Charles appears to have spent his Christmas under canvas before the walls of Pavia, or else in one of the numerous expeditions by which he brought the cities on the left bank of the Po into his obedience. But as the siege still dragged on, though there could be little doubt of its final event, when Easter approached, Charles, with a brilliant train of dukes and counts, of bishops and abbots, journeyed through Tuscany to Rome. Never had his father, King Pippin, though he had twice crossed the Alps, visited the Eternal City, and this was Charles’s first visit to that Rome with which his name was to be inseparably linked in after ages. He went by forced marches, hastening to be in Rome on the eve of Easter Sunday. At thirty miles from the city, Pope Hadrian ordered that he should be met by the nobles of the _Ducatus Romae_, displaying the banner of St. Peter. At one mile from the city the various squadrons of the Roman militia with their officers and the boys out of the schools met him, all bearing palm-branches and olive-branches and crosses, and singing loud his praises, for Hadrian had ordered that in all things the reception of the King of the Franks should do him as great honor as ever had been done of old to the patrician and exarch arriving from Ravenna. When Charles saw the crosses and the banners he dismounted from his horse and went on foot with all his nobles to the church of St. Peter. There on the top of the steps stood Pope Hadrian, with all the clergy and people of Rome who had arisen at dawn to be ready to welcome the victorious king. As he ascended each step, Charles knelt down and kissed the venerable stones; and so he reached the summit where, in the long _atrium_ outside the doors of the church the pope stood waiting to receive him. King and pontiff were clasped in mutual embrace (we hear nothing of the abject prostrations performed by later emperors before later popes), and then holding Hadrian’s right hand Charles entered the great basilica, while all the clergy and all the monks shouted with loud voices, “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.” Then the king and all the Frankish nobles and churchmen in his train knelt at the tomb of St. Peter, thanking God for the great victories already wrought through the intervention of the Prince of the Apostles. On the three following days, at Sta. Maria Maggiore, at St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, the king, after humbly imploring the papal permission, offered up his prayers to God, and on Easter Sunday there was a great banquet at the Lateran. Thus we come to the Wednesday on which an important piece of business was transacted between the two potentates. So much here turns on a few words that it will be well to give a literal translation of the passage in the _Liber Pontificalis_ (our only authority), which describes this memorable interview.