Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

by T. W. Allies

When Constans landed with a certain force at Tarentum, he found the Lombards in possession of the duchy of Beneventum. A legend said that their king Autharis after a bold march through the Peninsula to the Straits of Messina, had spurred his horse into the sea and exclaimed, “This shall be the Lombard boundary”. But his successors had never made good the words of Autharis. Naples and Amalfi, Sorrentum, Gaeta, and Tarentum had imperial governors. Alboin however made a duchy of Beneventum which then included the ancient Samnium and Apulia, and portions of Campania and Lucania. It was a stronghold of Lombard robbers in southern Italy. Constans tried to expel the young duke Romuald. But he failed, and hearing that King [pg 232] Grimoald was approaching to aid his son, he went to Naples, left at Formiæ, the present Mola di Gaeta, 20,000 men, and marched on Rome by the Appian Way.

Pope Vitalian went out to meet him as legitimate Roman emperor. It was true that ten years before he had seized Pope St. Martin in his church, and carried him off by stealth to trial, suffering, and ultimate martyrdom in the Crimea. It was true likewise that while holding St. Martin in prison, he had repeated the evil deed committed by Justinian's empress Theodora, a hundred and sixteen years before, and compelled the Roman clergy under threat of worse things to elect a new Pope while the Pope was living, though in this case the elected was himself blameless and excellent. It is true, also, that later still he had treated the great confessor Maximus with equal cruelty. But these crimes did not prevent his being the actual emperor to whom loyal submission was due from the great throne of justice in the earth. It would seem also by the mode in which Constans had received the nuntios who bore Pope Vitalian's synodical letter, announcing his accession, and by the superb present which he sent back in acknowledgement, that somehow a better spirit prevailed at the moment towards the Pope. We are met indeed by the fact that the Monothelite patriarch Peter held the see of Constantinople for twelve years from the death of the re-established Pyrrhus in 654, to his own death in 666, being the fourth heretic in succession from Sergius in the see of the royal city. Constans approached Rome at the head of an army. He made his offerings as [pg 233] emperor to the three great churches of Rome, the Lateran, St. Peter's and St. Mary Major. The Pope was completely at his mercy. He lodged in the imperial palace on the Palatine, which, however great its desolation, was able at least to receive him. In his twelve days sojourn he laid his hands upon every bronze statue which he thought worth plundering: and he stripped of its costly roof the church which his predecessor sixty years before had given to the Pope, dedicated to the Mother of God and all Martyrs.

Such a visit accompanied by such acts give a lively picture of the regard entertained by a Byzantine emperor for the city which gave him his title. It sums up the hundred and ten years of abject servitude into which all Italy had fallen since the capture of the city by Narses under Justinian. We have the contemptuous despot, the long-suffering Pope, the half-ruined powerless city. Three hundred and six years had passed since the degenerate son of Constantine, when he came to Rome in 357, was amazed at the beauty of its great buildings, the forum of Trajan, the theatre of Pompey, the unequalled Flavian amphitheatre. But in Constans the memories of Rome were dead: he robbed the last relic of its grandeur, Agrippa's pantheon, nor was he ready to reverence the protection of the Blessed Virgin over the Church dedicated to her by the Pope on receiving it as the gift of a preceding emperor. These last spoils he had embarked for his royal city, but they were detained at Syracuse, and on its capture shortly afterwards by the Saracens fell into their hands.

But before this event the life and misdeeds of the emperor Constans II. had come to a sudden end. He was living in Ortygia, the sole remaining quarter of that once princely city, wherein Achradyna, Tyche, Neapolis, and Epipolæ lay desolate. He had entered his bath one day, and received in it a blow on his head by his attendant, whether a slave, or a conspirator. His courtiers when they at length came in found him dead. The Greek chronologist Theophanes alleges as a reason for this event that after his murder of his brother he became greatly hated at Constantinople, both for his persecution of Pope Martin and Maximus, “that most wise confessor, whose tongue he cut out, and whose hands he cut off, and condemned many of the orthodox with tortures, banishments, and confiscations, because they would not submit to his heresy”. In his dread he had wished to transfer his residence to the West, but this his counsellors prevented. His treatment of the Sicilians was so bad that some in despair went to settle at Damascus, though it had become the capital of the chalif.

