Chapter VII: Rome’s Three Hundred Years, 455-756 From Genseric to Aistulf, (1)

BETWEEN THE GOTH, THE LOMBARD, AND THE BYZANTINE.

I propose to give a continuous review of the Roman pontiff’s position in the city of Peter from the plundering of imperial Rome by the Vandal Genseric in 455 to the siege of papal Rome and desolation of the Campagna by the Lombard king Aistulf, beginning January 1, 756. This attack was followed in that year by the enfranchisement of Rome and the gift of the exarchate by Pipin, king of the Franks, to St. Peter and his successors, when he laid the keys of the cities surrendered by the Lombards on the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles.

Three hundred years of suffering unbroken and of glory unsurpassed which preceded the passage of the Roman pontiff from servitude to sovereignty.

The sun of imperial Rome set for ever when the degenerate grandson of the great Theodosius, great grandson also of Valentinian, whose name he covered with infamy, perished by the stroke of an assassin in the Campus Martius, the result of a life in which he imitated the crime of Tarquin. But Tarquin’s crime led to Rome’s freedom, the crime of Valentinian III. brought the end of the imperial city, and the substitution of a Rome built upon revealed truth and eternal justice for the Rome of secular pride and unjust conquest.

In these three hundred years the brother Apostles, the fisherman and the tentmaker, took the place of the robber brothers, Romulus the slayer, and Remus the slain, when the twelve centuries of augured dominion were exactly fulfilled, and in the time of St. Leo the Great the twelve vultures had had their full flight.

The three hundred years begin with the formal acknowledgement of St. Leo’s primacy, as consisting in the descent from St. Peter, bearer of the keys and feeder of the flock, made to him by the Council of Chalcedon in the letter soliciting the confirmation of their decrees by him; a letter to which the eastern emperor Marcian, husband of the noble grand-daughter and heiress of Theodosius, adds his own request for confirmation, and with his wife, St. Pulcheria, in his character as the head of the temporal power, acknowledges St. Leo, the Pope, as “the very person entrusted by the Saviour with the guardianship of the vine”.

The three hundred years end with the Pope emerging a temporal sovereign from the Iconoclast persecution. The eastern empire also has fulfilled its work in these three centuries, and the soldier of fortune, who, at the end of many revolutions has become the successor of Marcian, has ridden his warhorse into the Church of God, and attempted to substitute himself as its governor for the successor of St. Peter, to dictate its creed, and interfere with its worship. In recompense he is expelled from the Italy which he and his predecessors had stripped and sacrificed during two hundred years. Then the crown of temporal sovereignty is added to the papal mitre of spiritual power, which Leo the Isaurian had sought to displace. And, moreover, the “advocate of the Church,” who, “as Christian prince and Roman emperor,” had used _against_ the Church the very God-given power which it was his first duty to use _for_ her, was on the eve of seeing the same powerful race which had enfranchised Rome and dowered the Roman See exalted to the imperial throne in the face of both the Byzantine and the Saracen. The emperor of the East had lowered his dignity to the poor ends of ambition, and the task of degrading God’s Church. In Leo the Isaurian, and in his son Kopronymus we see, in fact, that the man who sits on the throne of the first Christian emperor is become the chief enemy of the Church. The deeds of Heraclius and Constans II. had given adequate cause for the Divine Providence to allow the rise of Mohammed and the severance of its eastern and southern provinces for ever from the empire of Constantine and Theodosius. Thereupon Leo and his son Kopronymus interpreted the lesson thus given as entitling them to meet the assumption of the prophet-emperor enthroned in the Damascus which had ceased to be theirs with equal arrogance in the counter assumption to be emperor-priest. The enemy from Mecca had seized Both Powers in his claim to be prophet; the enemy at Byzantium seized both as emperor. Civil power was the appendage to Mohammed, but became the root of spiritual authority to Leo the Isaurian.

Let us now retrace the period of civic disaster which the Popes encountered from the last years of St. Leo the Great. The following may be considered the main causes:—

First of all is the domination, not of barbarians only, but of heretical barbarians, as Pope Gelasius termed Odoacer.(195) In that passage of his letter the Pope says that when “Odoacer occupied the realm of Italy he had enjoined things to be done which were not lawful, but to which we, by the help of God, would, as is well known, not submit”. He speaks in the name of his see, but what the acts alluded to were we do not know. The domination of Odoacer and of Theodorich after him was Arian. It lasted at least sixty years, from 476 to 536. It was the policy of Theodorich to treat Rome well, in its civil aspect. He fostered the Senate, keeping it in quiet subjection to himself. He professed to treat Italian and Goth on equal terms. As long as the Acacian schism lasted, which effectually prevented unity of action between the emperors Zeno and Anastasius and the Popes who had ceased to be their subjects, but who regarded the Roman emperor with all the consideration required by Roman loyalty to the head of the Roman name, the Gothic king observed this conduct of neutrality; but when a new emperor, Justin I., had acknowledged all the demands of Pope Hormisdas and began to act as a Catholic emperor, Theodorich dropped the mask and appeared as he was, the head and bond of the whole Arian league in the West. Pope Symmachus died in 514. The Acacian schism at that time was in full force; the emperor Anastasius full of enmity and deceit against the Pope. Theodorich allowed Hormisdas to be elected Pope after a vacancy of the see for one single day. Hormisdas died in 523, and a vacancy of six days only ensued, when Pope John I. was allowed to be freely elected. In the meantime the acts of the emperor Justin I. roused the full Arian spirit in Theodorich. He allowed Pope John I. to be freely elected, which did not prevent him from compelling that Pope to go as his ambassador to Constantinople in order to gain indulgence for the eastern Arians. And he uttered the threat that he would fill Italy with blood if his demands were not complied with. And when Pope John I. came back crowned with honours rendered to him as the first Pope who had ever visited the eastern capital, Theodorich threw the Pope into prison, and he never came out alive from the royal dungeon at Ravenna.

