Page:Toleration and other essays.djvu/182

158 municipal government. Not by the authority of your bishop, Gregory III., but of your own decision, you offered the dignity of patrician to the great Charles Martel, master of his king, conqueror of the Saracens in the year 741 of our faulty vulgar era.

Believe not that it was the Bishop Leo III. who made Charlemagne emperor; it is an absurd romance of the secretary Eginhard, a vile flatterer of the popes, who had won him. By what right and in what way could a subject bishop make an emperor? Emperors were created only by the people, or by the armies that took the place of the people.

It was you, people of Rome, who used your rights ; you who would no longer depend on a Greek emperor, who gave you no aid; you who appointed Charlemagne, or he would have been a usurper. The annalists of the time agree that all was arranged by Carolo and your leading officers, as is, indeed, most probable. Your bishop's only share in its was to conduct an empty ceremony and receive rich presents. The only authority he had in your city was that of the prestige attaching to his mitre, his clergy, and his ability.

But while you gave yourselves to Charlemagne, you retained the election of your officers. The police was in your hands; you kept possession of the mole of Adrian, so absurdly called in later times the Castello Sant' Angelo; and you were not wholly enslaved until your bishops seized that fortress.

They made their way step by step to that supreme greatness, so expressly forbidden them by him whom they call their God, and of whom they dare to call themselves the vicars. They had never any juris-