“You have written in favour of an ecumenical Council being held. To us it

seems unadvisable. You are he who prosecutes, insults and destroys the

images. Give way, and grant us silence, and the world will be at peace,

and scandals will cease. Suppose that we listen to you, that bishops have

met together from all the world, that the Senate and Council have sat.

Where is the devoted Christian emperor who is wont by custom to sit at the

Council, to honour those who speak on the right side, to reject those who

err from the truth, when you, the emperor, waver, and speak with the

tongue of barbarians? Know you not that your attack upon the holy images

is a work of contention, arrogance, and pride? At a moment when the

churches of God enjoyed unbroken peace you raised up dissensions,

enmities, and scandals. Be quiet, rest, and there is no need of a Council.

Write to every one and everywhere throughout the world which you have

scandalised by saying that Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and

Gregory, Pope of Rome, have erred respecting the images, and we will bear

you scatheless for the sin of your mistake, as having received from God

authority to loose things in heaven and things on earth. God is our

witness that we have presented all the letters which you have written to

us to the ears and hearts of the kings of the West, pacifying them in

respect of your soul, praising and magnifying you in respects of your

former government. Hence they welcomed your imperial letters with the

honour due from kings when they had not yet heard of your evil attack upon

the images. When they heard and were assured of this, that you had sent

Jovinus, your officer of the guards, to destroy the statue of our Saviour,

called the Witness, by which many miracles have been worked, many women of

fervent zeal, such as the ointment-sellers, were present, beseeching the

guardsman not to do it. He heard them not, but planted a a ladder, and

mounted it, and with three blows of his axe shivered the face of the

Saviour. The women could not bear that impious act. They drew away the

ladder, clubbed him, and put him to death on the spot. You, zealous for

evil, sent and slew there I know not how many women, in the presence of

competent witnesses from Rome, from France, from the Vandals, from

Mauritania, from Gothia, and generally from all the countries comprising

the interior of the West. When these returned each to his own land and

told the story of your revolutionary and childish deeds, they tore down

your laurelled letters and defaced your countenance. Lombards and

Sarmatians and other peoples towards the north overran unhappy Decapolis,

they took your very metropolis, Ravenna, deposed your magistrates, and

appointed their own. And they are minded so to do to imperial possessions

adjoining us, and to Rome, while you are not able to defend us. These are

the results of senseless folly. Yet you frighten us and say ‘I will send

to Rome and break in pieces the image of St. Peter, nay, and bring up in

fetters their bishop Gregory, as Constans did to Martin’. And yet you

should know and be assured that the pontiffs who in series sit at Rome for

the sake of peace are as a middle wall and a fence to the East and to the

West, the arbitrators of concord. And the emperors, your predecessors,

struggled hard to maintain this peace. And if you bluster and threaten us,

we have no need to fight you. Let the Bishop of Rome retreat twenty-four

stades into Campania and go you, pursue the winds. Our predecessor, the

pontiff Martin, sat for peace-sake exhorting. Thus it was that the evil

Constans, erroneous in his belief as to the Holy Trinity, and throwing in

his aid to the then heretical pontiffs, Sergius and Paul and Pyrrhus, sent

and kidnapped him and tyrannously brought him up to Byzantium. After many

cruelties inflicted he banished him, as he inflicted many on Maximus the

monk also, and his disciple Anastasius, and banished them to Lazika. And

Constans, their banisher, was murdered, and died in his sin. And the

count, who was the chief of his household, being assured by the bishops of

Sicily that he was a heretic, buried him secretly in the church, and his

course was ended in his sin. But for the blessed Martin, the city in which

he was banished bears witness to him, Cherson, and the Bosphorus, and all

the North, and the dwellers in the North, by flocking to his tomb and

receiving cures.

“May the Lord think us worthy to go the way of Martin, but for the help of

the many we are willing to live, and live on. For all the West has its

eyes fixed upon our humility, if we be not such, but they have a great

faith in us, and upon him whose statue you threaten to destroy and sweep

away, the blessed Peter, whom all the kingdoms of the West look upon as a

god upon earth. And if you venture to try the truth of this, the kings of

the West are ready even to avenge the easterns whom you have wronged. But,

we beseech you in the Lord, turn away from these revolutionary, childish

actions. You know that you are not able to defend Rome, the very head of

your royalty, unless perhaps the mere city from its nearness to the sea

and a fleet. As I said before, if the Pope go two miles and a half out of

Rome, he fears nothing from you. One thing is our grief: savages and

barbarians are civilised; you that are civilised become savage and

barbarous. In full assurance of faith the whole West makes its offering to

the holy Prince of the Apostles. And if you send to pull down the statue

of St. Peter, look, we tell you beforehand, not on us be the bloodshed

which will follow. On thy neck and head let it fall. We have just received

an entreaty from the far West, from one called Septetus, desiring by the

grace of God to see our face, that we may give him holy baptism. To avoid

the reproach of neglect and slackness we are preparing for the journey.

“May God cast his fear into your heart and bring you back to the truth

after the evils which you have inflicted upon the world. Let me receive

your letter announcing your conversion. May the God who came down from

heaven, and entered into the womb of the holy Virgin, the Mother of God,

for the salvation of men, dwell in thy heart and cast out at once those

who dwell in thee and have put in scandals; and may He bestow peace upon

the Church of all Christians for ever and ever. Amen.”

To this letter of Pope Gregory II. to Leo the Isaurian must be added a

second, written at some time between the date of the first, in 727, and

the date of the Pope’s death in 731. Indeed from some expressions in the

second we may infer that it was sent very shortly after the first.(169)

“We have received by our legate Rufinus the letter of your God-defended

Majesty and Brotherhood in Christ. Indeed it is a burden to my life that

you have not changed, but persist in the same evils—not having a Christian

mind, nor being a follower and imitator of our holy and glorious

wonder-working fathers and teachers. Indeed, foreign teachers I do not

bring into the field, but those of your own city and country. Are there

wiser than Gregory the wonder-worker, and Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory

the theologian, and Basil of Cappadocia, and John Chrysostom? not to speak

of thousands upon thousands like to them of our holy fathers and teachers

inspired by God. But you have rather followed your self-assurance, and the

passions of your own heart, when you wrote, ‘I am priest as well as

emperor’. This indeed, the emperors before you showed both in word and

deed by planting and caring for the churches; in conjunction with the

bishops seeking out the truth with the desire and zeal of orthodoxy. Such

were the great Constantine, the great Theodosius, the great Valentinian,

and Constantine the father of Justinian II., the man of the Sixth Council.

Those emperors governed in the spirit of religion, assembling councils in

unity of mind and purpose with the bishops, searching out truth of

doctrine, and so establishing and adorning the holy churches. These are

priests and emperors; they showed it by their action. But you from the

time you took the empire have not kept to the end the boundaries set by

the Fathers. You found the churches arrayed in embroidered robes, fringed

with gold; you stripped off their ornaments and left them in nakedness.

For what are our churches? Are they not things made with hands—stones,

wood, straw, at best? But they were adorned by pictures and histories,

portraying the wonders of the saints, the sufferings of our Lord, and of

His holy and glorious Mother, and of the holy Apostles. On these histories

and pictures men spend their substance.

“Fathers and mothers, bearing in their arms little children fresh from

baptism, leading the youth and those who have come in from the heathen,

point with their finger to the histories, build them up in faith, and

carry their minds and their hearts aloft to God. You have deprived the

poor of these things, and have plunged them into idle talk, gossip, songs,

castanets, pipings, and trifling. Instead of thanksgiving and glorifying

you have taught them to babble. Have your portion with the speakers of

idle words.

“O emperor, listen to our humility, and cease. Follow holy Church as you

found and received it. Dogmas belong not to emperors, but to bishops. It

is we who have the mind of Christ. One is the discipline of the Church’s

commands; another, the perception of secular things. That military,

ill-omened, rude mind, which you have for secular management, you cannot

use for the spiritual treatment of doctrine. I point out to you the

difference between palace and church, between emperors and pontiffs.

Acknowledge it, and save yourself, and be not contentious. Were any one to

take from you the royal robes, the purple, the diadem, the mantle, the

several marks of rank, you would seem, in the sight of men, unseemly,

shapeless, worthless; so you have made the churches. As you would then be,

you have stripped the churches, and reduced them to tatters. For, just as

the pontiff has no authority to enter the palace, and to make royal

appointments, so the emperor has no authority to enter into the church, to

make elections of the clergy, to consecrate and handle the symbols of the

sacred mysteries, nor even to participate in them without the priest. Let

each of us remain in the vocation wherein he was called by God. O emperor,

do you see the difference between bishops and kings? If any one sins

against you, O emperor, you confiscate his house, and leave him naked of

all but his life, and, at last, you hang or behead him, or banish him, and

make him a stranger to his children, and all his relations and friends.

Pontiffs do not this. But if any one has sinned and confessed, instead of

hanging and beheading, they put upon his neck the gospel and the cross,

they guard him in their treasury, banish him to where the deacons and

catechumens attend, put fasting on his stomach, vigil on his eyes,

thanksgiving on his tongue. And when they have well disciplined and

chastised him, they set before him the precious Body of the Lord, and give

him to drink His holy Blood. And having restored him to be a vessel of

election, cleansed from sin, they help him forward, pure and blameless, to

the Lord. Emperor, do you see the difference between church and palace?

Emperors who have reigned piously in Christ have neither disobeyed nor

afflicted pontiffs. You, O emperor, transgressor and perverter, wrote with

your own hand and subscribed, that he who removes the boundaries of the

Fathers is accursed. Therein you condemned yourself, and separated the

Holy Spirit from you: you punish and tyrannise over us with the soldier’s

arm of flesh. We, unarmed and undefended, having no earthly and carnal

armies, invoke the sovereign ruler of all creation, Christ, whose seat is

in heaven, who leads the hosts of the heavenly powers that He may send to

you a demon, according to the Apostle’s words, to ‘deliver over such a one

to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,’ that the spirit may be saved.

See, O emperor, into what a depth of shamelessness and inhumanity you have

thrust yourself. You have cast your soul into abysses and precipices,

because you would not humble yourself, nor bend your stubborn neck. For,

when bishops, by good instruction and teaching, are able to present kings

to God blameless, and exempt from errors and faults, they lay up a store

of praise and glory before Him for the great Resurrection, when God will

make manifest our hidden deeds in the presence of His angels. We, the

humble, will then be ashamed, not to have reclaimed you through your

disobedience. The pontiffs, before us, who each, in his own time, present

their emperors to God, shame our poverty, in that we do not, in our days,

present an emperor in honour and glory, but one disgraced and counterfeit.

Once again we invite you: repent and be converted: enter into the truth:

maintain what you found and received: give honour and glory to our holy

and renowned fathers and teachers, who, following God’s guidance, opened

the blindness of our hearts and eyes, until they recovered sight. Your

letter said, ‘Why was nothing said about images in the six Councils?’ Most

true, O emperor, neither was anything said about bread and water, eating

or not eating, drinking or not drinking. From the very beginning these

things were given for the life of man. So, too, were images handed down.

Bishops carried them into councils. No traveller, loving Christ and God,

went on a journey without pictures, as men of virtue, and in God’s favour.

We pray you become bishop at once, and emperor, as you wrote. If, as

emperor, you are ashamed to call yourself to account, write to all the

countries which you have scandalised, by saying that Gregory, the Pope of

Rome, has erred in the matter of images, and also Germanus, the patriarch

of Constantinople. Then we take upon ourselves the guilt of your sin, as

those who have received from the Lord authority and warrant to loose and

to bind things on earth and things in heaven. And we will make you without

charge as to this. You refuse. We, as those who shall give account to

Christ our Master, have exhorted, have instructed you, as we were taught

by the Lord. You recoiled: you refused to obey us, weak as we are: and

Germanus, your bishop: and our fathers, the holy and glorious

wonder-workers and teachers. You followed men perverse and rotten, erring

from truth of doctrine. Take your portion with them. As we wrote to you

before, we, by the grace of God, are following the road to the interior of

the West for those who seek baptism. I have sent thither bishops and

clergy of our holy Church. Their princes have received them, and bow their

heads to be illuminated. They ask for me in person to receive them. On

this path, by God’s grace, we are bent: that we may not be condemned for

neglect.

