I will here insert the judgment of another historian, upon the gift of the exarchate, made by Pipin to St. Peter, in the person of the Popes:—(221) “To question the rightness of this donation is unreasonable and preposterous. Since the reconquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, Rome was regarded at Constantinople simply as a province, not as a member of the realm, or not as, what it had originally been, the seat of empire. On what could the right of Greek tyrants be founded constantly to receive back, even at second hand, conquests which they were able neither to govern nor to maintain? The assertions of some late historical writers seem to pre-suppose that all Europe, as far as the Rhine and the Danube, were placed by God for ever under the Byzantine yoke, and that the shaking off this yoke was an unpardonable injustice. Rome did under her bishops what peoples did under their kings. Rome took her opportunity to free herself from the yoke of foreign dominion and unnatural relations. No prince, no people of Europe has any other claim upon its soil to show than this and the centuries. Both tell for Rome. Before this testimony, the lesser but yet valid right disappears, that the Greek emperor had confiscated the Papal possessions situated in Lower Italy, and that nothing was more natural than that it should take the compensation which presented itself. The other question which has been also proposed, whether the office of a teacher and bishop of the Christian community can be united with a secular administration, had been long before answered. _Rome owed its actual existence solely to the protection of its bishops._ They had found their best right of sovereignty in the gratitude of the people, and long before the donation of Ravenna, they had been, if not in name, yet in fact, princes in Rome.” At the beginning of the year 756, Aistulf, the most aggressive of Lombard kings, had strictly invested Rome, ravaged its campagna, and destroyed the churches therein, while he devoutly exhumed the bodies of martyrs to transport them to new shrines in Pavia. In the spring of that year he surrendered his capital to the king of the Franks, and submitted to all the conditions imposed on him by Pipin. In the autumn, by a sudden stroke of God, he died out hunting. At the beginning of the year 757, Desiderius, by the help of the Pope, Stephen II. had succeeded to the Lombard throne, itself spared by Pipin, and these great changes are recorded in an extant letter of Pope Stephen, a hymn of gratitude and praise, to Pipin, who had placed the keys of the recovered cities, forming the new created State of the Church, on the tomb of St. Peter. Great is the contrast between the letters of 756, written to Pipin, in the height of Rome’s distress and danger, and this letter from the first Pope-king to his benefactor.