But just as victory seemed about to crown the East-Roman’s banners, the whole aspect of the war was suddenly changed by the arrival of two new Saracen hosts. A force despatched by Ziadet-Allah to aid his first army fell upon Palermo and took it. A second force, composed of Moors of Spain, a band of exiles driven out of their own land by civil war, landed on the south coast, relieved their besieged co-religionists at Mineo, and defeated the strategos of Sicily in the open field.
For some time the emperor Theophilus, who had just succeeded his father Michael on the Byzantine throne, continued to send succour to Sicily. But in 832 he became involved in a desperate war with the caliph Motassem, which distracted all his attention to the East. This war in Asia proved the ruin of Sicily. The African Moors kept pouring in fresh fanatical hordes, and gradually subdued all the cities of the western half of the island. |The Moors conquer East Sicily.| For a moment it seemed likely that Sicily would be permanently divided between Greek and African, just as it had been twelve hundred years before, in the days of Dionysius and Hiero II. But at last the stubborn defence of the Byzantines was broken down by two fatal blows, the fall of Messina in 842, and that of Enna, the strongest post in the centre of the island, seventeen years later, in 859. This drove the East Romans back to the eastern coast, where they retained no more than the sea-girt city of Syracuse and the strong towns about the roots of Mount Etna—Taormina, Catania, and Rametta. The Moslems, masters of the bulk of the island, were now at leisure to turn their arms farther afield, and to cross the Straits of Messina to invade the mainland.
In south Italy all the elements of disaster were ready and prepared. Sicard duke of Benevento, a ruffian and an oppressor, had been assassinated by his outraged subjects in 839. The Beneventans then proclaimed a certain count Radelchis as their prince. But the important towns of Capua and Salerno adhered to Siconulf, the brother of the deceased tyrant. A civil war broke out between these two pretenders, which was destined to last, with many variations of fortune, for no less than twelve years. In the second year of the struggle (840) Radelchis, hard pressed by his rival, had the unhappy inspiration of asking aid from the Moslems of Sicily. The chance was too good to be lost, and a Moorish army was landed at Bari, where it was received by the partisans of Radelchis, and allowed to take possession of the town. Then Siconulf, as mad as his enemy, answered evil with evil by sending to Crete to call in to his aid the Saracen pirates of Candia. |The Dukes of Benevento call in the Moors, 840.| They came, and the same sight was seen which occurred six hundred years later, when the rival emperors of Constantinople called in the Turks. The auxiliaries of each prince sacked the towns held by his rival, and generally ended by garrisoning them, and holding them on their own account. Apulia and Lucania were overrun by the Moors and Cretans, while, at the same moment, the Sicilian Saracens crossed the straits—Messina had just fallen—and swept all over the Byzantine possessions in Calabria. Between 843 and 851 the whole of Italy, from Reggio to the gates of Rome, was overrun by the Moslem marauders, and it seemed as if Christendom was to lose the southern part of the peninsula. Half its towns, Bari, Taranto, Reggio, Brindisi, even the castle of Misenum at the very gates of Naples, had now become Saracen fortresses. In 846 a great fleet from Africa appeared at Ostia, and the pirates overran the Roman Campagna, and even sacked the rich churches of St. Paul outside the Walls and St. Peter on the Vatican. But for the solid ramparts of Aurelian they would have entered the eternal city itself, and the town of Romulus and Gregory might have become a Moslem stronghold.
But already the man to whom, above all others, Italy was to owe her salvation, had crossed the Alps and taken up his life’s task. Lewis, the eldest son of the unwise emperor Lothair, was appointed king of Italy by his father in 844, soon after the Partition of Verdun, and appeared in the next year before Sergius II., to be solemnly crowned at Rome. The Pope made the young Frankish prince swear to protect the Church and all its privileges, but when once crowned Lewis made Sergius and all the nobles of Rome do him homage, and when in 847 Sergius died, and Leo IV. followed him, the imperial right of confirmation was duly acknowledged.
Lewis and Leo, who lived in concord and amity, were the first to discomfit the Saracens, and give some hope of salvation to Italian Christendom. In 849 the African and Sicilian Moslems sent a second and larger expedition against Rome. |Pope Leo’s victory at Ostia, 849.| Pope Leo took the field himself with the forces of the Roman and Latin counts and barons, while the fleets of Naples and Amalfi, under the consul Caesarius, guarded the harbour of Ostia. When the infidels appeared battle was joined at sea, but a tempest arose, and drove most of the African fleet ashore. Caught between the Neapolitan ships and the Pope’s army, the Moors were crushed: the few who escaped death by the sea and the sword became the slaves of the Romans, and were set to labour on the wall which Leo built to protect the Vatican and St. Peter’s—the new quarter of Rome, which got from him the name of the Leonine city. The great fresco of Raphael representing this victory has made pope Leo’s triumph the one ninth century event in Italy which is well remembered by the world.
