Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

by T. W. Allies

Chapter VI. An Emperor Priest And Four Great Popes.

The Sixth General Council had been held in 680, and on the union of the East and West the long and obstinate Monothelite heresy had seemed to be extinguished with all the authority wielded by the Pope at the head of a General Council. Yet thirty years after this event the fifth emperor of the line of Heraclius was dethroned and beheaded by a usurper; and the first act of the insurgent when seated on the throne of Constantine was to call a council of his own eastern bishops at Constantinople, which at his command attempted to abrogate the Sixth Council and to set up again as the proper faith of the Church the heresy which it had condemned. And this act of Philippicus Bardanes met with nothing like an adequate resistance from the eastern bishops. It is true that the patriarch Cyrus, refusing to comply with the wishes of the new emperor, was deposed by him, and a more obsequious successor, the deacon John, put in his place. But even Germanus, then archbishop of Cyzicus, yielded to the storm, and thus a bishop of imperial blood, who four years afterwards was himself placed in the see of Constantinople, who held it during fifteen years, and [pg 298] then was deposed because he would not yield to the heretical measures of another emperor, is said to have been subservient to the will of Philippicus Bardanes.

No incident can show more plainly the pretensions of the eastern emperor and the weakness of the eastern bishops than the fact that the first act of an Armenian officer when he had, by the murder of his sovereign, put on the imperial buskins on which the eagle of the Roman power was embroidered, consisted in an attempt to alter the faith of the Church, and that the alteration was supported by the bishops whom he had convened. Philippicus himself was a worthless sensualist, whose reign was put an end to in eighteen months by another revolution. Two more transient emperors passed to the dishonoured throne, and then appeared a third, who reigned twenty-four years, and has left his mark on history.

Leo III. was a soldier of great courage and considerable skill. He was of low birth in the province of Isauria, but worked his way through the various grades of the army until he became the most highly reputed of its generals at a moment when a succession of seven revolutions had seemed to portend the coming extinction of the empire. Besides its internal dissensions, it was hard pressed by the chalif Solomon, who was making every preparation for the final conquest of the capital. When by the cession of the good but impotent Theodosius III. the Isaurian officer obtained the crown, sodden as it were with the blood of three successive emperors, it might have seemed that the last hour had come of the [pg 299] great city whose ramparts had served as the only sufficient bulwark against the Mohammedan torrent of conquest. Leo III. thought not so. His first act was to defeat the chalif and cast back his invading host. The eastern empire breathed afresh under his resolute spirit and strategic skill, and learnt to meet not ingloriously the Saracen in battle. Ten years of success had given to its ruler some rays of the glory which had shone upon the older emperors.

It is of the year 726 that the most learned of Italian historians[164] speaks in these words: “This year Leo, the Isaurian, began a tragedy which convulsed the Church of God and laid the foundations for the loss of Italy to the Greek emperors. Theophanes, Nicephorus, and other historians tell us that a submarine volcano had broken out in the Ægean Sea and cast up a quantity of pumice stone on the adjoining coast. This natural incident had produced the greatest alarm. Moreover, a perfidious renegade named Bezer,[165] who had embraced the Arabian superstition, had nestled himself in the imperial court, and succeeded in making the emperor believe that God was enraged with the Christians on account of the images which they had in their churches and venerated. No doubt abuses did exist in the veneration of these images, as have since appeared among the Moscovites, united to the Greek Church. But such abuses neither were nor are a reason to abolish these images, for, as men of [pg 300] great knowledge have proved, the use of images and a well-regulated veneration of them is not only lawful, but greatly fosters piety in the Christian Catholic people. Now the emperor Leo, infatuated by his own great penetration of mind and seduced by this evil counsellor, practised a usurpation upon the rights of the priesthood, and published an edict ordering that from that moment all the sacred images should be forbidden and removed through the territory of the Roman empire. He called the kissing them or venerating them idolatry. This was the beginning of the Iconoclast heresy. This rash and iniquitous prohibition excited great commotion among his subjects. The larger part detested him as heretical, as holding Mohammedan sentiments, and the more because it was known that he held in abomination the sacred relics, and denied the intercession of the saints with God—that is, attacked beliefs established in the Church of God. He also impugned thereby the profession of faith which he had made when he assumed the imperial throne, refusing to listen to the judgment of bishops who are chosen by God for guardians of the doctrine which belongs to the faith. Though we have not the letters written by him to Pope Gregory II. about abolishing the sacred images, and the pontiff's answers to him, yet the sequel plainly shows that he sent to Rome the above-named edict, and that the holy pontiff not only opposed it, but wrote with kindled feelings to the emperor about it, inducing him to give up this sacrilegious design.”

Though the letters thus mentioned no longer exist, we [pg 301] possess letters from Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo shortly after, which present to us the clearest and most authentic picture of the Iconoclast contest. Both the contention of the emperor and the censure of the pontiff are there expressed in the words used at the very moment of the struggle. I shall follow them accurately and in so much detail as to show the interests which were then at stake.

In the person of St. Gregory II., after several Popes of eastern descent, a Roman had again reached the pontificate.[166] He was acquainted with Constantinople, to which place he had accompanied his predecessor, Pope Constantine. His experience in political things was as great as his grasp of theological knowledge was firm. He had dealt with Greeks and Lombards, not only in ecclesiastical affairs, but as counsellor, as arbitrator, and as party concerned in disputes. He adorned the churches of Rome, but he likewise strengthened her fortifications on the Esquiline. When, in the year 717, a considerable portion of the city had been dangerously flooded, and in the quarter of the Via Lata the water had risen eight-feet high, the poor people found support and consolation in the Pope. During many years there had been peace between Church and Empire as also between the Roman See and the patriarchate of the imperial capital. The first years of Leo III. promised nothing but good. Born of low birth in the mountains of Isauria, and destitute of education, he had risen by his valour step by step, and was in command of the Anatolian army when called to [pg 302] succeed Theodosius III. His reign of four and twenty years would have been fortunate had not the dogmatising fancies which seemed to be inherited by the most various natures on the Byzantine throne taken possession of him. Through them he kindled a conflict which set East and West in commotion, and completed the rent between them.

It was about the year 727, the twelfth year of his own pontificate, and ten years after the accession of Leo III., when the acts of the eastern emperor caused St. Gregory II. to address the following letter to him.[167]

“The letter of your God-protected majesty and fraternity we have received by the augustal officer of the Guards, and we likewise keep it securely in the holy church close to the confession of the holy and glorious Peter, prince of the apostles, where likewise are kept the letters of your predecessors who reigned in the love of Christ. In this letter you well and piously, as befits a Christian emperor, professed that you would keep without fail the injunctions of our holy fathers and teachers. It is first, and remarkable, that the letter is yours and not another's, sealed with the imperial seal, and subscribed within in vermilion, by your own hand, as is the wont of emperors to subscribe. Therein you professed with the clearest piety our blameless and orthodox faith. You wrote, ‘he who moves and pulls down the boundaries of the fathers is execrable’. On receiving this we uttered hymns of thanksgiving to God, for God assuredly has given you the throne. You were running well. Who [pg 303] then has rung an alarum in your ears, and perverted your heart like a twisted bowstring, and turned your eyes backwards? During ten years by the grace of God you went well. You never spoke of the holy images. Now you say they take the place of idols, and that those who worship them are idolaters. And you are bent on sweeping them away, and clearing the land of them. And you fear not the judgment of God in bringing scandals into the hearts of men, not of the faithful only, but of the faithless too. Christ charges you not to scandalise one of the little ones, and for a small offence to depart into everlasting fire, and you have scandalised the whole world, as if you could not endure death, nor make an evil confession. You have written that ‘we should not worship things made with hands, nor any kind of likeness, as God said, neither in heaven nor on earth; and show me, if you please, who has charged us to reverence and worship things made with hands. Then I will confess that is God's command’. And why, you that are emperor and head of Christians, did you not enquire of those who had the knowledge of experience? You might have been satisfied by them concerning what things made by hands God spoke, before stirring up, confounding, and disturbing humble people. But you thrust away, and denied, and cast out our holy fathers and teachers whom, with your own hand and in writing, you professed to obey and follow. The holy and inspired fathers and teachers are our scripture, our light and our salvation. The six Councils held in Christ have commanded us, and you do not accept their testimony. [pg 304] We are compelled to write to you in rude uncultured words, since uncultured and rude you are. But truly they carry the power and the truth of God. We entreat you in God's name to cast aside the haughtiness and pride which beset you, and gently and humbly give us your attention. May God lead you to the truth of what He has said. He was speaking of idolaters who had possession of the promised land. They worshipped animals in gold and silver and wood; they worshipped the whole creation, and all winged birds. Their cry was, ‘These are our gods and other god there is not’. It was for these devilish things, made by the hand, injurious and execrable, that God condemned their worship. For since there are things made with hands to the service and glory of God, whose will it was to introduce His own holy people of the Hebrews, as He foretold to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give them the land of promise, and to make the Israelites possessors and inheritors of the possessions of idolaters, and to crush and utterly wipe out those generations because they had polluted the land and the air by their transgressions, God warned His people beforehand not to fall into their modes of worship. He selected two men of the Israelite people, blessed and hallowed them for the execution of works wrought by the hand, but for the glory and service of God, as a memorial to those generations, Bezaleel and Eliab, of the first tribe of Dan. God said to Moses, ‘Cut out two tables of stone and bring them to Me’. He brought them, and God, with His own finger, wrote upon them the ten life-giving and immortal words. Then God said: ‘Make cherubim and seraphim, [pg 305] and a table, and cover it within and without with gold: and mark an ark of incorruptible wood, and put thy testimonies into the ark for a memorial to your generations, that is, the tablets, the urn, the rod, the manna’. Are these fashions and resemblances made by hand, or are they not? But they are for the glory and service of God. That great Moses, full of fear, in his desire to see a likeness and resemblance, not to be deceived, besought God, saying, ‘Lord, show me Thyself manifestly, that I may see Thee’. And the Lord answered, ‘If thou seest Me, thou wilt die. But pass into the hole of the rock, and thou shalt see My hind parts.’ God showed to him in a vision the mystery hidden from the beginning of the world. But in our generations, in the last days, He showed Himself to us manifestly, both His front and His hind part, entire. When God saw the race of men perishing to the end, taking pity on His own creation, He sent forth His Son, begotten before time. And, coming down from heaven, He entered the womb of the holy Virgin Mary. The true Light shone forth in her womb, and, instead of human generation, the Light became flesh. And He was baptised in the River Jordan, and us also He baptised. He began to give us pledges of knowledge, that we might not be deceived. And, entering into Jerusalem, into the Upper Chamber of holy and glorious Sion, to the mystical supper, He delivered to us His holy Body, and gave us to drink His precious Blood. There also He washed our feet; we drank with Him, and we ate with Him, and our hands felt Him, and He became our companion. [pg 306] And the Truth was manifested to us, and the error and the mist which encompassed us fled away and vanished. And their ‘voice went forth into all the world, and their words to the end of the earth’. Then men from the whole world came flying as eagles to Jerusalem, as the Lord said in the gospels, ‘wheresoever the body shall be, there shall the eagles also be gathered together’. Christ is the Body: the high flying eagles are men who worship God and love Christ. Those who saw the Lord, as they saw Him, drew His portrait. Those who saw James, the Lord's brother, as they saw him, drew his portrait. Those who saw the proto-martyr, Stephen, as they saw him, drew his portrait. In a word, those who saw the faces of the martyrs who poured forth their blood for Christ, drew them. And men in all the world, beholding, gave up the worshipping of the devil, and worshipped these not with absolute, but with relative, worship. Which of the two seems to you, O emperor, right, to worship: these images, or those of the devil's error? When Christ was present at Jerusalem, Augar, then king of the Edessenes, hearing of His wonderful works, wrote to Christ: and Christ, with His own hand, sent him an answer, and His own holy and glorious face. Send to that not made with hands, and behold it. Multitudes of eastern peoples flock thither, and worship. Many other such things not made with hands exist, which the hosts of Christian pilgrims possess, whose daily worship you overlook.[168] Why do we not examine and depict the [pg 307] Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Because we know Him not, and it is impossible to examine and depict the nature of God. Had we beheld and known Him as we did His Son, Him also we might have examined and depicted, and you might call His image, too, an idol.

