specified in the treaty of 756 had belonged to the Roman Empire. Envoys of the Empire met Pepin in Pavia and offered him a large sum of money to restore the lands to the Empire, but he refused, saying that they belonged to St Peter and the Roman church. The exact boundaries of the grant to the Pope can only be approximated, since the text of the treaty does not survive. It is possible that the boundaries were the same as those in a previous Imperial–Lombard treaty. Abbot Fulrad was charged with collecting the keys of the cities to be handed over and depositing them along with the written agreement on the tomb of St Peter. The Donations made the Pope a temporal ruler for the first time. This strip of territory extended diagonally across Italy from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic. Over these extensive and mountainous territories the medieval Popes were unable to exercise effective sovereignty, given the pressures of the times. Charlemagne In 774 Pepin's son Charlemagne visited Rome and again confirmed and reasserted the Donation. Some later chronicles falsely claimed that he also expanded them, granting Tuscany, Emilia, Venice and Corsica. See also Donation of Constantine, a forged Roman imperial decree by which the 4th-century emperor Constantine the Great supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope. References Sources Foreign relations of the Holy See History of the papacy Papal States 756 8th century in the Papal States