Quod sim cunctarum Mater Caput Ecclesiarum”.
Nor is there any spot on the earth upon which the guiding hand of God in the fortunes of the world may be more profitably studied than before the entrance of that Church so well styled in her double character Mother and Head. If the Mother were not head her rule would be impotent; if the head were not mother it would be unbearable.
The munificence thus begun in his gratitude by Constantine was continued during centuries by great Roman families and by others also. The pastoral staff fixed itself in Roman earth, and became a great tree. In due time it flowered in a prince's sceptre. It is most interesting to mark in the gifts to the Roman See the heathen names of ancient patrician families commemorated. Under the properties administered by St. Gregory the Great we read of the Massa Papirianensis, the Massa Furiana, the Massa Varroniana, the Fundus Cornelii.
A fact[215] which enters deep into the world's history bears remarkable witness to the rapid increase of papal wealth and its inevitable accompaniment, the political independence of St. Peter's chair. From the time the unity of the Roman realm began to be dissolved into two empires, [pg 422] the eastern and the western, not a single western ruler fixed his seat abidingly in Rome, although almost all lived in Italy, and although many of them could have put to good use, amid the State's increasing weakness, the help which the charm of the Roman name offered. After the death of Constantine the Great in 337, of his three sons Constantius I. received the East, Constans I. received the West in union with his younger brother Constantine II., but after his murder, alone. This Constans usually dwelt in Gaul. When he visited Italy we find him prefer Milan and Aquileia to Rome. He yielded to the insurgent Maxentius, and then Constantius became sole master of the realm, and, when in the West, lived chiefly in Milan. In his whole reign once only did he enter Rome.[216]
The second division of the realm, which followed the emperor Jovian, gave Valentinian for ruler of the West, who selected at first Milan for residence, but was compelled by incursions of the German peoples to spend much time on the Rhine. We learn, partly from the history of St. Ambrose, partly from other documents, that the sons and successors of Valentinian I., Gratian, and Valentinian II., as well as the mother and guardian of the latter, the widowed empress Justina, when in Italy held their court chiefly at Milan and Aquileia.
The third and final partition, which severed the West for ever from the East, took place in 395 after the death of the Spaniard, Theodosius I., whom Gratian had taken for his partner. From that time not Rome, not [pg 423] Milan, or Aquileia, but the seaport Ravenna appears the permanent residence of those phantom-emperors who ruled for nearly a century until the full dissolution of the western empire. The political significance of the last city even remarkably survived the name of the Roman empire.
We are expressly told that Odoacer, the first German king of Italy, who deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last West Roman, had his seat in Ravenna. The same was the case with Odoacer's conqueror, the great Ostrogoth, Theodorich. During his government Ravenna received the title of the royal city, though the Ostrogoth often lived in other great cities of upper Italy, such as Pavia and Verona. Finally Ravenna, after the extinction of the Ostrogothic state and people, remained for nearly two hundred years the seat of the exarchs, Byzantine viceroys of Italy.
Why of so many princes bearing the title of Roman emperors or kings of Italy did no single one make his seat in the former capital of the world? Why did the greater number pay it only a transitory visit, some perhaps not see it at all? I think only one sufficient answer can be given to this question. They shunned a longer stay at Rome because they felt that in a city which had assumed a priestly character they would no longer play the first part so much as kings desire and must desire it. That fact is, therefore, an incontestable proof not only of the papal power, but likewise of its wealth. Without property no co-active force, not even spiritual, can in the long run maintain itself.
The law of the year 321, allowing churches to receive landed[217] property from any testator, had results so astonishingly great, that in 50 years Valentinian I. thought it necessary to put a limit on it. We may pass at once to the time of St. Gregory the Great, the fourteen years 590 to 604. At that time the Bishop of Rome in his Lateran Palace, had become the greatest ground landlord in Italy, and even in all the West. He was the real protector of Rome. The eastern emperor bore the name, but in every need and trial it was not at Ravenna or at Constantinople that help was sought, but at the Lateran. Royal dignity waited already upon the Vicar of Christ; a dignity with which the spontaneous offerings of three hundred years had invested him. St. Gregory lived like a monk, and gave away as a king from the inexhaustible fountain of the apostolic charity.
His letters enable us to form a fair estimate of the domains of the Roman Church at that time. In his unresting activity to minister aright the material wealth of the Church, the son of St. Benedict ripened the recognition of his political independence. His death preceded by 150 years the legal acknowledgment of sovereignty attained by his successor, Stephen II., and that intervening period was, as we have seen, a time of exceedingly severe trial. A notice of the deacon John, biographer of St. Gregory, informs us that in his pontificate the Roman Church possessed at least twenty-three patrimonies. These were respectively, that of [pg 425] Sicily, of Syracuse, of Palermo, of Calabria, of Apulia, the Samnite, the Neapolitan, the Campanian, the Tuscan, the Sabine, the Nursian, the Carseolan, that of Via Appia, of Ravenna, of Illyricum, the Istrian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, Corsican, Ligurian, that of the Cottian Alps, of Germanicia, and of Gaul.