"In the name of the holy and undivided Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the Emperor Caesar Flavius Constantine ... to the most holy and blessed Father of Fathers, Silvester, bishop of Rome and Pope, and to all his successors in the seat of St. Peter to the end of the world...." Here comes, interspersed with snatches of Christian dogma, a rambling narrative of his leprosy, of the advice of his physicians to bathe in a font on the Capitol filled with the warm blood of babies; how he refused, how Peter and Paul appeared in a dream and sent him to Silvester, how he then abjured paganism, accepted the creed, was baptized and healed, and how he then recognized that heathen gods were demons and that Peter and his successors had all power on earth and in heaven. After this long preamble comes the grant: "We, together with all our Satraps and the whole Senate, Nobles and People ... have thought it desirable that even as St. Peter is on earth the appointed Vicar of God, so also the Pontiffs his viceregents should receive from us and from our Empire, power and principality greater than belongs to us ... and to the extent of our earthly Imperial power we decree that the Sacrosanct Church of Rome shall be honoured and venerated, and that higher than our terrestrial throne shall the most sacred seat of St. Peter be gloriously exalted. "Let him who for the time shall be pontiff over the holy Church of Rome ... be sovereign of all the priests in the whole world; and by his judgment let all things which pertain to the worship of God or the faith of Christians be regulated.... _We hand over and relinquish our palace, the city of Rome, and all the provinces, places, and cities of Italy and the western regions, to the most blessed Pontiff and universal Pope, Silvester_; and we ordain by our pragmatic constitution that they shall be governed by him and his successors, and we grant that they shall remain under the authority of the holy Roman Church."[5] The date of this document and many statements in it are anachronisms and errors. It was composed about the time of Pippin's _Donation_, probably by somebody connected with the papal chancery, and may be considered to be a pious forgery representing the facts as the writer deemed they were or else should be. It was officially referred to for the first time in 777, but did not receive its full celebrity until the eleventh century, when the relations of the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire became the centre of European history. FOOTNOTES: [5] _Italy and her Invaders_, T. Hodgkin, vol. vii, pp. 149-151; _Select Historical Documents of the Middle Ages_, Ernest F. Henderson, pp. 319-329. CHAPTER VI CHARLEMAGNE (768-814)