Why of so many princes bearing the title of Roman emperors or kings of Italy did no single one make his seat in the former capital of the world? Why did the greater number pay it only a transitory visit, some perhaps not see it at all? I think only one sufficient answer can be given to this question. They shunned a longer stay at Rome because they felt that in a city which had assumed a priestly character they would no longer play the first part so much as kings desire and must desire it. That fact is, therefore, an incontestable proof not only of the papal power, but likewise of its wealth. Without property no co-active force, not even spiritual, can in the long run maintain itself. The law of the year 321, allowing churches to receive landed(217) property from any testator, had results so astonishingly great, that in 50 years Valentinian I. thought it necessary to put a limit on it. We may pass at once to the time of St. Gregory the Great, the fourteen years 590 to 604. At that time the Bishop of Rome in his Lateran Palace, had become the greatest ground landlord in Italy, and even in all the West. He was the real protector of Rome. The eastern emperor bore the name, but in every need and trial it was not at Ravenna or at Constantinople that help was sought, but at the Lateran. Royal dignity waited already upon the Vicar of Christ; a dignity with which the spontaneous offerings of three hundred years had invested him. St. Gregory lived like a monk, and gave away as a king from the inexhaustible fountain of the apostolic charity. His letters enable us to form a fair estimate of the domains of the Roman Church at that time. In his unresting activity to minister aright the material wealth of the Church, the son of St. Benedict ripened the recognition of his political independence. His death preceded by 150 years the legal acknowledgment of sovereignty attained by his successor, Stephen II., and that intervening period was, as we have seen, a time of exceedingly severe trial. A notice of the deacon John, biographer of St. Gregory, informs us that in his pontificate the Roman Church possessed at least twenty-three patrimonies. These were respectively, that of Sicily, of Syracuse, of Palermo, of Calabria, of Apulia, the Samnite, the Neapolitan, the Campanian, the Tuscan, the Sabine, the Nursian, the Carseolan, that of Via Appia, of Ravenna, of Illyricum, the Istrian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, Corsican, Ligurian, that of the Cottian Alps, of Germanicia, and of Gaul.