This fact throws back a full and disastrous light upon the whole Arian domination in Italy. A poet of our day has put in the mouth of the doomed Gothic princess, the royal-hearted Amalasunta, words of her father:—

“I never loved that Apostolic Throne!”(196)

the truth of which is a striking epitome of history. No Arian ruler _could_ love that Apostolic Throne. But we learn from the fact what the Popes must have gone through from the period when Rome fell under the rule of northern condottieri to the expulsion of the Goths under Belisarius and Narses. It is impossible that one who denied the Godhead of the Master should look, with love and veneration, upon the successor of the Disciple. If the Shepherd of shepherds be not God Himself, the Shepherd, who acts in His name, will not be received, as invested with supreme and universal spiritual power.

Let us examine the connection of Arian domination over Rome and Italy, as exercised, first, by Odoacer, and, secondly, by Theodorich, with the eastern throne’s position and claim.

Odoacer exercised the authority which he held in Rome and in Italy, with the approval of the emperor Zeno. He compelled the Roman Senate to send to Zeno at Constantinople the insignia of the western emperor’s dignity, together with the declaration that a western emperor was no longer required; and that one emperor seated at Constantinople was sufficient. In return, he was invested by Zeno with the title of Patricius of Rome. It may be said that Zeno could do nothing else at the time: and that Odoacer’s power was really the power of the sword. Nevertheless, the emperor of the East had become the sole Roman emperor. The Popes acknowledged him as such, and continually called upon him to discharge the duty of protection to the Church of God, which belonged to the head of the Roman Commonwealth. A few years later, Zeno wished to be delivered from the near neighbourhood of the stirring Gothic king, Theodorich. He commissioned Theodorich to lead his people into Italy, and take possession of it. Five years of terrible conflict ensued between the Herule and the Goth. They inflicted great sufferings on the Italian cities. The Goth prevailed. Ravenna was taken. There was a compact made between Theodorich and Odoacer. A banquet ensued, and in it Odoacer was slain. The first act of Theodorich was to send an embassy to the emperor Anastasius, who had succeeded Zeno, asking for the crown of Italy from his hands. He was acknowledged by Anastasius as the ruler of Italy, and as ruling it in the imperial name. Theodorich became more and more powerful, and if he did not expressly renounce the emperor’s over-lordship, he acted, in all respects, as the sovereign of Italy, and of the great dominion which he had attached to it. But the Byzantine sovereignty in Italy was never resigned in the purpose of the emperor. When, after 33 years of rule, Theodorich expired in 526, and Justinian speedily succeeded his uncle, Justin I., the Gothic rule showed evident signs that it had been built up by the extraordinary skill and energy of a single man, but had entirely failed to assimilate the Roman and the Gothic elements in a stable union. When Justinian conquered the northern provinces of Africa, and Rome, the old seat of the empire, by the arm of Belisarius, he was, in his own mind, only recovering his own, and reassuming what Zeno and Anastasius had _lent_ to Odoacer and Theodorich. This was the mind of every Byzantine sovereign from the date of the western empire’s extinction in 476, or rather it was not extinguished to them, but _they_ had become its lords. Herule, and Vandal, and Goth, and Frank, and Burgundian, and whatever else those northern savages called themselves, they were only encamped on the sacred Roman soil, which belonged indefensibly to the emperor who sat at Constantinople, the heir of Constantine’s Rome.

What has just been said will supply us, as I believe, with a key to the whole conduct of the eastern emperors. I will review it under three heads: first, Byzantine despotism as exhibited in secular government: secondly, Byzantine despotism as pushed into theological doctrine: thirdly, Byzantine despotism, as laying claim to the government of the Church. The three together make up the thing which has received the name of Byzantinism.

The first vacancy of the Holy See, after the extinction of the western emperor by the death of Pope Simplicius, in 483, witnessed the beginning of the Acacian schism. The connection of that schism with the making Zeno sole Roman emperor I have already traced in a former volume. It also marks the beginning of the aggression by the civil power ruling Rome with the title of Patricius bestowed by Zeno, but really with the unrestricted power of the barbarian sword, upon the freedom of Papal election.

When, on the death of Pope Simplicius in 483, they were assembled at St. Peter’s for the election of his successor, Basilius, prefect of the prætorium, and patricius, representing also king Odoacer, rose and said that the late Pope had given Odoacer the most earnest charge to guard against any injury being done to the Church, upon his own death, by being present, and sharing in the election. Odoacer(197) did not go so far as to claim authority to _confirm_ the election. No such power was then recognised either in the eastern emperor, or in the actual ruler of Rome. Pope Gelasius was elected in 492; Pope Anastasius in 496; they were chosen in Rome; they took possession of the chair of Peter immediately upon their election; they then informed the emperor of their accession, or received first congratulations from him.

