THE LOMBARDS AND THE PAPACY
653-743
Usurpation and successful wars of Grimoald—Reigns of Berthari and
Cunibert—Quarrels of the Papacy and the empire—The exile of Pope
Martin I.—Gradual alienation of Italy from the empire—Civil wars
of Aribert II. and Ansprand—Successful reign of Liutprand—Leo
the Isaurian and Gregory II.—Italy rebels against the
Iconoclasts—Liutprand conquers most of the Exarchate.
After the death of Rothari the law-giver the Lombard kingdom entered
into its second stage: it had now almost reached the full growth of its
territorial extension, and had settled down into its final shape. For
nearly a hundred years the main events of its political history are
civil wars, or defensive campaigns against its two neighbours, the Roman
exarch and the Chagan of the Avars. There is no sustained effort either
to expel the Imperialists from Italy, or to extend the boundary of the
Lombard realm to the north. It was only in the middle of the eighth
century that the estrangement between Constantinople and its Roman
subjects in Italy led to such a weakening of the Imperial authority,
that the Lombard kings were able to seize the long-coveted Exarchate.
The history of the cutting short of the dominions of the eastern Caesar
beyond the Adriatic turns much more on the growth of the Papal power,
and on the quarrel on the subject of Iconoclasm, which sundered the
churches of Rome and Constantinople, than on the ambition or ability of
the rulers of Lombardy.
On the murder of Rothari’s short-lived son in 653, the Lombards elected
as their king Aribert, a nephew of the sainted queen Theodelinda, whose
name was still held in kindly memory all over the land. [Sidenote:
Aribert I. 653-62.] Count Gundoald, Aribert’s father, had long been
settled in Italy: he had crossed the Alps with his pious sister more
than half a century before, so that Aribert himself was counted a
Lombard, and not a Bavarian. The new king reigned obscurely for nine
years (653-62): he waged no wars and was mainly noted as a friend of the
clergy and a builder of churches. He was a fervent Catholic, and did his
best to root out the few traces of Arianism yet remaining in Lombardy.
The land had peace under his sway, but ere he died he sowed the seeds of
future troubles by the unhappy inspiration which led him to induce the
Lombard Witan to elect his two sons, Godebert and Berthari, as joint
heirs to the kingship.
When their father was dead, Godebert, the elder brother, dwelt as king
at Pavia, while Berthari took possession of Milan. Before they had been
reigning a year the inevitable civil war broke out, ‘because evil-minded
men sowed discord and suspicion between them.’ [Sidenote: Grimoald king
of the Lombards, 662-71.] They were mustering their followers for a
decisive campaign, when Godebert was treacherously murdered by the chief
of his own supporters, Grimoald, duke of Benevento, who had left his
duchy in the south, and led his men-at-arms to Pavia, under the pretence
of helping his suzerain against his unruly younger brother. Grimoald
took possession of the crown, and married his victim’s sister, in order
to connect himself with the house of the holy Theodelinda. He chased
Berthari out of Milan, and forced him to take refuge with the Chagan of
the Avars, in the far east, by the shores of the Danube.
The unscrupulous usurper reigned for nine years (662-71) over the whole
Lombard realm, holding his own court at Pavia, while Romuald, the son of
his first marriage, ruled for him at Benevento. This was the only period
in the whole history of the Lombards when the king’s mandate was as well
obeyed in the southern Apennines as in the valley of the Po. It was,
therefore, fortunate for the Lombard race that the attack on Italy of
the vigorous emperor Constantinus (Constans II.) fell within the years
of Grimoald’s reign. Though he overran much of the duchy of Benevento,
the energy of Constantinus failed before the advent of king Grimoald,
and the danger passed away (663).[42]
Footnote 42:
See page 245.
His successes against the emperor were not the only triumphs of king
Grimoald: he repelled an irruption of the Avars into Venetia, and
repulsed a Frankish army which the Mayor Ebroin, who ruled in behalf of
king Chlothar III., sent across the Western Alps. His only territorial
gain, however, was the capture from the Imperialists of the little town
of Forimpopoli, near Rimini, which he stormed by surprise on Easter Day,
and harried most cruelly, ‘slaying the worshippers at the altar, and the
deacons at the baptismal font, while all were engaged in celebrating the
Holy Feast.’ We might have supposed that the Romans in central Italy
would have fared worse after the repulse of Constantinus: but no other
city was lost. In the south, however, Grimoald’s son Romuald captured
Taranto and Brindisi, two of the chief remaining strongholds of the
Imperialists in Apulia. But this was after the death of Constantinus,
during the troubles caused by the rebellion of Mezecius in Sicily
(668-9?).
