A fact(215) which enters deep into the world’s history bears remarkable witness to the rapid increase of papal wealth and its inevitable accompaniment, the political independence of St. Peter’s chair. From the time the unity of the Roman realm began to be dissolved into two empires, the eastern and the western, not a single western ruler fixed his seat abidingly in Rome, although almost all lived in Italy, and although many of them could have put to good use, amid the State’s increasing weakness, the help which the charm of the Roman name offered. After the death of Constantine the Great in 337, of his three sons Constantius I. received the East, Constans I. received the West in union with his younger brother Constantine II., but after his murder, alone. This Constans usually dwelt in Gaul. When he visited Italy we find him prefer Milan and Aquileia to Rome. He yielded to the insurgent Maxentius, and then Constantius became sole master of the realm, and, when in the West, lived chiefly in Milan. In his whole reign once only did he enter Rome.(216) The second division of the realm, which followed the emperor Jovian, gave Valentinian for ruler of the West, who selected at first Milan for residence, but was compelled by incursions of the German peoples to spend much time on the Rhine. We learn, partly from the history of St. Ambrose, partly from other documents, that the sons and successors of Valentinian I., Gratian, and Valentinian II., as well as the mother and guardian of the latter, the widowed empress Justina, when in Italy held their court chiefly at Milan and Aquileia. The third and final partition, which severed the West for ever from the East, took place in 395 after the death of the Spaniard, Theodosius I., whom Gratian had taken for his partner. From that time not Rome, not Milan, or Aquileia, but the seaport Ravenna appears the permanent residence of those phantom-emperors who ruled for nearly a century until the full dissolution of the western empire. The political significance of the last city even remarkably survived the name of the Roman empire. We are expressly told that Odoacer, the first German king of Italy, who deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last West Roman, had his seat in Ravenna. The same was the case with Odoacer’s conqueror, the great Ostrogoth, Theodorich. During his government Ravenna received the title of the royal city, though the Ostrogoth often lived in other great cities of upper Italy, such as Pavia and Verona. Finally Ravenna, after the extinction of the Ostrogothic state and people, remained for nearly two hundred years the seat of the exarchs, Byzantine viceroys of Italy.