The exarch, in the judgment of the despotic Justinian and his successors,

was a viceroy of all Italy, planted in the fortress of Ravenna, one side

of which was guarded by the sea, the other by marshes. Thence Theodorich

ruled: there he was buried: and the Byzantine only felt secure in the

Gothic stronghold. Defenceless Rome was stretched out beneath his feet in

central Italy, or, if it had a defence, it was that the deathless spirit

of the Apostolic See lived within the walls of Aurelian, and animated by

its guardianship the often broken and rudely repaired towers of the

world’s ancient mistress. The exarch was the choice instrument of the

emperor’s despotism. St. Gregory, in his fourteen years’ struggle with all

the elements of civil dissolution, accounts the exarch Romanus as his

worst enemy. He was always ready to combine with the Lombard, then in the

depths of savagery and ignorance, against his own lord’s liege vassals in

Rome. Thus St. Gregory unbosoms himself to Sebastian, bishop of

Sirmium:—“Words cannot express what we suffer from your friend, the lord

Romanus. I would say, in a word, that his malice towards us surpasses the

swords of the Lombards. The enemies who destroy us seem to us kinder than

the magistrates of the Commonwealth, who wear out our thoughts by their

ill-will, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to

have the care of bishops and clergy, of monasteries and people, to watch

carefully against enemies in ambuscade, to be exposed even to suspicion by

the deceit and ill-will of rulers—the labour and the sorrow of this your

brotherhood can the better weigh by the purity of your affection for me

who suffer it.”(206) These words may fitly introduce us to the Byzantine

exarchate as a government. In the thirty years succeeding St. Gregory, the

exarch appears as the great manager of Papal elections: from which his

least hostile act would be to extort a fee as great, at least, as that

laid down in the last Gothic time as 3000 gold coins. Now and then, as

opportunity offered, he would enjoy the greater luxury of plundering the

Lateran treasury of the Church at his leisure: as done by the exarch Isaac

in 638, who was immortalised for the deed in the inscription of his tomb

at Ravenna, as the most faithful servant of his most serene masters at

Constantinople. The exarch Olympius, in 648, received from his master,

Constans II., the higher commission to murder St. Martin, as he was giving

holy Communion. But the attempt was frustrated, as was believed at the

time, by a divine intervention. However, the exarch Theodore Kalliopa,

sent for the special purpose, succeeded in carrying off Pope St. Martin,

as he lay ill before the altar of the Lateran, five years later in 653,

and placing him in the hands of Constans II., to be condemned for high

treason, in that he had not waited for the confirmation of his election by

Constans, but, instead, had condemned his heresy in the great Council

which he summoned at Rome. In the interval of twenty-five years, from the

death of St. Martin to the opening of the Sixth Council, the exarchs were

faithful to the imperial tradition until Constantine the Bearded renounced

the heresy of which his father, Constans, and his grandfather, Heraclius,

had been the chief supporters, while they were nursed in it by a

succession of Byzantine patriarchs. But when Justinian II. had followed,

the exarch John Platina, in 687, hurried from Ravenna to Rome to hinder

the election of the great pontiff, Sergius. Finding it accomplished, he

was obliged to content himself with fining the new Pope to the extent of a

hundred pounds’ weight of gold, that being the bribe which the

unsuccessful candidate had promised him if he would come to Rome to secure

his election. Four years afterwards, Justinian II., unable to induce Pope

Sergius to accept the decrees of his Council in Trullo, or to accept the

place for his signature of them which the emperor had provided in a line

between his own signature and that of his patriarch, sent Zacharias not an

exarch, but a guardsman, to repeat, if possible, in the person of Pope

Sergius, what had been done forty years before in the person of Pope St.

Martin. But, instead, the emperor’s own troops caused the guardsman to

tremble for his life. His only place of refuge was under the bed in the

Pope’s own chamber: the Pope’s intercession alone saved the imperial

emissary from a fatal outburst of Italian wrath. Yet ten years later,

under the upstart emperor Apsimar, in his short reign, another exarch,

Theophylact, was again repulsed from his execution of an intended attack

on the Pope by Italian soldiers. Once more, when Pope Constantine, obeying

an imperial letter of the restored Justinian II., had left Rome for

Constantinople, several chief Papal officers were summarily executed at

Rome. Thus the five attempts on the life of the Pope Gregory II. made by

exarchs or guardsmen, at the bidding of the emperor Leo III., in his

Iconoclastic fury, were but the consistent continuation of the spirit

shown by the exarchs, and fostered and supported by the emperors, from the

time of St. Gregory’s adversary, the Lord Romanus.

During these two hundred years, from the first inroad of the Lombards,

nothing could be more embarrassing than the civil position of the Popes.

Beside the main body of the Lombards, occupying the great plain of North

Italy, with their capital at Pavia, there were two duchies, one of

Spoleto, immediately to the north of Rome and its territory, and another

of Benevento, holding a considerable portion of Italian territory near

Naples. This city, with other seaports, continued in possession of the

empire. The Lombard kings were evermore trying to bring their outlying

duchies into closer obedience to the royal power. Again the fortress and

territory of Ravenna, the imperial metropolis, lay further to the north,

touching the Lombard possessions. The Lombards, when they came into Italy,

were so little advanced in political science of government, so little

coherent among themselves, that at one time they were divided among

thirty-six chiefs, so many heads of robbers and devastating bands,

barbarous and un-Christian. There can be no doubt that the aim of the

Lombard kings from the beginning had been to make themselves masters of

Rome, and to rule the whole of Italy as a kingdom. The example and success

of Theodorich was fresh before them. Justinian’s success under his

generals Belisarius and Narses was even younger than the glory of the

great Gothic king. Gregory the Great had laid a foundation for

christianising the Lombard people in his friendship with the great and

good Queen Theodelinda. In process of time they had become Catholic. Their

king, Liutprand, had caused the relics of St. Augustine, which had been

carried from Africa to Sardinia during the Vandal persecution, to be

brought to his capital city, Pavia, where the shrine of the greatest of

the fathers still abides in honour. Pope Zacharias, by his personal

dignity, prevailed over both Liutprand and Rachis. But the contest for the

dominion of Italy went on in spite of reverence for the Apostolic See. The

people were Catholic, but tumultous and stubborn. After a long-continued

struggle of various success, the king Liutprand seemed to be on the point

of incorporating the Spolentine and Beneventan duchies, of closing upon

Rome, and expelling the emperor from Ravenna. Upon his death, and the

retirement of Rachis, Aistulf was uniting all the Lombard force for the

attainment of their purpose from the beginning, to expel the emperor from

Italy, and to make the Pope a Lombard subject. He went so far as to put a

poll-tax on the Roman duchy, and to style himself king of Italy. There the

Carlovingian hand arrested him: and the keys of the cities which the

Lombard had won from the Byzantine, and Pipin from the Lombard, laid by

the gift of Pipin on the tomb of the chief apostle, signified to all men

that his successor had become a temporal prince, after forming Rome in the

centre of a captive province from a heathen city into a spiritual capital

during the unceasing calamity of three centuries. We have scarcely any

record of the indescribable sorrows which the Lombard in his aggressive

policy, and the Byzantine in his continuous resistance, made up of

treachery and bribery added to insufficient military power, inflicted on

the cities and the people of Italy: nor of what the Popes endured in their

loyal acknowledgment of their duty as subjects, and their unbroken

tenacity in maintaining the faith and government of the Church against the

succession of adventurers who mounted the Byzantine throne. These

culminated in the seven revolutions terminated by that of Leo III. Then

the strong man, armed, rode his charger right into the Church of God and

strove to add the Popes of Rome to the number of patriarchs whom he

raised, deposed, blinded, and executed as he pleased. He made them

ecumenical and trod upon them when so made, with the heel of the imperial

buskin. And now we come from the first oppression in confirming the Pope,

and the second in reducing him to a captive vassal, to the third of

subjecting him as the chief teacher of the Church to the lay power of the

emperor.

As we look back we see the whole mind of Justinian photographed in his

imperial legislation. When he had to speak to the bishop of his capital

his language ran: “To the most holy and blessed Archbishop of this

Imperial City, and Ecumenical Patriarch”—the core of the title was “Bishop

of this Imperial City,” its corollary “Ecumenical Patriarch”. To him the

bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were to submit any appeal

from the provinces subject to them. Rome was not to be deposed from the

prior rank acknowledged once for all by the eastern monarch and episcopate

at the termination of the Acacian schism, in which act Justinian himself,

as the ruling nephew, had taken notable part: but there was to be at

Constantinople a similar patriarch, whom the whole eastern world should

obey. From him the eastern bishops were to learn the mind of the emperor,

just as, when they attended the court, he introduced them to the imperial

presence. The emperor would honour him by using him as his chief

ecclesiastical minister, who held the portfolio of doctrine. The laws

which all the world was to receive bore this exaltation of the imperial

bishop in their bosom. And it must be confessed that in St. Gregory’s time

the patriarchal title which Pope Gelasius had utterly refused to the

Byzantine bishop a century before, had been conceded to him in St.

Gregory’s practice: the patriarchal title, but not the ecumenical. Of the

patriarchs, when speaking of a fault to be condoned, he wrote, “if any of

the four patriarchs had done this we could not pass it over,” and

Constantinople must be added to Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to make

up this number of four: but of the assumed title of ecumenical, he wrote

that it was diabolical, and the forerunner of anti-Christ.

But another part of Justinian’s conduct is no less salient. He is not the

first, indeed, but he is the chief of the theologising emperors. The

disastrous assumption of dictating doctrine, and deciding in theological

controversies, which, at the moment of the fall of the western empire, the

insurgent Basiliscus had begun during his short-lived reign, and Zeno

continued, and Anastasius reinforced, was taken up with far greater force

by Justinian. He laboured during eight years just at the middle of the

sixth century to exhibit Pope Vigilius at Constantinople as the first of

_his_ five patriarchs: he made the bishop of his capital hold a General

Council without the Pope: he imposed his own doctrinal lucubrations upon

that Council. He raised in the minds of the western bishops suspicions and

fears as to Pope Vigilius being forced to become his instrument. The

patriarch Epiphanius, who had weakly yielded to him, he afterwards

deposed. Pope Vigilius escaped at last to die at Syracuse on his return to

Rome worn out with the “contradiction of sinners” which he had

experienced. In his person St. Peter had been a captive; seeds of schism

and distrust had been scattered by Justinian in the West: which it

required all the wisdom, the energy, and the patience of the great St.

Gregory a generation later to overcome and root out. The following

theologising emperors, Heraclius, Constans II., Justinian II., the poor

phantom Philippicus Bardanes, and lastly Leo III., were only completing

and crowning Justinian’s double work, of making an ecumenical patriarch,

and an emperor behind him, the ultimate judge of doctrine.

But had Leo III. succeeded in his attempt to grasp spiritual and temporal

power in one hand, the Church of God would have come to an end. The whole

future of the world was touched by the issue of this conflict.

It is to be remarked how immovable the Popes were, not only in the

maintenance of Christian doctrine pure and proper, but likewise in the

maintenance of that relation between the Two Powers which Christian

doctrine requires as one of the conditions of its own action in the world.

What on this subject Pope Gelasius in the last decade of the fifth century

had said to the emperor Anastasius, now after two hundred and thirty years

Pope St. Gregory II. was saying to the Iconoclast emperor Leo. In the

interval Italy had been governed by the Byzantines, so far as they

possessed it, during two centuries as a subject province, the captive of

its spear; Rome had lived through it only in virtue of the Pope’s primacy.

The eastern empire having been false to the faith in its emperors and in

many of its bishops, but especially in four successive patriarchs of

Constantinople, had been cut in two, and one half of it given over to an

anti-Christian religion to rule with unrestricted violence. And now the

diminished emperor, who had just saved his capital from the Mohammedan

chalif, had been seduced by Jewish and Mohammedan principles to sweep the

Christian churches in his remaining dominion, from Sancta Sophia to the

least country church, free of Christian symbols, beginning with the most

sacred image of the Redeemer(207) which adorned the gate of his own palace

as the witness for the need of the oppressed. Then St. Gregory II. stood

up against Leo III. exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gelasius, had

resisted the emperor of the former day. Syria and Egypt and North Africa,

and, still greater shame and peril, Spain had become Mohammedan. The Pope

stood, in 727, where he had stood in 495. In the interval all these

countries had fallen: but St. Gregory II. could tell a furious tyrant that

all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as “a god upon earth”—that

he could not execute his threat to pull down the statue of St. Peter,

which the Christians of that day reverenced in his basilica at Rome, which

the Christians of eleven centuries have reverenced since in the same

place, and put their head under the Apostle’s foot as the acknowledgment

of the dignity with which Christ invested him.

