The king lodged Stephen in the monastery of St. Denys for the winter, and well on into the next summer. There Stephen was attacked by an illness so dangerous that his recovery was regarded as a miracle, due to the intercessions of St. Dionys, St. Peter, and St. Paul; where again we notice the twinship of St. Peter and St. Paul as regards the protection of the Pope, with the local saint added. After the return of the Pope to Rome, he was besieged by the Lombard king, who vowed not to leave him a scrap of territory the size of the palm of his hand. The Pope sent to Pepin a letter of entreaty and threat. The king, he said, hazarded eternal condemnation. He had vowed to secure to St. Peter the vast donation to which reference has been made, and St. Peter had promised to him eternal life. If the king was not faithful to his word, the Saint kept firmly the donation, as it were the sign manual of the king, and this he would produce against him at the day of judgement.[179] The envoys came late in the year, and the king could not conduct an army into Italy in the winter. In February, 755, or a little earlier, Stephen wrote another letter, with a literally awe-full account of the horrors of the siege, which had then lasted fifty-five days. He conjured Pepin to come and help, “by God and his holy Mother, by the powers of the heavens, by the apostles Peter and Paul, and by the last day.” The collocation and the order of these adjurations is significant. Still Pepin did not come. The Pope then resorted to the blasphemous proceeding which it has seemed necessary to describe. We may suppose that the Pope’s metaphorical statement—that St. Peter had Pepin’s sign manual to a document which would be produced against him at the day of judgement—had suggested to the harassed mind of the Pope the idea that an immediate letter from St. Peter himself would be more effective than the threat to produce signatures at the day of judgement; and that if the letter was addressed to the Franks at large, and not as the former letter to Pepin and his sons, the whole nation would be terrified into prompt action. However that may have been, a letter[180] was written with the heading: “Peter, called to be an Apostle by Jesus Christ the Son of the living God ... and [after a long paragraph] Stephen the prelate of the catholic and apostolic Roman Church, ... to the most excellent kings Pepin, Charles, and Carloman, with all the bishops, abbats, priests, and all monks; all judges, dukes, counts, military officers, and the whole people of the Franks.” The letter begins with the words “Ego Petrus Apostolus”, I, Peter the Apostle. In it St. Peter adjures those whom he addresses to rescue Rome from the Lombards, making a special appeal that his own body, which suffered torture for the Lord Jesus Christ, may be preserved from desecration. “With me,” he proceeds, “the Mother of God likewise adjures you, and admonishes and commands you, she as well as the thrones and