“We entreat you, as brethren in Christ, enter again into the truth, which you have left. Cast aside pride, destroy your self-assurance, write to all and everywhere, raise up again those whom you have scandalised and blinded, though, insensible as you are, you hold this for nothing. The charity of Christ knows that, when we enter the church of the holy Prince of the Apostles, and behold his portrait, compunction comes on us, and, like rain from heaven, a flood of tears comes down. Christ made the blind to see; you have blinded those who saw well, and have made them stumble, little as you think of it. You have reduced men to ignorance, stopped their fair running, deprived them of their prayers. Instead of vigils, prayerfulness, and zeal to God, you have dissolved the poor population in sleepiness, slumbering, and carelessness. They have lost their head. And you say that we worship stones, and walls, and boards. Not so, O emperor. But to rouse memory and feeling, to raise up the dull, rude, and untaught mind, by their names, their invocation, their features. Not as gods, as you assert: far from it: for we do not place our hopes in these things. If it be a picture of our Lord, we say, ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, help us and save us’. If it be of His holy [pg 308] Mother, we say, ‘Holy bearer of God, Mother of the Lord, intercede with thy Son, our true God, to save our souls’. If it be of a martyr, ‘Saint Stephen, who didst shed thy blood for Christ, by thy confidence as proto-martyr, intercede for us’. So we say, in the case of every martyr who suffered martyrdom. Suchlike are the prayers which we address through them. It is not, as you assert, O emperor, that we call the martyrs gods. Put away those evil thoughts of yours. I charge you, save your own soul from the scandals and the imprecations which you receive from all the world: for even the little children make a mock of you. Go to the children's schools, and say, ‘I am he who pull down and drive away pictures’. They will answer by throwing their slates at your head: and what you have failed to learn from the wise, you will be taught by the simple.

“You write, ‘Ozias, the Jewish king, took out of the temple, after eight hundred years, the brazen serpent: so have I, after eight hundred years, expelled the idols from the churches’. Truly, Ozias was your brother, and had your self-conceit, and tyrannised over the priests of that day, just as you do. For holy David carried that serpent into the temple with the sacred ark. What was it but a brazen work consecrated by God for those who were then suffering from the bite of serpents: that an image might be shown to the people of the prime suggester of sin to the first creature formed by God, Adam and Eve, this was set up for the healing of sins. But you, as you boast, after eight hundred years, have [pg 309] cast out from the churches the blessing and consecration of the martyrs, and, as you fairly confessed at first, of set purpose and without necessity, and, lastly, by the subscription of your own hand, put upon your own head their curse.

“Now we, as holding supreme and undoubted authority from St. Peter the chief, were minded to rebuke you, but since you have brought the curse upon yourself, keep it and share it with your advisers. See to what extent you have broken in upon the edification and good course of others. The charity of Christ knows this. When we enter a church ourselves and behold the picture of our Lord Jesus Christ's wonderful deeds and of His holy Mother bearing in her arms and nursing our Lord and our God, and the angels standing round them and chanting the Holy, Holy, Holy, we do not leave that church without compunction. And, again, who is not touched with compunction and moved to tears when he beholds the baptismal vessels and the circle of priests surrounding, and the mystical supper, and the blind recovering their sight, and the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the leper and the paralytic, and the multitude reclining on the grass, the baskets and the remnants taken up, and the fragments, and the transfiguration on Mount Thabor, the Lord's crucifixion, His burial, His resurrection, His holy ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who that beholds the history of Abraham, and the knife approaching the throat of his son, is not moved to compunction and tears? In a word, all the sufferings of our Lord. It [pg 310] were better for you, emperor, if the choice were offered you, to be called a heretic than the persecutor and destroyer of the histories, the pictures, the images, the sufferings of our Lord. Yet to be called a heretic would be thy misery and thy loss. Let me tell you the difference. The heretic is said to be known, when he is known only to few. The scandals he gives are dark, the thoughts perplexed and hard to discern. Those who enforce them and are destitute of humiliation soon fall by their own ignorance and confusion of mind. Their condemnation is not so great as yours. You have openly pursued things well observed and conspicuous as light. You have stripped naked the churches of God. As the holy fathers clothed and adorned them you have left them bare and tattered. And that, too, when you had no less a pontiff than the lord Germanus, our brother and fellow priest. You should have taken his counsel as that of a father and teacher, as aged and experienced in matters both of Church and State. He is ninety-five years old: he has served one after another patriarch and emperor. He was never dispensed with, for his utility in both these services. You disregarded him and called to your side that transgressing fool the Ephesian, the son of Apsimar, and his like. For the lord Germanus and the then patriarch George, having informed and persuaded Constantine, the son of Constans, the father of Justinian, to write to us at Rome, he wrote to us under sanction of an oath, and proposed to us fitting men that there should be an ecumenical Council. ‘Nor will I,’ said he, ‘sit with them as emperor, nor speak as having control, but [pg 311] as one of them; and as the pontiffs enact I will execute. And those who hold the right we will receive, and those who hold the wrong we will cast out and banish. If my father perverted anything in the pure and blameless faith, I will be the first to lay him under anathema. For it was by the grace of God that we sent to you; and the Sixth Council was held in peace.’ O emperor, you know that the dogmas of holy church belong not to kings but to pontiffs, and require to be infallibly determined. For this reason pontiffs have been set over the churches, who abstain from secular matters, and kings equally abstain from matters of the Church and take charge of what is in their hands. The agreement of Christ-loving kings and of faithful pontiffs is one power when their administration is ruled by peace and charity.

“You have written in favour of an ecumenical Council being held. To us it seems unadvisable. You are he who prosecutes, insults and destroys the images. Give way, and grant us silence, and the world will be at peace, and scandals will cease. Suppose that we listen to you, that bishops have met together from all the world, that the Senate and Council have sat. Where is the devoted Christian emperor who is wont by custom to sit at the Council, to honour those who speak on the right side, to reject those who err from the truth, when you, the emperor, waver, and speak with the tongue of barbarians? Know you not that your attack upon the holy images is a work of contention, arrogance, and pride? At a moment when the churches of God enjoyed unbroken peace you raised up dissensions, enmities, and scandals. [pg 312] Be quiet, rest, and there is no need of a Council. Write to every one and everywhere throughout the world which you have scandalised by saying that Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and Gregory, Pope of Rome, have erred respecting the images, and we will bear you scatheless for the sin of your mistake, as having received from God authority to loose things in heaven and things on earth. God is our witness that we have presented all the letters which you have written to us to the ears and hearts of the kings of the West, pacifying them in respect of your soul, praising and magnifying you in respects of your former government. Hence they welcomed your imperial letters with the honour due from kings when they had not yet heard of your evil attack upon the images. When they heard and were assured of this, that you had sent Jovinus, your officer of the guards, to destroy the statue of our Saviour, called the Witness, by which many miracles have been worked, many women of fervent zeal, such as the ointment-sellers, were present, beseeching the guardsman not to do it. He heard them not, but planted a a ladder, and mounted it, and with three blows of his axe shivered the face of the Saviour. The women could not bear that impious act. They drew away the ladder, clubbed him, and put him to death on the spot. You, zealous for evil, sent and slew there I know not how many women, in the presence of competent witnesses from Rome, from France, from the Vandals, from Mauritania, from Gothia, and generally from all the countries comprising the interior of the West. When these [pg 313] returned each to his own land and told the story of your revolutionary and childish deeds, they tore down your laurelled letters and defaced your countenance. Lombards and Sarmatians and other peoples towards the north overran unhappy Decapolis, they took your very metropolis, Ravenna, deposed your magistrates, and appointed their own. And they are minded so to do to imperial possessions adjoining us, and to Rome, while you are not able to defend us. These are the results of senseless folly. Yet you frighten us and say ‘I will send to Rome and break in pieces the image of St. Peter, nay, and bring up in fetters their bishop Gregory, as Constans did to Martin’. And yet you should know and be assured that the pontiffs who in series sit at Rome for the sake of peace are as a middle wall and a fence to the East and to the West, the arbitrators of concord. And the emperors, your predecessors, struggled hard to maintain this peace. And if you bluster and threaten us, we have no need to fight you. Let the Bishop of Rome retreat twenty-four stades into Campania and go you, pursue the winds. Our predecessor, the pontiff Martin, sat for peace-sake exhorting. Thus it was that the evil Constans, erroneous in his belief as to the Holy Trinity, and throwing in his aid to the then heretical pontiffs, Sergius and Paul and Pyrrhus, sent and kidnapped him and tyrannously brought him up to Byzantium. After many cruelties inflicted he banished him, as he inflicted many on Maximus the monk also, and his disciple Anastasius, and banished them to Lazika. And Constans, their banisher, [pg 314] was murdered, and died in his sin. And the count, who was the chief of his household, being assured by the bishops of Sicily that he was a heretic, buried him secretly in the church, and his course was ended in his sin. But for the blessed Martin, the city in which he was banished bears witness to him, Cherson, and the Bosphorus, and all the North, and the dwellers in the North, by flocking to his tomb and receiving cures.

“May the Lord think us worthy to go the way of Martin, but for the help of the many we are willing to live, and live on. For all the West has its eyes fixed upon our humility, if we be not such, but they have a great faith in us, and upon him whose statue you threaten to destroy and sweep away, the blessed Peter, whom all the kingdoms of the West look upon as a god upon earth. And if you venture to try the truth of this, the kings of the West are ready even to avenge the easterns whom you have wronged. But, we beseech you in the Lord, turn away from these revolutionary, childish actions. You know that you are not able to defend Rome, the very head of your royalty, unless perhaps the mere city from its nearness to the sea and a fleet. As I said before, if the Pope go two miles and a half out of Rome, he fears nothing from you. One thing is our grief: savages and barbarians are civilised; you that are civilised become savage and barbarous. In full assurance of faith the whole West makes its offering to the holy Prince of the Apostles. And if you send to pull down the statue of St. Peter, look, we tell you beforehand, not on us be the bloodshed which will follow. On [pg 315] thy neck and head let it fall. We have just received an entreaty from the far West, from one called Septetus, desiring by the grace of God to see our face, that we may give him holy baptism. To avoid the reproach of neglect and slackness we are preparing for the journey.

