With their consent, he pronounced a general excommunication against all who by word or deed should attack the tradition of the fathers and the images of the saints: in this sentence the emperor was tacitly involved, 40 but the vote of a last and hopeless remonstrance may seem to imply that the anathema was yet suspended over his guilty head. No sooner had they confirmed their own safety, the worship of images, and the freedom of Rome and Italy, than the popes appear to have relaxed of their severity, and to have spared the relics of the Byzantine dominion. Their moderate councils delayed and prevented the election of a new emperor, and they exhorted the Italians not to separate from the body of the Roman monarchy. The exarch was permitted to reside within the walls of Ravenna, a captive rather than a master; and till the Imperial coronation of Charlemagne, the government of Rome and Italy was exercised in the name of the successors of Constantine. 41 37 (return) [ I shall transcribe the important and decisive passage of the Liber Pontificalis. Respiciens ergo pius vir profanam principis jussionem, jam contra Imperatorem quasi contra hostem se armavit, renuens haeresim ejus, scribens ubique se cavere Christianos, eo quod orta fuisset impietas talis. Igitur permoti omnes Pentapolenses, atque Venetiarum exercitus contra Imperatoris jussionem restiterunt; dicentes se nunquam in ejusdem pontificis condescendere necem, sed pro ejus magis defensione viriliter decertare, (p. 156.)] 38 (return) [ A census, or capitation, says Anastasius, (p. 156;) a most cruel tax, unknown to the Saracens themselves, exclaims the zealous Maimbourg, (Hist. des Iconoclastes, l. i.,) and Theophanes, (p. 344,) who talks of Pharaoh’s numbering the male children of Israel. This mode of taxation was familiar to the Saracens; and, most unluckily for the historians, it was imposed a few years afterwards in France by his patron Louis XIV.] 39 (return) [ See the Liber Pontificalis of Agnellus, (in the Scriptores Rerum Italicarum of Muratori, tom. ii. pars i.,) whose deeper shade of barbarism marks the difference between Rome and Ravenna. Yet we are indebted to him for some curious and domestic facts—the quarters and factions of Ravenna, (p. 154,) the revenge of Justinian II, (p. 160, 161,) the defeat of the Greeks, (p. 170, 171,) &c.]