Charles, had two results at once of inestimable value: one to free the
Popes and the inhabitants of Italy from the perpetual invasion, threats,
and devastation of the Lombards. Thrice since the assault of the emperor
Leo III., in 726, upon the faith and internal government of the Church,
had Rome been in the utmost peril of subjugation, once by Liutprand, then
by Aistulf, lastly by Desiderius. What would have been the condition of
the Pope under such a king as Aistulf or Desiderius, seated at the
Capitol? He could only expect a servitude far worse than had ever been
suffered under the vice-cæsars of Ravenna, or the cæsars of
Constantinople. The original Roman empire had been broken into a multitude
of independent kingdoms. That changed condition of the Christian society
of itself required that there should be lodged in its head a greater
independence of the civil power. The hand of Charles, coming down upon the
hand of Pipin, assured to Adrian the legal recognition of a sovereignty
sufficiently large to secure him in the guardianship of the faith which
was the chief work of St. Peter’s See in every age. And so the misery
which the rudest barbarian horde began in 568 was stayed at last in 774:
and if Gregory the Great, in his time, complained that he had been for
thirty years keeping watch and ward against Lombard violence and intrigue,
the four great pontiffs, Gregory II., Gregory III., Zacharias, and Stephen
II., witnessed the last access of their attempt at domination, and the
royal city of Ravenna acknowledged in Pope Adrian, not only its spiritual
head, but its temporal sovereign.
At the same time the second inestimable benefit of deliverance from the
eastern despotism, fastened upon Italy since the time of Narses, took
place. Some slight sketch of what the exarchate had been to Italy has been
attempted. At last those two hundred years of misery were closed: the
universal consent of the peoples of central Italy accepted with delight
the Papal sovereignty. From the time of Justinian to Stephen II.—perhaps
it should rather be said from the time of Leo the Great, the Popes alone
had cared for Italy. They alone had possessed the power, the wisdom, and
the charity to meet, in some degree at least, the calamities which rained
down upon that land, reduced to the condition of a “servile province”.
Forty years after St. Gregory the Great, in the middle of the seventh
century, a Pope had been torn from his sick bed, laid before the altar in
the Lateran Basilica, carried to Byzantium, judged by the senate as a
traitor for the exercise of his spiritual rights, and left to die of
famine in the Crimea.(252) In the middle of the eighth century if we plant
ourselves, and look through the events of two or three centuries, a
certain fact comes out clearly. No one can assign the precise point of its
completion, but it is seen attested by a multitude of indications. The
Popes in gradually taking an acknowledged sovereignty, only yielded to the
long and ardent desire of the peoples at whose head they stood, no less
than to the stringent demand of public necessity. The feeling of the
subject here answered to the fact in the prince: that is, as the Popes
were princes by actual necessity so long before they had the name and
solemn right to it, so the Romans, and the Italians of the exarchate and
the Pentapolis were spontaneous subjects of the Popes long before they
bore the legal title. A mutual attraction joined the two together. The
Popes through charity for the public good began to exercise in behalf of
an ill-treated or a deserted population the part of provident civil
governors; the people from gratitude and affection clung more and more to
the Popes. The ever increasing calamities and the common trials which
pressed on the Popes and the Italians in those miserable times, partly
caused by the Byzantine emperors, partly by the barbarous Lombards, drew
them more closely together, until the Popes found themselves sovereigns,
and the people found themselves subjects, in a complete civil society. But
the character of that society was indeed paternal: and as the civil bond
sprung from a spiritual fathership, Pipin and Charlemagne named with the
name of St. Peter himself the State which their love and reverence for him
had partly preserved and partly created.
CHAPTER IX. THE MAKING OF CHRISTENDOM.
Among the events of history, as the historic mind would ponder them, or
the judgments of God, as the Christian mind would interpret them, there
are none greater than the two which for some time past I have been
attempting to narrate or to contemplate. One is the wandering of the
nations on the north of the great inland sea: the other is, the wandering
of the nations on its south. Having reached the last year of the eighth
century, we may cast a glance back upon both, and unite, if it may be, in
a single picture the action upon both of a power which owed its
institution only to the greatest fact of all facts concerning our race,
the assumption of human nature, the soul and body of man, in His own
Person, by the Creator of all things, the Son of God. That power existed
only in virtue of certain words uttered and a certain will exercised,
during His life upon earth. As the last of His thirty-three years was
beginning, He had said to a man: Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I
will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
How far did the gates of hell advance upon the Church of God in the four
hundred years which elapsed from the death of the great Theodosius?
When he closed his eyes in the year 395, the great empire of Augustus in
the East and West was still intact. The fifth and the sixth centuries may
be said to be filled by the fall of that empire in the West. I have
required ten chapters to give even a slight account of the effects
produced upon the Christian Church by the wandering of the northern
nations to the time of St. Gregory the Great. But the seventh and eighth
centuries are filled with the pouring out of the Mohammedan flood upon the
Christian people, which had more or less remained after the wandering of
the northern nations ended in their settlement. It is another convulsion
equal in its range and perhaps still greater in its effects than that
which made Teuton tribes the masters of Gaul and Spain and Britain, of
Germany, of Italy, and Illyricum. The peoples of the north had struggled
for hundreds of years to break the barriers of the Rhine and the Danube,
and in their savage ferocity and tameless independence wrest the South, so
long coveted, from the civilised but degenerate Roman. The prize, which
they had almost reached in the third century, was saved from their grasp
until the fifth by a succession of brave and able generals invested with
imperial power. But the Teuton could both admire and receive the law and
the religion of the empire which he overthrew. Far otherwise was it, when
a savage tribe of Arabia, kindled to white heat by a fanatic and false
belief, burst upon a despotic empire in which Christian faith and morality
were deeply impaired. It needed but the third decade of one emperor’s
reign to abrogate the Roman sovereignty held during seven hundred years
over Syria and Egypt, and to establish the sway of a false prophet, the
bitterest enemy of the Christian faith, over the very city which contained
the sepulchre of Christ. “The law had gone forth from Sion and the word of
the Lord from Jerusalem,” and thither all Christian nations sent a host of
pilgrims to kindle anew their faith and love before the shrine which had
held for a day the source of all that life, the Body of the God-man. Now
that shrine, with all the memorial places of the Divine Life upon earth,
fell into hands whose work it was to set up instead of the Christ, a man
of turbulent passions and unmeasured ambition: instead of the Christian
home, the denial of all Christian morality: instead of a Virgin Mother
placed at the head of her sex, and unfolding from age to age the worth and
dignity of woman, the dishonoured captives of a brigand warfare. All this
took place within ten years after the death of Mohammed, and by the end of
the reign of Heraclius, when the greatest triumph ever won by a Roman
emperor over the rival Persian monarchy was followed by the most
ignominious defeat from a troop of Arabian robbers, and the permanent
abandonment of Roman territory. During the sixty following years, not only
had Antioch and Alexandria, as well as Jerusalem, become Mohammedan, but
the last fortress of Christian power in the East, the impregnable city of
Constantine, trembled repeatedly at the approach of Saracen hosts, being
rescued rather by its matchless position, its strong walls, and the
invention of the Greek fire, than by the superior valour of its defenders.
At the end of that seventh century, the whole northern coast of Africa had
passed away from Roman to Saracenic rule: from the Christian faith to its
Mohammedan antagonist. In ten years more, the Saracen banner crossed over
the straits of Gibraltar, and the Church of Spain fell under its
domination. At this time the eastern empire, diminished as it had been,
passed through severe revolutions. It seemed that from intestine
dissension and the despotism of one crowned adventurer after another, the
remnant of the eastern realm, which during seventy years could hardly
maintain itself against Saracen aggression, was coming of itself to an
end. In this uttermost extremity at Constantinople, a soldier had risen
from the ranks to be a trusted general, and when the empire received him
for its chief, a long prepared attack by the chalif on his capital was
beaten back successfully by Leo III. In the time of the chalif Walid, who
reigned from 705 to 715, the Arabian flag floated over the walls of
Samarcand: its conquest had stretched to the foot of the Himalayas. His
governor in Africa, Musa, had carried the bounds of his empire to the
Atlantic ocean. The single city of Ceuta owned still the Byzantine sway.
And the Christian count, Julian, for a private wrong, betrayed to the
Saracen the city entrusted to his charge. Musa added almost all Spain to
the Saracen domain. Constantinople had been besieged in 668, and saved
under Constantine the Bearded; it was saved again in 718, under Leo III.
These two deliverances, with the fact that it had not been taken in all
the interval from the time of Heraclius, may be termed the only checks
received from Christians by the Mohammedan conquest in the whole period
from the death of Mohammed. Had it succeeded in gaining Constantinople
when it gained Toledo, it is difficult to see how the universal
enthralment of the Christian faith under the almost insufferable tyranny
of the Arabian false prophet could have been prevented.
Thus when St. Gregory II. succeeded to the throne of Peter in 715, and Leo
III. to the throne of Constantine in 717, the position of the Christian
Faith before Islam seemed to stand in terrible danger.(253) The sons of
Mohammed, lords of Asia, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, were besetting, with
long prepared fleet and army, the last remains of the Greek power in
Constantinople on the East, and on the West had only to look to the
conquest of France. If they became masters of France, there was no
strength left to resist them, neither Italy divided between Lombards,
Greeks, and the old inhabitants, subjects of one or the other, nor Germany
divided among various peoples. The whole world seemed to be reserved for
the anti-Christian kingdom of Mohammed: all nations about to pass under
the hard servitude of a conquering Arabian tribe, instinct with hatred to
the Christian life; all women to become slaves of man’s passion: all
reason to endure subjection to a lie imposed by the scimitar. What we have
since seen of Mohammedan rule in Asia and in Africa during twelve hundred
years, seemed then on the point of becoming the general doom.
That was the time chosen by the eastern emperor, after a reign of ten
years, to attempt the imposition of a fresh heresy upon Pope Gregory II.
The man who was formally bound by his position as Roman emperor, and by
the oath taken at his coronation to defend the Church as it had come down
to him from the seven preceding centuries, was filled with a desire to
remodel the practice of that Church in all its worship. He advanced claims
which were not only an invasion of its independence by the civil power,
but in themselves rested only upon the practice and the sentiments of the
Church’s two great enemies, the Jew and the Saracen. The Jew abhorred the
relative worship paid to the images and pictures of our Lord, of His
Mother, and of the saints, because he utterly denied the fact of the
Incarnation, which these images and pictures were ever presenting in the
daily worship of the faithful. The Mohammedan shared this abhorrence,
because he denounced the Christian as an idolater for his belief in our
Lord, as Son of God. Leo III. took up the mind of the Jew and the Saracen
into his own rude and unformed nature, and bent the whole force of the
imperial power to subdue the Pope to his will. Spain had just fallen into
Mohammedan hands: and the lord at Damascus ruled from the Atlantic to
Samarcand. Under his rule, which was the bitterest ignominy to every
Christian, lay more than half the empire which Justinian had left. Then,
in 726, a contest, the most unequal which can be conceived, began between
Pope Gregory II. and the emperor Leo III. It continued fifty years under
Leo and his son, Kopronymus, who died in 776. In the course of it, Leo
sent a great fleet against the coast of Italy, whose commander was
instructed to take and plunder Ravenna, to proceed to Rome, to put down
all opposition to the imperial heresy, and to carry Pope Gregory captive
to Constantinople, after the fashion used in the preceding century to Pope
St. Martin. Pope Gregory II. endured to his death the joint heresy and
tyranny of the eastern lord, and induced the irritated populations of
Italy still to keep allegiance to him. His successor, Pope Gregory III.,
used the same forbearance. Pope Zacharias for ten years went on enduring,
while the Frank nation accepted, on his judgment, a new dynasty. For
twenty-eight years, from 726 to 754, no amount of wrong could induce four
successive Popes to throw off the allegiance which had pressed upon Italy
as a servile province since the conquest of Justinian. At length, the
fourth Pope, Stephen II., was deserted in his utmost need by the emperor
himself: was threatened with a Lombard poll tax laid upon Rome, and the
position of vassal to an Aistulf in the city of St. Peter. Then the
eastern servitude at last dropped, and the issue of the most unequal
combat, begun in 726, was terminated by the compact ratified at Quiersy in
754, and carried out at Pavia in 756. This compact secured to Pope Stephen
and his successors the position of sovereign princes in Rome, and the
territory attached to it. In 756 Pope Stephen II. re-entered Rome as its
acknowledged civil sovereign. Yet, in the eighteen years following this
event, the last king of the Lombards renewed the ambition of Liutprand and
Aistulf, to become the lord of Rome, and the renewal of Pipin’s gift by
Charlemagne, in 774, alone closed the momentous contest which, beginning
in 726 with an attack on the unarmed Pope, ended in the deliverance of
Italy from the most cruel of thraldoms, and made the Pope, who had long
been Rome’s only support and benefactor, its temporal as well as its
spiritual head.
