ADRIAN I. Pope, ascended the papal throne, A.D. 772. He was the son of Theodore, a Roman nobleman, and possessed considerable talents for business. He maintained a steady attachment to Charlemagne, which provoked Desiderius, a king of the Lombards, to invade the state of Ravenna, and to threaten Rome itself. Charlemagne rewarded his attachment, by marching with a great army to his aid; and having gained many considerable advantages over Desiderius, he visited the pope at Rome, and expressed his piety, by the humiliating ceremony of kissing each of the steps, as he ascended to the church of St Peter. The affairs of the church now claimed Adrian's particular attention: for Irene, who, in 780, assumed the regency at Constantinople, during the minority of her son Constantine, wishing to restore the worship of images, applied to Adrian for his concurrence. The pontiff readily acquiesced in her proposal for calling a council, and commissioned two legates to attend it. The first council, however, was dispersed by an insurrection of the citizens; but at the next meeting in the city of Nice, in 787, which was protected by a military force, a decree was passed for restoring the worship of images. Adrian approved the decree, but in the western church it was deemed heretical and dangerous. Charlemagne condemned the innovation, and the French and English clergy concurred in opposing it. A treatise, containing 120 heads of refutation, was circulated, as the work of Charlemagne, under the title of "The Caroline Books," in opposition to the decree of the council. This work was presented to the pope by the king's ambassador, and the pope wrote a letter to Charlemagne by way of reply. The king, and also the Gallican and English churches, retained their sentiments; and, in 794, a council was held at Frankfort on the Maine, confining about 300 western bishops, by which every kind of image-worship was condemned. Adrian did not live to see a termination of this contest; for after a pontificate of nearly twenty-four years, he died in 795. Adrian seems to have directed his chief attention to the embellishment of the churches, and the improvement of the city of Rome; and he was probably furnished by Charlemagne, out of the plunder of his conquests, with ample means for this purpose.