Peter’s Rock

                                    In

                             Mohammed’s Flood

                From St. Gregory The Great to St. Leo III.

                       Being the Seventh Volume of

                       The Formation of Christendom

                                    By

                        Thomas W. Allies, K.C.S.G.

                        London: Burns & Oats, Ld.

                New York: Catholic Publication Society Co.

                                   1890






PROLOGUE TO THE SEVEN VOLUMES OF THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.


This work being from the beginning one in idea, I place here together the
titles of the fifty-six chapters composing it. For each of these was
intended to be complete in itself, so far as its special subject reached;
but each was likewise to form a distinct link in a chain. The Church of
God comes before the thoughtful mind as the vast mass of a kingdom. Its
greatest deeds are but parts of something immeasurably greater. The most
striking evidence of its doctrines and of its works is cumulative. Those
who do not wish to let it so come before them often confine their interest
in very narrow bounds of time and space. Thus I have known one, who
thought himself a bishop, accept Wycliffe as the answer of a child to his
question, Who first preached the Gospel in England? And not only this.
They also seize upon a particular incident, or person, and so invest with
extraordinary importance facts which they suppose, and which so conceived
are convenient for their purpose, but in historical truth are anything but
undisputed. In this tone of mind, or shortness of vision, that which is
gigantic becomes puny, that which is unending becomes transient. The
sequel and coherence of nations, the mighty roll of the ages spoken of by
St. Augustine, are lost sight of. Again, in English-speaking countries
alone more than two hundred sects call themselves Christian. Their
enjoyment of perfect civil freedom and equality veils to them the horror
of doctrinal anarchy, in virtue of which alone they exist. By this anarchy
the very conception of unity as the corollary of truth is lost to the
popular mind. But through the eight centuries of which I have treated, the
loss of unity was the one conclusive test of falsehood, and the Christian
Faith stood out to its possessors with the fixed solidity of a mountain
range whose summit pierced the heaven.

It has been my purpose to exhibit the profound unity of the Christian
Faith together with the infinite variety of its effects on individual
character, on human society, on the action of nations towards each other,
on universal as well as national legislation. Like the figure of the great
Mother of God bearing her Divine Son in her arms, and so including the
Incarnation and all its works, the Faith stands before us in history,
“veste deaurata, circumdata varietate”. And as the personal unity appears
in the symbol of the Divine Love to man expressed in her Maternity, so it
appears also in the figure of the Church through the ages in which that
Divine Love executes His work. A divided creed means a marred gospel and
an incredulous world.

I offer this work as a single stone, though costing the labour of thirty
years, if perchance it may be accepted in the structure of that Cathedral
of human thought and action wherein our Crucified God is the central
figure, around which all has grown.

Be it allowed me to quote here words of the present Sovereign Pontiff
addressed on the 18th August, 1883, to the Cardinals de Luca, Pitra, and
Hergenröther:—


    “It is the voice of all history that God with the most careful
    providence directs the various and never-ending movements of human
    affairs. Even against man’s intention he makes them serve the
    advancement of His Church. History says further that the Roman
    Pontificate has ever escaped victorious from its contests and the
    violence employed against it, while its assaulters have failed in
    the hope which they cherished, and have wrought their own
    destruction. Not less openly does history attest the divine
    provision made concerning the city of Rome from its very
    beginning. This was to give for ever a home and seat to the
    successors of St. Peter, from which as a centre, being free from
    all control of a superior, they might guide the whole Christian
    commonwealth. And no one has ventured to resist this counsel of
    the divine Providence without sooner or later perceiving the
    vanity of his efforts.

    “It cannot be expedient, nor is it wise counsel, to fight with a
    power for whose perpetuity God has pledged Himself, while history
    attests the performance of the pledge. Since Catholics throughout
    the whole world pay it religious veneration, it is their interest
    to defend it with all their power. Nay even the rulers of secular
    governments must acknowledge this, and lay it to heart, especially
    in times so dangerous, when the very foundations on which human
    society rests appear well nigh to shake and totter.”





CONTENTS TO THE SEVEN VOLUMES OF THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM.


VOLUME I.

_INAUGURAL LECTURE ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY, 1854.—THE CHRISTIAN FAITH
AND THE INDIVIDUAL._

CHAPTER I.

The Consummation of the Old World.

CHAPTER II.

The New Creation of Individual Man.

CHAPTER III.

Heathen and Christian Man compared.

CHAPTER IV.

Effect of the Christian People on the World.

CHAPTER V.

New Creation of the Primary Relation between Man and Woman.

CHAPTER VI.

The Creation of the Virginal Life.

VOLUME II.

_THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND SOCIETY._

CHAPTER VII.

The gods of the Nations when Christ appeared.

CHAPTER VIII.

The First and the Second Man.

CHAPTER IX.

The Second Man verified in history.

CHAPTER X.

The First Age of the Martyr Church.

CHAPTER XI.

The Second Age of the Martyr Church.

CHAPTER XII.

The Third Age of the Martyr Church.

CHAPTER XIII.

The Christian Church and the Greek Philosophy, I.

CHAPTER XIV.

The Christian Church and the Greek Philosophy, II.

VOLUME III.

_THE CHRISTIAN FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY._

CHAPTER XV.

The Foundation of the Roman Church, the Type and Form of every particular
Church; its contrast with Philosophy, and its development of the Judaic
embryo.

CHAPTER XVI.

Neostoicism and the Christian Church.

CHAPTER XVII.

The First Resurrection of Cultured Heathenism in the Neopythagorean
School.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Standing-ground of Philosophy from the accession of Nerva to that of
Severus.

CHAPTER XIX.

The Gospel of Philosophic Heathenism.

CHAPTER XX.

The Neoplatonic Philosophy and Epoch.

CHAPTER XXI.

The respective power of the Greek Philosophy and the Christian Church to
construct a Society.

CHAPTER XXII.

The Church reconstructing the Natural Order by the Supernatural.

VOLUME IV.

_CHURCH AND STATE IN THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOM._

CHAPTER XXIII.

Prologue.—The Kingdom as prophesied and as fulfilled.

CHAPTER XXIV.

Relation between the Civil and the Spiritual Powers from Adam to Christ.

CHAPTER XXV.

Relation between the Spiritual and the Civil Powers after Christ.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Transmission of Spiritual Authority from the Person of our Lord to Peter
and the Apostles, as set forth in the New Testament.

CHAPTER XXVII.

Transmission of Spiritual Authority as witnessed in the history of the
Church from A.D. 29 to A.D. 325.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

The One Episcopate resting upon the One Sacrifice.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Independence of the Antenicene Church shown in her organic growth.

CHAPTER XXX.

Independence of the Antenicene Church shown in her mode of positive
teaching and in her mode of resisting error.

CHAPTER XXXI.

The Church’s battle for independence over against the Roman Empire.

VOLUME V.

_THE THRONE OF THE FISHERMAN BUILT BY THE CARPENTER’S SON, THE ROOT, THE
BOND, AND THE CROWN OF CHRISTENDOM._

CHAPTER XXXII.

The witness of Eighteen Centuries to the See of Peter.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

From St. Peter to St. Sylvester, No. 1.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

From St. Peter to St. Sylvester, No. 2.

CHAPTER XXXV.

Constantine and the Church.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

Constantine and his Sons: Julian, Valentinian, Valens.

CHAPTER XXXVII.

From Constantine at Nicæa to Theodosius at Constantinople.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

Church and State under the Theodosian House.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

Church and State and the Primacy from 380 to 440.

CHAPTER XL.

The flowering of Patristic Literature, No. 1.

CHAPTER XLI.

The flowering of Patristic Literature, No. 2.

CHAPTER XLII.

St. Leo the Great.

VOLUME VI.

_THE HOLY SEE AND THE WANDERING OF THE NATIONS: LEO I. TO GREGORY I._

CHAPTER XLIII.

The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations.

CHAPTER XLIV.

Cæsar fell down.

CHAPTER XLV.

Peter stood up.

CHAPTER XLVI.

Justinian.

CHAPTER XLVII.

St. Gregory the Great.

VOLUME VII.

_PETER’S ROCK IN MOHAMMED’S FLOOD._

CHAPTER XLVIII.

The Pope and the Byzantine.

CHAPTER XLIX.

Pope Martin: his Council, and his Martyrdom.

CHAPTER L.

Heraclius betrays the Faith, and cuts his empire in two.

CHAPTER LI.

Christendom and Islam.

CHAPTER LII.

Old Rome and New Rome.

CHAPTER LIII.

An Emperor-Priest and four great Popes.

CHAPTER LIV.

Rome’s Three Hundred Years, 455-756, from Genseric to Aistulf, between the
Goth, the Lombard, and the Byzantine.

CHAPTER LV.

From Servitude to Sovereignty.

CHAPTER LVI.

The Making of Christendom.