“May God grant you understanding and repentance to return to the truth

which you have deserted, and restore the humble populations to Christ, the

One Shepherd, and to the one fold of orthodox churches and priests. And

may our Lord and God grant peace to the whole world now and for ever and

ever. Amen.”

These letters, which I have given entire, were written at the end of the

third decade of the eighth century. They mark the breaking out of the

Iconoclast persecution. They seem to me to give a complete picture not

merely of the personal character in the two great factors of the time,

Pope St. Gregory II. and the Isaurian emperor, Leo III., but of the power

and influence of the Pope and the bishops in the spiritual life, and of

the eastern ruler in the civil commonwealth. What the Pope claims, he puts

forth in the most distinct language, and through all his letters it comes

out that his predecessors have ever both possessed and exercised it. It is

matter of simple history. Again we see incidentally from the words which

he uses regarding the images and pictures, that, when he wrote, they were

as much part of the Church’s ritual as the prayers. To expel them from the

Church was at once a complete interference with the inner life and conduct

of Christians, and also had the effect to make at least in appearance the

sacred places themselves synagogues and mosques, instead of habitations

wherein Christ, His holy Mother and the saints had a dwelling. The

conjunction of tyranny with impiety in Leo’s attempt is made manifest.

Again, the relation between kings who rule the secular commonwealth, and

the Pope, who, with the bishops throughout the world, presides over the

one fold of Christ, is marked as simply and also as decisively as words

can mark it. The Pope recognises in the amplest terms the temporal king as

God’s minister in his own domain, not a mandatory appointed by the people,

who might be called to account by the people, and be deposed at its will,

but the image of God, and one who administers the authority of God for the

government of human society. As simply and as distinctly he mentions

himself as holding, by express grant of God, power to bind and to loose

things in earth and things in heaven. The king has no more power to enter

the Church and touch the things of God therein than he himself has to

enter the palace, and make appointments in matters of State. But there is

this great difference—he has to answer for the conduct of kings in

spiritual matters. Kings have to answer for how they treat him; but cannot

call him to account for his administration of the divine power committed

to him. In all things that concern sin the spiritual supremacy is

complete. Its giver is God alone, and to God alone it is subject. This

root of the spiritual power is brought out by the whole tenor of his

words, in which the exact mediæval relation of the two powers is

implicitly contained. The supreme minister of God in temporal things is

the first son, but likewise the subject of the Church in spiritual things.

In all this Pope Gregory II. in the year 727 may be said exactly to repeat

what Pope Gelasius said in the year 494, both unarmed Popes speaking to

emperors, lords of armies and absolute in civil power.

The relation between East and West is also very distinctly stated. The

East lies crouching almost helpless beneath an unalloyed despotism, whilst

all the nations of the West look up to St. Peter in Rome “as a God upon

earth”. When this was written just ninety years had passed since the

sepulchre of Christ had fallen into subjection to the infidel and no less

anti-Christian Saracen. The pilgrims who could no longer go to the

sepulchre of Christ went to the sepulchre of the fisherman, and saw in the

statue of St. Peter in his own Basilica the symbol of Christ reigning. But

likewise all the kings of the West looked upon the successor of St. Peter

as no less seated on the throne of justice, of peace, of concord, of

charity, than as the supreme oracle of the Christian faith. What the

patriarch Sophronius had said of him in the agony of the holy city before

the impure Omar, the nations of the West knew and felt him to be. As Leo

III. threatened to destroy the statue of Peter, so they went to him for

baptism, so their kings were already buried in peace beneath the shadow of

the Vatican. In 716, the year before the accession of Leo III., Theodon,

Duke of Bavaria, came to Rome, being the first German prince who made a

pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostles, as later on in 726, the very year

in which the nefarious proceedings of Leo III. began, Ina, king of Wessex,

with his queen Ethelberga came and began the school of the English in

Rome, and made his land tributary to the Romescot.(170) So Constantine the

Bearded had acknowledged the authority which his successor was trying to

diminish, while he sought to reduce the Christian Church, instinct with

the presence, the miracles, the sufferings of our Lord, His Mother, and

His Saints, to the bareness of the Jewish synagogue and the Mohammedan

mosque.

It may be observed also that the Pope associates his own office with that

of bishops throughout the world, especially with that of Germanus, as

bishop of the imperial city. In his mind the bishops belong to the Pope,

and the Pope no less to the bishops. There is no jealousy of them in his

supremacy, nor of him in their subordinate jurisdiction. He censures Leo

III. for not consulting his patriarch, Germanus. The authority which he so

clearly describes is one and the same in the whole episcopate, where St.

Gregory II. himself according to the language used three centuries before

of St. Leo the Great is “princeps episcopalis coronæ”.

All these things come out not in the way of controversy but in an

uncontroversial and authoritative exhortation of a Pope to an emperor. The

Pope is clad in spiritual armour only in the midst of a captive province;

the emperor is the master of fleets and legions behind the walls of

Constantine.

No history written afterwards at a distance of time could set forth these

things with so great a force as the words of a Pope issued to the chief

actor in a desperate struggle at the very beginning of the conflict. The

immediate result is to be noted. In the year 730 the emperor, finding that

he could not make Germanus, the nonagenarian patriarch of Constantinople,

further his design in stripping the churches of their ornament, deposed

him and put a compliant instrument in his stead, Anastasius, a priest and

officer of the great Church, who held the see three and twenty years to

the time of Leo’s son Kopronymus, with what effect and what ending will be

afterwards seen. St. Gregory II. died in 731. In the four years which

elapsed from the first letter to his death he was rewarded for it by the

emperor Leo in five attempts to have him murdered. All these attempts were

frustrated by the fidelity of those about the Pope, and by the awakened

solicitude of the Italian people, who saw in Leo the most cruel and

remorseless of tyrants, in Gregory not only the champion of their faith,

but the defender of their temporal well-being, of every moral as well as

religious liberty.(171)

The Greek chronographer, Theophanes, the main part of whose life belongs

to this same eighth century, calls Pope Gregory II. “the most holy

apostolic man, the assessor(172) of Supreme Peter in his chair,

conspicuous in word and deed”. His resistance to the rude soldier on the

eastern throne won him great praise from the subjects of that throne. The

rude soldier met him only with scorn and violence, as he met the murmuring

of his people. Greece itself had taken arms in defence of its violated

churches. Leo, by means of the Greek fire, destroyed the fleet of the

insurgent Cyclades, and punished with the utmost severity his opponents in

the capital. He carried on with greater violence the attack on the images.

In many cases it passed on to the relics. The patriarch Germanus made one

more attempt to persuade the emperor. He reminded the emperor of the oath

taken at his coronation to maintain the faith of the Fathers. This brought

matters to an open breach. St. John of Damascus attests that “the blessed

Germanus, distinguished in his life and his words, was scourged and

banished”. Another Greek historian, Cedrenus, adds that the emperor called

him an idolater and struck with his own hands the patriarch of ninety

years, who laid upon the altar of the great church the omophorion, the

symbol of his rank, and departed into exile, with the words, “If I am

Jonas, cast me into the sea, but I cannot touch the faith without a

General Council be held”. Germanus had sat for fifteen years; St. John

Chrysostom and he the noblest who ever sat on that perilous throne. He

retired to his paternal house, and did not cease his courageous struggle

against the Iconoclast. He died in most extreme old age, it is supposed in

740.

The destruction of the images proceeded with brutal violence. Leo was not

content with destroying them, but likewise ruined the finest works of art.

The new patriarch, Anastasius, priest and syncellus of Sancta Sophia, who

had played the traitor to the man in whose place the emperor had intruded

him, acted with the emperor in all his violence. Bishops were persecuted

as idolaters, and above all the monks, who practised painting. The schools

directed by them perished almost entirely. Leo is even said to have burnt

the famous library with the twelve monks and their superior who presided

over it. The imperial edict found no execution in the East only, under

Saracenic domination, where the great theologian, John of Damascus, openly

opposed the Iconoclasts, as the Pope had; like whom he censured the

imperial despotism in religious matters. “It belongs not to kings,” said

he, “to lay down laws for the Church. The Apostle said, ‘God has placed in

the Church first apostles, then prophets, thirdly, pastors and teachers

for the perfection of the Church’; he did not go on to say kings. And,

again, ‘Obey those set over you and be subject to them, for they watch

over you, as those who will give account for your souls’. And further,

‘Remember your prelates, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose

faith follow, considering; the end of their conversation’. Not kings, but

apostles and prophets, pastors and doctors spoke the word to you. When God

had commanded David concerning building Him a house, He said afterwards to

him, ‘Thou shalt not build Me a house, because thou art a man of blood’.

The Apostle Paul cried out, ‘Tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to

whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour’. To kings belong

prosperity of the body politic; the regimen of the Church to pastors and

teachers. This, brethren, is the invasion of a robber. Saul rent the

mantle of Samuel. What was the retribution? God rent the kingdom from him

and gave it to David, the meekest of men. Jezabel persecuted Elias; swine

and dogs licked up her blood, and harlots washed themselves in it. Herod

slew John, and died eaten up of worms. And now the blessed Germanus,

illustrious in life and word, has been scourged and banished with many

other bishops and fathers, whose names we know not. Is not this a robber’s

act? ‘The Lord, when scribes and Pharisees drew near to tempt Him, that

they might entangle Him in His talk, and asked Him, is it lawful to give

tribute to Cæsar. He answered, bring Me the coin: when they brought it He

said, whose image is this? They answered, Cæsar’s. And He said, Give then

to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, and to God the things of God.’ We yield to

you, O emperor, in the things that are secular, tribute, custom, gifts. As

to these our substance is in your hands. But in the regimen of the Church

we have pastors who have spoken to us the word, and have formed

ecclesiastical legislation; we remove not the ancient boundaries which our

fathers have set us, but we hold to the traditions as we have received

them. For, if we begin to pull about in the smallest thing the structure

of the Church, the whole will come to pieces bit by bit.”(173)

While Leo III. was thus violently proscribing and executing the defenders

of the Church’s rights in the East, St. Gregory II. at Rome censured his

interference with the faith, but maintained his sovereignty as emperor in

Italy. He had much ado to keep the peoples of Italy within imperial

allegiance. When Anastasius, the intruded heretical patriarch of

Constantinople, sent the letter announcing his succession to Gregory, the

Pope rejected it. The personal acts of the emperor against his life did

not move him from his settled purpose. The guardsman Marinus was sent as

duke to Rome with orders to kill the Pope, or at least to take him

prisoner. He could do nothing. A second attempt was made by the Duke

Basil, in conjunction with the chartular Jordanes and the sub-deacon John.

A third under the exarch Paul, who caused troops to march against Rome.

Romans and Tuscans encountered them and made them retreat. Duke Basil had

to save his life by taking refuge in a monastery. The Romans frustrated

the further attempts of the exarch, and compelled the Pope to assume the

full government of Rome, while the emperor intended to depose him and put

a compliant tool in his place. Venice, Ravenna, and the five cities of the

Pentapolis, under support of the Lombards, chose themselves dukes,

renounced obedience to the exarch, and declared themselves for the cause

of the Pope. The purpose of the Italians was to choose themselves a new

emperor and advance upon Constantinople. Only the fidelity and the

prudence of the Pope, who still hoped for the emperor’s amendment,

prevented the execution of this project.

The Lombard king, Liutprand, thought it was just the opportunity for which

he was waiting to extend his monarchy in central Italy. Exhilaratus,

imperial prefect at Naples, with his son Adrian, got possession of part of

Campania, and set the people against the Pope; but the Romans attacked

them, and after a furious battle slew them both. They chased the duke

Peter from Rome. In the territory of Ravenna it came to a fierce struggle

between the Italians on the Pope’s side and the imperials, in which the

exarch Paul lost his life. The Lombards took many cities, especially in

the Pentapolis, and well nigh put an end to the imperial dominion there.

