The municipal franchises of Italy have played a large part in her history, and that of Rome is no exception. Moreover the Senate of Rome, the heads of each _gens_ from among the original settlers, and the _Populus_, who be it remembered were the _gentes_ and were never synonymous with the _plebs_, represented two constant facts and factors--a free Senate and free municipal government by the _Populus Romanus_. These flourished in the middle ages as they had flourished in the classical city, and it was thus easy for Cola di Rienzo to restore them when the popes had abandoned the city to its fate. Papal letters to Charlemagne's predecessors were indited in the name of the Senate and people of Rome--a custom which influenced the early government of the Roman Church herself, for her letters to other Christian Churches were written in the name of "the Roman Church," even when, as in the case of Clement's epistle, they were the actual handiwork of the then head of the Christian community. Again, when Pepin obliged the Lombard king to cede the exarchate of Ravenna not to the emperor but to Rome, the words employed were: "to the Holy Church and the Roman Republic." Even in the time of the proud Innocent III. the city was still governed "by the Senate and people of Rome," and when the Romans again tired of their Senate--as tradition says they had done when they made Numa king--they created in its place a supreme magistrate who was designated "the Senator," one of whose duties was to maintain the pontiff in his See, and to provide conveniently for his safe conduct and that of the Sacred College when journeying within his jurisdiction. The extent of this jurisdiction is perhaps all that now remains of the power once held by the Senate and Roman people. The municipality of Rome is the largest in the world; it is conterminous with the whole Roman _agro_, so that its history is inseparably linked with that of the Roman boundaries as well as with the life of the Roman people.