In reading the long-winded chronicles it is often difficult to gather to which power the various small towns at this time belonged. One point is, however, clear, that during endless contentions between the Popes and the Greek, and later the German Emperors, the Umbrian cities were often left to manage their own affairs, and because of the periods of rest which they thus enjoyed and used in their individual ways, we are inclined to speak of them as republics. For a long time Assisi remained annexed to the Duchy of Spoleto, then under the rule of the Lombard Dukes whose advent had filled the different cities in the valley with Arian Christians, unfriendly to the Papacy. Assisi, together with other towns swerved from her allegiance to the Pope, and it is perhaps on this account that Charlemagne in 773 with his "terrible and fierce followers" came to besiege her. They laid the country waste, and made many attacks upon Assisi which met with stout resistance; but while prowling round the walls one night they found the main drain, and stealing through it they were able to discover the weakest part of the town. Next night they returned well armed, slew the guards who were keeping watch by the midnight fires, and before the citizens could rush to arms, the gates were opened to Charlemagne. The army passed in, her citizens were put to the sword, and the town razed to the ground. "Thus," says a chronicler, "Assisi bereft of her inhabitants, found herself an unhappy widow. Then was the most clement emperor grieved, and ordering that the city should be rebuilt, he placed therein a new colony of Christians of the Roman faith, and the city was restored, and in it the Divine Worship."[4] A small arched doorway ornamented with a delicate frieze of foliage still remains as a record of the rebuilding of the city by Charlemagne's Lombard workmen. The stone is blackened, the tracery worn away. Few find this dark corner in the Piazza delle Rose, and the people wonder at those who stop to look, for "it is ugly and very old," they say.