HADRIAN I. AND THE TEMPORAL POWER
Two centuries after the death of Gregory the Great we still find an occasional prelate of rare piety, such as Alcuin, scanning the horizon for signs of the approaching dissolution. Vice and violence had so far triumphed that it seemed as if God must soon lower the curtain on the human tragedy. But the successors of Gregory in the chair of Peter were far from entertaining such feelings. From the heart of the threatening north, another Constantine had come to espouse their cause, to confound their enemies, and to invest the Papacy with a power that it had never known before. The story of the Popes as temporal sovereigns had begun.
Once more we must say that the development was an almost inevitable issue of the circumstances. The Byzantine rule in Italy had never been strong enough to restrain the Lombards, and the rise of the Mohammedans in the farther East now made Constantinople less competent than ever to administer and to defend its trans-Adriatic province. First the city, then the duchy, of Rome fell under the care of the Popes, from sheer lack of other administrators and defenders. We saw this in the Pontificate of Gregory. Beyond the Roman duchy were the scattered patrimonies, the estates given or bequeathed to the Papacy, and these were often towns, or included towns. Here again the lack of secular authority put all government in the hands of the Pope's agents. Then the Eastern court successively adopted two heresies, Monothelitism and Iconoclasm, and the dwindling respect of Rome for the Greeks passed into bitter hostility. Imperial troops sacked the Lateran, dragged a Pope (Martin I.) ignominiously to the East, and induced another Pope (Honorius I.) to "subvert the immaculate faith" or, at least, to "allow the immaculate to be stained."[113] On the whole, however, the Pontiffs who succeeded Gregory were firm and worthy men. Rome began to shudder between the fierce Lombard and the heretical Greek, and there slowly grew in the Lateran Palace the design of winning independence of the erratic counsels of kings.
At this juncture, the name of Charles Martel blazed through the Christian world, and Gregory III. and the people of Rome implored him to take them under his protection. The Lombards were, however, auxiliaries of Charles, and, as Duchesne suggests, Charles probably resented Gregory's interference in secular affairs; the Pope had recently encouraged the Lombard dukes who were in rebellion against their king, and Liutprand had, in revenge, seized four frontier towns of the Roman duchy. Gregory failed, but his amiable and diplomatic successor, Pope Zachary, changed the Roman policy and made progress. He lent Liutprand the use of the little Papal army to aid in suppressing his dukes, and received the four towns and other "patrimonies." A little later, the Exarch and the Archbishop of Ravenna asked Zachary to intercede for them, and the genial Pope again saw and disarmed the Lombard. The language of the Liber Pontificalis is, at this important stage, so barbarous—a sad reflection of Roman culture, for it must have been written in the Lateran—that one often despairs of catching its exact meaning, but it seems to me clear that it represents Liutprand as giving the district of Cesena to the Papacy, and restoring the exarchate of Ravenna to the city of Ravenna. Presently, however, we shall find the Popes claiming the exarchate.
The next step was the famous intervention of Rome in the affairs of the Franks. Pippin, Mayor of the Palace, aspired to the throne of Childeric III., and consulted the Papacy as to the moral aspect of his design. The astute Pontiff went far beyond the terms of the request, and "ordered" the Franks to make Pippin their monarch: an act which founded the lucrative claim of Rome that she had conferred the kingdom on the father of Charlemagne. Zachary's successor, Stephen II.,[114] completed the work. He was hard pressed by the Lombard King Aistulph, and, after a fruitless appeal to Constantinople, he went to France in 753 and implored Pippin to "take up the cause of the Blessed Peter and the Republic of the Romans." This broke the last link with the East, and Stephen secured the gratitude of Pippin and his dynasty by anointing the King and his sons and pronouncing a dire anathema—which he had assuredly no right to pronounce—on any who should ever dare to displace the family of Pippin from the throne. And so Pippin swore a mighty oath that he would take up the cause of the Blessed Peter, but what he precisely engaged to do is one of the great controversies of history.