St. Gregory II. told Leo, the Isaurian, that his own imperial dignity was

itself of divine institution, as the organ of human government: while the

ecclesiastical dignity was of divine institution, in virtue of that divine

intervention by which alone men become sons of God. The answer of the

tyrant was five times to attempt the Pope’s life, as that of a rebellious

vassal whom he was entitled to put under ban, and efface as a _natura

ferina_. But the issue of this contest was that three Popes, St. Gregory

II., St. Gregory III., St. Zacharias, equally great, wise, and prudent,

maintained intact their Primacy: that their successor, Stephen II., was

the first Pope who crossed the Alps; that he consecrated the Carlovingian

dynasty, and was accepted in Rome triumphantly as her king. In this series

of acts he had also broken the chains of Italy, and a Pope presently

following, who had ceased to be an eastern vassal, was to create a

counterpoise to the chalif of Mohammed in an emperor, not Byzantine, but

Roman, not grasping illicit power in the spirit of Saracenic pride, but as

a type of Christian monarchy placed at the head of lawful government, not

a perversion of Constantine and Theodosius, but the loyal spirit of both

embodied by a divine consecration.

During the reigns of Leo III. and his son, Constantine Kopronymus, and the

times of the Popes Gregory II., Gregory III., Zacharias, and Stephen II.,

certain events take place in the East and the West respectively, which, by

their striking contrast with each other, while they coincide in the time

of their happening, remarkably express and sum up the course taken by the

three centuries which we are considering. Despotism matures in the East,

and barbaric savagery triumphs: freedom, order, the majesty of nations

growing into one faith, dawn upon the West.

In 727 the yet existing letters of Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo

exhibit that monarch as thoroughly possessed with the claim to govern the

Church as he governs the State. In this he is as thoroughly encountered by

the Pope, who calls up against him the unbroken tradition of the Church

during the seven centuries, and reminds him of the sad misfortunes of

those emperors who had attempted to carry their civil authority into the

domain of revealed truth. The great eastern teacher, St. John of Damascus,

then living in the Syrian court of the chalif, lays this down in language

as peremptory as that of the Pope. The guilt of Leo III. is heightened by

the fact that he had before him in the history of his own realm during the

hundred years preceding him the rise of a religion essentially opposed to

the Christian faith, which he was professing himself to purify. Its force,

ever exercised against Christians with the utmost virulence and cruelty,

was centered in the fact that its chief deduced all civil authority from

the prophetic office of its founder. But while the kingship of Mohammed,

as inherited by his chalifs, began with his attempt to found a religion,

Leo, in continuing and advancing to their utmost tension the interferences

of Justinian with the spiritual order, was undoing the ancient laws of the

empire for a hundred and fifty years, from the time of Constantine to that

of Zeno. His own patriarch, Germanus, chose rather to lay his omophorion

on the altar, and depart into exile than sanction and accept Leo’s

usurpation in sacred things. The whole liberty, and with it the whole

existence of the Church, were comprehended in the resistance maintained by

Pope Gregory, and attested by patriarch Germanus as a victim. Gregory II.

followed, in giving to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, but to God the things of

God, the whole line of his predecessors. Leo III. imitated wrongly the

chief antagonist of the Christian name; but Mohammed was at least

consistent with his original falsehood. In this his religion itself was

contained. Likewise the whole work of Christendom was embodied in the

victorious defence of Gregory against the consummation of eastern

despotism.

The acts which followed by Pope and by emperor agreed with their several

principles. Gregory III. on his accession at once endeavoured to bring the

emperor to a better mind. But Leo had already deposed Germanus, and put

Anastasius, a docile instrument, in his stead. The Pope called a council

at Rome, which entirely supported the freedom of the Church. Leo turned to

brute force. He sent out a great fleet with the commission to destroy his

own metropolis, Ravenna, then to advance upon Rome, seize the Pope, and

carry him away captive, as eighty years before St. Martin had been taken.

Five years after this violent act of despotism, which the winds and seas

had frustrated, Pope Gregory III., pressed hard by the advancing arms of

the Lombard king, Liutprand, besought the great conqueror, Charles

Martell, to take up his defence. He appealed to the piety of the Frank

leader in behalf of St. Peter, a piety extinct in the Roman emperor’s

breast. Two years later Pipin had succeeded to the power of Charles

Martell, and intimated in the strongest manner the veneration for the

Apostolic See felt by the Frank people, in asking Pope Zacharias to

pronounce as Pope that Pipin might duly be elected king of the Franks.

Zacharias gave his decision: and the diet of the kingdom at Soissons bore

out to the full the sentence of Pope Gregory II. in his letter to Leo

III., that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as a god upon

earth. Pipin became king of the Franks by the diet of the Franks accepting

the decision of Pope Zacharias in 752, when in 733 the rough Isaurian

soldier thought only of subduing the predecessor of Zacharias, Gregory

III., by a dungeon in Byzantium after the mode of Constans II. with St.

Martin. But even yet the contrast is not complete.

Not only had Leo III., in his wrath at being foiled by the elements,

confiscated the patrimonies of the Church in the southern provinces of

Italy which he possessed, and in Sicily, and in his realm generally, but

he interfered with the immemorial spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope as

patriarch, and assigned to his own patriarch at Constantinople the

privileges which by the appointment of St. Leo had been given to the great

metropolis, Thessalonica. This jurisdiction the patriarchs of

Constantinople had coveted for centuries. Theodosius II. had tried to give

it them by an imperial decree: but it was rescinded. Anastasius, who had

been substituted for Germanus in 730, received the ill-omened gift in 733.

The giver’s son, Kopronymus, afterwards punished by blindness this unhappy

man, but sent him back thus blinded to occupy his see during ten years;

made him crown his son, and only in 753 Anastasius, becoming once more a

servile persecutor of images, terminated the episcopate which he had so

ingloriously received in 730. On the other hand, Pope Stephen II.,

successor of Zacharias, in spite of bodily weakness and continual danger,

crossed the Alps, crowned Pipin, his wife and his sons, in the Abbey of

St. Denys, in 754, and so consecrated the Carlovingian race. The rising

monarchy of the Franks exulted in that very dignity of St. Peter’s

successor, which the Byzantine monarch was striving to subject to his own

will.

But this contrast had a yet further and even more striking issue. Pope

Stephen II., hard pressed by the resolute attempt of king Aistulf to make

himself temporal king of Rome, applied for defence to the man he still

recognised as sovereign, Constantine Kopronymus, and received for answer

only the words that he might get it where he could. He beheld the Lombard

destroying and trampling on every thing outside the walls of Rome. In the

utmost bodily weakness he had taken the road to Pavia: he resisted every

effort of Aistulf to detain him. He had been received by Pipin with joy

and admiration. Protection against the Lombards was promised him. The

Lombard king gave way to his fear of the Frankish kings, but presently

broke through every engagement. On 1st January, 756, he had promised

himself Rome, and all which it contained. By the end of the year he had

surrendered the exarchate to St. Peter, and Rome had accepted her Pontiff

Stephen as her king. And the name of Stephen II. is numbered with that of

his three predecessors as the maker of pontifical liberty. Kopronymus

ventured to ask Pipin to restore to him the cities which Pipin had

conquered. He received for reply that not for earthly reward or wealth,

but for the love of St. Peter, the king of the Franks had bestowed on the

Pope, his successor, the cities which he had delivered from the Lombard,

and restored Rome to him by delivering it from Lombard aggression.

Constantine Kopronymus had succeeded his father Leo III. in 740. An

insurrection arose against him in his own house. It was put down with

terrible severity.(208) These were his doings in Constantinople in the

same year 754, when Pipin was crowned by the Pope. He had surpassed his

father in the cruelty with which he attempted to alter the existing

worship of the Church. He had obtained some advantage in war against the

Saracens, who were divided by the contest between the Ommaiads and the

Abbassides, but he thought not the least of saving Italy from the

Lombards, much more he desired to deliver the churches from the sacred

images. For this purpose he caused many assemblies to be held and

addressed the people, moving them to destroy the images. At last he held a

Council at Constantinople of 338 bishops. At their head stood Gregory,

bishop of Neocesarea, Theodosius, archbishop of Ephesus, a son of the

emperor Apsimar, Sisinnius, bishop of Perge in Pamphylia. There was no

patriarch, no representative from the sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch,

and Jerusalem. The see of Constantinople was vacant, as Anastasius had

just died. The Council met on the Asiatic side, opposite Constantinople,

on the 10th February, 754, and sat six months. Then on the 8th August it

passed over to the Church of Blachernæ. There the emperor presented

himself at the ambon holding by the hand the monk Constantine, bishop of

Sylæum, and cried with a loud voice, “Many years to the ecumenical

patriarch Constantine.” At the same time he invested him with the

patriarchal robes and the pallium. The Council ended that day, and nothing

of it remains to us except a so-called confession of faith in the acts of

the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second of Nicæa, in 787, where it was

refuted and rejected.

The Council of 787, called in the time of another Constantine, the

grandson of Kopronymus, when the eastern emperor had returned for the

moment to the orthodox faith, has denounced this Council of 754 as

claiming most unlawfully the title of ecumenical. Being confirmed by Pope

Adrian I., it enjoys that title itself, and its utter condemnation of the

Council of 338 bishops which met at the request of Kopronymus can be

trusted. Here it is sufficient to say that this Council of 754 covered

Kopronymus and his little son Leo with acclamations for having destroyed

idolatry. When the emperor and the new patriarch Constantine and the rest

of the bishops appeared in the square at Constantinople they published the

decree of the Council, and renewed their anathemas against the patriarch

Germanus and St. John Damascene. When the decree reached the provinces,

Catholics were everywhere dismayed; the Iconoclasts began to sell the holy

vessels and disorganise the churches. The images were burnt, the pictures

torn down or whitewashed; only landscapes and the figures of birds and

beasts were retained, especially pictures of theatres, hunts, and races.

To bow before the images of Christ and of the saints was forbidden; to bow

before the emperor was retained, and any insult to his figure upon a coin

punished with death.

In 754, Kopronymus, holding Constantine by the hand, presented him to the

assembled bishops as his own choice for ecumenical patriarch. Not only was

the individual his choice, but his father, Leo, twenty years before, had

made the office by constituting the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops

of the capital conterminous with the empire, in that he deprived the Pope

in his quality of the first patriarch of the ten provinces which from the

beginning had acknowledged his patriarchal superintendence.

We may follow to his end the ecumenical patriarch who had this beginning.

It seems that neither a bishop nor a secular priest in the eastern empire

ventured to oppose the decree of this Council. But monks suffered the most

fearful persecution.(209) They were driven away and their monasteries

destroyed. Nor were these the worst blows which the emperor dealt upon

their institution. He invented truly devilish means to make them

contemptible and abhorred. Some who had been banished from Constantinople

yielded to his will, subscribed the edict against images, quitted their

dress and married. Thereupon they returned to the city, recovered all

their civil rights, were marked with favour, received the emperor’s

personal attention. But those who remained true to their faith and their

habit experienced his utmost severity. A month after his return from the

war, the 24th August, 766, on which day he had appointed a chariot-race,

he caused the monks in the neighbourhood of Constantinople to be brought

together into the racecourse. There, as the rows of seats were crowded

with people, he compelled each monk to pass in procession with a woman of

bad life beside him. Thus they suffered every indignity which an excited

populace could put upon them. The bad courtiers saw that it was an evil

stroke of the emperor. Those who had not the secret thought that they had

been taken in company with these women.

This spectacle so pleased the emperor that, four days afterwards, he

repeated it with nineteen of his chief officers, whom he charged with a

conspiracy against him. The real offence was the maintenance of the right

belief, the having had relation with the banished Stephen in his exile at

Proconnesus, and more than once to have praised his constancy in

suffering. He caused them to be led round the racecourse, and made the

crowd spit on them and revile them. The two of highest account were

beheaded: two patricians, brothers, Constantine, who had been

controller-general of the posts, and Strategius, officer in the life

guards; the rest were blinded and banished to an island, nor did

Kopronymus forget every year that he lived to send thither executioners to

inflict on each a hundred strokes of oxhide. When he found that the people

grieved over the execution of Constantine and Strategius, had not forborne

tears, and even murmured, he put down this to the fault of the prefect

Procopius, who ought to have suppressed these seditious cries; he had him

scourged and deprived.

The patriarch Constantine had received from the emperor extraordinary and

unfitting honours. They were followed by public disgrace. The emperor

learnt that he had had intercourse with one of the accused for conspiracy.

He put up witnesses who declared that they had heard expressions from him

against the emperor. This the patriarch absolutely denied, and proof was

not forthcoming. The emperor caused them secretly to confirm their

statement by an oath taken on the holy Cross. Thereupon, without further

proof he set seals upon the door of the patriarchal palace, and banished

the patriarch to Prince’s Island. Constantine was thus deposed on the 30th

August, 766, and on the 16th November the emperor, without regarding any

canonical form, named Nicetas to his place. The new patriarch was yet more

unfitted for so eminent a rank, being a eunuch and slave by birth. From

his youth he had only been accustomed to attend on women, had scarcely

learnt to read; but the emperor, on recommendation of certain ladies of

the court, had caused him to be made a priest and given him a post in the

Church of the Apostles. Upon entering the patriarchal palace Nicetas

showed himself worthy of the imperial choice, for he caused the

magnificent mosaics on the walls to be destroyed. These his two

predecessors had spared for their beauty.