King Liutprand advanced as far as Sutri, took it, but a hundred and forty

days later bestowed it upon the Apostles Peter and Paul, that is, the

Roman Church. This was in the year 727. It is reckoned by some the first

beginning of the State of the Church.(174)

Then it lay in the hand of the Pope to put an end to Byzantine dominion in

central Italy. The exarchate was in Liutprand’s possession. Had Gregory

II. come to terms with him, the Pope would have obtained a free hand over

the duchy of Rome. It already refused tribute to the emperor; in arms

repulsed his troops, frustrated the repeated attempts upon the freedom and

life of Gregory II., and bound itself under oath to protect him. The city

of Rome expelled the imperial duke, and seems to have given itself a

municipal government. It was the desire of the cities on the Adriatic to

substitute an orthodox for an heretical emperor. Had the Pope put himself

at the head of this revolt, the emperor’s power was at an end. He did it

not. He maintained the purity and the freedom of the faith against

imperial interference; but he urged the population to continue their

allegiance to the sovereign. No stronger proof of this can be given than a

letter of the Pope to Ursus, doge of Venice, in these words: “Gregory, the

bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Ursus, duke of Venice. Since by

sinful action the city of Ravenna, the head of all, has been captured by

that unutterable race of Lombards, and our son, the noble lord the exarch,

is, as we know, sojourning at Venice, your nobility should support him,

and maintain his cause, as we do, that the city of Ravenna may return to

the former condition of the sacred commonwealth, as belonging to the

domain of our lords and sons, the high emperors Leo and Constantine. So by

the help of the Lord we may be able to remain firm, by zeal and love to

our holy faith, in the commonwealth and the imperial service. God preserve

you in safety, beloved son.”(175)

This conduct could not fail to endanger the Pope’s position with king

Liutprand. In the year 728 the strangest scene of this perplexed time took

place. The Lombard king appeared with his host before Rome. Pope Gregory

II. visited him in his camp, and exercised such influence over him that

the king desisted from the siege, went as pilgrim to the Apostle’s tomb,

and left as gifts there his crown, his arms, and his mantle.

Such events as these fill up the last four years of Gregory II. The result

was what we might expect. Lord of Rome the emperor was called; Pope

Gregory II. became in fact a glorious beginning of the papal rule. Not

reckless force, not ambitious struggle and self-seeking formed the basis

of this rule, but the free voice of the population in return for real

protection, for duty steadfastly fulfilled, for never-failing courage,

firm belief, and holy life. Put on the one hand the struggles, the fierce

enmities, the treacheries, the revolts, the scenes of blood, the shifting

of parties evoked by the Iconoclast storm in Italy and Rome, threatened by

the two antagonists, Greeks and Lombards; and on the other hand the great

activity of Pope Gregory II. in his own spiritual domain. And then

estimate the Pope who repulsed Leo III. in his attack upon the Church’s

indefeasible rights, but maintained him as emperor; who fostered St.

Boniface, enabling him by erecting a united hierarchy to lay the

foundation of a Germany, one and Christian. We may fairly place the second

Gregory by the side of the first for prudence, for courage, for insight,

for the sagacity of a ruler in the person of a saint. The great annalist

has even said of him, “If what he wrote were extant, and what he did had

been more carefully recorded, he would be thought no less than Gregory the

Great”.(176)

On the 11th February, 731, St. Gregory II. closed a pontificate as

renowned in its present action, as fruitful in its results. While the

clergy and laity stood beside his coffin, they chose his successor, who

was consecrated thirty-five days later, when the consent of the exarch was

brought from Ravenna, this being the last time it was given by a viceroy

of the Greek emperor.(177)

Concerning this Pope, Anastasius writes:—“Gregory III., a Syrian by

nation, son of John. He sat ten years, two months, and twenty days. A man

most meek and most wise, well instructed in the holy Scriptures, knowing

both the Greek and Latin tongues. He knew all the psalms by heart, in

their order, and was exceedingly skilful in their meaning by his long

study of them. He was a polished speaker, an exhorter to all good works, a

favourite popular preacher, a maintainer of the Catholic and Apostolic

faith immutilate, who, by his fatherly warnings, ceased not to strengthen

the hearts of the faithful, a fearless and zealous defender of orthodoxy:

a lover of poverty, providing solicitously for those in want, not only

with piety, but with careful pains. Redeemer of captives, generous

supporter of orphans and widows: a lover of the religious life, so, by

God’s help, he reached the sacred order of the priesthood. Upon him the

Romans, moved from the highest to the lowest by an inspiration from

heaven, while he was absorbed in devotion beside the coffin of his

predecessor, suddenly laid their hands and chose him for pontiff. It was

in the times of the emperors Leo and Constantine, in the midst of that

persecution which they set up, for the casting down and destruction of the

sacred images of our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Mother of God, of the

apostles, and all saints and confessors. The same most holy man issued

writings with the vigour of the Apostolic See, like as his predecessor of

holy memory had done, to move them to repentance, and to put away this

error.”

Anastasius then records how the emperor had imprisoned his messenger in

Sicily. “Whereupon the pontiff, with greater zeal, attended by the

archbishops of Grado and Ravenna, with other bishops of the western part,

to the number of ninety-three, held a Council at the sacred confession of

St. Peter’s most holy body, with all the clergy and the people, and passed

a decree, that if henceforth there be any who, despising those who

faithfully retain the ancient usage of the Apostolic Church, pull down,

destroy, profane, or blaspheme the veneration of the Sacred Images, that

is, of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, of His Ever-Virgin Mother, the

immaculate and glorious Mary, of the blessed apostles, and of all saints,

he be debarred from the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is,

from the unity and structure of the whole Church. This they all solemnly

confirmed with their subscriptions.”(178)

While the emperor replied to the Council’s decree by imprisoning the papal

bearer of it for a year in Sicily, the position of Pope Gregory III. was

one of great difficulty in respect to the Lombard duchies of Benevento and

Spoleto. They desired to be set free from their loose connection with King

Liutprand, who, on his part, desired their complete subordination to

himself. To the Pope their maintenance was of great importance. Thence

arose a web of party-shiftings, treaties, and counter treaties, which

encompasses the whole later history of the Lombard kingdom.

The archbishop of Ravenna had taken part in the Council at Rome, and his

city was as much opposed to the emperor’s godless attempts as was Rome.

Leo III. resolved to be avenged upon the Pope and Italy. He put a great

fleet under the command of the Duke Manes, and ordered him to sack

Ravenna, to treat the cities of the Pentapolis as rebels, to march on

Rome, to destroy the images there, to treat without mercy those who

attempted to defend them, to seize the Pope, and bring him in fetters to

Constantinople. But storms deranged these plans. A hurricane fell upon the

fleet as it was in sight of Ravenna. Part of it was sunk with all the

crews: part managed to reach an arm of the Po, close to the city. Manes

disembarked troops from it, and went against Ravenna. The people took

arms, with the bishop at their head: whilst the women and old men went in

sackcloth and ashes through the streets in supplication; the young marched

out against the enemy, and drew him into an ambuscade. The Greeks flew to

their ships, many of which were sunk, and the 26th June, 733, was kept as

a perpetual festival in Ravenna: while, for six years out of hatred to the

Greeks the conquerors would eat no fish from that arm of the river.

Leo became furious at this reverse: he redoubled his cruelty on the

defenders of images, and since he could hurt the Roman Church in no other

way, he confiscated all the possessions of the Church in his realm. In the

words of Theophanes,(179) “That opponent of God, roused to a greater

madness, and indulging further in his Arabian mind, imposed capitation

taxes on the third part of Calabria and Sicily. Moreover, he ordered to be

paid to the public treasury the so-named patrimonies of the holy chief

apostles honoured at Rome, three golden talents and a-half, which had been

paid of old to the churches, and he subjected to inspection and enrolment

the male children, as Pharaoh did of old to the Hebrews: what not even his

teachers, the Arabs, had done to the Christians in the East.”

But he did a great deal more and a worse thing not noted by Theophanes. By

an arbitrary act of secular despotism he severed from the jurisdiction of

the Roman patriarch not only Calabria and Sicily, but the ten Illyrian

provinces, Epirus, Illyricum, Macedonia, Thessaly, Achaia—that is present

Greece—Dacia, Mæsia, Dardania, Prævalis, and attached them to the

patriarchate of Constantinople. By this act its jurisdiction became

co-extensive with the eastern empire, and the patriarch ecumenical in that

sense of the Greek word which considered their own empire as pre-eminently

the world, the land that is inhabited by men, as contra-distinguished from

the land foraged by barbarians.

The patriarch to whom this honour accrued was that Anastasius who had been

put by force into the place of the deposed Germanus, and was afterwards

scourged and deposed by the same force under Leo’s son and successor,

Kopronymus.

Calabria and Sicily returned to the jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch

when the eastern emperor lost his dominion in them. The other provinces

remained under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the gift of an

heretical emperor to a patriarch raised by him as his instrument to the

ecumenical throne and at last deposed by his son as an instrument of

little value.

In this act we see the completion of the aggression begun in the year 381,

which attempted to give to the see of Constantinople the second rank in

the Church. The sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem have sunk under

it, but they have fallen into Saracen domination, and are little more than

names; the diminished empire has in its capital the only real patriarch,

and seeks to indemnify him for eastern losses by severing ten provinces

from the patriarchal jurisdiction of Rome, under which they had been from

the beginning of the Christian hierarchy. And Nova Roma, halved it is true

in its secular extension, and trembling at the perpetual aggression of the

Mohammedan chalif, beholds at length its patriarch standing over against

the elder Rome as the chief instrument of imperial despotism in spiritual

things.

Leo III. consciously completes the structure which Theodosius unwittingly

began. The exaltation of the see of the capital is from beginning to end

the work of imperial power, and this special character bears out to the

full the denunciation of it by St. Gregory the Great in his own time, when

he called the bishop’s assumed title “a name of blasphemy and diabolical

pride, and a forerunner of anti-Christ”.(180)

Further, the acts of Leo III. in 733 are unanimously viewed by historians

as having a large effect in the deliverance of Italy from the eastern

sovereignty, and his arrogation of the power to sever from the Pope,

patriarch, a large extent of provinces is viewed no less as a prelude to

the great schism between the East and West. The remaining years of Gregory

III. are filled up with his embarrassing position between the Lombard

duchies of Benevento and Spoleto and Liutprand aiming at uniting Italy in

a Lombard monarchy, whereby the Pope should become his subject as before

he had been a subject of the Goths. From the moment when king Liutprand

resumed more decidedly his plan against the Greek possessions and

therefore against the duchy of Rome, he was bound to endeavour to end the

independence of the two outlying Lombard duchies. But at the same time the

alliance between these duchies and the papacy became a political

necessity.

In the year 738 Liutprand took the field. He began with incursions into

the territory of Ravenna, and invited the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento

to attack the duchy of Rome. They refused, since, as Pope Gregory III. in

one of his letters informs us, they had declared that they would not take

the field against God’s holy Church and her people, with whom they had

entered into covenant. Thereupon the king made war against his disobedient

liegemen. While he laid waste the possessions of the Church in the

territory of Ravenna, he sat down before Spoleto in the spring of 739 with

a considerable force. Duke Thrasimund could not resist and fled to Rome.

In June the king entered Spoleto. He compelled Benevento to receive his

nephew Gregory for duke. At the same time he drew the exarch to his

interest, to whom the Pope’s independence had long been odious. The

confused accounts of annalists and historians make it difficult, if not

impossible, to establish particular events in chronological accuracy. And

the greatest uncertainty lies upon one of these events which is of

particular importance, since it would secure for us an adequate reason for

the Pope’s conduct. Liutprand is said immediately after the taking of

Spoleto to have appeared before Rome, demanding that the fugitive duke

should be delivered up to him. Encamped in the meadows of Nero, beside the

Vatican, he plundered St. Peter’s, laid waste the neighbourhood, and made

many Romans prisoners. It is certain that he took four cities in the

Tuscan part of the Roman duchy, Amelia, Ortes, Bomarzo, and Bleda, as

hostages for Duke Thrasimund.