PREFACE.


This volume is strictly in continuance of the two which it follows—“The
Throne of the Fisherman built by the Carpenter’s Son,” and “The Holy See
and the Wandering of the Nations”. It is bulk alone which prevents my
offering the three in one cover as historic proof, from original
documents, of the first eight centuries that the Holy See by the
institution of Christ is the Root, the Bond, and the Crown of Christendom.
The works chiefly used in it are before and above all the letters of the
Popes in their office of governing the Christian Commonwealth, which are
contained in the great collection of Mansi, thirty-one volumes folio. The
full titles of other works chiefly referred to are Cardinal Hergenröther,
to whose work, _Photius, Patriarch von Constantinopel, sein Leben, seine
Schriften, und das griechische Schisma_, and to his _Handbuch der
allgemeinen Kirchengeschichte_, I owe great obligations—they are each in
three volumes; Alfred von Reumont, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, in three
volumes; Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom_, in eight volumes; Kurth,
_Les origines de la Civilisation moderne_, in two volumes; Jungmann,
_Dissertationes_, in seven volumes; the German edition of Rohrbacher’s
History, vol. x. by Rump, vol. xi. by Kellner; Hefele,
_Concilien-Geschichte_, in seven volumes; Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_;
Brunengo, _Le Origini della Sovranità Temporale dei Papi_, and _I primi
Papi-Re e l’ultimo Re dei Longo-bardi_; F. von Hoensbroech, _Enstehung und
Entwicklung des Kirchenstaates_; Niehues, _Kaiserthum und Papstthum_,
Döllinger, _Muhammed’s Religion, nach ihrer inneren Entwicklung und ihrem
Einflusse auf das Leben der Völker_. Regensburg, 1838.





CONTENTS


Prologue To The Seven Volumes Of The Formation Of Christendom.
Contents To The Seven Volumes Of The Formation Of Christendom.
Preface.
Chapter I. The Pope And The Byzantine.
Chapter II. Pope Martin, His Council, And His Martyrdom.
Chapter III. Heraclius Betrays The Faith, And Cuts His Empire In Two.
Chapter IV. Christendom And Islam.
Chapter V. Old Rome And New Rome.
Chapter VI. An Emperor Priest And Four Great Popes.
Chapter VII. Rome’s Three Hundred Years, 455-756 From Genseric To Aistulf,
Between The Goth, The Lombard, And The Byzantine.
Chapter VIII. From Servitude To Sovereignty.
Chapter IX. The Making Of Christendom.
Index.
Footnotes





CHAPTER I. THE POPE AND THE BYZANTINE.


I have hitherto conducted the history of the Throne of the Fisherman built
by the Carpenter’s Son in unbroken succession from St. Peter to St.
Gregory the Great. It is a period of 575 years from the Day of Pentecost
A.D. 29 to St. Gregory’s death in A.D. 604. This period is very nearly
bisected by the conversion of Constantine. The first half contains the
action of the Primacy over against a hostile heathen empire. The second
half contains its action upon an empire which, at least in principle,
acknowledged union with the Catholic Church as a duty, a privilege, and a
necessity. The testimony rendered by Councils and by Fathers to the Roman
Primacy may be said to be complete in the time of St. Gregory. Subsequent
Councils can only add a closer precision to the testimony of the Council
of Chalcedon. Subsequent acts of the Eastern empire can scarcely go beyond
the submission of its episcopate, its emperor, and its nobles to Pope
Hormisdas. The point of that submission consists in the solemn acceptance
of the line of Roman bishops as inheriting the charge given by our Lord to
St. Peter. Subsequent legislation can but apply in detail the acceptance
by Justinian of the Pope’s right to examine everything which belongs to
the doctrine or concerns the conduct of the Church throughout the world.
And force is even added to this acceptance, because it was made when the
Pope, John II., to whom it was made, was not in fact his temporal subject.

I propose to treat in this volume of a period embracing two hundred years.
It runs from the time of St. Gregory the Great to the founding of the holy
Roman empire, in the person of Charlemagne, by Pope St. Leo III.

But, before entering on this treatment, it seems to me called for to make
one remark on all which I have hitherto written or am hereafter to write,
and to draw out distinctly a principle which affects every line of my
narrative. This is the necessity of considering the Church as the one
kingdom of Christ in all ages: one and the same polity from the Day of
Pentecost to the Day of Judgment. This idea has always been before me as
the rule of faith in writing the six preceding volumes. It has been the
major premiss of my whole argument. To a Catholic the unity of the Church
is as necessary as the unity of God; and, equally, to say that the Church
is fallible is to deny the existence of any such thing as the kingdom of
God upon earth. The sooner that anything which is fallible is swept away
the better. The one duty which we owe to fallibility is to label it. The
thing called public opinion(1) is fallible, and, accordingly, every
generation sweeps it away and substitutes a fresh fallibility, destined to
disappear after a similar ascendency, which waxes and wanes in varying
durations of time. Division is the strongest proof of fallibility in that
which is divided, as unity is of truth in that which remains one mass. For
this cause those who substitute national churches in a particular country
under the political head of that country, whether king, president, or
parliament, for the one divine polity in all countries, are divided from
my argument by an impassable gulf. They no more believe in the Church
which is “the house of God, the pillar and basis of the truth,” than he
who sets up three gods believes in one Infinite Creator and Rewarder of
His creatures. The decrees of a General Council in matters of faith are
not recognised by them as part of the divine deposit; for to them they are
not acts of the Sovereign Lord in His plenary council. The lessons of
history fail to convey any definite impressions to minds in which this
idea is wanting. Rather the lessons of history affect them as the heathen
was affected who heard the description of our Lord’s sufferings undergone
for his redemption only to exclaim, “Was it not a long time ago?” There
are facts, but no connection. A strong instance of this is that the want
of written records in the first three centuries is not made up to them by
the acts of the Church in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, because
to them the Church is not a polity instinct with one life and following
from the beginning identical rules of government. On the contrary, they
argue from the silence of perished documents in the three earliest
centuries against the recorded practice of the three centuries following.
Thus to them the acts of the Church in the Council of Ephesus in 431,(2)
the next ecumenical council to the Nicene, throw no light upon the acts of
the Church in the Nicene, of which no full record exists. Nor, again, do
the acts of the Council of Chalcedon illustrate to them the antecedent
constitution of the Church. And the supplication of the Eastern emperor,
Marcian, to Pope St. Leo to confirm those acts tells them nothing as to
the relation of the Council to the Pope in the time of the Nicene Council.
Less even than infidels, who reject the Christian revelation altogether,
but have a regard for historical sequence, do the nurslings of a national
church, especially if it was in origin a queen’s love-child, and then
dandled on the knees of successive kings, understand the majesty of the
Apostolic See, as set forth in the words of our Lord, or as unfolded in
the course of ages. If the political constitution under which they live be
a system of compromise, they are tempted to make the constitution of the
Church a similar system, in which a change of ministry alters or even
reverses the policy of a kingdom. “The holy Catholic Church, the communion
of saints,” is not an entity to such minds. Therefore they fail to
appreciate the proof of the one polity at the head of which St. Peter’s
successor stands. For some that polity ceased to exist in the fifth
century; for others in the ninth; for others in the sixteenth; for all
such it is non-existent in the nineteenth. It is for them as the human
soul for the infidel surgeon: he cannot find it under his knife. Or as God
for the infidel astronomer: he cannot see God in the order of the
universe, though he will receive what physicists tell him, that the
universe is absolutely one.

But I write for those to whom history is intelligible, because it is an
order of events unrolling itself as a drama at once human and divine; to
whom the human soul makes itself known by its acts; to whom “the heavens
declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork—day unto
day utters speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.” To whom
likewise there is one “Jesus Christ yesterday and to-day, and the same for
ever”: yesterday at Pentecost with St. Peter and the apostles and our
Blessed Lady; to-day with Leo XIII. at Rome and nineteen hundred years of
doctors, martyrs, and saints; “the same for ever” at the Day of Judgment.

And now I turn another leaf in the book of human actions, which our Lord
holds on His knees and unfolds in His history of His one Church.

During the whole pontificate of St. Gregory he was defending himself
against the deceit and despotism of the man whom he acknowledged as his
lawful sovereign, the Byzantine emperor. The despotism usually veiled
itself in deceit, while the deceit rested upon the despotism rooted in the
heart of the eastern that he was lord of the world.(3) Worse than the
Lombards, who pursued to the very gates of Rome the people nourished by
Gregory on the Church’s patrimonium, who spoiled, maimed, and tortured
those whom they could catch, were the intrigues of the imperial
lieutenants, the exarchs of Ravenna, plotting with the Lombards, enemies
of the emperor, against his subjects, the Pope and his Romans. With this
state of things the seventh century begins, and so it continues to the
end. We have to consider the great events which took place in this
century, and especially to point out their connection with this fact of
the Byzantine temporal despotism as it was turned upon the spiritual
power.

