After their prayer the king turned to the Pope and earnestly requested of him permission to enter Rome, in order to venerate the other churches of the city, and therein pay his vows. Whereupon the Pope and the king, together with Roman and Frank judges, descending to the body of St. Peter, bound themselves by oath to mutual protection. This permission to enter Rome was granted in after times by the Popes to Roman emperors themselves, as often as they approached the gates of Rome with armed force. After this permission received Charles and the Pope rode in solemn pomp from St. Peter’s to the Lateran, through the whole of Rome. And Charles, in the Lateran church, witnessed the Pope’s celebration of the baptismal rite to the catechumens as usual on that day. So the Romans on that day first beheld the flower of the greatest western nation passing in the pomp of armed men by their palaces, porticoes, Capitol, forum, and colosseum, with the greatest champion of Christendom then in the glory of his manhood at the age of thirty-two years. His secretary, Eginhard, attests his stature to have been seven of his own feet, and his whole aspect was full of majesty. When he ascended on his knees the thirty-five steps leading to St. Peter’s, separately kissing each, he manifested in his own person the truth of the reply which nearly fifty years before Pope St. Gregory II. had made to the eastern emperor, Leo III. Leo threatened that he would tear down the statue of St. Peter. St. Gregory said that all the nations of the West regarded him as a God upon earth.