Pope Symmachus in 498 followed Pope Anastasius. And here acts of great importance took place. The Acacian schism had then divided the East from Rome. Zeno, in order to unite the Monophysites with the Catholics, had drawn up an ambiguous formulary of union called the Henotikon. The emperor Anastasius was most desirous to maintain this formulary. He also wished to recover union with Rome. When the Senator Festus came to Constantinople on the embassy of Theodorich, he promised the emperor that he would induce Pope Anastasius to accept this formulary. But Festus, returned to Rome, found Anastasius dead, and Symmachus chosen by the greater part of the clergy to succeed. He saw that there was no chance of inducing Symmachus to accept the formulary. But Festus was able to raise a schism, and set up, as Antipope, Laurentius. After great troubles, which lasted four years, Symmachus was established: but neither the emperor nor Theodorich exercised or claimed authority to _confirm_ his election.

In 514 Theodorich, the king of Italy, allowed the election of Pope Hormisdas to take place without interference: and again the election of Pope John I. in 523. But upon the death of that martyred Pope in 526, instead of his former indulgence, a state of suspicion and anger against Rome had taken possession of the mind of Theodorich. He imposed upon the Romans the choice of Pope Felix IV. It is supposed that at this time he enacted that in future no one should ascend the papal chair without the confirmation of himself and his successors.(198) Thus only can it be explained that after this, on the death of a Pope the Apostolic Chair remained vacant sometimes for months, and a large sum had to be paid into the Gothic treasury for the deed of confirmation.

Very shortly after the death of Pope John I., and the fellow-victims, Boethius and Symmachus, Theodorich died, and was succeeded by his grandson, Athalarich, eight years old, under the tutelage of his mother, Amalasunta. During her regency Pope Felix IV. died in 530. The electors were divided into a Gothic-Roman and a national-Roman party.(199) The candidate of the former, Bonifacius II., and of the latter, Dioscorus, were both elected two days after the death of Pope Felix, and both consecrated on the following Sunday: and so without any confirmation from Ravenna. But the death of Dioscorus after twenty-eight days prevented a schism, and Boniface was fully recognised as Pope. Boniface, in dread of troubles which would arise at his death, ventured to summon the clergy to St. Peter’s, and laid before them a decree to subscribe: upon which he declared the deacon Vigilius to be his successor. But feeling speedily that this act was contrary to the existing laws of the Church, he called a second assembly of the clergy, the senate, and the people of Rome, declared himself to have violated the freedom and sanctity of the Papacy, and caused in their presence the paper nominating Vigilius to be burnt.

The next election took place in 532, according to the usual conditions. The young king, Athalarich, was made to defer the confirmation of Pope John II. for two months.(200) The state of Rome in the meantime was frightful. Every man sought to plunder the goods of the Church. The Senate had passed a decree strictly forbidding the alienation of church goods by candidates for the Papacy. It was disregarded: and the only resource for the new Pope was to appeal to the king and beg him to confirm the senate’s decree. Athalarich decided that the decree should be inscribed on a marble tablet, and set up in front of the court of St. Peter’s. But the Gothic king’s help was purchased dearly, and the fee for confirming a Pope was established at 3000 gold pieces.

Such in fifty-one years was the result of Odoacer meddling with the Papal election. Not only had the right to confirm been allowed to the civil ruler of Rome, but a heavy money payment had been imposed for the confirmation, and delay superadded.

In that year, 534, the young King Athalarich perished at the age of eighteen by his own excesses. The Queen Amalasunta speedily lost her power. She nominated her cousin, Theodatus, of the royal blood of Amali, king. He repaid her by allowing her to be murdered. His name and character became odious to the Romans. On the death of Pope John II. in 535 he allowed the free choice of the Roman Agapetus to take place in seven days. But he exercised great tyranny over the Romans. He forced Pope Agapetus to go to Constantinople as his ambassador. When that Pope died, as we have seen, in the eastern capital, he imposed on the Romans the choice of Silverius as Pope, threatening with death any one who did not consent to his appointment.

This is the briefest possible record of how the original liberty of the Roman clergy and people to elect the Pope was treated by the foreign Arian rulers, Odoacer, Theodorich, Athalarich, and Theodatus. Then the emperor Justinian became by right of conquest immediate lord of Rome, and seized without scruple upon the appointment and confirmation of the Popes. The act of his empress Theodora, in her violent deposition of Pope Silverius, is the first specimen of Byzantine conduct when it enters by right of conquest upon Italian territory. That the Romans had every reason to wish for the extinction of foreign, which was also heretical, domination, must be clear to every one who follows history in its detail. But likewise the example with which Byzantine domination in Italy opens will suffice to represent to us in a living picture the permanent relation of the Popes to the eastern or Greek empire. If arbitrary(201) violations of the freedom of Papal election by the Gothic kings may be given as the exception, it became by frequent repetitions under Justinian the rule. As the patriarchal see of Constantinople had long been given only to select Court favourites, and taken away from the occupants at every change of imperial inclination, the same plan was pursued henceforth with the filling of the Apostolical See. The emperor issued his edict: the Romans and the Pope were expected to obey. Not even the domain of the Faith was kept free to the Pope. In this also the attempt of the emperors was to lower the chief dignity of the Church to be the echo of their commands.

