The relation between East and West is also very distinctly stated. The East lies crouching almost helpless beneath an unalloyed despotism, whilst all the nations of the West look up to St. Peter in Rome “as a God upon earth”. When this was written just ninety years had passed since the sepulchre of Christ had fallen into subjection to the infidel and no less anti-Christian Saracen. The pilgrims who could no longer go to the sepulchre of Christ went to the sepulchre of the fisherman, and saw in the statue of St. Peter in his own Basilica the symbol of Christ reigning. But likewise all the kings of the West looked upon the successor of St. Peter as no less seated on the throne of justice, of peace, of concord, of charity, than as the supreme oracle of the Christian faith. What the patriarch Sophronius had said of him in the agony of the holy city before the impure Omar, the nations of the West knew and felt him to be. As Leo III. threatened to destroy the statue of Peter, so they went to him for baptism, so their kings were already buried in peace beneath the shadow of the Vatican. In 716, the year before the accession of Leo III., Theodon, Duke of Bavaria, came to Rome, being the first German prince who made a pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostles, as later on in 726, the very year in which the nefarious proceedings of Leo III. began, Ina, king of Wessex, with his queen Ethelberga came and began the school of the English in Rome, and made his land tributary to the Romescot.(170) So Constantine the Bearded had acknowledged the authority which his successor was trying to diminish, while he sought to reduce the Christian Church, instinct with the presence, the miracles, the sufferings of our Lord, His Mother, and His Saints, to the bareness of the Jewish synagogue and the Mohammedan mosque. It may be observed also that the Pope associates his own office with that of bishops throughout the world, especially with that of Germanus, as bishop of the imperial city. In his mind the bishops belong to the Pope, and the Pope no less to the bishops. There is no jealousy of them in his supremacy, nor of him in their subordinate jurisdiction. He censures Leo III. for not consulting his patriarch, Germanus. The authority which he so clearly describes is one and the same in the whole episcopate, where St. Gregory II. himself according to the language used three centuries before of St. Leo the Great is “princeps episcopalis coronæ”. All these things come out not in the way of controversy but in an uncontroversial and authoritative exhortation of a Pope to an emperor. The Pope is clad in spiritual armour only in the midst of a captive province; the emperor is the master of fleets and legions behind the walls of Constantine.