“May God cast his fear into your heart and bring you back to the truth after the evils which you have inflicted upon the world. Let me receive your letter announcing your conversion. May the God who came down from heaven, and entered into the womb of the holy Virgin, the Mother of God, for the salvation of men, dwell in thy heart and cast out at once those who dwell in thee and have put in scandals; and may He bestow peace upon the Church of all Christians for ever and ever. Amen.”

To this letter of Pope Gregory II. to Leo the Isaurian must be added a second, written at some time between the date of the first, in 727, and the date of the Pope's death in 731. Indeed from some expressions in the second we may infer that it was sent very shortly after the first.[169]

“We have received by our legate Rufinus the letter of your God-defended Majesty and Brotherhood in Christ. Indeed it is a burden to my life that you have not changed, but persist in the same evils—not having a Christian mind, nor being a follower and imitator of our holy and glorious wonder-working fathers and teachers. Indeed, foreign teachers I do not bring into the field, but those of your own city and country. Are there [pg 316] wiser than Gregory the wonder-worker, and Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory the theologian, and Basil of Cappadocia, and John Chrysostom? not to speak of thousands upon thousands like to them of our holy fathers and teachers inspired by God. But you have rather followed your self-assurance, and the passions of your own heart, when you wrote, ‘I am priest as well as emperor’. This indeed, the emperors before you showed both in word and deed by planting and caring for the churches; in conjunction with the bishops seeking out the truth with the desire and zeal of orthodoxy. Such were the great Constantine, the great Theodosius, the great Valentinian, and Constantine the father of Justinian II., the man of the Sixth Council. Those emperors governed in the spirit of religion, assembling councils in unity of mind and purpose with the bishops, searching out truth of doctrine, and so establishing and adorning the holy churches. These are priests and emperors; they showed it by their action. But you from the time you took the empire have not kept to the end the boundaries set by the Fathers. You found the churches arrayed in embroidered robes, fringed with gold; you stripped off their ornaments and left them in nakedness. For what are our churches? Are they not things made with hands—stones, wood, straw, at best? But they were adorned by pictures and histories, portraying the wonders of the saints, the sufferings of our Lord, and of His holy and glorious Mother, and of the holy Apostles. On these histories and pictures men spend their substance.

“Fathers and mothers, bearing in their arms little children [pg 317] fresh from baptism, leading the youth and those who have come in from the heathen, point with their finger to the histories, build them up in faith, and carry their minds and their hearts aloft to God. You have deprived the poor of these things, and have plunged them into idle talk, gossip, songs, castanets, pipings, and trifling. Instead of thanksgiving and glorifying you have taught them to babble. Have your portion with the speakers of idle words.

“O emperor, listen to our humility, and cease. Follow holy Church as you found and received it. Dogmas belong not to emperors, but to bishops. It is we who have the mind of Christ. One is the discipline of the Church's commands; another, the perception of secular things. That military, ill-omened, rude mind, which you have for secular management, you cannot use for the spiritual treatment of doctrine. I point out to you the difference between palace and church, between emperors and pontiffs. Acknowledge it, and save yourself, and be not contentious. Were any one to take from you the royal robes, the purple, the diadem, the mantle, the several marks of rank, you would seem, in the sight of men, unseemly, shapeless, worthless; so you have made the churches. As you would then be, you have stripped the churches, and reduced them to tatters. For, just as the pontiff has no authority to enter the palace, and to make royal appointments, so the emperor has no authority to enter into the church, to make elections of the clergy, to consecrate and handle the symbols of the sacred mysteries, nor even [pg 318] to participate in them without the priest. Let each of us remain in the vocation wherein he was called by God. O emperor, do you see the difference between bishops and kings? If any one sins against you, O emperor, you confiscate his house, and leave him naked of all but his life, and, at last, you hang or behead him, or banish him, and make him a stranger to his children, and all his relations and friends. Pontiffs do not this. But if any one has sinned and confessed, instead of hanging and beheading, they put upon his neck the gospel and the cross, they guard him in their treasury, banish him to where the deacons and catechumens attend, put fasting on his stomach, vigil on his eyes, thanksgiving on his tongue. And when they have well disciplined and chastised him, they set before him the precious Body of the Lord, and give him to drink His holy Blood. And having restored him to be a vessel of election, cleansed from sin, they help him forward, pure and blameless, to the Lord. Emperor, do you see the difference between church and palace? Emperors who have reigned piously in Christ have neither disobeyed nor afflicted pontiffs. You, O emperor, transgressor and perverter, wrote with your own hand and subscribed, that he who removes the boundaries of the Fathers is accursed. Therein you condemned yourself, and separated the Holy Spirit from you: you punish and tyrannise over us with the soldier's arm of flesh. We, unarmed and undefended, having no earthly and carnal armies, invoke the sovereign ruler of all creation, Christ, whose seat is in [pg 319] heaven, who leads the hosts of the heavenly powers that He may send to you a demon, according to the Apostle's words, to ‘deliver over such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,’ that the spirit may be saved. See, O emperor, into what a depth of shamelessness and inhumanity you have thrust yourself. You have cast your soul into abysses and precipices, because you would not humble yourself, nor bend your stubborn neck. For, when bishops, by good instruction and teaching, are able to present kings to God blameless, and exempt from errors and faults, they lay up a store of praise and glory before Him for the great Resurrection, when God will make manifest our hidden deeds in the presence of His angels. We, the humble, will then be ashamed, not to have reclaimed you through your disobedience. The pontiffs, before us, who each, in his own time, present their emperors to God, shame our poverty, in that we do not, in our days, present an emperor in honour and glory, but one disgraced and counterfeit. Once again we invite you: repent and be converted: enter into the truth: maintain what you found and received: give honour and glory to our holy and renowned fathers and teachers, who, following God's guidance, opened the blindness of our hearts and eyes, until they recovered sight. Your letter said, ‘Why was nothing said about images in the six Councils?’ Most true, O emperor, neither was anything said about bread and water, eating or not eating, drinking or not drinking. From the very beginning these things were given for the life of man. So, too, [pg 320] were images handed down. Bishops carried them into councils. No traveller, loving Christ and God, went on a journey without pictures, as men of virtue, and in God's favour. We pray you become bishop at once, and emperor, as you wrote. If, as emperor, you are ashamed to call yourself to account, write to all the countries which you have scandalised, by saying that Gregory, the Pope of Rome, has erred in the matter of images, and also Germanus, the patriarch of Constantinople. Then we take upon ourselves the guilt of your sin, as those who have received from the Lord authority and warrant to loose and to bind things on earth and things in heaven. And we will make you without charge as to this. You refuse. We, as those who shall give account to Christ our Master, have exhorted, have instructed you, as we were taught by the Lord. You recoiled: you refused to obey us, weak as we are: and Germanus, your bishop: and our fathers, the holy and glorious wonder-workers and teachers. You followed men perverse and rotten, erring from truth of doctrine. Take your portion with them. As we wrote to you before, we, by the grace of God, are following the road to the interior of the West for those who seek baptism. I have sent thither bishops and clergy of our holy Church. Their princes have received them, and bow their heads to be illuminated. They ask for me in person to receive them. On this path, by God's grace, we are bent: that we may not be condemned for neglect.

“May God grant you understanding and repentance to return to the truth which you have deserted, and restore [pg 321] the humble populations to Christ, the One Shepherd, and to the one fold of orthodox churches and priests. And may our Lord and God grant peace to the whole world now and for ever and ever. Amen.”

These letters, which I have given entire, were written at the end of the third decade of the eighth century. They mark the breaking out of the Iconoclast persecution. They seem to me to give a complete picture not merely of the personal character in the two great factors of the time, Pope St. Gregory II. and the Isaurian emperor, Leo III., but of the power and influence of the Pope and the bishops in the spiritual life, and of the eastern ruler in the civil commonwealth. What the Pope claims, he puts forth in the most distinct language, and through all his letters it comes out that his predecessors have ever both possessed and exercised it. It is matter of simple history. Again we see incidentally from the words which he uses regarding the images and pictures, that, when he wrote, they were as much part of the Church's ritual as the prayers. To expel them from the Church was at once a complete interference with the inner life and conduct of Christians, and also had the effect to make at least in appearance the sacred places themselves synagogues and mosques, instead of habitations wherein Christ, His holy Mother and the saints had a dwelling. The conjunction of tyranny with impiety in Leo's attempt is made manifest.

Again, the relation between kings who rule the secular commonwealth, and the Pope, who, with the bishops throughout the world, presides over the one fold of Christ, [pg 322] is marked as simply and also as decisively as words can mark it. The Pope recognises in the amplest terms the temporal king as God's minister in his own domain, not a mandatory appointed by the people, who might be called to account by the people, and be deposed at its will, but the image of God, and one who administers the authority of God for the government of human society. As simply and as distinctly he mentions himself as holding, by express grant of God, power to bind and to loose things in earth and things in heaven. The king has no more power to enter the Church and touch the things of God therein than he himself has to enter the palace, and make appointments in matters of State. But there is this great difference—he has to answer for the conduct of kings in spiritual matters. Kings have to answer for how they treat him; but cannot call him to account for his administration of the divine power committed to him. In all things that concern sin the spiritual supremacy is complete. Its giver is God alone, and to God alone it is subject. This root of the spiritual power is brought out by the whole tenor of his words, in which the exact mediæval relation of the two powers is implicitly contained. The supreme minister of God in temporal things is the first son, but likewise the subject of the Church in spiritual things. In all this Pope Gregory II. in the year 727 may be said exactly to repeat what Pope Gelasius said in the year 494, both unarmed Popes speaking to emperors, lords of armies and absolute in civil power.

The relation between East and West is also very distinctly stated. The East lies crouching almost helpless beneath an unalloyed despotism, whilst all the nations of the West look up to St. Peter in Rome “as a God upon earth”. When this was written just ninety years had passed since the sepulchre of Christ had fallen into subjection to the infidel and no less anti-Christian Saracen. The pilgrims who could no longer go to the sepulchre of Christ went to the sepulchre of the fisherman, and saw in the statue of St. Peter in his own Basilica the symbol of Christ reigning. But likewise all the kings of the West looked upon the successor of St. Peter as no less seated on the throne of justice, of peace, of concord, of charity, than as the supreme oracle of the Christian faith. What the patriarch Sophronius had said of him in the agony of the holy city before the impure Omar, the nations of the West knew and felt him to be. As Leo III. threatened to destroy the statue of Peter, so they went to him for baptism, so their kings were already buried in peace beneath the shadow of the Vatican. In 716, the year before the accession of Leo III., Theodon, Duke of Bavaria, came to Rome, being the first German prince who made a pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostles, as later on in 726, the very year in which the nefarious proceedings of Leo III. began, Ina, king of Wessex, with his queen Ethelberga came and began the school of the English in Rome, and made his land tributary to the Romescot.[170] So Constantine the Bearded had acknowledged the authority which his [pg 324] successor was trying to diminish, while he sought to reduce the Christian Church, instinct with the presence, the miracles, the sufferings of our Lord, His Mother, and His Saints, to the bareness of the Jewish synagogue and the Mohammedan mosque.