From Justinian onwards the Byzantine emperors claimed and exercised the right to confirm the papal election.(202)

When the ill-treated Vigilius died at Syracuse, returning from his unhappy sojourn of eight years at Constantinople, Justinian caused the archdeacon Pelagius, who had been nuncio at Constantinople, to be elected his successor. In like manner John III. in 560, and Benedict I. in 574 were elected under pressure from the emperor. But in 568 the Lombards came into Italy, and at the death of Benedict I. in 578 they were pressing Rome so severely that no one could undertake the journey to Constantinople to ask for imperial confirmation. So the Book of the Popes says, “Pelagius,(203) a Roman, was consecrated without the command of the emperor, because the Lombards were besieging the City of Rome, and Italy was greatly laid waste by them. There was such calamity as had not occurred in memory of man.” In 590 St. Gregory the Great waited six months for his election to be approved at Constantinople. What use was made by the eastern emperor of the right to confirm the Papal election from the time of St. Gregory to the breaking out of the Iconoclast persecution has already been recounted. The last instance of this degrading mark of servitude was the confirmation of Pope Gregory III.’s election in 731 by the exarch of Ravenna. From that time forth the Popes elect were no longer confirmed by the emperor or his delegate; and in 756 the hand of a western ruler made them sovereign princes, and the much injured Italy was relieved from eastern oppression so far at least as regarded Rome and the central and northern provinces.

What took place at the death of a Pope was after this fashion. The representation of the see was vested in the three chief officers; the primicerius of the notaries, the archpriest and the archdeacon informed of the fact the exarch of Ravenna. They addressed their letter thus: “To the most excellent and distinguished lord, long to be preserved by God for us in the discharge of his supreme office, N., ex-consul, patricius, and exarch of Italy, N., the archpriest, N., the archdeacon, N., the primicerius of the notaries, keeping the place of the holy Apostolic See”. The exsequies of the late Pope took place, and a three days’ fast and prayer preceded the act of election. In this act took part the higher clergy with the whole spirituality, the more important magistrates of the city, the nobility, the deputies of the people, and such Greek troops as might be present in the city. When the election was completed the elect was conducted in solemn procession to the Lateran, where he received the first homage of the people. The electors subscribed the decree of election which in the meantime had been prepared, and laid it up for future record in the archive. A second shorter copy was sent to the emperor at Constantinople, which ended with the words:(204) “wherefore we, all your servants, in our sorrow beseech that the piety of our masters may favourably receive the entreaties of their servants, and by their grant of their permission would allow the desires of their petitioners to take effect for the good of their empire by their own command. So that in virtue of their sacred letters we, being under the same pastor, may solicit without ceasing the almighty God and the Prince of the Apostles, who has granted the appointment of a worthy governor of his Church, for the life and empire of our most serene masters.”

Yet more submissive is the tone of the letter to the exarch. After the election has been fully described, it continues: “This being so, most exalted God-protected master, we yet more earnestly entreat that by God’s quick operation inspiring your heart you would give command to adorn the Apostolic See with the perfect consecration of our father and pastor, as by the grace of Christ happily and faithfully discharging your execution of the imperial supremacy, so that we, your humble servants, seeing our desire more rapidly fulfilled, may be enabled to return unceasing thanks to God, to the imperial clemency, and to your admirable government willed by God. Thus, by the appointment of the Pontiff of the Apostolic See, our spiritual pastor, we may pour forth continual prayers for the life and safety and complete victory of our most Christian masters. For we know that the prayer of him whom by God’s will we elect to the supreme pontifical dignity, will propitiate the divine power, and obtain for the Roman empire all the success which it can desire. It will also preserve your own power, under God’s protection, for the ruling of this captive Italian province, for the protection of us, all your servants, and for the continuation of long deeds of arms.”(205)

The three Papal officers also informed the archbishop of Ravenna, the magistracy, and the Roman nuntio there, of what had taken place, beseeching their assistance that the confirmation of the election might speedily be given. When this arrived from Constantinople and Ravenna, the Pope elect received consecration. The seven regions of Rome were represented in a procession which conducted him from the sacristy of St. Peter’s to the Confession of the Prince of the Apostles, where he recited his profession of faith. Thereupon Mass began to the Gloria, the bishops of Albano and Porto led him to the bishop of Ostia, who was seated in an elevated chair. They held the gospels over his head, and said the first and second prayer. Then the bishop of Ostia completed the proper consecration, while the archdeacon laid the pallium upon him. After this, the new Pope ascended the papal throne, gave his blessing to all the priests, and proceeded with the sacrifice of the Mass.

A papal vacancy was reckoned from the burial of the deceased Pope to the consecration of the Pope elect.

This power of confirming the election of a Pope, in complete derogation from the original liberty, which had only once been broken by the tyranny of the first Constantius, in the year 355, down to the Arian occupation of Rome by Odoacer, appears to have been exercised from the last days of Theodorich in 526 down to Pope Gregory III. in 731. The emperor Constantine the Bearded, had, after the Sixth Council, suffered Pope Benedict II., in 684, to be freely elected: but his son, Justinian II., reimposed the yoke.

