The popes were delivered from their debt of gratitude; and the nominal gifts of the Carlovingians were no more than the just and irrevocable restitution of a scanty portion of the ecclesiastical state.
The sovereignty of Rome no longer depended on the choice of a fickle people; and the successors of St.Peter and Constantine were invested with the purple and prerogatives of the Caesars.

So deep was the ignorance and credulity of the times, that the most absurd of fables was received, with equal reverence, in Greece and in France, and is still enrolled among the decrees of the canon law.

[70] The emperors, and the Romans, were incapable of discerning a forgery, that subverted their rights and freedom; and the only opposition proceeded from a Sabine monastery, which, in the beginning of the twelfth century, disputed the truth and validity of the donation of Constantine.

[71] In the revival of letters and liberty, this fictitious deed was transpierced by the pen of Laurentius Valla, the pen of an eloquent critic and a Roman patriot.
[72] His contemporaries of the fifteenth century were astonished at his sacrilegious boldness; yet such is the silent and irresistible progress of reason, that, before the end of the next age, the fable was rejected by the contempt of historians [73] and poets, [74] and the tacit or modest censure of the advocates of the Roman church.

[75] The popes themselves have indulged a smile at the credulity of the vulgar; [76] but a false and obsolete title still sanctifies their reign; and, by the same fortune which has attended the decretals and the Sibylline oracles, the edifice has subsisted after the foundations have been undermined.
[Footnote 68: Piissimo Constantino magno, per ejus largitatem S.
R.Ecclesia elevata et exaltata est, et potestatem in his Hesperiae partibus largiri olignatus est....