now come before the Pope, whose power therefore to revise the sentence of one who called himself ecumenical patriarch he did not dispute. Nor, indeed, did it appear over what domain he claimed to be universal. It might be over the eastern bishops; it might be over the two patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, with the later patriarch of Jerusalem; it might be over the actual Roman empire; it might be, finally, over the whole Church. But whichever it might be, the claim would equally be, in Gregory's judgment, unlawful, based simply and solely upon imperial power; resting also in its origin upon a direct untruth, which assaulted the whole foundation whereon the charge of the whole Church, the Principate of Gregory, rested; couched, moreover, in language which would enable future generations of Greeks to draw the conclusion that, since the Primacy of Rome proceeded from its being the capital, when Rome ceased to be the capital, and Constantine's city became the capital, the Primacy also passed to it. Thus, in the whole assumption of the bishops of Constantinople, it was presupposed that the spiritual power and the hierarchy of the Church descended not from Jesus Christ, but from the emperors.[193] So it is clear that this empty title, which seemed to the emperor Mauritius a meaningless word, a mere nothing, contained in itself the whole system of Antichrist. The Pope saw it, and his words are the more significant when we remember that at the time he uttered them the man had already reached full manhood who was to cut the empire of Justinian in half, to deprive of their liberty three of the eastern patriarchs, destroy a multitude of the Christian people, and be parent of the religion which through the course of 1200 years has shown itself to be specially anti-Christian. There in his Arab tent, as yet the faithful husband of an old wife, was the future Khalif, in whom the spiritual and the temporal power would be joined together; who would set up in a false theocracy that usurpation which Constantine's eastern successors were striving to carry out in the Christian Church. Mahommed would consecrate that very false principle which was at the root of the ecumenical patriarch's arrogance. Thus the strongest word used by Gregory of John the Faster's assumption, that it was "a name of blasphemy, of diabolical pride, and a forerunner of Antichrist," received its exact verification within a generation after Gregory had spoken it.