So lived and so died the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., “Roman emperor and Christian prince”[117] from 642 to 668, in the times when the chalifs of Mohammed, Omar, Osman, Ali, and Muawiah carved the Saracen realm out of the empire which Heraclius had possessed, and out of the kingdom of the “Great [pg 235] King,” whom Heraclius, when bearing the standard of the cross had brought low. If Heraclius treated Syria and Egypt as Constans treated Rome and Italy, is not the wonder diminished that in the ten years of Omar the structure of Roman power which had lasted seven centuries was overthrown, and those provinces had received a Mohammedan instead of a Byzantine master? Muawiah at Damascus cherished the Syria which at Antioch the lord on the Bosphorus had ground down with taxes. The Rome also which Constans, when he had been welcomed as its emperor, left stripped of its last ornaments was regarded with veneration by the farthest isle of the West, which it was winning at once to civilised and to Christian life. An English authority tells us that five years after the visit of Constans, Pope Vitalian, in the twelfth year of his pontificate, on the 26th March, 668, consecrated a monk of Tarsus, then living at Rome, learned both in secular and divine literature, speaking both Greek and Latin, of holy life, and venerable in age, being sixty-six years old. Thus Theodore was sent to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He was received in his passage through France by the Archbishop of Arles, and the bishop of Paris. He reached his see in the following year, 669, and sat in it full twenty-one years.[118] St. Bede's account of him says that he went over the whole island, wheresoever there were English, was received by all most cordially, and obeyed, when he gave them a right order of life, and the canonical celebration of Easter, which he spread [pg 236] abroad. St. Bede adds that he was the first among the archbishops whom the whole Church of the English consented to obey. His friend Adrian, who had recommended him to the Pope, and accompanied him from Rome, attended him in England: they had a large number of disciples, whom they instructed not only in theology, but in music, astronomy, and arithmetic. St. Bede wrote forty years after the death of Theodore, and says, “Even at this day there survive persons taught by them, who know the Greek and Latin languages as well as their own. Nor from the time the English came to Britain were there ever happier times, since, possessing kings most valiant and at the same time Christian, they were a terror to all barbarous nations; and the vows of all men tended to the joys of the heavenly kingdom but newly revealed to them; and all who wished to be instructed in the sacred lessons had masters ready to teach them.”

Constans was succeeded by his son Constantine IV. after he had put down in Sicily a short-lived rebellion. He did not imitate his father's violent deeds: he did not wish to maintain by force the Typus, which was still in legal existence. Pope Vitalian had done him service in his struggle with the usurper, and made use of his favourable sentiments to proceed with more decision against the Monothelites.

The Monothelite patriarch Peter had died in 666, two years before Constans. The three following patriarchs, Thomas II., John V., and Constantine, inclined to orthodoxy. They occupied together only nine years, [pg 237] from 667 to 676. The Sixth Council left their names in the diptychs. Yet so great was the power which the Monothelites possessed in the capital that Constantine Pogonatus, though not a Monothelite, and much wishing to be reconciled with the Roman Church, thought it dangerous at the beginning of his government to alter the state of things; and the Typus, as law imposed by the State, was not abrogated. The next patriarch, Theodore, in 670 was again Monothelite, and he was, though moderate himself, induced by Makarius, patriarch of Antioch, to erase from the diptychs the names of all the Popes since Honorius.

Pope Vitalian, after an admirable pontificate of fourteen years and a half, had died in 672, and was succeeded by the Roman, Adeodatus, who sat four years, and he by Pope Donus, also a Roman, in 676. Donus died in 678, and was followed by Agatho, a Sicilian of Palermo.

During seven years, which end in 678, the Emperor Constantine was fighting a battle of life or death with the Saracen chalif Muawiah for Constantinople itself. Every year during several months the Saracen fleet was in the waters of the Bosphorus. They had taken the city of Cyzikus and wintered there, renewing the contest in the spring. During seven years they continued to do this. Had they taken the city the whole Christian empire in the East would have fallen. It is hard to limit the ruin which would have ensued to the Christian Church. But in weighing the events of this century the extreme peril in which the Church lay through the [pg 238] furious outburst of the Saracens should not be forgotten. On this occasion the Greek fire is said to have been first used. By it, as water would not extinguish it, many ships and their crews were destroyed. After this conflict of seven years, the Saracens having lost a great multitude of men, at last retired, owning that they were defeated. Their fleet in retiring met with a great tempest, and in a battle also which took place with three imperial commanders the Saracens lost 30,000 men. Muawiah, the chalif, treated for peace with the emperor, and it was concluded on glorious terms for the empire. This victory led the northern Avars also to treat the emperor with deference.[119]

Thus the emperor was enabled to execute his wish for the restoration of communion with the West. He addressed a letter to Pope Donus on the 12th August, 678, requesting him to send commissioners to Constantinople to make arrangements for a Council to be held there. Pope Donus had died in 678 and this letter was received by his successor, Agatho. He desired the whole West on this occasion to be called to council, and for that purpose caused particular synods to be held everywhere. During this year Theodore, the patriarch of Constantinople, was deposed, it is not known on what grounds, but he was indisposed to union with the West. In his stead George was chosen, who at first was on the Monothelite side, but, instructed by the testimonies of the Fathers and the synods at Rome, which were read in [pg 239] the Sixth Council, he attached himself strongly to the orthodox.