To this course he was impelled all the more as Frederic, in further proof of his contempt of the most sacred obligations, when they stood in the way of his ambition, shortly added to his crimes against the Church another against public morals, by wantonly repudiating, out of motives of state policy, his lawful empress, to marry in her stead Beatrix of Burgundy. Any remnants of hesitation to adopt extreme measures which Adrian might still cherish, were completely eradicated in his mind by this crying scandal; and he at once prepared a ban of excommunication against the emperor; but in the moment of fulminating it, death paralysed his arm. This happened Sept. 1st, 1159, near Anagnia, in the Campagna, and according to William of Tyre, in consequence of a quinsy. Pagi relates that the partisans of Frederic told a story to this effect--that Pope Adrian died by a judgment of God, who permitted him while drinking at a well, a few days after denouncing excommunication against the emperor, to swallow a fly, which stuck in his throat, and could not be extracted by the surgeons, till the patient had expired through the inflammation produced by the accident. Adrian, however, did not excommunicate the emperor at all, but died on the eve of doing so. His body was carried to Rome, and entombed in a costly sarcophagus of marble, beside that of Eugenius III., in the nave of the old basilica of St. Peter. In the year 1607, on the demolition of this church, the body was exhumed and found entire, as well as the pontificals in which it was arrayed. It was re-interred under the pavement of the new basilica. According to Pagi, Pope Adrian IV. composed Catechisms of Christian Doctrine for the Swedes and Norwegians, a Memoir of his Mission to those nations--_de Legatione sua_--various Homilies, and a Treatise on the Conception of the Blessed Virgin,--performances which appear to have perished. The work, describing his mission to the north, must have been of great interest for the light which it no doubt threw on the history and manners of those countries. Munter, the church historian of Denmark, mentions that he sought to discover it at Rome, but without success; it being supposed, if still extant, to lie buried beneath the impracticable hoards of the Vatican.