At the period of the Burgundian conquest Geneva possessed a bishop, and the invasion of the Germans soon gave this prelate considerable power. Gifted with intelligence far superior to that of the men by whom they were surrounded, respected by the barbarians as the high-priests of Rome, knowing how to acquire vast possessions by slow degrees, and thus becoming the most important personages in the cities where they resided, the bishops laboured to protect their city from abroad and to govern it at home. Finally they confiscated without much ceremony the independence of the people, and united the quality of prince with that of bishop. In 1124 Aymon, Count of Genevois, by an agreement made with Humbert of Grammont, Bishop of Geneva, gave up the city to the latter,[23] reserving only the old palace and part of the criminal jurisprudence, but continuing to hold the secondary towns and the rural district. The institution of bishop-princes, half religious and half political, equally in disaccord with the Gospel of past ages and the liberty of the future, may have been exceptionally beneficent; but generally speaking it was a misfortune for the people of the middle ages, and particularly for Geneva. If at that time the Church had possessed humble but earnest ministers to hold up the light of the Gospel to the world, why should not the same spiritual power, which in the first century had vanquished Roman polytheism, have been able in later times to dispel the darkness of feudalism? But what could be expected of prelates who turned their croziers into swords, their flocks into serfs, their pastoral dwellings into fortified castles? _Corruptio optimi pessima._ The prince-bishop, that amphibious offspring of the barbaric invasion, cannot be maintained in christendom. The petty people of Geneva--and this is one of its titles to renown--was the first who expelled him in modern times; and the manner in which it did this is one of the pages of history we desire to transcribe. It needed truly a powerful energy--the arm of God--to undertake and carry through this first act which wrested from episcopal hands the temporal sceptre they had usurped. Since then the example of Geneva has often been followed; the feudal thrones of the bishops have fallen on the banks of the Rhine, in Belgium, Bavaria, Austria, and elsewhere; but the first throne that fell was that of Geneva, as the last will be that of Rome.