Again, during his whole pontificate, St. Gregory was resisting the
attempts of the bishops of Constantinople to extend their power. In his
own time it would seem to have been an effect of Justinian’s legislation
that the Roman See accepted them as patriarchs, which Pope Gelasius denied
them to be. Not only so but in every step of their advancement they were
backed by the emperors to go on yet further by pushing their See under the
title of Ecumenical to a position over the eastern empire parallel to that
of the Pope over the West, while it was subordinate at the same time to
the emperor himself. The four-and-twenty immediate successors of St.
Gregory, from Pope Sabinian, elected in 604, to Pope Constantine, who died
in 715, were exposed to the full force of this attempt. The bearing of it
upon the rise of the Mohammedan empire will appear more and more as we
proceed in the history of this terrible century.

The first event on which we must dwell for a time on account of its great
effect upon the history of the century, is the long continued hostility
between the eastern and the Persian empires. In the year 602 the general
Phocas had deposed the emperor Mauritius.(4) From his reign most Byzantine
historians date the ever increasing calamities of the empire. The popular
feeling that a bad ruler is a judgment from God was expressed in the story
that a pious monk once asked, O God, why hast Thou set this man over us as
emperor? when he received for answer, Because I could find none worse.
Phocas reigned about seven years, and his end was as follows. The
patriarch Thomas had, by his entreaties, drawn to Constantinople Theodore
of Siceon, who enjoyed a great reputation for holiness. The mind of
patriarch Thomas had been greatly moved by auguries of misfortune which as
it were filled the air. He urged the saint to pray and then to give him
his advice. The saint at last yielded to his entreaties and said, “It was
my mind not to disturb you. It is not for your good to know these things.
But since you will have it so, learn that the incident which troubles you
betokens many great misfortunes. Many will leave our religion. Incursions
of barbarians will follow, and great blood-shedding. Devastation and
insurrection through the whole world. Churches will be deserted. The fall
of the divine service and of the empire is approaching: and the adversary
is nigh at hand.”

Whilst St. Theodore was at Constantinople the emperor Phocas suffered from
gout in hands and feet. He sent for the saint, who laid his hands upon him
and prayed for him. The emperor felt relief, and commended himself and his
realm to Theodore’s prayers. The saint replied that if he wished such a
prayer to be heard he must cease from oppression and shedding of blood.
Phocas had great need of such warning, but profited little by it. Narses
was the ablest and bravest general whom he had to send against the
Persians, but he broke his word, and had him burnt alive. This frightful
execution moved the patrician Germanus to try after the place of emperor
which Phocas had once offered to him. He planned a conspiracy with
Constantina, widow of the emperor Mauritius. She had taken asylum with her
daughters in Sancta Sophia. This was in 606. At the sight of her the
people flocked together and took up arms. Phocas sent orders to bring out
Constantina with her daughters. The patriarch Cyriakus refused: only when
he had compelled Phocas to swear that no harm should be done to them, he
gave them up. Phocas kept his word, and only confined them in a monastery.
Germanus was forced to become a priest. In the next year, 607, Germanus
and Constantina with other persons of high rank made a new conspiracy. It
was discovered. Germanus with his daughter, the widow of prince
Theodosius, eldest son of the preceding emperor Mauritius, was beheaded.
The same lot befel Constantina and her daughters at Chalcedon, on the spot
where, five years before, the emperor Mauritius had witnessed the
execution of five sons, one after another, uttering at each stroke only
the words: “Just art Thou, O Lord, and just is Thy judgment”: and then
offering his own head to the sword. Phocas put to death the other
conspirators with fearful tortures. Such executions were followed by fresh
conspiracies, and these by similar punishments. At last, Crispus, the very
stepson of Phocas, rose against him, and invited Heraclius, governor of
Africa, to depose the emperor. Heraclius despatched a fleet under the
command of his son, bearing the same name. Only as it drew near
Constantinople did Phocas hear of it. He prepared for defence, but Crispus
secretly traversed all his efforts, pretending to be on his side. After a
bloody engagement the fleet appeared before the walls of the capital on
Sunday the 4th October, 610. The next morning a senator, whose wife Phocas
had dishonoured, appeared with a troop of soldiers at the palace. Phocas
was seized, stripped of the purple, his hands bound behind his back, and
carried through the city and the fleet before the young Heraclius, who was
still on board his vessel. “Wretch,” said Heraclius, “hast thou governed
the empire so?” “And wilt thou,” answered Phocas, “govern it better?”
Heraclius trampled on him, cut off his hands and feet, and then his head,
in sight of the vast throng which lined the shore. His head and limbs were
carried on spears through the city, the trunk dragged through the streets,
and all at last burnt.

Heraclius, accompanied by Crispus, disembarked. He invited Crispus to put
on the imperial robe, since he was not come to invest himself with it, but
only to avenge Mauritius and his children. Crispus refused, and then
Heraclius had nothing to oppose to the request of the patriarch Sergius,
who had just succeeded Thomas, that he should be crowned by him. Crispus
was given the government of Cappadocia: but becoming a few years later
unfaithful to Heraclius, as he had been to his stepfather Phocas, was
compelled to receive the torture, and pass the rest of his days in
banishment.

It may here be said that the dynasty thus begun occupied the throne for
five generations. Justinian II., great-great-grandson of Heraclius, was
more cruel if possible, than Phocas: he was deposed by an adventurer in
695, and his nose cut off to incapacitate him for any future recovery of
the throne. His successor lasted three years: and another for seven; after
which Justinian, who wore a golden nose for the one which he had lost,
recovered the throne; practised during five years atrocious cruelties, was
deposed by a third adventurer, Philippicus Bardanes in 711: put to death,
and his head carried to Rome to assure all men that they were delivered
from a tyrant, and a special oppressor of the Church.

Such in personal conduct was the manner of men who sat on the eastern
throne of the great Constantine during the seventh century: whom
four-and-twenty Popes found themselves bound to acknowledge as “Christian
kings and Roman princes”. What they were in this capacity, which was the
first and greatest of all their duties, as recognised by the imperial
laws, will be seen as the narrative proceeds. Under these men the Popes,
utterly deprived of temporal power, in the midst of a province an outlying
domain of a distant despot, had to maintain the unity of the Christian
faith, and the independence of the Holy See as its guardian. In the midst
of these things the chalifs of Mohammed broke upon the eastern empire, and
severed from it its fairest provinces. It is requisite to follow closely
the series of events, and the connection of times.

Upon his accession to the throne in 603 Phocas had sent an embassy to the
Persian emperor Chosroes, expressing his desire to maintain peace with
him. But Chosroes under pretext of avenging his benefactor, the late
emperor Mauritius, began a war which lasted more than four and twenty
years, inflicted fearful sufferings on both empires, and had the most
important consequences by leaving them in a state of great weakness to
meet the assault of a new enemy, the Mohammedan chalifate.

During the first eighteen years of this war, that is, from 604 to 622, the
Greek empire suffered a series of defeats and disasters. Through the whole
East, from the ruins of Babylon to the Bosphorus, cities were burnt and
destroyed, the country ravaged and left without cultivation, the
inhabitants slain or carried away into slavery. The Persians tore from the
empire province after province—Armenia, Mesopotamia, Cappadocia. In 610
they came up to the walls of Chalcedon. The accession of Heraclius
produced no pause in their destructive course. In 611 they took Edessa,
Apamea, and Antioch. In 615 they plundered Palestine, and took Jerusalem.
The Church of Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives, and Constantine’s
Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre were destroyed or burnt. Among the
inhabitants carried away was the patriarch Zacharias. The Persians seized
in plunder all that was valuable, and the priceless relic of the Holy
Cross was taken away by the fire-worshipper Chosroes. The Sponge and the
Lance were saved by the patrician Nicetas, who purchased them at a high
price from a Persian soldier, and then brought them to Constantinople,
where they were exposed for veneration of the faithful.

It is to be noted that in 610 the Jews at Antioch had an insurrection, and
massacred a great number of the most considerable inhabitants. They seized
the patriarch Anastasius II., whom we have seen St. Gregory treat with
such regard; they frightfully maimed him, dragged him by the feet through
his city, and finished by casting him upon a funeral pile. When Jerusalem
was captured in 615, the Jews of Palestine bought of the Persians as many
Christians as they could get, for the pleasure of strangling them. It is
recorded that they murdered seventy thousand in this manner.

Eight days before the taking of Jerusalem the fortress monastery of Mar
Sabas, 2000 feet above the Dead Sea, then, as now, of the greatest renown,
was assaulted by the Arabs. All but fourty-four of the oldest monks had
fled, but these remained, and, after its capture, suffered first grievous
tortures, and at last martyrdom. When the monks who had fled returned,
they found the bodies of their brethren unburied; the abbot Modestus gave
them holy burial. He afterwards superintended the diocese of Jerusalem
during the absence of the captive patriarch. What Monte Cassino is to
Italy, and Mount Athos to Greece, Mar Sabas was then and is now to
Palestine.