The weight of imperial pressure upon Rome had been considerably affected by the Lombard occupation of the northern provinces of Italy, beginning in 568. The capture of Italy as a province, won for Justinian by the conquest of Narses, was only completed in 555. In thirteen years the Lombards entered upon the country which the Goths had well nigh reduced to ruin. Lombard aggression ran well nigh side by side with Byzantine oppression for two centuries. Right in the midst of both the Apostolic See was placed. In 596, the great St. Gregory complained that he had been keeping watch and ward against these new northern robbers for twenty-eight years, which is the second arm of Byzantine oppression.

The exarch, in the judgment of the despotic Justinian and his successors, was a viceroy of all Italy, planted in the fortress of Ravenna, one side of which was guarded by the sea, the other by marshes. Thence Theodorich ruled: there he was buried: and the Byzantine only felt secure in the Gothic stronghold. Defenceless Rome was stretched out beneath his feet in central Italy, or, if it had a defence, it was that the deathless spirit of the Apostolic See lived within the walls of Aurelian, and animated by its guardianship the often broken and rudely repaired towers of the world’s ancient mistress. The exarch was the choice instrument of the emperor’s despotism. St. Gregory, in his fourteen years’ struggle with all the elements of civil dissolution, accounts the exarch Romanus as his worst enemy. He was always ready to combine with the Lombard, then in the depths of savagery and ignorance, against his own lord’s liege vassals in Rome. Thus St. Gregory unbosoms himself to Sebastian, bishop of Sirmium:—“Words cannot express what we suffer from your friend, the lord Romanus. I would say, in a word, that his malice towards us surpasses the swords of the Lombards. The enemies who destroy us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of the Commonwealth, who wear out our thoughts by their ill-will, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to have the care of bishops and clergy, of monasteries and people, to watch carefully against enemies in ambuscade, to be exposed even to suspicion by the deceit and ill-will of rulers—the labour and the sorrow of this your brotherhood can the better weigh by the purity of your affection for me who suffer it.”(206) These words may fitly introduce us to the Byzantine exarchate as a government. In the thirty years succeeding St. Gregory, the exarch appears as the great manager of Papal elections: from which his least hostile act would be to extort a fee as great, at least, as that laid down in the last Gothic time as 3000 gold coins. Now and then, as opportunity offered, he would enjoy the greater luxury of plundering the Lateran treasury of the Church at his leisure: as done by the exarch Isaac in 638, who was immortalised for the deed in the inscription of his tomb at Ravenna, as the most faithful servant of his most serene masters at Constantinople. The exarch Olympius, in 648, received from his master, Constans II., the higher commission to murder St. Martin, as he was giving holy Communion. But the attempt was frustrated, as was believed at the time, by a divine intervention. However, the exarch Theodore Kalliopa, sent for the special purpose, succeeded in carrying off Pope St. Martin, as he lay ill before the altar of the Lateran, five years later in 653, and placing him in the hands of Constans II., to be condemned for high treason, in that he had not waited for the confirmation of his election by Constans, but, instead, had condemned his heresy in the great Council which he summoned at Rome. In the interval of twenty-five years, from the death of St. Martin to the opening of the Sixth Council, the exarchs were faithful to the imperial tradition until Constantine the Bearded renounced the heresy of which his father, Constans, and his grandfather, Heraclius, had been the chief supporters, while they were nursed in it by a succession of Byzantine patriarchs. But when Justinian II. had followed, the exarch John Platina, in 687, hurried from Ravenna to Rome to hinder the election of the great pontiff, Sergius. Finding it accomplished, he was obliged to content himself with fining the new Pope to the extent of a hundred pounds’ weight of gold, that being the bribe which the unsuccessful candidate had promised him if he would come to Rome to secure his election. Four years afterwards, Justinian II., unable to induce Pope Sergius to accept the decrees of his Council in Trullo, or to accept the place for his signature of them which the emperor had provided in a line between his own signature and that of his patriarch, sent Zacharias not an exarch, but a guardsman, to repeat, if possible, in the person of Pope Sergius, what had been done forty years before in the person of Pope St. Martin. But, instead, the emperor’s own troops caused the guardsman to tremble for his life. His only place of refuge was under the bed in the Pope’s own chamber: the Pope’s intercession alone saved the imperial emissary from a fatal outburst of Italian wrath. Yet ten years later, under the upstart emperor Apsimar, in his short reign, another exarch, Theophylact, was again repulsed from his execution of an intended attack on the Pope by Italian soldiers. Once more, when Pope Constantine, obeying an imperial letter of the restored Justinian II., had left Rome for Constantinople, several chief Papal officers were summarily executed at Rome. Thus the five attempts on the life of the Pope Gregory II. made by exarchs or guardsmen, at the bidding of the emperor Leo III., in his Iconoclastic fury, were but the consistent continuation of the spirit shown by the exarchs, and fostered and supported by the emperors, from the time of St. Gregory’s adversary, the Lord Romanus.

