which the taxation had first aroused on the part of the Italian people
and their champion the papacy. These feelings were to be crystallised
by the extraordinary and tactless council that the emperor convened in
691, in which the empire attempted to avenge the defeat it had
sustained at the hands of the papacy in regard to the Monothelete
heresy. The council, which was mainly concerned with discipline,
altogether disregarded Western custom and the See of Rome, and
especially asserted that "the patriarchal throne of Constantinople
should enjoy the same privileges as that of Old Rome, and in all
ecclesiastical matters should be entitled to the same pre-eminence and
should count as second after it." The pope promptly forbade the
publication of the decrees of this council which he had refused to
sign. Then the emperor sent a truculent soldier, one Zacharias, to
Rome with orders to seize Sergius and bring him to Constantinople as
Martin had been arrested and dragged away. It only needed this to make
the whole situation clear once and for all.
For it was not only the people of Rome who rose to prevent this
outrageous act. When Zacharias landed in Ravenna, the citadel of the
empire in Italy, the "army of Ravenna," no longer perhaps Byzantine
mercenaries, but Italians, mutinied and determined to march to Rome to
defend the pope. As they marched down the Flaminian Way, the soldiers
of the Pentapolis joined them, a Holy War, a revolution, declared
itself, and for this end: "We will not suffer the Pontiff of the
Apostolic See to be carried to Constantinople." This curious mob of
soldiers, gathering force and recruits as it marched with songs and
shouting down the Way, hurled itself against the walls of the Eternal
City, battered down the gate of S. Peter which Zacharias, afraid and
in tears, had ordered to be closed, and demanded to see the pope who
was believed to have been spirited away in the night on board a
Byzantine ship like his predecessor Martin. Zacharias took refuge
under the pope's bed, and Sergius showed himself upon the balcony of
the Lateran and was received with the wildest enthusiasm.
In that revolution was destroyed all hope of the Byzantine empire in
Italy. A new vision had suddenly appeared to those whom we may call,
and rightly now, the Italian people. The long resurrection of the
West, the greatest miracle of the papacy, was upon that day secured
for the future. And henceforth the mere appearance of the exarch in
Rome was regarded as an insult and a declaration of war.
In the year 695 Justinian II. was deposed and mutilated by Leontius,
but he was to appear again as emperor ten years later when Sergius was
dead and John VII. sat on the throne of Peter. Pope John reigned but
for three years, in which he was successfully bullied by Justinian. He
was then succeeded by Sisinnius, who reigned for a few months, and
then by Constantine who ruled for seven years (708-715). The
archbishops of Ravenna had certainly not dared openly to side with the
imperial party and the exarch during the revolution, but, with the
restoration of Justinian, archbishop Felix (708-724) felt himself
strong enough to oppose the pope when he categorically required of him
an oath "to do nothing contrary to the unity of the Church and the
safety of the empire." He had, however, chosen a bad time to set
himself against his superior, who in the minds of all was the champion
of Italy.
Justinian II. had by no means forgotten the injuries he had received
at the hands of the Ravennati: "_ad Ravennam_," says Agnellus, "_corda
revolvens retorsit, et per noctem plurima volvens, infra se taliter
agens; heu quid agam et contra Ravennam quae exordia sumam_?" "What
can I do against Ravenna?" What he did was this. Theodore the
patrician, one of his generals, was despatched with a fleet to Ravenna
by way of Sicily. He proceeded up the Adriatic and when far off he saw
the great imperial city, he first, according to Agnellus, lamented its
fate, "for she shall be levelled with the ground which lifted her head
to the clouds;" and then having landed and been greeted with due
ceremony, set his camp on the banks of the Po a few hundred yards
outside the city walls. There he invited all the chief men of the
Ravennati to a banquet in the open air. As two by two they entered his
tent to be presented to their host they were bound and gagged and put
aboard ship. Thus all the nobles and Felix the archbishop were taken
and the soldiers of Theodore entered Ravenna and burned their houses
to the ground.
Theodore took his captives to Constantinople where they were all slain
save Felix, who, however, was blinded. Later he returned to Ravenna,
was reconciled with the Holy See, and died archbishop in 725.
