'Our Lady the Mother of God, even Virgin Maria, together with us,
protests to you, adjuring you with great obligations, and admonishes and
commands you, and with her the thrones, dominations, all the heavenly
angels, the martyrs and confessors of Christ, on behalf of the Roman
city, committed to us by the Lord God, and the sheep of the Lord dwelling
in it. Defend and free it speedily from the hands of the persecuting
Lombards, lest my body which suffered torments for Christ, and my home in
which it rests by the command of God, be contaminated by the people of
the Lombards, who are guilty of such iniquitous perjury, and are proud
transgressors of the divine scripture. So will I at the day of judgment
reward you with my patronage, and prepare for you in the kingdom of God
most shining and glorious tabernacles, promising you the reward of
eternal retribution, and the infinite joys of paradise.
'Run, by the true and living God I exhort you, run, and help; before the
living fountain, whence you were consecrated and born again, shall dry
up: before the little spark remaining of that brilliant flame, from which
you knew the light, be extinguished; before your spiritual mother, the
holy Church of God, in which you hope to receive eternal life, shall be
humiliated, invaded, violated, and defiled by the impious.
'But if not, may your provinces in return, and your possessions, be
invaded by people whom you know not. Separate not yourselves from my
Roman people; so you will not be aliens, and separate from the kingdom of
God, and eternal life. For whatever you shall ask of me, I will surely
give you, and be your patron. Assist my Roman people, your brothers; and
strive more perfectly; for it is written, No man receiveth the crown,
unless he strive lawfully.
'I conjure you, most beloved, by the living God, leave not this my city
of Rome to be any longer torn by the Lombards, lest your bodies and souls
be torn and tormented for ever, in inextinguishable and Tartarian fire
with the devil and his pestiferous angels; and let not the sheep of the
Lord's flock, which are the Roman people, be dispersed any more, lest the
Lord disperse you, and cast you forth as the people of Israel was
dispersed.'
You will conclude, doubtless, that this curious document can be nothing
but a papal allocution. Its peculiar scriptural style (wrongly supposed
to have been invented by the Puritans, who merely learnt it from the old
Roman clergy), as well as the self-conceit, which fancies the fate of the
whole world to depend on the prosperity of a small half-ruined city in
Italy, will be to you sufficient marks of the Roman hand. But you will
be somewhat mistaken. It is hardly an epistle from the successor of St.
Peter. It professes to be an epistle from St. Peter himself, and sent by
him through the hands of Pope Stephen III. to Pepin the king of the
Franks, in the year 755. You will have concluded also from it, that
Catholic Christianity is in its extreme agony; that the worship and name
of our Lord, and the fountains of sacramental grace are about to be
extinguished for ever, and that nothing but heresy or heathendom can
follow. Then you will be quite mistaken. These Lombards are pious
Catholics. Builders of churches and monasteries, they are taking up the
relics of the Roman martyrs, to transfer them to the churches of Milan
and Pavia. They have just given Pope Stephen the most striking proof of
their awe of his person and office. But they are quarrelling with him
about the boundaries of his estates for the patrimony of St. Peter. They
consider that he and his predecessors have grossly wronged them at
different times; and now last of all, by calling in foreign invaders; and
they are at the gates of Rome laying waste the country, and demanding a
poll-tax as ransom. That is all.
The causes which led to this quarrel must be sought far back in history.
The original documents in which you will find the facts will be Paulus
Diaconus, as far as King Luitprand's death; then the Life and Writings of
Gregory the Great; and then Baronius' Annals, especially his quotations
from Anastasius' Life of Stephen III., bearing in mind that, as with the
Ostrogoths, we have only the Roman Papal story; that the Lombards have
never stated their case, not even through Paulus Diaconus, who, being a
clergyman, prudently holds his tongue about the whole matter. But by far
the best account is to be found in Dean Milman's 'Latin Christianity,'
Vols. I. and II. Rome, you must understand, has become gradually the
patrimony of St. Peter; the Popes are the practical kings of Rome,
possessing, in the name of the Church, much land round Rome, and many
estates scattered throughout Italy, and even in Sicily, Gaul, Africa, and
the East--estates probably bequeathed by pious people. They have
succeeded to this jurisdiction simply by default. They rule Rome,
because there is no one else to rule it. We find St. Gregory the Great
feeding the pauper-masses of Rome, on the first day of every month, from
the fruitful corn-bearing estates in Sicily; keeping up the 'Panem;' but
substituting, thank Heaven, for the 'Circenses' at least the services of
the Church. Of course, the man who could keep the Roman people alive
must needs become, ipso facto, their monarch.