By similar services the highest dignitaries of the kingdom were obtained.

A zealous Iconoclast was in the eyes of the emperor qualified for every

civil or military post. Thus Michael of Melissene, brother of the empress

Eudocia, was made governor of Phrygia, Lachanodracon of Asia, and Manes of

Galatia. At the beginning of 767 Constantine sent these new and yet more

severe governors into the provinces, having just before imposed an oath on

all his subjects not to honour images. Then began a general persecution of

the orthodox. Those governors showed themselves in the provinces obedient

instruments of their emperor’s rage. They profaned churches, persecuted

monks, and destroyed pictures. They tore relics of the saints from their

sanctuaries, and cast them into rivers or drains. They mixed them with

bones of animals, and burnt them together, so that the ashes might not be

distinguished. The relics of the martyr St. Euphemia, in whose church at

Chalcedon the great Council had been held, were its chief treasure. The

emperor had the shrine cast into the sea, changed part of the church into

an arsenal, and made the other part a place where all the rubbish of the

city might be shot. The waves carried the shrine to the Isle of Lemnos,

whose inhabitants fished it up. Twenty years after the death of

Kopronymus, Irene, then reigning with her son Constantine, caused this

treasure to be brought back to Chalcedon, the church to be purified and

restored to its former condition.

The deposed patriarch Constantine had endured the hardest treatment at

Prince’s Island during thirteen months. The emperor had learnt that this

unhappy prelate had told to others an impious remark concerning the Mother

of God, which the emperor had made, and enjoined silence about it. Furious

in his wrath he ordered him to be brought to Constantinople; he had him

beaten till he could not stand, and had him carried in a litter to Sancta

Sophia to be degraded. He was cast down on the steps of the sanctuary. A

court-secretary read in presence of the whole assembly, called together by

the emperors order, a detailed accusation with loud voice, and as he read

each detail struck him with it in the face. In the meantime Nicetas had

mounted the patriarchal chair, and presided over each insult which his

benefactor suffered. When the reading was finished, Nicetas took the act

of accusation, had Constantine carried to the tribune, where he was held

upright by several, that the people might see him, made one of his

suffragans go up to pronounce the anathema, to take off the episcopal

robes, and with insulting expressions to expel him from the church, from

which he had to go backwards.

The next day, a day of games in the circus, his beard, eye-brows, and hair

were torn out; he was dressed in a short woollen smock without sleeves,

put backwards on an ass, and led through the circus by a nephew whose nose

had been cut off. The parties of the circus reviled him and spat on him.

At the end of the circus he was thrown down, trodden under foot, and put

upon the stone which terminated the circus to be exposed there, so long as

the games lasted, to the jeers of the riders as they passed. He was then

thrown into prison, where he lay almost forgotten to the 15th August of

the following year, 768. That day was the last of his sufferings. The

emperor sent two patricians to him to ask what he thought of the emperor’s

belief and the doctrine of the council. The sufferer, to the last a

courtier, thought by a submissive answer to alleviate his punishment. He

replied: “The emperor’s belief is holy, and the council has issued a holy

confession”. The patricians said at once: “That is just the admission

which we wished to have from thy godless mouth. Nothing more remains for

thee but death.” They then pronounced his condemnation, and led him into

the amphitheatre, where his head was struck off. It was fastened by the

ears to the mile-stone, where it served the mob three days for a

spectacle. The body was dragged to the Pelagium, a spot where the church

of St. Pelagia had stood, which the emperor had pulled down, to make a

court where the bodies of the condemned were thrown after execution; in

the same way as on the other side the water he had pulled down St.

Andrew’s church to make a place of execution. The body was also said to

have been dissected for the good of science.(210) This was the reward

which the patriarch received for having sacrificed his faith and

conscience in giving sanction to his master’s impieties.

This degradation by Kopronymus of the man whom he had made and called

ecumenical patriarch, and to make him had persisted in his father’s

overthrow of the Church’s order from the beginning, by an act of despotic

power breaking into her constitution, is it not also a token of the

condition into which the most ruthless tyranny had reduced the episcopate

of that eastern realm? Those bishops who, at the bidding of an adventurer,

successful for the moment and presently swept away, had met at

Constantinople in 710 to overthrow the Sixth Council and the faith of the

Church; and again, the three hundred and thirty-eight who had met at the

same place at the bidding of Kopronymus to make the whole order of divine

worship subject to his will, did the spirit of St. Basil, St. Athanasius,

St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria live in them still, or were they

in possession indeed of unquestioned episcopal rank and all the powers

which belong to consecration, but in fact the most abject minions of the

most debased human will—the will of a Byzantine despot? The will of one

fined already of one half his empire by the divine Hand which raised up

the most abject of savages to punish a debased Christian realm. Yet ruler

after ruler had not received the lesson which faith derives from

chastisement. Leo III. surpassed his predecessors, and his son surpassed

the father, in imitating the arrogance of a false theocracy. He carried

his civil autocracy into interference with the doctrine and the worship of

the Church. This interference the laws of his own empire warned him

against, as cited by St. Gregory II. in the examples of the greatest

emperors.

It is not too much to say that the despotism wielded by those who occupied

the Byzantine throne from Justinian to Kopronymus had eaten out the

courage and dulled the sense of divine things which we admire in the

Fathers of the fourth century. Athanasius denounced a Constantius, and

Basil a Valens, but the eastern bishops of the eighth century crouched

before Leo and Kopronymus, and if there had not been a succession of

Popes, in whom the spirit of St. Leo lived on, and the doctrine of St. Leo

was maintained, the Church herself would have yielded to the most debasing

despotism ever seen. But it must not be forgotten that the bishops of the

West were faithful to the teaching and emulated the stedfastness of the

Popes. A despotic patriarch, nominee and instrument of a despotic emperor,

made a servile episcopate. A martyr Pope, such as St. Martin, likewise

made an army of martyrs. The several character of bishops in the East and

West completes the contrast which we have been drawing out.

In the patriarch Constantine the ecumenical patriarchate received its

completed form. Kopronymus chose him; took him by the hand, presented him

to the 338 bishops who held an illicit and heretical council at his

bidding; having used him for his purposes, deposed, beheaded him, treated

his lifeless body with extreme dishonour.

In the same Kopronymus, the two hundred years of secular lordship begun by

Justinian’s conquest of Rome came to an end. He had disregarded the appeal

of Pope Stephen to defend his own dominion from the Lombards. Pipin had

deprived them of that dominion, and then bestowed it upon St. Peter.

Kopronymus asked Pipin to give it back to him. Pipin refused, and after

thirty-four successive Popes had endured a dominion which began with the

deposition of St. Silverius by a shameless woman, and perhaps cannot show

a single act of generous defence in return for loyal service during two

centuries, the attempt inaugurated by Justinian, and finished by

Kopronymus, to reduce the successor of St. Peter to a patriarch whom they

might treat as the patriarch Constantine was treated, failed finally and

for ever. Stephen II., an infirm old man who had crossed the Alps at the

risk of his life, deserted by Kopronymus and threatened by Aistulf, sat at

the grave of the chief Apostle, Prince as well as Bishop of Rome, and the

Christian faith was not left to be determined by soldiers of fortune on

the throne of Byzantium, but saved by and for the guardianship of the

living Peter.

From Metrophanes,(211) the first recorded bishop of Byzantium, not yet

Constantinople, in the time of the Nicene Council to Methodius, in the

year 842, when the Iconoclast contest came to a final end, fifty-eight

bishops sat on the chair of the Greek capital. The first was simple bishop

of a suffragan city to the Thracian metropolis of Heraclea. As soon as

Constantine in the year 330 had consecrated his new capital as Nova Roma,

there began a continual exaltation, the work of the eastern emperors for

their own purposes; after four centuries the bishops of Constantinople had

in 733 reached the culmination of their hopes by receiving from the

emperor Leo III. ten provinces out of the Roman jurisdiction, and twenty

bishoprics of his own birth-land, Isauria, previously belonging to the

patriarch of Antioch. They were in a Greek sense ecumenical, not because

their authority extended over the world, but because by imperial gift it

had become conterminous with that portion of the world which was

considered by the Greek emperor the habitation of men,(212) that is, his

subjects. The original and true patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch

had fallen under Mohammedan domination. So likewise had Jerusalem, which

attained patriarchal rank only in the middle of the fifth century. The

name of each as patriarch was carefully maintained, especially for

appearance in the list of Greek councils, but in each case, and for

hundreds of years, it was little more than “magni nominis umbra”.(213) Of

the fifty-eight bishops of the capital many have gained for themselves

imperishable honour, many are venerated in the number of the saints by

Greeks and Latins, and looked up to as intercessors and protectors, others

have at least left behind them in one or other respect a distinguished

memory. But more than a third, one and twenty, are branded as heretics or

favourers of heresy. Almost as many were for various reasons deposed,

partly by heretical, partly by orthodox emperors. Several, also, of them

received at the same time dishonouring treatment, such as Kallinikus,

Anastasius, and Constantine. In three cases, those of St. Chrysostom,

Eutychius, and Pyrrhus, deposed prelates, were restored, a case which much

oftener recurs in later Byzantine history.

In the fourth century the names of Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and

Demophilus in the see of the capital are marked as supporters of the Arian

heresy. In the fifth century the Nestorian heresy springs from its author

in the very chair of Constantinople. Fifty years later the Acacian schism

springs in like manner from the ambition of its author in the same chair,

and the names of four successors, Fravitas, Euphemius, Macedonius II, and

Timotheus are struck from the diptychs of their own church, when the

schism was terminated under Pope Hormisdas. In less than twenty years

after this, Anthimus, put into the see of the capital by the intrigues of

the same empress Theodora who violently deposed Pope St. Silverius, was

deposed by Pope Agapetus in his visit to Constantinople, as a Monophysite

heretic. In the sixth century the Monothelite heresy was owing mainly to

the political intrigues of Sergius, sitting for twenty-eight years in the

see of Constantinople, also the prime minister and guide of the emperor

Heraclius; he and his three successors, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, were the

main-stay of that most insidious and stubborn heresy, which for forty

continuous years kept the Church in peril, and strove to overthrow the

efforts of ten Popes to maintain the faith, and brought one of them to die

a martyr under the rule of Constans II. But in the seventh and eighth

centuries, the most terrible Iconoclast persecution found in six bishops

of Constantinople its main support, in that they put to the service of the

emperors Leo III. and Constantine Kopronymus, Leo V. and Theophilus, these

immense ecclesiastical powers with which the emperors themselves had

invested them over the eastern bishops. The single patriarch had himself

become a despot in wielding the tyranny of the civil despot as his chief

instrument. These six ecumenical patriarchs wielded their authority under

Iconoclast emperors for a long time: Anastasius I. from 730 to 753;

Constantine II. from 754 to 766; Nicetas I. from 766 to 780; then an

orthodox sovereign brought with him an orthodox council. The patriarch

Tarasius and union with the West might seem to have secured a deliverance

from a renewed reign of the Iconoclast violence. On the contrary, three

succeeding patriarchs, Theodotus from 815 to 821; Antonius I. from 821 to

832, and John VII. from 832 to 841, did what they could to carry out the

wishes of their masters for that heresy.

Such was the conduct, as guardian of the faith, of the line of

pseudo-popes set up by state policy at Constantinople, in virtue of the

pretension that the bishop of Nova Roma should enjoy equal rights with the

bishop of Old Rome.

It is to be noted that in this period the whole doctrine concerning the

Person of our Lord Jesus Christ went through the most complete sifting and

discussion in the Councils of the Church. During it, from St. Silvester to

Gregory IV., seventy pontiffs sat in the chair of Peter. They lived in

full five hundred years of perpetual struggle. One after another “apparent

diræ facies inimicaque Troiæ numina”—Arius in the foreground heralding

Mohammed in the rear; Nestorius and Eutyches tearing the unity of the

Church on opposite sides; an able bishop of Constantinople seizing the

moment of Rome’s temporal captivity under Arian strangers to raise his see

to parity: the East well nigh devoured by opposing sects. After this, an

insidious Byzantine couple, Heraclius and Sergius, emperor and patriarch,

covering up deep wounds with ambiguous words, and sacrificing the empire

by their sacrifice of the faith; and lastly, emperors who disregard things

human and divine, and mark their mastery over doctrine by the subversion

of worship, a Leo III. and a Constantine Kopronymus. All secular power is

in the hands of Nova Roma which Constantine has set up to be the Christian

city from its cradle: the seven greater hills to take the place of the

hills by the Tiber, and in these very hills of Constantine from age to age

the evil vision nestles—his successor and his patriarch are the chief

performers in this ever recruited drama of heresy. But through all these

attacks the seventy successors on St. Peter’s throne have kept the

doctrine of the Church, that is the doctrine of the Incarnation itself,

one and unchanged. The infidel has trampled upon Alexandria, Antioch, and

Jerusalem; but while the old Christendom has sunk from debased nations

into Saracen serfdom, a new Christendom has arisen among Teuton settlers,

making their first steps in national life. Nova Roma has been false to the

purpose for which Constantine founded it; and Old Rome has found among

those whom the rival counts as barbarians, one more faithful as well as

more powerful than she has been. Charlemagne stands at the end of the

vista which Constantine begins. Of the two, does he not merit most in the

Church of God?

