While monasticism was transforming Italy and placing Catholicism on a firm basis in the Western lands of the Empire, the power of the papal see, when Rome was reconquered by the imperial forces from Constantinople, seemed to sink to the lowest depths. The papacy under Vigilius (537-55) and Pelagius (555-60) was the servant of the Byzantine Caesars. The history of the controversies in which each pope was engaged, the scandal of their elections, there is no need to relate here. Suffice it to say that the decisions of the Fifth General Council were in no way the work of either, but were eventually accepted by both. The self-contradictions of Vigilius are pitiable; and the acceptance of Pelagius by the Romans was only won by his rejecting a formal statement of his predecessor.
Consecrated only by two bishops[7] on Easter Day, 556, he began a pontificate which was from the first disputed and even despised. The Archbishop of Milan and the patriarch of Aquileia would not communicate with him. In Gaul he was received with suspicion, and he was obliged to write to King Childebert, submitting to him a profession of his faith.[8] It is clear that the Gallican Church no more than the Lombard regarded {40} the pope as ipso facto orthodox or the guardian of orthodoxy. Even this letter of Pelagius was not regarded as satisfactory. It was long before the Churches entered into communion with him; and even to the last, the northern sees of Italy refused. He ruled, unquietly enough, for four years; and died, leaving a memory free at least from simony, and honoured as a lover of the poor.
Under him, as under Vigilius, the papacy had been compelled to submit to the judgment of the East. "The Church of Rome," says Mgr. Duchesne, "was humiliated." [9]
The lives of these two popes cover the most important period in the ecclesiastical history of the sixth century. After the death of Pelagius I., and up to the accession of Gregory the Great in 590, the interest of Italian history is political rather than ecclesiastical. The emperors tried to rule, through their exarchs at Ravenna, from Constantinople. The papacy grew quietly in power. Then came the Lombards and a new era began.
[1] So Var., i. 26, ed. Mommsen, p. 28.
[2] ii. 29, p. 63.
[3] Italy and her Invaders, vol. iii. p. 516.
[4] Anonymus Valesii.
[5] Italy and her Invaders, vol. vi. p. 528.
[6] Instances are collected by M. Diehl, Études sur l'administration byzantine dans l'exarchat de Ravenne, p. 320.