At the time of that event, more than four centuries had passed since
Constantine, in 330, consecrated his city on the Bosphorus to be Nova
Roma, pursuing his idea to found a capital which should be Christian from
its birth, and the centre of a great Christian empire. Five years before
the Church had met for the first time in General Council. The object of
its meeting was to refute and censure an attack upon the Godhead of its
Founder, and the place at which it met was a city immediately on the
Asiatic side of the strait, on which what was then Byzantium stood. The
position taken by Constantine was to guard with the imperial sword the
chamber in which the Church’s bishops sat, to accept their decrees as the
utterance of Christ himself, and to add the force of imperial law to the
spiritual authority which he acknowledged them of themselves to possess.
From the baptism of Byzantium as Nova Roma in 330, fifty years succeed to
380, in which Constantinople becomes the chief seat of the very heresy
condemned by the Church at the Council of 325. Its see is sought after
immediately as the prize of worldly ecclesiastics in the East. Eusebius,
the man who presently became its bishop, deceives Constantine into
fostering the heresy which he abhorred: its bishop, Macedonius, was the
docile servant of the emperor Constantius in his attempt to change the
faith of the Church: its bishop, Eudoxius, nurtured the emperor Valens in
the same heresy. But the succession of Popes in Julius, Liberius, and
Damasus, frustrated these efforts of the bishops of Nova Roma in the first
half century of its promotion: and when Theodosius sat on the throne of
Constantine, with his colleagues, Gratian and Valentinian, their law of
380 called upon their peoples “to hold the religion which is proved to
have been delivered to the Romans by the divine apostle, Peter, since it
has been maintained there from his time to our own”.(254)
But the terrible effects wrought upon the eastern episcopate by the Arian
assault had not been finally overcome. The next attack upon the Person of
our Lord proceeded from the eloquent Syrian, Nestorius, who had been put
in the see of Constantinople. It required all the energy of Pope Celestine
and the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, to overcome that heresy which still
attacked the Incarnation, and was supported by court favour at the eastern
capital, and the jealousy of its emperor for his bishop. It is remarkable
that the First Council at Ephesus, in 431, should have been followed by a
Second Council at the same place in 447. This second Council was, so far
as its convocation and its constitution went, regularly entitled to be a
General Council. Its decree was in favour of an opposite heresy to that of
Nestorius, on the same subject of our Lord’s Person, and its originator
was the monk Eutyches, in high repute at the head of a monastery at
Constantinople. The Council after its completion was rejected, and the
heresy overthrown, by the single arm of St. Leo the Great. The whole
Church at Chalcedon accepted his act and acknowledged his Primacy. But
this Monophysite heresy had driven its roots deep into the Greek mind.
During two hundred years, to the time of Mohammed himself, its effects may
be traced, corrupting the unity of belief in the eastern patriarchates,
encouraging perpetual party spirit, breaking constantly the succession of
bishops in the hierarchy. In the time of St. Leo, the patriarch Proterius,
who succeeded the deposed Dioscorus, was murdered by the Monophysite
faction. A few years later the bishop of Constantinople used this heresy
for the purpose of exalting his see against Rome, which had just been
deprived of its emperor, and its government left in the hand of
barbarians, who were also heretics. Thus supported by imperial power,
Acacius brought about a schism which lasted for thirty-five years. The
resistance of seven Popes, the last of whom, Hormisdas, obtained the full
result which his predecessors had sought for, frustrated this second
century of Byzantine aggression upon the faith and government of the
Church.
Indeed, so striking and unquestionable was the submission of the Byzantine
sovereign, and the recognition by the Byzantine bishop of the Papal
authority, that from this time forth a somewhat new course was pursued by
the eastern emperor and patriarch in regard to that authority. The purpose
of Justinian in his subsequent reign was, while he acknowledged in very
ample terms the papal primacy, to subject it in its practical execution to
his own civil power. Thus when he had become by conquest immediate lord of
Rome, he summoned Pope Vigilius to attend him at Constantinople. During
eight years he subjected him to perpetual mortifications. He issued
doctrinal decrees and required the Pope to accept them. His laws fully
admitted the Pope’s rank; he never denied his succession from St. Peter:
but his pretension was to make the five patriarchs use their great
authority in submission to himself; and he included the first of the
patriarchs in this overweening claim, as his namesake Justinian II. signed
his council in Trullo at the head of all, and left a line between himself
and the patriarch of Constantinople for the signature of Pope Sergius,
which was never given.
The result of Justinian’s oppression of Pope Vigilius was to create
temporary schisms in some parts of the West, through dread of the bishops
that something had been conceded to the usurpation of the civil power. Not
until the time of Gregory the Great could the Apostolic See recover the
injury thus inflicted. But Justinian did much more than persecute a
particular Pope. I think it may be said with truth, that from the conquest
of Italy under his generals, Belisarius and Narses, it was the continual
effort of the Byzantine emperors to subject the Papacy to the civil power
in the exercise of its spiritual supremacy. From Justinian to Constantine
Kopronymus—a period of more than two hundred years—that is the relation
between the Two Powers which the eastern emperors carried in their minds
and executed as far as they were able.
The fourth century of Nova Roma’s exaltation opened with the strongest
assertion of this claim which had yet been seen. The able and unscrupulous
Sergius had become patriarch of Constantinople, and was prime minister of
the emperor Heraclius. The whole East was teeming with Monophysite
opinions, and every city, in proportion to its size and dignity, torn with
party conflicts arising out of dissension respecting the Person of our
Lord. Sergius thought he had devised a remedy by that Monothelite
statement which, as he imagined, enabled him to present in a more
conciliating form the old heresy put down by St. Leo and the Council of
Chalcedon. He led the emperor Heraclius to publish this heresy in the
imperial name. Then four successive patriarchs of Constantinople were
found to put all their spiritual rank at the service of two emperors,
Heraclius and Constans II., to formulate the heresy, and force it, if
possible, on the Popes. Ten successive Popes resisted—one to martyrdom
itself—and after a struggle of fifty years, Popes Agatho and Leo II. at
the Sixth Council—when the eastern emperor for the moment became orthodox,
and his patriarch and bishops followed him—condemned and expelled the
heresy. But this fatal attempt of Sergius and Heraclius had been exactly
coincident with the rise of Mohammed. The Greek contention respecting the
Person of Christ had lasted three hundred years, from the Nicene Council,
when the success of the false prophet led vast countries, once the most
flourishing of Christian provinces, to yield to the human authority of a
robber, and to put him in the place of the God-man whom by their works
they had so often denied. And so the fourth century from the exaltation of
Nova Roma had been completed.
Yet still it was reserved for the fifth century to Constantinople, at a
time of its extreme humiliation, when for ninety years it had only just
obtained from a new and undisclosed invention the power to keep the
all-conquering Saracen outside its walls—to make its final and most
absolute attack upon the elder sister whom it acknowledged as the leader
of the Christian faith. Syria and Egypt and Africa and Spain were gone,
and the Persian monarchy, for so many hundred years the rival of the
Roman, equally was absorbed in the enormous Saracen dominion, and the
cities of Asia Minor were in daily dread of the same foe prevailing over
their religion and desecrating their homes. Such was the condition of
things when the yet remaining Christian emperor assumed over the Christian
Church the power of Mohammed’s chalifs in the territory which they ruled
in Mohammed’s name. Another fifty years occur in which, when after the
orthodox patriarch Germanus had been forced to lay the insignia of his
rank on the altar of Sancta Sophia and depart, three Iconoclast patriarchs
in succession, Anastasius from 730 to 753, Constantine from 753 to 766,
and Nicetas I. from 766 to 780, placed themselves at the disposal of their
emperors to corrupt the faith and subject the government of the Church,
until at the Seventh Council once again an eastern emperor became
orthodox: and an eastern orthodox patriarch followed again in Tarasius;
and Adrian I. was received as Pope, being no longer a vassal of
Constantinople, but a sovereign prince.
Upon these antecedents ensued the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. What
is the witness of history to the spiritual action of the Popes during this
long period of 426 years, from 330, when Byzantium became Constantinople,
to 756, when the people of Rome welcomed with universal jubilee the return
of their Pope, Stephen II., as sovereign?—when again in 774 Charles at the
beginning of his great career approached St. Peter as a pilgrim, and
renewed to him his father Pipin’s act of munificent piety.
Let us follow the course of the heresies which, during four centuries and
a half from the Nicene Council in 325, to the defeat of the Iconoclasts at
the Seventh Council, attacked the faith of the Church. They turn upon the
Person of our Lord: upon that mighty fact of the Incarnation which filled
all men’s minds. The Arian denied that He was God; the Nestorian and
Monophysite sought in opposite methods to deal with His two natures. The
Monothelite pursued the question to its inmost point as it touched the two
natures in the operation of the Will; his error in its root was especially
Eutychean. When the question began the original eastern patriarchates of
Alexandria and Antioch were in their primal state and glory. They held
their descent from Peter, like the See of Rome. Like the Apostolic See
their chairs were at the head of a great mass of bishops, Antioch in
particular having a crowd of metropolitans governing important provinces,
who looked up to the great see of the East, who, when the patriarchate was
vacant, voted for the election, as they received from him the confirmation
of their own election. Alexander in the mother see of Egypt had been the
first to condemn his own insurgent priest, Arius, and at the Nicene
Council he was attended by his deacon, Athanasius, who was soon to succeed
to his place, and raise during his episcopate of forty-six years the See
of St. Mark to its loftiest renown. Eustathius, at the same Council, the
twenty-fourth bishop of Antioch, was a noted confessor, and with Alexander
contributed to its decision; while Pope Silvester threw the whole weight
of the West, which had no doubt as to the Godhead of Christ, in favour of
the same result. As yet Constantinople was not; and the See of Jerusalem,
though highly honoured, was in the hierarchy a simple bishopric suffragan
to the metropolitan of Cesarea. There could be no controversy more
reaching to the inmost heart of faith in the Church than that which
concerned the Person of the Lord. Taking the four centuries and a half as
a whole we find that the eastern patriarchates failed under the trial. The
first of them, Alexandria, had for its two greatest teachers Athanasius
and Cyril, both doctors of the Church, both renowned in their defence and
illustration of the doctrine that God became man. But no sooner had Cyril
died than his see became the centre of the Monophysite error. Almost the
whole Christian people of Egypt followed its bad lead, and when the
Saracen chief took Egypt and Alexandria in the name of Mohammed he found
support rather than opposition in the mass of the Christians, who, in
their bitter party hatred, called the remnant of Catholics still remaining
Melchites or Royalists as the most opprobrious epithet they could devise.