But to estimate at its due value this long series of historic facts, it

must be remembered that during at least three centuries of this period,

the seventy Popes work as captives, the fifty-eight bishops of

Constantinople work as the right hand of emperors. From the time indeed

when St. Silvester passed from the catacombs to the Lateran palace, to the

time when the Vandal robbers desolated Rome under the eyes of St. Leo, the

Popes were not captives. They had severe persecution at times to undergo:

especially under Constantius I., the whole fifty years of Arian trial were

a special test of their fortitude, their clear undoubted maintenance of

the Godhead of our Lord, their unfaltering trust in their apostolic right.

But so long as there was a Christian western emperor he had a regard to

the Apostolic See of the West: even a Valentinian III. could acknowledge

St. Leo in an imperial edict in 447 as “Principem episcopalis coronæ”;

words which present the very idea of St Peter’s majesty, as the root, the

bond, and the crown of the episcopate. But with the inroad of barbarians,

as soldiers of fortune and civil masters of Rome, another time begins. And

when to barbarous manners and brute force was added the Arian spirit, a

period ensued which was calculated to test to the utmost the dowry of

truth bestowed on the Apostolic See. Justinian as a civil ruler may be

deemed worse than Odoacer, worse even than Theodorich. What the Popes did,

they did often after being nominated without free election, often with the

postponement of their confirmation after election (as when after the death

of Pope Honorius, Pope Severinus had his three years diminished to two

months, in the hope of Heraclius to bend him to the Monothelite heresy),

sometimes with unjust depositions, as St. Silverius by Theodora, as St.

Martin by Constans II., as St. Sergius attempted by Justinian II., as John

VI. attempted by Apsimar, the emperor of a day: again by unlawful

substitution for a living Pope, as Eugenius to St. Martin, when condemned

but not yet martyred. Then again the eleven years preceding the great Pope

Sergius from 676 to 687 witness the appointment of six Popes. At this time

there is a series of Popes who show eastern lineage, as if the emperor’s

hand were busy in the choice of them. But no one of them fails, and St.

Sergius and St. Gregory III., both easterns, are of the very greatest and

most stedfast in the whole time of Popes.

Add to this that the civil condition of these Popes, from the entrance of

the Lombards to the end of the exarchs, was often most perilous. It was

plaintively alluded to by St. Agatho in addressing the Sixth Council, when

forty years after the death of Honorius he set forth in most absolute

language the unfaltering integrity of faith which had marked the Apostolic

See to his own time, language; which the Council accepted.

It is to be noted that a Pope, whose election had been long delayed by the

mere arbitrary will of emperor or exarch, as soon as he was consecrated,

entered into the full possession of his unrestricted rights. The exarch

who had power to delay, who had power to plunder the Lateran treasury of

the Church, as Isaac and John Platina did, had no power to lessen the

dignity of St. Peter’s succession when once acknowledged. Even Vigilius is

admitted to have emancipated himself from the thraldom of Theodora; and

Eugenius, forced upon the Romans by the tyranny of Constans II., was a

blameless Pope, who did not yield to the heresy of Constans.

What manner of men were they who were loyal vassals to the most iniquitous

rulers, and when solicited by their own faithful peoples to break an

abhorred yoke yet held them back, and adhered to those who gave them

neither protection nor justice? They did not rule as Satraps in a kingdom

worn down to prostration by centuries of arbitrary power, but were

acknowledged as sitting in the apostolic throne of Faith and Justice by

rough lords from the North, to whom obedience in spiritual things was a

Christian virtue learned with great difficulty by those who inherited a

natural independence. Interminable intestine quarrels among the western

potentates, who yet accept the voice of an unarmed Pope as the interpreter

of faith, and the most upright arbiter of human justice, are a proof the

more how deeply the rule of St. Peter had sunk into the western mind.

What guarantee of truth can be offered by the course of human things if

this be not one? That is the testimony of the three centuries from

Genseric the Vandal to Aistulf the Lombard. The testimony of Teuton

conquerors, who burn what they once worshipped, and worship what they once

burnt, who enter on their dominion as spoilers and develop into Christian

monarchs. The testimony of Constantine’s imperial successors, who own the

papal succession to St. Peter, while they try to bend it to their will,

and in the attempt subject half their empire to an anti-Christian tyranny.

Lastly, the testimony of St. Leo the Great and fifty-one successors to the

time when St. Leo III., invested with civil sovereignty, employed the

acknowledged greatness of his spiritual power to restore the empire which

the first Leo saw sinking in ruins.

CHAPTER VIII. FROM SERVITUDE TO SOVEREIGNTY.

The first land possession(214) of the Roman See appears to have been the

Cæsarean palace of the Lateran, the gift to it of the emperor Constantine,

in gratitude to God for having conquered the heathen empire at the Milvian

Bridge. It noted the impression on the conqueror’s soul of the divine

sign, _in this prevail_. Therein St. Silvester took up his abode, and in

it was built the Cathedral Church of Rome and of the world. For a thousand

years it remained the abode of the Popes—the centre of the Church’s

visible life, whence her spiritual jurisdiction radiated, the proper

residence of one hundred and sixty Popes, from St. Silvester to B. Pope

Benedict XI.

It is not a little to be noted that the original root of the Pope’s

temporal power was his unique spiritual power, that the gift of

Constantine foreshadowed the empire of Charlemagne; that the first

Christian emperor removed the Pope from the catacombs to a Cæsarean

palace; that the second emperor received back from the Pope that imperial

title and power which so many successors seated in Constantine’s Nova Roma

had used so cruelly against the successor of St. Peter, whom yet they

acknowledged. And still the Lateran Basilica bears on its front in

barbarous Latin the title no less true than proved,

“Dogmate Papali datur ac simul Imperiali,

Quod sim cunctarum Mater Caput Ecclesiarum”.

Nor is there any spot on the earth upon which the guiding hand of God in

the fortunes of the world may be more profitably studied than before the

entrance of that Church so well styled in her double character Mother and

Head. If the Mother were not head her rule would be impotent; if the head

were not mother it would be unbearable.

The munificence thus begun in his gratitude by Constantine was continued

during centuries by great Roman families and by others also. The pastoral

staff fixed itself in Roman earth, and became a great tree. In due time it

flowered in a prince’s sceptre. It is most interesting to mark in the

gifts to the Roman See the heathen names of ancient patrician families

commemorated. Under the properties administered by St. Gregory the Great

we read of the Massa Papirianensis, the Massa Furiana, the Massa

Varroniana, the Fundus Cornelii.

A fact(215) which enters deep into the world’s history bears remarkable

witness to the rapid increase of papal wealth and its inevitable

accompaniment, the political independence of St. Peter’s chair. From the

time the unity of the Roman realm began to be dissolved into two empires,

the eastern and the western, not a single western ruler fixed his seat

abidingly in Rome, although almost all lived in Italy, and although many

of them could have put to good use, amid the State’s increasing weakness,

the help which the charm of the Roman name offered. After the death of

Constantine the Great in 337, of his three sons Constantius I. received

the East, Constans I. received the West in union with his younger brother

Constantine II., but after his murder, alone. This Constans usually dwelt

in Gaul. When he visited Italy we find him prefer Milan and Aquileia to

Rome. He yielded to the insurgent Maxentius, and then Constantius became

sole master of the realm, and, when in the West, lived chiefly in Milan.

In his whole reign once only did he enter Rome.(216)

The second division of the realm, which followed the emperor Jovian, gave

Valentinian for ruler of the West, who selected at first Milan for

residence, but was compelled by incursions of the German peoples to spend

much time on the Rhine. We learn, partly from the history of St. Ambrose,

partly from other documents, that the sons and successors of Valentinian

I., Gratian, and Valentinian II., as well as the mother and guardian of

the latter, the widowed empress Justina, when in Italy held their court

chiefly at Milan and Aquileia.

The third and final partition, which severed the West for ever from the

East, took place in 395 after the death of the Spaniard, Theodosius I.,

whom Gratian had taken for his partner. From that time not Rome, not

Milan, or Aquileia, but the seaport Ravenna appears the permanent

residence of those phantom-emperors who ruled for nearly a century until

the full dissolution of the western empire. The political significance of

the last city even remarkably survived the name of the Roman empire.

We are expressly told that Odoacer, the first German king of Italy, who

deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last West Roman, had his seat in Ravenna.

The same was the case with Odoacer’s conqueror, the great Ostrogoth,

Theodorich. During his government Ravenna received the title of the royal

city, though the Ostrogoth often lived in other great cities of upper

Italy, such as Pavia and Verona. Finally Ravenna, after the extinction of

the Ostrogothic state and people, remained for nearly two hundred years

the seat of the exarchs, Byzantine viceroys of Italy.

Why of so many princes bearing the title of Roman emperors or kings of

Italy did no single one make his seat in the former capital of the world?

Why did the greater number pay it only a transitory visit, some perhaps

not see it at all? I think only one sufficient answer can be given to this

question. They shunned a longer stay at Rome because they felt that in a

city which had assumed a priestly character they would no longer play the

first part so much as kings desire and must desire it. That fact is,

therefore, an incontestable proof not only of the papal power, but

likewise of its wealth. Without property no co-active force, not even

spiritual, can in the long run maintain itself.

The law of the year 321, allowing churches to receive landed(217) property

from any testator, had results so astonishingly great, that in 50 years

Valentinian I. thought it necessary to put a limit on it. We may pass at

once to the time of St. Gregory the Great, the fourteen years 590 to 604.

At that time the Bishop of Rome in his Lateran Palace, had become the

greatest ground landlord in Italy, and even in all the West. He was the

real protector of Rome. The eastern emperor bore the name, but in every

need and trial it was not at Ravenna or at Constantinople that help was

sought, but at the Lateran. Royal dignity waited already upon the Vicar of

Christ; a dignity with which the spontaneous offerings of three hundred

years had invested him. St. Gregory lived like a monk, and gave away as a

king from the inexhaustible fountain of the apostolic charity.

His letters enable us to form a fair estimate of the domains of the Roman

Church at that time. In his unresting activity to minister aright the

material wealth of the Church, the son of St. Benedict ripened the

recognition of his political independence. His death preceded by 150 years

the legal acknowledgment of sovereignty attained by his successor, Stephen

II., and that intervening period was, as we have seen, a time of

exceedingly severe trial. A notice of the deacon John, biographer of St.

Gregory, informs us that in his pontificate the Roman Church possessed at

least twenty-three patrimonies. These were respectively, that of Sicily,

of Syracuse, of Palermo, of Calabria, of Apulia, the Samnite, the

Neapolitan, the Campanian, the Tuscan, the Sabine, the Nursian, the

Carseolan, that of Via Appia, of Ravenna, of Illyricum, the Istrian,

Dalmatian, Sardinian, Corsican, Ligurian, that of the Cottian Alps, of

Germanicia, and of Gaul.

The position of the Popes from the time of St. Gregory to the beginning of

the State of the Church is thus described by a Jewish writer forty years

ago.(218) “The Popes were usually the helpers out of every need. They

supplied the money required for the payment of the troops, and for the

requisite provisionment, to keep off the ever-impending threatenings of

scarcity. They also frequently redeemed captives. Now as the Protector

always exercised a decisive influence on the protected, and the distant

emperors distinguished themselves as much by their neglect, as the Vicars

of Christ by their activity in the interest of Italy, and especially of

the seven-hilled city, nothing was more natural than that the estimation

of those who were so often its preservers advanced more and more. Thus

they soon came in fact to stand at the head of almost all secular matters

in and about Rome, with almost sovereign power. That was especially the

case since the pontificate of the great Gregory I., a Pope truly venerable

both for his very distinguished mental gifts, and for his far-stretching,

sound, practical discernment, and his inflexible will. These were the

reasons enabling him to assume a freer political position towards the

Greek imperial court than his predecessors.”

It has been computed(219) that the Popes were in all landlords of 1360

square miles, that is 870,400 acres, in the time of Leo the Isaurian, and

that these lands produced to them 200,000 gold soldi in money, and 500,000

in kind. And if we add to this computation the very great secular powers

which the policy of Justinian had placed throughout his empire in the

hands of the bishops, we may form some notion of the secular authority

wielded by the Popes before they obtained the technical rank of

sovereigns, according to modern definition of that word. Constantine’s

gift of the Lateran palace may be considered the starting point which the

continual generosity of so many succeeding generations extended, as has

been recounted, until the unanimous voice of his people, delivered, as

they hoped, from the Lombard burden, saluted Stephen II. on his return in

756, not only as Papa, but as Dominus Urbis.