During these two hundred years, from the first inroad of the Lombards, nothing could be more embarrassing than the civil position of the Popes. Beside the main body of the Lombards, occupying the great plain of North Italy, with their capital at Pavia, there were two duchies, one of Spoleto, immediately to the north of Rome and its territory, and another of Benevento, holding a considerable portion of Italian territory near Naples. This city, with other seaports, continued in possession of the empire. The Lombard kings were evermore trying to bring their outlying duchies into closer obedience to the royal power. Again the fortress and territory of Ravenna, the imperial metropolis, lay further to the north, touching the Lombard possessions. The Lombards, when they came into Italy, were so little advanced in political science of government, so little coherent among themselves, that at one time they were divided among thirty-six chiefs, so many heads of robbers and devastating bands, barbarous and un-Christian. There can be no doubt that the aim of the Lombard kings from the beginning had been to make themselves masters of Rome, and to rule the whole of Italy as a kingdom. The example and success of Theodorich was fresh before them. Justinian’s success under his generals Belisarius and Narses was even younger than the glory of the great Gothic king. Gregory the Great had laid a foundation for christianising the Lombard people in his friendship with the great and good Queen Theodelinda. In process of time they had become Catholic. Their king, Liutprand, had caused the relics of St. Augustine, which had been carried from Africa to Sardinia during the Vandal persecution, to be brought to his capital city, Pavia, where the shrine of the greatest of the fathers still abides in honour. Pope Zacharias, by his personal dignity, prevailed over both Liutprand and Rachis. But the contest for the dominion of Italy went on in spite of reverence for the Apostolic See. The people were Catholic, but tumultous and stubborn. After a long-continued struggle of various success, the king Liutprand seemed to be on the point of incorporating the Spolentine and Beneventan duchies, of closing upon Rome, and expelling the emperor from Ravenna. Upon his death, and the retirement of Rachis, Aistulf was uniting all the Lombard force for the attainment of their purpose from the beginning, to expel the emperor from Italy, and to make the Pope a Lombard subject. He went so far as to put a poll-tax on the Roman duchy, and to style himself king of Italy. There the Carlovingian hand arrested him: and the keys of the cities which the Lombard had won from the Byzantine, and Pipin from the Lombard, laid by the gift of Pipin on the tomb of the chief apostle, signified to all men that his successor had become a temporal prince, after forming Rome in the centre of a captive province from a heathen city into a spiritual capital during the unceasing calamity of three centuries. We have scarcely any record of the indescribable sorrows which the Lombard in his aggressive policy, and the Byzantine in his continuous resistance, made up of treachery and bribery added to insufficient military power, inflicted on the cities and the people of Italy: nor of what the Popes endured in their loyal acknowledgment of their duty as subjects, and their unbroken tenacity in maintaining the faith and government of the Church against the succession of adventurers who mounted the Byzantine throne. These culminated in the seven revolutions terminated by that of Leo III. Then the strong man, armed, rode his charger right into the Church of God and strove to add the Popes of Rome to the number of patriarchs whom he raised, deposed, blinded, and executed as he pleased. He made them ecumenical and trod upon them when so made, with the heel of the imperial buskin. And now we come from the first oppression in confirming the Pope, and the second in reducing him to a captive vassal, to the third of subjecting him as the chief teacher of the Church to the lay power of the emperor.

As we look back we see the whole mind of Justinian photographed in his imperial legislation. When he had to speak to the bishop of his capital his language ran: “To the most holy and blessed Archbishop of this Imperial City, and Ecumenical Patriarch”—the core of the title was “Bishop of this Imperial City,” its corollary “Ecumenical Patriarch”. To him the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were to submit any appeal from the provinces subject to them. Rome was not to be deposed from the prior rank acknowledged once for all by the eastern monarch and episcopate at the termination of the Acacian schism, in which act Justinian himself, as the ruling nephew, had taken notable part: but there was to be at Constantinople a similar patriarch, whom the whole eastern world should obey. From him the eastern bishops were to learn the mind of the emperor, just as, when they attended the court, he introduced them to the imperial presence. The emperor would honour him by using him as his chief ecclesiastical minister, who held the portfolio of doctrine. The laws which all the world was to receive bore this exaltation of the imperial bishop in their bosom. And it must be confessed that in St. Gregory’s time the patriarchal title which Pope Gelasius had utterly refused to the Byzantine bishop a century before, had been conceded to him in St. Gregory’s practice: the patriarchal title, but not the ecumenical. Of the patriarchs, when speaking of a fault to be condoned, he wrote, “if any of the four patriarchs had done this we could not pass it over,” and Constantinople must be added to Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to make up this number of four: but of the assumed title of ecumenical, he wrote that it was diabolical, and the forerunner of anti-Christ.

But another part of Justinian’s conduct is no less salient. He is not the first, indeed, but he is the chief of the theologising emperors. The disastrous assumption of dictating doctrine, and deciding in theological controversies, which, at the moment of the fall of the western empire, the insurgent Basiliscus had begun during his short-lived reign, and Zeno continued, and Anastasius reinforced, was taken up with far greater force by Justinian. He laboured during eight years just at the middle of the sixth century to exhibit Pope Vigilius at Constantinople as the first of _his_ five patriarchs: he made the bishop of his capital hold a General Council without the Pope: he imposed his own doctrinal lucubrations upon that Council. He raised in the minds of the western bishops suspicions and fears as to Pope Vigilius being forced to become his instrument. The patriarch Epiphanius, who had weakly yielded to him, he afterwards deposed. Pope Vigilius escaped at last to die at Syracuse on his return to Rome worn out with the “contradiction of sinners” which he had experienced. In his person St. Peter had been a captive; seeds of schism and distrust had been scattered by Justinian in the West: which it required all the wisdom, the energy, and the patience of the great St. Gregory a generation later to overcome and root out. The following theologising emperors, Heraclius, Constans II., Justinian II., the poor phantom Philippicus Bardanes, and lastly Leo III., were only completing and crowning Justinian’s double work, of making an ecumenical patriarch, and an emperor behind him, the ultimate judge of doctrine.

