Hitherto the bishop of Rome had been popularly elected like every other, and subject like every other to acceptance by the emperor. But after Pope Zacharias (741-52) the eastern emperor was ignored; and Charlemagne was crowned as the successor, by Roman decision, not of the old emperors of the West, but of the line of emperors which in the East had never ceased. Constantine VI, who had just been deposed by his mother Irene (797), was the sixty-seventh "Roman" emperor in order from Augustus, and Charlemagne was enrolled in the West as the sixty-eighth. He even received, with the diplomatic assent of the Moslem Haroun Alraschid, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre from the Patriarch of Jerusalem--an empty but suggestive honour. It was thus inevitable that the new imperial line should sooner or later seek to hold power over the papacy as the old had claimed to do; and Charlemagne made his force felt very much as Constantine had done, going even further in the way of appointing bishops, and lecturing the pope at times with the consciousness of virtual supremacy. So long as the emperor, needing and using the services of the Church to organize his administration, enriched the hierarchy on all hands, enforcing tithes and protecting the entire priesthood against lay turbulence, his pretensions were naturally allowed. Everything depended on the strength of the ruler; and already under Charlemagne's good but weak son Louis we find many of the bishops, backed by the pope, supporting the emperor's rebellious sons and claiming to depose him. About 875, again, we find Pope John VIII not only hectoring the weak Charles the Fat, but claiming the right to choose the emperor. Until, however, there began to rise in Italy a new and vigorous civilization, the papacy was on the whole discreetly subject to the ratification of the northern emperors; and this is perhaps the period of maximum demoralization and dishonour in its history; its economic evolution being very much on the lines of that of the original Church in the centuries from its establishment by Constantine till the humiliation of the empire by the Moslems. Intellectually, the papacy had no prestige within the Church. It was in 824 that a council of Frankish bishops at Paris, following on previous declarations, denounced as absurdity the decrees of the Pope enjoining the worship of images. Even when the Pope Gregory IV entered France to support the bishops who backed the rebellious sons of Louis, and threatened to excommunicate those on the emperor's side, the latter treated him with indignant contempt.