It may be observed also that the Pope associates his own office with that of bishops throughout the world, especially with that of Germanus, as bishop of the imperial city. In his mind the bishops belong to the Pope, and the Pope no less to the bishops. There is no jealousy of them in his supremacy, nor of him in their subordinate jurisdiction. He censures Leo III. for not consulting his patriarch, Germanus. The authority which he so clearly describes is one and the same in the whole episcopate, where St. Gregory II. himself according to the language used three centuries before of St. Leo the Great is “princeps episcopalis coronæ”.

All these things come out not in the way of controversy but in an uncontroversial and authoritative exhortation of a Pope to an emperor. The Pope is clad in spiritual armour only in the midst of a captive province; the emperor is the master of fleets and legions behind the walls of Constantine.

No history written afterwards at a distance of time could set forth these things with so great a force as the words of a Pope issued to the chief actor in a desperate struggle at the very beginning of the conflict. The immediate result is to be noted. In the year 730 the emperor, finding that he could not make Germanus, the nonagenarian patriarch of Constantinople, further his design [pg 325] in stripping the churches of their ornament, deposed him and put a compliant instrument in his stead, Anastasius, a priest and officer of the great Church, who held the see three and twenty years to the time of Leo's son Kopronymus, with what effect and what ending will be afterwards seen. St. Gregory II. died in 731. In the four years which elapsed from the first letter to his death he was rewarded for it by the emperor Leo in five attempts to have him murdered. All these attempts were frustrated by the fidelity of those about the Pope, and by the awakened solicitude of the Italian people, who saw in Leo the most cruel and remorseless of tyrants, in Gregory not only the champion of their faith, but the defender of their temporal well-being, of every moral as well as religious liberty.[171]

The Greek chronographer, Theophanes, the main part of whose life belongs to this same eighth century, calls Pope Gregory II. “the most holy apostolic man, the assessor[172] of Supreme Peter in his chair, conspicuous in word and deed”. His resistance to the rude soldier on the eastern throne won him great praise from the subjects of that throne. The rude soldier met him only with scorn and violence, as he met the murmuring of his people. Greece itself had taken arms in defence of its violated churches. Leo, by means of the Greek fire, destroyed the fleet of the insurgent Cyclades, and punished with the utmost severity his opponents in the capital. He carried on with greater violence the attack [pg 326] on the images. In many cases it passed on to the relics. The patriarch Germanus made one more attempt to persuade the emperor. He reminded the emperor of the oath taken at his coronation to maintain the faith of the Fathers. This brought matters to an open breach. St. John of Damascus attests that “the blessed Germanus, distinguished in his life and his words, was scourged and banished”. Another Greek historian, Cedrenus, adds that the emperor called him an idolater and struck with his own hands the patriarch of ninety years, who laid upon the altar of the great church the omophorion, the symbol of his rank, and departed into exile, with the words, “If I am Jonas, cast me into the sea, but I cannot touch the faith without a General Council be held”. Germanus had sat for fifteen years; St. John Chrysostom and he the noblest who ever sat on that perilous throne. He retired to his paternal house, and did not cease his courageous struggle against the Iconoclast. He died in most extreme old age, it is supposed in 740.

The destruction of the images proceeded with brutal violence. Leo was not content with destroying them, but likewise ruined the finest works of art. The new patriarch, Anastasius, priest and syncellus of Sancta Sophia, who had played the traitor to the man in whose place the emperor had intruded him, acted with the emperor in all his violence. Bishops were persecuted as idolaters, and above all the monks, who practised painting. The schools directed by them perished almost entirely. Leo is even said to have burnt the famous library with the twelve monks and their superior who [pg 327] presided over it. The imperial edict found no execution in the East only, under Saracenic domination, where the great theologian, John of Damascus, openly opposed the Iconoclasts, as the Pope had; like whom he censured the imperial despotism in religious matters. “It belongs not to kings,” said he, “to lay down laws for the Church. The Apostle said, ‘God has placed in the Church first apostles, then prophets, thirdly, pastors and teachers for the perfection of the Church’; he did not go on to say kings. And, again, ‘Obey those set over you and be subject to them, for they watch over you, as those who will give account for your souls’. And further, ‘Remember your prelates, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering; the end of their conversation’. Not kings, but apostles and prophets, pastors and doctors spoke the word to you. When God had commanded David concerning building Him a house, He said afterwards to him, ‘Thou shalt not build Me a house, because thou art a man of blood’. The Apostle Paul cried out, ‘Tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour’. To kings belong prosperity of the body politic; the regimen of the Church to pastors and teachers. This, brethren, is the invasion of a robber. Saul rent the mantle of Samuel. What was the retribution? God rent the kingdom from him and gave it to David, the meekest of men. Jezabel persecuted Elias; swine and dogs licked up her blood, and harlots washed themselves in it. Herod slew John, and died eaten up of worms. And now the blessed Germanus, illustrious [pg 328] in life and word, has been scourged and banished with many other bishops and fathers, whose names we know not. Is not this a robber's act? ‘The Lord, when scribes and Pharisees drew near to tempt Him, that they might entangle Him in His talk, and asked Him, is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar. He answered, bring Me the coin: when they brought it He said, whose image is this? They answered, Cæsar's. And He said, Give then to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, and to God the things of God.’ We yield to you, O emperor, in the things that are secular, tribute, custom, gifts. As to these our substance is in your hands. But in the regimen of the Church we have pastors who have spoken to us the word, and have formed ecclesiastical legislation; we remove not the ancient boundaries which our fathers have set us, but we hold to the traditions as we have received them. For, if we begin to pull about in the smallest thing the structure of the Church, the whole will come to pieces bit by bit.”[173]

While Leo III. was thus violently proscribing and executing the defenders of the Church's rights in the East, St. Gregory II. at Rome censured his interference with the faith, but maintained his sovereignty as emperor in Italy. He had much ado to keep the peoples of Italy within imperial allegiance. When Anastasius, the intruded heretical patriarch of Constantinople, sent the letter announcing his succession to Gregory, the Pope rejected it. The personal acts of the emperor against his life did not move him from his settled [pg 329] purpose. The guardsman Marinus was sent as duke to Rome with orders to kill the Pope, or at least to take him prisoner. He could do nothing. A second attempt was made by the Duke Basil, in conjunction with the chartular Jordanes and the sub-deacon John. A third under the exarch Paul, who caused troops to march against Rome. Romans and Tuscans encountered them and made them retreat. Duke Basil had to save his life by taking refuge in a monastery. The Romans frustrated the further attempts of the exarch, and compelled the Pope to assume the full government of Rome, while the emperor intended to depose him and put a compliant tool in his place. Venice, Ravenna, and the five cities of the Pentapolis, under support of the Lombards, chose themselves dukes, renounced obedience to the exarch, and declared themselves for the cause of the Pope. The purpose of the Italians was to choose themselves a new emperor and advance upon Constantinople. Only the fidelity and the prudence of the Pope, who still hoped for the emperor's amendment, prevented the execution of this project.

The Lombard king, Liutprand, thought it was just the opportunity for which he was waiting to extend his monarchy in central Italy. Exhilaratus, imperial prefect at Naples, with his son Adrian, got possession of part of Campania, and set the people against the Pope; but the Romans attacked them, and after a furious battle slew them both. They chased the duke Peter from Rome. In the territory of Ravenna it came to a fierce struggle between the Italians on the Pope's side and the imperials, [pg 330] in which the exarch Paul lost his life. The Lombards took many cities, especially in the Pentapolis, and well nigh put an end to the imperial dominion there. King Liutprand advanced as far as Sutri, took it, but a hundred and forty days later bestowed it upon the Apostles Peter and Paul, that is, the Roman Church. This was in the year 727. It is reckoned by some the first beginning of the State of the Church.[174]

Then it lay in the hand of the Pope to put an end to Byzantine dominion in central Italy. The exarchate was in Liutprand's possession. Had Gregory II. come to terms with him, the Pope would have obtained a free hand over the duchy of Rome. It already refused tribute to the emperor; in arms repulsed his troops, frustrated the repeated attempts upon the freedom and life of Gregory II., and bound itself under oath to protect him. The city of Rome expelled the imperial duke, and seems to have given itself a municipal government. It was the desire of the cities on the Adriatic to substitute an orthodox for an heretical emperor. Had the Pope put himself at the head of this revolt, the emperor's power was at an end. He did it not. He maintained the purity and the freedom of the faith against imperial interference; but he urged the population to continue their allegiance to the sovereign. No stronger proof of this can be given than a letter of the Pope to Ursus, doge of Venice, in these words: “Gregory, the bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Ursus, duke of Venice. Since by sinful [pg 331] action the city of Ravenna, the head of all, has been captured by that unutterable race of Lombards, and our son, the noble lord the exarch, is, as we know, sojourning at Venice, your nobility should support him, and maintain his cause, as we do, that the city of Ravenna may return to the former condition of the sacred commonwealth, as belonging to the domain of our lords and sons, the high emperors Leo and Constantine. So by the help of the Lord we may be able to remain firm, by zeal and love to our holy faith, in the commonwealth and the imperial service. God preserve you in safety, beloved son.”[175]

This conduct could not fail to endanger the Pope's position with king Liutprand. In the year 728 the strangest scene of this perplexed time took place. The Lombard king appeared with his host before Rome. Pope Gregory II. visited him in his camp, and exercised such influence over him that the king desisted from the siege, went as pilgrim to the Apostle's tomb, and left as gifts there his crown, his arms, and his mantle.

