Thus affairs went in Britain down to the time of the great King Pepin, of the Franks, and again, after him, of his yet greater son Charles, who was known as Charlemagne, or Charles the Great--that is to say until about the year 800. And at about that time there came down upon the English the invasion of another nation of sea-rovers like themselves--the Danes. [Sidenote: The Pope] All this while, too, the power of the Pope of Rome had been increasing, by no means at a steady rate of progress, but at times gaining greatly and at others losing, but on the whole going forward like the incoming tide. Doubtless the fact that the Western Empire no longer looked on Rome as its capital city, gave the Bishop of Rome opportunity for increased power. So long as Rome was the home of the Emperor and his court, there was a greater and more powerful person in Rome than its bishop. But the Emperor, as we saw, removed his court to Milan and, later, to Ravenna. That left the Pope as certainly one of the chief men, if not absolutely chief, in Rome. We have also seen that about halfway through the seventh century--that is, about 650--the Saracens had turned out from their seats three of the five {65} patriarchs of the Church, namely those of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch. There remained the Patriarch at Constantinople and the Patriarch, the Pope, at Rome. The regulation of religious matters in the Eastern Empire fell naturally therefore to the former and the latter became head of the Church throughout the Western Empire. The authority of the Pope depended largely on the belief that when Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, made Constantinople the seat of his power, he gave, or donated, to the Bishop of Rome his authority over all the Western Empire. This "donation of Constantine" became very famous. It is generally thought that the deed, that is to say the parchment with the words on it which were supposed to make the gift good, was all made up--that the signature was a forgery, and the whole story of the donation an invention. But if it was so, it was an invention which had a great effect. It helped the Pope to establish his supremacy over all the churches in the West. Nevertheless it seems that when there was trouble in any of the churches of Spain, where the Visigothic kingdom was established, the trouble used to be referred for decision to the capital city of that kingdom. Likewise in France, trouble in any of the Frankish churches was settled, if possible, by bringing the case up before the bishop in the capital of the Franks. But, for all that, both Visigoths and Franks looked on Rome, the city of St. Paul and St. Peter, as a place--we might say as the place--especially sacred and its bishop as a personage holding an authority superior to all others in Christendom. The feeling was the same in those churches yet farther from the Roman centre, the churches of Germany and of England.