But had Leo III. succeeded in his attempt to grasp spiritual and temporal power in one hand, the Church of God would have come to an end. The whole future of the world was touched by the issue of this conflict.

It is to be remarked how immovable the Popes were, not only in the maintenance of Christian doctrine pure and proper, but likewise in the maintenance of that relation between the Two Powers which Christian doctrine requires as one of the conditions of its own action in the world. What on this subject Pope Gelasius in the last decade of the fifth century had said to the emperor Anastasius, now after two hundred and thirty years Pope St. Gregory II. was saying to the Iconoclast emperor Leo. In the interval Italy had been governed by the Byzantines, so far as they possessed it, during two centuries as a subject province, the captive of its spear; Rome had lived through it only in virtue of the Pope’s primacy. The eastern empire having been false to the faith in its emperors and in many of its bishops, but especially in four successive patriarchs of Constantinople, had been cut in two, and one half of it given over to an anti-Christian religion to rule with unrestricted violence. And now the diminished emperor, who had just saved his capital from the Mohammedan chalif, had been seduced by Jewish and Mohammedan principles to sweep the Christian churches in his remaining dominion, from Sancta Sophia to the least country church, free of Christian symbols, beginning with the most sacred image of the Redeemer(207) which adorned the gate of his own palace as the witness for the need of the oppressed. Then St. Gregory II. stood up against Leo III. exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gelasius, had resisted the emperor of the former day. Syria and Egypt and North Africa, and, still greater shame and peril, Spain had become Mohammedan. The Pope stood, in 727, where he had stood in 495. In the interval all these countries had fallen: but St. Gregory II. could tell a furious tyrant that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as “a god upon earth”—that he could not execute his threat to pull down the statue of St. Peter, which the Christians of that day reverenced in his basilica at Rome, which the Christians of eleven centuries have reverenced since in the same place, and put their head under the Apostle’s foot as the acknowledgment of the dignity with which Christ invested him.

St. Gregory II. told Leo, the Isaurian, that his own imperial dignity was itself of divine institution, as the organ of human government: while the ecclesiastical dignity was of divine institution, in virtue of that divine intervention by which alone men become sons of God. The answer of the tyrant was five times to attempt the Pope’s life, as that of a rebellious vassal whom he was entitled to put under ban, and efface as a _natura ferina_. But the issue of this contest was that three Popes, St. Gregory II., St. Gregory III., St. Zacharias, equally great, wise, and prudent, maintained intact their Primacy: that their successor, Stephen II., was the first Pope who crossed the Alps; that he consecrated the Carlovingian dynasty, and was accepted in Rome triumphantly as her king. In this series of acts he had also broken the chains of Italy, and a Pope presently following, who had ceased to be an eastern vassal, was to create a counterpoise to the chalif of Mohammed in an emperor, not Byzantine, but Roman, not grasping illicit power in the spirit of Saracenic pride, but as a type of Christian monarchy placed at the head of lawful government, not a perversion of Constantine and Theodosius, but the loyal spirit of both embodied by a divine consecration.

During the reigns of Leo III. and his son, Constantine Kopronymus, and the times of the Popes Gregory II., Gregory III., Zacharias, and Stephen II., certain events take place in the East and the West respectively, which, by their striking contrast with each other, while they coincide in the time of their happening, remarkably express and sum up the course taken by the three centuries which we are considering. Despotism matures in the East, and barbaric savagery triumphs: freedom, order, the majesty of nations growing into one faith, dawn upon the West.

In 727 the yet existing letters of Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo exhibit that monarch as thoroughly possessed with the claim to govern the Church as he governs the State. In this he is as thoroughly encountered by the Pope, who calls up against him the unbroken tradition of the Church during the seven centuries, and reminds him of the sad misfortunes of those emperors who had attempted to carry their civil authority into the domain of revealed truth. The great eastern teacher, St. John of Damascus, then living in the Syrian court of the chalif, lays this down in language as peremptory as that of the Pope. The guilt of Leo III. is heightened by the fact that he had before him in the history of his own realm during the hundred years preceding him the rise of a religion essentially opposed to the Christian faith, which he was professing himself to purify. Its force, ever exercised against Christians with the utmost virulence and cruelty, was centered in the fact that its chief deduced all civil authority from the prophetic office of its founder. But while the kingship of Mohammed, as inherited by his chalifs, began with his attempt to found a religion, Leo, in continuing and advancing to their utmost tension the interferences of Justinian with the spiritual order, was undoing the ancient laws of the empire for a hundred and fifty years, from the time of Constantine to that of Zeno. His own patriarch, Germanus, chose rather to lay his omophorion on the altar, and depart into exile than sanction and accept Leo’s usurpation in sacred things. The whole liberty, and with it the whole existence of the Church, were comprehended in the resistance maintained by Pope Gregory, and attested by patriarch Germanus as a victim. Gregory II. followed, in giving to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, but to God the things of God, the whole line of his predecessors. Leo III. imitated wrongly the chief antagonist of the Christian name; but Mohammed was at least consistent with his original falsehood. In this his religion itself was contained. Likewise the whole work of Christendom was embodied in the victorious defence of Gregory against the consummation of eastern despotism.