Such events as these fill up the last four years of Gregory II. The result was what we might expect. Lord of Rome the emperor was called; Pope Gregory II. became in fact a glorious beginning of the papal rule. Not reckless force, not ambitious struggle and self-seeking formed the basis of this rule, but the free voice of the population in return for real protection, for duty steadfastly fulfilled, for never-failing courage, firm belief, and holy life. Put on the one hand the struggles, the [pg 332] fierce enmities, the treacheries, the revolts, the scenes of blood, the shifting of parties evoked by the Iconoclast storm in Italy and Rome, threatened by the two antagonists, Greeks and Lombards; and on the other hand the great activity of Pope Gregory II. in his own spiritual domain. And then estimate the Pope who repulsed Leo III. in his attack upon the Church's indefeasible rights, but maintained him as emperor; who fostered St. Boniface, enabling him by erecting a united hierarchy to lay the foundation of a Germany, one and Christian. We may fairly place the second Gregory by the side of the first for prudence, for courage, for insight, for the sagacity of a ruler in the person of a saint. The great annalist has even said of him, “If what he wrote were extant, and what he did had been more carefully recorded, he would be thought no less than Gregory the Great”.[176]

On the 11th February, 731, St. Gregory II. closed a pontificate as renowned in its present action, as fruitful in its results. While the clergy and laity stood beside his coffin, they chose his successor, who was consecrated thirty-five days later, when the consent of the exarch was brought from Ravenna, this being the last time it was given by a viceroy of the Greek emperor.[177]

Concerning this Pope, Anastasius writes:—“Gregory III., a Syrian by nation, son of John. He sat ten years, two months, and twenty days. A man most meek and most wise, well instructed in the holy Scriptures, knowing both the Greek and Latin tongues. He [pg 333] knew all the psalms by heart, in their order, and was exceedingly skilful in their meaning by his long study of them. He was a polished speaker, an exhorter to all good works, a favourite popular preacher, a maintainer of the Catholic and Apostolic faith immutilate, who, by his fatherly warnings, ceased not to strengthen the hearts of the faithful, a fearless and zealous defender of orthodoxy: a lover of poverty, providing solicitously for those in want, not only with piety, but with careful pains. Redeemer of captives, generous supporter of orphans and widows: a lover of the religious life, so, by God's help, he reached the sacred order of the priesthood. Upon him the Romans, moved from the highest to the lowest by an inspiration from heaven, while he was absorbed in devotion beside the coffin of his predecessor, suddenly laid their hands and chose him for pontiff. It was in the times of the emperors Leo and Constantine, in the midst of that persecution which they set up, for the casting down and destruction of the sacred images of our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Mother of God, of the apostles, and all saints and confessors. The same most holy man issued writings with the vigour of the Apostolic See, like as his predecessor of holy memory had done, to move them to repentance, and to put away this error.”

Anastasius then records how the emperor had imprisoned his messenger in Sicily. “Whereupon the pontiff, with greater zeal, attended by the archbishops of Grado and Ravenna, with other bishops of the [pg 334] western part, to the number of ninety-three, held a Council at the sacred confession of St. Peter's most holy body, with all the clergy and the people, and passed a decree, that if henceforth there be any who, despising those who faithfully retain the ancient usage of the Apostolic Church, pull down, destroy, profane, or blaspheme the veneration of the Sacred Images, that is, of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, of His Ever-Virgin Mother, the immaculate and glorious Mary, of the blessed apostles, and of all saints, he be debarred from the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, from the unity and structure of the whole Church. This they all solemnly confirmed with their subscriptions.”[178]

While the emperor replied to the Council's decree by imprisoning the papal bearer of it for a year in Sicily, the position of Pope Gregory III. was one of great difficulty in respect to the Lombard duchies of Benevento and Spoleto. They desired to be set free from their loose connection with King Liutprand, who, on his part, desired their complete subordination to himself. To the Pope their maintenance was of great importance. Thence arose a web of party-shiftings, treaties, and counter treaties, which encompasses the whole later history of the Lombard kingdom.

The archbishop of Ravenna had taken part in the Council at Rome, and his city was as much opposed to the emperor's godless attempts as was Rome. Leo III. resolved to be avenged upon the Pope and Italy. He put a great fleet under the command of the Duke [pg 335] Manes, and ordered him to sack Ravenna, to treat the cities of the Pentapolis as rebels, to march on Rome, to destroy the images there, to treat without mercy those who attempted to defend them, to seize the Pope, and bring him in fetters to Constantinople. But storms deranged these plans. A hurricane fell upon the fleet as it was in sight of Ravenna. Part of it was sunk with all the crews: part managed to reach an arm of the Po, close to the city. Manes disembarked troops from it, and went against Ravenna. The people took arms, with the bishop at their head: whilst the women and old men went in sackcloth and ashes through the streets in supplication; the young marched out against the enemy, and drew him into an ambuscade. The Greeks flew to their ships, many of which were sunk, and the 26th June, 733, was kept as a perpetual festival in Ravenna: while, for six years out of hatred to the Greeks the conquerors would eat no fish from that arm of the river.

Leo became furious at this reverse: he redoubled his cruelty on the defenders of images, and since he could hurt the Roman Church in no other way, he confiscated all the possessions of the Church in his realm. In the words of Theophanes,[179] “That opponent of God, roused to a greater madness, and indulging further in his Arabian mind, imposed capitation taxes on the third part of Calabria and Sicily. Moreover, he ordered to [pg 336] be paid to the public treasury the so-named patrimonies of the holy chief apostles honoured at Rome, three golden talents and a-half, which had been paid of old to the churches, and he subjected to inspection and enrolment the male children, as Pharaoh did of old to the Hebrews: what not even his teachers, the Arabs, had done to the Christians in the East.”

But he did a great deal more and a worse thing not noted by Theophanes. By an arbitrary act of secular despotism he severed from the jurisdiction of the Roman patriarch not only Calabria and Sicily, but the ten Illyrian provinces, Epirus, Illyricum, Macedonia, Thessaly, Achaia—that is present Greece—Dacia, Mæsia, Dardania, Prævalis, and attached them to the patriarchate of Constantinople. By this act its jurisdiction became co-extensive with the eastern empire, and the patriarch ecumenical in that sense of the Greek word which considered their own empire as pre-eminently the world, the land that is inhabited by men, as contra-distinguished from the land foraged by barbarians.

The patriarch to whom this honour accrued was that Anastasius who had been put by force into the place of the deposed Germanus, and was afterwards scourged and deposed by the same force under Leo's son and successor, Kopronymus.

Calabria and Sicily returned to the jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch when the eastern emperor lost his dominion in them. The other provinces remained under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the gift of an heretical emperor to a patriarch raised by him as his instrument [pg 337] to the ecumenical throne and at last deposed by his son as an instrument of little value.

In this act we see the completion of the aggression begun in the year 381, which attempted to give to the see of Constantinople the second rank in the Church. The sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem have sunk under it, but they have fallen into Saracen domination, and are little more than names; the diminished empire has in its capital the only real patriarch, and seeks to indemnify him for eastern losses by severing ten provinces from the patriarchal jurisdiction of Rome, under which they had been from the beginning of the Christian hierarchy. And Nova Roma, halved it is true in its secular extension, and trembling at the perpetual aggression of the Mohammedan chalif, beholds at length its patriarch standing over against the elder Rome as the chief instrument of imperial despotism in spiritual things.

Leo III. consciously completes the structure which Theodosius unwittingly began. The exaltation of the see of the capital is from beginning to end the work of imperial power, and this special character bears out to the full the denunciation of it by St. Gregory the Great in his own time, when he called the bishop's assumed title “a name of blasphemy and diabolical pride, and a forerunner of anti-Christ”.[180]

Further, the acts of Leo III. in 733 are unanimously viewed by historians as having a large effect in the deliverance of Italy from the eastern sovereignty, and [pg 338] his arrogation of the power to sever from the Pope, patriarch, a large extent of provinces is viewed no less as a prelude to the great schism between the East and West. The remaining years of Gregory III. are filled up with his embarrassing position between the Lombard duchies of Benevento and Spoleto and Liutprand aiming at uniting Italy in a Lombard monarchy, whereby the Pope should become his subject as before he had been a subject of the Goths. From the moment when king Liutprand resumed more decidedly his plan against the Greek possessions and therefore against the duchy of Rome, he was bound to endeavour to end the independence of the two outlying Lombard duchies. But at the same time the alliance between these duchies and the papacy became a political necessity.

In the year 738 Liutprand took the field. He began with incursions into the territory of Ravenna, and invited the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento to attack the duchy of Rome. They refused, since, as Pope Gregory III. in one of his letters informs us, they had declared that they would not take the field against God's holy Church and her people, with whom they had entered into covenant. Thereupon the king made war against his disobedient liegemen. While he laid waste the possessions of the Church in the territory of Ravenna, he sat down before Spoleto in the spring of 739 with a considerable force. Duke Thrasimund could not resist and fled to Rome. In June the king entered Spoleto. He compelled Benevento to receive his nephew Gregory for duke. At the same time he drew the exarch to his [pg 339] interest, to whom the Pope's independence had long been odious. The confused accounts of annalists and historians make it difficult, if not impossible, to establish particular events in chronological accuracy. And the greatest uncertainty lies upon one of these events which is of particular importance, since it would secure for us an adequate reason for the Pope's conduct. Liutprand is said immediately after the taking of Spoleto to have appeared before Rome, demanding that the fugitive duke should be delivered up to him. Encamped in the meadows of Nero, beside the Vatican, he plundered St. Peter's, laid waste the neighbourhood, and made many Romans prisoners. It is certain that he took four cities in the Tuscan part of the Roman duchy, Amelia, Ortes, Bomarzo, and Bleda, as hostages for Duke Thrasimund.

The Pope was in the utmost danger of being speedily swallowed up by the encircling Lombard monarchy. Another siege of Rome, perhaps its capture, was to be immediately expected. The Lombard duchies were unable to repulse the Lombard king: for defence the emperor was impotent. He could send a fleet to ravage the imperial metropolis of Italy; he could not defend the ancient mistress and maker of his empire: from whom he still took a title, which seemed a mockery. The Lombard threatened to dethrone Leo and make the Pope his subject. The dread of sacrificing the Church's independence drove St. Gregory III. to the last and sole remaining refuge.

The relations[181] of the Franks to Rome had been [pg 340] various since the emperor Maximian had received the Salian Franks into the number of Rome's allies. After the victory over Syagrius, near Soissons, Clovis had raised up the Gallic-Frankish kingdom upon the ruins of Roman and Visigoth dominion. When baptised by St. Remigius, Clovis had become the first Catholic king in the midst of northern peoples attached to Arianism. This had brought him into manifold connection with the Holy See. In the time of Pope Gregory II., the conversion to the faith of Germany, from the Rhine as far as Saxony and Thuringia, not only relied for support, but had its root in the Frankish kingdom, and bound it still closer with the Papacy. There were also connections of another sort. As far back as the year 577, the emperor Justin II., conscious of his own impotence, had given to the messenger from Rome, soliciting help against Lombard aggression, for answer, either to seek to gain one of the Lombard dukes, or, if that failed, to draw the Franks to make a diversion by an expedition into Italy. The emperor Mauritius had himself made use of these means. From the year 584, king Childebert had been induced, by Byzantine invitation and gold, to undertake four campaigns against the Lombards. But it was reserved to a stronger family than his to co-operate in producing a great change south of the Alps. At the head of a people formed by the conjunction of various races amalgamated out of Germans, Gauls, and Romans, there grew up, in spite of sundry partial divisions, the mass of a mighty monarchy, north of the Alps. The weakness of the [pg 341] larger number of the kings who succeeded Clovis caused the chief officers of the crown to increase in strength. The lower the Merovingians sank, the higher rose the sons of Pipin, from the banks of the Meuse, until they equalled and outgrew the effete race. By the end of the first quarter of the eighth century, Charles Martell, Major Domus, first of the Austrasian, and then of the Neustrian-Frankish realm, had all power in his hands. In October, 732, he had won a greater merit from all the West than, perhaps, even Aetius and the Visigoth kings had gained. They had repulsed the vast Mongol mass at Chalons: he, by Tours, in a bloody battle, had set bounds for ever to the advance of the Arabians, overflooding Gaul after the conquest of Spain. He threw them back upon the uttermost south of Gaul, from which, after many a battle, they were forced to recross the Pyrenees.