The Pope acknowledges, of course, a certain allegiance to the Emperor at
Constantinople, and therefore to his representative, the Exarch of
Ravenna: that is to say, he meets them with flattery when they are
working on his side; with wrath when they oppose him. He intrigues with
them, too, whenever he can safely do so, against the Lombards.
Thus the Pope has become, during the four centuries which followed the
destruction of the Western Empire, the sole surviving representative of
that Empire. He is the head of the 'gens togata;' of the 'Senatus
Populusque Romanus.' In him Rome has risen again out of her grave, to
awe the peoples once more by the Romani nominis umbra; and to found a new
Empire; not as before, on physical force, and the awe of visible power;
but on the deeper and more enduring ground of spiritual force, and the
awe of the invisible world.
An Empire, I say. The Popes were becoming, from the 5th to the 8th
centuries, not merely the lords of Rome, but the lords of the Western
Church. Their spiritual Empire, to do them justice, was not so much
deliberately sought by them, as thrust upon them. As the clergy were,
all over the Empire, the representatives of the down-trodden Romans, so
they naturally gravitated toward the Eternal City, their ancient
mistress. Like all disciplined and organized bodies they felt the need
of unity, of monarchy. Where could they find it, save at Rome? Rome was
still, practically and in fact, the fountain of their doctrine, of their
superior civilization; and to submit themselves to the Pope of Rome was
their only means of keeping up one faith, one practice, and the strength
which comes from union.
To seat the Pope upon the throne of the Caesars; to attribute to him
powers weightier than all which the Caesars had possest . . . It was a
magnificent idea. A politic idea, too; for it would cover the priesthood
with all the prestige of ancient Rome, and enable them to face the
barbarian in the name of that great people whose very memory still awed
him; whose baths, aqueducts, palaces, he looked on as the work of demons;
whose sages and poets were to him enchanters; whose very gems, dug out of
the ruins by night, in fear and trembling, possest magic influence for
healing, for preservation, for good fortune in peace or war.
Politic; and in their eyes, true. Easy enough to be believed honestly,
by men who already believed honestly in their own divine mission. They
were the representatives of Christ on earth. Of that fact there could be
then, or can be now, no doubt whatsoever. Whatsoever truth, light,
righteousness, there was in the West, came to it through them. And
Christ was the King of kings. But He delayed his coming: at moments, He
seemed to have deserted the earth, and left mankind to tear itself in
pieces, with wild war and misrule. But it could not be so. If Christ
were absent, He must at least have left an authority behind Him to occupy
till He came; a head and ruler for his opprest and distracted Church. And
who could that be, if not the Pope of Rome?
It ought to be so.--It must be so--thought they. And to men in that
mood, proofs that it was so soon came to hand, and accumulated from
generation to generation; till the Pope at last found himself
proclaiming, and what was more, believing, that God had given the whole
world to St. Peter, and through St. Peter to him; and that he was the
only source of power, law, kingship, who could set up and pull down whom
he would, as the vicegerent of God on earth.
Such pretensions, of course, grew but slowly. It was not, I believe,
till the year 875, 180 years after the time of which I am speaking, that
Pope John VIII. distinctly asserted his right, as representative of the
ancient Roman Empire, to create the Caesar; and informed the Synod of
Pavia that he had 'elected and approved Charles the Bald, with the
consent of his brothers the bishops, of the other ministers of the Holy
Roman Church, and' (significant, though empty words) 'of the Roman senate
and people.'
At the time of which I speak, the power was still in embryo, growing,
through many struggles: but growing surely and strongly, and destined
speedily to avenge the fall of Rome on the simple barbarians who were
tearing each other to pieces over her spoils.
It is not easy to explain the lasting and hereditary hatred of the Popes
to the Lombards. Its origin is simple enough: but not so its
continuance. Why they should be nefandissimi in the eyes of Pope Gregory
the Great one sees: but why 100 years afterwards, they should be still
nefandissimi, and 'non dicenda gens Langobardorum,' not to be called a
nation, is puzzling.
