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Updated: June 27, 2025
The pope's commissioners received the keys of the towns, which were placed upon the altar of St. Peter; and this, the Dotation of Pepin, the Dotation of the Exarchate, was the first legal temporal sovereignty of the Popes: born in sin, and conceived in iniquity, as you may see. The Lombard rule now broke up rapidly.
Yet, as the Bulgarians insist, "the autonomous orthodox Bulgarian Church forms an inseparable part of the Holy Orthodox Church." The Bulgarian Exarchate used to comprise all the Bulgarian dioceses in the provinces of the Turkish Empire, as they were enumerated explicitly or in general terms by the Firman of 1870 as well as the dioceses of the Bulgarian Principality.
We know very little of this revolution, what directly was the cause of it, or how it was suppressed; but it is clear that the exarchate, if it did not actually perish, was from this time forth for all intents and purposes dead. Three more exarchs were to reign in Ravenna, but not to govern. In 713, Scholasticus was appointed and remained till 726.
In the face of that refusal Turkey acted as the creator of a new Christian Church, and in 1870 a firman of the Sultan created the Bulgarian Exarchate, and Bulgaria had again a national ecclesiastical organisation. Two years later the first Exarch was elected by the Bulgarian clergy.
It was worthy of him; but the Italy he knew and saved was not in need of any change in her administrative divisions which, as I have said, remained under Narses almost the same as they had been in the last days of the Western empire. The transformation out of which the exarchate arose was slow and obscure, not the work of a great creative mind, but of necessity.
In this treaty, Astolphus promised to give to the church all the places he had taken from her; but the king's forces having returned to France, he did not fulfill the agreement, and the pope again had recourse to Pepin, who sent another army, conquered the Lombards, took Ravenna, and, contrary to the wishes of the Greek emperor, gave it to the pope, with all the places that belonged to the exarchate, and added to them Urbino and the Marca.
Had they a right to alienate his gift of the Exarchate? Had they power to abolish his government of Rome? The title of patrician was below the merit and greatness of Charlemagne; and it was only by reviving the Western empire that they could pay their obligations or secure their establishment.
Stephen passed the winter at St. Denis, and gained the favor of the people as well as that of the King. Astolphus peremptorily refused to listen to the remonstrances of Pépin, who called upon him to evacuate the towns in the exarchate of Ravenna, and to leave the Pope unmolested in the environs of Rome as well as in Rome itself.
The Gothic warriors who survived had leave to quit the country with their property, they having taken an oath never to return. The Ostrogoths, as a nation, vanish from history. The EXARCHATE, or vice-royalty of the Eastern Empire, was established, with its seat at Ravenna.
Most of the orthodox Bulgarian population in Turkey recognise the authority of the Exarchate, but some still owe allegiance to the Greek Patriarchate. What the religious position will be now that the wars of 1912-1913 have changed boundaries so considerably it is hard to say.
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