To Charles Martell, shining in the lustre of that great victory which saved the West from Mohammed, as Leo III. prevented his entrance into Constantinople, the beleagured Pope turned from the cruel yet impotent tyranny of Leo, and the pretension of the encroaching Lombard. And his own words, at the moment of trial, will better express his situation than any others which can be put in his mouth:—[182]

“We have thought it necessary to write again to your Excellency for the excessive grief which is in our heart, and for our tears, confiding that you are a loving son of St. Peter, prince of the apostles, and ours also, [pg 342] and that from reverence to him you will listen to our charge for the defence of God's Church, and his own peculiar people: we, who can no longer endure the persecution and oppression of the Lombard race. They have taken from us all the lights in St. Peter's Church, which were given by your relations or yourself. Next to God, we take refuge in you: for this the Lombards oppress and make a mock of us. St. Peter's Church is stripped, and reduced to utter desolation. But we have rather confided the details of our sorrows to your liegeman, the bearer of this, which he may present by word of mouth. O my son, may the Prince of the Apostles deal with thee now and in the future life before our Almighty God, as thou disposest and contendest with all speed for his Church and our defence, that all nations may know your fidelity, your pure intention, the love which you bear to the Prince of the Apostles, to us, and to his peculiar people, by your zeal and your defence of us. And by it you will also gain eternal life.”

Either with this letter, or before it, the Pope had sent to Charles Martell the keys of St. Peter's Confession, together with rich presents. His messengers were received with great honour, but no actual help in soldiers came. It is supposed that Charles Martell was then engaged, together with Eudo, Duke of Aquitania, in expelling the Saracens from Southern France.

The acts of Leo III., as an open enemy of the Pope's spiritual power, by his completion of the Byzantine patriarch's usurped jurisdiction in the year 733, as [pg 343] above described, thus precede, by about five years, the appeal made to Charles Martell, by Gregory III., in the face of the advancing Lombard king, Liutprand, on the one hand, and the absence of any protection by the emperor on the other.

Such was the uncertain position of things when, in the year 741, the three great actors were withdrawn from this life, Leo III., on the 18th June, Charles Martell, on the 24th October, Gregory III., on the 27th November.

Of what this most noble Pope did for Rome, Anastasius gives a long account. If the Romans loved and admired him as a cardinal priest, they loved and admired him no less as Pontiff to the end. While fully acknowledging still the sovereignty of the eastern emperor, a man as unworthy of the loyalty which bound the Pope to him, as a sovereign could be, the Pope neither by his heresy nor by his tyranny was induced to renounce him. He did, indeed, one great and momentous act. He sent to Charles Martell the keys of St. Peter's Confession, conjuring him in the name and person of the Apostle, to save his city from the Lombard robber: the city which its sovereign was neither able nor willing to save: the city on which the robber was descending with the utmost force. It is supposed that Charles Martell was engaged in battle with the Saracens in Southern France at the time. The Pope sent a second time, to the great leader, the Hammer of the infidel, the Liberator of the Christian. What took place is not exactly known: but the Lombard king, Liutprand, retired [pg 344] in the month of August, 739, from the siege of Rome with his army to Pavia, and helped Charles Martell against the Saracens, who had again invaded Provence. Then also Rome was saved by her pontiff from becoming a Lombard prey.

Once more towards the end of 741, Liutprand was preparing a new expedition against Rome and its duchy, when Rome lost, on the 27th November, St. Gregory III., its pontiff, prince, and champion. At Constantinople, Leo III. had been succeeded by his son, Kopronymus, whom the Greek Zonaras calls, “a cub more cruel than his sire”. Rome seemed covered by a terrible tempest: France had been deprived not a month before of Charles Martell. All minds were in fearful expectation, when a star of peace appeared on the horizon. There rose up one who, by the force of his mind and the unsparing risk of his own person, was to preserve Italy during ten years from the destruction which seemed impending.

Upon the death of Pope Gregory III., the Roman chair was filled in four days. The usual three days having been devoted to the solemn funeral of that Pope, the electors, on the fourth day, which was Sunday, the 2nd December, met in the Lateran palace, and immediately united their votes on the person of Zacharias, and he was consecrated the same day. Two things combined to bring about this rapid election and ordination, one the extraordinary merit of the elected, the other the extreme urgency of the public need, as Rome, with its provinces, was threatened by King [pg 345] Liutprand. The confirmation by the exarch, that token of imperial oppression, was not waited for. Zacharias was the last of those illustrious orientals of whom a series at this time occupied the Roman Chair. Though born in Italy, being a native of the Calabrian city, St. Severina, he was Greek by lineage. Of him and of his predecessor, Photius himself, the leader of the Greek schism, has left written, “How could I pass over in silence the two Roman prelates, Gregory and Zacharias, who were eminent for their virtue, who contributed to increase the flock of Christ by their teaching full of divine wisdom, who were even conspicuous by the divine gift of miracles?” Of Zacharias, the character given by Anastasius is, “a man most meek and gentle, adorned with every goodness, a lover of the clergy and all the Roman people, slow to anger and quick to mercy, rendering to no man evil for evil, nor punishing according to desert, but from the time of his ordination made kind and tender to all: so that he returned good for evil to his former persecutors, both promoting and enriching them”. During ten years, Zacharias, by his wisdom and personal influence, kept at bay the three Lombard kings, Liutprand, Rachis, and Aistulf, who seemed on the point of completing the long-fostered ambition of their people by the absorption of Rome into a barbarian kingdom. The whole time is a contest of mind against matter, of right against encroachment. We learn, by the very words of these Popes, that even in the eighth century the radical opposition between Romans and Lombards continued [pg 346] still as in the time of the first invasion under Alboin. The end of the Lombards was to make themselves lords of all Italy: that of the Romans, to prevent themselves passing under a barbarian yoke. True peace there could never be between them. A truce, liable at any time to be broken, was all that could subsist.

Three times at least in the ten years of his pontificate, Zacharias repeated, with Lombard kings, the action of his great predecessor, Leo, with Attila. Liutprand, after thirty years of reign, was consolidating his kingdom by the reduction of the two Lombard dukedoms, Spoleto and Benevento. Bent upon gaining Rome, when he had subdued Spoleto, free from the check of Charles Martell, secure of the East by the contested succession to Leo of his son, Kopronymus, Liutprand was at Terni. Thither Pope Zacharias resolved to go in person, accompanied by a train of clergy. Liutprand received the Pope with great honour, and the result of a long interview was that he agreed to restore to the Pope four cities of the Roman duchy which he had taken. He likewise gave back the patrimony of Sabina, which he had seized thirty years before, and made peace with the Roman duchy for twenty years. The Pope returned as it were in triumph to Rome, was received with exultation, and ordered a procession of thanksgiving from the Church of St. Mary of the Martyrs, that is, the Pantheon, to St. Peter's. This was in his first year, 742.

But the next year, 743, Liutprand broke out against [pg 347] the exarchate: and Eutychius, the exarch, with the archbishop of Ravenna, and the other cities of Emilia and the Pentapolis, had no better resource than to beseech the Pope to succour them. The Pope, accepting the request, sent two legates to the king with gifts, beseeching him to cease hostility with the Ravennese. But they accomplished nothing.

Then the Pope left Rome to the government of the Duke Stephen, and, with his train of clergy, went in person to Ravenna. The archbishop met him fifty miles from the city. The people welcomed him with cries, “to the shepherd who left his own sheep to deliver us who were about to perish”. But the Pope insisted upon going on to Pavia itself, in spite of the objections of king Liutprand to receive him. Disregarding every risk, he reached the Po on the 28th June, where he met the Lombard nobles sent to attend him; and, on the 20th, he celebrated Mass on the feast of the chief Apostle in the church of St. Peter, called the Golden Ceiling, wherein was the shrine of St. Augustine: whose body Liutprand himself had brought from Sardinia.

King Liutprand then received the Pope with great honour in his palace. The Pope pressed him not to attack the province of Ravenna, but to restore its cities. The king, after great resistance, consented to leave the province of Ravenna as it was before. The king then accompanied the Pope to the river, and sent his chief captains with him on his return, who restored the territories of Ravenna, and the castle of Cesena.

So the Pope disarmed a second time the most powerful of the Lombard kings, and saved the exarchate for the empire. From that time Liutprand lived in peace with the Romans and the Ravennese. He did not live to receive the report of the ambassadors whom he had sent to Constantinople to inform the emperor of the peace thus given to Ravenna. He closed in the next year, 744, his reign of thirty-two years, the longest in the Lombard series, and that in which the Lombard kingdom most developed its power. It must be confessed that the power of religion was great over the mind of Liutprand. He reverenced Pope Gregory II. under the walls of Rome: he listened to the voice of Pope Zacharias in the interviews of Terni and Pavia. At the bidding of the Vicar of Christ, he more than once stopped himself in the middle of his victories, and renounced the greatest desire of his heart.

Hildebrand, Liutprand's co-regent, and successor, maintained himself only a few months, and had to resign the crown before the end of the year 744 to Rachis, duke of Friuli. A good understanding seemed to be established with the Pope under a king renowned for piety, married to a Roman, who made rich offerings to the Church. Peace was assured with the Roman duchy. But after a few years Rachis also was in conflict with the exarchate. In 749 a new war burst out in central Italy. The king of the Lombards came in great wrath and with a valiant army to besiege Perugia. Then once more Pope Zacharias appeared. Attended by some clergy and chief people of Rome he went to the [pg 349] camp at Perugia. His gifts and his prayers so prevailed with King Rachis that he consented to raise the siege of the city and return in peace to Pavia. But the king had been so moved by the words of Pope Zacharias that after a few days he resigned his kingdom. With his queen Tassia and his daughter Ratruda he came like a pilgrim to Rome to venerate the tomb of St. Peter and to ask admission among the clergy. The Pope cut off the long hair of the Lombard king, gave him with his own hands the clerical tonsure, and vested him, as well as his wife and daughter, in the habit of St. Benedict. He retired, by the Pope's suggestion, to Monte Cassino, which had been restored by the abbot Petronax from its ruin towards the end of the sixth century. With him also retired the prince Carloman, younger brother of King Pipin, and a Benedictine as well as Rachis. Pope Zacharias greatly loved that monastery, enriched it with gifts and books, and exempted it from all episcopal jurisdiction, subjecting it immediately to the Holy See.

The three pacific victories gained by Pope Zacharias, twice over King Liutprand and once over King Rachis, victories due to the dignity of the Vicar of Christ and his Christian virtues, had raised to the highest point the estimation of the Romans for the Holy See. Is it possible to conceive a greater contrast that that presented by Leo III. and his son Kopronymus on the one hand, and the three pontiffs, the second and third Gregories and Zacharias, on the other; or between the governments of the blinding, scourging, maiming, and torturing sovereigns of the East, and the pastors ruling with beneficence and risking [pg 350] their lives for their flock in the West? Thus had the Popes become the protectors of desolated Italy; therefore had the Kings Liutprand and Rachis offered their royal mantles at the shrine of St. Peter. We are come now to the last and crowning incidents of this contrast.

