It is pretended that Pepin and his son Charlemagne gave to the Roman bishops many lands of the exarchate, which was designated the Justices of St. Peter--"_les Justices de St. Pierre_." Such is the real origin of their temporal power. From this period, these bishops appear to have assiduously exerted themselves to obtain something of rather more consideration and of more consequence than these justices. We are in possession of a letter from Pope Arian I. to Charlemagne, in which he says, "The pious liberality of the emperor Constantine the Great, of sacred memory, raised and exalted, in the time of the blessed Roman Pontiff, Sylvester, the holy Roman Church, and conferred upon it his own power in this portion of Italy." From this time, we perceive, it was attempted to make the world believe in what is called the Donation of Constantine, which was, in the sequel, for a period of five hundred years, not merely regarded as an article of faith, but an incontestable truth. To entertain doubts on the subject of this donation included at once the crime of treason and the guilt of mortal sin. After the death of Charlemagne, the bishop augmented his authority in Rome from day to day; but centuries passed away before he came to be considered as a sovereign prince. Rome had for a long period a patrician municipal government. Pope John XII., whom Otho I., emperor of Germany, procured to be deposed in a sort of council, in 963, as simoniacal, incestuous, sodomitical, an atheist, in league with the devil, was the first man in Italy as patrician and consul, before he became bishop of Rome; and notwithstanding all these titles and claims, notwithstanding the influence of the celebrated Marosia, his mother, his authority was always questioned and contested. Gregory VII., who from the rank of a monk became pope, and pretended to depose kings and bestow empires, far from being in fact complete master of Rome, died under the protection, or rather as the prisoner of those Norman princes who conquered the two Sicilies, of which he considered himself the paramount lord. In the grand schism of the West, the popes who contended for the empire of the world frequently supported themselves on alms. It is a fact not a little extraordinary that the popes did not become rich till after the period when they dared not to exhibit themselves at Rome. According to Villani, Bertrand de Goth, Clement V. of Bordeaux, who passed his life in France, sold benefices publicly, and at his death left behind him vast treasures. The same Villani asserts that he died worth twenty-five millions of gold florins. St. Peter's patrimony could not certainly have brought him such a sum. In a word, down to the time of Innocent VIII., who, made himself master of the castle of St. Angelo, the popes never possessed in Rome actual sovereignty.