And in process of time, under Omar and his successors, the country of
Athanasius has become the heart of Mohammedan learning and zeal.
Scarcely less melancholy is the history of Antioch and its twelve
provinces of metropolitans, with their 163 bishops.(255) Eustathius was
speedily deposed by the Arian faction, even before Athanasius, and during
ninety years a perpetual schism preyed upon the dignity of the great
eastern see. In the fifth century it was unable to prevent the advance of
Constantinople. It fell a speedy prey to the Mohammed’s chalif, and from
that time the man who bore the name of its patriarch was often a dependent
and pensioner at the eastern capital. Jerusalem had succeeded in obtaining
the patriarchal dignity at the Council of Chalcedon. But in less than two
hundred years Omar polluted its holy place by his presence, and the most
stirring voice uttered by its patriarchs is that cry of its noble
Sophronius, bidding his chief bishop go to the throne of Peter, “where the
foundations of holy doctrine are laid,” and invite the sitter on that
throne, who was Honorius, to rescue the faith imperilled by his brother
patriarchs, Sergius at Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria, leaders of
the Monothelite heresy.
When therefore the emperor Constantine Kopronymus, in 754, took by the
hand Constantine whom he had chosen to be ecumenical patriarch, and
presented him as the elect of the emperor to the Council of more than
three hundred bishops, whom he had convoked to sanction his own heresy,
while twelve years afterwards, as the sequel of many torments, he executed
him and had his body dissected; we may say that the eastern patriarchs had
utterly failed to defend either the faith or the hierarchy of the Church.
Mohammed did not appear to complete the work of Arius, until the
descendants of those who condemned Arius in 325 had obscured by
interminable disputes during three hundred years what their spiritual
ancestors had declared to be the faith of the Church. The causes of this
failure had been internal. There had been great bishops in the East during
this period. Chrysostom had sat in Constantinople, suffered, confessed,
and been exiled before Nestorius, who sat there also, and was exiled for
his heresy. Germanus, in the same see, did not yield to Leo III., and in
that worst time confessed, and his place was forthwith taken by
Anastasius, who subscribed all Leo’s evil will. Kopronymus strove to
exterminate the monks, who suffered every extremity for their maintenance
of the faith. But as the main result the Byzantine despotism had overcome
the eastern episcopate. I do not know how more telling proofs of that evil
victory could be shown than that Philippicus Bardanes, in 711, during his
ephemeral reign, should be able to assemble a council at Constantinople,
which he required to restore the Monothelite heresy, condemned at the
Sixth Council, and scarcely met with an episcopal opponent; and again that
Kopronymus could assemble another large council in 754, to establish his
Iconoclast aggression, which was received without dissent.
How then was the faith preserved during these four hundred and sixty
years?
From Pope Sylvester to Pope Stephen II. we count sixty-one Popes. In that
long period of time the doctrine of the Godhead and the Person of Christ
with all its manifold consequences was fully drawn out. The variation
which had been seen in the patriarchal and episcopal sees of the East was
never found at Rome. All political and external help may be said to have
failed the Popes. They lost their own western emperor, and the sole
remaining eastern emperor turned against them. More also, he set up
against them a new bishop who at the beginning of the time did not exist,
the bishop of the eastern capital. The eastern lord added from generation
to generation rank and influence to this bishop. He made him his own
intermediate instrument of communication with all the bishops of his
eastern realm, to whom it had been the continual policy of Justinian and
his successors to grant great political privileges, making them in large
degree partakers of civil authority. They sought to rule the East
throughout its manifold divided interests by the authority of the local
bishops; and they sought to rule the bishops themselves by their own
patriarch. Rome, from being the head of the Roman monarchy at the
beginning of the period, ceased to be the capital even of a “servile”
Italy, the captive of Belisarius. The Popes passed through Odoacer,
Theodorich, Theodatus, also Vitiges and Totila, also Liutprand, Aistulf,
and Desiderius. Their elections, when made, were delayed in their
recognition, or even controlled in their choice. They saw a crowd of
northern raiders take possession of the whole West, and at one time the
very heresy which at the beginning of the period had been condemned by the
Church, was in possession of all the governments of the West but that of
the Franks, and had for the chief ruler of its councils and the head of
the regal league against the faith of Rome the greatest man whom the
northern tribes can show during their time of immigration, and he had made
Italy powerful and respected, and cultivated Rome with extreme solicitude.
When St. Silvester sat in St. Peter’s chair, Rome was the single capital
of the whole empire; when St. Leo sat there he witnessed the fall of the
West, but stood imperturbable before Attila and Genseric; when St. Gregory
sat there, he divined from the temporal ruin and desolation of Rome, which
he saw perishing piecemeal around him, that the world’s last time was
coming. When St. Martin sat there, he was torn from his sick bed by the
eastern master to die in the Crimea; when St. Gregory II. sat there, the
same eastern master threatened to break in pieces the statue of St. Peter
in his Basilica. But in all the four hundred and sixty years from the
first to the second Nicene Council, the witness of Rome to the Divine
Person of her Lord was clear and distinct. Neither the greatest nor the
worst of her opponents had subdued that witness, or rendered it faltering
or indistinct. For this reason it was that the Pope, whose life the
Iconoclast soldier, when clothed with the imperial purple, five times
attempted, could reply to his threat, that all the West looked upon St.
Peter as a God upon earth; that the one Teuton king before whose
victorious reign that of Theodorich is pale and colourless, ascended on
his knees the steps before St. Peter’s tomb, laid upon the altar over his
body the gift of temporal sovereignty, and went forth from that moment the
predestined civil head of that new Christendom which St. Peter had made
out of the northern adventurers.
Taking in all this time the simple witness of history, I ask if in it the
words of our Lord to Peter were not palpably fulfilled: “Thou art the
Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church”. If the Rock had not
been, each one in this long line of heresies would have destroyed the
Church. The line of St. Athanasius was not infallible; the line of St.
Ignatius of Antioch was annulled after frequent falls by the Mohammedan
captivity; the line of Byzantium had some saints, but was prolific in
heretics, and the last utterance of Jerusalem before it fell, when the
Saracen ascetic voluptuary trod its courts, was uttered by its patriarch
from Calvary itself, when he adjured his messenger: “Go swiftly from end
to end of the earth, until thou reach the Apostolic See, in which the
foundations of our holy doctrine rest”.
The state of the eastern Church from the Council of Chalcedon to the final
assault of the emperor Leo III. upon the whole fabric of Church government
is one continual descent. It has certain recoveries, as the cessation of
the Acacian schism, in 518; as the reversal of the Monothelite tyranny,
under Constantine Pogonatus, in 680; as the repudiation of the still
greater Iconoclast tyranny a century later, at the Seventh Council in 787,
under Pope Adrian and the patriarch Tarasius. But even General Councils
were attacked by eastern emperors in the last excesses of their overgrown
domination. As Philippicus Bardanes got together a great Council in 711 to
denounce the Sixth Council, so the Emperor Leo the Armenian had deposed an
unbending patriarch, Nicephorus, in 815, supplied his place with the
yielding Theodotus, and found another council in the same year to
anathematise the work of the Seventh Council. Three more Iconoclast
patriarchs—Theodotus from 815 to 821, Antonius I. from 821 to 832, John
VII. from 831 to 841—close this evil list of heretical bishops. The feast
of orthodoxy was established in 842. The incessant attempts of the Greek
emperors to meddle with the faith took presently another development. They
could no longer oppress as their subject a sovereign Pope. When they could
not oppress him, they learnt to deny him. In less than another generation
the schism of Photius began.
Such was the first century running from the time that Leo the Isaurian
made, in 733, his creature Anastasius ecumenical in the sense that all the
remaining Greek empire was put under his patriarchal jurisdiction. But it
is plain that long before this, the Greek empire, so far as its own
episcopate was concerned, had ceased to possess any inflexible rule of
doctrine. The most venerable of its authorities, the original patriarchs
of Alexandria and Antioch, had yielded before the Nestorian and
Monothelite storms; had perpetual interruptions in their succession,
sometimes had a double succession—one Catholic, another Monophysite—had
submitted to the State-patriarch set over them at Constantinople; and
being found in this condition by the Mohammedan flood, had seen their
former dignity all but overwhelmed in its swelling waves. The western
Church, which from the time of the northern wandering of the nations had
been visited by unnumbered catastrophes, had, on the contrary, possessed
in its bosom exactly that inflexible rule of doctrine which the East
wanted: a rule of doctrine not imposed by civil despotism, but the very
root as well as the bond of its episcopate. The Ostrogoth had made his
kingdom in Italy, and the Visigoth his kingdom in Spain; the Frank, the
Burgundian, and many more set up realms in France and Germany, whose
limits were in perpetual fluctuation; seven or eight little Saxon kingdoms
were dividing in Britain the old Roman unity. These Teuton tribes had two
qualities in common—great personal valour and the most persisting spirit
of division. Endless were the intestine quarrels and separations between
those of the same northern race, who in political condition had hardly
passed the tribal state. Every invading army whose commander became a king
in the conquered territory had its own local interests, but none of that
great political sense which had nurtured the empire of the Cæsars. The one
Ostrogoth who had such a sense had grown up a hostage at Constantinople,
and though it is said that he could not read, had certainly divined and
carried off with him into the Italy which he captured the imperial secret
of government: that is, the force of unity, justice, and subordination of
the part to the whole; and Theodorich had come to the conclusion that he
could not make Italian mind and Gothic manners coalesce in the structure
of a kingdom. His device to rule them equally and separately scarcely
lasted for his life. After ruling with equity, he died in remorse. No
stronger instance of this great defeat can be found than the custom of the
Merovingian race to the end. Their monarchy was in their eyes a family
property. When their father died they took the throne as a part of the
paternal inheritance. It was not delivered down in whole as a mighty trust
of the nation itself. If there were several children, their swords cut the
patrimony into slices, and each carried off his bit, like a wild beast. No
political sense presided here. The sole solicitude of each was that his
lot might not be of less value than his brother’s.(256)
There exists no history giving in detail the most wonderful event of these
troubled centuries—that is, the process by which the Arian heresy, which,
in the time of Theodorich, had possession of all these peoples—except the
Franks, and the Saxons, who were pagans—finally became Catholic: a
conquest of the northern warriors which one of the greatest enemies of the
Christian faith seems to consider a more wonderful deed than the conquest
of the former Roman world, so far as it was achieved at the time of
Constantine’s conversion.
At Rome the Pope sat through all these centuries, the visible
representative of all that was good in the Roman empire, of law, justice,
order, besides holding in himself the inflexible rule of faith. The Chair
of Peter had no rival in the West, the eldest of its bishops looked up
with reverence to his single and immemorial pre-eminence. Their local
influence had in each of them its weight with their own people. For
instance, St. Gregory of Tours was of an old senatorian Gallic family: all
the interests of the population around him, whether Frank or Gallic, known
to him as a native of the soil. In this double position much nearer and
dearer to him was the Petrine descent, by consecration of which he
maintained as bishop the Christian faith. Thus in the see of Tours he
protected the temporal rights of his people, and resisted in particular
the violent acts of king Chilperic. The faith itself was to him the strong
exemplar of political sense: the one family of Christ bore in its very
bosom the society of nations. He could not say the creed without feeling
that the centre of faith was the natural centre of all humanising
influence. The Saxon bishop in Northumberland would recognise the Saxon
bishop in Kent in spite of intervening Mercia. The episcopate set up among
the German tribes by St. Boniface in the name of the Popes, was the form
of such unity as afterwards led these separate tribes to coalesce in an
empire. And they coalesced with such difficulty as to show that without
the spiritual bond they would have remained in their original antagonism.