On the resignation of Rachis the true Lombard spirit had raised his brother Aistulf to the throne. In June, 749, he was elected at Milan. Almost immediately thereupon a series of regulations showed that other political principles than those of Rachis had obtained the mastery. The presents made by the last king after his abdication were declared invalid; commerce with the Romans forbidden. The fortresses in the Alpine passes were strengthened. The army was put on a new footing. Presently Aistulf marched upon the exarchate. In July, 751, he was in Ravenna. Every imperial possession in the northern and midland Adriatic provinces fell into his power. Only Rome then was wanting to Aistulf's ambition. Hitherto no barbarian had been able to fix his seat there. His dreams were to reach all the power of the ancient emperors in Italy, and so verify the proud title of “king of all Italy” which a hundred and fifty years before Agilulf had inscribed upon his crown. He named his palace at Pavia “the palace of Italy,” and an inscription has been found, “Aistulf, in the name of Christ, by God's will Imperator Augustus, in the fourth year of his reign”.[183]

No help came from Byzantium, where the emperor [pg 351] Constantine Kopronymus, after putting down a pretender to his throne, was only occupied with Iconoclast troubles. For a long time no opposition was perceived; when the last exarch fell into the Lombard king's power Rome seemed to be the sure prey of him who had won Ravenna.

At that moment when the last authority of the empire threatened to disappear a new bond was knitted between Rome and the West as token of the world's changed situation. Pipin, son of Charles Martell, on the point of taking the idle sceptre from the hand of the last phantom-king of Merovingian race, turned to Pope Zacharias with the request that he would approve this great change. This is one principal mark of the immense moral power wielded by the Pope in the middle of the eighth century that the mayor of the palace in the Frankish empire sought his sanction to change his deputed into immediate royal authority. The Pope thus called upon exercised his supreme judgment in this highest secular matter. He decided that it was lawful for him who fulfilled the royal duty to be king rather than for him who only bore the name. In these words he deposed the Merovingian and recognised the Carlovingian dynasty, and the nobles of the Franks assembled in diet accepted his judgment. Pipin was proclaimed king of the Franks in 752 on the field of Mars at Soissons. Some but not all accounts say that St. Boniface, at the head of the German episcopate, three years before his martyrdom, gave the Church's sanction to the political act, in accordance with the judgment of the Pope.

This momentous judgment of Pope Zacharias, given at the end of 751, was one of his last acts. He died on the 14th March, 752. The last words of Anastasius respecting him are an epitome of his life and character. Having recorded his general deeds of kindness and munificence, he adds:—“Embracing and fostering all as a father and good shepherd, and absolutely allowing none to suffer tribulation in his times, the people entrusted to him by God lived in great security”.

At once clergy and people proceeded to a new choice, but the Stephen whom they chose lived but three days, and died before consecration. “Then,” says Anastasius, “the whole people of God met in the basilica of St. Mary at the Crib, and beseeching the mercy of our Lord God, and with the good will of our Lady, the holy ever-virgin Mary, Mother of God, they elected, with one mind, another Stephen, a man preserving the tradition of the Church with inviolable constancy, swift to help the poor, a firm preacher, a most valiant defender of the fold in the strength of God.” Immediately a great persecution against the city of Rome and its adjoining cities broke out from the savage king Aistulf. Three months after his consecration, the Pope sent two legates, his brother, Paul, and another, with large gifts to move the Lombard king to a treaty of peace. The king made a peace for forty years, but in four months, treading oath and treaty under foot, he pretended that the city of Rome, with all its province, was subject to him, and that all the inhabitants should pay him yearly a capitation tax of a gold solidus. The Pope sent to [pg 353] him two fresh legates, whom the king received, but refused all conditions, and ordered them to return to their monasteries without seeing the Pope.

At the end of this year, an imperial legate came to Rome with two sacred letters[184] from the emperor, one for the Pope, the other for Aistulf. In it he asked the Lombard king to restore the lands of the Commonwealth, unjustly taken by him. The Pope immediately sent on his brother, Paul, with the imperial Silentiarius, to Aistulf at Ravenna. The king scorned to listen either to emperor or Pope, but he added a messenger of his own, to go to Constantinople, and make some proposition to the emperor. The two legates, John the Silentiarius, and Paul, the deacon, returned to Rome, and reported to the Pope that they could do nothing. Then the Pope, convinced of the evil purpose of the king, sent to the imperial city his own messengers, in company with John the Silentiarius, “beseeching the imperial clemency that, as he had already often written to him, he would come with an army to defend by every means all this part of Italy, and would deliver this city of Rome and the whole Italian province from the fangs of the son of iniquity”.[185]

In the meantime, “that most atrocious king of the Lombards burst into fury, threatening that he would slay all the Romans with one sword if they did not submit to his sovereignty”. The Holy Father called [pg 354] all the Roman people together, and walked in procession with them with naked feet, hearing in his arms the image of our Lord still venerated in the chapel sancta sanctorum. This he carried from the Lateran Church to Santa Maria Maggiore, the clergy and people chanting litanies and intercessions; and Aistulf's broken treaty of peace was affixed to a lofty cross, and formed part of the procession.

This legation from Pope Stephen II. took place in the year 753. The emperor Constantino Kopronymus was not the man to save Italy from the Lombards. To the repeated requests of the Pope he sent no other help than imperial letters, charging him to induce Aistulf to restore the provinces he had taken from the empire, and to Aistulf in the same sense, calling him to undo his diabolical aggression.

The emperor also left the Pope free to unite himself with any one who could defend him. It was a natural right in such a case: but the imperial sanction made it more easy of success.

“Then,” says Anastasius,[186] “the most holy man having, in vain, sought, by innumerable presents, to conciliate that pestilent king for the flocks committed to him by God, that is, for the whole army at Ravenna and all the people of that province of Italy, of which he was in possession, and seeing especially that there was no help from the imperial power, as his predecessors of blessed memory, the second and third Gregories and Zacharias, begged help from the king of the Franks [pg 355] against the oppressions and invasions which they had suffered in this Roman province from the abominable Lombard race; so he in like manner, by the inspiration of divine grace, sent in his deep sorrow a letter by a foreign hand to Pipin, king of the Franks.” Thus from 726, the beginning of the Iconoclastic heresy and tyranny of the emperors Leo III. and Kopronymus, the Popes acknowledged the Byzantine sovereignty until in 753 the direct attack of the Lombard king Aistulf upon Rome, and the attempt to make himself sovereign of the Popes of Rome and of the territory called its duchy, together with the impotence of the Byzantine emperor to defend his own subjects, and the Pope himself vainly entreating succour from him, compelled Stephen II. “to turn his thoughts from the East to the West”.[187]

While the Lombards were pressing Rome and all its fortified places, Pipin replied to Stephen's entreaty for succour by sending the Bishop of Metz and the Duke Autchar to accompany him in his journey to France. “Then the same most blessed Pope, trusting in the mercy of our almighty God, went out of this city of Rome to St. Peter's on the 14th October, and many Romans followed him and people of the neighbouring cities, and weeping and crying, they would hardly let him go on. But he, trusting in the strength of God and the protection of the holy Mother of God and the chief apostles for the safety of all, weak as he was in body, began that laborious journey, commending all the Lord's flock to Peter, our Lord, the good shepherd and blessed [pg 356] Prince of the Apostles.” As he drew near to Pavia that most wicked king Aistulf sent him messengers, ordering that he should on no account ask for the restoration of Ravenna and its exarchate or the other places of the commonwealth which Aistulf or his predecessors had invaded. The Pope replied that nothing should induce him not to ask it. When he reached Pavia and was received by the king he made him many presents, and ceased not with many tears to ask him for the restitution of what he had taken. He could obtain nothing. The Frank legates pressed that he might be allowed to go on to France. The king asked the Pope if he desired it. The Pope avowed it, and the king gnashed his teeth, and sent his satellites repeatedly in secret to turn him from it. The Frank legates at last succeeded in obtaining permission for him to go forward.

On the 15th November, attended by the bishop of Ostia and a large train of clergy, he left Pavia, and continued his journey. He reached the valley of the Rhone by Aosta and the Mons Jovis, where about two hundred years later Bernard of Menthon founded the monastery which has given its new name to the mountain, and he rested at length at the abbey of St. Maurice, now one of the oldest existing monasteries.[188]

Stephen II. was the first Pope who crossed the Alps. The few Popes who had up to that time travelled outside Italy had been banished, as St. Clement by Trajan to the Crimea, or St. Liberius confined by Constantius I. at Berea in Thrace, or St. Silverius banished by [pg 357] Belisarius to Patara; St. John I., St. Agapetus, and Vigilius had by royal orders gone to Constantinople. St. Martin had been taken thither a prisoner by Constans II., and Pope Constantine, ordered by Justinian II. to go thither, had been courteously received by him.

Now at the call of duty, but with his own free consent, Stephen II. crossed the Alps and took refuge in France, to consolidate an alliance with the most potent kingdom of the West, full of importance for that Christendom which the see of St. Peter, and that alone, was creating. As the eastern emperor had nothing for him but to impose heresy and execute tyranny, the king of the Franks, hearing news of his approach, sent a splendid train under his eldest son Charles to convoy him. That was a memorable day when Stephen and Pipin met at the royal villa of Pontigny, near Chalons, on the Marne, not far from the field of battle where Attila three hundred years before failed to make Europe a Mongol empire. Now the union of Stephen and Pipin saved it from a Mohammedan enthralment.

The long-suffering loyalty of so many Popes was at length exhausted. The deliverance of the Holy See and their flock from the intolerable Lombard yoke, a usurpation both upon their natural right and their divine commission to rule the people of God, combined with their desertion by the eastern emperor, whom, in despite of the most inhuman government during two hundred years ever practised by men called Christian, they had acknowledged and maintained, led Stephen II. to inaugurate [pg 358] a new political order of things. His request, accompanied with many tears, to Aistulf at Pavia to restore to “the commonwealth” of the empire the exarchate and to forbear grasping Rome, a request which the Lombard cast away in scorn, led the Pope, feeble as he was, to risk all the dangers of the Alpine passes, as well as to seek in France, where alone it could be found, an arm strong enough to save Italy both from Lombard and from Byzantine.

The king of the Franks, besides his eldest son Charles, had sent Fulrad the abbot and Rothard the duke to conduct the Pope from the monastery of St. Maurice, whom they brought with all his retinue to the king with great honour. “When,” says Anastasius, “the king heard of the most blessed pontiff's approach he hastened to meet him with his wife, his sons, and his chief men. Advancing three miles from his palace called Pontigny, he dismounted from his horse, and with great humility threw himself on the earth, together with his wife, his children, and his chieftains, and so received the Pope. He also walked for some space to a certain spot guiding the Pope's horse.” Then the papal train went on together with the king to the palace, rendering thanks to God in hymns and spiritual songs. It was the feast of the Epiphany, and Pope and king sat side by side in the oratory, when the Pope with tears besought the same most Christian king that by a treaty of peace he would arrange the cause of St. Peter and the commonwealth of the Romans. And the king satisfied the Pope by oath that he would to the utmost listen to all his requirements [pg 359] and restore the exarchate of Ravenna and the other rights and territories of the commonwealth.

