Cæsar was but your dictator; Augustus was content to be your general,
consul, and tribune; Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero left you your
elections, your prerogatives, and your dignities; even the barbarians
respected them. You maintained your municipal government. Not by the
authority of your bishop, Gregory III., but of your own decision, you
offered the dignity of patrician to the great Charles Martel, master
of his king, conqueror of the Saracens in the year 741 of our faulty
vulgar era.
Believe not that it was the Bishop Leo III. who made Charlemagne
emperor; it is an absurd romance of the secretary Eginhard, a vile
flatterer of the popes, who had won him. By what right and in what
way could a subject bishop make an emperor? Emperors were created
only by the people, or by the armies that took the place of the
people.
It was you, people of Rome, who used your rights; you who would
no longer depend on a Greek emperor, who gave you no aid; you who
appointed Charlemagne, or he would have been a usurper. The annalists
of the time agree that all was arranged by Carolo and your leading
officers, as is, indeed, most probable. Your bishop’s only share in
it was to conduct an empty ceremony and receive rich presents. The
only authority he had in your city was that of the prestige attaching
to his mitre, his clergy, and his ability.
But while you gave yourselves to Charlemagne, you retained the
election of your officers. The police was in your hands; you kept
possession of the mole of Adrian, so absurdly called in later times
the Castello Sant’ Angelo; and you were not wholly enslaved until
your bishops seized that fortress.
They made their way step by step to that supreme greatness, so
expressly forbidden them by him whom they call their God, and of
whom they dare to call themselves the vicars. They had never any
jurisdiction in Rome under the Othos. Excommunication and intrigue
were their sole arms; and even when, in an age of anarchy, they
became the real sovereigns, they never dared to assume the title. I
defy the astutest of those fabricators of titles who abound in your
court to find a single one in which the pope is described as prince
by the grace of God. A strange princedom, when one fears to avow it!
The imperial cities of Germany, which have bishops, are free; and
you, Romans, are not. The archbishop of Cologne has not even the
right to sleep in that city; and your pope will hardly allow you to
sleep in your own. The sultan of the Turks is far less despotic at
Constantinople than the pope has become at Rome.
You perish miserably in the shade of superb colonnades. Your noble
and faded paintings, and your dozen gems of ancient sculpture, bring
you neither a good dinner nor a good bed. The opulence is for your
masters: the indigence is for you. The lot of a slave among the
ancient Romans was a hundred times better than yours. _He_ might
acquire a large fortune; _you_ are born serfs, you die serfs, and
the only oil you have is that of the Last Anointing. Slaves in body
and in soul, your tyrants do not even allow you to read, in your own
tongue, the book on which they say your religion is founded.
Awake, Romans, at the call of liberty, truth, and nature. The cry
rings over Europe. You must hear it. Break the chains that bind your
generous hands--the chains forged by tyranny in the den of imposture.