This, then, was the point at issue, and when the western emperor was suppressed, and the overlordship of the eastern emperor acknowledged, the Pope was deprived of all temporal support, and left to meet the attack of Acacius in the naked power of his apostolate. From the year 483, when the deeds of Acacius led to his excommunication, followed by the schism, to its termination in 519, the Popes, being subjects of Arian sovereigns, who were likewise of barbaric descent, braved the whole civil power of the eastern emperors, as well as the whole ecclesiastical influence of the bishops of Constantinople. Not only were Zeno and Anastasius unorthodox, but likewise they were bent on increasing the influence of that bishop whom they nominated and controlled. The sovereigns of the East had been able, even by a simple practice of Byzantine etiquette, to put their own bishop in a position of determining influence over the whole eastern episcopate. For we learn from the instruction of Pope Hormisdas to his legates that it was the custom for every bishop to be presented to the emperor by the bishop of Constantinople. The Pope most strictly enjoins his legates not to submit to this. The effect of such a rule upon the eastern bishops who frequented the court of an absolute sovereign exhibits another cause of that perpetual growth which accrues to the bishop of the imperial city. Every human power, every conjunction of circumstances, seemed to be against the Popes in this struggle. While the East was thus in hostile hands, under emperors who were either secretly or avowedly heretical, the West was under Arian domination. Italy was ruled from 493 to 526 by a man of great ability. Few rulers have surpassed Theodorick either in success as a warrior or in political skill. He had, further, enlaced the contemporary rulers in the various countries of the West in ties of relationship with himself. He had married Andefleda, sister of Clovis; he gave Theudigotha, one of his own daughters by a concubine, to Alaric of Toulouse, king of the Visigoths, and another, Ostrogotha, to Sigismund, king of the Burgundians, at Lyons. Even before he had conquered Odoacer, in 493, he was in strict alliance with the king of the Vandals in Africa, to whom he gave his sister Amalafrieda to wife, and her daughter Amalaberga to the king of the Thuringians. He solicited the royal title in 496 by an embassy to Anastasius, and the result of that embassy was that the chief man in it, Faustus, patrician and senator, when he returned to Rome, contrived to raise a schism in the clergy itself against Pope Symmachus. This schism was the greatest difficulty which the Pope in all this period encountered. Theodorick in political talent and warlike genius reminds historians of Charlemagne: but instead of having that monarch's faith, he was an Arian. His equal treatment of Arian and Catholic was a carefully thought-out policy; nor did he scruple at the very end of his career to sacrifice even