|Lewis II. pacifies south Italy.| In the next year the emperor Lewis compelled the rival Beneventan dukes to come to terms. He marched into Samnium and threatened to attack Radelchis if he refused to make peace with his enemy Siconulf. Under this pressure a partition of the duchy was made: Radelchis kept the capital and the eastern half of the principality: Siconulf became ‘prince of Salerno,’ and ruled the Campanian and Lucanian half. The conclusion of peace was celebrated by the massacre of the Saracen auxiliaries of Radelchis, whom the duke quietly betrayed to the sword of Lewis, now that he had no further need for their aid (851).
But though the civil war in south Italy was ended, the situation was still perilous. The whole coast from Bari to Reggio was still in the hands of the Moslems, who were coalescing into a single state under Mofareg-ibn-Salem, the pirate-king who governed Bari. He had taken the title of Sultan, and the majority of his countrymen had done homage to him. For eighteen years (853-71) he was the terror of south Italy, and might have founded a kingdom and a dynasty, if he had not been opposed by a warrior as active and obstinate as himself in the person of the emperor Lewis.
The young Frankish Caesar was already making his power felt in Italy as neither his sire nor his grandsire had done. Unlike most of his race, he concentrated his mind on one kingdom, and devoted himself to its defence. It resulted that he was an excellent ruler for Italy, but that he never gained such a footing beyond the Alps as he might have claimed in virtue of being the eldest heir of Charles the Great. Though a crowned emperor he never reigned at Aachen, or held a foot of land outside the peninsula, except the single county of Provence. But in Italy his power was very real. He dealt most firmly with the Papacy. When Benedict III. and Anastasius contested the Papal throne in 855, the emperor’s legate held a court of inquiry in the Lateran and adjudged the former to be the true successor of St. Peter. Nicolas I., the next pontiff, was nominated by Lewis in opposition to the majority of the Roman clergy; when he ventured to oppose his creator he saw his city occupied by a Lombard army, and soon had to make his peace.
Hadrian II. who followed Nicolas was no less content to keep on good terms with the emperor, whom he praised as ‘the sovereign who wars not, like other kings, against Christians, but only against the sons of Belial, the enemies of the Christian faith; wherefore the hand of the Apostolic See will always be strong on the side of this most pious emperor, and the great Dispenser of battles, through the intercession of the chief of the apostles, will ensure his triumph.’
|Quarrel of Benedict and Photius.| The success of Lewis in keeping the Papacy in hand was all the more notable because the three popes Benedict, Nicolas, and Hadrian were all men of mark, who left their impress for ever on the history of the Roman See. It was Benedict who began that quarrel with the patriarch Photius of Constantinople which brought about the final schism between the Eastern and the Western Churches. Starting with a mere dispute as to the validity of the election of Photius, it was soon complicated by wrangles about the supremacy of the Roman See over the Illyrian and Macedonian bishoprics, a supremacy which had ceased to be real since Leo the Isaurian had declared them to owe no obedience save to Constantinople.[[63]] Benedict died in 858, but his successor Nicolas kept up the struggle with vigour, styling Photius an intruder and usurper, because his predecessor had never legally resigned the patriarchate, and finally declaring him deposed from his metropolitan throne. That one patriarch should venture to remove and excommunicate another without the aid of a general council, and merely in virtue of his power as the successor of Peter, appeared monstrous to the Byzantine clergy. They paid no attention to the letters of Nicolas, and the emperor Michael the Drunkard threatened to make his arm felt in Italy, and to reclaim by the sword the right of the successor of Justinian over Rome. |Breach between Eastern and Western Churches.| Nicolas replied by comparing the Byzantine ruler to Sennacherib, and by taunting him with the loss of Sicily and Calabria to the Saracens, which had deprived him of any opportunity of exercising his power west of the Adriatic. After seven years of wrangling the division between East and West was finally formulated by the Synod of Constantinople (866), where the patriarch, the emperor, and a thousand bishops and abbots drew up the eight articles which declared the Roman Church to have departed from the orthodox faith and discipline. Six of the articles only dealt with small ritual matters, such as the observance of Lent and the shaving of the clergy. But the third, which denounced the enforced celibacy of the priesthood as a snare of Satan, and the seventh, which condemned the Roman doctrine as to the procession of the Holy Ghost, were all-important. The Eastern Church now formally stated that the Western Church, by declaring that the Holy Spirit proceeded both from the Father and the Son, fell into ‘a heresy so awful as to deserve a thousand anathemas.’