It would appear that all this happened when Theophylact (702-709) was
exarch, though Theodore the patrician may have superseded him for a
moment on his arrival. The exarch in 710 was Joannes Rizocopus, and in
that year pope Constantine visited Constantinople with the future pope
Gregory II. in his train. They met in Rome, the pope about to set
sail, the exarch on his way to Ravenna, where he was apparently
assassinated in a popular tumult, "the just reward of his wickedness."
The people of Ravenna then elected a certain Giorgius as their
captain, and all the neighbouring cities, Cervia, Forli, Forlimpopoli,
and others, placed themselves under his government and turned upon the
imperial troops. We know very little of this revolution, what directly
was the cause of it, or how it was suppressed; but it is clear that
the exarchate, if it did not actually perish, was from this time forth
for all intents and purposes dead. Three more exarchs were to reign in
Ravenna, but not to govern. In 713, Scholasticus was appointed and
remained till 726. He was followed by Paulus (726-727) who attempted
to arrest Leo III., was prevented by the joint action of the Romans
and the Lombards, and met his death at the hands of the people of
Ravenna; and by Eutychius (727-752) who it seems saw the fall of
Ravenna before the assault of the Lombard Aistulf. He was the last
representative of the Byzantine empire to govern in Ravenna or in
Italy.
But the fall of the imperial power in Italy was not the work of the
Romans or of the Lombards. It fell because it had ceased to be
Catholic.
We have seen the invasions of the Visigoths and the Huns fade away
into nothing; we have seen the greater attempt of the Ostrogoths to
found a kingdom in Italy brought to nought. One and all they failed
for this fundamental reason, that they were not Catholic. The future
belonged to Catholicism, and since it is only what is in the mind and
the soul that is of any profound and lasting effect, to be Arian, to
be heretic, was to fail. The great attempt, the noble attempt of
Justinian to refound the empire in the West, to gather Italy
especially once more into a universal government, succeeded, in so far
as it did succeed, because the circumstances of the time in Italy
forced it to be a pre-eminently Catholic movement. When that movement
ceased to be Catholic it failed.
Let us be sure of this, for our whole understanding of the Dark Age
depends upon it. Justinian's success in Italy was a Catholic success.
What had always differentiated the imperialists from the barbarians
since the fall of the old empire was their Catholicism. Justinian, a
great Catholic emperor, perhaps the greatest, faced and outfaced the
Arian Goths. He succeeded because his cause was the Catholic cause.
But when his successors had to meet the Lombards they soon found that,
for all they could do, they had no success. The Lombards, never very
eagerly Arian, were open to conversion, slowly they became Catholic,
and from the day they became Catholic there was no longer any hope of
turning them out of Italy. It is only what is in the mind that is of
any fundamental account. Face to face with such a thing as religion,
race is as a tale that is told. But though all hope of turning the
Lombards out of Italy ceased with their conversion, and the plan of
Justinian, with nothing as it were to kick against, was thus rendered
a thousand times more difficult, it did not become utterly hopeless
and impossible till the empire, the East, that is, Constantinople,
fell into heresy and ceased itself to be Catholic. It was the gradual
failure of Constantinople in Catholicism that disclosed the pope to
the Italians as their champion. It was this failure that raised up
even in the imperial citadel, even in Ravenna, men and armies
passionately antagonistic to the emperor, passionately papal too.
During a hundred years this movement grew till, in the eight century,
the _coup de grace_, as we might say, was given to the Justinian plan
by the Iconoclastic heresy.
The Iconoclastic decrees of the emperor Leo are said to have appeared
in Italy in the year 726. Leo was an adventurer from the mountains of
Isauria. He was, so Gibbon tells us, "ignorant of sacred and profane
letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with
the Jews and the Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with an
hatred of images." It was his design to pronounce the condemnation of
images as an article of faith by the authority of a general council.
This, however, he was not able to do, for he was at once met and his
iconoclasm pronounced heretical by the greatest of all opponents, the
pope--Gregory II.