At first, of course, the Pope could only look on them as a fresh horde of
barbarous conquerors; half heathen, half Arian. Their virtuous and loyal
life within the boundaries of Alboin's conquests--of which Paulus
Diaconus says, that violence and treachery were unknown--that no one
oppressed, no one plundered--that the traveller went where he would in
perfect safety--all this would be hid from the Pope by the plain fact,
that they were continually enlarging their frontier toward Rome; that
they had founded two half-independent Dukedoms of Beneventum and Spoleto,
that Autharis had swept over South Italy, and ridden his horse into the
sea at Reggio, to strike with his lance a column in the waves, and cry,
'Here ends the Lombard kingdom.'
The Pope (Gregory the Great I am speaking of) could only recollect,
again, that during the lawless interregnum before Autharis' coronation,
the independent Lombard dukes had plundered churches and monasteries,
slain the clergy, and destroyed the people, who had 'grown up again like
corn.'
But as years rolled on, these Arian Lombards had become good Catholics;
and that in the lifetime of Gregory the Great.
Theodelinda, the Bavarian princess, she to whom Autharis had gone in
disguise to her father's court, and only confessed himself at his
departure, by rising in his stirrups, and burying his battle-axe in a
tree stem with the cry, 'Thus smites Autharis the Lombard,'--this
Theodelinda, I say, had married after his death Agilwulf his cousin, and
made him king of the Lombards.
She was a Catholic; and through her Gregory the Great converted Autharis,
and the Lombard nation. To her he addressed those famous dialogues of
his, full alike of true piety and earnestness, and of childish
superstition. But in judging them and him we must bear in mind, that
these Lombards became at least by his means Catholics, and that Arians
would have believed in the superstitions just as much as Catholics. And
it is surely better to believe a great truth, plus certain mistakes which
do not affect it in the least, than a great lie, plus the very same
mistakes likewise. Which is best, to believe that the road to London
lies through Bishopstortford, and that there are dog-headed men on the
road: or that it lies through Edinburgh, but that there are dog-headed
men on that road too?
Theodelinda had built at Modicaea, twelve miles above Milan, a fair
basilica to John the Baptist, enriched by her and the Lombard kings and
dukes, 'crowns, crosses, golden tables adorned with emeralds, hyacinths,
amber, carbuncles and pearls, gold and silver altar-cloths, and that
admirable cup of sapphire,' all which remained till the eighteenth
century. There, too, was the famous iron crown of Lombardy, which
Austria still claims as her own; so called from a thin ring of iron
inserted in it, made from a nail of the true cross which Gregory had sent
Agilwulf; just as he sent Childebert, the Frankish king, some filings of
St. Peter's chains; which however, he says, did not always allow their
sacred selves to be filed.
In return, Agilwulf had restored the church-property which he had
plundered, had reinstated the bishops; and why did not all go well? Why
are these Lombards still the most wicked of men?
Again, in the beginning of the eighth century came the days of the good
Luitprand, 'wise and pious, a lover of peace, and mighty in war; merciful
to offenders, chaste and modest, instant in prayer, bountiful in alms,
equal to the philosophers, though he knew no letters, a nourisher of his
people, an augmenter of the laws.' He it was, who, when he had
quarrelled with Pope Gregory II., and marched on Rome, was stopped at the
Gates of the Vatican by the Pontiff's prayers and threats. And a sacred
awe fell on him; and humbly entering St. Peter's, he worshipped there,
and laid on the Apostle's tomb his royal arms, his silver cross and crown
of gold, and withdrawing his army, went home again in peace. But why
were this great king's good deeds towards the Pope and the Catholic faith
rewarded, by what we can only call detestable intrigue and treachery?
Again; Leo the Iconoclast Emperor destroyed the holy images in the East,
and sent commands to the Exarch of Ravenna to destroy them in western
Italy. Pope Gregory II. replied by renouncing allegiance to the Emperor
of Constantinople; and by two famous letters which are still preserved;
in which he tells the Iconoclast Emperor, that, 'if he went round the
grammar-schools at Rome, the children would throw their horn-books at his
head . . . that he implored Christ to send the Emperor a devil, for the
destruction of his body and the salvation of his soul . . . that if he
attempted to destroy the images in Rome, the pontiff would take refuge
with the Lombards, and then he might as well chase the wind that the
Popes were the mediators of peace between East and West, and that the
eyes of the nations were fixed on the Pope's humility, and adored as a
God on earth the apostle St. Peter. And that the pious Barbarians,
kindled into rage, thirsted to avenge the persecution of the East.' Then
Luitprand took up the cause of the Pope and his images, and of the mob,
who were furious at the loss of their idols; and marched on Ravenna,
which opened her gates to him, so that he became master of the whole
Pentapolis; and image-worship, to which some plainspoken people give a
harsher name, was saved for ever and a day in Italy. Why did Gregory II.