The Pope was in the utmost danger of being speedily swallowed up by the

encircling Lombard monarchy. Another siege of Rome, perhaps its capture,

was to be immediately expected. The Lombard duchies were unable to repulse

the Lombard king: for defence the emperor was impotent. He could send a

fleet to ravage the imperial metropolis of Italy; he could not defend the

ancient mistress and maker of his empire: from whom he still took a title,

which seemed a mockery. The Lombard threatened to dethrone Leo and make

the Pope his subject. The dread of sacrificing the Church’s independence

drove St. Gregory III. to the last and sole remaining refuge.

The relations(181) of the Franks to Rome had been various since the

emperor Maximian had received the Salian Franks into the number of Rome’s

allies. After the victory over Syagrius, near Soissons, Clovis had raised

up the Gallic-Frankish kingdom upon the ruins of Roman and Visigoth

dominion. When baptised by St. Remigius, Clovis had become the first

Catholic king in the midst of northern peoples attached to Arianism. This

had brought him into manifold connection with the Holy See. In the time of

Pope Gregory II., the conversion to the faith of Germany, from the Rhine

as far as Saxony and Thuringia, not only relied for support, but had its

root in the Frankish kingdom, and bound it still closer with the Papacy.

There were also connections of another sort. As far back as the year 577,

the emperor Justin II., conscious of his own impotence, had given to the

messenger from Rome, soliciting help against Lombard aggression, for

answer, either to seek to gain one of the Lombard dukes, or, if that

failed, to draw the Franks to make a diversion by an expedition into

Italy. The emperor Mauritius had himself made use of these means. From the

year 584, king Childebert had been induced, by Byzantine invitation and

gold, to undertake four campaigns against the Lombards. But it was

reserved to a stronger family than his to co-operate in producing a great

change south of the Alps. At the head of a people formed by the

conjunction of various races amalgamated out of Germans, Gauls, and

Romans, there grew up, in spite of sundry partial divisions, the mass of a

mighty monarchy, north of the Alps. The weakness of the larger number of

the kings who succeeded Clovis caused the chief officers of the crown to

increase in strength. The lower the Merovingians sank, the higher rose the

sons of Pipin, from the banks of the Meuse, until they equalled and

outgrew the effete race. By the end of the first quarter of the eighth

century, Charles Martell, Major Domus, first of the Austrasian, and then

of the Neustrian-Frankish realm, had all power in his hands. In October,

732, he had won a greater merit from all the West than, perhaps, even

Aetius and the Visigoth kings had gained. They had repulsed the vast

Mongol mass at Chalons: he, by Tours, in a bloody battle, had set bounds

for ever to the advance of the Arabians, overflooding Gaul after the

conquest of Spain. He threw them back upon the uttermost south of Gaul,

from which, after many a battle, they were forced to recross the Pyrenees.

To Charles Martell, shining in the lustre of that great victory which

saved the West from Mohammed, as Leo III. prevented his entrance into

Constantinople, the beleagured Pope turned from the cruel yet impotent

tyranny of Leo, and the pretension of the encroaching Lombard. And his own

words, at the moment of trial, will better express his situation than any

others which can be put in his mouth:—(182)

“We have thought it necessary to write again to your Excellency for the

excessive grief which is in our heart, and for our tears, confiding that

you are a loving son of St. Peter, prince of the apostles, and ours also,

and that from reverence to him you will listen to our charge for the

defence of God’s Church, and his own peculiar people: we, who can no

longer endure the persecution and oppression of the Lombard race. They

have taken from us all the lights in St. Peter’s Church, which were given

by your relations or yourself. Next to God, we take refuge in you: for

this the Lombards oppress and make a mock of us. St. Peter’s Church is

stripped, and reduced to utter desolation. But we have rather confided the

details of our sorrows to your liegeman, the bearer of this, which he may

present by word of mouth. O my son, may the Prince of the Apostles deal

with thee now and in the future life before our Almighty God, as thou

disposest and contendest with all speed for his Church and our defence,

that all nations may know your fidelity, your pure intention, the love

which you bear to the Prince of the Apostles, to us, and to his peculiar

people, by your zeal and your defence of us. And by it you will also gain

eternal life.”

Either with this letter, or before it, the Pope had sent to Charles

Martell the keys of St. Peter’s Confession, together with rich presents.

His messengers were received with great honour, but no actual help in

soldiers came. It is supposed that Charles Martell was then engaged,

together with Eudo, Duke of Aquitania, in expelling the Saracens from

Southern France.

The acts of Leo III., as an open enemy of the Pope’s spiritual power, by

his completion of the Byzantine patriarch’s usurped jurisdiction in the

year 733, as above described, thus precede, by about five years, the

appeal made to Charles Martell, by Gregory III., in the face of the

advancing Lombard king, Liutprand, on the one hand, and the absence of any

protection by the emperor on the other.

Such was the uncertain position of things when, in the year 741, the three

great actors were withdrawn from this life, Leo III., on the 18th June,

Charles Martell, on the 24th October, Gregory III., on the 27th November.

Of what this most noble Pope did for Rome, Anastasius gives a long

account. If the Romans loved and admired him as a cardinal priest, they

loved and admired him no less as Pontiff to the end. While fully

acknowledging still the sovereignty of the eastern emperor, a man as

unworthy of the loyalty which bound the Pope to him, as a sovereign could

be, the Pope neither by his heresy nor by his tyranny was induced to

renounce him. He did, indeed, one great and momentous act. He sent to

Charles Martell the keys of St. Peter’s Confession, conjuring him in the

name and person of the Apostle, to save his city from the Lombard robber:

the city which its sovereign was neither able nor willing to save: the

city on which the robber was descending with the utmost force. It is

supposed that Charles Martell was engaged in battle with the Saracens in

Southern France at the time. The Pope sent a second time, to the great

leader, the Hammer of the infidel, the Liberator of the Christian. What

took place is not exactly known: but the Lombard king, Liutprand, retired

in the month of August, 739, from the siege of Rome with his army to

Pavia, and helped Charles Martell against the Saracens, who had again

invaded Provence. Then also Rome was saved by her pontiff from becoming a

Lombard prey.

Once more towards the end of 741, Liutprand was preparing a new expedition

against Rome and its duchy, when Rome lost, on the 27th November, St.

Gregory III., its pontiff, prince, and champion. At Constantinople, Leo

III. had been succeeded by his son, Kopronymus, whom the Greek Zonaras

calls, “a cub more cruel than his sire”. Rome seemed covered by a terrible

tempest: France had been deprived not a month before of Charles Martell.

All minds were in fearful expectation, when a star of peace appeared on

the horizon. There rose up one who, by the force of his mind and the

unsparing risk of his own person, was to preserve Italy during ten years

from the destruction which seemed impending.

Upon the death of Pope Gregory III., the Roman chair was filled in four

days. The usual three days having been devoted to the solemn funeral of

that Pope, the electors, on the fourth day, which was Sunday, the 2nd

December, met in the Lateran palace, and immediately united their votes on

the person of Zacharias, and he was consecrated the same day. Two things

combined to bring about this rapid election and ordination, one the

extraordinary merit of the elected, the other the extreme urgency of the

public need, as Rome, with its provinces, was threatened by King

Liutprand. The confirmation by the exarch, that token of imperial

oppression, was not waited for. Zacharias was the last of those

illustrious orientals of whom a series at this time occupied the Roman

Chair. Though born in Italy, being a native of the Calabrian city, St.

Severina, he was Greek by lineage. Of him and of his predecessor, Photius

himself, the leader of the Greek schism, has left written, “How could I

pass over in silence the two Roman prelates, Gregory and Zacharias, who

were eminent for their virtue, who contributed to increase the flock of

Christ by their teaching full of divine wisdom, who were even conspicuous

by the divine gift of miracles?” Of Zacharias, the character given by

Anastasius is, “a man most meek and gentle, adorned with every goodness, a

lover of the clergy and all the Roman people, slow to anger and quick to

mercy, rendering to no man evil for evil, nor punishing according to

desert, but from the time of his ordination made kind and tender to all:

so that he returned good for evil to his former persecutors, both

promoting and enriching them”. During ten years, Zacharias, by his wisdom

and personal influence, kept at bay the three Lombard kings, Liutprand,

Rachis, and Aistulf, who seemed on the point of completing the

long-fostered ambition of their people by the absorption of Rome into a

barbarian kingdom. The whole time is a contest of mind against matter, of

right against encroachment. We learn, by the very words of these Popes,

that even in the eighth century the radical opposition between Romans and

Lombards continued still as in the time of the first invasion under

Alboin. The end of the Lombards was to make themselves lords of all Italy:

that of the Romans, to prevent themselves passing under a barbarian yoke.

True peace there could never be between them. A truce, liable at any time

to be broken, was all that could subsist.

Three times at least in the ten years of his pontificate, Zacharias

repeated, with Lombard kings, the action of his great predecessor, Leo,

with Attila. Liutprand, after thirty years of reign, was consolidating his

kingdom by the reduction of the two Lombard dukedoms, Spoleto and

Benevento. Bent upon gaining Rome, when he had subdued Spoleto, free from

the check of Charles Martell, secure of the East by the contested

succession to Leo of his son, Kopronymus, Liutprand was at Terni. Thither

Pope Zacharias resolved to go in person, accompanied by a train of clergy.

Liutprand received the Pope with great honour, and the result of a long

interview was that he agreed to restore to the Pope four cities of the

Roman duchy which he had taken. He likewise gave back the patrimony of

Sabina, which he had seized thirty years before, and made peace with the

Roman duchy for twenty years. The Pope returned as it were in triumph to

Rome, was received with exultation, and ordered a procession of

thanksgiving from the Church of St. Mary of the Martyrs, that is, the

Pantheon, to St. Peter’s. This was in his first year, 742.

But the next year, 743, Liutprand broke out against the exarchate: and

Eutychius, the exarch, with the archbishop of Ravenna, and the other

cities of Emilia and the Pentapolis, had no better resource than to

beseech the Pope to succour them. The Pope, accepting the request, sent

two legates to the king with gifts, beseeching him to cease hostility with

the Ravennese. But they accomplished nothing.

Then the Pope left Rome to the government of the Duke Stephen, and, with

his train of clergy, went in person to Ravenna. The archbishop met him

fifty miles from the city. The people welcomed him with cries, “to the

shepherd who left his own sheep to deliver us who were about to perish”.

But the Pope insisted upon going on to Pavia itself, in spite of the

objections of king Liutprand to receive him. Disregarding every risk, he

reached the Po on the 28th June, where he met the Lombard nobles sent to

attend him; and, on the 20th, he celebrated Mass on the feast of the chief

Apostle in the church of St. Peter, called the Golden Ceiling, wherein was

the shrine of St. Augustine: whose body Liutprand himself had brought from

Sardinia.

King Liutprand then received the Pope with great honour in his palace. The

Pope pressed him not to attack the province of Ravenna, but to restore its

cities. The king, after great resistance, consented to leave the province

of Ravenna as it was before. The king then accompanied the Pope to the

river, and sent his chief captains with him on his return, who restored

the territories of Ravenna, and the castle of Cesena.

So the Pope disarmed a second time the most powerful of the Lombard kings,

and saved the exarchate for the empire. From that time Liutprand lived in

peace with the Romans and the Ravennese. He did not live to receive the

report of the ambassadors whom he had sent to Constantinople to inform the

emperor of the peace thus given to Ravenna. He closed in the next year,

744, his reign of thirty-two years, the longest in the Lombard series, and

that in which the Lombard kingdom most developed its power. It must be

confessed that the power of religion was great over the mind of Liutprand.

