Читать книгу Crises in the History of the Papacy. Lives and Legacy of the Most Influential Popes Who Shaped the Development & History of Church онлайн

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Charlemagne again ignored the Pope's efforts, and soon had the Spoletan and Beneventan troops co-operating with his own against the Greeks. Hadrian obtained no control over Spoleto and Beneventum, and the fact that he does not charge Charlemagne with failing to keep faith with the Blessed Peter casts further discredit on the supposed donation. In Venetia and Istria he had no influence whatever, and his agents were barbarously treated.134 Corsica never enters his correspondence. His power was confined to the Roman duchy, the exarchate, and the Pentapolis; and even there it was much assailed. It is true that in an hour of resolution he forbade Charlemagne to interfere in an ecclesiastical election at Ravenna, and it was as master of Ravenna that he gave Charlemagne the marbles and mosaics of the old palace. But he complained bitterly that Charlemagne listened to his critics in Ravenna,135 and he had repeatedly to appeal to Frank authority to enforce his sentences. To the end his letters to Charlemagne were querulous and exacting. A few years before his death he heard that Offa of England was proposing to Charlemagne to depose him, and he protested, with more petulance than dignity, that he had been elected, not by men, but by Jesus Christ.136