But during that year (772) these Italian complications were rapidly increasing. At the end of January came the death of Pope Stephen III., the Sicilian, a weak and ineffectual man, who during all his short pontificate had been pulled this way and that by the two factions, the Lombard and the Frankish, which divided the nobility of Rome. When his insolent letter to Charles failed to divert him from the Lombard alliance, he had thrown himself into the arms of Desiderius, and allowed the Lombard faction, headed by a certain Paulus Afiarta, to work their lawless will in Rome, banishing, blinding, imprisoning, putting to death the chiefs of the opposite party. Now, however, on the death of the Sicilian, a very different man was raised to the vacant papal chair. This was Hadrian I., a man of Roman birth, of spotless if somewhat ambitious character, capable of forming and executing large and statesmanlike plans, a man not altogether unworthy in point of intellect to be compared to the great Emperor whose name he bore. His pontificate, one of the longest in the papal annals, lasted very nearly twenty-four years (772–795), so that he narrowly missed “seeing the years of St. Peter,” and during this long space of time, common hopes, common dangers, common enterprises drew him and Charles sometimes very close together, and though there were also some sharp disputes between them, the king, we are told, “regarded the pope as his chief friend, and when he received the tidings of his death wept for him as for a much loved son or brother.” 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.