He reverenced Pope Gregory II. under the walls of Rome: he listened to the

voice of Pope Zacharias in the interviews of Terni and Pavia. At the

bidding of the Vicar of Christ, he more than once stopped himself in the

middle of his victories, and renounced the greatest desire of his heart.

Hildebrand, Liutprand’s co-regent, and successor, maintained himself only

a few months, and had to resign the crown before the end of the year 744

to Rachis, duke of Friuli. A good understanding seemed to be established

with the Pope under a king renowned for piety, married to a Roman, who

made rich offerings to the Church. Peace was assured with the Roman duchy.

But after a few years Rachis also was in conflict with the exarchate. In

749 a new war burst out in central Italy. The king of the Lombards came in

great wrath and with a valiant army to besiege Perugia. Then once more

Pope Zacharias appeared. Attended by some clergy and chief people of Rome

he went to the camp at Perugia. His gifts and his prayers so prevailed

with King Rachis that he consented to raise the siege of the city and

return in peace to Pavia. But the king had been so moved by the words of

Pope Zacharias that after a few days he resigned his kingdom. With his

queen Tassia and his daughter Ratruda he came like a pilgrim to Rome to

venerate the tomb of St. Peter and to ask admission among the clergy. The

Pope cut off the long hair of the Lombard king, gave him with his own

hands the clerical tonsure, and vested him, as well as his wife and

daughter, in the habit of St. Benedict. He retired, by the Pope’s

suggestion, to Monte Cassino, which had been restored by the abbot

Petronax from its ruin towards the end of the sixth century. With him also

retired the prince Carloman, younger brother of King Pipin, and a

Benedictine as well as Rachis. Pope Zacharias greatly loved that

monastery, enriched it with gifts and books, and exempted it from all

episcopal jurisdiction, subjecting it immediately to the Holy See.

The three pacific victories gained by Pope Zacharias, twice over King

Liutprand and once over King Rachis, victories due to the dignity of the

Vicar of Christ and his Christian virtues, had raised to the highest point

the estimation of the Romans for the Holy See. Is it possible to conceive

a greater contrast that that presented by Leo III. and his son Kopronymus

on the one hand, and the three pontiffs, the second and third Gregories

and Zacharias, on the other; or between the governments of the blinding,

scourging, maiming, and torturing sovereigns of the East, and the pastors

ruling with beneficence and risking their lives for their flock in the

West? Thus had the Popes become the protectors of desolated Italy;

therefore had the Kings Liutprand and Rachis offered their royal mantles

at the shrine of St. Peter. We are come now to the last and crowning

incidents of this contrast.

On the resignation of Rachis the true Lombard spirit had raised his

brother Aistulf to the throne. In June, 749, he was elected at Milan.

Almost immediately thereupon a series of regulations showed that other

political principles than those of Rachis had obtained the mastery. The

presents made by the last king after his abdication were declared invalid;

commerce with the Romans forbidden. The fortresses in the Alpine passes

were strengthened. The army was put on a new footing. Presently Aistulf

marched upon the exarchate. In July, 751, he was in Ravenna. Every

imperial possession in the northern and midland Adriatic provinces fell

into his power. Only Rome then was wanting to Aistulf’s ambition. Hitherto

no barbarian had been able to fix his seat there. His dreams were to reach

all the power of the ancient emperors in Italy, and so verify the proud

title of “king of all Italy” which a hundred and fifty years before

Agilulf had inscribed upon his crown. He named his palace at Pavia “the

palace of Italy,” and an inscription has been found, “Aistulf, in the name

of Christ, by God’s will Imperator Augustus, in the fourth year of his

reign”.(183)

No help came from Byzantium, where the emperor Constantine Kopronymus,

after putting down a pretender to his throne, was only occupied with

Iconoclast troubles. For a long time no opposition was perceived; when the

last exarch fell into the Lombard king’s power Rome seemed to be the sure

prey of him who had won Ravenna.

At that moment when the last authority of the empire threatened to

disappear a new bond was knitted between Rome and the West as token of the

world’s changed situation. Pipin, son of Charles Martell, on the point of

taking the idle sceptre from the hand of the last phantom-king of

Merovingian race, turned to Pope Zacharias with the request that he would

approve this great change. This is one principal mark of the immense moral

power wielded by the Pope in the middle of the eighth century that the

mayor of the palace in the Frankish empire sought his sanction to change

his deputed into immediate royal authority. The Pope thus called upon

exercised his supreme judgment in this highest secular matter. He decided

that it was lawful for him who fulfilled the royal duty to be king rather

than for him who only bore the name. In these words he deposed the

Merovingian and recognised the Carlovingian dynasty, and the nobles of the

Franks assembled in diet accepted his judgment. Pipin was proclaimed king

of the Franks in 752 on the field of Mars at Soissons. Some but not all

accounts say that St. Boniface, at the head of the German episcopate,

three years before his martyrdom, gave the Church’s sanction to the

political act, in accordance with the judgment of the Pope.

This momentous judgment of Pope Zacharias, given at the end of 751, was

one of his last acts. He died on the 14th March, 752. The last words of

Anastasius respecting him are an epitome of his life and character. Having

recorded his general deeds of kindness and munificence, he

adds:—“Embracing and fostering all as a father and good shepherd, and

absolutely allowing none to suffer tribulation in his times, the people

entrusted to him by God lived in great security”.

At once clergy and people proceeded to a new choice, but the Stephen whom

they chose lived but three days, and died before consecration. “Then,”

says Anastasius, “the whole people of God met in the basilica of St. Mary

at the Crib, and beseeching the mercy of our Lord God, and with the good

will of our Lady, the holy ever-virgin Mary, Mother of God, they elected,

with one mind, another Stephen, a man preserving the tradition of the

Church with inviolable constancy, swift to help the poor, a firm preacher,

a most valiant defender of the fold in the strength of God.” Immediately a

great persecution against the city of Rome and its adjoining cities broke

out from the savage king Aistulf. Three months after his consecration, the

Pope sent two legates, his brother, Paul, and another, with large gifts to

move the Lombard king to a treaty of peace. The king made a peace for

forty years, but in four months, treading oath and treaty under foot, he

pretended that the city of Rome, with all its province, was subject to

him, and that all the inhabitants should pay him yearly a capitation tax

of a gold solidus. The Pope sent to him two fresh legates, whom the king

received, but refused all conditions, and ordered them to return to their

monasteries without seeing the Pope.

At the end of this year, an imperial legate came to Rome with two _sacred_

letters(184) from the emperor, one for the Pope, the other for Aistulf. In

it he asked the Lombard king to restore the lands of the Commonwealth,

unjustly taken by him. The Pope immediately sent on his brother, Paul,

with the imperial Silentiarius, to Aistulf at Ravenna. The king scorned to

listen either to emperor or Pope, but he added a messenger of his own, to

go to Constantinople, and make some proposition to the emperor. The two

legates, John the Silentiarius, and Paul, the deacon, returned to Rome,

and reported to the Pope that they could do nothing. Then the Pope,

convinced of the evil purpose of the king, sent to the imperial city his

own messengers, in company with John the Silentiarius, “beseeching the

imperial clemency that, as he had already often written to him, he would

come with an army to defend by every means all this part of Italy, and

would deliver this city of Rome and the whole Italian province from the

fangs of the son of iniquity”.(185)

In the meantime, “that most atrocious king of the Lombards burst into

fury, threatening that he would slay all the Romans with one sword if they

did not submit to his sovereignty”. The Holy Father called all the Roman

people together, and walked in procession with them with naked feet,

hearing in his arms the image of our Lord still venerated in the chapel

_sancta sanctorum_. This he carried from the Lateran Church to Santa Maria

Maggiore, the clergy and people chanting litanies and intercessions; and

Aistulf’s broken treaty of peace was affixed to a lofty cross, and formed

part of the procession.

This legation from Pope Stephen II. took place in the year 753. The

emperor Constantino Kopronymus was not the man to save Italy from the

Lombards. To the repeated requests of the Pope he sent no other help than

imperial letters, charging him to induce Aistulf to restore the provinces

he had taken from the empire, and to Aistulf in the same sense, calling

him to undo his diabolical aggression.

The emperor also left the Pope free to unite himself with any one who

could defend him. It was a natural right in such a case: but the imperial

sanction made it more easy of success.

“Then,” says Anastasius,(186) “the most holy man having, in vain, sought,

by innumerable presents, to conciliate that pestilent king for the flocks

committed to him by God, that is, for the whole army at Ravenna and all

the people of that province of Italy, of which he was in possession, and

seeing especially that there was no help from the imperial power, as his

predecessors of blessed memory, the second and third Gregories and

Zacharias, begged help from the king of the Franks against the oppressions

and invasions which they had suffered in this Roman province from the

abominable Lombard race; so he in like manner, by the inspiration of

divine grace, sent in his deep sorrow a letter by a foreign hand to Pipin,

king of the Franks.” Thus from 726, the beginning of the Iconoclastic

heresy and tyranny of the emperors Leo III. and Kopronymus, the Popes

acknowledged the Byzantine sovereignty until in 753 the direct attack of

the Lombard king Aistulf upon Rome, and the attempt to make himself

sovereign of the Popes of Rome and of the territory called its duchy,

together with the impotence of the Byzantine emperor to defend his own

subjects, and the Pope himself vainly entreating succour from him,

compelled Stephen II. “to turn his thoughts from the East to the

West”.(187)

While the Lombards were pressing Rome and all its fortified places, Pipin

replied to Stephen’s entreaty for succour by sending the Bishop of Metz

and the Duke Autchar to accompany him in his journey to France. “Then the

same most blessed Pope, trusting in the mercy of our almighty God, went

out of this city of Rome to St. Peter’s on the 14th October, and many

Romans followed him and people of the neighbouring cities, and weeping and

crying, they would hardly let him go on. But he, trusting in the strength

of God and the protection of the holy Mother of God and the chief apostles

for the safety of all, weak as he was in body, began that laborious

journey, commending all the Lord’s flock to Peter, our Lord, the good

shepherd and blessed Prince of the Apostles.” As he drew near to Pavia

that most wicked king Aistulf sent him messengers, ordering that he should

on no account ask for the restoration of Ravenna and its exarchate or the

other places of the commonwealth which Aistulf or his predecessors had

invaded. The Pope replied that nothing should induce him not to ask it.

When he reached Pavia and was received by the king he made him many

presents, and ceased not with many tears to ask him for the restitution of

what he had taken. He could obtain nothing. The Frank legates pressed that

he might be allowed to go on to France. The king asked the Pope if he

desired it. The Pope avowed it, and the king gnashed his teeth, and sent

his satellites repeatedly in secret to turn him from it. The Frank legates

at last succeeded in obtaining permission for him to go forward.

On the 15th November, attended by the bishop of Ostia and a large train of

clergy, he left Pavia, and continued his journey. He reached the valley of

the Rhone by Aosta and the Mons Jovis, where about two hundred years later

Bernard of Menthon founded the monastery which has given its new name to

the mountain, and he rested at length at the abbey of St. Maurice, now one

of the oldest existing monasteries.(188)

Stephen II. was the first Pope who crossed the Alps. The few Popes who had

up to that time travelled outside Italy had been banished, as St. Clement

by Trajan to the Crimea, or St. Liberius confined by Constantius I. at

Berea in Thrace, or St. Silverius banished by Belisarius to Patara; St.

John I., St. Agapetus, and Vigilius had by royal orders gone to

Constantinople. St. Martin had been taken thither a prisoner by Constans

II., and Pope Constantine, ordered by Justinian II. to go thither, had

been courteously received by him.