In the last century of Merovingian rule the inapt government and private
vices—if a king’s vices can ever be called private—had inflicted a very
great injury both on the civil and the ecclesiastical administration of
the great Frank empire. The intercourse in writing between the Popes of
the sixth century with the Frank rulers had been greatly interrupted in
the seventh. While perpetual domestic murders and sensual crimes polluted
the royal family, the nobility had become disordered; national councils
were suspended, and in too many sees the bishops no longer answered in
character to those who, in the time of Gregory the Great, had built up
Gaul. At that moment there sprung from two great nobles of Austrasian
Gaul, Arnulf, afterwards bishop of Metz, and Pipin of Landen, a family
whose saintly virtues as well as their nobility raised it to great power.
In 673 Pipin d’Herstal, who by his father descended in the second degree
from Arnulf, and by his mother from Pipin of Landen, was mayor of the
palace, and the degenerate blood of Chilperic and Fredegonde was put to
shame by the chief minister of the kingdom. The race of Clovis was dying
out in sensual cruelty: the family of Arnulf was raised up to take its
place. In forty years, Pipin d’Herstal, as mayor of the palace, used the
royal power with such effect as greatly to restore the unity of the
kingdom. After his death and an interval of trouble his son Charles, in
707, united in his hands all the power of the Franks. It was just a
hundred years from the death of Mohammed, when, in 732, the Saracen army
having under his chalifs conquered all the East and the South, and
over-run Spain, had only one more battle to fight with the bravest nation
of the West, in order to trample the cross under their feet. The flood had
passed the Pyrenees, and advanced over prostrate Aquitaine to Poitiers,
which it had taken. As it issued from that city, the bastard son of Pipin
d’Herstal, still mayor of the palace in name, but sovereign of the Franks
in fact, met it with the rapidly collected warriors whom he had so often
led to victory. Then, it is said, the Saracen and the Christian hosts for
seven days watched each other; the Arabs on their light horses and in
their white mantles, the Franks with their heavy iron-clad masses. On the
eighth day, a Saturday at the end of October, the Arabs left their camp at
the call of the Muezin to prayer, and drew out their order of battle.
Their strength was in their horsemen, and twenty times they charged the
Frankish squares, and were unable to break them. An Arab writer says: “Abd
Errahman, trusting to his fortune, made a fierce attack. The Christians
returned it with as much firmness. Then the fight became general and
continued with great loss on both sides. Assault followed upon assault
until four o’clock in the afternoon. The Frankish line stood like a wall
of iron.” Then a cry for succour was heard from the Arab camp. Duke Eudo
with his Aquitains and Basques had surprised those left to guard it.
Disorder and panic arose among the Saracens. Charles saw and ordered the
whole line to advance. The wall of iron moved and all fell before it. Abd
Errahman passed from rank to rank to check the flight, and did wonders.
But when, struck by many lances, he fell from his horse, disorder and
flight prevailed. They burst into the camp and expelled Eudo. Night came
on, and Charles kept his army in its ranks on the plain, expecting a fresh
battle on the morrow. On that morrow the Franks saw the white tents, but
the Arabs had fled under cover of the night. The booty was great. The
Franks report that there was no pursuit; the Arabs, that the Christians
pursued their victory for many days, and compelled the fugitives to many
battles, in which the loss was great, until the Moslem host threw itself
into Narbonne.(257)
In that battle Charles merited his title of “the Hammer”. Had he or his
Franks blenched upon that day, Europe would have become Mohammedan, as
three hundred years before in the battle of the nations by Macon it would
have been the prey of the Mongol, had Attila prevailed. Carcassonne and
Nimes and all southern France had yielded. But the hammer of Charles
descended on the Saracen anvil. His son, king Pipin, carried on his work
in southern France, and his grandson Charles, before his death, had become
lord of an united realm from the Ebro to the Eyder. Islam never advanced
further in the West. As France in the fifteenth century owed its
deliverance to the maiden of Arc, so in the eighth, not Gaul only, but all
the West would seem to have owed its inheritance of the Christian name to
the four great men whom Providence raised up in the family of Arnulf of
Metz, and Pipin of Landen. Pipin, the mayor of the palace, Charles the
Hammer, Pipin the king, and Charlemagne, are four continuous generations
from grandfather to greatgrandson the like of which I know not that any
other family can produce.
An old man so feeble that he had hardly strength to cross the Alps, and
was almost killed by the exertion, laid his hand on the head of Pipin, and
the mayor of the palace became king of the Franks. The hand was the hand
of St. Peter. Forty-six years later the same hand will be laid upon the
head of his son; and the king of the Franks will become emperor of the
Romans; and the Saracens who felt the arm of one Charles in the battle by
Tours, will feel another Charles rise up before them to meet the Moslem
lord of the southern and eastern world on equal terms.
After Charles left Rome,(258) at Easter, 774, as above narrated, attempts
were made against him by the Lombard dukes, and Adelchis, the son of
Desiderius. In spite of the Saxon wars he was in upper Italy at the end of
the winter of 776: he prevailed over his opponents, sent his counts to the
various cities, and protected the State of the Church. At the end of 780
he was again at Pavia, and he celebrated the feast of Easter on April 15,
781, at Rome. Here Pope Adrian crowned his son Pipin king of Lombardy, and
the youngest, Louis, king of Aquitania. All seemed to go well. Greek
messengers from the regent Irene, widow of Leo IV., brought proposals of
agreement and treaty. During this longer sojourn the new arrangement of
the Lombard kingdom would be completed. Frankish counts took the place of
the old dukes, whose relation to the central power had been far looser
than that of their successors was made.
The introduction of the royal missi and their action upon the
administration of law likened subject Italy much more to the other states
of Charles. The position of the native population was not essentially
altered, but the improvement of the laws helped them. Charles all the
while was carrying on war after war with the resisting Saxons, enlarging
the Christian domain by founding bishoprics as far as the Weser and the
Elbe, taking the Spanish marches from the Arab, and the eastern marches
from the Avars, uniting the dukedom of Bavaria with his kingdom, and
carrying out that mighty work of civilisation which has made his name
immortal for its religious institutions, its legislation, and the
encouragement which he gave to literature.
Early in the year 787 Charles was again with Pope Adrian at Rome. In a
rapid campaign he reduced to his obedience Arichis, duke of Benevento, who
was married to a daughter of Desiderius; and returning once more spent
Easter with Adrian. It was the last meeting between those two fast
friends. On Christmas day, 795, Adrian closed a pontificate of nearly
twenty-four years. Three years before Rome had been desolated by one of
its most fearful inundations, and the Pope had gone about in a boat
succouring the needy. This pontificate was both in its spiritual and
temporal consequences most brilliant.(259) Adrian possessed every quality
which should adorn a great Pope, a tender and active piety, a zeal the
ardour of which was tempered by wisdom: a union of goodness and
resolution, so that in the exercise of his charge he combined the
affection of a father with the authority of a teacher, and the vigilance
of a Pope. Charles mourned for him both as a friend and father. He had an
inscription of thirty-eight verses engraved in golden letters on the black
marble stone which covered his tomb. He had Masses said for his soul in
all churches; and dispensed great alms in distant lands, especially to
England. In his letter to Offa, king of Mercia, he wrote:—“We have sent
you these alms begging intercession for the Apostolic Lord Adrian, not
that we doubt, that that blessed soul is at peace, but to show our faith
and affection for a most dear friend”. It cannot be doubted that Adrian’s
influence upon the great king, since he first came to Rome in 774, had
prepared him for the future exaltation which he was to receive in that
same church of St. Peter, the steps of which he had ascended on his knees
twenty-six years before. The day after Adrian’s death, Leo III. was chosen
his successor. He was by birth a Roman, and brought up in the patriarchal
palace, and is described by contemporaries as learned, eloquent, and
beneficent.
From the gift of king Pipin to Pope Stephen II., when the keys of the
cities surrendered to him were laid upon the altar over the body of St.
Peter, to the repetition of that gift by Charles in 774, and again from
that most solemn action of Charles to the year 800, no difference in the
relation of the Pope to the king of the Franks took place. In the first
instance, in the year 754, Charles had been made Patricius of the Roman
Church together with his father, and had as such taken on himself its
protection and defence. Therefore the Popes took pains, in particular Leo
III., that the Romans acknowledged under oath this relation, binding
themselves to observe the rules which their Patricius should make for the
security of the Church. No conclusion can be drawn from this, as to an
overlordship of the king of the Franks in the territories assigned to the
Pope. Pope Adrian and Leo III. sent to Charles a standard together with
the keys of St. Peter’s tomb.(260) The jurisdiction which the king of the
Franks exercised in Rome as Patricius was not an overlordship; it was
necessary for his office as Protector. But now an extraordinary event took
place. In the year 799, three years after the accession of Leo III., a
tumult broke out which in its savage violence surpassed that under Stephen
III. On April 25, St. Mark’s day, the Pope was conducting the solemn
procession ordered by St. Gregory the Great, from the Lateran to St.
Lorenzo in Lucina. A band of conspirators broke out of the Flaminian way,
not far from the Church of St. Silvester. At their head were two nephews
of the late Pope Adrian: Paschalis, the Primicerius, that is, the first of
the seven Palatine judges, and Campulus, the treasurer, another of them,
both in immediate attendance on the Pope. Leo III. was thrown to the
ground, and an attempt made to tear out his eyes and his tongue. He was
dragged into the Church of St. Silvester, and thence taken to the
monastery of St. Erasmus on the Cælian.
The conspirators had not succeeded, as they hoped, in blinding the Pope.
His wounds were wonderfully healed. His friends rescued him on a dark
night from his confinement in the monastery, and brought him safely to St
Peter’s. A large number of the people and clergy surrounded him. The Frank
duke came from Spoleto with a hurriedly collected troop, took him from St.
Peter’s, and carried him to Spoleto, where again bishops, priests, and
laity surrounded him with congratulations.
When Charles heard of these events in Rome he caused the Pope to come into
his kingdom. He was in the act of marching against the Saxons. At
Paderborn he learnt of the Pope’s approach. He sent to him(261) archbishop
Hildebald, his chaplain; the Count Anochar and his son Pipin, with many
counts, and a considerable force to escort him, while he set in order the
whole army for his reception. When the head of the Church appeared all
fell on their knees to receive his blessing. Charles dismounted, tenderly
embraced the oppressed fugitive before his army, and accompanied him to
the cathedral.
Leo remained several days in the camp at Paderborn to consult with the
king about the state of things at Rome, and what measures should be taken
to meet them. No doubt it was felt that the powers of the Patricius at
Rome must be increased, to give security in the future to the Pope.
The conspirators had acted with great violence at Rome, and sent to the
king a list of accusations against the Pope.
The Pope returned to Rome accompanied by the archbishops of Cologne and
Salzburg, and a large escort of Frank bishops and nobles. All the clergy,
senate, people, soldiers, the schools of foreigners, Franks, Friesons,
Saxons, and Lombards, also the chief matrons of Rome came out to Ponte
Molle to meet him, with standards and crosses, attended him to St.
Peter’s, where he sang High Mass, and the next day he re-entered the city,
and took again possession of the Lateran.