In spite of the treachery by which he had attained the throne,
Grimoald’s victories made him very popular among the Lombards, and many
tales survive bearing witness to his generosity and clemency, no less
than to his strong hand and cunning. But when he died it was seen that
his power rested purely upon his own personal merit: the Lombards did
not elect as king either his elder son Romuald, the duke of Benevento,
or his younger son, Garibald, whom the daughter of Aribert had borne
him. They recalled from exile king Berthari, the son of Aribert, whom
Grimoald had driven out of Milan ten years before. This prince had spent
an unhappy life in wandering from land to land, from the Danube to the
British seas, and was sailing to England when the news of the usurper’s
death reached him. He returned to Italy, and was received with
submission by the whole Lombard race, and solemnly crowned at Pavia.
Berthari reigned for seventeen years (672-88) in peace and quietness,
for he loved not war. He was ‘a man of religion, a true Catholic,
tenacious of justice, a nourisher of the poor; he built the famous
nunnery of St. Agatha, and the great Church of the Virgin outside the
walls of Pavia.’ The kings of this type, whom the monastic chroniclers
delighted most to honour, were not those who made history. Berthari
never attempted to conquer Rome or the Exarchate, and only took arms
once in his reign, when he was assaulted by a rebellious duke, Alahis of
Trent, whom he subdued and then pardoned,—as a Christian man should—a
pardon which was to cost Lombardy much blood in the next reign.
The reign of his son Cunibert (688-700) was far more disturbed. This
king was a man of mixed qualities, brave, generous, and popular, but
careless, incautious, and given over to the wine-cup. He was caught
unprepared and driven from Pavia by duke Alahis, who now rebelled again,
in spite of the fact that his life had once been spared by Cunibert’s
father. Cunibert was driven for a time from all his realm, save a single
castle in the lake of Como, where he stood a long siege. But Alahis, by
his tyranny, made himself unbearable to the Lombards, and ere many
months had elapsed the lawful king was able to issue from his stronghold
and face the usurper in battle. They met at Coronate on the Adda, not
far from Lodi, Alahis backed by the ‘Austrians’ of Venetia, Cunibert by
the ‘Neustrians’ of Piedmont. The men of the West had the better, Alahis
was slain, and the son of Berthari resumed his kingship over the whole
Lombard realm. This was not the last rebellion that Cunibert had to
crush: all through his reign we hear of risings of the unruly dukes, and
of the punishments which were inflicted on them when they fell into
their master’s hands.
There is nothing of first-rate historical importance to relate of the
doings of the Lombard kings in this last quarter of the seventh century.
But while Berthari was building churches, or Cunibert striving with his
rebels, the course of events in the city of Rome was growing more and
more important. [Sidenote: The Papacy in the seventh century. ] The
papacy and the empire were gradually working up to a pitch of
estrangement and mutual repulsion, which was in the next generation to
lead to open war between them. We have sketched in an earlier chapter
the work of pope Gregory the Great, in raising the papacy to a condition
of unprecedented spiritual importance in the Christian world, and no
less in building up a position of high secular importance for the Pope
in the governance of Rome. For half a century after Gregory’s death this
state of affairs remained unaltered. The Pope was now firmly established
as patriarch of the West, and sent missions to Britain, Gaul, and Spain
without let or hindrance. Nor was his secular authority much interfered
with, either by the exarch or by the home government at Constantinople.
But friction and struggling began under the reign of the stern and
ruthless Constantinus (Constans II.) and the hot-headed pope Martin I.
