The Roman Pontiff had not yet stretched forth his mighty hand from the seat of ancient empire to allay dissension, and to enforce obedience to the edicts of the greatest hierarchy that has ever arisen to enchain the intelligence and repress the independent aspirations of mankind. The final decisions of councils had not been formulated upon controverted points of doctrine. The Patriarch of Constantinople--first in ecclesiastical precedence, yet almost rivalled in pomp and prestige by the great episcopal dignitaries of Antioch, Alexandria, and Carthage--exacted with difficulty the reverence of the giddy and scoffing mob of the capital, and could not always maintain the dignity of his office, even in the presence of his sovereign, who was sometimes a skeptic and often a tyrant. Nor was the civil power, to which the ecclesiastical system was still jealously subordinated, in a less degraded condition. The authority of the Emperor was persistently defied in the precincts of his own palace, which, with the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, had become the theatre of the treasonable plots and licentious intrigues of infamous combinations of every class and nationality, and where a portentous union of monks, eunuchs, and women reigned unquestioned and supreme. A cumbrous and pompous etiquette; a theatrical display of costumes and devices; a court swarming with buffoons and parasites; an atmosphere of cowardice, duplicity, effeminacy, and corruption had supplanted the high sense of national honor, the austere dignity, the proud consciousness of superior manhood which, in the early days of republican simplicity and imperial grandeur, marked the exercise of Roman power. The incursions of pirates, which the diminished naval power of the emperors was inadequate to check, had driven commerce from the sea.