In the summer of the following year, 800, Charles left his capital,
Aix-la-Chapelle. At Mainz he announced his intention to go to Rome, that
he might punish those guilty of the ill-treatment of the Pope. It was his
fifth campaign in Italy. He stayed seven days in Ravenna, which was now in
the Pope’s possession. At Mentana, twelve miles from Rome, the Pope went
out to receive him. The next day, the 24th November, he came to St.
Peter’s, where the people waited for him in the usual order.
The king-protector declared that the chief object of his coming was to
clear the Pope from the accusations brought against him, and for this
purpose there was held on 1st December a great assembly at St. Peter’s of
archbishops and bishops, Frank and Roman nobility, before the king and the
Pope. “Then all the archbishops, bishops, and abbots said with one
voice:(262) ‘We dare not judge the Apostolic See, which is the head of all
the churches of God, for by it and by its successor we all are judged. But
itself is judged by no man, as from of old has been the custom, but we
will obey, as the canons require, according to the sentence of the supreme
pontiff.’ Then the Pope said: ‘I follow the example of my predecessors,
and am ready to clear myself of such false accusations’. And on another
day, before the same presence, ascending the ambo, and holding the gospels
in his hands, he said, under oath, with a loud voice: ‘I have no knowledge
of these false crimes which Romans, my unjust persecutors, have imputed to
me, and I never committed them. Whereupon they gave thanks to God in a
litany, and to our Lady the Mother of God and ever Virgin Mary, and to St.
Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and to all the saints of God.’ ”
After these things, on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, all were
again assembled in the same church of St. Peter’s.(263) Charles, at the
request of the Pope, wore his Roman dress as Patricius of the Roman Church
and Commonwealth. That majestic figure, seven of his own feet in stature,
was vested in an inner robe of pure white, hearing over it the purple
mantle which betokened his Frank monarchy. Pope Leo III. celebrated High
Mass in person; Charles knelt on the steps before the altar, his head
bowed in prayer. Then the Pope took the crown which lay on the altar, and
placed it on the head of the king of the Franks, and cried with a loud
voice: “Life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and
peace-bearing Emperor of the Romans!”
And from the Frank and the Roman nobles throughout the church the cry was
echoed back: “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing
emperor of the Romans, life and victory!”
The title was thrice proclaimed before the Confession of St. Peter. And
all the faithful of Rome seeing the great guardianship and affection which
Charles bore to the Roman Church, and its ruler, assented with one accord.
And the same day the Pope anointed with the holy oil Charles and the king
his son.
Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since at the bidding of
Odoacer the Herule and Ariun, the Roman senate had sent a message to the
eastern emperor Zeno, declaring that no western emperor was needed. During
the whole of that intervening period Rome had survived in virtue of St.
Peter’s primacy seated in her. She had subdued the Acacian schism. She had
lived through the Gothic war and the five captures by friends and foes.
During two centuries of Lombard invasion and of Byzantine oppression she
had remained unbroken. Upon the judgment of Pope Zacharias, the most
powerful nation of the West dethroned the unworthy race of Clovis, and
placed a nobler and more religious house on the throne of the Franks.
Another Pope, Stephen II., by his own authority had made the newly
anointed monarch Patricius of the Romans, and he first, and then his son,
during forty years, had in that character protected the sovereignty which
he had partly recovered, so far as regarded Rome and its own territory,
and partly bestowed, so far as regarded the exarchate as a gift to St.
Peter. The external protection had proved to be inadequate to guard the
papal succession in one case, the person of the Pope in another, from
domestic treason. And now the word of the Pope alone summoned up from the
past not only the title but the power of the emperor, and invested with it
the greatest man of all those northern races, who since the time of
Theodosius had subjugated the Roman western empire. Leo III. alone set the
crown on the head of Charles; not the crown which belonged to him as king
of the northern immigrants who had conquered Gaul, but the crown of
Augustus, given by Christ. “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God,” the word
ran. This was the crown which Charles received, and which all the nations
subject to his sway acknowledged, as the gift of St. Peter, seated in his
see of Rome. The first and chief duty of the sovereign so created was to
guard the Church of God. The four hundred years of Teuton immigration
passed by that act into the definitive recognition of a new Christian
people. Thereupon there became a family of nations, whose common life and
law were the one Church of God, whose common territory was named from its
master, Christendom. The eastern emperor in his ardour to impose heresy,
had shown his impotence to protect what Justinian had once acquired, and
Rome which created anew a western emperor was definitively free from any
civil subjection to the eastern.
Three chief aspects of this great act are to be considered: how it
regarded the West; how it regarded the East; how it regarded the enormous
Mohammedan power which stretched from farthest West to farthest East, from
the Tagus to the Indus.
First it is to be noted that the Pope alone made the empire. As Stephen
II. had conferred upon the newly made king of the Franks the office of
Roman Patricius, and with it the jurisdiction in his own State requisite
for the fulfilment of that office, so, where the jurisdiction of the
Patricius had been proved to be insufficient, both by the intrusion of the
anti-pope Constantine into the Papal See itself, and by the ferocious
attack upon Leo III., a reigning pontiff, during a solemn procession in
the streets of Rome, Leo III. created an emperor, who should have a
jurisdiction in Rome over all persons. He did not make himself a vassal,
but in making the emperor he gave judicial rights in the State of the
Church for the carrying out the most important part of the emperor’s
charge, to be Protector of the Roman Church. That Protector was to be
guardian of the whole Catholic Church: and so he bore the name and title,
of all other civil titles the most respected, emperor of the Romans; Rome
alone, re-entering into the right lost in 476, and exercised now by the
voice of her sovereign, gave the title, not drawn from the Franks or
Germans, nor dependent on the Byzantine, rather in itself a speaking sign
that the Byzantine subjection had passed away. The Roman, and the Frank,
and all the subjects of his vast domain accepted Charles as “crowned of
God”. That is, the Successor of St. Peter named him emperor of the Romans.
As he had exalted a mayor of the palace to be king of the Franks, and
Patricius of the Romans, so he had exalted the Patricius to be emperor;
and because he was himself in spiritual things the head of the whole
Church, he had made a particular king to be the advocate and defender of
the whole Church. No one else could do what Leo III. did.
The annalists(264) of that age universally agree that it was Leo III. who
devised and executed the exaltation of Charles to be emperor. The Pope in
a deed granting certain privileges to a monastery, dated on the very day
of his coronation, marks that his grant was made “in presence of our
glorious and most excellent son Charles, whom by God’s authority we have
this day consecrated to be emperor for the defence and advancement of the
universal Church”. Charles himself everywhere said that he was “crowned by
the divine will,” “crowned by God”. Most wise was the intention of Leo,
that the supreme pontiff, the pastor and ruler of all the faithful, should
institute this sacred empire by crowning and proclaiming Charles. It was
thus that the Church and the supreme pontiff determined the peculiar and
essential character, nature, and dignity of this empire. The purpose was
that among the kings there should be one, already most powerful by the
extent of his dominions, to whom besides a special charge and dignity
should be given. This consisted in being the protector and defender of the
Church and the Roman pontiff, and of the whole Christian society, to
promote and spread abroad the Christian faith with all its blessings. The
Church on her side, gave to this prince a pre-eminence over all other
princes. That intimate union, which ought to subsist between the Two
Powers, Spiritual and Temporal, preserving to each its own dignity and
honour, found its practical and supreme expression in that mutual respect
of Pontiff and emperor to each other. Five centuries of the Europe that
was to be born came out of that act of Leo III. on Christmas Day, 800.
Legitimate order and fixed possession were added to the innate courage and
the love for self-government of the Teuton tribes, which thus grew into
nations.
Divide into its chief parts the union thus consecrated before the eyes of
all men, by an authority which all men admitted.
First of all we find the nature of civil government in general
acknowledged by it. During five hundred years from the time of Constantine
this had been upheld with unwavering steadfastness by the Popes. Never had
they acknowledged a rule of despotism. One of the most marked characters
of the Arian heresy was its disposition to exaggerate the civil
sovereignty, admitting in it an absolute rule rather than a divine
delegation, and, extending that absolute rule into the spiritual order of
things. So far already had Arius anticipated Mohammed. Against this
confusion of the Two Powers, and their absorption into one, Athanasius,
Hilary, and Basil, Popes Julius, Liberius, and Damasus had struggled. A
hundred years later Pope Gelasius under Arian thraldom had maintained to
the emperor Anastasius the essential independence of the spiritual power,
and the defence in spiritual things due to it from emperors. When another
emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had intruded, if possible, further into the
fabric of the Church than Anastasius, he was met, as has been seen above,
by St. Gregory II. Now, seventy years later, in the last days of the
eighth century, the Iconoclast storm having broken in vain on the head of
four successive Popes, Leo III. set his seal upon all these acts of his
predecessors. He restored the empire, and in restoring set it forth once
again in its character of the supreme earthly right consecrated to the
defence of the divine right and Christian faith. The marvel was that he
made the head of the Teutonic tribes the guardian of Christ’s religion,
and invested him with the privileges involved in that guardianship which a
succession of degenerate Constantines on the eastern throne had abused.
The chalifs had shaken to its centre the Christian structure in the East;
had stripped the Christian empire of its fairest provinces; had set up
against it a religion of internecine hatred to its faith, of perpetual
pollution to its morals; and the Pope, when the loss of Italy was added to
all its other losses, had established, in the person of Charles, Christian
monarchy in the West. It was no longer an attempt to veneer with Christian
name an empire, all whose bureaucratic despotism was founded in the
heathen subjection of all power to the State, but the establishment in a
great conqueror of an empire whose basis was essentially Christian.
Charles was “Augustus crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of
the Romans,” not an Augustus made by the senate and people of Rome, who
had become in Diocletian the representative of armies, and in Byzantium
continued a succession of dissolute adventurers.
Again, Charlemagne received from the Pope a complete code of Christian
legislation, and as emperor he made it his own, and made it the centre of
civil right. The act which constituted him emperor made Rome itself the
point of a vast circumference of nations. It became for Christian
contemplation what it had been for heathen: Christian voices united with
the heathen. The imperial statute book spoke it out:(265) Rome is our
common country. Already Charles, as Patricius, had received from Adrian I.
a book of the councils and canons accepted by the Holy See. With it beside
him he had restored order and law in the Frankish Church, which the last
century of Merovingian misrule had so greatly impaired. He now added the
imperial dignity and power to that peculiar combination of moderation and
perseverance which marked his character. The harmonious equilibrium of
qualities,(266) excelling equally in the arts of war and the arts of
peace, and united with fidelity to the Church of God, made him the
greatest of Christian sovereigns. Whatever he undertook he pursued with
unfailing ardour. What he began, he finished; carrying on a multitude of
things at once, he gave to each his full attention. In a reign of
forty-seven years he made fifty-three military expeditions, most of which
he led himself; eight years he fought the Avars; and thirty-three the
Saxons. He enacted more laws than all his predecessors united, as well the
Merovingians as the princes of his own family. Age, which brings fatigue
and relaxation to other workers, saw his energies increase, for the
fourteen years from 800 to his death showed his greatest legislative
activity. The man in armour never laid aside his breastplate; his eye
retained its penetration and his hand its vigour till he went down
standing to his tomb, and there the great Christian emperor was found
seated on his throne, with sackcloth under his imperial mantle, hundreds
of years after his death.
