For the first ten years of the joint reign (780–790) the lad, Constantine VI., quietly submitted to his mother’s ascendency, and only her will and her projects require the historian’s attention. The Iconoclastic spirit was strong among the soldiers of her late husband’s family, and she had to wait four years before she could openly take steps towards the restoration of the worship of images; but she seems at once to have ceased the attacks on Hadrian’s subject cities, and to have assumed a more friendly attitude towards Charles, who was not himself at this time interested in the Iconoclastic controversy, but whose friendship was important if the Patriarchate of Constantinople was to be reconciled with that of Rome. Thus it came to pass that in 781, during Charles’s second visit to Rome, there appeared in that city two high nobles of the Byzantine Court, the _sacellarius_ Constans and the _primicerius_ Mamalus, who brought proposals for a marriage between the young emperor and Charles’s daughter Hrotrud, whom the Greeks called Eruthro. It was only an alliance at some future day that was talked of, for the prospective bridegroom was but ten years old, and the Frankish princess was probably about eight. But the match was a splendid one, there having been no previous instance of a matrimonial alliance between the Roman Cæsars and the Frankish kings, and Charles gladly accepted the offer. A tutor named Elissæus was sent to the Frankish court to instruct the future empress in the Greek tongue, and there was peace in Italy between the Franks and the generals of the empire.