But, in thus rendering homage to the imperial dignity, the popes seem to have reserved to themselves, by way of compensation, the right of conferring it. After the death of Lambert, and of Arnulf, the bishops and lords of Bavaria elected, in 899, a son of Arnulf, named Louis, and solicited the pope to confirm this election, excusing themselves for having made it without his approbation, in consequence of the pagans, that is the Hungarians, having cut off the passage into Italy. Neither John IX. nor his successor, Benedict IV. were in haste to crown Louis. After the example of John VIII. they endeavoured to accustom the Romans to dispense with an emperor: the empire remained vacant till 901. We must recognize in the partition of the States of Charlemagne between the sons of Louis-le-De-bonnaire, and in the subsequent subdivisions of these states, the principal cause of the degradation of the civil authority, and the metamorphose of the pontifical ministry into a tremendous power:¹⁰⁷ “Hence,” says Velly, “these enterprises of the popes, who, “considering themselves as the dispensers of an “empire, of which they were only the first subjects, “assumed under the cloak of a purely spiritual “authority, to dispose sovereignly of empires. “Hence, the enormous power of the bishops, who, “after having dethroned the father at the solicitation “of the children, believed themselves empowered to “elect, confirm or depose their masters; ambitious “prelates, rather warriors than priests, scarcely “knowing how to read, much less write; terrible “notwithstanding, as well from the spiritual thunders “which they after, as Pasquier expresses it, tilted “too freely and carelessly with, as from the tem− “poral power which they had usurped in their cities “and dioceses. Hence these almost independent “principalities that the monks established in those “countries, where some years before they tilled, with “their own hands, the grounds which a pious liberally “had abandoned to them.” ¹⁰⁷ Hist of France, vol. 2 (in 12), p. 244. Although there had been no authentic act which erected the pope into a sovereign, and which freed from the imperial supremacy the authority which he exercised at Rome, his power nevertheless became in effect independent; and as, in consecrating the emperors, he already considered himself as creating them, since he dared to speak of their dignity as a favour for which they were indebted to him, he doubtless had the means of placing limits to that obedience which they might be desirous of exacting from him. Far from imposing laws on him in his own states, they often acquiesced in his, even in the exercise of their civil rights and political powers. In the course of the succeeding centuries, every thing depended, not on the progress of ignorance or the return of knowledge alone, but on the personal energy of the kings and of the pontiffs individually.