[117] This is sometimes called the "Donation of Aistulph," but is really the completed Donation of Pippin. On this point the Liber Pontificalis is confirmed by the Annals of Eginhard, in which we read that Pippin gave the Roman See "Ravenna and the Pentapolis and the whole exarchate belonging to Ravenna" (year 756), and by the later letters of Hadrian I.
[118] Writers who say merely that Stephen was "suspected of complicity" must have overlooked the testimony of Hadrian himself in the Liber Pontificalis. He tells the Lombard envoys that Stephen assured him that, on Didier promising to return the cities, the Pope "caused the eyes of Christopher and Sergius to be put out." Stephen's character is further illustrated by his letter to the sons of Pippin (Ep., iv.), when it was proposed that one of them should marry Didier's daughter Hermingard. They were both married, but the Pope says very little about the sin of divorce; it is the infamy of alliance with the Lombards which he chiefly denounces. In point of fact, Charlemagne divorced his wife and married Hermingard, and not a word further was heard from Rome about this or any other of his peculiar domestic arrangements.
[119] The visit is described very fully in the Liber Pontificalis.
[120] Ep., lx. Some writers hold that this is merely an allusion to the Acta S. Silvestri, another forgery of the time, but the words which I have italicized point more clearly to the "Donation of Constantine." For the literature of the controversy see Dr. A. Solmi's Stato e Chiesa (1901), pp. 12-13. It is now the general belief that the "Donation" was fabricated at Rome, and probably in the Lateran, between 750 and 781. Dr. Hodgkin (Italy and her Invaders, vi.) has charitably suggested that perhaps the document was playfully composed by some Papal clerk in his leisure hours and taken seriously by a later generation, but apologists do not seem to grasp at this straw.
[121] Ep., lii.
[122] Ep., lvii.
[123] Dr. Mann (vol. i., part ii., p. 423) finds some confirmation in "a passage of Hadrian's letter to Constantine and Irene, read in the second session of the Seventh General Council." This part of Hadrian's letter was not read in the Council. It is not included in the letter in the Migne edition (vol. xcvi.), and in Mansi (xii., 1072) it is explained that the latter part of Hadrian's letter, in which the passage occurs, was not read to the Greeks. In any case, the passage merely affirms that Charlemagne gave the Roman See "provinces and cities and other territories," and this is quite consistent with the more modest estimate of his donation. A letter written by Leo III. to Charlemagne thirty years afterwards (when the Papal description of the donation certainly existed), speaking of his gift of the island of Corsica, is not conclusive.
[124] See the dissertation appended to vol. vi. of Dr. Hodgkin's Italy and her Invaders, where the author contends that a late writer used the contemporary account of Hadrian's early years to lead up to this fictitious donation. The hypothesis of interpolation in a genuine narrative is urged by Dr. W. Martens in his Die Römische Frage (1881) and Beleuchtung der neuesten Controversen über die R. Frage (1898). Professor Th. Lindner (Die sogenannten Schenkungen Pippins, Karls des Grossen, und Otto's I. an die Päpste, 1896) suggests that Charlemagne intended only to secure the patrimonies in the provinces named in the donation, but this is not consistent with the language of the Liber Pontificalis, though it may very well represent the actual intention of Charlemagne.
[125] Ep., lii.
[126] Ep., liii., liv., lv.