During the period following the fall of the Roman Empire of the West there had been evolved the temporal power of the Roman Bishop. It had many vicissitudes. Sometimes, as in the days of St. Leo and St. Gregory, it based its claims upon noble assertions of right and justice, and sometimes, as in the hands of pontiffs like Innocent VIII. and Paul V., it sought to force its way by fanaticism. Sometimes it strengthened its authority by real services to humanity, and sometimes by such monstrous frauds as the Forged Decretals. Sometimes, as under Popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., it laid claim to the mastership of the world, and sometimes, as with the majority of the pontiffs during the two centuries before the Reformation, it became mainly the appanage of a party or faction or family. Throughout all this history, there appeared in the Church two great currents of efficient thought. On one side had been developed a theocratic theory, giving the papacy a power supreme in temporal as well as in spiritual matters throughout the world. Leaders in this during the Middle Ages were St. Thomas Aquinas and the Dominicans; leaders in Sarpi's days were the Jesuits, represented especially in the treatises of Bellarmine at Rome and in the speeches of Laynez at the Council of Trent.[1] [1] This has been admirably shown by N. R. F. Brown in his Taylorian Lecture, pages 229-234, in volume for 1889-99. But another theory, hostile to the despotism of the Church over the State, had been developed through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance;--it had been strengthened mainly by the utterances of such men as Dante, aegidio Colonna, John of Paris, Ockham, Marsilio of Padua, and Laurentius Valla. Sarpi ranged himself with the latter of these forces. Though deeply religious, he recognized the God-given right of earthly governments to discharge their duties independent of church control.