Under the year 752, when Aistulf had attacked the exarchate and occupied

the city of Ravenna, and was turning his arms against the Roman duchy and

the cities depending on it, Muratori writes: “From what we have hitherto

seen, although the Greek emperors had their ministers in Rome, yet the

principal authority of government seems to have been seated in the Roman

Pontiffs. They with the power and majesty of their rank and with the

accompaniment of their virtues tranquilly governed that city and duchy,

defending it moreover vigorously, when need arose, from the claws of the

Lombards.”(220)

Such was the position of the Pontiffs before that definitive rejection of

the Byzantine sovereign made by Stephen II. when he was left naked to the

assault of Aistulf by the cowardice or the impotence of Constantine

Kopronymus. From his return in 756 he and his successors after him became

kings as well as Popes of Rome. Scrupulous as the two Gregories, Zacharias

and Stephen himself had been up to the time of the compact with Pipin,

never after did any Pope acknowledge the Byzantine as his civil sovereign.

Never could an Italian of those ages have given to the Goth or the Lombard

that heartfelt devotion which they felt for the perpetual defender of the

Italian people, who was seated in the centre of Italy at once the champion

of the Christian faith, and representative of Rome’s old Commonwealth. The

Byzantine slave-master revolted the Roman heart; the Arian politician

revolted the Christian faith: but in the Roman see St. Sergius the Syrian

emulated the courage of St. Martin the Roman, and St. Gregory III., also

Syrian, was in no quality behind his predecessor St. Gregory II. the

Roman. Is it any wonder that by the end of the seventh century when a

Justinian II. tried to repeat on the person of St. Sergius the wickedness

practised by his grandfather upon St. Martin, his own soldiers rose

against the guardsman whom he had deputed to this atrocious work, and

recognized in the Pope the defender of all which they held dear, whether

in the natural or the supernatural life.

And, again, had not the seven revolutions at Byzantium—ending in the

exultation of a rough soldier who was able in the field, but ignorant in

doctrine—given a sufficient lesson to the Italian peoples to cast off a

force which disregarded all right in the natural order, and the whole

tradition of faith in the supernatural realm of revealed truth?

That is the consummation which we have been following during a whole

generation, from 726 to 756.

I will here insert the judgment of another historian, upon the gift of the

exarchate, made by Pipin to St. Peter, in the person of the Popes:—(221)

“To question the rightness of this donation is unreasonable and

preposterous. Since the reconquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, Rome

was regarded at Constantinople simply as a province, not as a member of

the realm, or not as, what it had originally been, the seat of empire. On

what could the right of Greek tyrants be founded constantly to receive

back, even at second hand, conquests which they were able neither to

govern nor to maintain? The assertions of some late historical writers

seem to pre-suppose that all Europe, as far as the Rhine and the Danube,

were placed by God for ever under the Byzantine yoke, and that the shaking

off this yoke was an unpardonable injustice. Rome did under her bishops

what peoples did under their kings. Rome took her opportunity to free

herself from the yoke of foreign dominion and unnatural relations. No

prince, no people of Europe has any other claim upon its soil to show than

this and the centuries. Both tell for Rome. Before this testimony, the

lesser but yet valid right disappears, that the Greek emperor had

confiscated the Papal possessions situated in Lower Italy, and that

nothing was more natural than that it should take the compensation which

presented itself. The other question which has been also proposed, whether

the office of a teacher and bishop of the Christian community can be

united with a secular administration, had been long before answered. _Rome

owed its actual existence solely to the protection of its bishops._ They

had found their best right of sovereignty in the gratitude of the people,

and long before the donation of Ravenna, they had been, if not in name,

yet in fact, princes in Rome.”

At the beginning of the year 756, Aistulf, the most aggressive of Lombard

kings, had strictly invested Rome, ravaged its campagna, and destroyed the

churches therein, while he devoutly exhumed the bodies of martyrs to

transport them to new shrines in Pavia. In the spring of that year he

surrendered his capital to the king of the Franks, and submitted to all

the conditions imposed on him by Pipin. In the autumn, by a sudden stroke

of God, he died out hunting. At the beginning of the year 757, Desiderius,

by the help of the Pope, Stephen II. had succeeded to the Lombard throne,

itself spared by Pipin, and these great changes are recorded in an extant

letter of Pope Stephen, a hymn of gratitude and praise, to Pipin, who had

placed the keys of the recovered cities, forming the new created State of

the Church, on the tomb of St. Peter. Great is the contrast between the

letters of 756, written to Pipin, in the height of Rome’s distress and

danger, and this letter from the first Pope-king to his benefactor.

“Words(222) cannot express, most excellent son, our delight at your work

and your life. For we have seen miracles in our days wrought by the divine

power. For the Roman Church, the holy mother and head of all the churches

of God, the foundation of the Christian faith, which was groaning under

the attacks of enemies, now through you, has been translated into the

fulness of joy and security. Thus, by your work, and in our exultation, we

rejoice to exclaim with the angels, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on

earth peace to men of goodwill’. This time last year we were wounded and

afflicted on all sides: now, in our deliverance through you, we cry out.

‘This change is by the hand of the Most High,’ and, again, ‘In the

evening, there shall be weeping, but in the morning joy’. What heart is

there so stony that, knowing what your goodness has done, would not break

into praise of God and affection to your excellency. This I am wont to say

to those who come hither from all the nations of the earth: and I

perpetually pray to God for your welfare, and that of the whole nation of

the Franks. What can I call you but a new Moses and a glorious David, for,

as they delivered the people of God from the oppression of the heathen, so

have you the Church of God. May the Lord, the beauty of justice, bless you

and your children, Charles and Carloman, my spiritual sons, appointed by

God kings of the Franks, and patricii of the Romans.”

He then goes on to beg Pipin to execute fully all that he had promised to

St. Peter by oath. He mentions specially Imola, Ferrara, Ancona, Bologna,

with their complete territories; and begs him to favour the new king,

Desiderius, if he restore, as he had promised, fully the _justitia_, which

we may translate sovereignty, “to the Holy Church of God, or Commonwealth

of the Romans, St. Peter, your protector”. He also prays him that the Holy

Catholic and Apostolic faith may be preserved by him from “the pestilent

malice of the Greeks”. He ends with the prayer:—“O victorious king, may

God, in all your acts, extend His right hand over you, your queen, and

mine and your dearest sons: and, as He has given you the royal power in

this life, may you also hear the divine promise, ’Come, blessed of my

Father, you have fought the good fight, you have finished your course, you

have kept the faith; so take the crown laid up for you, and the kingdom

prepared for you from the foundation of the world’”.

A few days after this letter, that is, on the 24th April, 757, Stephen II.

closed in peace his course on earth. He died in the Lateran patriarchal

palace, acknowledged by all as king of Rome: and attended by his brother,

Paul, who was to be his successor. He was buried with extraordinary

honours in St. Peter’s. In his short pontificate of five years he set the

crown upon the work of his three great predecessors, Gregory II., Gregory

III., and Zacharias, and is counted among the most illustrious of the

Popes. He closed the seven centuries of Popes who were subjects: he opens

the eleven centuries of Popes who have been kings. From the Pope who was

crucified on the Roman hill to the Pope who died a king in the patriarchal

Lateran palace, 93 in number, enemies have tried to deface the memory of

two—but the voice of impartial history regards those rulers of the Church

with unalloyed gratitude as men who, through trials and difficulties

unsurpassed, kept the faith of the Church inviolate. That the city of Rome

existed in their day, and exists now, is due to the pastoral staff of St.

Peter, planted in its soil, which became, in the hand of Stephen II., the

most gracious, the most prolific, the most honoured of sceptres.

Stephen II. was succeeded immediately by his brother Paul, who had been

the chosen companion of his counsels and anxieties during the severe

trials of his pontificate, ending so gloriously. It was the first instance

of a brother to the Pope succeeding to his chair. He had been brought up,

like his brother Stephen, in the Lateran patriarchal palace from the time

of St. Gregory II., and was made a cardinal deacon by Pope Zacharias. “He

was meek and very merciful, never rendering evil for evil to anyone.”(223)

He sat from 757 to 767, ten years and a month. During the whole time the

closest union was maintained between the Holy See and King Pipin. A series

of letters from the Pope to the king is extant, testifying the affection

and the confidence which existed between them. It was by the influence of

Pope Stephen II. that the new king of the Lombards, Desiderius, was

accepted by that people after the untimely death of King Aistulf. He bound

himself strictly to carry out the compact at Pavia between the Franks, the

Lombards, and the Romans, in virtue of which, at the subjection of King

Aistulf to Pipin, the Lombard monarchy continued to exist. The reign of

Desiderius from 757 until he was finally overthrown and deposed by Charles

in 774 shows a repetition of attempts by fraud or by violence to evade the

conditions which he had bound himself to accept. Already, in 757, Pope

Paul I. wrote to King Pipin: “We(224) make known to your Excellence that

we have hitherto received nothing of those things which by our legates we

committed to your charge, for, according to their wont, those perfidious

and malignant Lombards, persisting in great arrogance of heart, are by no

means inclined to restore the justice of St. Peter”. The possession of the

cities and territories of Imola, Bologna, Osimo, Ancona, and Umana were in

question. In the next year, 758, Desiderius ravaged with fire and sword

the Pentapolis. Then he attacked the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento,

which had put themselves under the protection of the Pope and the king of

the Franks.

At another time the Greek emperor Kopronymus was bent upon recovering

Ravenna and the Pentapolis, and upon attacking Rome itself. Desiderius met

his agent and wrote to the emperor, exhorting him to send an army into

Italy, and promising that he with all his Lombards would help him to

recover Ravenna, and whatever else he desired.(225)

Through the whole ten years of Paul’s pontificate, this king Pipin

discharged with fidelity his office of Roman Patricius, that is, the sworn

defender of the Holy See. It was this protection alone which enabled the

Pope to maintain his newly founded State against the perpetual wiles of

the Lombard, as well as against the Greek enmity. As to Kopronymus, the

Iconoclastic heresy was the furious passion of his whole life. Pope Paul

wrote to King Pipin:(226) “You know well how those most nefarious Greeks

pursue us only to destroy and tread under foot the orthodox faith and the

tradition of the fathers”.

When Pope Paul I. died, in 767, his pontificate of ten years had been

throughout agitated by the perpetual oscillations of king Desiderius,

alternating acts of devotion with acts of hostility, promises with

violations of them, restitution of rights with fresh acts of

plundering.(227) Scarcely had Paul I. closed his eyes when the duke Toto,

a very powerful baron of the Roman Tuscany, conspired with his three

brothers, Constantine, Passivus, and Paschalis, to get possession of Rome

and the papacy.(228) Toto and his party, while preparation was being made

for the solemn obsequies of Paul I. and the due election of his successor,

broke into Rome, suddenly elected his brother Constantine, a layman,

introduced him by violence into the Lateran palace. He seized upon George,

bishop of Palestrina, and compelled him to confer minor orders upon

Constantine. The next day he was made deacon by the same bishop, and on

the following Sunday Toto, attended by a large body of armed men, carried

the intruded Constantine to St. Peter’s, where the three suburbican

bishops, the said George of Palestrina, and the bishops of Albano and

Porto, gave him episcopal consecration. In such fashion Constantine seated

himself in the chair of Peter; he forced the people to make oath of

fidelity to him. Thus the layman of a week before, thrust upon the clergy

and people of Rome by the rudest violence, held possession of the

Apostolic See for thirteen months. He wrote lying letters to King Pipin,

who was not deceived by them. But Rome was filled with conspiracy and

unrule.

A year after this event, in July, 768 the intruder Constantine was

deposed, his brother Toto killed, while a second pretended Pope, named

Philip, set up for the moment, was driven away. By the exertions of

Christophorus, first of the seven Palatine judges, and his son Sergius,

Stephen III., a Sicilian, and at the time cardinal priest of St. Cecilia,

was duly elected Pope. He sat during three years and six months, in the

course of which great events took place. His first act was to send Sergius

to King Pipin and his sons, beseeching him to depute a number of Frankish

bishops to Rome to hold a council there with him, and to make regulations

which might prevent the recurrence of violence so deplorable.

Sergius found king Pipin dying. He expired at St. Denys on the 24th

September, 768. There he was buried and afterwards his monument bore the

inscription, “Pipin, the king, father of Charles the Great”. He left his

states, with the consent of the nobles and bishops, between his sons

Charles and Carloman, who were crowned and anointed on the same day, 9th

October, 768, Charles at Noyon, Carloman at Soissons. Pipin died aged

fifty-five, having ruled France for twenty-seven years, ten as Mayor of

the palace, seventeen as king of the Franks.