We have mentioned elsewhere[43] how the emperor published his ‘Type’ or
edict of Comprehension, forbidding further discussions on the question
of the Monothelite heresy. Martin not merely refused to acquiesce in
letting the discussion sleep, but summoned a council which declared the
‘Type’ to be blasphemous and irreverent. Martin wrote to the same effect
to the kings of the Franks, Visigoths, and English, thus calling in
foreign sovereigns to participate in a dispute between himself and his
master. Relying on his remoteness from Byzantium, and on the grandeur of
his position as Patriarch of the West, he attempted to defy
Constantinus. The emperor’s proceedings show that he was determined to
assert his power, but that he was fully conscious of the danger and
difficulty of dealing with such an important personage as the bishop of
Rome had now become. [Sidenote: Fate of Pope Martin, 655.] He had to
wait for a favourable opportunity for punishing Martin, and it was not
by openly arresting him in the face of the people, but by secretly
kidnapping him, that he got him into his power. But when once shipped to
Constantinople the Pope felt his sovereign’s wrath: insulted, loaded
with chains, imprisoned, and banished to the remote Crimea, Martin
learnt that the emperor’s arm was still strong enough to reach out to
Rome (655).
Footnote 43:
See page 244.
But all Italy regarded Martin as a martyr to orthodoxy, and his fate did
much to estrange the Romans from their loyalty to the empire. Nor was
their wrath diminished by the sacrilegious plunder of the Pantheon and
other Roman churches, which Constantinus carried out, when in 663 he
deigned to visit his Western dominions. It would seem that Constantinus
himself was fully conscious that the Roman see was growing too strong,
and deliberately strove to sap its resources, for at this time he
granted to the archbishop of Ravenna a formal exemption from any duty of
spiritual obedience to the Pope as patriarch of the West, and
constituted him an independent authority in the exarchate. For twenty
years this schism of Rome and Ravenna continued, but in the end the old
traditional prestige of the see of St. Peter triumphed over the ambition
of the Ravennese archbishops.
If there had been a strong pontiff at this moment, it is probable that
an open rupture might have taken place between the papacy and the
empire. But pope Vitalian was a weak man, the fate of his predecessor
Martin had cowed him, and the idea of cutting Rome away from the
_respublica Romana_, as the empire was still habitually called, had not
yet entered into the minds of the Italian subjects of Byzantium. To
disown the Imperial supremacy would have been tantamount to throwing
Rome into the hands of king Grimoald the Lombard, and neither Pope nor
people contemplated such a prospect with equanimity.
Accordingly the breach between Rome and Byzantium was deferred for
another generation. After Constantinus was dead, more friendly relations
reigned for a space, for his son Constantine V. was impeccably orthodox.
He held the Council of Constantinople in 681 with the high approval of
pope Agatho, whose representatives duly appeared at it, to join in the
final crushing of the Monothelite heretics. Constantine, in the fulness
of his friendship to the papacy, even granted to the Roman see the
dangerous privilege that when at papal elections the suffrages of the
clergy, the people, and the soldiery,—the garrison of Rome—were
unanimously fixed on any one person, that individual might be at once
consecrated bishop of Rome, without having to wait for an imperial
mandate of approval from Constantinople. As a matter of fact, however,
unanimous elections were very rare, and the exarchs of Ravenna are still
found interfering to decide between the claims of rival candidates.
Signs of a breach became evident once again in the days of the tyrant
Justinian II. When pope Sergius refused obedience to his behests, the
emperor bade the exarch seize him and send him to Constantinople. But
not only the Roman mob, but the soldiers of the imperial garrison took
up arms to resist Justinian’s officials when they tried to lay hands on
Sergius: the ties of military obedience had already come to be weaker
than those of spiritual respect, and the Pope triumphed, for Justinian
was deposed, mutilated, and sent to Cherson by his rebellious subjects,
ere he had time to punish the Romans.