Now at the call of duty, but with his own free consent, Stephen II.

crossed the Alps and took refuge in France, to consolidate an alliance

with the most potent kingdom of the West, full of importance for that

Christendom which the see of St. Peter, and that alone, was creating. As

the eastern emperor had nothing for him but to impose heresy and execute

tyranny, the king of the Franks, hearing news of his approach, sent a

splendid train under his eldest son Charles to convoy him. That was a

memorable day when Stephen and Pipin met at the royal villa of Pontigny,

near Chalons, on the Marne, not far from the field of battle where Attila

three hundred years before failed to make Europe a Mongol empire. Now the

union of Stephen and Pipin saved it from a Mohammedan enthralment.

The long-suffering loyalty of so many Popes was at length exhausted. The

deliverance of the Holy See and their flock from the intolerable Lombard

yoke, a usurpation both upon their natural right and their divine

commission to rule the people of God, combined with their desertion by the

eastern emperor, whom, in despite of the most inhuman government during

two hundred years ever practised by men called Christian, they had

acknowledged and maintained, led Stephen II. to inaugurate a new political

order of things. His request, accompanied with many tears, to Aistulf at

Pavia to restore to “the commonwealth” of the empire the exarchate and to

forbear grasping Rome, a request which the Lombard cast away in scorn, led

the Pope, feeble as he was, to risk all the dangers of the Alpine passes,

as well as to seek in France, where alone it could be found, an arm strong

enough to save Italy both from Lombard and from Byzantine.

The king of the Franks, besides his eldest son Charles, had sent Fulrad

the abbot and Rothard the duke to conduct the Pope from the monastery of

St. Maurice, whom they brought with all his retinue to the king with great

honour. “When,” says Anastasius, “the king heard of the most blessed

pontiff’s approach he hastened to meet him with his wife, his sons, and

his chief men. Advancing three miles from his palace called Pontigny, he

dismounted from his horse, and with great humility threw himself on the

earth, together with his wife, his children, and his chieftains, and so

received the Pope. He also walked for some space to a certain spot guiding

the Pope’s horse.” Then the papal train went on together with the king to

the palace, rendering thanks to God in hymns and spiritual songs. It was

the feast of the Epiphany, and Pope and king sat side by side in the

oratory, when the Pope with tears besought the same most Christian king

that by a treaty of peace he would arrange the cause of St. Peter and the

commonwealth of the Romans. And the king satisfied the Pope by oath that

he would to the utmost listen to all his requirements and restore the

exarchate of Ravenna and the other rights and territories of the

commonwealth.

“It being winter, he then caused the Pope with all his retinue to take up

his abode in the abbey of St. Denys, near Paris. King Pipin, going to

Quiersy and there assembling all the nobles of his royal power, inflamed

them with the words of so great a father, and ordained with them to fulfil

what, under favour of Christ, he had decreed with the most blessed Pope.”

By this solemn compact between the Frank realm and the Holy See, the king

bound himself, should he be victorious, to give over to St. Peter, and in

him to Pope Stephen, and his successors, all the places of the exarchate,

and of those lands which had belonged to the empire, of which the Lombards

had taken possession. If we are to follow the text of the contemporaneous

statements and later references, Pipin considered this act not as a

donation, but a restitution. Those for whom this restitution ensued were

so blended together in the view which results from Pipin’s subsequent

declarations that to separate them seems impossible.(189) The one party is

the Roman Commonwealth, which here takes the place of the empire, without,

in its essence, containing any other idea, for empire is but one form of

commonwealth; the other party is the Roman Church. There is no reference

here to the duchy of Rome, the territory belonging to the city according

to the Byzantine departmental administration. The Pope conferred on the

king the title of Roman Patricius, a title which Pipin accepted simply in

its true meaning, understanding by it protection of the Church, as he

afterwards named himself merely Defensor or Protector of the Church.

Stephen, in the meantime, was staying at the Abbey of St. Denys, near

Paris, for a long time dangerously ill, in consequence of his sufferings

during his journey, and also of his great anxiety. On the 28th July, 754,

he anointed in this abbey Church, afterwards the resting-place of the

kings of France, Pipin and his wife, Bertrada, with their sons, Charles

and Carloman. So, for the first time, the hand of a Pope touched the

youthful head of that Charles, who, in riper age, was destined to act with

such force on the fortunes of the western Church.

When the negotiations between the king of the Franks and Aistulf led to no

result, the Frank army began its march. The Lombards were defeated near

Susa, at the foot of Mont Cenis, and presently Pipin stood before Pavia.

Thereupon Aistulf consented to peace. He promised to surrender Ravenna,

and divers other cities: he bound himself no longer to oppress Rome and

her territory. But scarcely was the covenant made, and the Frank host

withdrawn, and the Pope returned to Rome, which he entered before the

conclusion, having been welcomed in the meadows of Nero by the exulting

people, when king Aistulf repented of his concessions. Not only did he not

give up a palm of land in the exarchate: he broke again into the Roman

territory, took cities, laid waste the country. In this distress wore away

the year 755. With New Year’s Day, 756, the king began the siege of Rome.

He shut in the city on three sides. On the height of the Janiculum the

Tuscans were encamped. Aistulf, with his main force, lay beside the

Salarian and neighbouring gates: the Beneventans shut in the southern

gates. His attacks upon the walls were repulsed. Every one took part in

the struggle. Abbot Warnehar, the Frankish minister, put on armour and

worked day and night upon the walls. The whole country round, with its

churches, villas, and dwellings, was mercilessly wasted. The Lombards made

a desert round Rome. Letter after letter the Pope sent to Pipin.

The Father and Head of the Christian family was in the utmost possible

danger of beholding the spiritual rights of his see and the people which

he loved and cared for, subjected to the half barbarous domination of

intruders, who, for nearly two hundred years, had forced themselves upon

Italy. In those two centuries the possession of Rome, and lordship over

it, had been the coveted prize first of their heathen, and then of their

semi-Christian ambition. The rule of the Goth, much nobler in his natural

character, and much less savage, had yet failed, even under the genius of

Theodorich, to amalgamate itself with Roman thought, law, and usage. The

strong hand of the great Gothic king had seemed to tame it: as soon as he

was gone, it corrupted his grandson, and murdered his daughter and

heiress, Amalasunta, too good and noble for her people. But the prospect

of having to submit to an Aistulf, and his ferocious nobles, was worse

than the Gothic servitude had been, which yet had subjected the free

election of their Father and Pontiff by the Roman clergy and people to a

foreign domination. And this domination from Odoacer to Leo III. regarded

not the good of the Church, but the ends of Byzantine or Lombard.

What, in this day of terror, Pope Stephen wrote to Pipin bears so strongly

impressed the inmost belief of his own heart and of the Church at the time

that I quote it in part.

“Peter, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,

and in me the whole Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church of God, the head

of all the Churches of God, founded upon the firm rock in the blood of our

Redeemer, and Stephen, bishop of the said Church, to the most excellent

kings, Pipin, Charles, and Carloman, to the most holy bishops, abbots,

presbyters, monks, also to the dukes, counts, armies, and people of

France, grace, peace, and valour be abundantly ministered to you by our

Lord God for the rescue of that holy Church of God and its Roman people

entrusted to me, from the hands of persecutors.

“I, Peter, the apostle, having been in the absolute choice of supernal

clemency called by Christ, Son of the living God, to illuminate the whole

earth—who hold you for my adopted children to defend from the hands of

adversaries this Roman city, and the people committed to me by God, and

likewise the house in which, according to the flesh, I rest, to deliver it

from the contamination of the heathens: but likewise our Lady, the Mother

of God, ever-virgin Mary, adjures, admonishes, and commands you: and with

her the thrones and dominations, the whole army of the celestial host;

also, the martyrs and confessors of Christ join in the adjuration, that

you may grieve for that city of Rome, entrusted to us by the Lord God, and

for the Lord’s flock dwelling in it, and deliver it with all speed from

the hands of the persecuting Lombards, who are perjured with so great a

crime. Hasten and help before the living fountain, whence you have been

consecrated, and born again, be dried up.”(190)

The siege(191) had entered into the third month when tidings came that the

king of the Franks was on his way to answer the appeal of Pope Stephen. In

April, 756, he passed Mont Cenis. Again the enemy did not venture to

defend the Alpine passes. It would seem that Aistulf had not expected so

early a movement. The siege of Rome was broken up. The siege of Pavia took

its place. Pavia yielded sooner than Rome. Pipin was still in camp before

the city when a mission from the Greek emperor appeared to desire the

surrender to the empire of the lands which had been or were to be taken

from the Lombards. Here was seen in what sense the king of the Franks had

understood the word “restitution”. The eastern deputies promised rich

presents to Pipin,(192) if he would give back Ravenna and the other cities

and fortresses of its territory to the empire. The king of the Franks

replied that for nothing on earth would he suffer those cities to be taken

from the rule of St. Peter, the jurisdiction of the Roman Church, or of

the pontiff of the Apostolic see. He declared upon oath that for no man’s

favour had he repeatedly entered into this conflict, but only for the love

of St. Peter and the pardoning of his sins, adding that no amount of

treasure could persuade him to take away what he had once given to St.

Peter.

Then Aistulf, in fear of losing everything, asked for peace. The Frank

nobles in the army who had previous connections with the Lombard, managed

the agreement. Aistulf not only ratified the previous contract, but

surrendered the third of his treasure, and promised the payment of a

tribute which had been paid in the time of the dukes. Pipin presented to

the Pope a solemn document respecting the gift of the conquered territory.

The Abbot of St. Denys, accompanied by the Lombard Commissioner, with full

powers, executed the agreement and the royal will. Upon arriving at Rome,

he laid the keys of the cities ceded by the Lombard upon the tomb of the

Prince of the Apostles. The exarchate and the Pentapolis, and a large

portion of Umbria, were to belong to the Roman Church, and partly then,

and partly later, came into its actual possession, on one side from

Comacchio, in the swampy lowlands along the Adriatic coast, down to what

was afterwards the mark of Ancona; on the other side as far as Narni, not

far from the confluence of the Nera and the Tiber, where the duchy of Rome

began. That it did not need. If the distant emperor exercised nominal

authority there, the virtual authority had long belonged to the Pope, who

ruled there with acceptance of the people.

It was the summer of 756. About the end of the winter Aistulf died through

a fall from his horse, hunting. After his death ensued a struggle for the

throne. The monk Rachis strove again for the sovereignty, which

Desiderius, duke in Tuscany, contested. It is not clear how parties in the

Lombard kingdom had been so transformed that he who had been compelled

once to quit the throne for yielding to Rome now was unsuccessful against

a competitor favoured by Rome. But this one bought his victory dearly. He

renounced in favour of the Church several cities not mentioned by name in

Pipin’s gift, from Ferrara and Bologna down to south of Ancona. At the

same time Spoleto and Benevento put themselves under protection of the

Pope and the king of the Franks, as the dukes and nobles swore fidelity.

“This change is of the hand of the Lord,” wrote Pope Stephen to Pipin at

the beginning of 757.