“It being winter, he then caused the Pope with all his retinue to take up his abode in the abbey of St. Denys, near Paris. King Pipin, going to Quiersy and there assembling all the nobles of his royal power, inflamed them with the words of so great a father, and ordained with them to fulfil what, under favour of Christ, he had decreed with the most blessed Pope.”

By this solemn compact between the Frank realm and the Holy See, the king bound himself, should he be victorious, to give over to St. Peter, and in him to Pope Stephen, and his successors, all the places of the exarchate, and of those lands which had belonged to the empire, of which the Lombards had taken possession. If we are to follow the text of the contemporaneous statements and later references, Pipin considered this act not as a donation, but a restitution. Those for whom this restitution ensued were so blended together in the view which results from Pipin's subsequent declarations that to separate them seems impossible.[189] The one party is the Roman Commonwealth, which here takes the place of the empire, without, in its essence, containing any other idea, for empire is but one form of commonwealth; the other party is the Roman Church. There is no reference here to the duchy of Rome, the territory belonging to the city according to the Byzantine departmental administration. The Pope conferred on the king the title of Roman Patricius, a title which [pg 360] Pipin accepted simply in its true meaning, understanding by it protection of the Church, as he afterwards named himself merely Defensor or Protector of the Church.

Stephen, in the meantime, was staying at the Abbey of St. Denys, near Paris, for a long time dangerously ill, in consequence of his sufferings during his journey, and also of his great anxiety. On the 28th July, 754, he anointed in this abbey Church, afterwards the resting-place of the kings of France, Pipin and his wife, Bertrada, with their sons, Charles and Carloman. So, for the first time, the hand of a Pope touched the youthful head of that Charles, who, in riper age, was destined to act with such force on the fortunes of the western Church.

When the negotiations between the king of the Franks and Aistulf led to no result, the Frank army began its march. The Lombards were defeated near Susa, at the foot of Mont Cenis, and presently Pipin stood before Pavia. Thereupon Aistulf consented to peace. He promised to surrender Ravenna, and divers other cities: he bound himself no longer to oppress Rome and her territory. But scarcely was the covenant made, and the Frank host withdrawn, and the Pope returned to Rome, which he entered before the conclusion, having been welcomed in the meadows of Nero by the exulting people, when king Aistulf repented of his concessions. Not only did he not give up a palm of land in the exarchate: he broke again into the Roman territory, took cities, laid waste the country. In this [pg 361] distress wore away the year 755. With New Year's Day, 756, the king began the siege of Rome. He shut in the city on three sides. On the height of the Janiculum the Tuscans were encamped. Aistulf, with his main force, lay beside the Salarian and neighbouring gates: the Beneventans shut in the southern gates. His attacks upon the walls were repulsed. Every one took part in the struggle. Abbot Warnehar, the Frankish minister, put on armour and worked day and night upon the walls. The whole country round, with its churches, villas, and dwellings, was mercilessly wasted. The Lombards made a desert round Rome. Letter after letter the Pope sent to Pipin.

The Father and Head of the Christian family was in the utmost possible danger of beholding the spiritual rights of his see and the people which he loved and cared for, subjected to the half barbarous domination of intruders, who, for nearly two hundred years, had forced themselves upon Italy. In those two centuries the possession of Rome, and lordship over it, had been the coveted prize first of their heathen, and then of their semi-Christian ambition. The rule of the Goth, much nobler in his natural character, and much less savage, had yet failed, even under the genius of Theodorich, to amalgamate itself with Roman thought, law, and usage. The strong hand of the great Gothic king had seemed to tame it: as soon as he was gone, it corrupted his grandson, and murdered his daughter and heiress, Amalasunta, too good and noble for her people. But the prospect of having to submit to an Aistulf, and his [pg 362] ferocious nobles, was worse than the Gothic servitude had been, which yet had subjected the free election of their Father and Pontiff by the Roman clergy and people to a foreign domination. And this domination from Odoacer to Leo III. regarded not the good of the Church, but the ends of Byzantine or Lombard.

What, in this day of terror, Pope Stephen wrote to Pipin bears so strongly impressed the inmost belief of his own heart and of the Church at the time that I quote it in part.

“Peter, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, and in me the whole Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church of God, the head of all the Churches of God, founded upon the firm rock in the blood of our Redeemer, and Stephen, bishop of the said Church, to the most excellent kings, Pipin, Charles, and Carloman, to the most holy bishops, abbots, presbyters, monks, also to the dukes, counts, armies, and people of France, grace, peace, and valour be abundantly ministered to you by our Lord God for the rescue of that holy Church of God and its Roman people entrusted to me, from the hands of persecutors.

“I, Peter, the apostle, having been in the absolute choice of supernal clemency called by Christ, Son of the living God, to illuminate the whole earth—who hold you for my adopted children to defend from the hands of adversaries this Roman city, and the people committed to me by God, and likewise the house in which, according to the flesh, I rest, to deliver it from the contamination of the heathens: but likewise our [pg 363] Lady, the Mother of God, ever-virgin Mary, adjures, admonishes, and commands you: and with her the thrones and dominations, the whole army of the celestial host; also, the martyrs and confessors of Christ join in the adjuration, that you may grieve for that city of Rome, entrusted to us by the Lord God, and for the Lord's flock dwelling in it, and deliver it with all speed from the hands of the persecuting Lombards, who are perjured with so great a crime. Hasten and help before the living fountain, whence you have been consecrated, and born again, be dried up.”[190]

The siege[191] had entered into the third month when tidings came that the king of the Franks was on his way to answer the appeal of Pope Stephen. In April, 756, he passed Mont Cenis. Again the enemy did not venture to defend the Alpine passes. It would seem that Aistulf had not expected so early a movement. The siege of Rome was broken up. The siege of Pavia took its place. Pavia yielded sooner than Rome. Pipin was still in camp before the city when a mission from the Greek emperor appeared to desire the surrender to the empire of the lands which had been or were to be taken from the Lombards. Here was seen in what sense the king of the Franks had understood the word “restitution”. The eastern deputies promised rich presents to Pipin,[192] if he would give back Ravenna and the other cities and fortresses of its territory to the empire. The king of [pg 364] the Franks replied that for nothing on earth would he suffer those cities to be taken from the rule of St. Peter, the jurisdiction of the Roman Church, or of the pontiff of the Apostolic see. He declared upon oath that for no man's favour had he repeatedly entered into this conflict, but only for the love of St. Peter and the pardoning of his sins, adding that no amount of treasure could persuade him to take away what he had once given to St. Peter.

Then Aistulf, in fear of losing everything, asked for peace. The Frank nobles in the army who had previous connections with the Lombard, managed the agreement. Aistulf not only ratified the previous contract, but surrendered the third of his treasure, and promised the payment of a tribute which had been paid in the time of the dukes. Pipin presented to the Pope a solemn document respecting the gift of the conquered territory. The Abbot of St. Denys, accompanied by the Lombard Commissioner, with full powers, executed the agreement and the royal will. Upon arriving at Rome, he laid the keys of the cities ceded by the Lombard upon the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles. The exarchate and the Pentapolis, and a large portion of Umbria, were to belong to the Roman Church, and partly then, and partly later, came into its actual possession, on one side from Comacchio, in the swampy lowlands along the Adriatic coast, down to what was afterwards the mark of Ancona; on the other side as far as Narni, not far from the confluence of the Nera and the Tiber, where the duchy of Rome began. That it did not need. If [pg 365] the distant emperor exercised nominal authority there, the virtual authority had long belonged to the Pope, who ruled there with acceptance of the people.

It was the summer of 756. About the end of the winter Aistulf died through a fall from his horse, hunting. After his death ensued a struggle for the throne. The monk Rachis strove again for the sovereignty, which Desiderius, duke in Tuscany, contested. It is not clear how parties in the Lombard kingdom had been so transformed that he who had been compelled once to quit the throne for yielding to Rome now was unsuccessful against a competitor favoured by Rome. But this one bought his victory dearly. He renounced in favour of the Church several cities not mentioned by name in Pipin's gift, from Ferrara and Bologna down to south of Ancona. At the same time Spoleto and Benevento put themselves under protection of the Pope and the king of the Franks, as the dukes and nobles swore fidelity. “This change is of the hand of the Lord,” wrote Pope Stephen to Pipin at the beginning of 757.

In the course of a few years a new State, the State of the Church, had been founded.[193] For a new State it was, even if its connection with the empire was not dissolved. Its geographical position in the centre of the Peninsula and touching both seas, enhanced its importance. The moment was great and decisive. The times of the Roman empire were fulfilled. East and West had more and more decidedly parted, as well especially on the field of theological science as on the field of political [pg 366] formations. Agreement had become impossible unless the West was willing to give up its civilising mission. Italy's political formation was closely bound up with that mission. The Gothic domination had fallen inasmuch as it had been powerless to assimilate land and people. The Lombard people, inferior in energy and in warlike qualities to the Goths, in its late attempt to unite Italy under one sceptre, had failed less through the weak resistance of the last remains of the Roman empire than through the deep-lying failures of its political and military constitution. These showed themselves soon after its permanent occupation to the south of the Alps by its parting into numerous military fiefs, with slight internal connection. Moreover, the instability of relation between the two nationalities from the beginning made almost impossible the task which Liutprand and Aistulf had set themselves. Attempts to assimilate in life, custom, and law had followed a long period of barbarous oppression, when the hand of the Church had already enfolded conquerors and conquered. These attempts had there produced a reaction which threatened to undo what had been accomplished. After two hundred years of settlement the Lombards were still held to be strangers. Not to mention numerous other tokens of this, it has a deep meaning when under the successor of Pope Stephen “the whole Senate and all the people of the God-protected city of Rome” write to king Pipin concerning the extension of this province “rescued by you out of the hand of the heathen”.[194] The [pg 367] national Italian elements made their complete effect sensible in the State of the Church, and secured its establishment in opposition to that temper of aliens represented by the Lombards. The new temper was not one-sided and exclusive, but assimilating, and therefore certain of development and progress. Never has a State arisen under circumstances so remarkable, in the midst of a violent shock, yet with so general a concurrence. It was due to the consistently-pursued management of a series of distinguished men as the result of their moralising influence. This did not limit itself to the populations immediately participating in it, which had found steady advocates and actual protectors in the Popes, notwithstanding the extreme need and oppression suffered by them. It embraced the whole Christian world. The Church absolutely required secular independence in order to maintain in living energy this moralising influence, to fulfil this her great mission. This necessity must appear clear to every one if there were in the history of Italy and the Papacy no other period than that of the last Lombard times, or that following when the Carlovingian rule was falling to pieces. The foundation of the temporal power was no artificial plan devised by Gregory II. for himself and his successors when he began the great battle against the Iconoclasts. It was a necessity in the world's history, developing itself rapidly, yet step by step, out of the situation of things both in politics and religion. And as if it should not want a legitimate title also, the new formation rose at a moment [pg 368] when, independently of action on the part of the Popes, the whole claim of the empire practically disappeared in the centre of Italy. It was recognised by the Popes alone even when scarcely anything more remained of it than a mere form and name.

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