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

by T. W. Allies

But this contrast had a yet further and even more striking issue. Pope Stephen II., hard pressed by the resolute attempt of king Aistulf to make himself temporal king of Rome, applied for defence to the man he still recognised as sovereign, Constantine Kopronymus, and received for answer only the words that he might get it where he could. He beheld the Lombard destroying and trampling on every thing outside the walls of Rome. In the utmost bodily weakness he had taken the road to Pavia: he resisted every effort of Aistulf to detain him. He had been received by Pipin with joy and admiration. Protection against the Lombards was promised him. The Lombard king gave way to his fear of the Frankish kings, but presently broke through every engagement. On 1st January, 756, he had promised himself Rome, and all which it contained. By the end of the year he had surrendered the exarchate to St. Peter, and Rome had accepted her Pontiff Stephen as her king. And the name of Stephen II. is [pg 401] numbered with that of his three predecessors as the maker of pontifical liberty. Kopronymus ventured to ask Pipin to restore to him the cities which Pipin had conquered. He received for reply that not for earthly reward or wealth, but for the love of St. Peter, the king of the Franks had bestowed on the Pope, his successor, the cities which he had delivered from the Lombard, and restored Rome to him by delivering it from Lombard aggression.

Constantine Kopronymus had succeeded his father Leo III. in 740. An insurrection arose against him in his own house. It was put down with terrible severity.[208] These were his doings in Constantinople in the same year 754, when Pipin was crowned by the Pope. He had surpassed his father in the cruelty with which he attempted to alter the existing worship of the Church. He had obtained some advantage in war against the Saracens, who were divided by the contest between the Ommaiads and the Abbassides, but he thought not the least of saving Italy from the Lombards, much more he desired to deliver the churches from the sacred images. For this purpose he caused many assemblies to be held and addressed the people, moving them to destroy the images. At last he held a Council at Constantinople of 338 bishops. At their head stood Gregory, bishop of Neocesarea, Theodosius, archbishop of Ephesus, a son of the emperor Apsimar, Sisinnius, bishop of Perge in Pamphylia. There was no patriarch, no representative from the sees [pg 402] of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The see of Constantinople was vacant, as Anastasius had just died. The Council met on the Asiatic side, opposite Constantinople, on the 10th February, 754, and sat six months. Then on the 8th August it passed over to the Church of Blachernæ. There the emperor presented himself at the ambon holding by the hand the monk Constantine, bishop of Sylæum, and cried with a loud voice, “Many years to the ecumenical patriarch Constantine.” At the same time he invested him with the patriarchal robes and the pallium. The Council ended that day, and nothing of it remains to us except a so-called confession of faith in the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second of Nicæa, in 787, where it was refuted and rejected.

The Council of 787, called in the time of another Constantine, the grandson of Kopronymus, when the eastern emperor had returned for the moment to the orthodox faith, has denounced this Council of 754 as claiming most unlawfully the title of ecumenical. Being confirmed by Pope Adrian I., it enjoys that title itself, and its utter condemnation of the Council of 338 bishops which met at the request of Kopronymus can be trusted. Here it is sufficient to say that this Council of 754 covered Kopronymus and his little son Leo with acclamations for having destroyed idolatry. When the emperor and the new patriarch Constantine and the rest of the bishops appeared in the square at Constantinople they published the decree of the Council, and renewed their anathemas against the patriarch Germanus and St. John [pg 403] Damascene. When the decree reached the provinces, Catholics were everywhere dismayed; the Iconoclasts began to sell the holy vessels and disorganise the churches. The images were burnt, the pictures torn down or whitewashed; only landscapes and the figures of birds and beasts were retained, especially pictures of theatres, hunts, and races. To bow before the images of Christ and of the saints was forbidden; to bow before the emperor was retained, and any insult to his figure upon a coin punished with death.

In 754, Kopronymus, holding Constantine by the hand, presented him to the assembled bishops as his own choice for ecumenical patriarch. Not only was the individual his choice, but his father, Leo, twenty years before, had made the office by constituting the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of the capital conterminous with the empire, in that he deprived the Pope in his quality of the first patriarch of the ten provinces which from the beginning had acknowledged his patriarchal superintendence.

We may follow to his end the ecumenical patriarch who had this beginning.