At this time St. John the Almsgiver—the last great patriarch of
Alexandria—gave every help to the fugitives from the Persian seizure of
the Holy Land. It is a sign of the secular power wielded by the Egyptian
patriarch that he ordered the confiscation of the goods of those who used
in his city false weights and measures. After he had lovingly received and
supported the fugitives from Syria and Palestine, he had, in the next
year, 616, to fly himself in order to escape the sword of the Persians. He
was on his way with the patrician Nicetas to Constantinople, when, at
Rhodes, he had a vision, in consequence of which he said to his companion:
“You invite me to the king of this world, but the Lord of heaven comes
before you”. He told Nicetas the vision, and left him to go to Amathus in
Cyprus, his birthplace. There he made his will in these words: “I thank
Thee, O Lord, that Thou hast heard my prayer, and that only one-third of
one gold piece remains to me, though at my consecration I found 8000
pounds’ weight of gold in the bishop’s house at Alexandria, not reckoning
those countless sums which I have received from the friends of Christ.
Therefore, I order that this small remnant be given to Thy servants.” Ten
years he sat in the See of Alexandria. George was his successor. But from
this time nothing more is known of this Church’s history. Alexandria fell
first under the Persians, and then under Amrou, the Mohammedan. The
Arabian domination supported Christian errors only, and from that time the
Church of St. Athanasius has never lifted its head again, and the land of
the Desert Fathers is become the chief seat of the religion which puts an
impostor in the place of the Redeemer.

In the year 616, the Persians broke into Egypt, took and plundered
Alexandria, and carried their ravages to the borders of Æthiopia. Another
Persian army besieged Chalcedon. Still Heraclius remained inactive. He
only sent an embassy to Chosroes. In 619 he sent another, beseeching mercy
in the name of the senate. Chosroes replied: “I will spare the Romans when
they renounce their Crucified One and worship the sun”. He remembered not
that he had to thank the Romans for his crown, that in his time of trouble
he had found help only from the God of the Christians. Heraclius lost
courage at this answer. Since the loss of Egypt Constantinople was
suffering from famine, as well as a grievous pestilence. The emperor
resolved to quit his capital, and take refuge with his father in Africa.
He embarked his chief treasures, and directed the fleet to Carthage. Most
of it was wrecked in a storm. A panic fell on his people, and they
besought him with tears and cries not to forsake them. The patriarch
Sergius went to the palace, led Heraclius to Sancta Sophia, and compelled
him before the altar to swear aloud not to desert his capital. Heraclius
submitted against his will.

In 619 he was very nearly taken captive by the Khan of the Avars, who had
asked him for an interview, ostensibly to settle terms of peace, in
reality to secure his person and riches, and to fall upon Constantinople.
The emperor came in great pomp, was surprised, and scarcely escaped in
disguise. The Avars obtained an immense booty, and, according to the
patriarch Nicephorus, carried away captive beyond the Danube 270,000 men,
women, and children.

At length, in the twelfth year of his reign, Heraclius awoke from his
torpor, and his awakening was one of the most marvellous events recorded
in history. His treasury was empty and his credit not good enough to
borrow; but he resolved to attack the Persians in their own country. To
secure Constantinople he made peace with the Avars, and to hold them in
check he ceded provinces to other races, Slaves, Croatians, and Servians.
He made churches and monasteries supply a forced loan. He took even the
candlesticks and holy vessels of Sancta Sophia and coined them. When all
was ready for his departure, he declared his eldest son, Heraclius
Constantinus, ten years old, regent of the kingdom under tutorship of
Sergius the patriarch and Bonosus, patrician. Then he celebrated the
Easter festival, 4th April, 622. The next day he went to Sancta Sophia,
threw himself before the altar and cried: “Lord, deliver us not for the
punishment of our transgressions to our enemies, but look upon us in Thy
mercy and grant us victory, that the wicked cease to exalt themselves and
to mock Thine inheritance”. Then he turned to the patriarch Sergius with
the words: “My city and my son I leave to God’s protection, the Blessed
Virgin’s, and thine”. Upon this he took into his hands an image of our
Saviour, which was said not to have been made by hands, marched to the
Bosphorus and crossed over to Asia.

A train of defeats by the Persians had demoralised the Greek soldiers.
Heraclius reinforced his army with allied troops, amongst them a number of
Turks. He spent some months at first in restoring courage to his forces.
“See,” he said, “my children, how the enemies of God trample on our land,
lay waste our cities, burn our sanctuaries, desecrate our altars, pollute
our churches with the vilest abominations.” When he had thus enheartened
them he reviewed them together, and swore to fight with them and on equal
terms unto death, to share all their dangers, to be inseparable from them
as a father with his children. And moreover, he kept his word.

Heraclius was ever at the head of his soldiers: he united valour with
caution: he entered Armenia and defeated the Persians in several battles.
Then he made a show of taking up his winter-quarters in Pontus, but
suddenly burst into Persia, and utterly discomfited a large force. He took
the enemy’s camp, together with immense treasure. His troops were
astounded at their own victories, and he wintered them in Armenia. The
next campaign was no less glorious. He kept Easter Day in 623, which fell
on the 27th March, with his family at Nicomedia. By the 20th April he was
in Persia. He had written to Chosroes, and offered him peace. The Persian
king not only rejected his offer, but put the bearers of it to death.
Heraclius used all these circumstances to give courage and confidence to
his troops. He penetrated to the heart of Persia: he burnt the cities and
villages which he passed on his way, and marched on Ganzac, now Tauris,
where Chosroes was encamped with forty thousand men. At the first onset,
Chosroes took flight. His troops were mown down, captured, or scattered.
Ganzac was the capital of Atropatene. The Persian kings kept there a
treasure, said to be that of Crœsus and to have been brought thither by
Cyrus. The most renowned fire-temple of the chief god of the Persians was
in this city. Here Zoroaster, the founder of that worship, had been born
and lived. There was also here a colossal statue of Chosroes. He was
seated in the middle of the palace under a great baldachin representing
heaven. Round him were the sun, moon and stars, and angels bearing
sceptres. The statue, by means of machinery, caused rain to fall, and
thunder to sound. In fact, Chosroes assumed here divine worship. The
emperor ordered the statue to be overthrown and broken to pieces.
Heraclius burnt palace and temple, with part of the city. Then he marched
into Albania for the winter, and, out of pity, set free fifty thousand
Persian prisoners, to whom he likewise gave maintenance. This humanity so
won their hearts that they burst into tears, and prayed that he might
restore freedom to Persia, and put to flight Chosroes, whom they called
the Waster of the human race—so hateful had he made himself by oppression
and cruelty.

In the campaign of 624, Chosroes brought up three armies against the
emperor. Heraclius defeated them in three great battles. He made so sudden
a night attack upon what remained that their general, Sarbar, wakened by
the clash of arms, had scarcely time to spring from his bed on horseback,
and ride away at full speed, while the conqueror took possession of his
golden shield, and even his clothes. In his fourth campaign, that of 625,
Heraclius was also victorious. Chosroes avenged the defeat of his troops
by falling on the churches of Persia, which he stripped of all their
ornaments: and to punish the emperor, he compelled the Christians of his
realm to become Nestorians. Fifteen years before, he had, to please his
physician, compelled the inhabitants of Edessa to become Eutycheans.
Chosroes rallied all his forces for the campaign of 626. He raised three
great armies, composed indifferently of freemen and slaves, of natives and
foreigners. Sarbar led one of these armies to Chalcedon to besiege
Constantinople, on the Asiatic side, while the Khan of the Avars, breaking
truce, appeared on the European side, to demand the surrender of the city
and all its wealth. Its inhabitants, however, defended themselves with
such valour as to repulse both Avars and Persians. The fall of the Avar
power begins at this moment. It was henceforth occupied by intestine
struggles. Sais led the second army of Chosroes, which was defeated by
Theodore, brother of the emperor Heraclius. Heraclius himself broke the
third army under the command of Rhazates, at Nineveh, on the 12th
December, 627. The battle began in early morning, and ended only in the
evening. The Persians lost, besides the commanding general, his three
lieutenants, almost all their officers, and nearly the half of their
soldiers. The Romans had only fifty killed, but many thousands wounded.
These the emperor tended with so much care that only ten died.