in return, call in Orso, the first Venetian Doge, to expel from Ravenna
the very Luitprand who had fought his battles for him, and to restore
that Exarchate of Ravenna, of which it was confessed, that its civil
quarrels, misrule, and extortions, made it the most miserable government
in Italy? And why did he enter into secret negotiations with the Franks
to come and invade Italy?
Again, when Luitprand wanted to reduce the duchies of Beneventum and
Spoleto, which he considered as rebels against him, their feudal
suzerain; why did the next Pope, Gregory III., again send over the Alps
to Charles Martel to come and invade Italy, and deliver the Church and
Christ's people from ruin?
And who were these Franks, the ancestors of that magnificent, but
profligate aristocracy whose destruction our grandfathers beheld in 1793?
I have purposely abstained from describing them, till they appear upon
the stage of Italy, and take part in her fortunes--which were then the
fortunes of the world.
They appear first on the Roman frontier in A.D. 241, and from that time
are never at rest till they have conquered the north of Gaul. They are
supposed (with reason) not to have been a race or tribe at all; but a
confederation of warriors, who were simply 'Franken,' 'free;' 'free
companions,' or 'free lances,' as they would have been called a few
centuries later; who recruited themselves from any and every tribe who
would join them in war and plunder. If this was the case; if they had
thrown away, as adventurers, much of the old Teutonic respect for law,
for the royal races, for family life, for the sacred bonds of kindred,
many of their peculiarities are explained. Falsehood, brutality,
lawlessness, ignorance, and cruelty to the conquered Romans, were their
special sins; while their special, and indeed only virtue, was that
indomitable daring which they transmitted to their descendants for so
many hundred years. The buccaneers of the young world, they were
insensible to all influences save that of superstition. They had become,
under Clovis, orthodox Christians: but their conversion, to judge from
the notorious facts of history, worked little improvement on their
morals. The pages of Gregory of Tours are comparable, for dreary
monotony of horrors, only to those of Johnson's History of the Pyrates.
But, as M. Sismondi well remarks, their very ignorance and brutality made
them the more easily the tools of the Roman clergy: 'Cette haute
veneration pour l'Eglise, et leur severe orthodoxie, d'autant plus facile
a conserver que, ne faisant aucune etude, et ne disputant jamais sur la
foi, ils ne connaissaient pas meme les questions controversees, leur
donnerent dans le clerge de puissants auxiliaires. Les Francs se
montrerent disposes a hair les Ariens, a les combattres, et les
depouiller sans les entendre; les eveques, en retour, ne se montrerent
pas scrupuleux sur le reste des enseignements moraux de la religion: ils
fermerent les yeux sur les violences, le meurtre, le dereglement des
moeurs; ils autoriserent en quelque sorte publiquement la poligamie, et
ils precherent le droit divin des rois et le devoir le l'obeissance pour
les peuples {279}.'
A painful picture of the alliance: but, I fear, too true.
The history of these Franks you must read for yourselves. You will find
it well told in the pages of Sismondi, and in Mr. Perry's excellent book,
'The Franks.' It suffices now to say, that in the days of Luitprand
these Franks, after centuries of confusion and bloodshed, have been
united into one great nation, stretching from the Rhine to the Loire and
the sea, and encroaching continually to the southward and eastward. The
government has long passed out of the hands of their faineant Meerwing
kings into that of the semi-hereditary Majores Domus, or Mayors of the
Palace; and Charles Martel, perhaps the greatest of that race of great
men, has just made himself mayor of Austrasia (the real Teutonic centre
of Frank life and power), Neustria and Burgundy. He has crushed Eudo,
the duke of Romanized Aquitaine, and has finally delivered France and
Christendom from the invading Saracens. On his Franks, and on the
Lombards of Italy, rest, for the moment, the destinies of Europe.