The legate Sergius proceeded at once to the kings, Charles and Carloman.

They granted all which he desired. They gave him twelve Frankish bishops

well instructed in the scriptures and the holy canons, the archbishop of

Sens, the bishops of Mainz, Tours, Lyons, Bourges, Narbonne, Rheims,

Langres, Noyon, Worms, and two others with sees of names unknown. These

bishops came to Rome in April, 769, and Pope Stephen III. assembled

bishops from Tuscany, Campania, and the rest of Italy, and held a council

in the Lateran Basilica. Among other decrees they passed one under

anathema: “that no laymen, nor any one save a cardinal, deacon or priest,

ascending through the distinct degrees, be promoted to the honour of the

sacred pontificate”.(229) The Pope, all the priests, and the Roman people,

prostrate on the pavement, deplored the sin they had committed in

receiving Communion from the unhappy intruder, Constantine, who had been

deprived of sight during the wild struggle which attended his deposition,

and now in most abject guise confessed his crime before the council, and

was condemned to penance.

In this terrible outburst of ambition and crime, which showed but too

clearly to what sudden dangers Rome was exposed, the two great officers,

Christophorus, the first of the seven Palatine judges, and his son

Sergius, had done their utmost to prevent the usurpation, and in the end

delivered the Holy See from the intruder Constantine. Desiderius had taken

no part in the intrusion of the anti-pope. He even assisted Christophorus

and Sergius in removing him. But in doing this a Lombard priest,

Waldepert, sought to set up another anti-pope, and lost his life. After

the due appointment of Stephen III., the master stroke of the Lombard

king’s policy was to sever, if he could, the two Frank kings from

friendship with the Holy See, and so sooner or later to get possession of

Rome. He proposed in 770 a double marriage; on one side the marriage of

his daughter Desiderata or Ermengarde either with Charles or with

Carloman; on the other that of their sister, the princess Gisela, with his

son Adelchis. The queen mother, Bertrada, set her hand to accomplish the

first. There is a most earnest letter from Pope Stephen III. to the kings

Charles and Carloman, entreating them not to stain the noble Frank race,

the most eminent of all, by a connection with the faithless and perfidious

Lombard. “You have likewise,” he said, “by the will of God, and the

command of your father, contracted lawful marriages with excellent royal

ladies out of your own people, conspicuous for their nobility and beauty.

It is not lawful for you to repudiate them. To take other wives would be

an impiety. Heathens only can so act. Forget not, most illustrious sons,

that you received holy unction from St. Peter’s successor, that your

father of glorious memory listened to the injunctions of our predecessor

Stephen, and forebore to separate from your mother, Bertrada, and be

mindful of your repeated promise to St. Peter and his successor that you

would ever be friends of our friends and enemies of our enemies. Would you

now bind yourselves to our enemies? For the faithless people of the

Lombards, which ceases not to attack the Church of God, and make

incursions on our province of Rome, is our manifest enemy.”(230)

Nevertheless the queen mother, Bertrada, carried out her design, and the

king Desiderius seemed to attain the summit of security, so far at least

as this, that though his son Adelchis did not obtain the princess Gisela,

Charles took his daughter Ermengarde. He also sent her back to her father

the next year, and his friend and secretary, Eginhard, has left

unexplained the cause of this repudiation. No historian has thrown light

upon this particular in the history of Charles, either how he came to

brave the anathema of Pope Stephen III. by deserting a lawful wife, or how

he came to send back in a year the unhappy princess whom he had unlawfully

taken, or how we find Hildegarde acknowledged as his lawful wife from 771

to her death in 786. The blot remains unerased upon the memory of him who

was otherwise the greatest of the Christian emperors.

With the marriage—if it is to be so called—of his daughter with Charles,

Desiderius seemed to have reached well nigh the end of his ambition.

Christophorus and his son Sergius had put an end to the usurpation of

Constantine, were the heads of the national Roman party,(231) and the soul

of Pope Stephen III.’s government. Desiderius in a visit to Rome managed

to set the Pope against them. He had a Lombard party there, at the head of

which was a certain Paul Afiarta, high in the Pope’s service.

Christophorus and his son Sergius both lost their lives. They had urged

the king of the Lombards to restore to the Holy See the rights which he

kept back. Desiderius was infuriated by their conduct(232) and strove to

destroy them.(233) Desiderius was encamped outside of St. Peter’s. A

company of Lombard soldiers dragged the two victims, who had been taken

out of St. Peter’s, to the gate of the city, at the bridge: tore out their

eyes, of which outrage Christophorus died in three days: Sergius survived

in prison during two years, that is, to the death of Pope Stephen, when he

was most atrociously murdered by order of Paul Afiarta.

But now the whole course of history was altered by a death which occurred

on the 4th December. Carloman died in the flower of his youth, leaving

behind him two very young children by his wife Gilberga. Charles was

called by the unanimous vote of the Frank magnates to rule the whole

kingdom of the Franks increased greatly as it was by the late conquests of

Charles in Aquitania and Gascony. Two months later, 1st February, 772,

Stephen III. closed his pontificate of three years and a half. The Pope

before his death had discovered how grievously he had been deceived by

king Desiderius, to whom his two chief servants and ministers had been

sacrificed. Desiderius kept none of the promises which he had made on the

occasion of his coming to Rome: and when the Pope reminded him of them by

a special embassy, mockingly replied:(234) “The Holy Father Stephen might

have been contented that I delivered him from his two tyrants

Christophorus and Sergius, and did not need to demand the rights of St.

Peter. If I had not helped the Holy Father, great ruin would have fallen

upon him, since Carloman, king of the Franks, the friend of both, was

ready to bring an army to Rome to avenge their death, and carry away the

Pope captive.”

The repudiation of his daughter, Ermengarde, and the rupture of the

desired alliance between Desiderius and Charles, terminated the good

fortune of the Lombard king. From that time he seemed to lose his vigour

of mind, and political insight. He continued to pursue, without check, the

design of Aistulf, which he had now fully made his own, to become master

of Rome. But he had to deal with other adversaries. Eight days after the

death of Pope Stephen III., he was succeeded by one of the greatest

pontiffs who ever sat on the throne of St. Peter. Adrian, the son of

Theodorus, was born in Rome of a very noble family, one of the most

powerful in the city. Losing his parents early, he was brought up by a

relation named Theodotus, Primicerius of the Roman See. He was

distinguished from his youth by his purity of life, and his singular

personal beauty. Pope Paul I. had placed him among the clergy, Pope

Stephen III. created him a cardinal deacon, in which office his zeal,

eloquence, learning, and management of affairs endeared him to the Roman

people. On the very day of the Pope Stephen’s death he was proclaimed

unanimously his successor, and in eight days consecrated. He showed at

once the vigour of mind and promptitude of execution which rendered his

reign illustrious, and it continued nearly to twenty-four years, a period

which no Pontiff reached in the seven hundred years from St. Peter before

him, nor in the thousand years after him, until, at the end of the

eighteenth century, it was slightly passed by that Pontiff who died a

confessor, exiled, persecuted, and forlorn at Valence, in that land of the

Franks, with whose greatest king Pope Adrian was bound in the closest

personal friendship.

No sooner was Pope Adrian seated than he struck down that Lombard faction

which the gold and intrigues of Desiderius had planted at Rome. Its head

was Paul Afiarta. In the very last days of Pope Stephen, he had caused the

blinded Sergius to be assassinated, and banished from Rome certain judges,

both of the clergy and the army, that he might have more weight in the

forthcoming election. Adrian, the moment that he was elected, recalled the

judges, and delivered from prison those who had been confined for the like

reason. Desiderius, who desired to keep up appearances with him, sent him

a solemn embassy of the three principal persons in his kingdom,

Theodicius, duke of Spoleto, Tunno, duke of Ivrea, and the Lord Treasurer

Prandulus. Their office was to profess friendship and alliance to the new

Pope. Adrian replied:(235)—“It is my desire to have peace with all

Christians, and even with your king, Desiderius, I will study to remain in

that compact which was made between the Romans, the Franks, and the

Lombards. But how can I trust your king in the matter in which my

predecessor, Stephen, of holy memory, has spoken to me fully of his want

of good faith: how he falsified everything which he promised on oath over

the body of St. Peter, for the rights of holy Church, and only by his own

hostile pleading, caused the eyes of Christophorus and Sergius to be put

out, and worked out his own will upon those two chief men of the Church.

Such is the faith of your king, Desiderius, and how can I trust in a

treaty with him?” In reply, the ambassadors made oath that Desiderius

would fulfil what he had promised to Pope Stephen, and broken. The Pope

thereupon despatched messengers to see that Desiderius fulfilled the

promise. When these reached Perugia, they found that Desiderius had

already taken the city of Faenza, and the duchy of Ferrara, and was

pressing Ravenna with siege. It was only two months after the accession of

Pope Adrian, and presently messengers from Ravenna came supplicating his

help, just as thirty years before, when pressed by the arms of Liutprand,

they had recourse to Pope Zacharias. But now the exarchate was fully

subject to the Pope, and called upon him as part of his own State for

defence. When this conduct of Desiderius was reported to the Pope, he

wrote in the gravest terms to the Lombard king, requiring him to restore

the cities, and upbraiding him with the breach of those very promises

which his own ambassadors had just made in his name. “The king,” he said,

“had taken cities which his predecessors, Stephen II., Paul I., and

Stephen III., had possessed.” Desiderius returned, for answer, “that he

would not restore those cities, unless he first met the Pope”. At the same

time, he had received the widow and young children of the deceased

Carloman, and wanted to induce the Pope to crown them, and so create

division in the Frank empire, and alienate Charles, the Patricius of Rome,

from the Pope, and thus subjugate the city of Rome and all Italy to the

Lombard kingdom.(236) But Adrian stood firm as adamant. One of his two

legates to the king, Paul Afiarta, was in league with the king, and

promised to bring the Pope before him, even if it were with a rope round

him. But, at this very moment, the body of the murdered Sergius was

discovered at Rome. The Pope ordered an inquiry into the circumstances of

his death. At the earnest entreaty of the Palatine judges, among whom

Sergius had been second in rank, and of the whole Roman people, the Pope

ordered the prefect of the city to try for homicide the parties

inculpated. The crime was brought home to the legate, Paul Afiarta

himself, at whose suggestion other highly placed officers had taken the

blind Sergius out of prison, and pierced him with wounds. The Pope ordered

the bodies of Christophorus and Sergius to be taken up and honourably

buried in St. Peter’s. He sent the Acts of the Court to the archbishop of

Ravenna, instructing him to detain Paul Afiarta, when he returned from his

embassy to the Lombard king. Archbishop Leo went beyond the Pope’s

instructions: handed over Paul Afiarta to the chief judge of Ravenna,

before whom he acknowledged his guilt: and, instead of sending the

criminal, as the Pope ordered, in exile to the East, had him executed by

the judge.

Desiderius found himself bereft of his counsellor, Paul Afiarta: he

refused to listen to the Pope’s request to restore his cities. He

committed further outrages and assaults. He rejected repeated letters and

messengers of the Pope. His reply was that, instead of restoring cities,

he would march with his whole army to Rome, and force it to surrender. The

Pope had several of the gates of Rome built up and others carefully

closed, and sent by sea messengers to Charles, begging him to help the

Roman Church as his father had done, and force Desiderius to restore what

he had taken from St. Peter.(237)

Desiderius saw that his attempt to move the Pope to crown the sons of

Carloman was vain; then, with the widowed Gilberga, these sons and the

duke, Autchar, he advanced his troops from Pavia, on the way to Rome, and

informed the Pope of it. Adrian replied, “If the king does not give up the

cities, as he has promised, and fully satisfy us, it is useless for him to

take the trouble to come to us. He shall not see my face.”

Adrian, while awaiting the succour which he had asked from king Charles,

had taken all measures necessary for the defence of Rome. He collected all

the men of war whom he could from the Roman Tuscany, from Campania, from

the duchy of Perugia, from such cities of the Pentapolis as the Lombards

had not yet taken, who, with the Roman soldiers, might suffice to defend

the vast circle of the walls and towers, and sustain a siege at least for

a time. The two basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul, being outside the

walls, were defenceless. The Pope caused them to be stripped of all

precious objects, which were brought for protection within the city. He

had all the doors closed and barred up within: so that, if the Lombard

king attempted an entrance, it would be as a burglar.

These were his acts as a sovereign prince—as pontiff, learning that the

king was approaching the Roman frontiers, he sent to him the bishops of

Albano, Palestrina, and Tibur, with an intimation in his own hand,

adjuring him by all the divine mysteries, and under threat of

excommunication, that neither he, nor any Lombard, nor the Frank Autchar

should set foot on the Roman territory without his leave.