Gregory had been elected to the papacy in 715 upon the death of
Constantine. He was a man of great strength of purpose and nobility of
character. Upon the Lombard throne sat Liutprand whose boast it was
that "his nation was Catholic and beloved of God," and who
acknowledged the pope as "the head of all the churches and priests of
God through the world." These three men were the great protagonists
who decided the fate of the empire in Italy.
The Lombards though they were thus Catholic had certainly not ceased
to make war upon the empire. In this ceaseless quarrel, for instance,
they had, perhaps about 720, possessed themselves of Classis, the
seaport of Ravenna, and not long after of the fortress of Narni upon
the Flaminian Way, and a little later, about 752, Liutprand himself
laid siege to Ravenna, apparently without much result, though Classis
seems to have suffered pillage. But if Ravenna did not then fall it
was because the emperor's Iconoclastic decrees had not then reached
Italy. They appear to have arrived in the following year and
immediately the whole peninsula was aflame. "No image of any saint,
martyr, or angel shall be retained in the churches," said Leo, "for
all such things are accursed." The pope was told to acquiesce or to
prepare to endure degradation and exile. Then, says Gibbon, surely
here an unbiassed authority, "without depending on prayers or
miracles, Gregory II. boldly armed against the public enemy and his
pastoral letters admonished the Italians of their danger and their
duty. At this signal Ravenna, Venice, and the cities of the Exarchate
and Pentapolis adhered to the cause of religion; their military force
by sea and land consisted for the most part of the natives; and the
spirit of patriotism and zeal was transfused into the mercenary
strangers. The Italians swore to live and die in the defence of the
pope and the holy images; the Roman people were devoted to their
Father and even the Lombards were ambitious to share the merit and
advantage of this holy war. The most treasonable act, but the most
obvious revenge, was the destruction of the statues of Leo himself;
the most effectual and most pleasing measure of rebellion was the
withholding of the tribute of Italy and depriving him of a power which
he had recently abused by the imposition of a new duty."
The life of the pope was attempted by the imperial officials and the
exarch appears to have been privy to the plot. The Romans rose and
prevented the murder by slaying two of the conspirators, and when the
exarch attempted to arrest the pope the very Lombards "flocked from
all quarters" to defend him. In Ravenna itself there was revolution;
Paulus the exarch was slain it seems in 727, and Ravenna apparently
swore allegiance to the Holy See. Leo sent a fleet and an army to
chastise her; "after suffering," says Gibbon, "from the wind and wave
much loss and delay, the Greeks made their descent in the
neighbourhood of Ravenna; they threatened to depopulate the guilty
capital and to imitate, perhaps to surpass, the example of Justinian
II. who had chastised a former rebellion by the choice and execution
of fifty of the principal inhabitants. The women and clergy in
sackcloth and ashes lay prostrate in prayer; the men were in arms for
the defence of their country; the common danger had united the
factions, and the event of a battle was preferred to the slow miseries
of a siege. In a hard-fought day, as the two armies alternately
yielded and advanced, a phantom was seen, a voice was heard, and
Ravenna was victorious by the assurance of victory. The strangers
retreated to their ships, but the populous sea-coast poured forth a
multitude of boats; the waters of the Po were so deeply infected with
blood that during six years the public prejudice abstained from the
fish of the river; and the institution of an annual feast perpetuated
the worship of images and the abhorrence of the Greek tyrant."
So Gibbon, following Agnellus whose account is obscure and perhaps
altogether untrustworthy. What is certain is that Liutprand was
advancing against the empire in war; that he took Bologna and without
difficulty made himself master of the whole of the Pentapolis.
Yet the emperor took no heed. The eunuch Eutychius was appointed as
exarch. He appeared in Naples and sent orders to Rome to have the pope
murdered; but again the Roman people saved their champion and swore to
him a new allegiance. Then Eutychius turned to the Lombards.
He attempted to bribe both Liutprand and the dukes. At first he was
unsuccessful, but presently they began to listen to him. Liutprand
certainly hoped to make himself king of Italy, and it may be that it
was this which Eutychius offered him under the emperor. Moreover, he
was jealous, and not without cause, of the dukes of Spoleto and
Benevento, who had rallied to the pope, and was anxious to have them
under his feet. This, too, he may have hoped to attain as King of
Italy and the emperor's representative in Italy.
