ADRIAN I, Pope. - Pontiff from 1 (6) February 772 to 26 (25) December 795.
Born in Rome of an aristocratic family, having lost his father Theodore at a tender age, he received assistance and education from his uncle Theodatus, consul and duke and later primicerius. Intelligent, pious, charitable, he soon attracted the attention of Pope Paul I, who ordained him subdeacon. He was a deacon when he was called to succeed Stephen III in particularly difficult circumstances. His first concern was to break the influence of Paul Afiarta, an agent of Lombard policy, toward whom his predecessor had shown himself too compliant, and to this end he sent him to King Desiderius, who proposed a renewal of the agreement concluded with Stephen II, promising to restore to the Holy See the usurped territories. But Desiderius broke his word and invaded the Patrimony of St. Peter with the complicity of Afiarta himself, who, also convicted of the part he had played in the killing of the secundicerius Sergius, which had occurred during the previous pontificate, was seized by the archbishop of Ravenna and put to death against the will of the Pontiff, who intended only to exile him.
In the face of the renewed pressure of the Lombard threat, A. did not hesitate to pursue to the end the path already hinted at by his predecessors, appealing to Frankish aid, and indeed he turned to Charlemagne. The latter, having rapidly crossed the Alps in 773, defeated the Lombards and laid siege to Pavia, arriving in Rome on the occasion of Easter 774. Thus there took place, on Easter Wednesday, 6 April, a memorable meeting in the secretarium of St. Peter, and in it Charlemagne undertook to fulfill the promise made at Quierzy-sur-Oise in 754 to Pope Stephen II, according to which the pontifical domains were to extend to the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, to Tuscia, to Corsica, to the Venetian lagoon, to Istria, in addition to the duchy of Rome, the Pentapolis, and the exarchate of Ravenna, as it was before the conquest by Liutprand.
It will be useful to say at once that to many historians the conventions of Quierzy and Rome appeared implausible, while others, in agreement with Duchesne (Liber Pontificalis, I, Paris 1886, pp. CCXXXVI-LIII), hold them to be simply authentic, though all admit that, if they ever existed, they must have remained on an ideal plane which the Carolingians did not then concern themselves with realizing. And in fact only through successive concessions, obtained from Charlemagne in the course of two other journeys to Rome in 781 and 787, did A. succeed in constituting the Papal State approximately as it was maintained throughout the Middle Ages until Pius IX. Nevertheless Charles, in his capacity as patricius Romanorum, sought to arrogate to himself the direction of foreign policy and a right of high supervision in internal affairs. The interference of his agents proved, at times, quite troublesome, so much so that A. was forced to protest, but always ending by reaching an agreement. In this way he succeeded in persuading the Frankish king to refrain from intervening in the election of the archbishop of Ravenna (Ep. 48, ad Carolum regem: PL, 98, coll. 416-18).
Considerable too was the more properly ecclesiastical activity of A. In the first place he worked greatly to repress abuses in episcopal elections and to withdraw the churches from Carolingian caesaropapism; thus he restored all rights to the old metropolitan sees (Ep. ad Bertherium episc.: PL 96, 1215-16). It remains a fact, however, that his delicate position with respect to Charlemagne did not permit him to carry out all the necessary and desired reforms. According to Sigebert of Gembloux he would have granted to Charlemagne, returned to Rome after the capture of Pavia (774), the right to elect the Pope and the right of investiture for the episcopal sees of his kingdom. This fable, which probably dates back to the period of Otto I, is already mentioned in a decree of the antipope Leo VIII in 963, and later passed into the Decretum of Gratian under the name of Privilegium Hadriani pro Carolo.
The clergy of the Franks had taken up the habit of bearing arms and waging war. Hereupon A. called this matter to the attention of Charlemagne (Ep. 25: PL 98, 367). He also worked for the unification of the Roman and Gallican liturgy, sending to the same sovereign a copy of the Gregorian Sacramentary (ca. 780), just as in 774 he had sent him the Collection of canons of Dionysius the Little.
A.'s influence on the Spanish Church was eminently disciplinary and doctrinal. In one of his two letters to Egilas (PL 98, 333 and 346) he treats of the fast of Wednesday and Saturday, of the feast of Easter, of predestination, of grace and of free will. Two dogmatic letters were also dedicated by him to the question of Spanish Adoptionism (PL 99, 374 and 386; see also ADOPTIONISM).
The most important religious event of A.'s pontificate was the restoration of ecclesiastical unity between East and West, a unity broken by the iconoclast persecution. At the second Council of Nicaea, the seventh ecumenical (787), in which the Pope took part by sending two legates, the cult of the saints, of their images and of their relics was recognized as legitimate and salutary. The letter of the Pontiff to the empress Irene and to her son Constantine VI, a letter in which the Roman primacy was highly proclaimed, was solemnly approved by the Fathers of the council. This council, being composed almost exclusively of Orientals, and the bishops of the West not having been invited to it, was very poorly regarded by Charlemagne and his theologians. The Latin translation of its acts, carried out by order of A., turned out particularly defective. Thus the Greek word προσκύνησις, which means veneration, was rendered by adoratio, as if the council had defined the adoration of images. At the inspiration and under the direct control of Charlemagne, a group of theologians composed a detailed and polemical refutation of everything in the conciliar acts that struck them unfavorably, and from this came what were called the Libri carolini. A. then took up his pen to defend the council and to provide the necessary explanations to the Frankish king, and he did so in a tone of gentle firmness and with remarkable erudition (PL 98, 1247-92; Mansi, XIII, 759-810). But it seems that this reply arrived too late to prevent the Synod of Frankfurt of 794 from condemning the Council of Nicaea, as one that would have taught the adoration of images.
A.'s biographer tells us that he was a great lover of churches, amator ecclesiarum, and he insists on the restorations and embellishments of which the Roman basilicas and churches were the object during his pontificate; nor did A. fail to distinguish himself by great charity toward the poor. He died on Christmas Day 795, after a pontificate of about twenty-four years. Charlemagne mourned in him a friend and a father and had engraved on marble an epitaph of nineteen distichs, which is today walled onto the back wall of the portico of the Vatican basilica (cf. G. B. De Rossi, L'inscription du tombeau d'A. I, in Mélanges d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'École française de Rome, 8 [1888], pp. 478-501).
The character of A. presents a remarkable combination of firmness and adaptability. Inflexible toward the Lombard king, he showed himself conciliatory without baseness toward Charlemagne, while employing all the uncommon resources of his skillful diplomacy for the greater good of the faith and the exaltation of the Holy See. One would almost be tempted to reproach him with some weakness in repressing certain abuses, if, as we said, one did not bear in mind the fact that the very character of his relations with Charlemagne forced him into particular considerations. His dogmatic letters reveal a patristic erudition that is anything but common. Quotations from the Greek Fathers abound in them, a phenomenon very rare in the West during the Middle Ages.
Bibliography7 works
Martino Jugie