Another theory for which some good arguments may be adduced, is that in this promised gift we are still dealing not with a grant of sovereignty but with a restitution of property; that for instance when Spoleto and Benevento are mentioned, all that Charles undertook, or at least meant to undertake, was that any “patrimonies” in either of those duchies of which the see of St. Peter had been unjustly despoiled by the Lombards should be restored to it. It is not for the present author to pretend to decide a question on which so many able scholars are at issue, and to which so many special treatises have been devoted; but the impression produced on his mind is that at least the hand of the interpolator, if not that of the wholesale fabricator, must have been at work in the passage which he has quoted from the _Liber Pontificalis_. Having finished his conferences with the Pope, in which he discussed with him many matters ecclesiastical as well as civil, Charles returned to his camp under the walls of Pavia. It was now the tenth month of the siege: disease and probably famine were pressing the defenders hard: and Desiderius, who had never been a popular sovereign, heard on every side of the defection of his countrymen. At length on a certain Tuesday in June (774) the city opened her gates to her conqueror. The great hoard was handed over, the nobles and chief men from all the cities of northern Italy came to Charles seated in the royal palace of Pavia, and acknowledged him as their lord: the dominion of the Lombards in Italy was at an end.[34] To Desiderius and his family Charles showed himself merciful in his triumph. The fallen king was carried across the Alps, accompanied by his wife and one daughter (whether this was the divorced wife of Charles we know not), and was invited to enter the seclusion of a monastery, in Austrasia, where, if any faith is to be placed in the stories that were current a century or two after his death, he devoted himself with assiduity to the duties of the cloister, and even declared that he would not desire to resume his crown, having entered the service of the King of Kings.