To favour the Greeks was not his idea, so long as the pope gave him no offence; moreover he had a certain awe of the church, and of its head, which he never uprooted from his inner nature. Besides, his situation, independent of both sides and therefore alternately feared and courted by both, was the best possible for facilitating the execution of his ambitious and far-reaching projects.
In September of the year 727 till September 728 he addressed himself to a neighbourhood quite dangerously in the vicinity of Rome, seizing the town of Sutrium (Sutri), which, like the strip of country between the dukedoms of Spoleto and Tuscany was not yet incorporated with the Lombard kingdom. By dint of much persuasion and still more gold, he consented 140 days later to return this piece of territory, and leave the pope in possession, “the first presentation of a town to the church”—“the first germ of the pontifical state outside the walls of Rome.”
The following year after the subjection already mentioned, of Spoleto and Benevento, he followed Eutychius against Rome, and encamped on the Neronian meadows to the great dismay of the inhabitants. Nevertheless the matter was conducted to a peaceable issue. After a touching conference with Gregory II the Lombard king not only commenced no hostilities, but showed all possible respect to the papal throne, at the same time cautioning the pope to place himself on a better footing with Eutychius, and his (Liutprand’s) other allies. For this reason the idea of a serious alliance having existed between Liutprand and the emperor cannot be entertained.
Not long after, on the 11th of February, 731, Gregory II died. Under the rule of his successor, Gregory III, an enthusiastic image-worshipper, whose life in the Liber Pontificalis[z] is very scantily and unsatisfactorily told, “the Roman district was brought under the control of the accursed Lombards, under the king Liutprand himself,” a sentence which must not, of course, be taken literally, and which unfortunately stands without further explanation.
Probably the decade in which Gregory III sat on the stool of St. Peter, was the period during which these events took place which are only related by Paulus Diaconus.[p] To give an even moderately correct chronology of the sequence of events would be a hopeless endeavour. The battles against the East Romans which are here mentioned, are confined to those in the exarchate of Ravenna. Wherever the king himself led the fight, he always came off victor (according to Paulus), whilst in his absence the Lombards sustained many rebuffs. In the last year of Gregory III the complications between Rome and Liutprand assumed a very serious aspect, the intervention of the pope in Lombard affairs, which were purely secular, costing him dear.
It now appears to have been only by lavish expenditure that he was able to establish a friendly understanding. The fortress Gallese, north of Nepi on the Tiber, till now the object of so much desire, was resigned by Spoleto to the Ducatus Romanus, i.e., nominally to the East Roman kingdom, but in reality to the Patrimonium Petri. We have definite information that a formal treaty followed between the pope on the one side and the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento on the other, with the express purpose of restoring and protecting the autonomous rights of the dukes and safe-guarding both the eastern and western possessions of the pope from the clutches of Liutprand.
When, therefore, in 738, the king commenced a campaign in the Roman district in which the neighbourhood, particularly the church property in it, was not spared, the two dukes refused to answer the summons of Liutprand to follow and take part in the spoliation. Thereupon Liutprand abandoned the idea of Rome, and marched next against the insurrectionary duke of Spoleto through the devastated territory of Campania. Transamund did not venture to make any stand against him, but fled in the direction of Rome to Gregory III. Hilderic was promoted by the king to be duke in his stead, and assumed control, probably during June, 739. Liutprand next appealed urgently to the pope for the surrender of the insurrectionary vassals, but, as might have been expected, without success, Patricius the East Roman, and Duke Stephanus the commander of the troops in the Roman duchy both setting themselves in keen opposition to Liutprand’s desires. The latter avenged himself by seizing four towns. After accomplishing this as well as a siege of the Holy City, he returned in August, 739, to Pavia. A letter, the second written by Gregory III in 739 to Charles Martel, which has been preserved, gives a description of the poverty and anxiety in the Papal dominions, and is a veritable masterpiece of the meanest perfidy, in which he adjures Charles Martel by the keys of the Holy Sepulchre, which he had presented to him, to lend his help and strength against the dreaded Liutprand.
Scarcely had the king withdrawn when Transamund II, aided by the troops of the Roman duchy which were left with him in the confidence that he would regain the towns lost to the Romans, applied himself to re-assuming the sovereign power. The entire Roman military force invaded the dukedom of Spoleto in two columns, one town after another surrendered after a short resistance, and in December, 739, Transamund entered his capital in state; Hilderic being removed by murder. “And at this time there was a great disquietude among the Lombardians, as the Beneventines and Spoletines allied themselves with the Romans.”
Now that Transamund again felt himself in some measure secure in his duchy it was in vain that the pope and Patricius admonished him to fulfil his promise, and wrest from the king the four towns which had been lost through his means. The endeavour was next made to gain possession of them by friendly means, through the mediation of the Lombardian bishop, to whom on the 15th of October, 740, Gregory III despatched a pressing letter. All was in vain. Already there were new portents of evil, already Liutprand was arming himself for a new campaign against Rome, when, before the storm broke, came the death of Gregory III on the 29th of November, 741, five weeks after Charles Martel, five months after the emperor Leo III, the Isaurian, his implacable foe; Zacharias, his successor, consecrated on December 3rd, being left behind to quench the fire want of foresight had allowed to break out.
[741-743 A.D.]