The twenty-two years of anarchy and dissolution at Constantinople which
followed the deposition of Justinian (695-717) were fraught with
important consequences in Italy. The ephemeral emperors of those days
were unable to assert their authority over the West, and we once more
find the popes assuming secular functions, after the fashion of Gregory
the Great in the preceding century. John VI. levied taxes in Rome, made
treaties with the Lombard duke of Benevento, and even protected and
restored the exarch Theophylactus when he had been expelled from Ravenna
by a military revolt. [Sidenote: Quarrel of Gregory II. and
Philippicus.] Gregory II. went so far in his independence as to refuse
to acknowledge the usurping emperor Philippicus; by his advice ‘the
Roman people determined that state-documents should not bear the name of
a heretical Caesar, nor the money be struck with his effigy. So the
portrait of Philippicus was not set up in the Church, nor his name
introduced in the prayers at Mass.’ Gregory only consented to recognise
Philippicus’ successor Anastasius II. when he heard that the new emperor
was a man of unimpeachable orthodoxy. The independent position of the
popes had now grown so marked that the next quarrel with Constantinople
was destined to lead to the final rupture of relations between the
papacy and the empire. It was impossible that things should remain as
they were: the breach was inevitable. Its cause was to be the accession
of the stern Iconoclast, Leo the Isaurian, and his attempt to enforce
his own religious views on the western, no less than the eastern
provinces of his empire. The protagonists in the final struggle are Leo,
pope Gregory II., and the Lombard king Liutprand, whose position and
power we must now proceed to explain.
When king Cunibert died in the year 700, he left his throne to his young
son Liutbert, a mere boy, whose realm was to be administered by a
regent-guardian, count Ansprand, the wisest of the Lombards. A minority
was always fatal to one of the early Teutonic kingdoms. [Sidenote:
Rebellion of Reginbert of Turin.] Only eight months after Liutbert had
been proclaimed king, his nearest adult kinsmen rose in arms against
him, to claim the crown. These were Reginbert, duke of Turin, and his
son Aribert, the child and grandchild of king Godebert, and the cousins
of the boy-king’s father.
Reginbert was followed by all the Neustrian Lombards, and was able to
defeat the regent Ansprand at Novara. He died immediately after his
victory, but his son Aribert followed up the success by winning a second
battle in front of Pavia, and taking prisoner the boy Liutbert.
[Sidenote: Civil wars of the Lombards.] The victor seized the capital,
and was hailed as king by his followers, under the name of Aribert II.
The regent Ansprand, who had escaped from Pavia, tried to keep up the
civil war in the name of his ward: but the new king put an end to this
attempt by ordering the boy Liutbert to be strangled in his bath.
Ansprand then fled over the Alps and took refuge with the duke of
Bavaria.
Aribert II. reigned over the Lombards for ten troubled years (701-11),
fully occupied by the tasks of putting down rebellious dukes, driving
back raids of the Carinthian Slavs from Venetia, and endeavouring to
assert his power over Spoleto and Benevento. The time was opportune for
attacking the imperial possessions in Italy, but Aribert refrained from
making the attempt. He was friendly to the papacy, and made over to pope
John VI. a great gift of estates in the Cottian Alps: nor did he assist
his vassal Faroald, duke of Spoleto, when the latter in 703 made an
attempt on the Exarchate. Aribert preferred to live in peace both with
the Pope and the Emperor.
Aribert II. had gained his kingdom by the sword, and by the sword he was
destined to lose it. In 711 the exile Ansprand, once the regent for the
boy Liutbert, invaded Italy at the head of a Bavarian army, lent to him
by duke Teutbert. Many of the Lombards still loved the house of Berthari
and hated Aribert as a murderer and usurper. The army of Ansprand was
ere long increased by many thousands of the ‘Austrian’ Lombards, and he
was soon able to face the king in the open field near Pavia. The battle
was indecisive, but when it was over Aribert retired within the walls of
the city. His retreat discouraged his army, which began to fall away
from him: thereupon Aribert determined to take with him the royal
treasure, and flee to Gaul to buy aid of the Franks. While endeavouring
to cross the Ticino by night with all his hoard, he was accidentally
drowned, and left the throne vacant for his rival Ansprand (712).
The ex-regent was now proclaimed king, but only survived his triumph a
few months: on his deathbed he prevailed on the Lombards to elect as his
colleague his son Liutprand, who therefore became sole ruler when his
father died a few days later.
[Sidenote: Liutprand, king of the Lombards, 712-43.] Liutprand was the
most able and energetic king who ever ruled the Lombard realm, and his
long reign of thirty-one years (712-43) saw the completion of the
long-delayed process of the eviction of the East-Romans from Central
Italy, and the rise of the Lombards to the highest pitch of success
which they ever knew—a rise which was to be closely followed by the
extinction of their kingdom.
When Leo the Isaurian commenced his crusade against image-worship,
Liutprand had been on the throne for fourteen years. In these earlier
years of his reign he was occupied in strengthening his position, and
made no attack on the Imperial dominions in Italy, though he is found
making war on the Bavarians, and capturing some of their castles on the
upper Adige.