In the course of a few years a new State, the State of the Church, had

been founded.(193) For a new State it was, even if its connection with the

empire was not dissolved. Its geographical position in the centre of the

Peninsula and touching both seas, enhanced its importance. The moment was

great and decisive. The times of the Roman empire were fulfilled. East and

West had more and more decidedly parted, as well especially on the field

of theological science as on the field of political formations. Agreement

had become impossible unless the West was willing to give up its

civilising mission. Italy’s political formation was closely bound up with

that mission. The Gothic domination had fallen inasmuch as it had been

powerless to assimilate land and people. The Lombard people, inferior in

energy and in warlike qualities to the Goths, in its late attempt to unite

Italy under one sceptre, had failed less through the weak resistance of

the last remains of the Roman empire than through the deep-lying failures

of its political and military constitution. These showed themselves soon

after its permanent occupation to the south of the Alps by its parting

into numerous military fiefs, with slight internal connection. Moreover,

the instability of relation between the two nationalities from the

beginning made almost impossible the task which Liutprand and Aistulf had

set themselves. Attempts to assimilate in life, custom, and law had

followed a long period of barbarous oppression, when the hand of the

Church had already enfolded conquerors and conquered. These attempts had

there produced a reaction which threatened to undo what had been

accomplished. After two hundred years of settlement the Lombards were

still held to be strangers. Not to mention numerous other tokens of this,

it has a deep meaning when under the successor of Pope Stephen “the whole

Senate and all the people of the God-protected city of Rome” write to king

Pipin concerning the extension of this province “rescued by you out of the

hand of the heathen”.(194) The national Italian elements made their

complete effect sensible in the State of the Church, and secured its

establishment in opposition to that temper of aliens represented by the

Lombards. The new temper was not one-sided and exclusive, but

assimilating, and therefore certain of development and progress. Never has

a State arisen under circumstances so remarkable, in the midst of a

violent shock, yet with so general a concurrence. It was due to the

consistently-pursued management of a series of distinguished men as the

result of their moralising influence. This did not limit itself to the

populations immediately participating in it, which had found steady

advocates and actual protectors in the Popes, notwithstanding the extreme

need and oppression suffered by them. It embraced the whole Christian

world. The Church absolutely required secular independence in order to

maintain in living energy this moralising influence, to fulfil this her

great mission. This necessity must appear clear to every one if there were

in the history of Italy and the Papacy no other period than that of the

last Lombard times, or that following when the Carlovingian rule was

falling to pieces. The foundation of the temporal power was no artificial

plan devised by Gregory II. for himself and his successors when he began

the great battle against the Iconoclasts. It was a necessity in the

world’s history, developing itself rapidly, yet step by step, out of the

situation of things both in politics and religion. And as if it should not

want a legitimate title also, the new formation rose at a moment when,

independently of action on the part of the Popes, the whole claim of the

empire practically disappeared in the centre of Italy. It was recognised

by the Popes alone even when scarcely anything more remained of it than a

mere form and name.

CHAPTER VII. ROME’S THREE HUNDRED YEARS, 455-756 FROM GENSERIC TO AISTULF,

BETWEEN THE GOTH, THE LOMBARD, AND THE BYZANTINE.

I propose to give a continuous review of the Roman pontiff’s position in

the city of Peter from the plundering of imperial Rome by the Vandal

Genseric in 455 to the siege of papal Rome and desolation of the Campagna

by the Lombard king Aistulf, beginning January 1, 756. This attack was

followed in that year by the enfranchisement of Rome and the gift of the

exarchate by Pipin, king of the Franks, to St. Peter and his successors,

when he laid the keys of the cities surrendered by the Lombards on the

tomb of the Prince of the Apostles.

Three hundred years of suffering unbroken and of glory unsurpassed which

preceded the passage of the Roman pontiff from servitude to sovereignty.

The sun of imperial Rome set for ever when the degenerate grandson of the

great Theodosius, great grandson also of Valentinian, whose name he

covered with infamy, perished by the stroke of an assassin in the Campus

Martius, the result of a life in which he imitated the crime of Tarquin.

But Tarquin’s crime led to Rome’s freedom, the crime of Valentinian III.

brought the end of the imperial city, and the substitution of a Rome built

upon revealed truth and eternal justice for the Rome of secular pride and

unjust conquest.

In these three hundred years the brother Apostles, the fisherman and the

tentmaker, took the place of the robber brothers, Romulus the slayer, and

Remus the slain, when the twelve centuries of augured dominion were

exactly fulfilled, and in the time of St. Leo the Great the twelve

vultures had had their full flight.

The three hundred years begin with the formal acknowledgement of St. Leo’s

primacy, as consisting in the descent from St. Peter, bearer of the keys

and feeder of the flock, made to him by the Council of Chalcedon in the

letter soliciting the confirmation of their decrees by him; a letter to

which the eastern emperor Marcian, husband of the noble grand-daughter and

heiress of Theodosius, adds his own request for confirmation, and with his

wife, St. Pulcheria, in his character as the head of the temporal power,

acknowledges St. Leo, the Pope, as “the very person entrusted by the

Saviour with the guardianship of the vine”.

The three hundred years end with the Pope emerging a temporal sovereign

from the Iconoclast persecution. The eastern empire also has fulfilled its

work in these three centuries, and the soldier of fortune, who, at the end

of many revolutions has become the successor of Marcian, has ridden his

warhorse into the Church of God, and attempted to substitute himself as

its governor for the successor of St. Peter, to dictate its creed, and

interfere with its worship. In recompense he is expelled from the Italy

which he and his predecessors had stripped and sacrificed during two

hundred years. Then the crown of temporal sovereignty is added to the

papal mitre of spiritual power, which Leo the Isaurian had sought to

displace. And, moreover, the “advocate of the Church,” who, “as Christian

prince and Roman emperor,” had used _against_ the Church the very

God-given power which it was his first duty to use _for_ her, was on the

eve of seeing the same powerful race which had enfranchised Rome and

dowered the Roman See exalted to the imperial throne in the face of both

the Byzantine and the Saracen. The emperor of the East had lowered his

dignity to the poor ends of ambition, and the task of degrading God’s

Church. In Leo the Isaurian, and in his son Kopronymus we see, in fact,

that the man who sits on the throne of the first Christian emperor is

become the chief enemy of the Church. The deeds of Heraclius and Constans

II. had given adequate cause for the Divine Providence to allow the rise

of Mohammed and the severance of its eastern and southern provinces for

ever from the empire of Constantine and Theodosius. Thereupon Leo and his

son Kopronymus interpreted the lesson thus given as entitling them to meet

the assumption of the prophet-emperor enthroned in the Damascus which had

ceased to be theirs with equal arrogance in the counter assumption to be

emperor-priest. The enemy from Mecca had seized Both Powers in his claim

to be prophet; the enemy at Byzantium seized both as emperor. Civil power

was the appendage to Mohammed, but became the root of spiritual authority

to Leo the Isaurian.

Let us now retrace the period of civic disaster which the Popes

encountered from the last years of St. Leo the Great. The following may be

considered the main causes:—

First of all is the domination, not of barbarians only, but of heretical

barbarians, as Pope Gelasius termed Odoacer.(195) In that passage of his

letter the Pope says that when “Odoacer occupied the realm of Italy he had

enjoined things to be done which were not lawful, but to which we, by the

help of God, would, as is well known, not submit”. He speaks in the name

of his see, but what the acts alluded to were we do not know. The

domination of Odoacer and of Theodorich after him was Arian. It lasted at

least sixty years, from 476 to 536. It was the policy of Theodorich to

treat Rome well, in its civil aspect. He fostered the Senate, keeping it

in quiet subjection to himself. He professed to treat Italian and Goth on

equal terms. As long as the Acacian schism lasted, which effectually

prevented unity of action between the emperors Zeno and Anastasius and the

Popes who had ceased to be their subjects, but who regarded the Roman

emperor with all the consideration required by Roman loyalty to the head

of the Roman name, the Gothic king observed this conduct of neutrality;

but when a new emperor, Justin I., had acknowledged all the demands of

Pope Hormisdas and began to act as a Catholic emperor, Theodorich dropped

the mask and appeared as he was, the head and bond of the whole Arian

league in the West. Pope Symmachus died in 514. The Acacian schism at that

time was in full force; the emperor Anastasius full of enmity and deceit

against the Pope. Theodorich allowed Hormisdas to be elected Pope after a

vacancy of the see for one single day. Hormisdas died in 523, and a

vacancy of six days only ensued, when Pope John I. was allowed to be

freely elected. In the meantime the acts of the emperor Justin I. roused

the full Arian spirit in Theodorich. He allowed Pope John I. to be freely

elected, which did not prevent him from compelling that Pope to go as his

ambassador to Constantinople in order to gain indulgence for the eastern

Arians. And he uttered the threat that he would fill Italy with blood if

his demands were not complied with. And when Pope John I. came back

crowned with honours rendered to him as the first Pope who had ever

visited the eastern capital, Theodorich threw the Pope into prison, and he

never came out alive from the royal dungeon at Ravenna.

This fact throws back a full and disastrous light upon the whole Arian

domination in Italy. A poet of our day has put in the mouth of the doomed

Gothic princess, the royal-hearted Amalasunta, words of her father:—

“I never loved that Apostolic Throne!”(196)

the truth of which is a striking epitome of history. No Arian ruler

_could_ love that Apostolic Throne. But we learn from the fact what the

Popes must have gone through from the period when Rome fell under the rule

of northern condottieri to the expulsion of the Goths under Belisarius and

Narses. It is impossible that one who denied the Godhead of the Master

should look, with love and veneration, upon the successor of the Disciple.

If the Shepherd of shepherds be not God Himself, the Shepherd, who acts in

His name, will not be received, as invested with supreme and universal

spiritual power.

Let us examine the connection of Arian domination over Rome and Italy, as

exercised, first, by Odoacer, and, secondly, by Theodorich, with the

eastern throne’s position and claim.

Odoacer exercised the authority which he held in Rome and in Italy, with

the approval of the emperor Zeno. He compelled the Roman Senate to send to

Zeno at Constantinople the insignia of the western emperor’s dignity,

together with the declaration that a western emperor was no longer

required; and that one emperor seated at Constantinople was sufficient. In

return, he was invested by Zeno with the title of Patricius of Rome. It

may be said that Zeno could do nothing else at the time: and that

Odoacer’s power was really the power of the sword. Nevertheless, the

emperor of the East had become the sole Roman emperor. The Popes

acknowledged him as such, and continually called upon him to discharge the

duty of protection to the Church of God, which belonged to the head of the

Roman Commonwealth. A few years later, Zeno wished to be delivered from

the near neighbourhood of the stirring Gothic king, Theodorich. He

commissioned Theodorich to lead his people into Italy, and take possession

of it. Five years of terrible conflict ensued between the Herule and the

Goth. They inflicted great sufferings on the Italian cities. The Goth

prevailed. Ravenna was taken. There was a compact made between Theodorich

and Odoacer. A banquet ensued, and in it Odoacer was slain. The first act

of Theodorich was to send an embassy to the emperor Anastasius, who had

succeeded Zeno, asking for the crown of Italy from his hands. He was

acknowledged by Anastasius as the ruler of Italy, and as ruling it in the

imperial name. Theodorich became more and more powerful, and if he did not

expressly renounce the emperor’s over-lordship, he acted, in all respects,

as the sovereign of Italy, and of the great dominion which he had attached

to it. But the Byzantine sovereignty in Italy was never resigned in the

purpose of the emperor. When, after 33 years of rule, Theodorich expired

in 526, and Justinian speedily succeeded his uncle, Justin I., the Gothic

rule showed evident signs that it had been built up by the extraordinary

skill and energy of a single man, but had entirely failed to assimilate

the Roman and the Gothic elements in a stable union. When Justinian

conquered the northern provinces of Africa, and Rome, the old seat of the

empire, by the arm of Belisarius, he was, in his own mind, only recovering

his own, and reassuming what Zeno and Anastasius had _lent_ to Odoacer and

Theodorich. This was the mind of every Byzantine sovereign from the date

of the western empire’s extinction in 476, or rather it was not

extinguished to them, but _they_ had become its lords. Herule, and Vandal,

and Goth, and Frank, and Burgundian, and whatever else those northern

savages called themselves, they were only encamped on the sacred Roman

soil, which belonged indefensibly to the emperor who sat at

Constantinople, the heir of Constantine’s Rome.

What has just been said will supply us, as I believe, with a key to the

whole conduct of the eastern emperors. I will review it under three heads:

first, Byzantine despotism as exhibited in secular government: secondly,

Byzantine despotism as pushed into theological doctrine: thirdly,

Byzantine despotism, as laying claim to the government of the Church. The

three together make up the thing which has received the name of

Byzantinism.

The first vacancy of the Holy See, after the extinction of the western

emperor by the death of Pope Simplicius, in 483, witnessed the beginning

of the Acacian schism. The connection of that schism with the making Zeno

sole Roman emperor I have already traced in a former volume. It also marks

the beginning of the aggression by the civil power ruling Rome with the

title of Patricius bestowed by Zeno, but really with the unrestricted

power of the barbarian sword, upon the freedom of Papal election.

