More than once during the long quarrel between the Popes and the Isaurian emperors there had been some talk of electing a separate Augustus to bear rule over Roman Italy,—those districts of the peninsula which were not in the hands of the Lombards. [Sidenote: Tendencies to separation in Italy.] The scheme had not been carried out, mainly because the Popes opposed it, but it had not been forgotten. Now that the greater part of Italy, both Lombard and Roman, was under the rule of a single king, and one well liked both by the Pope and by the Roman people, it would have been strange if the idea of completely repudiating the ignominious dependence of Rome on Constantinople had not been once more mooted. For as long as there remained but one person bearing the Imperial style,—the ruler of the East,—the Pope and his Roman and Italian contemporaries had an uneasy consciousness that their homage ought still, perhaps, to be paid to that person, Greek and heretic though he or she might be. We may suppose that these doubts hardly troubled the Frankish vassals of Charles the Great, but to his Italian subjects they were a constant source of vexation of spirit; while practically they were liegemen of the Frankish king, they were not quite sure whether in theory they might not still be considered the liegemen of the hated Caesars at Constantinople. Such thoughts must have been running through the heads of all the Popes who held the Roman See from 773 to 800. But it would seem that it was Pope Leo III. who first bethought him of the easiest way of settling the situation—to declare the king of the Franks Roman emperor, and not merely Roman patrician. A barbarian Augustus would be unprecedented, but not more so than the female ruler of the Empire who now swayed Constantinople. It was evidently the sight of a woman—and a very wicked woman—on the Byzantine throne that gave the final impulse to the desire of the Italians to cut off the last thread of connection with the Imperial line in the East. Their desire must have been well known to Charles himself, but it would seem that he for some time shrank from granting it. Perhaps he feared the responsibilities of the title; more probably he did not see how it legally could be conferred upon him: there was no precedent to settle what person or body in the West could claim to give it, and it was most certain that the court of Constantinople would utterly refuse to grant it, and would view its assumption by a ‘barbarian’ king of the West as a gross piece of insolence.