For meanwhile another portent has appeared, this time out of the far
East. Another swarm of destroyers has swept over the earth. The wild
Arabs of the desert, awakening into sudden life and civilization under
the influence of a new creed, have overwhelmed the whole East, the whole
north of Africa, destroying the last relics of Roman and Greek
civilization, and with them the effete and semi-idolatrous Christianity
of the Empire. All the work of Narses and Belisarius is undone. Arab
Emirs rule in the old kingdom of the Vandals. The new human deluge has
crossed the Straits into Europe. The Visigoths, enervated by the
luxurious climate of Spain, have recoiled before the Mussulman invaders.
Roderick, the last king of the Goths, is wandering as an unknown penitent
in expiation of his sin against the fair Cava, which brought down (so
legends and ballads tell) the scourge of God upon the hapless land; and
the remnants of the old Visigoths and Sueves are crushed together into
the mountain fastnesses of Asturias and Gallicia, thence to reissue,
after long centuries, as the noble Spanish nation, wrought in the forges
of adversity into the likeness of tempered steel; and destined to
reconquer, foot by foot, their native land from the Moslem invader.
But at present the Crescent was master of the Cross; and beyond the
Pyrenees all was slavery and 'miscreance.' The Arabs, invading France in
732, in countless thousands, had been driven back at the great fight of
Tours, with a slaughter so great, that the excited imagination of Paulus
Diaconus sees 375,000 miscreants dead upon the field, while only 1500
Franks had perished. But home troubles had prevented 'the Hammer of the
Moors' from following up his victory. The Saracens had returned in force
in 737, and again in 739. They still held Narbonne. The danger was
imminent. There was no reason why they should not attempt a third
invasion. Why should they not spread along the shores of the
Mediterranean, establishing themselves there, as they were already doing
in Sicily, and menacing Rome from north as well as south? To unite,
therefore, the two great Catholic Teutonic powers, the Frank and the
Lombard, for the defence of Christendom, should have been the policy of
him who called himself the Chief Pontiff in Christendom. Yet the Pope
preferred, in the face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations
on destroying each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem.
The bribe offered to the Frank was significant--the title of Roman
Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter's chains, and
the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil.
Charles would not come. Frank though he was, he was too honourable to
march at a priest's bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in arms,
to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand might take him
on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become his father-in-arms,
after the good old Teuton fashion; Luitprand, who with his Lombards had
helped him to save Christendom a second time from the Mussulman in 737.
The Pope, one would think, should have remembered that good deed of the
good Lombard's whereof his epitaph sings,
'Deinceps tremuere feroces
Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos
Cum premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.'
So Charles Martel took the title of Patrician from the Pope, but sent him
no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the measure
of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul which his
sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is now, as St.
Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing therefore in the
lowest abyss of hell.
So one generation more passes by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to
manhood, is less scrupulous than his father. He is bound to the Pope by
gratitude. The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to depose
the royal house of the Merovingians, and so assumed the right of making
kings.--A right which future popes will not forget.
Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a
monastery. Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna. The Pope
succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome,
threatening to assault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by a
poll-tax.
Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help: and so awful
has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to do it;
allowed to pass safely and unarmed through the very land upon which he is
going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare.
It is a strange, and instructive figure, that. The dread of the unseen,
the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons; on Frank and
on Lombard alike. The Pope and his clergy are to them magicians, against
whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal the sick and blast the
sound; who can call to their aid out of the clouds that pantheon of demi-
gods, with which, under the name of saints, they have peopled heaven; who
can let loose on them the legions of fiends who dwell in every cave,
every forest, every ruin, every cloud; who can, by the sentence of
excommunication, destroy both body and soul in hell. They were very loth
to fear God, these wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men
have who will not fear God, to fear the devil.
So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church. He promises
to come with all his Franks. Stephen's conscience seems to have been
touched: he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation: but it is too
late now. Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps over the Alps, and
at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to the Lombards. The old
Lombard spirit seems to have past away.
Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises. The
Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which this
lecture commenced.
Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying the
land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated vessels,
insulting the sacrament of the altar. The Lombards have violated nuns;
and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they had really tried,
one cannot see why they should not have succeeded. In fact, Pope
Stephen's hysterical orations to Pepin must be received with extreme
caution. No Catholic historian of that age cares to examine the truth of
a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad to say of an enemy: and
really the man who would forge a letter from St. Peter might dare to tell
a few lesser falsehoods into the bargain. Pepin cannot but obey so
august a summons; and again he is in Italy, and the Lombards dare not
resist him. He seizes not only all that Astolf had taken from the Pope,
but the Pentapolis and Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the
Greek Emperors, and bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and 'the holy
Roman Republic.'