But in 726 things came to a head, when Leo issued his famous edict
against images, forbidding all worship of statues and paintings.
[Sidenote: Quarrel of Gregory II. and Leo the Isaurian.] Pope Gregory
II. was not in a mood to listen to such a command from Constantinople.
He was already in great disfavour with the emperor for having advised
the Italians to resist some extraordinary taxation which Leo had imposed
to maintain the Saracen war. When he received Leo’s rescript, and a
letter addressed to himself requesting him to carry out the imperial
orders, and destroy the images of Rome, he burst out into open
contumacy, and the Romans, with all the other Italians, followed his
lead. Exhilaratus, duke of Naples, who tried to carry out the edict in
his duchy, was slain by a mob, and many other imperial officials were
maltreated or driven off by those whom they governed. The cites elected
new rulers over themselves, and would have chosen and proclaimed an
Emperor of the West, if Gregory II. had not kept them from this final
step. [Sidenote: Liutprand conquers the Exarchate, 727.] Meanwhile, all
the imperial provinces of Italy being in open sedition, and quite cut
off from Constantinople, king Liutprand thought the moment had at last
come for rounding off the Lombard dominions by seizing the long-coveted
Exarchate. He crossed the Po, took Bologna, with most of the other
cities of Æmilia, and then conquered Osimo, Rimini, Ancona, and all the
Pentapolis. Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, fell before him, but the
exarch Paul succeeded in preserving the great City of the Marshes for a
short time longer, till he was murdered by rioters (727). The Lombard
king’s conquests were made with astonishing ease, for in each city the
anti-imperialist faction betrayed the gates to him without fighting.
Soon after, the triumph of Liutprand was completed by the surrender of
Ravenna itself: the exarch Eutychius fled to Venice, already a
semi-independent city, but one which still preserved a nominal
allegiance to the empire. [Sidenote: Gregory II. rebels against Leo II.]
Meanwhile, pope Gregory II. was occupied in writing lengthy manifestos
setting forth the atrocious conduct of Leo, and the intrinsic
rationality of reverencing images. His letters to the emperor were
couched in language of studied insolence. ‘I must use coarse and rude
arguments,’ he wrote, ‘to suit a coarse and rude mind such as yours,’
and then proceeded to say that ‘if you were to go into a boys’ school
and announce yourself as a destroyer of images, the smallest children
would throw their writing tablets at your head, for even babes and
sucklings might teach you, though you refuse to listen to the wise.’
After completely confusing king Uzziah with king Hezekiah in an argument
drawn from the Old Testament, Gregory then proceeded to quote apocryphal
anecdotes from early church history. He wound up by asserting that in
virtue of the power that he inherited from St. Peter, he might consign
the emperor to eternal damnation, but that Leo was so thoroughly damned
by his own crimes that there was no need to inflict any further curse on
him. A more practical threat was that if the emperor sent an army
against Rome, he would retire into Campania and take refuge with the
Lombards (729).
[Sidenote: Position of Gregory II.] As a matter of fact, however, to
throw himself into the hands of the Lombards was the last thing that
pope Gregory desired to do. He had the greatest dread of falling under
the direct authority of Liutprand, for the occupation of Rome by a
powerful and strong-handed Italian king would have been fatal to the
secular power of the papacy. It was easy to disobey a powerless exarch
and a distant emperor, but if Liutprand had become ruler of all Italy,
the popes would have been forced to be his humble subjects. Gregory
wished to rid himself of the domination of Leo, without falling into the
clutches of Liutprand. While disclaiming his allegiance to the emperor,
he pretended to adhere to the empire.
Meanwhile an unexpected turn of events had checked the career of victory
of king Liutprand. While he was absent at Pavia, the exarch Eutychius
had collected some troops at Venice, and aided by the forces of the
semi-independent citizens of the lagoon-city had landed near Ravenna.
The place was betrayed to him by the imperialist party within the walls,
and became once more the seat of imperial power in Italy. At the same
time the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento took arms against their
suzerain, and allied themselves with pope Gregory (729).