Desiderius had reached Viterbo, the last city of the Lombard Tuscany. He

was, at the head of his army, about to pass the frontier. On receiving the

Pope’s injunction he was struck with confusion and retired back with his

army to his own city, Pavia. As the Hun had listened to St. Leo, the

Lombard also listened to Adrian, and Rome was once more saved by her

pontiff.

When Peter,(238) the legate of Adrian, reached France in the first months

of 773, he found Charles wintering at Thionville, after his first

expedition against the Saxons. He had destroyed the famous idol Irminoul.

It was the beginning of his longest and fiercest war. Now, Pope Adrian

called upon him, as Patricius of the Romans, to defend Rome and the State

of St. Peter against Desiderius, from whom neither peace nor justice could

any longer be hoped. At the same time a Lombard embassy reached him,

professing that Desiderius had already restored every thing to the Pope.

Charles sent three messengers of his own to Rome to ascertain the facts.

They reached Rome just after its deliverance from the fear of a siege by

the retreat of Desiderius from Viterbo. The Pope related to them in order

all the late events: and sent with them other messengers of his own,

conjuring Charles afresh to carry into effect the promises which he had

formerly made with his father to St. Peter, and to fulfil the redemption

of the holy Church of God(239) by compelling the perfidious king of the

Lombards to restore without contest to St. Peter, both the cities and the

other rights which he had taken away. On their way to France the

joint-messengers appeared at the court of Pavia, and, by instruction of

Charles, urged Desiderius peacefully to restore the cities and rights. He

gave an absolute refusal, which they carried to Charles.

Charles sent fresh messengers to Desiderius, and offered him 14,000 gold

solidi, if he would make restitution. All was of no avail. When the

messengers returned to Charles, he brought the whole matter before his

dukes and chiefs, probably at the May diet, and an expedition into Italy

was resolved upon for the autumn. The Frank army was summoned to meet at

Geneva. One part of it Charles sent by the Mons Jovis, the St. Bernard;

the other he conducted himself by the passes of Mont Cenis, the same route

which Pipin had held in 754 and 756. When Charles reached the pass above

Susa, he found it strongly fortified and valiantly defended by Desiderius

in person, and his son, Adelchis. Here it is said the Franks were so long

detained, being unable to break through the Lombard defence, that they

were on the point of retiring, when a secret road was discovered to

Charles, and their flank was turned. The result was a precipitate retreat

of Desiderius to his fortified capital, Pavia, and of his son, Adelchis,

to Verona. From that moment the chief struggle was concentred about these

two cities. Other cities of Upper Italy, such as Turin, Ivrea, Vercelli,

Novara, Piacenza, Milan, Parma, Tortona, and the maritime cities, with

their castles, fell speedily into the hands of the Franks. Charles sat

down before Pavia at the end of September or beginning of October, 773.

That royal city of the Lombards, in the eighth century, was first among

all the cities of Upper Italy, not only for its riches and magnificence,

but for its military strength. Near the confluence of the Ticino and the

Po, it was esteemed almost impregnable. It had resisted Odoacer, and

Alboin required more than three years to take it, which he accomplished

rather by famine than by force. Charles encamped with his army round it,

and completely enclosed it with lines and trenches. He sent for the queen

Hildegarde and her children. He made an attempt to take Verona, but found

it too strong for anything short of a regular siege, defended, as it was,

by the most valiant Adelchis. However, the widowed queen Gilberga, with

her children, who were therein, surrendered themselves to him. They

disappear henceforward from history, and are supposed to have been

confined in Frank monasteries. Charles spent the feast of Christmas in the

camp at Pavia. All we know of these months is the two words of Eginhard,

that he spent them, “much employed”.(240) We may conclude that not only

the siege of Pavia, but the settlement of the numerous cities in North

Italy, which yielded to him, well occupied his time.

But Charles had hitherto never seen Rome, and the feast of Easter, which

fell in that year, 774, on the 3rd April, drew him with a great attraction

to visit the tombs of the apostles, and he resolved to be present for the

Paschal rites. He left therefore his army under the command of his chief

officers and with a great train of bishops, abbots, judges, dukes, and

counts, and a large escort of warriors, took the road of Tuscany, which

probably had been in a great part subdued, and advanced so quickly that he

reached the gates of Rome on the morning of Holy Saturday.

Great was the joy of Pope Adrian to hear of this unexpected visit of

Charles, and his rapid approach. He made the utmost preparation to receive

so great a king, who had likewise the special dignity of Rome’s Patricius,

that is, her sworn defender. He sent out all the judges of Rome to a spot

thirty miles away near the lake of Bracciano, where they awaited him with

banners displayed. At a mile from Rome, near Monte Mario, by order of the

Pope the soldiers under their respective leaders, and the children who

were learning letters, were drawn up to meet him, and bearing in their

hands branches of palm and olive sang welcome to him. The standards of

crosses were carried, as in the reception of an exarch or a Patricius.

When the king of the Franks, Patricius of the Romans, met these crosses,

he descended from horseback with his officers, and walked the rest of the

way on foot to St. Peter’s. There, Pope Adrian, rising early with all the

clergy and people of Rome waited, to receive the king of the Franks at the

top of the steps leading into the court of the Basilica.

At that time there were thirty-five steps in five series of seven each.

When Charles reached these steps, he threw himself on his knees, and so

ascended,(241) kissing separately each one of the thirty-five in the

fashion of a pilgrim. At the top he found Pope Adrian; they embraced each

other, and the king holding the Pope’s right hand they entered the church

together, all the clergy and the monks singing, “Blessed is he who cometh

in the name of the Lord”. When the king with the bishops, abbots, judges,

and all the Franks of his train, came to the Confession, they prostrated

themselves to our almighty God, and rendered their vows to the Prince of

the Apostles, glorifying the divine power in him, who had given them by

his intercession such a victory.

After their prayer the king turned to the Pope and earnestly requested of

him permission to enter Rome, in order to venerate the other churches of

the city, and therein pay his vows. Whereupon the Pope and the king,

together with Roman and Frank judges, descending to the body of St. Peter,

bound themselves by oath to mutual protection. This permission to enter

Rome was granted in after times by the Popes to Roman emperors themselves,

as often as they approached the gates of Rome with armed force. After this

permission received Charles and the Pope rode in solemn pomp from St.

Peter’s to the Lateran, through the whole of Rome. And Charles, in the

Lateran church, witnessed the Pope’s celebration of the baptismal rite to

the catechumens as usual on that day.

So the Romans on that day first beheld the flower of the greatest western

nation passing in the pomp of armed men by their palaces, porticoes,

Capitol, forum, and colosseum, with the greatest champion of Christendom

then in the glory of his manhood at the age of thirty-two years. His

secretary, Eginhard, attests his stature to have been seven of his own

feet, and his whole aspect was full of majesty. When he ascended on his

knees the thirty-five steps leading to St. Peter’s, separately kissing

each, he manifested in his own person the truth of the reply which nearly

fifty years before Pope St. Gregory II. had made to the eastern emperor,

Leo III. Leo threatened that he would tear down the statue of St. Peter.

St. Gregory said that all the nations of the West regarded him as a God

upon earth.

After this Charles returned to the meadows of Nero by St. Peter’s wherein

foreign armies usually encamped. At the following dawn of Easter day the

Pope sent his chief officers and soldiers to conduct Charles in great pomp

to Santa Maria Maggiore, where, with all his Franks, he heard the Pope

sing Mass. After Mass the Pope received him to a banquet at the

patriarchal palace of the Lateran. On the two following feasts the Pope,

according to usage, celebrated Mass on the Monday at St. Peter’s, on the

Tuesday at St. Paul’s, in presence of the king. At the Mass in St. Peter’s

Anastasius mentions that the Pope caused the ceremony called Lauds to be

inserted before the Epistle. It was sung before Popes and emperors at

their accession. It consisted of the clergy dividing themselves in two

bands before the altar, when the archdeacon on one side intoned with loud

voice, “O Christ, hear us!” the other side responded, “Long life to our

Lord decreed by God, Roman Pontiff and universal Pope!” This was repeated

three times; a short litany followed, in which to each invocation made by

the archdeacon, the other side replied, “Give him help”: and it ended with

a triple Kyrie Eleison. With this rite on that Easter Monday of 774

Charles was solemnly acclaimed as Patricius of the Romans. Eginhard in his

“Life” says that Charlemagne would never put on a foreign dress, however

splendid: and that he broke this rule twice only, both times at Rome, the

first at the request of Pope Adrian: the second at the request of his

successor, Pope Leo III., when he wore the long tunic and cloak, and was

shod also in Roman fashion. Now twenty years before, that is, in 754, Pope

Stephen II. had crowned Pipin and his two sons Charles and Carloman kings

of the Franks, and created them also Patricii of the Romans. Charles would

seem to have considered this ceremony a solemn inauguration of this

dignity. It was from this time, 774, that in his public acts he styled

himself king of the Franks and of the Lombards, and Patricius of the

Romans.

In that same week before Charles left Rome he transacted affairs of the

utmost importance with the Pope.

The ecclesiastical hierarchy in France, the rights of metropolitans, and

the other churches had fallen in the last eighty years under great

usurpations, which all the zeal of Pipin had not been able to remedy.

Adrian prevailed on Charles to work a restoration of the ancient state. He

also drew from the archives of the Roman See two authentic codes, one

containing the old order of the ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses in

France; the other, the councils and canons of the Greek and Latin church.

These were of the greatest service to Charles in the synods and capitulars

and wise regulations which he made for the restoration of the Church in

France.

But further, the Pope addressed himself to obtain from Charles the renewal

and confirmation of the promise made in April, 754, by king Pipin and

Charles himself to Pope Stephen II. The king promised not only to

reconquer for the Holy See the exarchate and Pentapolis, then occupied by

Aistulf, but to add to them likewise all the provinces of nearly all Italy

from the Po. That promise was grounded upon the design then entertained by

the Pope and the king to put an end altogether to the Lombard rule. But at

the siege of Pavia, in 754, the Pope and Pipin were so far moved by the

supplications and promises of Aistulf, that they left him the Lombard

kingdom. Giving up that first design, they made with him the treaty of

Pavia, that compact between the Franks, the Lombards, and the Romans,

which during eighteen years was appealed to as the basis of their

political relations. But in this interval the incorrigible perfidy and

ambition of Desiderius, and his obstinate refusal of all terms of

agreement, had last led Adrian and Charles to resume the original

intention of Stephen and Pipin. Charles after forcing the pass above Susa

resolved to pluck up by the roots the Lombard power. Thus the conditions

of 754, having returned in 774, would bring back the first promise of

Pipin, and the compact of Pavia in 756 having been trodden under foot by

Desiderius, and torn at the sword’s point, the compact of Quiersy was

restored to force. It had not been annulled but suspended. Adrian

therefore took the excellent opportunity of Charles’s presence in Rome to

complete the work so well begun by Stephen II. The fresh inauguration of

Charles as Patricius helped to obtain from him a solemn confirmation of

the former compact. His piety and devotion to St. Peter were not less

marked than his father’s, and he assented to the Pope’s desire.

On Easter Wednesday, the 6th April, 774, the solemn act was completed

which Anastasius has left carefully registered in the Liber

Pontificalis.(242) The Pope with all the judges of the clergy and army,

that is, all the ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries of Rome, went to St.

Peter’s, where he was met by Charles with all his train. Here Adrian in a

public speech recorded the acts of kindness and attachment which for so

long had joined together France and the Holy See. He reminded Charles of

the promise which, in April, 754, his father Pipin of sacred memory and he

himself with his brother Carloman and all the Frank judges had made and

sworn solemnly to St. Peter and Pope Stephen II. in the assembly of

Quiersy. That was to assure to St. Peter and all his successors in

perpetuity the possession of various cities and territories of Italy. He

then earnestly exhorted and prayed the king to give entire accomplishment

to that promise. Charles asked that the whole tenor of the promise of

Quiersy should be read before him. Having heard it read, and greatly

approved of it, with his judges, he most willingly accorded the request of

the Pope, he immediately ordered his chaplain and notary Etherius to draw

out another deed of promise and donation exactly similar to the first. In

this he granted to St. Peter the same cities and lands and promised to

give them over to Pope Adrian, marking out the limits. These are, says

Anastasius, as we now read them in the text of donation, from Luni and the

isle of Corsica, by Parma, Reggio, Mantua, and Monselice, embracing the

whole exarchate of Ravenna as it was of old, the province of Venetia and

Istria, the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. This Charles subscribed with

his own hand, and caused it to be subscribed by all his bishops, abbots,

dukes, and counts. After this the king and his nobles, having placed the

deed, first upon the altar of St. Peter, and then within the Confession,

took a terrible oath to St. Peter and Pope Adrian, to maintain every

syllable of its contents, and they placed the deed in the hands of the

Pope. Further, Charles made Etherius write another copy of the same

donation, placed it with his own hand on the inner altar of the

Confession, under the gospels which were wont to be kissed there by the

faithful, that it might remain in most secure guarantee and eternal

memorial of the devotion of Charles and the Franks to the Prince of the

Apostles. Other copies were afterwards made in authentic form by the

proper officer of the Roman Church, which Charles carried with him into

France.