The pope's commissioners received the keys of the towns, which were
placed upon the altar of St. Peter; and this, the Dotation of Pepin, the
Dotation of the Exarchate, was the first legal temporal sovereignty of
the Popes:--born in sin, and conceived in iniquity, as you may see.
The Lombard rule now broke up rapidly. The Lombards of Spoleto yielded
to the double pressure of Franks and Romans, asked to be 'taken into the
service of St. Peter,' and clipt their long German locks after the Roman
fashion.
Charlemagne, in his final invasion, had little left to do. He confirmed
Pepin's gift, and even, though he hardly kept his promise, enlarged it to
include the whole of Italy, from Lombardy to the frontier of Naples,
while he himself became king of Lombardy, and won the iron crown.
And so by French armies--not for the last time--was the Pope propt up on
his ill-gotten throne.
But the mere support of French armies was not enough to seat the Pope
securely upon the throne of the western Caesars. Documentary evidence
was required to prove that they possessed Rome, not as the vassals of the
Frankish Kaisers, or of any barbarian Teutons whatsoever; but in their
own right, as hereditary sovereigns of Rome. And the documents, when
needed, were forthcoming. Under the name of St. Isidore, some ready
scribe produced the too-famous 'Decretals,' and the 'Donation of
Constantine,' and Pope Adrian I. saw no reason against publishing them to
Charlemagne and to the world.
It was discovered suddenly, by means of these remarkable documents, that
Constantine the Great had been healed of leprosy, and afterwards
baptized, by Pope Sylvester; that he had, in gratitude for his cure,
resigned to the Popes his western throne, and the patrimony of St. Peter,
and the sovereignty of Italy and the West; and that this was the true
reason of his having founded Constantinople, as a new seat of government
for the remnant of his empire.
This astounding falsehood was, of course, accepted humbly by the
unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It is
said--I trust not truly--to be still enrolled among the decrees of the
Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics. Be that
as it may, on the strength of this document the Popes began to assume an
all but despotic sovereignty over the western world, and--the Teutonic
peoples, and Rome's conquest of her conquerors was at last complete.
What then were the causes of the Papal hatred of a race who were good and
devout Catholics for the last 200 years of their rule?
There were deep political reasons (in the strictest, and I am afraid
lowest sense of the word); but over and above them there were evidently
moral reasons, which lay even deeper still.
A free, plain-spoken, practical race like these Lombards; living by their
own laws; disbelieving in witchcraft; and seemingly doing little for
monasticism, were not likely to find favour in the eyes of popes. They
were not the material which the Papacy could mould into the Neapolitan
ideal of 'Little saints,--and little asses.' These Lombards were not a
superstitious race; they did not, like the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, crowd
into monasteries. I can only find four instances of Lombard sovereigns
founding monasteries in all Paulus' history. One of them, strangely
enough, is that of the very Astulf against whom the Pope fulminated so
loudly the letter from St. Peter which I read you.
Moreover, it must be said in all fairness--the Lombards despised the
Romans exceedingly. So did all the Teutons. 'We Lombards,' says Bishop
Luitprand, 'Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Sueves, Burgunds,
consider it a sufficient insult to call our enemy a Roman; comprehending
in that one name of Roman, whatever is ignoble, cowardly, avaricious,
luxurious, false, in a word, every vice.' If this was--as it very
probably was--the feeling of the whole Teutonic race; and if it was
repaid--as it certainly was--on the part of the Roman, by contempt for
the 'barbarism' and 'ignorance' of the Teuton; what must have been the
feeling between Roman and Lombard? Contact must have embittered mutual
contempt into an utter and internecine hatred, in which the Pope, as
representative of the Roman people, could not but share.
As for the political reasons, they are clear enough. It is absurd to say
that they wished to free Italy from Lombard tyrants. What did they do
but hand her over to Frankish tyrants instead? No. The true reason was
this. Gradually there had arisen in the mind of all Popes, from Gregory
the Great onward, the idea of a spiritual supremacy, independent of all
kings of the earth. It was a great idea, as the event proved: it was a
beneficent one for Europe; but a ruinous one for Italy. For the Popes
were not content with spiritual power. They could not conceive of it as
separated from temporal power, and temporal power meant land. How early
they set their hearts on the Exarchate of Ravenna, we shall never know:
the fact is patent, that it was a Naboth's vineyard to them; and that to
obtain it they called in the Franks.