Nineveh, at that time, was only a village on the ruins of the old capital.
Heraclius marched thence upon Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia, built upon
the remains of old Babylon, at a little distance. On his road he passed
palaces, seats, and chaces wherein the Persian nobles pursued their
hunting. Heraclius suffered his soldiers to sack and burn them all.
Chosroes fled from city to city. Heraclius made him new peace-proposals at
the beginning of 628. Chosroes refused them all, and became perfectly
hated by the Persians. He thought not of the justice of God, which was
pursuing him. Thirty-eight years before he had murdered his father
Hermisdas to obtain his throne. What he had done to his father was to
happen to him from his eldest son. He had been struck by a violent
dysentery: and wished to make Medarses, his son by his favourite wife
Syra, a Christian, his successor in the throne. His eldest son, Siroes,
irritated by this preference, gained the nobles and the army, was
proclaimed king, and sent an embassy to Heraclius. Chosroes was captured
in his flight, and brought to Ctesiphon, on the 24th February, 628. He was
put in chains and imprisoned in the strong tower, Tenebres, which he had
built to keep his treasures. The next day Siroes was crowned: the first
act of his government was to condemn his father to die of starvation. “Let
him eat,” he said, “the gold for which he has desolated the world, and
condemned so many to die of hunger.” The Satraps and all his enemies were
made to mock the fallen ruler, and spit in his face. Siroes ordered
Medarses and all his brethren to be strangled before his father’s eyes:
and, as the old king was still living on the fifth day, had him shot to
death with arrows. So ended Chosroes, king of Persia, murdered by his son
as he murdered his father.

These victories the emperor Heraclius reported at Constantinople, and also
sent a letter, in which Siroes announced his coronation, and proclaimed
his wish for peace. This letter was read from the ambo of Sancta Sophia on
the Feast of Pentecost, 15th May, 628.

Siroes, in fact, established a stable peace with the emperor. He restored
him all Christian prisoners in Persia, among them, Zacharias, patriarch of
Jerusalem. He delivered to him also the true Cross, which Sarbar had taken
away fourteen years before at the capture of Jerusalem. This was at first
carried to Constantinople: but in the following year, 629, the emperor
took ship to bring it back to Jerusalem, and give thanks to God for his
victories. Here he replaced the Cross on its old spot. It had remained in
its case, as it was taken away. The patriarch, with his clergy, recognised
the seal as intact, opened with its key the shrine, worshipped the Cross,
and showed it to the people. The Church celebrates, by the Feast of the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross, this event on the same day, the 14th
September, on which she had before celebrated the apparition of the Cross
to Constantine. Heraclius, in the same year, came to Edessa, and restored
to the Catholics the church which Chosroes had given to the Nestorians.
And he paid back, in the shape of a yearly income to Sancta Sophia and its
clergy, the sums which he had borrowed for the costs of the war.

Let us dwell for a moment on these acts of Heraclius, from 622 to 629.

No Roman emperor, in the course of many hundred years, during the whole
time in which Rome and Persia stood as rivals over against each other,
obtained such a triumph over the king of kings, as did Heraclius. He
surpassed by far Trajan at the culmination of the empire. Heraclius,
commending his city and his son to the protection of God, of our Blessed
Lady, and of the bishop of his city, God’s representative, went forth on
what seemed a desperate expedition, borrowing from churches and
monasteries the means to equip it. For seven years victory crowned his
course. Trajan stopped at the Mesopotamian provinces. Julian perished in
them. Mark Antony won no honour of Rome’s eastern rival: Crassus and his
host never returned. Galerius was stuffed and served as a footstool for
the great king to mount on horseback. Into the heart of that eastern realm
Heraclius threw himself fearlessly. He made his own army out of divers
peoples, and shared their dangers. Host after host he overthrew, as only
the son of Philip, the conqueror without his match, had done before him.
In the end, on the very spot where a Roman emperor, the special despiser
of the Nazarene, and fostering in his heart the destruction of the Church
as the crowning work of his reign, to be achieved upon his return as
conqueror, perished by a Persian lance, Heraclius, after driving to
despair the great king, the persecutor of the Cross, its possessor by
conquest, saw him dethroned, famished, and at last shot to death by his
son. He received from that son, the successor of the murdered father,
abundant satisfaction for the wrongs which the Roman empire had suffered
from its great rival of so many hundred years.

But, moreover, during these very seven years in which Heraclius won a
perpetual victory in the name of the Cross—the wood of which he brought
back as a conqueror to Jerusalem, giving thanks and worship, and replaced
it with the seal which guarded it unbroken in its old sanctuary—an Arabian
trafficker who had gained his living by carrying goods from city to city,
and lived virtuously with one wife much his elder, upon her death, when he
was more than fifty years of age, was assuming the name of a prophet and
the position of a conqueror. The year in which Heraclius started is the
same in which this pretension was set up. His claim to be a prophet is
exactly coincident with the years in which he was taking to himself wife
after wife, in which, entering suddenly the tent of his adopted son, he
was seduced by a casual glance on that wife’s beauty to desire her, to
obtain her, and to forge a permission from the Most High to take as many
wives as he pleased, and the wives of others—a forgery as yet unique in
all the history of imposture; for many bad men have taken the wives of
others, but no one except Mohammed has pretended to have a divine sanction
for an act which treads under foot all human justice, and pulls down for
the lust of one man the very foundation of domestic life.

It is of this man that one who has analysed his religion and described its
course opens his work with these words(5):—

“Since the beginning of the world has no other man—mere man—ever exerted
so boundless an influence on the human race in the relations of religion,
morality, and polity as Mohammed, the Arab. A man, by no means one of
those rare spirits whom Providence at times evokes and endues with genius
to open a path for a new world—a man rather whose mind was enclosed in
narrow limits, poor in ideas for the construction of a new religion: a man
such as this has for twelve hundred years cast his net of artless yet
impenetrable links of doctrine round a hundred million souls—roots of
teaching which have sunk into the marrow of men’s minds, have taken up
into themselves and mastered the whole of life, and impressed a uniform
stamp on the thoughts and deeds of races as well as individuals.”

The seven years of Heraclius form part of the ten years of this Mohammed,
in which the trader turns prophet and the reformer of religion endeavours
to put a divine sanction on polygamy, in conjunction with a boundless
concubinage of which captives were the prey.

As eighteen years of continual defeat by the Persians, from 604 to 622,
had reduced the Eastern empire to a state of demoralised weakness, so the
seven succeeding years, from 622 to 629, in which Heraclius wrought a full
revenge on the Persian king, inflicted no passing collapse upon the empire
resuscitated by the Sassanides in the third century. King Siroes did not
long enjoy the fruit of his parricide. He reigned six months and then he
died—some say of the plague, some of remorse. After his death the throne
of Persia seemed to become a seat of murder. His young son, Ardeschir, or
Artaxerxes, was killed after reigning seven months by his uncle, the
general Sarbar. Sarbar kept the throne two months and was killed.
Devanschir took his place. He was followed by Borane, a daughter of
Chosroes. She was replaced by a certain Tschaschindeh, who was followed by
Borane’s sister, Azermidokt. A certain Kesra, or Chosroes, succeeded, and
he gave way to a Ferokzad. Finally, Jezdedjerd, a grandson of the last
Chosroes, was crowned in the year 632. Thus in the short space of four
years about nine persons succeeded to the throne by murder. Jezdedjerd
III. began his reign in the year Mohammed died. He is called by
Theophanes, Hormisdas. He had the honour to be the last king of Persia and
to end his days by the sword of the Arab in 651. His son, Peroxes, became
a captain in the life-guards of the emperor of China at Singapore, and
left no posterity.

After this glimpse at the action of the Byzantine and Persian empires on
each other during the thirty years which follow immediately on the death
of St. Gregory, we turn to consider the conduct of the temporal liege-lord
of the Pope towards him whom he recognised as successor of St. Peter.

The emperor Phocas, following in this his predecessor Justinian, had
expressly enjoined on the patriarch of Constantinople to recognise the
Primacy of Rome.(6) What the chroniclers remark is important, that
Boniface III., the next to succeed St. Gregory, received a decree from
Phocas, in which he solemnly declared that the See of the Roman Church was
to be considered the head of Christendom. It may be remarked here that
Phocas did not say a word more than his predecessor, Marcian, said to St.
Leo a hundred and fifty years before. Phocas may be named a tyrant, but
Marcian has left an unspotted reputation as a Christian king and Roman
prince, who received the empire with the hand of Pulcheria, heiress of the
great Theodosius, and the only descendant worthy of his greatness, whose
name stands also on the diptychs of the Catholic Church as a virgin
saint.(7)

Upon the history of the City of Rome during the first half of the seventh
century the greatest obscurity rests.(8) It was indeed the most frightful
and destructive century for the former queen-city of the world. The Book
of the Popes by Anastasius(9) trickles in a slender thread amid war,
famine, and pestilence, and inundations of the Tiber; but it is all we
have to look at.

