At the same time the second inestimable benefit of deliverance from the eastern despotism, fastened upon Italy since the time of Narses, took place. Some slight sketch of what the exarchate had been to Italy has been attempted. At last those two hundred years of misery were closed: the universal consent of the peoples of central Italy accepted with delight the Papal sovereignty. From the time of Justinian to Stephen II.—perhaps it should rather be said from the time of Leo the Great, the Popes alone had cared for Italy. They alone had possessed the power, the wisdom, and the charity to meet, in some degree at least, the calamities which rained down upon that land, reduced to the condition of a “servile province”. Forty years after St. Gregory the Great, in the middle of the seventh century, a Pope had been torn from his sick bed, laid before the altar in the Lateran Basilica, carried to Byzantium, judged by the senate as a traitor for the exercise of his spiritual rights, and left to die of famine in the Crimea.(252) In the middle of the eighth century if we plant ourselves, and look through the events of two or three centuries, a certain fact comes out clearly. No one can assign the precise point of its completion, but it is seen attested by a multitude of indications. The Popes in gradually taking an acknowledged sovereignty, only yielded to the long and ardent desire of the peoples at whose head they stood, no less than to the stringent demand of public necessity. The feeling of the subject here answered to the fact in the prince: that is, as the Popes were princes by actual necessity so long before they had the name and solemn right to it, so the Romans, and the Italians of the exarchate and the Pentapolis were spontaneous subjects of the Popes long before they bore the legal title. A mutual attraction joined the two together. The Popes through charity for the public good began to exercise in behalf of an ill-treated or a deserted population the part of provident civil governors; the people from gratitude and affection clung more and more to the Popes. The ever increasing calamities and the common trials which pressed on the Popes and the Italians in those miserable times, partly caused by the Byzantine emperors, partly by the barbarous Lombards, drew them more closely together, until the Popes found themselves sovereigns, and the people found themselves subjects, in a complete civil society. But the character of that society was indeed paternal: and as the civil bond sprung from a spiritual fathership, Pipin and Charlemagne named with the name of St. Peter himself the State which their love and reverence for him had partly preserved and partly created. CHAPTER IX. THE MAKING OF CHRISTENDOM.