Their dread was, evidently, lest the Lombards should become masters of
the whole of Italy. A united Italy suited their views then, no more than
it does now. Not only did they conceive of Rome as still the centre of
the western world, but more, their stock in trade was at Rome. The
chains of St. Peter, the sepulchres of St. Peter and St. Paul, the
catacombs filled with the bones of innumerable martyrs;--these were their
stock in trade. By giving these, selling these, working miracles with
these, calling pilgrims from all parts of Christendom to visit these in
situ, they kept up their power and their wealth. I do not accuse them of
misusing that power and that wealth in those days. They used them, on
the contrary, better than power and wealth had been ever used in the
world before. But they were dependent on the sanctity attached to a
particular spot; and any power, which, like the Lombard, tended to give
Italy another centre than Rome, they dreaded and disliked. That Lombard
basilica, near Milan, with all its treasures, must have been in their
eyes, a formidable rival. Still more frightful must it have been to them
to see Astulf, when he encamped before the walls of Rome, searching for
martyrs' relics, and carrying them off to Milan. That, as a fact, seems
to have been the exciting cause of Stephen's journey to Pepin. This
Astulf was a good Catholic. He founded a nunnery, and put his own
daughters in it. What could a man do more meritorious in the eyes of the
Pope? But he took away the lands of the Church, and worse, the relics,
the reserved capital by which the Church purchased lands. This was
indeed a crime only to be expiated by the horrors of a Frank invasion.
On the same principle the Popes supported the Exarchs of Ravenna, and the
independent duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum. Well or ill ruled,
Iconoclast or not, they were necessary to keep Italy divided and weak.
And having obtained what they wanted from Pepin and Charlemagne, it was
still their interest to pursue the same policy; to compound for their own
independence, as they did with Charlemagne and his successors, by
defending the pretences of foreign kings to the sovereignty of the rest
of Italy. This has been their policy for centuries. It is their policy
still; and that policy has been the curse of Italy. This fatal gift of
the patrimony of St. Peter--as Dante saw--as Machiavelli saw,--as all
clear-sighted Italians have seen,--as we are seeing it now in these very
days--has kept her divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered
by foreign invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his
dominions into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable, as the hierophant of
a priestly caste, to unite his people in the bonds of national life;
unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for himself;
and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in the balance of
power; the Pope has been forced, again and again, to keep himself on his
throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and calling in foreign arms;
and the bane of Italy, from the time of Stephen III. to that of Pius IX.,
has been the temporal power of the Pope.
But on the popes, also, the Nemesis came. In building their power on the
Roman relics, on the fable that Rome was the patrimony of Peter, they had
built on a lie; and that lie avenged itself.
Had they been independent of the locality of Rome; had they been really
spiritual emperors, by becoming cosmopolitan, journeying, it may be, from
nation to nation in regular progresses, then their power might have been
as boundless as they ever desired it should be. Having committed
themselves to the false position of being petty kings of a petty kingdom,
they had to endure continual treachery and tyranny from their foreign
allies; to see not merely Italy, but Rome itself insulted, and even
sacked, by faithful Catholics; and to become more and more, as the
centuries rolled on, the tools of those very kings whom they had wished
to make their tools.
True, they defended themselves long, and with astonishing skill and
courage. Their sources of power were two, the moral, and the
thaumaturgic; and they used them both: but when the former failed, the
latter became useless. As long as their moral power was real; as long as
they and their clergy were on the whole, in spite of enormous faults, the
best men in Europe; so long the people believed in them, and in their
thaumaturgic relics likewise. But they became by no means the best men
in Europe. Then they began to think that after all it was more easy to
work the material than the moral power--easier to work the bones than to
work righteousness. They were deceived. Behold! when the righteousness
was gone, the bones refused to work. People began to question the
virtues of the bones, and to ask, We can believe that the bones may have
worked miracles for good men, but for bad men? We will examine whether
they work any miracles at all. And then, behold, it came out that the
bones did not work miracles, and that possibly they were not saints'
bones at all; and then the storm came: and the lie, as all lies do,
punished itself. The salt had lost its savour. The Teutonic intellect
appealed from its old masters to God, and to God's universe of facts, and
emancipated itself once and for all. They who had been the light of
Europe, became its darkness; they who had been first, became last; a
warning to mankind until the end of time, that on Truth and Virtue
depends the only abiding strength.