Will they now ask us what the nature of the concession was which was made to the popes by Pepin-le-Bref: if he bestowed the absolute sovereignty or the mere administration; a secondary or delegated power, or the property only, and, as it is termed, the fee-simple of it? In default of a positive text which would offer an immediate reply to these questions, we have no other way of resolving them, but by continuing, even to the year 800, the examination of facts relative to the government of Rome and the authority of the popes. Now, it is certain, as we have stated, that during the fifty last years of the eighth century, the popes had never been sovereigns, seldom administrators. We have a series of letters in which they complain of the non-fulfilment of the promises of Pepin, and of the infidelity of the Lombard kings, who ravaged, or again seized on, the possessions of the church. Besides, Constantine Copronymus never renounced his rights: he offered to pay the expenses attending’the victories of the French army over the Lombards, provided the places recovered from them were restored to him. Pepin, though very little disposed to comply with these requisitions, evaded characterizing the power which he exercised over the Roman republic by the title of patrician; leaving it undecided, whether he considered himself as actual sovereign, or as but provisionally invested with the functions of the impeiial authority. What is very remarkable is, that in fixing the limits of the states of this monarch, no French historian extends them beyond the Alps.⁴² As to the popes, although their influence almost always swayed the authority of the deputies of the patrician, they did not as yet exercise a civil magistracy, properly so called, either regularly instituted or delegated. They continued to date from the reign of the emperors of Constantinople, and to call them their lords and masters. This is to be seen in an epistle written by Stephen II. in 757, a short time before his death;⁴³ in a diploma subscribed the same year by Paul I. the brother and successor of Stephen;⁴⁴ in a statute or rule of the same Paul in 758;⁴⁵ in a letter which Adrian addressed, in 772, to the emperor, in transmitting to him the decision respecting a crime committed in the duchy of Rome;⁴⁶ and in 785, in an epistle of the same Adrian to Constantine V. and his mother Irene.⁴⁷ ⁴² Antiquit. S. Dionyt. 1.2, c. 9. Regnabant inter Rhenum Ligerimque priores, Ad Boream fuerat terminus oceanus, Australemque dabant Balearica littora finem. Alpes et tectæ perpetuis nivibus. ⁴³ Ibid. 1.2. c. 3. ⁴⁴ Concil. vol. 6. p. 1619. ⁴⁵ Ibid. vol. 6. p. 1694. ⁴⁶ Fleury Hist. Eccles. 1.14. n. 2. ⁴⁷ [--Greek--] Concil. Vol. 7. p. 99. Many cities comprised in the pretended donation were governed, according to the instructions of Pepin, by the Archbishops of Ravenna, who seem to have succeeded the Exarchs, whose title remained unrevived.