Liutprand determined to conquer the Lombard rebels before resuming the
hard task of retaking Ravenna. He even made a truce with the exarch, by
which it was stipulated that they should mutually aid each other, the
one in subduing the revolted dukes, the other in compelling the Pope to
return to his allegiance. Accordingly Eutychius marched against Rome,
and Liutprand against Spoleto. On the king’s approach the two dukes
submitted to him, and swore to be his faithful vassals. [Sidenote:
Liutprand pacifies Italy, 730.] He then moved toward Rome, which the
exarch was already besieging. But he had no wish that the imperial power
should be strengthened by the recovery of Rome, and, encamping his army
in the Field of Nero, outside the city, proceeded to claim to act as
arbitrator between Gregory and Eutychius. They were too weak to resist
him, and the Pope at least gladly acquiesced in the pacification of
Italy which Liutprand proposed. The exarch was to return to Ravenna,
leaving Rome unmolested, and to be content with the possession of
Ravenna only, all his other lost dominions in the Pentapolis and Æmilia
remaining in the hands of the Lombards. Gregory, in consideration of
being left unmolested in Rome, professed to return to his allegiance,
but in reality remained in an independent position. He did not withdraw
his opposition to Iconoclasm, and took advantage of the peace to call
together a great council of Italian bishops, ninety-three in number, who
solemnly anathematised all who refused to reverence images, though they
did not curse the emperor by name (730).
Two months later pope Gregory II. died, and was succeeded by Gregory
III., as great an enemy of Iconoclasm as his namesake. He had no sooner
displayed his views, than the emperor, discontented with the peace which
the exarch had concluded, and much irritated by the anathema of the
Council of Rome, revenged himself on the papacy by issuing an edict
which removed from the jurisdiction of the Pope, as Patriarch of the
West, the Illyrian and south Italian dioceses which had hitherto paid
spiritual obedience to Rome. For the future, not only Epirus and Sicily,
but even Apulia and Calabria, were to look to the Patriarch of
Constantinople as their head and chief (731).
In 732 Leo took a more practical step for reducing the Pope to
obedience. He fitted out a great armament in the ports of Asia Minor,
which was to sail to Italy, to recover by force of arms the lost regions
of the Exarchate, and to arrest Gregory III. and send him in chains to
Constantinople. But the fates were against the restoration of imperial
authority in the West: the fleet was completely wrecked by a storm in
the Adriatic, and the fragments of it which reached Ravenna effected
nothing. This was the last serious attempt of the empire to recover
central Italy. [Sidenote: Last effort of Leo to reconquer Italy, 732.]
Henceforth the Popes went their own way, while the exarch, penned up in
the single fortress of Ravenna, awaited with trembling the outbreak of
the next Lombard war—a war which would certainly sweep away him and his
shrunken Exarchate.
But for eight years after the treaty of 730, king Liutprand maintained
peace over all Italy. He was a pious prince, and a respecter of the
papacy, to which he had even made a grant of territory, ceding the town
of Sutri in Tuscany, which he had captured from the exarch in the war of
728-30. His reign was a time of prosperity for Lombardy: the southern
dukes were compelled to obey orders from Pavia: the Slav and Avar were
kept back from the northern marches, Liutprand also kept up his friendly
relations with Charles Martel, the great Mayor of the Palace in Gaul.
When Charles was looking about for a neighbour sovereign who should,
according to old Teutonic custom, gird with arms and clip the hair of
his son Pippin on his arrival at manhood, he chose Liutprand to
discharge this friendly office. On the invasion of Provence by the
Saracens in 736-7, Charles asked the Lombard for the aid of his host,
and Liutprand crossed the Alps and joined in expelling the infidels from
Aix and Arles.
The peace of Italy was not broken till 738 when Transimund duke of
Spoleto rebelled, not for the first time, against Liutprand. The king
crushed the revolt with his accustomed vigour, and the duke was
compelled to fly: he took refuge at Rome with pope Gregory III.