With the death of the great Pontiff, who guarded and fed his city while
the calamities which he saw all round the sphere of his vision over the
whole Church led him to look for the end of the world, the See of Peter
remained half a year unfilled until his successor, Sabinianus of Volterra,
formerly Papal Nuncio at the Byzantine court, received the confirmation of
his election from the exarch or the emperor. The confirmation of each
pope’s election was, as a rule, obtained either from the exarch or direct
from the emperor. It was a business both costly and protracted. It also
made the spiritual head of Rome dependent for his recognition on the
imperial court. I find that in the period of 111 years, running from the
death of St. Gregory in 604 to the death of Pope Constantine in 715,
twenty-four popes succeeded. Of these the first, Sabinian, in 604, had to
wait six months. Phocas confirmed the election of Boniface III., the next
pope, after a year. He died in November, 607, and Boniface IV. following
took his seat in August, 608. When he died, Pope Deusdedit waited five
months. At his death Boniface V. succeeded after a year, in 619. Pope
Honorius followed Boniface in five days and sat during thirteen years, but
at his death the confirmation of his successor, Pope Severinus, was
delayed by Greek intrigue, and for a purpose hereafter to be mentioned,
during nineteen months and sixteen days, so that he only sat from the 28th
May to the 1st August, 640. St. Martin in 649 did not wait for the
imperial confirmation; he was first banished and then martyred by the
emperor Constans II., who put in by threats his successor, Eugenius,
during his lifetime. St. Leo II. waited eighteen months in 682, after the
death of Pope Agatho, and the next Pope, Benedict II., a year in 684.

This privation of its original freedom, according to which the Pope’s
consecration followed at once upon his complete and legitimate election by
clergy and people, the Roman Church owed to the Arian Herule Odoacer,
during his occupation of Italy. It was eagerly grasped, after Theodorich
and Theodatus had exercised it, by Justinian, when he became, by conquest,
lord of Rome. I have already recorded the infamous violence exerted by
Belisarius as soon as he had entered Rome, at the bidding of the Empress
Theodora, upon St. Silverius. Now we have the eastern emperors, through
the seventh century, exerting, sometimes directly, sometimes by delegation
to their exarch, this stolen privilege. It was taken by Odoacer ostensibly
for the preservation of order in the election, and the prevention of
violence. I suppose it is the furthest reach of disloyalty to exercise a
power which has been entrusted for protection to the injury of the party
protected. This disloyalty was perpetually shown by the eastern emperors
to the Popes, whose Primacy over the Church they acknowledged, until they
finally lost the opportunity by the new-creation of the Western empire,
and the acquisition of temporal sovereignty by the Popes.

At the accession of Honorius I., in 625, it is stated to have been the
custom, upon the death of a Pope, that the Archpriest, the Archdeacon, and
the first of the Notaries signified his death to the exarch. The Acts of
the new election, subscribed by clergy and laity, were deposited in the
archives of the Lateran. A copy of them was sent to the emperor. The
report sent to the exarch was the more important. This Viceroy of Italy
was humbly besought for his consent: nay, even the Archbishop and Judges
of Ravenna were asked to obtain it from him. The clergy and people of Rome
had to look to the exarch, the emperor’s delegate, even more than to the
emperor, since he stood in more immediate relation to Rome, and determined
the decision of the Byzantine court. The Romans, suffering from the delay
of their bishop’s consecration, would entreat the emperor to lessen the
time of disturbance by allowing the exarch to confirm their choice.(10)

In the short pontificates of the Popes, who sat from St. Gregory to
Honorius, we may note one remarkable fact. Full six centuries after its
erection by Agrippa, as the vestibule of his baths in the centre of the
Campus Martius, stood what was called the Pantheon, with its superb
portico of granite pillars and white marble capitals, untouched in their
beauty—the fairest relic of ancient Rome. It had withstood all the
inundations of the Tiber: all the devastations of the Gothic war: all the
injuries of time. Every winter the floods forced themselves up over its
floor: day and night the dome, through its aperture, received the waters
of heaven. The images of Augustus(11) and Agrippa probably stood still in
their niches: the beams of gilded brass supported its roof, covered with
the gilt tiles of bronze, which neither Vandal, nor Goth, nor Byzantine
robber had yet carried away. Pliny had given it the name of Pantheon: Dio
Cassius had seen in it the statues of Mars and Venus, and of the deified
Cæsars. A tablet of the Fratres Arvales has been found, dating from the
year 59, in Nero’s time, and showing that worship to the pagan gods was
then offered in it.

Pope Boniface IV. beheld this wonder of ancient art, and longed to make a
church of that beautiful dome which hung like the vault of heaven over the
broadest expanse ever covered by a roof. He asked it of the emperor
Phocas, and received it as a gift. He assembled the clergy of Rome, and a
procession, singing hymns, entered that noble doorway, and the Pope
sprinkled with holy water the marble-encrusted walls, from which every
vestige of heathendom was cleared away. The “Gloria in Excelsis” resounded
for the first time in that dome from which Michael Angelo took his most
beautiful creation. The temple of all the demons was purified: and Pope
Boniface IV. preserved it for all succeeding ages, under its dedication to
the Ever-virgin Mother of God, and all martyrs. So it was saved from
becoming, in mediæval times, the hold of some noble robber. And from it
the devotion to All Saints, on the 1st November, and for All Souls, on the
2nd, was propagated amongst the nations of the West. What was originally a
Roman festival passed beyond the Alps and the dome of Agrippa, the partner
of Augustus and the husband of Julia, and through her progenitor of
Cæsars, became the shrine from which the glorious office of all the saints
in the Church triumphant, and that of intercession for all souls in the
Church suffering, went forth to the Christian world.

From 604 to 625, five Pontiffs had ascended the Roman chair, and all had
to wait, after their election, for the good pleasure of the Byzantine
emperor, that they should take their seat. In 625, there succeeded a man
of great distinction. He was a Campanian of high birth, and he strove to
follow the example of his master, St. Gregory. Honorius I. sat for 13
years, and with Vitalian, A.D. 657-672, and Sergius, 687-701, alone
reached that length of pontificate, while twenty-one other Popes share
between them, including vacancies and delays interposed by the Byzantine,
the remaining 69 years. We have no documents existing to account for such
a number of short pontificates. Honorius busied himself much in the
conversion of the southern Saxon kingdoms in England, where St. Bede(12)
attests that the Bishop Birinus came by his instance. Anastasius gives a
long account of the gifts which he bestowed on the churches of Rome; among
them, that he covered the confession of St. Peter with pure silver,
weighing 187 pounds: and the whole church with brazen tiles which, with
the consent of the emperor Heraclius, he took from the temple of Roma:
that he built the church of St. Agnes, and made her a silver shrine,
weighing 252 pounds; also, the church of the Four-crowned. Of his
character, the Abbot Jonas, near his time, writes: he was “a venerable
prelate, sagacious, strong in counsel, clear in doctrine, powerful by his
gentleness and humility”. He also clothed with silver plates, weighing 975
pounds, the middle or royal door of St. Peter’s, on which there was an
inscription, calling him “Honorius, the good bishop, the leader of the
people. Your own prelate, blessed Peter, made your doors of silver; O
doorkeeper of heaven, maintain for this in tranquillity all the times of
your flock.” And there, in the great Basilica, he was buried in all
honour.

But, in his person, one of the State-made patriarchs of Constantine’s city
is able to make the solitary boast that he once deceived one Roman
Pontiff. Sergius, who sat in that See, from 610 to 638, and who seems to
have obtained as great a mastery over the mind of the emperor Heraclius as
his predecessor, Acacius, had over the emperor Zeno, constructed a
doctrinal exposition called the Ecthesis, which he induced the emperor to
father and promulgate. He was desirous, above all things, to obtain the
Pope’s approval of the doctrine which he afterwards set forth in this
document. He wrote to the Pope letters, the purpose of which the successor
of St. Peter, instead of seeing through, appears to have misconceived.
After the death of Honorius, the Monothelite emperors and patriarchs
claimed to have received the support of that Pope. His not having
detected, and actively condemned the deceit of Sergius, brought upon the
memory of Honorius the heavy rebuke that Pope St. Leo. II. assented so far
to the sentence of the Sixth General Council in 682, as to have written to
the Spanish bishops:—“Those who had been traitors to the purity of the
Apostolic tradition were punished with eternal condemnation: they are
Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, Petrus
of Constantinople, together with Honorius, who, instead of extinguishing,
when it began to arise, the flame of heretical doctrine, fostered it by
his neglect”.(13)

Much light would appear to be thrown upon the belief of Pope Honorius by
the history of the forty years succeeding his death.

He sat within a few days of thirteen years. He was buried, says
Anastasius, on the 12th October, 638, in St. Peter’s, and the See remained
vacant one year seven months and seventeen days. Why did it so remain
vacant?

The era and the question are both most important to note. The following
narrative(14) will explain why the Papal See was kept vacant nineteen
months after the election of a successor to Pope Honorius.