To put the laws and customs of the Church in the hands of such a man as
Augustus, crowned of God in St. Peter’s Basilica, was of itself to change
the wandering of the nations into an abode of settled peoples, capable of
growing into the brotherhood of a Christian bond. So Leo III. completed
the work of St. Gregory the Great. In Gregory’s time the Visigothic
kingdom of Spain had been already established on these same principles;
now that it had been overthrown by the Moslem occupation, they were
established on a vaster scale by the central empire of Charlemagne. So the
Church carried her legislative wisdom, gained in the exercise of 800
years, into the civil counsels of princes.
Pipin le Bref,(267) great grandfather of Charles, had restored in France
the great assembly of the Field of May. These assemblies were carefully
held by Charles. Like his predecessors he took no measure and promulgated
no law in opposition to the public wish. At Byzantium the practice which
had triumphed was “the will of the prince has the force of law,” but the
emperor Louis II., in 862, expressed the practice of Charles: “Law is made
by the consent of the people, and the sanction of the king”. Every year at
the Champs de Mai that principle became a reality. The king of the Franks
appeared there the soul and centre of the assembly. He convoked it when
and where he pleased. He proposed the subjects for its consideration, he
gave his sanction to what it passed. He dissolved it at his pleasure. But
it was consulted on all important acts of his government. It gave its
advice with unlimited freedom; it had full right to amend the projects
proposed. Often special commissions composed of the most competent persons
considered what was brought before them; the bishops, ecclesiastical
affairs; the lords, political. The government considered the interests of
the Church with the most constant care. More than one Champ de Mai held by
Charles bears the aspect at once of a council and a parliament. The king
presided, listened, advised. The law which sprang from that familiar
intercourse between king and nation perfectly expressed the harmony which
reigned between an authority which was loved, and an obedience which was
free. There was no written constitution, but it was one power exercised by
sovereign and people. The Capitularies remain the monument of this immense
activity.
The royal commissioners, Missi Dominici, an institution perfected by
Charles, carried everywhere throughout his vast empire a knowledge of the
laws thus passed, and reported to the sovereign how they were kept. By
them the king touched each member of his political body. It was a class of
removable functionaries, entirely under the order of the central power. It
was composed chiefly, but not always, of bishops and counts. They went
four times a year, usually two and two, an ecclesiastic and a layman, to
inspect the district entrusted to them. All authorities were subject to
this inspection. They reported to the sovereign upon all, and conveyed to
him the popular feeling, as well as informed him as to the popular needs.
This institution, together with the Champs de Mai, contributed to the
empire’s unity by maintaining its peace. It checked excesses of power in
the great proprietors.
An account is extant how these commissioners acted in one of the remotest
provinces, that of Istria. They consisted of two counts and a simple
priest. At their arrival they held a public enquiry upon the conduct of
the religious and civil authorities. The patriarch of Grado was obliged to
appear in person, together with all the bishops and counts of the
province. After that they considered the conduct of the duke John. The
patriarch and the duke were alike compelled to give pledges to amend what
had been wrongly done. All felt that Charlemagne himself was behind his
commissioners; and when they departed it was with the full assurance that
their visit had not been in vain. It will be right to take this instance
as representing the government of Charles everywhere, and at all times.
For the first time since the origin of Frank society a power existed, each
of whose acts indicated a resolution to maintain the general good and to
impregnate the whole nation with the spirit of the sovereign.
In all this government the model of the Christian hierarchy was before the
mind of Charles, and in the strength of union with it he worked. What is
so singularly civilising in his power is the extinction in his personal
character as ruler of anything local, bounded, and particular, together
with the maintenance of every right in every place. The Pope was the head
of the Church, and he looked upon himself as the head of the State; the
Pope was surrounded in every province by bishops, his colleagues and
coadjutors; they worked together in one mass. So Charles willed that his
dukes and counts should work with him in one mass for one end, the pacific
unity of his great empire. The act of the Pope(268) in making him Roman
emperor helped him greatly to conceive of himself as the secular head of a
Christian brotherhood of peoples, as the Pope was its spiritual head. But
the act which made him emperor did not give him secular dominion over any
people not already subject to him. For instance, it did not subject to him
the Saxon kingdoms in Britain. He was not territorial, but moral leader
and president in the council of kings; their chief in the defence of the
Church. He did not take from the Greek empress or her successors any
temporal lordship; though the Greek pride long refused to acknowledge him
as an equal. The Pope remained what he had been from the time of Stephen
II., an independent sovereign in the Papal State: he had not given himself
a master in erecting a new empire. In fact we see Leo III. retain the
exercise of his secular sovereignty, and the emperor appear only as
defender of St. Peter’s landed inheritance. Leo III. maintained the right
of his own officers against the interference of some imperial
commissioners, and distinguished accurately the limits of the State of the
Church, from the imperial realm. He took measures against Arab inroads, to
secure his State in full independence. What he needed was the emperor’s
support against the violent party spirit of the time; against such deeds
as the intrusion of a Pope upon the Apostolic See by armed force; against
the assault upon a Pope by conspirators. This the authority of the emperor
in Rome secured. For that he had a jurisdiction, as the Patricius had
before. For this the Romans took an oath to the emperor as well as to the
Pope; to the one as protector and advocate, to the other as temporal lord.
If in all this action Charlemagne had before him the model of the
Christian hierarchy, not only his own vast kingdom, but all the nations of
the West had spread out before them in the forty-six years of his reign,
but especially in the last fourteen, when he had become, by the Pope’s
act, emperor of the Romans, the cordiality of union between the two great
powers of human life, the spiritual and the temporal. The positive and
intrinsic effect of the Holy See as the inflexible rule of doctrine and of
justice on the Teuton features of the several northern tribes was seen
when a man of immense natural capacity wielded so great a power in close
conjunction and amity with it. What can be further than the action of
Charles in the Champs de Mai, in the Missi Dominici, in a legislation
which considered all the needs and desires of the subject, while it was
supreme and final in its authority, from the condition of the northern
tribes when they broke into the empire. The Vandals howled around the
walls of Hippo when St. Augustine was repeating the penitential psalms on
his death-bed; while Charles kept under his pillow St. Augustine’s City of
God, and strove to rule his empire for the maintenance of the Christian
faith. He was accomplishing that union of many nations in one political
bond as members of the same religion which Augustine himself, the most
clear-sighted of saintly historians, was unable to contemplate. The
mixture of earth with iron in the feet of the great heathen statue had
wrought its dissolution; but the Teuton monarch, who mounted on his knees
the steps of St. Peter’s, kissing each separately, at the beginning of his
career pledged his faith to the Pope over the tomb of the chief apostle,
and before it ended he had given a final check to the intestine struggles
of disunion. He had more than equalled the work of Constantine. The great
Roman was indeed personally, though imperfectly, Christian. How much there
was of policy, how much of faith in his conversion is a problem too hard
to solve; but he was baptised on his death-bed, and the delay was probably
of disastrous import to his inward life; and his empire was, in a great
degree, still unconverted and heathen. His latter years were especially
faulty in his practical execution of the relation between the Two Powers.
From his time forward his own special foundation at Byzantium declined
more and more, until the emperor who represented him became, in Leo, the
Isaurian, and his son Kopronymus, the greatest enemy of the Church. But
Charlemagne by his real union with St. Peter’s successor, imparted Roman
order, Christian civilisation, and civil constitution to that mass of
seething peoples. If in the five hundred years succeeding Constantine his
work deteriorated more and more, until the city which he wished to be the
head of Christian empire yielded half of it to the Saracen, and then
became the very seat of schism, the West, in the five hundred years which
followed Charlemagne, saw a family of Christian and Catholic nations
surround the throne of the chief apostle, nations which his Primacy had
called into existence when he placed the imperial diadem on the head of
“Charles Augustus, crowned of God”.
If from the West we extend our view to Charlemagne’s effect on the East,
we find the new order of things which his empire introduced, present him
as the temporal head of the Christian faith in union with its spiritual
head over against the powerless Byzantine emperor. The Pope had ceased to
be a subject, and his word had set a Teuton sovereign on full equality
with the power which had so grievously maltreated Italy during two hundred
years. Never could he have taken such a step had he been still a vassal of
the Greek court, which had not only tyrannised itself, but left the
Apostolic See defenceless to the Lombard aggression for many generations.
The emperor Zeno had made Odoacer Roman Patricius for the subjugation of
Italy and of Rome itself. Stephen II. had made Pipin Patricius for its
delivery and defence of the Holy See. Leo III. had exalted the Patricius
to be emperor for fuller defence. No Roman noble or bandit could resist
the power thus created. The Greek influence in Italy was all but
extinguished; the Roman Church was protected from that violation of its
rights, that plundering of its property, which Cæsar and Exarch had so
often inflicted. For the patrimonies which the Isaurian had confiscated,
the Roman See was thus in another form compensated. The Pope had received
a domain in central Italy, and was in the possession of full independence.
Over against that free life and mounting sap of the West, the East
presented but an image of decay and stagnation.
Harun al Raschid was reigning as chalif at Bagdad when Charles was made
emperor at Rome. His troops advanced to Ephesus and compelled the empress
Irene to pay tribute during a four years’ suspension of hostilities. Again
and again had Moslem armies polluted the Christian cities from Antioch to
the Bosphorus with every iniquity. In 726, they took possession of St.
Basil’s Cæsarea, in the year when the Isaurian was trying to force his
Mohammedan hatred of images on Pope St. Gregory II., and seven years
before he was stripping the Roman Church of its patrimony, and
transferring ten provinces of the Papal patriarchate to the bishop of the
eastern capital. From the death of Mohammed in 632 to the creation of
Charles as emperor of the Romans in 800, was a time of scarcely
interrupted disaster inflicted by the Saracen on the Christian through the
East and the South. The outburst began as we have seen, by the betrayal of
the faith on the part of Heraclius, the sole Roman emperor: Constans II.,
Leo III., and Kopronymus continued this betrayal. Mohammed waxed greater
and greater through this whole period. The Christian successes consisted
in _not_ losing Constantinople, and in saving the south of France after
the loss of Spain. In the reign of Harun al Raschid, that most terrible of
destructions was at its greatest expansion and intensity. Then an emperor
of the Romans was created by the Pope for the special defence of the
Church. Exactly as Harun in his character of chalif was bound to lay waste
and destroy the Christian Church and Faith, Charles was bound to watch
over it. This was the tenure by which he held the empire, and his
successors after him.(269) It was given, not for the glory and distinction
of the wearer, but its true and proper significance lay in the fulfilment
of the duties which the emperor was to discharge as protector of the
Church. All imperial grandeur was an attribute of this duty. Exactly
because the Greek emperor had not fulfilled this duty, the Pope undertook
the renovation of the western Roman empire. It would be an entirely
erroneous view of Leo’s act to suppose that he could have done nothing
else, that he must have made Charlemagne emperor, and by this single
crowning bound himself and his successors to accept every succeeding
emperor. Things in the East had come to that pass, but in the West the
whole empire, in conception and in fact, was the Pope’s work. The office
thus created was a spiritual office, to which the spiritual head of
Christendom should consecrate, anoint, and crown its temporal head. When
there was a new king of the Franks, he was to come to Rome for
consecration as emperor of the Romans: the Pope did not elect the new
king, neither of the Franks then, nor of the Germans afterwards, but he,
and he alone, invested the man chosen king with the title and power of the
Roman emperor.