When, on the death of Pope Simplicius in 483, they were assembled at St.

Peter’s for the election of his successor, Basilius, prefect of the

prætorium, and patricius, representing also king Odoacer, rose and said

that the late Pope had given Odoacer the most earnest charge to guard

against any injury being done to the Church, upon his own death, by being

present, and sharing in the election. Odoacer(197) did not go so far as to

claim authority to _confirm_ the election. No such power was then

recognised either in the eastern emperor, or in the actual ruler of Rome.

Pope Gelasius was elected in 492; Pope Anastasius in 496; they were chosen

in Rome; they took possession of the chair of Peter immediately upon their

election; they then informed the emperor of their accession, or received

first congratulations from him.

Pope Symmachus in 498 followed Pope Anastasius. And here acts of great

importance took place. The Acacian schism had then divided the East from

Rome. Zeno, in order to unite the Monophysites with the Catholics, had

drawn up an ambiguous formulary of union called the Henotikon. The emperor

Anastasius was most desirous to maintain this formulary. He also wished to

recover union with Rome. When the Senator Festus came to Constantinople on

the embassy of Theodorich, he promised the emperor that he would induce

Pope Anastasius to accept this formulary. But Festus, returned to Rome,

found Anastasius dead, and Symmachus chosen by the greater part of the

clergy to succeed. He saw that there was no chance of inducing Symmachus

to accept the formulary. But Festus was able to raise a schism, and set

up, as Antipope, Laurentius. After great troubles, which lasted four

years, Symmachus was established: but neither the emperor nor Theodorich

exercised or claimed authority to _confirm_ his election.

In 514 Theodorich, the king of Italy, allowed the election of Pope

Hormisdas to take place without interference: and again the election of

Pope John I. in 523. But upon the death of that martyred Pope in 526,

instead of his former indulgence, a state of suspicion and anger against

Rome had taken possession of the mind of Theodorich. He imposed upon the

Romans the choice of Pope Felix IV. It is supposed that at this time he

enacted that in future no one should ascend the papal chair without the

confirmation of himself and his successors.(198) Thus only can it be

explained that after this, on the death of a Pope the Apostolic Chair

remained vacant sometimes for months, and a large sum had to be paid into

the Gothic treasury for the deed of confirmation.

Very shortly after the death of Pope John I., and the fellow-victims,

Boethius and Symmachus, Theodorich died, and was succeeded by his

grandson, Athalarich, eight years old, under the tutelage of his mother,

Amalasunta. During her regency Pope Felix IV. died in 530. The electors

were divided into a Gothic-Roman and a national-Roman party.(199) The

candidate of the former, Bonifacius II., and of the latter, Dioscorus,

were both elected two days after the death of Pope Felix, and both

consecrated on the following Sunday: and so without any confirmation from

Ravenna. But the death of Dioscorus after twenty-eight days prevented a

schism, and Boniface was fully recognised as Pope. Boniface, in dread of

troubles which would arise at his death, ventured to summon the clergy to

St. Peter’s, and laid before them a decree to subscribe: upon which he

declared the deacon Vigilius to be his successor. But feeling speedily

that this act was contrary to the existing laws of the Church, he called a

second assembly of the clergy, the senate, and the people of Rome,

declared himself to have violated the freedom and sanctity of the Papacy,

and caused in their presence the paper nominating Vigilius to be burnt.

The next election took place in 532, according to the usual conditions.

The young king, Athalarich, was made to defer the confirmation of Pope

John II. for two months.(200) The state of Rome in the meantime was

frightful. Every man sought to plunder the goods of the Church. The Senate

had passed a decree strictly forbidding the alienation of church goods by

candidates for the Papacy. It was disregarded: and the only resource for

the new Pope was to appeal to the king and beg him to confirm the senate’s

decree. Athalarich decided that the decree should be inscribed on a marble

tablet, and set up in front of the court of St. Peter’s. But the Gothic

king’s help was purchased dearly, and the fee for confirming a Pope was

established at 3000 gold pieces.

Such in fifty-one years was the result of Odoacer meddling with the Papal

election. Not only had the right to confirm been allowed to the civil

ruler of Rome, but a heavy money payment had been imposed for the

confirmation, and delay superadded.

In that year, 534, the young King Athalarich perished at the age of

eighteen by his own excesses. The Queen Amalasunta speedily lost her

power. She nominated her cousin, Theodatus, of the royal blood of Amali,

king. He repaid her by allowing her to be murdered. His name and character

became odious to the Romans. On the death of Pope John II. in 535 he

allowed the free choice of the Roman Agapetus to take place in seven days.

But he exercised great tyranny over the Romans. He forced Pope Agapetus to

go to Constantinople as his ambassador. When that Pope died, as we have

seen, in the eastern capital, he imposed on the Romans the choice of

Silverius as Pope, threatening with death any one who did not consent to

his appointment.

This is the briefest possible record of how the original liberty of the

Roman clergy and people to elect the Pope was treated by the foreign Arian

rulers, Odoacer, Theodorich, Athalarich, and Theodatus. Then the emperor

Justinian became by right of conquest immediate lord of Rome, and seized

without scruple upon the appointment and confirmation of the Popes. The

act of his empress Theodora, in her violent deposition of Pope Silverius,

is the first specimen of Byzantine conduct when it enters by right of

conquest upon Italian territory. That the Romans had every reason to wish

for the extinction of foreign, which was also heretical, domination, must

be clear to every one who follows history in its detail. But likewise the

example with which Byzantine domination in Italy opens will suffice to

represent to us in a living picture the permanent relation of the Popes to

the eastern or Greek empire. If arbitrary(201) violations of the freedom

of Papal election by the Gothic kings may be given as the exception, it

became by frequent repetitions under Justinian the rule. As the

patriarchal see of Constantinople had long been given only to select Court

favourites, and taken away from the occupants at every change of imperial

inclination, the same plan was pursued henceforth with the filling of the

Apostolical See. The emperor issued his edict: the Romans and the Pope

were expected to obey. Not even the domain of the Faith was kept free to

the Pope. In this also the attempt of the emperors was to lower the chief

dignity of the Church to be the echo of their commands.

From Justinian onwards the Byzantine emperors claimed and exercised the

right to confirm the papal election.(202)

When the ill-treated Vigilius died at Syracuse, returning from his unhappy

sojourn of eight years at Constantinople, Justinian caused the archdeacon

Pelagius, who had been nuncio at Constantinople, to be elected his

successor. In like manner John III. in 560, and Benedict I. in 574 were

elected under pressure from the emperor. But in 568 the Lombards came into

Italy, and at the death of Benedict I. in 578 they were pressing Rome so

severely that no one could undertake the journey to Constantinople to ask

for imperial confirmation. So the Book of the Popes says, “Pelagius,(203)

a Roman, was consecrated without the command of the emperor, because the

Lombards were besieging the City of Rome, and Italy was greatly laid waste

by them. There was such calamity as had not occurred in memory of man.” In

590 St. Gregory the Great waited six months for his election to be

approved at Constantinople. What use was made by the eastern emperor of

the right to confirm the Papal election from the time of St. Gregory to

the breaking out of the Iconoclast persecution has already been recounted.

The last instance of this degrading mark of servitude was the confirmation

of Pope Gregory III.’s election in 731 by the exarch of Ravenna. From that

time forth the Popes elect were no longer confirmed by the emperor or his

delegate; and in 756 the hand of a western ruler made them sovereign

princes, and the much injured Italy was relieved from eastern oppression

so far at least as regarded Rome and the central and northern provinces.

What took place at the death of a Pope was after this fashion. The

representation of the see was vested in the three chief officers; the

primicerius of the notaries, the archpriest and the archdeacon informed of

the fact the exarch of Ravenna. They addressed their letter thus: “To the

most excellent and distinguished lord, long to be preserved by God for us

in the discharge of his supreme office, N., ex-consul, patricius, and

exarch of Italy, N., the archpriest, N., the archdeacon, N., the

primicerius of the notaries, keeping the place of the holy Apostolic See”.

The exsequies of the late Pope took place, and a three days’ fast and

prayer preceded the act of election. In this act took part the higher

clergy with the whole spirituality, the more important magistrates of the

city, the nobility, the deputies of the people, and such Greek troops as

might be present in the city. When the election was completed the elect

was conducted in solemn procession to the Lateran, where he received the

first homage of the people. The electors subscribed the decree of election

which in the meantime had been prepared, and laid it up for future record

in the archive. A second shorter copy was sent to the emperor at

Constantinople, which ended with the words:(204) “wherefore we, all your

servants, in our sorrow beseech that the piety of our masters may

favourably receive the entreaties of their servants, and by their grant of

their permission would allow the desires of their petitioners to take

effect for the good of their empire by their own command. So that in

virtue of their sacred letters we, being under the same pastor, may

solicit without ceasing the almighty God and the Prince of the Apostles,

who has granted the appointment of a worthy governor of his Church, for

the life and empire of our most serene masters.”

Yet more submissive is the tone of the letter to the exarch. After the

election has been fully described, it continues: “This being so, most

exalted God-protected master, we yet more earnestly entreat that by God’s

quick operation inspiring your heart you would give command to adorn the

Apostolic See with the perfect consecration of our father and pastor, as

by the grace of Christ happily and faithfully discharging your execution

of the imperial supremacy, so that we, your humble servants, seeing our

desire more rapidly fulfilled, may be enabled to return unceasing thanks

to God, to the imperial clemency, and to your admirable government willed

by God. Thus, by the appointment of the Pontiff of the Apostolic See, our

spiritual pastor, we may pour forth continual prayers for the life and

safety and complete victory of our most Christian masters. For we know

that the prayer of him whom by God’s will we elect to the supreme

pontifical dignity, will propitiate the divine power, and obtain for the

Roman empire all the success which it can desire. It will also preserve

your own power, under God’s protection, for the ruling of this captive

Italian province, for the protection of us, all your servants, and for the

continuation of long deeds of arms.”(205)

The three Papal officers also informed the archbishop of Ravenna, the

magistracy, and the Roman nuntio there, of what had taken place,

beseeching their assistance that the confirmation of the election might

speedily be given. When this arrived from Constantinople and Ravenna, the

Pope elect received consecration. The seven regions of Rome were

represented in a procession which conducted him from the sacristy of St.

Peter’s to the Confession of the Prince of the Apostles, where he recited

his profession of faith. Thereupon Mass began to the Gloria, the bishops

of Albano and Porto led him to the bishop of Ostia, who was seated in an

elevated chair. They held the gospels over his head, and said the first

and second prayer. Then the bishop of Ostia completed the proper

consecration, while the archdeacon laid the pallium upon him. After this,

the new Pope ascended the papal throne, gave his blessing to all the

priests, and proceeded with the sacrifice of the Mass.

A papal vacancy was reckoned from the burial of the deceased Pope to the

consecration of the Pope elect.

This power of confirming the election of a Pope, in complete derogation

from the original liberty, which had only once been broken by the tyranny

of the first Constantius, in the year 355, down to the Arian occupation of

Rome by Odoacer, appears to have been exercised from the last days of

Theodorich in 526 down to Pope Gregory III. in 731. The emperor

Constantine the Bearded, had, after the Sixth Council, suffered Pope

Benedict II., in 684, to be freely elected: but his son, Justinian II.,

reimposed the yoke.

The weight of imperial pressure upon Rome had been considerably affected

by the Lombard occupation of the northern provinces of Italy, beginning in

568. The capture of Italy as a province, won for Justinian by the conquest

of Narses, was only completed in 555. In thirteen years the Lombards

entered upon the country which the Goths had well nigh reduced to ruin.

Lombard aggression ran well nigh side by side with Byzantine oppression

for two centuries. Right in the midst of both the Apostolic See was

placed. In 596, the great St. Gregory complained that he had been keeping

watch and ward against these new northern robbers for twenty-eight years,

which is the second arm of Byzantine oppression.