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

by T. W. Allies

But the next year, 743, Liutprand broke out against [pg 347] the exarchate: and Eutychius, the exarch, with the archbishop of Ravenna, and the other cities of Emilia and the Pentapolis, had no better resource than to beseech the Pope to succour them. The Pope, accepting the request, sent two legates to the king with gifts, beseeching him to cease hostility with the Ravennese. But they accomplished nothing.

Then the Pope left Rome to the government of the Duke Stephen, and, with his train of clergy, went in person to Ravenna. The archbishop met him fifty miles from the city. The people welcomed him with cries, “to the shepherd who left his own sheep to deliver us who were about to perish”. But the Pope insisted upon going on to Pavia itself, in spite of the objections of king Liutprand to receive him. Disregarding every risk, he reached the Po on the 28th June, where he met the Lombard nobles sent to attend him; and, on the 20th, he celebrated Mass on the feast of the chief Apostle in the church of St. Peter, called the Golden Ceiling, wherein was the shrine of St. Augustine: whose body Liutprand himself had brought from Sardinia.

King Liutprand then received the Pope with great honour in his palace. The Pope pressed him not to attack the province of Ravenna, but to restore its cities. The king, after great resistance, consented to leave the province of Ravenna as it was before. The king then accompanied the Pope to the river, and sent his chief captains with him on his return, who restored the territories of Ravenna, and the castle of Cesena.

So the Pope disarmed a second time the most powerful of the Lombard kings, and saved the exarchate for the empire. From that time Liutprand lived in peace with the Romans and the Ravennese. He did not live to receive the report of the ambassadors whom he had sent to Constantinople to inform the emperor of the peace thus given to Ravenna. He closed in the next year, 744, his reign of thirty-two years, the longest in the Lombard series, and that in which the Lombard kingdom most developed its power. It must be confessed that the power of religion was great over the mind of Liutprand. He reverenced Pope Gregory II. under the walls of Rome: he listened to the voice of Pope Zacharias in the interviews of Terni and Pavia. At the bidding of the Vicar of Christ, he more than once stopped himself in the middle of his victories, and renounced the greatest desire of his heart.

Hildebrand, Liutprand's co-regent, and successor, maintained himself only a few months, and had to resign the crown before the end of the year 744 to Rachis, duke of Friuli. A good understanding seemed to be established with the Pope under a king renowned for piety, married to a Roman, who made rich offerings to the Church. Peace was assured with the Roman duchy. But after a few years Rachis also was in conflict with the exarchate. In 749 a new war burst out in central Italy. The king of the Lombards came in great wrath and with a valiant army to besiege Perugia. Then once more Pope Zacharias appeared. Attended by some clergy and chief people of Rome he went to the [pg 349] camp at Perugia. His gifts and his prayers so prevailed with King Rachis that he consented to raise the siege of the city and return in peace to Pavia. But the king had been so moved by the words of Pope Zacharias that after a few days he resigned his kingdom. With his queen Tassia and his daughter Ratruda he came like a pilgrim to Rome to venerate the tomb of St. Peter and to ask admission among the clergy. The Pope cut off the long hair of the Lombard king, gave him with his own hands the clerical tonsure, and vested him, as well as his wife and daughter, in the habit of St. Benedict. He retired, by the Pope's suggestion, to Monte Cassino, which had been restored by the abbot Petronax from its ruin towards the end of the sixth century. With him also retired the prince Carloman, younger brother of King Pipin, and a Benedictine as well as Rachis. Pope Zacharias greatly loved that monastery, enriched it with gifts and books, and exempted it from all episcopal jurisdiction, subjecting it immediately to the Holy See.

The three pacific victories gained by Pope Zacharias, twice over King Liutprand and once over King Rachis, victories due to the dignity of the Vicar of Christ and his Christian virtues, had raised to the highest point the estimation of the Romans for the Holy See. Is it possible to conceive a greater contrast that that presented by Leo III. and his son Kopronymus on the one hand, and the three pontiffs, the second and third Gregories and Zacharias, on the other; or between the governments of the blinding, scourging, maiming, and torturing sovereigns of the East, and the pastors ruling with beneficence and risking [pg 350] their lives for their flock in the West? Thus had the Popes become the protectors of desolated Italy; therefore had the Kings Liutprand and Rachis offered their royal mantles at the shrine of St. Peter. We are come now to the last and crowning incidents of this contrast.

On the resignation of Rachis the true Lombard spirit had raised his brother Aistulf to the throne. In June, 749, he was elected at Milan. Almost immediately thereupon a series of regulations showed that other political principles than those of Rachis had obtained the mastery. The presents made by the last king after his abdication were declared invalid; commerce with the Romans forbidden. The fortresses in the Alpine passes were strengthened. The army was put on a new footing. Presently Aistulf marched upon the exarchate. In July, 751, he was in Ravenna. Every imperial possession in the northern and midland Adriatic provinces fell into his power. Only Rome then was wanting to Aistulf's ambition. Hitherto no barbarian had been able to fix his seat there. His dreams were to reach all the power of the ancient emperors in Italy, and so verify the proud title of “king of all Italy” which a hundred and fifty years before Agilulf had inscribed upon his crown. He named his palace at Pavia “the palace of Italy,” and an inscription has been found, “Aistulf, in the name of Christ, by God's will Imperator Augustus, in the fourth year of his reign”.[183]

No help came from Byzantium, where the emperor [pg 351] Constantine Kopronymus, after putting down a pretender to his throne, was only occupied with Iconoclast troubles. For a long time no opposition was perceived; when the last exarch fell into the Lombard king's power Rome seemed to be the sure prey of him who had won Ravenna.

At that moment when the last authority of the empire threatened to disappear a new bond was knitted between Rome and the West as token of the world's changed situation. Pipin, son of Charles Martell, on the point of taking the idle sceptre from the hand of the last phantom-king of Merovingian race, turned to Pope Zacharias with the request that he would approve this great change. This is one principal mark of the immense moral power wielded by the Pope in the middle of the eighth century that the mayor of the palace in the Frankish empire sought his sanction to change his deputed into immediate royal authority. The Pope thus called upon exercised his supreme judgment in this highest secular matter. He decided that it was lawful for him who fulfilled the royal duty to be king rather than for him who only bore the name. In these words he deposed the Merovingian and recognised the Carlovingian dynasty, and the nobles of the Franks assembled in diet accepted his judgment. Pipin was proclaimed king of the Franks in 752 on the field of Mars at Soissons. Some but not all accounts say that St. Boniface, at the head of the German episcopate, three years before his martyrdom, gave the Church's sanction to the political act, in accordance with the judgment of the Pope.

This momentous judgment of Pope Zacharias, given at the end of 751, was one of his last acts. He died on the 14th March, 752. The last words of Anastasius respecting him are an epitome of his life and character. Having recorded his general deeds of kindness and munificence, he adds:—“Embracing and fostering all as a father and good shepherd, and absolutely allowing none to suffer tribulation in his times, the people entrusted to him by God lived in great security”.