In the year 638, Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, composed in the
name of the emperor Heraclius an edict which he called Ecthesis or
exposition, as if it were merely an exposition of the Catholic faith
respecting the dispute about the One or the Two Operations in our Lord. He
then brought about that the emperor subscribed and published it. Perhaps
Sergius wished to take advantage of the vacancy in the Papal See to make
the Monothelite error a law of the State, and to compel the future Pope to
subscribe it, for which he wished to get the imperial subscription making
it a law.

The Ecthesis begins with a confession of faith in the Holy Trinity which
is quite orthodox. It then enlarges upon the Incarnation, and draws out
the distinction of the Two Natures and the Unity of the Person. It
proceeds:—“We acknowledge one Son and Lord Jesus Christ, who is at once
capable and incapable of suffering, visible and invisible. We teach that
the miracles and the sufferings belong to one and the same; we ascribe all
divine and human Operation to one and the same Word become flesh; we offer
... to Him one adoration, and allow no man to hold and teach either One or
Two Operations in the Divine Incarnation of the Lord; but rather,
according to the tradition of the holy General Councils, that one and the
same only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, works both the divine and
the human actions, and that the whole Operation belonging at once to God
and to man proceeds from one and the same Incarnate God, the Word,
indivisibly and unconfusedly, and is to be referred to one and the same.
Since the expression, One Operation, if used by some fathers, still sounds
strange and disturbs the ears of some who conceive that it is used for the
doing away of the Two Natures personally united in Christ our God, and in
like manner the expression Two Operations offends many, as not used by any
one of the chief doctors of the Church, and because there follow from it
two Wills opposed to each other, as if God the Word willed to fulfil His
saving passion, while His Manhood resisted that will of His, and so two
are introduced willing contrary things, an impious thing opposed to
Christian doctrine. For even the impious Nestorius, though he divided the
divine taking of the manhood from the Lord, and introduced two Sons, did
not venture to speak of two Wills. Rather he taught identity of will in
the two persons invented by him. How then can they who confess the right
faith, and glorify one Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, receive
two Wills and those opposed to each other in Him? Following, therefore,
the holy Fathers in all things and in this, we confess One Will of our
Lord Jesus Christ, the true God, so that at no time did His Flesh,
animated by the mind, make a natural movement of itself separately and by
its own impulse, which was contrary to the bidding of God the Word
personally united with it; but when and such and as much as God the Word
Himself willed ... and we exhort all Christians to be so minded, and so to
hold, adding nothing and taking away nothing. I, Heraclius, the faithful
emperor in Jesus Christ our Lord, have subscribed.”

Sergius did not fail to have the Ecthesis confirmed by a council at
Constantinople. He died himself in December, 638, but before this he had
it read, probably, to his Resident Council, and asked for the judgment of
its members. The bishops answered, like good courtiers, “The exposition of
our great and most wise Emperor agrees in truth with the teaching of the
Apostles. This is the doctrine of the Fathers, this the support of the
Church. This the confessions of the Five Councils teach; by this the unity
of the Christian people is assured, the weakness of the simple
strengthened. This works the salvation of mankind. This we also believe;
this we confirm; with this we agree.” Sergius gave his solemn
confirmation, and added, “If any one henceforth, disregarding the
prohibition of the Emperor and the Council, dares to teach that there is
One Operation or that there are Two in Christ he shall, if he be bishop,
priest, deacon, or clerk, be deposed; but if monk or layman, be excluded
from Communion in the Body and Blood of our Lord until he return to his
duty”. Thereupon the Ecthesis was attached publicly to the narthex of
Sancta Sophia.

The Ecthesis had been specially drawn up against the teaching of the
champion of orthodoxy in the East, Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, who
had appealed to Pope Honorius, and expressed full trust in his defence of
the truth. But before its appearance Sophronius was already dead, and his
see had come into the hands of the Monothelite Sergius, Bishop of Joppa.
Macedonius had, contrary to the canons, been imposed on the see of
Antioch, and consecrated by Sergius of Constantinople. It is true he had
never entered his city, which was already captured by the Arabs. He had
remained in Constantinople.

Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, in an epistle read afterwards at the Roman
Council of Pope St. Martin, expressed to his spiritual brother and
fellow-ministrant, Sergius of Constantinople, his intense delight at the
Ecthesis which his great sovereign had drawn up in behalf of the faith,
which was ready to be sent to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, and was to be
accepted by his brother Severinus, elected at Rome. I have read it, he
said, not once or twice but many times. I admire an exposition brilliant
as the sun’s light, announcing with unswerving accuracy the true faith;
and I sung praises to God who had bestowed on us so wise a governor,
guiding to harbour the holy churches. He has saved us once, twice, and
thrice from tyrannous power, from Persian boastfulness, from Saracen
domination.(15)

In the meantime Sergius had died, and Heraclius had put his friend
Pyrrhus, who shared his Monothelite heresy, in his place at
Constantinople. We learn from the letter just quoted that the death of
Pope Honorius and the choice of Severinus to succeed him had already been
made known at Constantinople before the Ecthesis was sent to Rome,(16)
which was, therefore, never presented for acceptance to Honorius.

I will now take another narrative(17) of what was happening at Rome.
Honorius died on 12th October, 638, and was buried in peace and great
renown at St. Peter’s. The Romans chose their countryman Severinus, son of
Labienus, for his successor. The confirmation was delayed during nineteen
months and sixteen days, as it seems, because the elected refused to
subscribe the Ecthesis of the patriarch Sergius, being a formulary
favouring Monothelism.

Before Severinus was yet consecrated the imperial officers practised a
robbery upon the treasury of the Church, in which the violence exercised
reminds of the dealing of Turkish pashas, with whom in general Byzantine
ministers may be compared. The treasures of the Roman Church were kept in
the vestiary of the episcopal palace.(18) There were the costly presents
which various Christian emperors, patricians, and consuls had left to the
blessed Apostle Peter for the redemption of their souls, to be given, as
occasion might be, in alms to the poor or for ransoming of captives. There
was a report that Honorius had stored up vast sums, and his magnificent
buildings caused full credence to be given to this report. Isaac, the
exarch in Ravenna, found himself in want of money. The imperial troops
riotously demanded to be paid. Isaac had long cast his eyes on the
Church’s treasury, and now devised a plan to get possession of it. The
Book of the Popes gives a detailed description of this incident, and it is
not only an exception to the scantiness of historical accounts about Rome,
but casts a passing light on the circumstances of the city.

The chartular Mauritius was then at Rome, perhaps as Magister Militum and
commander of the Roman army. This consisted of troops in Byzantine pay,
but no doubt was already organised as a city militia. Mauritius led by
deceit against the Church of God, and taking counsel with certain
ill-minded persons, stirred up this Roman force. What good, he said, is it
that such a mass of money has been laid up by Pope Honorius in his Lateran
Palace while your wages are not paid, which our lord the emperor has sent,
and the holy man has put them in his treasury? Kindled by these words, all
the armed men in the city of Rome, young and old, flocked to the Lateran
Palace. They could not force an entrance, because those who attended on
Severinus, the Pope elect, resisted. Mauritius, seeing this, encamped his
army there for three days. Then he summoned the judges, that is, the high
officers of the city, who were in his counsel. They broke in and set the
imperial seal upon the treasure. Then Mauritius wrote an account of what
he had done to the exarch Isaac at Ravenna, saying that he had put his
seal on the treasury and they could take without harm anything which they
liked. When Isaac learnt this he came to Rome; he banished all the chief
persons of the church who resided in the several cities, so that none of
the clergy could resist him, and, after some days, he entered the Lateran
Palace; he stayed there eight days, and plundered everything. Part he sent
to the emperor in the imperial city, part he gave to the troops, part he
kept for himself. Anastasius concludes with the words: After this the most
holy Severinus was consecrated, and Isaac returned to Ravenna. The meaning
of which seems to be that Isaac had come to Rome under pretence of
confirming the election of Severinus, which he made the elected Pope pay
for by the plunder of his treasury.(19)

In the meantime Roman Commissioners were urging upon the emperor Heraclius
at Constantinople to issue the imperial consent to the consecration of the
Pope. After many negotiations, the chief of the clergy there showed them a
doctrinal writing, the Ecthesis, and said, “We will only support you in
your matter if you promise us to persuade the Pope to subscribe this act
and to recognise without reserve the doctrines therein contained”. The
Commissioners, who perceived the drift of the act, and that on account of
this the first See of Christendom had so long remained unfilled, answered
calmly and prudently: “In this affair we can do nothing. A message has
been entrusted to us, but no order given us to make a confession of faith.
We will give you the assurance that we will inform the Elect of everything
that you have said; that we will show him this paper and beseech him, if
he approve of its contents, to subscribe it. Be so good, therefore, as to
put no hindrance to our mission for this matter, to do us no violence, and
not to detain us without end. None can do violence to another, especially
in a matter of faith; for in such a case even the weakest becomes very
strong, even the quietest feels himself a hero; and since he strengthens
his soul with the word of God, the most violent attacks serve only to
confirm not to weaken him. And how much more does this apply to the Church
and clergy of Rome, who, from the beginning to the present, as eldest of
all the churches under the sun, presides over all! Having received this
privilege according to the canons, as well from councils and apostles as
from their supreme Head, in this matter of succession in the Pontificate,
it is subject to no writings whatsoever, to no issue of synodical
documents; but in all these matters all are subject to it according to
sacerdotal law.” This is what with a most sacred and becoming confidence,
fearing nothing, those intrepid ministers(20) of the immovable Rock said
to the clergy of Constantinople; who thereupon ceased from their
pretension, and promised to obtain for them the imperial confirmation.