The acts which followed by Pope and by emperor agreed with their several principles. Gregory III. on his accession at once endeavoured to bring the emperor to a better mind. But Leo had already deposed Germanus, and put Anastasius, a docile instrument, in his stead. The Pope called a council at Rome, which entirely supported the freedom of the Church. Leo turned to brute force. He sent out a great fleet with the commission to destroy his own metropolis, Ravenna, then to advance upon Rome, seize the Pope, and carry him away captive, as eighty years before St. Martin had been taken. Five years after this violent act of despotism, which the winds and seas had frustrated, Pope Gregory III., pressed hard by the advancing arms of the Lombard king, Liutprand, besought the great conqueror, Charles Martell, to take up his defence. He appealed to the piety of the Frank leader in behalf of St. Peter, a piety extinct in the Roman emperor’s breast. Two years later Pipin had succeeded to the power of Charles Martell, and intimated in the strongest manner the veneration for the Apostolic See felt by the Frank people, in asking Pope Zacharias to pronounce as Pope that Pipin might duly be elected king of the Franks. Zacharias gave his decision: and the diet of the kingdom at Soissons bore out to the full the sentence of Pope Gregory II. in his letter to Leo III., that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as a god upon earth. Pipin became king of the Franks by the diet of the Franks accepting the decision of Pope Zacharias in 752, when in 733 the rough Isaurian soldier thought only of subduing the predecessor of Zacharias, Gregory III., by a dungeon in Byzantium after the mode of Constans II. with St. Martin. But even yet the contrast is not complete.

Not only had Leo III., in his wrath at being foiled by the elements, confiscated the patrimonies of the Church in the southern provinces of Italy which he possessed, and in Sicily, and in his realm generally, but he interfered with the immemorial spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch, and assigned to his own patriarch at Constantinople the privileges which by the appointment of St. Leo had been given to the great metropolis, Thessalonica. This jurisdiction the patriarchs of Constantinople had coveted for centuries. Theodosius II. had tried to give it them by an imperial decree: but it was rescinded. Anastasius, who had been substituted for Germanus in 730, received the ill-omened gift in 733. The giver’s son, Kopronymus, afterwards punished by blindness this unhappy man, but sent him back thus blinded to occupy his see during ten years; made him crown his son, and only in 753 Anastasius, becoming once more a servile persecutor of images, terminated the episcopate which he had so ingloriously received in 730. On the other hand, Pope Stephen II., successor of Zacharias, in spite of bodily weakness and continual danger, crossed the Alps, crowned Pipin, his wife and his sons, in the Abbey of St. Denys, in 754, and so consecrated the Carlovingian race. The rising monarchy of the Franks exulted in that very dignity of St. Peter’s successor, which the Byzantine monarch was striving to subject to his own will.

But this contrast had a yet further and even more striking issue. Pope Stephen II., hard pressed by the resolute attempt of king Aistulf to make himself temporal king of Rome, applied for defence to the man he still recognised as sovereign, Constantine Kopronymus, and received for answer only the words that he might get it where he could. He beheld the Lombard destroying and trampling on every thing outside the walls of Rome. In the utmost bodily weakness he had taken the road to Pavia: he resisted every effort of Aistulf to detain him. He had been received by Pipin with joy and admiration. Protection against the Lombards was promised him. The Lombard king gave way to his fear of the Frankish kings, but presently broke through every engagement. On 1st January, 756, he had promised himself Rome, and all which it contained. By the end of the year he had surrendered the exarchate to St. Peter, and Rome had accepted her Pontiff Stephen as her king. And the name of Stephen II. is numbered with that of his three predecessors as the maker of pontifical liberty. Kopronymus ventured to ask Pipin to restore to him the cities which Pipin had conquered. He received for reply that not for earthly reward or wealth, but for the love of St. Peter, the king of the Franks had bestowed on the Pope, his successor, the cities which he had delivered from the Lombard, and restored Rome to him by delivering it from Lombard aggression.

Constantine Kopronymus had succeeded his father Leo III. in 740. An insurrection arose against him in his own house. It was put down with terrible severity.(208) These were his doings in Constantinople in the same year 754, when Pipin was crowned by the Pope. He had surpassed his father in the cruelty with which he attempted to alter the existing worship of the Church. He had obtained some advantage in war against the Saracens, who were divided by the contest between the Ommaiads and the Abbassides, but he thought not the least of saving Italy from the Lombards, much more he desired to deliver the churches from the sacred images. For this purpose he caused many assemblies to be held and addressed the people, moving them to destroy the images. At last he held a Council at Constantinople of 338 bishops. At their head stood Gregory, bishop of Neocesarea, Theodosius, archbishop of Ephesus, a son of the emperor Apsimar, Sisinnius, bishop of Perge in Pamphylia. There was no patriarch, no representative from the sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The see of Constantinople was vacant, as Anastasius had just died. The Council met on the Asiatic side, opposite Constantinople, on the 10th February, 754, and sat six months. Then on the 8th August it passed over to the Church of Blachernæ. There the emperor presented himself at the ambon holding by the hand the monk Constantine, bishop of Sylæum, and cried with a loud voice, “Many years to the ecumenical patriarch Constantine.” At the same time he invested him with the patriarchal robes and the pallium. The Council ended that day, and nothing of it remains to us except a so-called confession of faith in the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second of Nicæa, in 787, where it was refuted and rejected.