Ravenna, a Study

by Edward Hutton

It is obvious from this letter that the pope and the emperor no longer understood one another, and it is not surprising that the one thought the other a fool and told him so. Doubtless the emperor recalled the long and finally successful war against the Ostrogoths, in which Belisarius had always refused, not only terms of peace other than unconditional surrender, but even to treat. That policy had been, at least from the point of view of Constantinople, successful. From the point of view of the papacy and of Italy, it had had a more doubtful result, but the fact that the Ostrogoths were Arians had satisfied perhaps both, and certainly the papacy, that a truce could not be thought of.

From the imperial point of view things remained much the same in the Lombard war as they had been in the war with the Ostrogoths. From the papal and Italian point of view they were very different. To begin with, the Lombards were fast accepting the Catholic Faith, and then if Italy had suffered in the Ostrogothic wars, which were everywhere eagerly contested by Constantinople, what was she suffering now when the greater part of the country was open to a continual and an almost unopposed attack? "You think me a fool," the pope wrote to the emperor. In Ravenna the papal envoy was lampooned and laughed at. Then in the end of 596 the exarch Romanus died.

Romanus was succeeded by Callinicus (Gallicinus) in whom the pope found a more congenial and perhaps a more reasonable spirit. By 598 an armistice had been officially concluded between the imperialists and the Lombards, and at length in 599, after some foolish delays in which it would appear that the pope was not without blame, a peace was concluded. Gregory, however, for all his reluctance at the last, had won his way. Henceforth it would be impossible to regard the Lombards as mere invaders after the pattern of their predecessors, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns, and Ostrogoths. They were, or would shortly be, a Catholic people; they held a very great part of Italy; they had entered into a treaty with the emperor not as foederati but as equals and conquerors. Gregory the Great had permanently established the barbarians in Italy, and in his act, the act be it remembered of the apostle of the English, of the apostle of the Lombards, we seem to see the shadowy power that had been Leo's by the Mincio suddenly appear, a new glory in the world. The new power in the West, the papacy, which thus shines forth really for the first time in the acts of Gregory, unlike the empire, whether Roman or Byzantine, will know no frontiers, but will go into all the world and compel men to come in as its divine commission ordained.

In Italy from the time of the peace with the Lombards (599) onwards what we see is the decline of the imperial power of Constantinople and the rise of the papacy. And this was brought about not only by the circumstances in which Italy and the West found themselves, but also by the character of the imperial government.

When Justin II. disappeared in 578, and made way for Tiberius II., he was already a madman, and though Tiberius was renowned for his virtues, he reigned but four years, and in 582 Maurice the Cappadocian sat upon the throne of Justinian and ruled for twenty years not unwisely, but, so far as Italy was concerned, without success. It was he who was at last brought to make peace with the Lombards and thus for the first time to acknowledge a barbarian state independent of the empire in Italy. He and his children were all murdered in 602 by Phocas, a centurion, whose shame and crimes and cruelties doubtless did much to weaken the moral power of the empire face to face with the papacy.

The peace of 599, the usurpation of Phocas in 602, and the death of Gregory the Great in 604, close a great period and stamp the seventh century in its very beginning with a new character.

That character is in a sense almost wholly disastrous. Those vague and gloomy years, of which we know so little, are almost unrelieved in their hopeless confusion. It is true that Italy had found a champion in the papacy which would one day restore the empire in the West, as Justinian himself had not been able to do; it is true that already Arianism was defeated if not stamped out. But it is in the seventh century that Mahometanism, the greater successor of the Arian heresy, first appears; and it is in the seventh century that it first becomes certain that East and West are philosophically and politically different and irreconcilable. The whole period is full of disasters, and is as we may think the darkest hour before the dawn.

As I have said, the history of those disastrous years is everywhere in the West vague and confused, and this is not least so in Italy and Ravenna.

Ravenna as always remains the citadel of the imperialists in Italy and the West, and as such we must regard her, passing in review as well as we may those miserable years in which she played so great and so difficult a part.

When the Emperor Maurice was assassinated with his family in the year 602, Callinicus was, as we have seen, exarch in Ravenna, but with the usurpation of Phocas that Smaragdus who had already been exarch and had been recalled, perhaps for his too great violence, in 589, was again appointed. He seems to have ruled from 602 to 611. In the last year of the government of Callinicus an attempt had been made by the exarch to force the Lombards to renew the two years' peace established in 599, and on better terms, by the seizure of a daughter of Agilulf's, then in Parma, with her husband. They were carried off to Ravenna. But the imperialists got nothing by their treachery. Agilulf at once moved against Padua and took it and rased it to the ground. In the following year Monselice also fell to his arms, and though after the murder of the emperor Maurice in 602 the exarch Callinicus, the author of the abduction, fell, and Smaragdus was appointed by Phocas, the hostages were not returned, and in July 603, Agilulf, after a campaign of less than three months, had possessed himself of Cremona, Mantua, and Vulturina, and probably of most of those places which the imperialists had re-occupied in Cisalpine Gaul in 590. Smaragdus was forced to make peace and to give up his hostages. The peace he made, which left Agilulf in possession of all the cities he had taken, was to endure for eighteen months, but it seems to have been renewed from year to year, and when in 610 Phocas was assassinated and with the accession of Heraclius (610-641) Smaragdus was again recalled and Joannes appointed to Ravenna, the same policy seems to have been followed.