When the pope saw Liutprand march southward with the exarch he must
have known that the whole of the future depended upon the outcome of
this act. Liutprand presently encamped with his army in the plain of
Nero between the Vatican and Monte Mario. There the pope met him and,
even as Leo the Great had done upon the banks of the Mincio, and as
Gregory the Great had done upon the steps of S. Peter's, overawed the
barbarian. Liutprand laid his crown and his sword at the pope's feet
and begged, not only for his own forgiveness, but for that of the
exarch his ally. The moment of enormous danger passed, the pope
received both his enemies; but from that moment it was evident that
the Lombards were not to be trusted and must one day feel the weight
of the papal arm.
Gregory died in February 731, and was succeeded by Gregory III. who
continued his predecessor's Italian policy. The great and terrible
danger which had suddenly threatened the whole of papal policy when
Liutprand and the exarch approached one another seems to have haunted
the third Gregory. His obvious defence was to support the dukes
against Liutprand, and this he did. Liutprand marched down against him
and seized several towns in the duchy of Rome. It is now that the
future begins to declare itself. The pope in his peril, a peril that
would presently increase, made an appeal to the great Christian
champion, Charles Martel; he appealed to the Franks; in the event, as
we know, it was the Franks who saved the situation. In 740, however,
Charles Martel refused to interfere; he was the kinsman of Liutprand
and his son was a guest at the court of Pavia; that son was to be king
Pepin the Deliverer--the father of Charlemagne, the first emperor of
the restored West.
That appeal for help was in all probability not made only on account
of the threat of Liutprand against Rome. It was obvious and more and
more obvious that the imperial power in Italy was about to dissolve.
What was to take its place? The papacy? Yes, but the state of Italy,
the hostility of Liutprand, the whole attitude and condition of the
Lombards, forced upon the papacy the necessity of finding a champion,
a soldier and an army. That champion Gregory hoped to find in Charles
Martel; his successors found him in Charles's son Pepin and in
Charlemagne.
I say the appeal of the pope for help was not made only on account of
the Lombard threat against Rome. It was the sudden dissolution of the
imperial power that called it forth. In or about 737, the city of
Ravenna, as we may believe, was besieged and taken by Liutprand and
for some three years remained in his hands, till at the united prayers
of exarch and pope the Venetians fitted out a fleet and recaptured it
for the empire as we may think in 740.[1]
[Footnote 1: I follow Hodgkin, vi. p. 482 _et seq_., and Appendix F.
Cf. also for discussion as to the date, Pinton in _Archivio Veneto_
(1889), pp. 368-384, and Monticolo in _Archivio della R. S. Romana di
St. Pat_. (1892), pp. 321-365.]
We know nothing of that siege and capture and practically nothing of
the splendid victory of the Venetians. But the tremendous significance
of the fall of Ravenna, which had been the impregnable seat of the
empire in Italy since Belisarius entered it in 540, must not escape
us. Rightly understood it made necessary all that followed.
At this dramatic moment the Emperor Leo died, to be followed in 741 by
Pope Gregory and Charles Martel. Gregory was succeeded by Pope
Zacharias, who in the year of his election met Liutprand at Narni and
obtained from him the restoration of the four frontier towns he had
taken two years before. But though Rome was thus secured Ravenna was
in worse danger than ever, for Liutprand now renewed his attack upon
it and it was only the intervention of the pope in person at Pavia
that saved the city. Zacharias set forth along the Flaminian Way; at
Aquila perhaps near Rimini the exarch met him, and he entered Ravenna
in triumph, the whole city coming out to meet him. In spite of the
opposition of Liutprand he made his way to Pavia, and was successful
in persuading him to give up his attempt to take the once impregnable
city and to restore much he had captured. Liutprand was an old man;
perhaps he was not hard to persuade, for he was on the eve of his
death, which came to him in 744. His successor Hildeprand reigned for
six months and was deposed. Ratchis became king, a pious man who made
truce with the pope, and in 749 abdicated and entered a monastery.
Aistulf was chosen king, and at once turned his thoughts to Ravenna.
