770-789 Danes Invade England, Charlemagne Destroys Lombards

In this twenty year period the West Saxon King Beorhtric became king of the English in 786;  in 787 the very first Danish Invasion on the Dorset coast occurred; and Charlemagne destroyed the Lombard kingdom by 774.

In Rome, Pope Stephen IV had cast aside Charlemagne and his Frankish allies and thrown in his lot with the Lombards. 

In 772, Hadrian I succeeded Stephen as pope and tried to extricate Rome from the Lombards, demanding the Lombard king Desiderius to restore lands to the Holy See.

King Desiderius refused and Charlemagne came to Pope Hadrian I's assistance, destroying the Lombard kingdom between 773-774.

Arriving in Rome, Charlemagne gave the pope a document promising to give the papacy a large portion of the Italian peninsula in return for giving up Tuscany and Spoleto.

With the papacy's power restored, Pope Hadrian I then proposed at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 that inconaclasm, favoured by Constantinople, be condemned and in doing so he drove a further wedge between the eastern and the western church.