Moreover, it must be said in all fairness—the Lombards despised the Romans exceedingly. So did all the Teutons. ‘We Lombards,’ says Bishop Luitprand, ‘Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Sueves, Burgunds, consider it a sufficient insult to call our enemy a Roman; comprehending in that one name of Roman, whatever is ignoble, cowardly, avaricious, luxurious, false, in a word, every vice.’ If this was—as it very probably was—the feeling of the whole Teutonic race; and if it was repaid—as it certainly was—on the part of the Roman, by contempt for the ‘barbarism’ and ‘ignorance’ of the Teuton; what must have been the feeling between Roman and Lombard? Contact must have embittered mutual contempt into an utter and internecine hatred, in which the Pope, as representative of the Roman people, could not but share.
As for the political reasons, they are clear enough. It is absurd to say that they wished to free Italy from Lombard tyrants. What did they do but hand her over to Frankish tyrants instead? No. The true reason was this. Gradually there had arisen in the mind of all Popes, from Gregory the Great onward, the idea of a spiritual supremacy, independent of all kings of the earth. It was a great idea, as the event proved: it was a beneficent one for Europe; but a ruinous one for Italy. For the Popes were not content with spiritual power. They could not conceive of it as separated from temporal power, and temporal power meant land. How early they set their hearts on the Exarchate of Ravenna, we shall never know: the fact is patent, that it was a Naboth’s vineyard to them; and that to obtain it they called in the Franks.
Their dread was, evidently, lest the Lombards should become masters of the whole of Italy. A united Italy suited their views then, no more than it does now. Not only did they conceive of Rome as still the centre of the western world, but more, their stock in trade was at Rome. The chains of St. Peter, the sepulchres of St. Peter and St. Paul, the catacombs filled with the bones of innumerable martyrs;—these were their stock in trade. By giving these, selling these, working miracles with these, calling pilgrims from all parts of Christendom to visit these in situ, they kept up their power and their wealth. I do not accuse them of misusing that power and that wealth in those days. They used them, on the contrary, better than power and wealth had been ever used in the world before. But they were dependent on the sanctity attached to a particular spot; and any power, which, like the Lombard, tended to give Italy another centre than Rome, they dreaded and disliked. That Lombard basilica, near Milan, with all its treasures, must have been in their eyes, a formidable rival. Still more frightful must it have been to them to see Astulf, when he encamped before the walls of Rome, searching for martyrs’ relics, and carrying them off to Milan. That, as a fact, seems to have been the exciting cause of Stephen’s journey to Pepin. This Astulf was a good Catholic. He founded a nunnery, and put his own daughters in it. What could a man do more meritorious in the eyes of the Pope? But he took away the lands of the Church, and worse, the relics, the reserved capital by which the Church purchased lands. This was indeed a crime only to be expiated by the horrors of a Frank invasion.
On the same principle the Popes supported the Exarchs of Ravenna, and the independent duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum. Well or ill ruled, Iconoclast or not, they were necessary to keep Italy divided and weak. And having obtained what they wanted from Pepin and Charlemagne, it was still their interest to pursue the same policy; to compound for their own independence, as they did with Charlemagne and his successors, by defending the pretences of foreign kings to the sovereignty of the rest of Italy. This has been their policy for centuries. It is their policy still; and that policy has been the curse of Italy. This fatal gift of the patrimony of St. Peter—as Dante saw—as Machiavelli saw,—as all clear-sighted Italians have seen,—as we are seeing it now in these very days—has kept her divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable, as the hierophant of a priestly caste, to unite his people in the bonds of national life; unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for himself; and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in the balance of power; the Pope has been forced, again and again, to keep himself on his throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and calling in foreign arms; and the bane of Italy, from the time of Stephen III. to that of Pius IX., has been the temporal power of the Pope.
But on the popes, also, the Nemesis came. In building their power on the Roman relics, on the fable that Rome was the patrimony of Peter, they had built on a lie; and that lie avenged itself.
Had they been independent of the locality of Rome; had they been really spiritual emperors, by becoming cosmopolitan, journeying, it may be, from nation to nation in regular progresses, then their power might have been as boundless as they ever desired it should be. Having committed themselves to the false position of being petty kings of a petty kingdom, they had to endure continual treachery and tyranny from their foreign allies; to see not merely Italy, but Rome itself insulted, and even sacked, by faithful Catholics; and to become more and more, as the centuries rolled on, the tools of those very kings whom they had wished to make their tools.
True, they defended themselves long, and with astonishing skill and courage. Their sources of power were two, the moral, and the thaumaturgic; and they used them both: but when the former failed, the latter became useless. As long as their moral power was real; as long as they and their clergy were on the whole, in spite of enormous faults, the best men in Europe; so long the people believed in them, and in their thaumaturgic relics likewise. But they became by no means the best men in Europe. Then they began to think that after all it was more easy to work the material than the moral power—easier to work the bones than to work righteousness. They were deceived. Behold! when the righteousness was gone, the bones refused to work. People began to question the virtues of the bones, and to ask, We can believe that the bones may have worked miracles for good men, but for bad men? We will examine whether they work any miracles at all. And then, behold, it came out that the bones did not work miracles, and that possibly they were not saints’ bones at all; and then the storm came: and the lie, as all lies do, punished itself. The salt had lost its savour. The Teutonic intellect appealed from its old masters to God, and to God’s universe of facts, and emancipated itself once and for all. They who had been the light of Europe, became its darkness; they who had been first, became last; a warning to mankind until the end of time, that on Truth and Virtue depends the only abiding strength.
LECTURE XII—THE STRATEGY OF PROVIDENCE
I no not know whether any of you know much of the theory of war. I know very little myself. But something of it one is bound to know, as Professor of History. For, unfortunately, a large portion of the history of mankind is the history of war; and the historian, as a man who wants to know how things were done—as distinct from the philosopher, the man who wants to know how things ought to have been done—ought to know a little of the first of human arts—the art of killing. What little I know thereof I shall employ to-day, in explaining to you the invasion of the Teutons, from a so-called mechanical point of view. I wish to shew you how it was possible for so small and uncivilized a people to conquer one so vast and so civilized; and what circumstances (which you may attribute to what cause you will: but I to God) enabled our race to conquer in the most vast and important campaign the world has ever seen.
I call it a campaign rather than a war. Though it lasted 200 years and more, it seems to me (it will, I think, seem to you) if you look at the maps, as but one campaign: I had almost said, one battle. There is but one problem to be solved; and therefore the operations of our race take a sort of unity. The question is, how to take Rome, and keep it, by destroying the Roman Empire.