The chalifate, set up in the false pretension of succeeding a man whose
whole claim to rule was founded on a falsehood, had become the most
terrible despotism which human history had witnessed. It had taken
possession of a very large part of what was Christian territory when it
appeared in the world. Heraclius and his line trembled before it. At the
time when a soldier of fortune closed seven revolutions at Byzantium
Christian Spain was overwhelmed by it. And presently the Isaurian line
helped its onward march by arrogating to itself that intrusion into
spiritual government, which was the very basis of the chalifate. Then the
action of Leo III., on Christmas Day, 800, created in the West a power
adequate to resist the further advance of Mohammedan rule. As long
continued dissension in the faith, decline in Christian morals, and an
ever advancing despotism had given entrance to Saracen conquest, so from
the very tomb of St. Peter, and at the voice of his Successor, arose that
Christian king and Roman prince whom Pope Felix and his successors sought
in vain from the heirs of Constantine. The vileness of oriental despotism
was to meet in conflict Christian monarchy: the union of nations in the
faith to give one spirit to the West: the flood which had almost
overflowed the earth to stop before the Rock of Peter.
INDEX.
_Abu Bekr_, elected the first chalif, 118.
_Adrian I., Pope_, his accession and character, 441;
replies to the embassy of king Desiderius, 442;
his cities seized by Desiderius, 443;
defends Rome against Desiderius, and stops him by interdict, 445;
calls upon Charlemagne to rescue him, 446;
whom he receives at St. Peter’s as Patricius, at Easter, 474, 450;
confers with Charles as to Pipin’s donation, 453;
receives the renewal of the donation from him, 455;
visits of Charles to Rome during his pontificate, 497;
dies in 795, mourned over by Charles, as a father, 498.
_African Bishops_ repeat to Pope St. Martin the words of his predecessor,
Innocent I., made in the time of St. Augustine, 72;
acknowledge the special divine gift of maintaining the faith, dwelling
in the Apostolic Chair, 73.
_Agatho, Pope_, holds councils preparatory to the Sixth Council, 239;
describes the legates whom he sends to the Council, 239;
restores St. Wilfrid to his see, 240;
asserts before the Sixth Council the inerrancy of the Apostolic See,
245;
his claims fully admitted by the Council, 247;
and by the emperor, 249, who calls him “your most sacred Headship,” 249;
the Sixth Council beseeches him to confirm it, 247;
dies before the Council ends in 681, 250.
_Aistulf_, king of the Lombards, takes Ravenna in 751, and names himself
king of Italy, 350;
attacks the duchy of Rome, and imposes a poll-tax on Rome, 353;
will not listen to Pope Stephen II. at Pavia, 355;
yields to Pipin, who besieges Pavia, 360;
breaks his compact with Pipin, and begins a fresh siege of Rome, 361;
yields Pavia to Pipin, and submits to his terms, 363;
invests Rome at the beginning, and dies hunting at the end of 756, 365.
_Alexandrine Patriarchate_, its history from Dioscorus to Mohammed, 144-9.
_Ali_, fourth chalif, 656-661;
assassinated in the mosque, 153.
_Amalasunta_, allowed to be murdered by her cousin, Theodatus, whom she
had made king of the Goths, 380.
_Anastasius_, made patriarch on the deposition of Germanus by Leo III.
336;
made ecumenical by a tyrannical act of Leo III., 336;
deposed by his son Kopronymus as a useless instrument, 337.
_Anastasius_, the Librarian, as authority for Roman history, 26;
his account of Pope St. Martin, 52-5;
of the visit of Constans II. to Rome, 230;
his character of St. Gregory III., 332;
describes his works, 343;
his character of Pope Zacharias, 345, 352;
describes the election and character of Pope Stephen III., 352;
character and letter to Desiderius of Pope Adrian I., 441-3;
describes Charlemagne ascending the steps to St. Peter’s on his knees,
450;
records the donation of Charlemagne in 774, 454;
and the visit of Pope Leo III. to Charles at Paderborn, 500;
his exculpation in St. Peter’s and crowning of Charlemagne, 502;
Justinian II., his captain of the guards sent to seize Pope Sergius,
272;
entrance of Pope Constantine into Constantinople, 278;
the election of Pelagius II. left free because of the Lombards, 382;
his character of Pope Paul I., 432.
_Antiochene Patriarchate_, history from St. Chrysostom to Mohammed, 143.
_Anastasius_, formerly _Artemius_, and the first secretary, made emperor,
282;
is deposed after a civil war of six months, and becomes a priest, 289;
revolts against Leo III., and executed as a criminal by him, 289.
_Athalarich_, king of the Goths, perishes by his excesses in 534, 380;
imposes a fine for confirming the Papal election, 380.
_Augustine, St._, his confession of the primacy of the Apostolic See
praised by Pope St. Martin, 73.
_Bardanes, Philippicus_, reigns eighteen months, and tries to set up again
the Monothelite heresy, 281;
deposed and blinded, 282.
_Baronius_, his judgment as to the greatness of St. Gregory II., quoted,
332.
_Bede, St._, his account of archbishop Theodore, 236.
_Boniface IV., Pope_, consecrates Agrippa’s Pantheon to be the Church of
“the ever-virgin Mother of God and all martyrs,” 28.
_Brunengo_, I primi Papi-Re and Le Origini della Sovranità Temporale dei
Papi, quoted continually in the 8th chapter.
_Byzantium_, its despotism the Church’s enemy from the time of St.
Gregory, 5;
its patriarch the special rival of the Pope, 6;
tries for forty years to impose the Monothelite heresy on the Pope and
the Church, 41;
five acts of its theological despotism, 61;
march of this despotism from Constantine to Constans II., 64;
secular power declines, as spiritual usurpation advances, 65;
development of its double despotism, civil and religious, from
Constantine to Heraclius, 110-117;
its fostering the heretical spirit destroys the empire, 117-118;
two hundred years of eastern wickedness lead up to the Mohammedan
conquest, 141, and the destruction of the eastern
patriarchates, 143-6;
triple despotism over the Popes,
1, controlling and confirming their election, 376-385;
2, the exarchal government, plundering and oppressing, 386-390;
3, interfering with doctrine, 393-400;
eastern episcopate demoralised by it, 409;
its advancement of its bishop from 381 to 733, 337.
_Charlemagne_, sent by his father Pipin to meet Pope Stephen II., 358;
crowned with his father and brother by Pope Stephen at St. Denys in 754,
360;
and made with them Patricius of the Romans, 360, 431;
becomes with his brother Carloman, king of the Franks, 768, 436;
marries Desiderata or Ermengarde, daughter of Desiderius, 437;
sends her back repudiated after a year, 438;
becomes king of the whole Frank empire, Dec. 4, 771, 440;
marches into Italy against Desiderius, 446;
invests Pavia, October, 773, 448;
enters St. Peter’s and welcomed by Pope Adrian as Patricius, at Easter,
774, 449;
confers with Pope Adrian I., 450;
renews and confirms the pact of Quiersy, 454;
lays the donation on the altar of the Confession, 455;
captures Verona and Pavia and becomes king of the Lombards, 457;
takes time to carry out the donation, but is never unfaithful, 459;
his visit to Rome in 774 inaugurates his 40 years of triumphs, 463;
his loyalty in repeating his father’s acts, 465;
visits to Rome in the pontificate of Adrian I., 497;
receives Pope Leo III. at Paderborn, 501;
comes from Aix-la-Chapelle to Rome, 502;
the Pope acquitted on his personal word in St. Peter’s before him, 503;
crowned by Leo III. emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800, 503;
made emperor by the Pope alone, to be protector of the Church, 505;
this making by the Pope acknowledged by all his subjects, 506;
it recognises the proper nature of civil government, 508;
it establishes Christian legislation in the person of Charles, 510;
his action in the Champs de Mai, 511; his action by the Missi Dominici,
512;
makes the Christian hierarchy the model of his civil government, 514;
how his government civilises the West, 515;
how his work surpasses that of Constantine, 516;
how his empire bears on the Byzantine, 517;
how it stands over against the chalifate, 518.
_Charles Martell_, saves Europe from Mohammed at the battle by Tours, 494;
second of the four great Carlovingians, 496;
called upon for aid by St. Gregory III., 339.
_Church, the Catholic_—the one kingdom of Christ in all ages, 2;
unity of, as necessary as the unity of God, 2;
want of the idea makes documents unintelligible, 4.
_Constans II._, emperor, charges the exarch Olympius to murder Pope St.
Martin, 54;
appoints another exarch, Kalliopas, to kidnap the Pope, 79;
tortures and puts to death St. Maximus, the Confessor, 159-170;
forces the election of Pope Eugenius in the life-time of St. Martin,
226;
murders his brother, Theodosius, a deacon, 230;
his visit to Rome described by Anastasius, 230;
strips Rome of statues, and St. Mary of the Martyrs (the Pantheon) of
its roof, 233;
assassinated in his bath at Syracuse, 234.
_Constantine and Charlemagne_, their work on the Church compared, 516.
_Constantine III._, poisoned by the empress Martina, 159.
_Constantine IV._, Pogonatus, 236;
solicits union with the Pope, 238;
addresses the Pope at the Sixth Council as the living Peter, 249;
his position as emperor, 261;
reigns from 668 to 685, a great contrast to his father, Constans II.,
262.
_Constantine V._, Kopronymus, emperor, leaves Pope Stephen II. undefended
at the Lombard invasion, 354;
Pope Stephen II. ceases to recognise his sovereignty over Rome, 357;
asks Pipin to restore to him Rome and the exarchate, 364, 411;
the last eastern emperor who exercises thraldom over Rome, 411.
_Constantine_, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, so presented to the
bishops by the emperor in 754, 403;
banished to Prince’s Island in 766, 405;
degraded in Sancta Sophia, 407;
imprisoned, condemned, beheaded, and dissected, 768, 408.
_Cyrus_, made by Heraclius patriarch of Alexandria, 105;
constructor with Sergius, of the Monothelite heresy, 105;
supplies Heraclius with heresy drawn out scientifically, 253.
_Desiderius_, last king of the Lombards, 757-774, made by help of Pope
Stephen II., 433;
plots against Popes Paul I., Stephen III., and Adrian I., 433-438;
marries his daughter to Charlemagne in 770, repudiated by him in 771,
437;
gets rid of the Palatine judges Christophorus and Sergius, 439;
encounters and is foiled by Pope Adrian I., 441-446;
is invested in Pavia by Charlemagne in 773, 447;
conquered and deposed by him in 774, 457.
_De Vere, Aubrey_, quoted, 373, the sin of Constantine cleaving his
empire, note, 111.
_Döllinger_, quoted on the purpose of the Greek Council in Trullo, 264;
analyses Mohammed’s religion and estimates his work, 23, 208;
sums up the effect of the Mohammedan attack, 224;
makes absolute despotism the proper offspring of Mohammed, 220-224;
what Mohammed was named by his companions, 217.
_Eugenius, Pope_, elected in the lifetime of St. Martin, 226, 229.
_Gfrörer_, Papst Gregorius, vii., vol. v. p. 10-11 quoted.
_Gregorovius_ quoted, 25, 26, 28, 29, 37, 45, 257, 269, 270, 280, 290.
_Gregory II._, _Pope_, 19th May, 715, 290;
extent of the Christian region at his accession, 290-293;
his character and actions, 301;
his letter to the emperor Leo III., 302-315;
shows the bearing of a God Incarnate on the making of images, 306;
compares the conduct of Leo III. with that of the Jewish king Ozias,
308;
effects on the mind of portraying divine actions, 309;
defines the bounds of Church and State, 311, 317;
reproves the emperor’s impiety in breaking up an image of Christ, 312;
laughs to scorn his threats against St. Peter, 313;
whom all the nations of the West look upon as a God upon earth, 314;
contrasts Church discipline with State punishment, 318;
the Pope and the patriarch hear God’s commission to pardon the emperor,
if penitent, 320;
these letters, a picture of the time in which they were written, 321;
especially as to the relation between the Two Powers, 322;
and the unjealous unity of the Papal and the episcopal authority, 324;
he rejects Leo’s attack on the faith, but maintains allegiance, 328;
causes king Liutprand to retire from before Rome, 329;
Baronius esteems Pope Gregory II. as equal to St. Gregory the Great,
332;
he dies in February, 731.
