But we see him, in 827, examine into and approve that of Gregory IV. Eginhard, and another historian of Louis-le-Debonnaire,⁶⁷ attest this circumstance to us. As to Sicily it did not in any wise belong to Louis: he never possessed it; the pope did not even dream of governing it; and it is so incredible that it should have been ceded to the pope in 816, by the emperor, that Father Morin,⁶⁸ in supporting the authenticity of the donation of Louis I. is obliged to suppose, that the name of this isle had not been originally in it, but had been inserted in the course of time. Furthermore, it is a donation unknown to contemporary writers, and which appears not in historical records until long after its date. ⁶⁷ Coll. of Histories of France, toI. 6. p. 108. ⁶⁸ History of the Origin of the Power of the Popes, p. 627. The forgery of documents occurs often in the history of the temporal power of the popes. The Donation of Constantine was fabricated, as we have already observed, between the years 756 and 779, and it was about the same period that an Isidore, Mercator or Peccator, forged the decretals of the ancient popes, Anaclet, Clement, Evaristus, and others, down to St. Sylvester. In the sixth century, Dionysius-le-Petit was unable to collect any decretals, but those subsequent to St. Siricius, who died at the end of the fourth. Those of Isidore are long, full of common place, and all in the same style, which, according to Fleury⁶⁹ is much more that of the eighth century, than of the early ages of the Church. “Their dates are almost all of them incorrect,” adds the historian we have just mentioned,: “and the matter of these letters, still further “evinces the forgery: they speak of archbishops, “primates, patriarchs, as if these titles had been “received from the birth of the Church. They “forbid the holding of any council, even a provincial “one, without the permission of the pope, and “represent as a usual thing, the appeals to Rome.” These false decretals have contributed to the extension of the popes’ spiritual power, and to invest them with political authority: their fatal effects have been fully exposed by Fleury, in his fourth discourse on ecclesiastical history. We believe, that from the details we have collected, it is sufficiently clear, that up to the year 800, and still later, the pope and the Romans have always acknowledged, as their sovereigns, the emperors of the East or the West, and even particular governors, as the exarch, the patrician, and the kings of the Lombards, or of Italy.⁷⁰ ⁶⁹ Hist, eccles. I. 45. n. 22. ⁷⁰ Muratori introduces the same results, in the three first chapters of his work entitled: Piena Esposizione di diritti im-periali ed Estensi sopra Comacchio, 1712, in—fol.