For the rest, the private lives of the popes is not the object which claims our attention; we shall only consider their political relations with secular governments. In confining ourselves to this view, we shall not be troubled with unravelling the thread of succession, somewhat confused, of thirty popes, who, in the course of this century, have occupied, more or less legitimately, the chair of St. Peter. When two shall start up at the same moment, we shall not stop to inquire which of them is the true one; we shall not take on us to decide between Baronius, who never wishes to recognize save the worthiest or the most canonically elected, and those authors who adhere to the most effective, that is, to the man who has more decisively exercised the pontifical power: these are delicate questions, requiring long discussions, and the investigation of a multitude of petty circumstances, foreign to the history of those great disputes between the pontiffs and kings. In the midst of those things and of those changes, two points appear to us incontrovertible; one, that the Holy See was at this period reckoned in the number of temporal governments; the other, that occupied with its own affairs, and the interior troubles which agitated it, it lost, without, a large portion of the influence and power which the preceding century had bequeathed to it. The first of these consequences is confirmed by Constantine Porphyrogenites, the Greek Emperor, who, previous to the middle of the tenth century, digested a sort of statistical table of the east and of the west: he in it represents the popes as ‘sovereigns of Rome’.
Even in modifying this incorrect expression, we must admit, that this text places the bishops of Rome in the rank of princes who immediately governed states. As to the second conclusion, it followed almost of course: pleasure ever extinguishes the fire of ambition, discord shackles power, and the intrigues which employ us within, suspend our exterior projects; he who is compelled to defend himself in the bosom of his palace never meditates distant attacks. The excommunications so familiar to Gregory III. to Nicholas I. and to John VIII. menace, therefore, less frequently crowned heads. Theological opinions themselves become less exposed to anathemas. We find no general council, no new heresy in the tenth century.