Yet to say that the Empire has completely disappeared would be an exaggeration. One of the chief prerogatives of the Emperor is still maintained. It was his function not merely to safeguard the unity of the Frankish monarchy, but his duty was also to protect the Church and the Holy See, that is, to take care that religious peace was preserved, at all events, throughout Western Christendom, and, in concert with the Pope, to govern Rome and the Papal States. As Lothar had been entrusted with these duties during his father's lifetime, he would be more familiar with them than any other person. "The Pope," he said himself, "put the sword into my hand to defend the altar and the throne," and the very first measure of his administration had been the Roman Constitution of 824 which defined the relations of the two powers. These imperial rights and duties had not been made to vanish by the new situation created in other respects for the Emperor in 843. If Lothar does not seem to have given any large share of his attention to ecclesiastical affairs, on the other hand he is found intervening, either personally or through his son Louis, in papal elections. In 844 Sergius II, who had been consecrated without the Emperor's participation, met with bitter reproaches for having thus neglected to observe the constitution of 824. On his death (847) the people of Rome, alarmed at the risk involved in a vacancy of the Holy See while Saracen invasions were threatening, again ignored the imperial regulations at the election of Leo IV. But the latter hastened to write to Lothar and Louis II to make excuses for the irregular course taken by the Romans. In 855 the election of Benedict III took place, all forms being duly observed, and was respectfully notified to the two Augusti through the medium of their missi. The measures taken by Lothar against the Saracens of Italy were dictated as much by the necessity of defending his own states as by a sense of his position as Protector of the Holy See, but there were one or two occasions on which he appears to have attempted to exercise some authority on matters ecclesiastical in the dominions of his brother Charles.
It is at least highly probable that it was at his request that Sergius II, in 844, granted to Drogo Bishop of Metz, who had already under colour of his personal claims been invested with archiepiscopal dignity, the office of Vicar Apostolic throughout the Empire north of the Alps, with the right of convoking General Councils, and of summoning all ecclesiastical causes before his tribunal, previous to any appeal being made to Rome. This, from the spiritual point of view, was to give control to the Emperor, through the medium of one of his prelates, over ecclesiastical affairs in the kingdoms of his two brothers. But as early as the month of December 844, a synod of the bishops of the Western Kingdom at Ver (near Compiègne) declared, with abundance of personally complimentary expressions towards Drogo, that his primatial authority must be first of all recognised by a general assembly of the bishops concerned. Such an
