the example of Rome, where not even a pen and paper were to be had free. Dante addresses the shade of Pope Nicholas III in the _Inferno_ (xix.):-- "Your gods ye make of silver and of gold; And wherein differ from idolaters, Save that their God is one--yours manifold?" And he ascribes the evil which he is condemning to the so-called Donation of Constantine. [Sidenote: Papal Legates.] The most manifest agents and organs of papal authority throughout Christendom were the legates. The Pope had appointed permanent representatives called Apocrisiaries at Constantinople, and had sent emissaries to General Councils and for other special matters. But from the time of Leo IX legates began to be appointed with a general commission to visit the churches; and Gregory VII developed this method of interference with the local authorities into a regular system. In some cases local hostility was disarmed by the appointment of the Metropolitan as ordinary legate, and the position was accepted with the object of retaining the chief authority upon the spot. Such the Archbishop of Canterbury became after 1135. But the existence of this official did not prevent the despatch from time to time of legates _à latere_, as they were called. The ordinary legate exercised the concurrent jurisdiction claimed by the Pope, that is, the right of interference in every diocese; these legates coming from the side of the Pope were armed with the power of exercising most of the rights specially reserved for the personal authority of the Pope. The _Dictatus Papae_ asserts that the Pope's legates take precedence of all bishops in a council even though they may be of inferior rank, and Gregory VII applies to their authority the text "He that heareth you heareth me." In 1125 John of Crema, a legate sent to England, presided at a Council at Westminster, where were present ecclesiastics from the archbishops downwards and a number of nobility; and "on Easterday he celebrated the office of the day in the mother church in place of the supreme pontiff, and although he was not a bishop, but merely a Cardinal Priest, he used pontifical insignia." A Metropolitan in his oath of loyalty to the Pope was made to swear that he would treat with all honour the Roman legates in their coming and going, and would help them in their needs; and the procuration or maintenance from all countries which they not only visited, but merely passed through, was arbitrarily assessed. Innocent III enforces it by directing against ecclesiastics who were contumacious a sentence of distraint of goods without any right of appeal. The burden was no light one. Wichmann, Archbishop of Magdeburg, writing on behalf of Frederick I, tells the Pope that the whole Church of the Empire is subject to such heavy exactions at the hands of the papal officials, that both churches and monasteries, which have not enough to supply their own daily wants, are yet compelled "beyond their utmost