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Home | Christain Leader | Pope Adrian I
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Shortly after Adrian's accession the territory ruled by the papacy was invaded by Desiderius, king of the Lombards, and Adrian was compelled to seek the assistance of the Frankish king Charlemagne, who entered Italy with a large army. Charlemagne besieged Desiderius in his capital of Pavia; after taking the town he banished the Lombard king to the abbey of Corbie in France, and adopted the title "King of the Lombards" himself. The pope, whose expectations had been aroused, had to content himself with some additions to the duchy of Rome, and to the Exarchate of Ravenna, and the Pentapolis in the Marches, which consisted of the "five cities" on the Adriatic coast from Rimini to Ancona with the coastal plain as far as the mountains. He celebrated the occasion by striking the earliest papal coin, and in a mark of the direction the mediaeval papacy was to take, no longer dated his documents by the Emperor in the east, but by the reign of Charles, king of the Franks. A mark of such newly settled conditions in the Duchy of Rome is the Domusculta Capracorum, the central villa on the Roman plan that Adrian assembled from a nucleus of his inherited estates and acquisitions from neighbors in the countryside north of Veii. The villa is documented in Liber Pontificalis but its site was not rediscovered until the 1960s, when excavations revealed the structures on a gently rounded hill that was only marginally capable of self-defense but fully self-sufficient, with its own grain mill, smithies and tile-kilns, for a mixed economy of grains and vineyards, olives, vegetable gardens and piggery. During the 10th century villages were carved out of Adrian's Capracorum estate: Campagnano mentioned first in 1076, Formello mentioned in 1027, Mazzano in 945, and Stabia (modern Faleria) in 998. |