephen IV (768-772) is, as has been already hinted, a period of violence and bloodshed: and the events which characterised it are repeated almost exactly not thirty years later in the days of Leo III: for centuries not even the person of a pope was safe in Rome without the protecting hand of some external authority. It is only possible here to allude to the strange story of Stephen IV as related in the Liber Pontificalis; and to proceed to a hasty summary of the main events of the reign of Charles the Great.
On Pepin's death the Frankish dominions were divided between his two sons Charles and Carloman. The two brothers speedily became rivals, and the scene of their machinations was Italy. Their mother Bertrada had brought about a nominal reconciliation between her two sons Charles king in Austrasia, and Carloman king in Neustria, and in the interests of peace sought to contract matrimonial alliances with the Lombard monarch Desiderius. With this end in view she visited Italy and persuaded Charles to give up the lady whom he had perhaps irregularly married and to take Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king. These projects alarmed Stephen IV, and his letter to Charles and Carloman warning them against an alliance with the detestable Lombards, a race infected with leprosy and naturally repulsive to noble Franks, is one of the most extraordinary in the papal correspondence with the Carlovingian family; and confirms us in the idea that Stephen's passionate weakness of character was one cause of the misfortunes of that unhappy pontiff. But the alliance was short-lived. Charles repudiated his Lombard wife, and on Carloman's death in 771 the widow Gerberga placed herself and her children under the protection of Desiderius — a proof that the two brothers regarded the Lombard as the determining factor in their rivalry for the possession of the whole Frankish realm. The Pope sided with Charles against Gerberga and her children; for Desiderius, no doubt hoping that the Franks were sufficiently divided to leave him alone, had ravaged the newly acquired papal dominions in the exarchate and the Pentapolis.
Stephen died in 772, and was succeeded by two pontiffs who held the Papacy for no less than forty-four years. Hadrian I from 772 to 795 and Leo III from 795 to 816. Never till our own days have two successive pontificates occupied so long a period. Till the days of Pius IX no pope so nearly attained to the traditional years of Peter as Hadrian.
Judged by his actions Hadrian was a man of vigour and ability; and if he shews himself querulous and apprehensive in his correspondence with Charles, it only reveals the extreme difficulty of the situation in