It is clear that Pippin was made "Patrician" of Rome. This had long been the official title of the Byzantine Exarch in Italy, and it has no definite meaning when it is transferred to Pippin and Charlemagne. Probably this vagueness was part of the Roman plan. The Pope wanted Pippin's army without his suzerainty. Moreover, in conferring on Pippin the title which had belonged to the Exarch, it was probably implied that the exarchate became part of "the cause of the Blessed Peter." In point of fact, the Liber Pontificalis goes on to say that Pippin swore to win for Rome "the exarchate of Ravenna" as well as other "rights and territories of the Republic." Later, in recording the life of Hadrian I., the Liber Pontificalis says that Stephen asked for "divers cities and territories of the province of Italy, and the grant of them to the Blessed Peter and his Vicars for ever." This part of the work is, it is true, under grave suspicion of interpolation, but the sentence I have quoted may pass. Pippin swore to secure for the Popes, not only the Roman duchy, and "divers cities and territories" which they claimed as "patrimonies," but also the exarchate of Ravenna, to which they had no right whatever. As Hadrian I. repeatedly refers, in his letters to Charlemagne, to this "Donation of Pippin," and in one letter (xcviii.) says that it was put into writing, it is idle to contest it.[115]
Pippin crossed the Alps and forced Aistulph to yield, but as soon as the Franks returned to their country the Lombard refused to fulfil his obligations and again devastated Italy. No answer to the Pope's desperate appeals for aid came from France and, in 756, when Rome was gravely threatened, Stephen sent a very curious letter to Pippin.[116] It is written in the name of St. Peter, and historians are divided in opinion as to whether or no the Pope wished to impose on the superstition of the French monarch and to induce him to think that it was a miraculous appeal from the apostle himself. There is grave reason to think that this was Stephen's design. The letter does not identify the Pope with Peter, as apologists suggest; it speaks of Stephen as a personality distinct from the apostolic writer, insists that it is the disembodied spirit of Peter in heaven that addresses the King, and threatens him with eternal damnation unless he comes to Rome and saves "my body" and "my church" and "its bishop." As Pippin, who had ignored the Pope's appeals so long, at once hurried to Italy on receiving this letter, we may assume that he regarded it as miraculous. However that may be, he crushed Aistulph and forced him to sign a deed abandoning twenty-three cities—the exarchate, the adjacent Pentapolis, Comacchio, and Narni—to the Roman See.[117] The representatives of the Eastern court had hurried to Italy and had claimed this territory, but Pippin bluntly told them that he had taken the trouble to crush Aistulph only "on behalf of the Blessed Peter." Byzantine rule in Italy was henceforth confined to Calabria in the south and Venetia and Istria in the north. The Pope succeeded the Eastern Emperor by right of gift from Pippin; and Pippin would, no doubt, claim that the provinces were his to give by right of the sword. In point of fact, however, the Papacy had claimed the exarchate on some previous title, and that title is unsound.
We may now pass speedily to the Pontificate of Hadrian. Aistulph died in 756; Stephen III. in 757. The ten years' Pontificate of Paul I. was absorbed in a tiresome effort to wring the new rights of Rome from the new Lombard King, Didier, and the struggle led to the severance of the Romans into Frank and Lombard factions: one of the gravest and most enduring results of the secular policy of the Papacy. When Paul died, the Lombard faction, under two high Papal officials named Christopher and Sergius, led Lombard troops upon the opposing faction (who had elected a Pope), crushed them in a brutal and bloody struggle, and elected Stephen IV. Stephen was, however, not the Lombard King's candidate, and Didier intrigued at Rome against the power of Christopher and Sergius. He bribed the Papal chamberlain, Paul Afiarta, and it is enough to say that before long Christopher and Sergius were put in prison and deprived of their eyes. This was done at the Pope's command; it was the price of the restoration by Didier of the cities he still withheld.[118]