The action of Desiderius at this eventful crisis of his nation’s history is not easy to understand: it is only possible here to describe its general course without entering into details. He seems to have recognized that he had an enemy in the new pope and one of a more determined kind than either Paul I. or Stephen III., whose demands for a further cession of territory he had been for the last fifteen years successfully evading. Apparently, however, he cherished the hope that by a judicious mixture of threats and entreaties he might draw the pope over to his side and induce him to anoint the infant sons of Carloman as Kings of the Franks. For to this desperate act of defiance to Charles was he now impelled both by the memory of his daughter’s wrongs and by the conviction that, sooner or later, war must again break out between the Frank and the Lombard. In this frame of mind he despatched alternately embassies to sue for the pope’s friendship and armies to invade his territory. The rapid changes of his attitude probably irritated the pontiff then as much as they perplex the historian to-day. First Faenza, Ferrara, and Comacchio, the latest acquisitions of the papacy, were occupied; then Ravenna was closely pressed; Urbino and the greater part of the Pentapolis were invaded; Blera and Otriculum, not a day’s journey from Rome, were entered by the Lombard troops, who in the former city are said to have perpetrated a cruel massacre of the unresisting inhabitants. But all these violent measures failed to shake the resolution of Hadrian or induce him to consent to an interview with Desiderius. His uniform answer to the Lombard ambassadors was, “First let your master restore the possessions of which he has unjustly despoiled St. Peter; and then, but not till then, will I grant him an interview.” At last, when the Lombard king was evidently preparing to tighten his grip on Rome itself, Pope Hadrian sent a messenger named Peter to beg for the help of the great King of the Franks. At the same time he did what he could to put the city in a state of defence, gathering in soldiers from Tuscany, Campania, and the Pentapolis, removing the most precious adornments of the churches of St. Peter and St. Paul to safer custody within the walls of the city, and barring up all the doors of St. Peter’s so that the Lombard king, without some violent act of sacrilege, should not be able to enter.