“Hence,” says Velly, “these enterprises of the popes, who, “considering themselves as the dispensers of an “empire, of which they were only the first subjects, “assumed under the cloak of a purely spiritual “authority, to dispose sovereignly of empires. “Hence, the enormous power of the bishops, who, “after having dethroned the father at the solicitation “of the children, believed themselves empowered to “elect, confirm or depose their masters; ambitious “prelates, rather warriors than priests, scarcely “knowing how to read, much less write; terrible “notwithstanding, as well from the spiritual thunders “which they after, as Pasquier expresses it, tilted “too freely and carelessly with, as from the tem− “poral power which they had usurped in their cities “and dioceses. Hence these almost independent “principalities that the monks established in those “countries, where some years before they tilled, with “their own hands, the grounds which a pious liberally “had abandoned to them.”
¹⁰⁷ Hist of France, vol. 2 (in 12), p. 244.
Although there had been no authentic act which erected the pope into a sovereign, and which freed from the imperial supremacy the authority which he exercised at Rome, his power nevertheless became in effect independent; and as, in consecrating the emperors, he already considered himself as creating them, since he dared to speak of their dignity as a favour for which they were indebted to him, he doubtless had the means of placing limits to that obedience which they might be desirous of exacting from him. Far from imposing laws on him in his own states, they often acquiesced in his, even in the exercise of their civil rights and political powers. In the course of the succeeding centuries, every thing depended, not on the progress of ignorance or the return of knowledge alone, but on the personal energy of the kings and of the pontiffs individually.
PROTESTANTS take a malicious pleasure in pourtraying the court of Rome in the tenth century, and in extracting from Liutprand a contemporary author, the unedifying details with which he has filled up the ecclesiastical and political history of this period. But without examining whether the relations of this writer are as faithful as they are satirical, we may say with Fleury¹⁰⁸ that Rome under these unworthy popes ceased not to be the centre of Christendom. We may add with other theologians, that so many abuses not having drawn after them the destruction of the Holy See, their very excess serves to manifest the care of Providence to maintain this visible focus of Catholic unity.