However, in this my first discourse I do not wish to urge princes and peoples to restrain the Pope in his unbridled course as he roams about, and compel him to stay within bounds, but only to warn him, and perhaps he has already learned the truth, to betake himself from others’ houses to his own, and to put to port before the raging billows and savage tempests. But if he refuses, then I will have recourse to another discourse far bolder than this.[532] If only I may sometime see, and indeed I can scarcely wait to see it, especially if it is brought about by my counsel, if only I may see the time when the Pope is the vicar of Christ alone, and not of Caesar also! If only there would no longer be heard the fearful cry, “Partisans for the Church,” “Partisans against the Church,” “The Church against the Perugians,” “against the Bolognese”! It is not the church, but the Pope, that fights against Christians; the church fights against “spiritual wickedness in high places.”[533] Then the Pope will be the Holy Father in fact as well as in name, Father of all, Father of the church; nor will he stir up wars among Christians, but those stirred up by others he, through his apostolic judgment and papal prerogative, will stop.[534] FOOTNOTES [411] The meaning of this word in this connection is unknown. The chapters to which it is prefixed are for the most part supposed to have been early marginal annotations afterwards incorporated in the text of the Decretum. Cf. Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici, vol. I, Prolegomena, p. lxxxvi. [412] The subject of chapters xi and xii is, “The Emperors must be under the Pontiffs, not over them.” Chapters xiii and xiv continue the same subject. [413] _retro_ was used at Rome in the latter part of the eighth century with the peculiar meaning of “still” or “again.” This is one of the clues to the date and place of the document. Henderson’s translation is erroneous. [414] Ps. cxxxix, 7. [415] I Tim. v, 20. [416] Valla’s error for Marcellinus. The whole story is apocryphal. [417] A reference to the reforming councils of the fifteenth century. [418] Valla was in the service of the king of Sicily and of Naples when he wrote this. [419] The phrase “Italy and the western provinces,” in the Donation of Constantine, meant to the writer of that document the Italian peninsula, including Lombardy, Venetia, Istria, and adjacent islands. Other countries probably did not occur to him as part of the Roman Empire. Valla, however, followed the current interpretation. [420] In many versions of the Life of Sylvester there is a marvellous story of an enormous serpent, finally subdued by the saint. Cf. _infra_, p. 143; Coleman, Constantine the Great and Christianity, pp. 161 _et seq._; Mombritius, Sanctuarium, Sive Vitae collectae ex codibus (Milan, _c._ 1479), v, ii, pp. 279 _et seq._, also Paris edition, 1910. For the story of Bel and the Dragon, cf. the book of that name in the Apocrypha.