_Gregory III., Pope_, elected in 731,
his character in Anastasius, 332, 343;
holds a Council at Rome proscribing the Iconoclast heresy, 334;
is deprived by Leo III. of the patrimonies in Leo’s realm, and of his
spiritual jurisdiction in ten provinces, 336;
keeps king Liutprand at hay from Rome, 339;
turns for aid to Charles Martell, 341;
sends him the keys of St. Peter’s Confession, 342;
dies 27th November, 741, 344;
having saved Rome from the Lombards, 344.
_Heraclius_, emperor; made of his accession, 9;
his dynasty reigns for five generations, 10;
tries to desert Constantinople, 14;
his twelve years’ inactivity, 14;
his awakening, 15;
conquers Persia in five campaigns, 17;
brings back the Holy Cross to Jerusalem, 21;
his success as a whole from 622 to 629, 21;
subscribes and publishes the Ecthesis, 33;
makes Pyrrhus patriarch of Constantinople, 36;
triumphs when orthodox, and ruins the empire when heretical, 42;
the revolution which follows his bringing back the Cross to Jerusalem,
102;
he falls into the hands of Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, and of
Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, 103.
_Hefele_, quoted, 32, 37, 41, 51, 60, 68, 71, 103, 104, 107, 168, 169,
227, 264, 265.
_Hergenröther_, quoted, 7, 26, 48, 142, 169, 238, 240, 245, 264, 266, 268,
296, 325, 408, 411, 412, 513.
_Honorius, Pope_, his accession and acts, 30;
his deception by the patriarch Sergius, 31;
his death and burial at St. Peter’s, 37;
censured for neglect of his office by St. Leo II., in confirming the
Sixth Council, 256;
five Popes, who had been members of his clergy, condemn the Monothelite
error, 56-7, 65;
Muratori, Hergenröther, and Jungmann deny that he is chargeable with any
error of faith, 252;
he died before the Exposition of Sergius was presented for his
acceptance, 253.
_Hoensbroech_, quoted, 424, 425, 426.
_Isaac_ the model exarch, his tomb at Ravenna, 47.
_Jerome, St._, his account of the northern wandering of the nations,
138-141.
_John IV., Pope_, at his accession, censures the Monothelite heresy, 43;
defends Honorius against having supported it, in a letter to the
emperor, 44;
calls upon the emperor Constantine III. to abolish the Ecthesis of his
father, Heraclius, 155.
_John, the Almsgiver, St._, last great
patriarch of Alexandria, 13.
_John VI._, patriarch of Constantinople, asks pardon of Pope Constantine,
282;
describes his pre-eminence in the church as that of the head in the
human body, 283.
_John of Damascus, St._, his record of Mohammed, 211;
observes that Mohammed has no witness to his truth, 213;
censures Iconoclasm as the invasion of a robber, 327.
_Justinian I._, embues all his successors with doctrinal despotism over
the Church, 63;
his conquest of Italy the source of woe, 113;
confesses the Primacy of the Pope, while seeking to enthral it to
himself, 115;
his persecution of Pope Vigilius during eight years at Constantinople,
286, 393;
as lord of Rome by right of conquest seizes on the confirmation and even
nomination of Popes, 380;
from his time the Byzantine emperors claimed the right of confirming
Popes, 381;
which they exercised down to Pope Gregory III. in 731, 385;
the maker of the ecumenical patriarchate to hold under the emperor the
portfolio of doctrine, 392;
the chief of the theologising emperors, 393;
moulder of the despotism which ate out the eastern episcopate, 410;
which began by the deposition of Pope Silverius through his empress
Theodora and continued to Constantine Kopronymus, 411;
reduces Italy to be the “servile” province, deplored by Pope Agatho,
417;
stands at the head of two centuries in which Byzantine oppression causes
the Primacy to work in fetters, 503;
as a civil ruler worse to the Church than Odoacer or Theodorich, 417.
_Justinian II._, succeeds in 685, 262;
summons a Greek Council in Trullo, 263;
strives to reduce the Pope to a patriarch, 265;
claims to confirm the council in Trullo, 267;
sends his guardsman Zacharias to carry Pope Sergius to Constantinople,
273;
forces the patriarch Callinicus to demolish a church, 274;
is deposed with his nose slit, 275;
is restored in 705, his tyranny and savage cruelty, 276;
his massacre at Ravenna, 277;
summons Pope Constantine to Constantinople, 279;
falls at the Pope’s feet and acknowledges the privileges of the Roman
See, 279;
is deposed, murdered, and his head sent to Rome, 280.
_Jungmann_, quoted, 506—denies that Pope Honorius is chargeable with any
error of faith, 252.
_Kurth_, quoted, 491, 509. 511.
_Leo II._, _Pope_, August, 682, to July, 683;
confirms the Sixth Council, 250;
modifies the condemnation of Honorius, 251-2;
contrasts the negligence of Honorius with the four patriarchs, Sergius,
Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, “who lurked as thieves in the See
of Constantinople rather than acted as guides,” 251.
_Leo III., Pope St._, succeeds Adrian I. in 795, 498;
attacked in a procession, 500;
consultation with Charlemagne at Paderborn, 501;
acquits himself upon his word, 502;
crowns Charles, king of the Franks, as emperor of the Romans, 503.
_Leo III._, the Isaurian, made emperor, 289, 298;
begins in 726 the Iconoclast contest, 299;
destroys the statue of Christ attached to his palace, 312;
threatens the Pope to break in pieces the statue of St. Peter, 313;
answers the Pope’s letter by five attempts upon his life, 325;
destroys the images and lays waste the churches, 326;
censured by St. John Damascene, 327;
deposes the patriarch Germanus, 326;
sends a great fleet against Ravenna and Rome, 335;
confiscates the patrimonies of St. Peter in his realm, 336;
severs the Illyrian provinces from the Pope’s patriarchal jurisdiction,
336;
takes twenty Isaurian bishoprics from Antioch for Constantinople, dies
in the year 741, the same year as Charles Martell and Pope
Gregory III., 343.
_Leo XIII., Pope_, attests the witness borne by history to the Holy See,
vii.
_Liutprand_, king of the Lombards, 712-744, 229;
advances on Rome and retires at the Pope’s intervention, 329;
takes Spoleto, and takes four cities of the duchy of Rome, 338;
yields to Pope Zacharias at Terni in 743, 346;
receives the Pope at Pavia, and restores the province of Ravenna, 347-8;
dies after 32 years’ reign, the greatest of the Lombard kings, 348.
_Martin, Pope St._, his Council and his martyrdom, 51-100;
condemns four patriarchs for heresy, 53;
convokes a Lateran Council against the Monothelite heresy, 55;
directs an encyclical to all bishops and peoples, 56;
informs the emperor Constans II. that he has condemned his Typus, 56;
his speech on opening the Lateran Council, 66;
letter of the African bishops read at the Lateran Council, 72;
answer of the Pope to it, 73;
releases the people of Thessalonica from obedience to an heretical
archbishop, his own vicar, 74;
appoints a vicar in the eastern patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem,
75;
describes his capture in the Lateran Church and deportation to
Constantinople, 79-83;
his sufferings described by an eyewitness, 85;
arraigned for high treason before the Senate of Constantinople, 86;
dragged through the city as a condemned criminal with the sword borne
before him, 89;
confined in the guard-house during 85 days, 95;
starved to death at Cherson, 97;
repeats in his death the Passion of Christ, and Constans II, the tyranny
of Trajan, 100.
_Mary_, the Mother of God, declared by Sophronius, in his synodical
letter, approved by the Sixth Council, “free from all spot in
body, soul, and mind,” 108;
“whoever does not honour and worship her who is blessed above every
creature—let him be anathema both in this world and the
next”. Pope St. Martin, the Martyr, 84;
“the most chaste, immaculate, most excellent of all creatures, the
fullest of grace, the maker and giver of joy,” 100.
_Maximus_, the Confessor, his life, labours, and martyrdom, 157-170;
the great opponent of the Monothelite heresy, 158;
counsels Pope St. Martin to call the Lateran Council, 159;
his testimonies to the Apostolic See, 160;
carried to Byzantium, and tried before the Senate, 162;
rejects the imperial offers of honour, 168;
tortured and put to death by Constans II., 169;
traces the danger of the empire to the misconduct of its rulers, 260.
_Menzel, Adolph_, quoted as to the right of Pipin and Charlemagne to make
the donation, 428.
_Mohammed_, his work described by Dollinger, 23;
his personal life and character, 172-189;
change in his conduct after the death of his wife Chadidja, 173;
proclaims force as the instrument of spreading his religion, 174;
orders a marauding excursion in the holy months, 175;
justifies it by verses of the Koran 176;
his first battle at Bedr, 177;
is defeated at Ohod, 179;
defends Medina in a siege and loses reputation, 180;
puts to death the men of a Jewish clan and enslaves their wives, 181;
attempts a pilgrimage to Mecca and is forced to retire, 182;
his polygamy after Chadidja’s death, 183;
rebukes by aid of the Koran a revolt of his wives, 184;
takes the wife of his adopted son and justifies it as the command of
God, 185;
forbids by the Koran his wives to marry after his death, 186;
obtains possession of Mecca, A.D. 630, 186;
issues a new law of nations and war, and dies, 187;
four principles of his life from the Hegira to his death, 190;
employment of force to propagate Islam, 190;
imposture in using the name of the angel Gabriel, 191;
invents privileges as to the number and choice of his wives, 192;
his disregard of human life, 193;
his character as founder of a religion, 194;
contrast between his character and that of Christ’s, 195;
how his life has infected the life of his followers, 196;
degradation of woman in all Mohammedan countries, 197;
his position at the time of his death, 199;
his civil virtues, 200;
effect of the invention of Gabriel on his title to belief, 201;
at his death simply a successful robber, 203;
the first twelve years of the Christian faith and the first twelve years
of Islam, 206;
holds in the Mohammedan system the place of Christ in the Christian,
208;
radical antagonism of that system with the Christian faith, 202;
his record by St. John Damascene, 211-214;
character and formation of the Koran, 214;
Christendom and Islam contemporaries in origin, 218;
absolute despotism his proper offspring, 219;
the locust people, 225.
_Monoethelite Heresy_, pioneer of the Mohammedan conquest, 118.
_Muratori_ on the Pope’s position before the donation of Pipin, 426;
absolves Pope Honorius from any error of doctrine, 252;
justifies Pope Stephen II. in turning to Pipin for aid, 355;
describes the government of the Lombard kings, 458;
describes the tyranny of Constans II., 231;
describes the massacre at Ravenna by order of Justinian II., 278;
Leo III., the Isaurian, convulsed the Church with the Iconoclastic
tragedy, 299.
_Niehues_, Kaiserthum und Papstthum, quoted, vol. i., 434, 436, 437, 446,
462.
_Nova Roma_, its ecclesiastical conduct, from A.D. 330 to 715, 476-481.
_Odoacer_, Patricius of Rome, by grant of the eastern emperor Zeno, 374;
did not claim to confirm a Papal election, 377;
five years of suffering to Italy before he is overthrown, 375;
slain at a banquet by order of Theodorich, 378;
results of his meddling with the Papal election, 379.
_Olympius_, the exarch, tries to murder St. Martin at Mass, 53.