CHAPTER III. TENTH CENTURY PROTESTANTS take a malicious pleasure in pourtraying the court of Rome in the tenth century, and in extracting from Liutprand a contemporary author, the unedifying details with which he has filled up the ecclesiastical and political history of this period. But without examining whether the relations of this writer are as faithful as they are satirical, we may say with Fleury¹⁰⁸ that Rome under these unworthy popes ceased not to be the centre of Christendom. We may add with other theologians, that so many abuses not having drawn after them the destruction of the Holy See, their very excess serves to manifest the care of Providence to maintain this visible focus of Catholic unity. ¹⁰⁸ Discour. 4, a. 10. For the rest, the private lives of the popes is not the object which claims our attention; we shall only consider their political relations with secular governments. In confining ourselves to this view, we shall not be troubled with unravelling the thread of succession, somewhat confused, of thirty popes, who, in the course of this century, have occupied, more or less legitimately, the chair of St. Peter. When two shall start up at the same moment, we shall not stop to inquire which of them is the true one; we shall not take on us to decide between Baronius, who never wishes to recognize save the worthiest or the most canonically elected, and those authors who adhere to the most effective, that is, to the man who has more decisively exercised the pontifical power: these are delicate questions, requiring long discussions, and the investigation of a multitude of petty circumstances, foreign to the history of those great disputes between the pontiffs and kings. In the midst of those things and of those changes, two points appear to us incontrovertible; one, that the Holy See was at this period reckoned in the number of temporal governments; the other, that occupied with its own affairs, and the interior troubles which agitated it, it lost, without, a large portion of the influence and power which the preceding century had bequeathed to it. The first of these consequences is confirmed by Constantine Porphyrogenites, the Greek Emperor, who, previous to the middle of the tenth century, digested a sort of statistical table of the east and of the west: he in it represents the popes as ‘sovereigns of Rome’.