It seems that neither a bishop nor a secular priest in the eastern empire ventured to oppose the decree of this Council. But monks suffered the most fearful persecution.[209] They were driven away and their monasteries destroyed. Nor were these the worst blows which the emperor dealt upon their institution. He invented truly devilish means to make them contemptible and abhorred. [pg 404] Some who had been banished from Constantinople yielded to his will, subscribed the edict against images, quitted their dress and married. Thereupon they returned to the city, recovered all their civil rights, were marked with favour, received the emperor's personal attention. But those who remained true to their faith and their habit experienced his utmost severity. A month after his return from the war, the 24th August, 766, on which day he had appointed a chariot-race, he caused the monks in the neighbourhood of Constantinople to be brought together into the racecourse. There, as the rows of seats were crowded with people, he compelled each monk to pass in procession with a woman of bad life beside him. Thus they suffered every indignity which an excited populace could put upon them. The bad courtiers saw that it was an evil stroke of the emperor. Those who had not the secret thought that they had been taken in company with these women.

This spectacle so pleased the emperor that, four days afterwards, he repeated it with nineteen of his chief officers, whom he charged with a conspiracy against him. The real offence was the maintenance of the right belief, the having had relation with the banished Stephen in his exile at Proconnesus, and more than once to have praised his constancy in suffering. He caused them to be led round the racecourse, and made the crowd spit on them and revile them. The two of highest account were beheaded: two patricians, brothers, Constantine, who had been controller-general of the posts, and Strategius, officer in the life guards; the rest were blinded and banished [pg 405] to an island, nor did Kopronymus forget every year that he lived to send thither executioners to inflict on each a hundred strokes of oxhide. When he found that the people grieved over the execution of Constantine and Strategius, had not forborne tears, and even murmured, he put down this to the fault of the prefect Procopius, who ought to have suppressed these seditious cries; he had him scourged and deprived.

The patriarch Constantine had received from the emperor extraordinary and unfitting honours. They were followed by public disgrace. The emperor learnt that he had had intercourse with one of the accused for conspiracy. He put up witnesses who declared that they had heard expressions from him against the emperor. This the patriarch absolutely denied, and proof was not forthcoming. The emperor caused them secretly to confirm their statement by an oath taken on the holy Cross. Thereupon, without further proof he set seals upon the door of the patriarchal palace, and banished the patriarch to Prince's Island. Constantine was thus deposed on the 30th August, 766, and on the 16th November the emperor, without regarding any canonical form, named Nicetas to his place. The new patriarch was yet more unfitted for so eminent a rank, being a eunuch and slave by birth. From his youth he had only been accustomed to attend on women, had scarcely learnt to read; but the emperor, on recommendation of certain ladies of the court, had caused him to be made a priest and given him a post in the Church of the Apostles. Upon entering the patriarchal palace Nicetas showed himself [pg 406] worthy of the imperial choice, for he caused the magnificent mosaics on the walls to be destroyed. These his two predecessors had spared for their beauty.

By similar services the highest dignitaries of the kingdom were obtained. A zealous Iconoclast was in the eyes of the emperor qualified for every civil or military post. Thus Michael of Melissene, brother of the empress Eudocia, was made governor of Phrygia, Lachanodracon of Asia, and Manes of Galatia. At the beginning of 767 Constantine sent these new and yet more severe governors into the provinces, having just before imposed an oath on all his subjects not to honour images. Then began a general persecution of the orthodox. Those governors showed themselves in the provinces obedient instruments of their emperor's rage. They profaned churches, persecuted monks, and destroyed pictures. They tore relics of the saints from their sanctuaries, and cast them into rivers or drains. They mixed them with bones of animals, and burnt them together, so that the ashes might not be distinguished. The relics of the martyr St. Euphemia, in whose church at Chalcedon the great Council had been held, were its chief treasure. The emperor had the shrine cast into the sea, changed part of the church into an arsenal, and made the other part a place where all the rubbish of the city might be shot. The waves carried the shrine to the Isle of Lemnos, whose inhabitants fished it up. Twenty years after the death of Kopronymus, Irene, then reigning with her son Constantine, caused this treasure to be brought back to [pg 407] Chalcedon, the church to be purified and restored to its former condition.

The deposed patriarch Constantine had endured the hardest treatment at Prince's Island during thirteen months. The emperor had learnt that this unhappy prelate had told to others an impious remark concerning the Mother of God, which the emperor had made, and enjoined silence about it. Furious in his wrath he ordered him to be brought to Constantinople; he had him beaten till he could not stand, and had him carried in a litter to Sancta Sophia to be degraded. He was cast down on the steps of the sanctuary. A court-secretary read in presence of the whole assembly, called together by the emperors order, a detailed accusation with loud voice, and as he read each detail struck him with it in the face. In the meantime Nicetas had mounted the patriarchal chair, and presided over each insult which his benefactor suffered. When the reading was finished, Nicetas took the act of accusation, had Constantine carried to the tribune, where he was held upright by several, that the people might see him, made one of his suffragans go up to pronounce the anathema, to take off the episcopal robes, and with insulting expressions to expel him from the church, from which he had to go backwards.