|Liutprand, king of the Lombards, 712-43.| Liutprand was the most able and energetic king who ever ruled the Lombard realm, and his long reign of thirty-one years (712-43) saw the completion of the long-delayed process of the eviction of the East-Romans from Central Italy, and the rise of the Lombards to the highest pitch of success which they ever knew—a rise which was to be closely followed by the extinction of their kingdom.
When Leo the Isaurian commenced his crusade against image-worship, Liutprand had been on the throne for fourteen years. In these earlier years of his reign he was occupied in strengthening his position, and made no attack on the Imperial dominions in Italy, though he is found making war on the Bavarians, and capturing some of their castles on the upper Adige.
But in 726 things came to a head, when Leo issued his famous edict against images, forbidding all worship of statues and paintings. |Quarrel of Gregory II. and Leo the Isaurian.| Pope Gregory II. was not in a mood to listen to such a command from Constantinople. He was already in great disfavour with the emperor for having advised the Italians to resist some extraordinary taxation which Leo had imposed to maintain the Saracen war. When he received Leo’s rescript, and a letter addressed to himself requesting him to carry out the imperial orders, and destroy the images of Rome, he burst out into open contumacy, and the Romans, with all the other Italians, followed his lead. Exhilaratus, duke of Naples, who tried to carry out the edict in his duchy, was slain by a mob, and many other imperial officials were maltreated or driven off by those whom they governed. The cites elected new rulers over themselves, and would have chosen and proclaimed an Emperor of the West, if Gregory II. had not kept them from this final step. |Liutprand conquers the Exarchate, 727.| Meanwhile, all the imperial provinces of Italy being in open sedition, and quite cut off from Constantinople, king Liutprand thought the moment had at last come for rounding off the Lombard dominions by seizing the long-coveted Exarchate. He crossed the Po, took Bologna, with most of the other cities of Æmilia, and then conquered Osimo, Rimini, Ancona, and all the Pentapolis. Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, fell before him, but the exarch Paul succeeded in preserving the great City of the Marshes for a short time longer, till he was murdered by rioters (727). The Lombard king’s conquests were made with astonishing ease, for in each city the anti-imperialist faction betrayed the gates to him without fighting.
Soon after, the triumph of Liutprand was completed by the surrender of Ravenna itself: the exarch Eutychius fled to Venice, already a semi-independent city, but one which still preserved a nominal allegiance to the empire. |Gregory II. rebels against Leo II.| Meanwhile, pope Gregory II. was occupied in writing lengthy manifestos setting forth the atrocious conduct of Leo, and the intrinsic rationality of reverencing images. His letters to the emperor were couched in language of studied insolence. ‘I must use coarse and rude arguments,’ he wrote, ‘to suit a coarse and rude mind such as yours,’ and then proceeded to say that ‘if you were to go into a boys’ school and announce yourself as a destroyer of images, the smallest children would throw their writing tablets at your head, for even babes and sucklings might teach you, though you refuse to listen to the wise.’ After completely confusing king Uzziah with king Hezekiah in an argument drawn from the Old Testament, Gregory then proceeded to quote apocryphal anecdotes from early church history. He wound up by asserting that in virtue of the power that he inherited from St. Peter, he might consign the emperor to eternal damnation, but that Leo was so thoroughly damned by his own crimes that there was no need to inflict any further curse on him. A more practical threat was that if the emperor sent an army against Rome, he would retire into Campania and take refuge with the Lombards (729).
|Position of Gregory II.| As a matter of fact, however, to throw himself into the hands of the Lombards was the last thing that pope Gregory desired to do. He had the greatest dread of falling under the direct authority of Liutprand, for the occupation of Rome by a powerful and strong-handed Italian king would have been fatal to the secular power of the papacy. It was easy to disobey a powerless exarch and a distant emperor, but if Liutprand had become ruler of all Italy, the popes would have been forced to be his humble subjects. Gregory wished to rid himself of the domination of Leo, without falling into the clutches of Liutprand. While disclaiming his allegiance to the emperor, he pretended to adhere to the empire.