The crisis so long foreseen, so often prevented by the papacy, came at
last with great suddenness. In 751 Ravenna fell and the Byzantine
empire in Italy thereby came to an end.
We know nothing of this tremendous affair; we do not know whether the
great imperial city, full of all the strange wonder of Byzantium, and
heavy with the destiny of Europe, was taken suddenly by assault or
after a long siege. We know only that it fell, and that Aistulf was
master there in the year of our Lord 751.
A sort of silence followed that fall. In 752 Pope Zacharias died. His
successor was never consecrated, but died within three days of his
election and made way for Pope Stephen. In the confusion of all things
it is said that a party in Rome urged Aistulf to usurp the empire.
This was enough; it might have been, and perhaps was, expected. The
pope had his answer ready. The heir of the empire in Italy was not the
Lombard but the Holy See. Aistulf threatened to invade Roman
territory, and, indeed, occupied Ceccano in the duchy of Rome. Again
the pope had his answer. That answer was the appeal to Pepin and his
Franks. The papacy had found a champion.
X
THE PAPAL STATE
PEPIN AND CHARLEMANGE
The appeal of Stephen, which was to have for its result the
resurrection of the empire in the West and the establishment of the
papacy as a temporal power and sovereignty, was made in a letter now
lost to us, which a pilgrim on his way back to France from Rome
carried to Pepin the king of the Franks. In reply to it, the abbot of
Jumieges appeared in Rome as Pepin's ambassador to invite the pope
himself to cross the Alps.
Meantime two events occurred, which cannot but have hardened the
resolve of the pope to find a champion. These events were the
occupation of Ceccano in the duchy of Rome by Aistulf and the appeal
of the emperor to the pope that he should go to Pavia and attempt to
persuade the Lombard king to give up Ravenna and the cities he had
lately taken. The appeal of the emperor must have assured the pope, if
indeed he had any doubt about it, that the emperor, so far as Italy
was concerned, was helpless; while the occupation of Ceccano made it
doubly obvious that the Lombard intended, now that the empire was
helpless, to be absolute master throughout the peninsula.
[Illustration: Colour Plate S. GlOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
Stephen considered what course he should pursue, received two other
Prankish envoys in Rome, consented to go to Pavia on behalf of the
emperor, and determined at the same time to visit Pepin in the north.
He set out for Pavia upon October 13, 753, leaving Rome with a vast
concourse of people, which accompanied him some distance along the
Way, out of the Flaminian Gate. His mission on behalf of the empire
was naturally entirely fruitless, and early in November the pope left
Pavia with the hardly won consent of Aistulf to cross the Alps by the
Great S. Bernard--a difficult and dangerous business at that time of
year--and to meet the Frankish king at S. Maurice in the valley of the
Rhone. In the latter he was disappointed. Pepin had been called away
to deal with an incursion of the Saxons, and now awaited his amazing
visitor at Ponthion in Champagne, but he sent his son Charles,
destined to be the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a hundred
miles down the long roads to meet the pope, and it was in the company
of this youthful hero that upon the Feast of the Epiphany 754 Stephen
entered Ponthion at last, and was greeted by Pepin, who cast himself
upon the ground before him and walked as his lackey beside him as he
rode.
The result of their interview is given in the _Liber Pontificalis_:
"The most blessed pope tearfully besought the said most Christian king
that by means of a treaty of peace (? with him the pope) he would
dispose of the cause of the blessed Peter and the republic of the
Romans, who by an oath there and then (de praesenti) satisfied the
most blessed pope that he would obey all his commands and admonitions
with all his strength and that it pleased him to restore by every
means the exarchate of Ravenna and the rights and territories of the
republic."[1]
[Footnote 1: As this is very important I give the original Latin
"Ibidem beatissmus Papa praefatum Christianissimum regem
lacrimabiliter deprecatus est ut per pacis foedera causam beati Petri
et reipublicarae Romanorum disponeret. Qui de praesenti jurejurando
eundem beatissimum Papam satisfecit omnibus ejus mandatis et
ammonitionibus sese totis nisibus obedire, et ut illi placitum fuerit
Exarchatum Ravennae et reipublicae jura seu loca reddere modis
omnibus."]