Thus the original compact of Quiersy resumed its legal force, and became

the foundation of political right in Italy. It is true that various

reasons prevented the compact from ever receiving its entire effect, but

it became, nevertheless, the standard which the Popes and the kings of the

Franks kept before them, the archetype on which the public deeds and

covenants renewed afterwards so often in the middle ages between the

emperors and the Holy See were all framed. Adrian in thus claiming and

securing the sovereign rights already acquired by the Roman Church may be

called the second founder, after Stephen II., of the temporal monarchy of

the Popes. Charles in crowning the work of Pipin showed himself not only

worthy of the Roman Patriciate, but of that further dignity to which he

was afterwards exalted by Leo III. In the twenty following years the union

and cordial friendship which bound Adrian and Charles together, maintained

and increased prosperity in the Church, and made closer still the old

alliance of France with the Papacy. Adrian ordered a prayer for king

Charles to be entered in the Roman liturgy, which thenceforward was made

for the Roman emperors, who succeeded him in his office of Protector of

the Church.

The Pope, in taking leave of Charles, predicted to him, in the names of

St. Peter and St. Paul, a quick and complete triumph over their common

enemies, and the total conquest of the Lombard kingdom: “after which,” he

said, “you will render to St. Peter the gift which you have promised him,

and will receive in reward greater and more signal victories”.

And Adrian ordered that in all the monasteries, and the twenty-eight

titular churches, and the seven deaconries of Rome, every day perpetual

prayers should be offered for victory to the Franks.

Thus Charles left Rome, and returned to his camp before Pavia. By the

first days of June, Verona had fallen, notwithstanding all the valour of

the prince Adelchis, and Pavia had yielded. With the submission of the

capital, the few remaining cities, and Lombard lords, accepted Charles for

their king. Thus, in the course of ten months, from September, 773, to

June, 774, Charles effected, with great good fortune and little effusion

of blood, the most brilliant of his conquests. He placed a strong Frank

garrison in Pavia, he sent his counts to govern the various cities and

provinces: in which, however, the chief Lombard dukes were comprised.

Charles did not change the constitution of the kingdom: he did not make it

a province of France. He left its integrity and autonomy. He became

himself king of the Lombards, as before he had been king of the Franks.

One of his first deeds(243) was to restore to the Holy See all the cities

and territories which, in his last years, Desiderius had invaded in the

exarchate, the Pentapolis, or the duchy of Rome. He thus gave back to Pope

Adrian full and pacific possession of the whole State of St. Peter, such

as it was after the donation of Pipin. This was the chief, if not the

sole, occasion of the war. It would be the first fruit of the victory.

That he performed what he had promised is attested by his secretary,

Eginhard: “Charles did not rest from the war which he had begun until he

had restored to the Romans all which had been taken away from them. ‘The

end of this war was the subjection of Italy: and the restitution to

Adrian, ruler of the Roman Church, of the things which had been seized by

the Lombard kings.’ ”(244) Other contemporary annals of the year 774 say:

“This year Pavia was surrendered to the Franks: and Desiderius was carried

into France, and the lord king Charles sent his counts through all Italy:

he joyfully restored to St. Peter the cities owed to him, and having

arranged everything, came speedily into France”. His return filled France

with triumph.

“The Lombards(245) had been governed by their kings with good laws and

exact justice, but they afterwards received better treatment under

Charlemagne, a monarch who, in loftiness of mind, in power and rectitude

of judgment, surpassed all Frank and Lombard kings.” But this encomium on

the good laws and exact justice of the Lombards belongs only to their

treatment of themselves, for the Romans(246) looked with horror upon the

ignominious servitude with which Aistulf and Desiderius threatened them.

These kings sought to crown that semi-barbarous occupation of North Italy

during two centuries by throning themselves in Rome, and making the Pope

their vassal. Aistulf sank before Pipin, and Desiderius before Charles.

The oppressors of the Pope were swept away: his champion and protector,

Charles, went on henceforth from victory to victory.

That the transition(247) of the lands secured to the Pope into the

relation of vassals to a sovereign was a matter of time is explained by

the insufficient material force at the command of the Pope, the love of

independence in the population, their power to resist, and the general

conditions of the time. Thus, from a letter of Adrian to Charles, in 787

or 788, we learn that he announced to the king how he had received the

cities of Toscanella. Bagnorea, and Viterbo, and requested from him the

tradition of Populania, and Rosella, near Piombino. Later, he shows him

that he had not yet received them, though two messengers of Charles had

been charged with their delivery. Thus it required fresh efforts on the

part of the Franks, and fresh reminders on the part of the Pope, to obtain

the complete execution of the gift. This does not show that Charles was

unwilling to keep his word: but it does show the difficulty of the matter.

It was a great undertaking to pacify the population in a number of cities,

and to subject the great and the small proprietors in them to the papal

lordship. Adrian had reason sometimes to express the wish to the king that

it might be accomplished in their life-time. Sometimes Charles’s own

Commissioners were not trustworthy, were disinclined to the Pope, were

liable to be corrupted or deceived, or made mistakes in executing their

commission. In March, 781, Charles came again to Italy, celebrated Easter

on the 15th of April at Rome, treated with the Pope, had his little son,

Pipin, four years old, baptised, and made him, after the Pope had anointed

him, king of the Lombards. The duchies of Spoleto and Benevento were to be

vassal lands of the Pope. The distance of the latter from the Franks, the

connection of the Duke Arichis with Desiderius, and the nearness to the

Greeks, who occupied Gaicta, and other parts of Campania, caused special

difficulties here. This gradual acquisition of the territories promised by

Charles in 774 occupied a number of years; but in them Adrian had every

reason to praise the good faith of Charles and the Franks.

From the time that all dependence on Constantinople was broken off, the

sovereign authority of the Pope appears entire.(248) In all dealings with

Pipin and the Franks, in the compact of alliance at Quiersy, in the two

peaces of Pavia, in 754 and 756, between the Franks, the Romans, and the

Lombards, the Pope appears as the sole actor and supreme arbiter of Rome’s

fortunes. He alone confers on Pipin and his sons the dignity of Patriciate

of the Romans, thereby binding him to an armed defence of Rome and its

State. To the Pope alone Fulrad consigns at St. Peter’s the keys and the

hostages of the cities of the exarchate. The Pope covenants with

Desiderius the conditions for his elevation to the Lombard throne; demands

of him the surrender of the cities not yet restored: guards against the

schemes of the Lombards and the Greeks to take away the sovereignty of the

Holy See; treats with the king of the Franks to frustrate them. He

continually sends his ambassadors into France, usually prelates, sometimes

dukes and Roman magnates. The kings of France send to him their

messengers; treat with him of all public affairs of Italy. The people of

Spoleto, Reate, and elsewhere, when at the fall of Desiderius they

voluntarily became subjects of the Roman State, swear fealty to St. Peter

and the Pope. In a word, in all political acts, in all concerning the

government and defence of the State, the Pope alone speaks and acts in his

own name with supreme and independent authority. No representative of the

Senate or Roman people is seen at his side, clothed with proper and

distinct authority. On the contrary, in the very gravest questions of

State, no decree of the Senate, no plebiscite, no form of citizen suffrage

is so much as hinted at. This is inexplicable had Rome been governed as a

republic, or if its citizens had had any part of sovereign authority.

With this the language of the Pope himself exactly agrees. He speaks as a

king of the cities and provinces of the Roman State. “The territories of

our cities, and the patrimonies of St. Peter;” “our city of Sinigallia;”

“our castle of Valens;” “this our city of Rome,” “our city of Civita

Vecchia;” “our city of Castle Felaty;” “our territories of the exarchate;”

“this our province;” “they are attempting to withdraw from our dominion

our cities of Campania, from the power and dominion of St. Peter and

ours;” “we have resolved to send thither our main army;” “in all the parts

which lie under the dominion of the holy Roman Church;” these and such

like expressions occur everywhere in the letters of the Popes to the Frank

kings. These also are no less frequent and significative. “The holy Church

of God and its peculiar people;” “the Roman Church and all the people

subject to it;” “our people;” “the people entrusted to us;” “all our

people of the Romans of that province;” “our people of the commonwealth of

the Romans”. These expressions the Popes used without doubt or reserve in

public letters to the Frank kings and nation. Adrian, in a letter to

Charlemagne,(249) declares his will to maintain and exercise in the

exarchate and Pentapolis exactly the same power which Stephen II. had

received. “Our predecessor distributed all appointments in the exarchate,

and all who ruled received their orders from this city of Rome. He sent

judges to right all who suffered wrong, to reside in that city of

Ravenna.”

The interests of the Romans and the Franks, of the Papacy and the Frankish

kingdom, of Adrian and Charles, became in this period blent together.(250)

An indivisible unity and sincere alliance existed between them. They were

the result of that great visit of Charles to Rome in 774. When that visit

took place, Charles was almost at the beginning of that wonderful career

which has placed him at the head of modern history. By the death of his

brother Carloman two years before, the whole Frank inheritance came into

his hands. In the three years since 768, when Charles and Carloman had

been crowned on the same day as kings of the Franks, but in different

cities, there had been dissension between them, and had Carloman lived, it

was to be feared that the young strength of the greatest western monarchy

would have been turned against itself, instead of being gathered up

together against the Saracen enemy who was bent on the conquest of the

world. But now the single hand of Charles wrought it to a unity of power,

moderation and wisdom, which first became conspicuous on this visit to

Rome. By this act of spontaneous devotion he may be said to have

inaugurated the unequalled success which afterwards attended on him. From

that time, forty-two years of reign were appointed to him, in which he

became greater and greater. The root may have been that first visit which

he made to Rome, shortly after that Pontificate of Adrian began, in answer

to his appeal. They became from this time fast personal friends. It is to

be observed with what magnificent loyalty Charles took up, repeated, and

ratified in his own person, the act of his father, Pipin, made twenty

years before. That act of Pipin is almost unique in history. When Stephen

II. came to him at Pontigny in 754, Pipin promised him _for __ the love of

St. Peter_ to defend the city and duchy of Rome from the intruding Lombard

king, Aistulf, and so not to _give_, but to _preserve_ its sovereignty to

St. Peter, as throned in his successors, alike from Lombard robbery and

Byzantine neglect and impotence. He promised also to recover the exarchate

of Ravenna, and the province on the Adriatic called the Pentapolis,

already taken by Aistulf from the Byzantine, and in his occupation, and to

_give_ them an inheritance to St. Peter. Also, he received the title of

Patricius of the Romans, then bestowed upon him by Stephen II., with the

engagement and the right of protection carried by it. His sons Charles and

Carloman, then children, were associated with him in these promises, and

in the dignity of Patricius. The nobles of the Franks assembled in diet

gave their sanction to these things: Pipin accomplished them. He would not

take to himself a palm of ground in that rich territory which he partly

preserved for St. Peter alone, and partly bestowed upon him. Rome and its

duchy he preserved; the exarchate and Pentapolis he bestowed. Stephen II.

_reigned_, when he returned to Rome, in 756, and his brother, Paul I.,

after him. The Lombard kingdom, from the taking of Pavia in 756, continued

by Pipin’s permission. The last Lombard king, Desiderius, repaid all this

by perpetual encroachment upon the cities given to St. Peter. The Lombard

faithlessness is repeatedly dwelt upon in the contemporary writings of the

Popes Stephen II., Paul I., Stephen III., and especially Adrian I. Charles

had listened to the solemn appeal of Adrian to right him. He came to Rome,

and the greatest warrior of the West ascended as a pilgrim on his knees

the thirty-five steps which led to the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles.

He was welcomed at St. Peter’s Confession as Patricius, in the way that

Popes and emperors alone, upon their accession, were welcomed. And before

he left Rome, at the request of the Pope, he ordered his father’s deed to

be read before him; in the midst of his princes, and with their consent,

he re-affirmed it: and he guarded the throne of Adrian as Patricius during

that pontificate, which, until seventeen hundred years from St. Peter had

elapsed, had no equal in length. In all this Charles equalled and repeated

the generosity of his father.

How greatly the Popes esteemed the deeds of Pipin and of Charlemagne is

witnessed perpetually by the letters of the day contained in the Codex

Carolinus.(251) In them the Frank king is constantly likened to Moses and

to David, who delivered the people of Israel from Egyptian bondage and

heathen oppression. He is called perpetually, “our helper and defender

after God,” “the guardian of holy Church,” “the liberator of the Christian

people,” “the ransomer of the Roman Church, and all the people subject to

it”. To him is attributed the prosperity and security of Rome and the

whole province of Roman Italy, which is said to be redeemed by him. No

tongue can express or praise sufficiently his benefits. God alone can

reward him. All nations must acknowledge his defence of the Church of God,

and magnify him for it over all the kings of the earth.