¹³ A copy of this donation will be found in the 2d volume. Laurence Valle having demonstrated, towards the middle of the fifteenth century, the falsity of this donation, the best writers of the sixteenth, even those of Italy, treated it with the contempt it deserved. Ariosto energetically expresses the contemptinto which it had fallen¹⁴ and places it among the various chimeras which Astolphus meets with in the moon. Four hundred and sixty-three years had passed from the death of Constantine in 337, to the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. Now during all this period, no epoch, no year, can be specified, in which the popes exercised sovereign authority. The immediate successors of Constantine reigned, as he did, over Italy: and when on the death of Theodoras two empires arose out of one, Rome, the metropolis of the west, continued to be governed still by an emperor. Then, as all historians attest, the popes assumed apostolic functions alone; they were not reckoned in the number of the civil magistrates; although their election, the work of the people and of the clergy, was obliged to be confirmed by the prince. When they sought from their creed and the exercise of their spiritual ministry, an independence which they did not always obtain, they rendered homage to that of the civil power, and did not claim any of its properties. In 476 the Western Empire fell: Augustulus was dethroned; the Heruli, the Ostrogoths, and other barbarians, invaded and laid waste Italy. Rome was governed by Odoacre down to 493, by Theodoric to 526, and, during the twenty-seven succeeding years, by Theodat, Vitiges, Totila, or the generals of the Eastern Emperors. ¹⁴ Or puzza forte: Questo era il dono, se pero dir lece, Che Costantino al buon Silvestro fece. Or I. Fur. 14th chap. 8th stanza: This was the gift, with reverence be it said, Which Constantine to good Sylvester made. It is necessary to observe here, that the sovereignty of these emperors over Italy, and especially over the city of Rome, had been acknowledged by Odoacre and by Theodoric, and sometimes even by their successors¹⁵ But in 553, the victory of Narses over Theia restored to the Greek emperors an immediate sovereignty over the Roman territory and the neighbouring countries. Thus terminated seventy-seven years of wars and revolutions, during which the popes neither obtained nor aspired to the exercise of any temporal authority. Theodoric, in 498, confirmed the election of Pope Symmachus;¹⁶ and when, in the year 500, this pope was accused by his enemies, the decision of the matter was referred to Theodoric.¹⁷