[Sidenote: Liutprand attacks Rome, 738.] Liutprand promptly demanded his
surrender: Gregory refused, and the Lombard army at once marched into
the duchy of Rome. The king captured Orte, Bomazo, and two other towns
in south Tuscany, and menaced Rome with a siege. Gregory III. could hope
for neither help nor sympathy from his master the emperor Leo, whom he
had so grievously insulted. Accordingly he determined to seek aid from
the one other power which might be able to succour him, the great Mayor
of the Franks. He sent to Charles Martel the golden keys of the tomb of
Saint Peter, and besought him to defend the holy city against the
impious Lombard. [Sidenote: Gregory III. asks aid from the Franks.] He
conferred on the Mayor the high-sounding title of Roman Patrician, which
was not legally his to give, for only the emperor could confer it. He
even offered to transfer to the ruler of the Franks the shadowy
allegiance which Rome still paid to the emperor.
Thus did Gregory III., first of all the Roman pontiffs, endeavour to
bring down upon Italy the curse of foreign invasion. He had drawn upon
himself the wrath of Liutprand by his secular policy: the war arose
purely from the fact that he had favoured the rebellion of the duke of
Spoleto, and sheltered him when he fled. Yet he made the Lombard
invasion a matter of sacrilege, complaining to Charles that Liutprand’s
attack was an impious invasion of the rights of the Church, and a
deliberate insult to the majesty of St. Peter. Considering that the king
had saved him from destruction eight years before, Gregory must be
accused of gross ingratitude, as well as of deliberate misrepresentation
and hypocrisy. But the Pope had imbibed a bitter and quite irrational
hatred for the Lombard race: the danger that he might lose his secular
power, by Rome being annexed to the realm of Liutprand, caused Gregory
to view the pious, peaceable, and orthodox king of the Lombards with as
much dislike as he felt for the heretical Iconoclast at Constantinople.
Considering the amiable character of Liutprand, and the respectable
national record of the Lombards when they are compared with their
contemporaries beyond the Alps, it is astonishing to read of the terms
in which Gregory and his successors spoke of them. No epithet applied to
the heathen in the Scriptures was too severe to heap upon the ‘fetid,
perjured, impious, plundering, murderous race of the Lombards.’ And all
this indignation and abuse was produced by the rational desire of
Liutprand to punish the Pope for harbouring his rebels! It is impossible
not to wish that the great king had succeeded in taking Rome, and
unifying Italy, a contingency which would have spared the peninsula the
curses of the Frankish invasion, of its long and unnatural connection
with the Western Empire, and of that still greater disaster, the
permanent establishment of the temporal power of the papacy.
Charles Martel did not accept Gregory’s offers, or carry out the Pope’s
plans: he would not quarrel with his old friend Liutprand on such
inadequate grounds as the Pope alleged. He chose instead to endeavour to
mediate between Gregory and the Lombard king. He accepted the title of
Patrician, and received the Roman ambassadors with great pomp and
honour, sending them home with many rich presents. But his own delegates
who accompanied them were charged to reconcile the Pope and the king,
not to promise aid to the one against the other. Both Charles and
Gregory, as it happened, were at this moment on the edge of the grave:
both died in the next year (741), and it was some time before the first
active interference of the Franks in behalf of the papacy was destined
to take place.
How uncalled for was the action of pope Gregory is shown by the fact
that in the next year Liutprand came to terms with the Roman See.
[Sidenote: Liutprand grants peace to the Pope, 742.] On the accession of
pope Zachariah, who promised to give no more aid to the rebel duke of
Spoleto, Liutprand restored the cities he had taken from the Roman
duchy, and granted a peace for twenty years. He even presented great
offerings to the Roman Churches and made a present of some valuable
estates to Zachariah. Yet the anger of the popes was in no way appeased:
in their hearts they hated the Lombards as if they were still Arians or
heathen, and only awaited another opportunity for conspiring against
them.
Meanwhile Liutprand died in peace in 743, after a reign of thirty-one
years, in which he had added the greater part of the Exarchate to his
kingdom, had extended the boundaries of Italy to north and east against
the Bavarian and Slav, and had reduced the Beneventan and Spoletan dukes
to an unwonted state of subservience. No one, save his enemies the
popes, ever laid a charge of any sort against his character, and he
appears to have been the best-loved and best-served king of his day. We
read with pleasure that he died in peace, ere the terrible invasion of
the Franks began to afflict the land he had guarded so well. It would
have been better perhaps for Italy if he had been a less virtuous and
pious sovereign: a less temperate ruler would have finished his career
of conquest by taking Rome, and so would have staved off the countless
ills that Rome was about to bring on the whole Italian peninsula.
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