Meanwhile an unexpected turn of events had checked the career of victory of king Liutprand. While he was absent at Pavia, the exarch Eutychius had collected some troops at Venice, and aided by the forces of the semi-independent citizens of the lagoon-city had landed near Ravenna. The place was betrayed to him by the imperialist party within the walls, and became once more the seat of imperial power in Italy. At the same time the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento took arms against their suzerain, and allied themselves with pope Gregory (729).
Liutprand determined to conquer the Lombard rebels before resuming the hard task of retaking Ravenna. He even made a truce with the exarch, by which it was stipulated that they should mutually aid each other, the one in subduing the revolted dukes, the other in compelling the Pope to return to his allegiance. Accordingly Eutychius marched against Rome, and Liutprand against Spoleto. On the king’s approach the two dukes submitted to him, and swore to be his faithful vassals. |Liutprand pacifies Italy, 730.| He then moved toward Rome, which the exarch was already besieging. But he had no wish that the imperial power should be strengthened by the recovery of Rome, and, encamping his army in the Field of Nero, outside the city, proceeded to claim to act as arbitrator between Gregory and Eutychius. They were too weak to resist him, and the Pope at least gladly acquiesced in the pacification of Italy which Liutprand proposed. The exarch was to return to Ravenna, leaving Rome unmolested, and to be content with the possession of Ravenna only, all his other lost dominions in the Pentapolis and Æmilia remaining in the hands of the Lombards. Gregory, in consideration of being left unmolested in Rome, professed to return to his allegiance, but in reality remained in an independent position. He did not withdraw his opposition to Iconoclasm, and took advantage of the peace to call together a great council of Italian bishops, ninety-three in number, who solemnly anathematised all who refused to reverence images, though they did not curse the emperor by name (730).
Two months later pope Gregory II. died, and was succeeded by Gregory III., as great an enemy of Iconoclasm as his namesake. He had no sooner displayed his views, than the emperor, discontented with the peace which the exarch had concluded, and much irritated by the anathema of the Council of Rome, revenged himself on the papacy by issuing an edict which removed from the jurisdiction of the Pope, as Patriarch of the West, the Illyrian and south Italian dioceses which had hitherto paid spiritual obedience to Rome. For the future, not only Epirus and Sicily, but even Apulia and Calabria, were to look to the Patriarch of Constantinople as their head and chief (731).
In 732 Leo took a more practical step for reducing the Pope to obedience. He fitted out a great armament in the ports of Asia Minor, which was to sail to Italy, to recover by force of arms the lost regions of the Exarchate, and to arrest Gregory III. and send him in chains to Constantinople. But the fates were against the restoration of imperial authority in the West: the fleet was completely wrecked by a storm in the Adriatic, and the fragments of it which reached Ravenna effected nothing. This was the last serious attempt of the empire to recover central Italy. |Last effort of Leo to reconquer Italy, 732.| Henceforth the Popes went their own way, while the exarch, penned up in the single fortress of Ravenna, awaited with trembling the outbreak of the next Lombard war—a war which would certainly sweep away him and his shrunken Exarchate.
But for eight years after the treaty of 730, king Liutprand maintained peace over all Italy. He was a pious prince, and a respecter of the papacy, to which he had even made a grant of territory, ceding the town of Sutri in Tuscany, which he had captured from the exarch in the war of 728-30. His reign was a time of prosperity for Lombardy: the southern dukes were compelled to obey orders from Pavia: the Slav and Avar were kept back from the northern marches, Liutprand also kept up his friendly relations with Charles Martel, the great Mayor of the Palace in Gaul. When Charles was looking about for a neighbour sovereign who should, according to old Teutonic custom, gird with arms and clip the hair of his son Pippin on his arrival at manhood, he chose Liutprand to discharge this friendly office. On the invasion of Provence by the Saracens in 736-7, Charles asked the Lombard for the aid of his host, and Liutprand crossed the Alps and joined in expelling the infidels from Aix and Arles.