Pope Severinus, after suffering the double humiliation of having the
treasury of the Church sacked by the emperor’s viceroy, and his own
election unconfirmed for nearly twenty months, ascended the throne of
Peter on the 28th May, 640, and sat two months and six days. “He loved the
clergy, and was most liberal to them all,” says of him the Book of the
Popes; “holy, benignant above all men, a lover of the poor, large-handed,
most gentle.” In this short Pontificate he found time to reject the
imperial decree, called the Ecthesis.

Had Pope Severinus at this moment failed in his duty, the whole Church
would have been involved in the Monothelite heresy. Not only Pope
Severinus, but his successors during forty years, were the sole stay of
the Church against a heresy—the last root of the condemned Eutychean
heresy—which overthrew the true doctrine of the Incarnation, making our
Lord Jesus Christ not God and Man in one Person, but a Person compounded
out of God and Man, and therefore not Man at all. The whole temporal power
of the Byzantine sovereign, at that time despotic lord of Rome, and backed
by subservient patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus, and Peter, was
exerted to compel the Popes who sat during these forty years to accept the
false doctrine presented to them in an imperial decree.(21) The successive
Popes in this time, Severinus, John IV., Theodore I., St. Martin I., St.
Eugenius I., St. Vitalian, Deusdedit, Donus I., rejected and condemned the
decision urged upon them by the imperial and patriarchal pressure, all of
them at the risk of every sort of persecution—one, St. Martin, at the cost
of a singularly painful and glorious martyrdom. The next Pope, St. Agatho,
condemned the heresy in a General Council allowed at Constantinople itself
by an orthodox emperor over which his legates presided. The Pope
succeeding him, St. Leo II. ratified the condemnation by the Council of
four successive Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus and Peter,
as heretics, and censured the negligence of Honorius in not extinguishing
at once so dangerous a flame. In truth it had held the life of the Church
in suspense during more than forty years. Had one of the ten successors of
Honorius failed, all would have been lost, so near to the precipice was
the Byzantine despotism and the State patriarchate, subservient to it, and
supplying it obediently with theological knowledge sufficient to formulate
heresy, allowed by the Divine Providence in that fearful century to drive
the Church. And precisely during these years the new Arabian conqueror—the
chalif of Mohammed—cut in two the empire which was attempting this
parricide. When Heraclius went forth committing his city and his son to
God, to the holy Mother of God, and to his bishop, he triumphed for the
only time in the long Roman history over Rome’s eastern rival, and brought
back the Cross from Persia to Constantinople, and then carried it in
dutiful homage to be replaced in its old shrine where our Lord suffered at
Jerusalem. When at the bidding of that very bishop Sergius he tampered
with the Christian faith, and oppressed the successor of St. Peter, he
lost Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, with the great provinces which
belonged to them. Out of the four patriarchates of his empire, three
became subject to the Mohammedan chalif. The subjection came suddenly, but
has lasted with a short interval from that time to this. The conquest, as
yet unbroken, of Mohammed over Christian peoples dates from the perfidy of
Heraclius and of his grandson Constans II. and the heresy propagated by
four Byzantine patriarchs.

Returning to the history of this time we find that the successor of Pope
Severinus, John IV., was consecrated 24th December, 640, and held a
council at Rome immediately after his accession, and condemned under
anathema the Monothelite heresy. Heraclius died February 11th, 641. Upon
his death Pope John IV. sent a letter to his successors,
Constantinus-Heraclius, and Heracleonas, setting forth the same faith. He
also informed the new Patriarch, Pyrrhus, that he had condemned the
Ecthesis: and St. Maximus informs us that Heraclius I., to turn away the
Western displeasure at the Ecthesis from his own person, at the beginning
of the year 641 wrote to Pope John IV. that “the Ecthesis is not mine, nor
did I command it to be drawn up, but the patriarch Sergius prepared it
five years ago, and besought me on my return from the East to publish it
with my subscription”. The purpose of John IV. in writing to the new
emperors was to set forth the doctrine of the two Operations and Wills in
Christ, and in doing this to defend the orthodoxy of his predecessor
Honorius. It is to be observed that after the death of Honorius, when the
eastern patriarchs began to assert that Honorius in his answers to
Sergius, which up to that time had been private, favoured the heresy which
Sergius had imposed upon the eastern bishops, and was trying to put upon
the Pope, his successors denied with much care that Honorius had any such
meaning. Thus in this document of Pope John IV. directed to the sons of
Heraclius, which bears the title,(22) Defence of Pope Honorius, he says:—

“My predecessor, teaching concerning the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation,
said that there were not in Him, as there are in us, opposing wills of the
spirit and the flesh. Certain men, twisting this to their own meaning,
threw out the suspicion that he had taught that there was one Will of the
Godhead and the Manhood, which is utterly contrary to the truth. I could
wish them to reply to my question, in regard to which nature do they
assert that there is one Will of Christ our God? If it be only in regard
to the Divine Nature, what is their reply concerning His Human Nature? For
he is likewise Perfect Man, lest they be condemned with Manichæus. If they
speak in regard to the Manhood of Christ that this Will is Perfect God,
let them see whether they do not fall under the condemnation of Photinus
and Ebion. But if they assert that in the Two Natures there is only one
Will, they will confuse not only the Natural Wills but the Natures
themselves, so that neither the one nor the other, that is, the Divine and
the Human, can be understood. For as we do not, like the impious
Nestorius, suffer Two Natures to make up one Christ, so we do anything but
deny, yet neither do we confuse, the difference of Natures, inasmuch as we
confess the Two Natures united in the one Person of Christ our God with an
agreement which language is not able to express. For in that they assert
One Will of Christ’s Godhead and Manhood and at the same time one
Operation, what else do they assert than that one Nature of Christ our God
operates according to the division of Eutyches and Severus. As a last
argument, the orthodox Fathers, who have flourished in the whole world,
are proved to teach in full accordance at once Two Natures and Two Wills
and Operations.”

In these words, which John IV. writes as Pope to the immediate successors
of Heraclius within three years after the death of Honorius, he would seem
not only to have set forth in plain language the immense importance of the
doctrine itself, but to be an unimpeachable witness of the meaning of
Honorius, one of whose priests he had been, and as such well acquainted
with his doctrine.

The pontificate of John IV., for the confirmation of which he had to wait
four months, lasted only twenty-one months, and was disquieted throughout
by the conflict with the Byzantine court and patriarch respecting the
Ecthesis.(23) There was war between the exarch and the Lombard king,
Rotharis, but it did not touch Rome. All misfortunes which threatened it
came from Byzantium. The struggle against the eastern heresy embittered
the feeling of Constantinople to Rome. At the same time, the Byzantine
court was disturbed by intestine revolutions. Heraclius ended his reign of
31 years in February, 641. His eldest son, Heraclius Constantinus,
succeeded, but, after seven months, was poisoned by his stepmother,
Martina, and the Monothelite patriarch Pyrrhus was charged with
concurrence. In a few months, Martina’s own son, Heracleonas, was deposed
by an insurrection. His nose was cut off, and the tongue of the empress
Martina cut out, and both were banished. The grandson of Heraclius,
Constans II., became emperor in 642, a boy of twelve years, and reigned 26
years, until 668. The reign of this emperor is much to be noted, because
it is contemporaneous with the second, third, and fourth chalifs: Constans
II. stands in history over against Omar, Osman, and Ali.

On the death of John IV., Theodorus, a Greek of Jerusalem, was made Pope:
it is supposed by the influence of the exarch Isaac. He was the first of
many Greeks, who, in this period, were made Popes: of all of whom, without
exception, it is recorded that their integrity, as Popes, was in no way
affected by any national feeling: they sacrificed nothing to Byzantine
policy.

At the beginning of this pontificate, Mauritius, the officer called
chartular, whose proceeding in the robbery of the Lateran treasury has
been recorded above, raised a rebellion in Rome. He found people,
nobility, and army embittered by the Byzantine domination, and used this
feeling for his own purposes. He spread a report that Isaac was striving
to be king, made party with those same turbulent Romans who had joined in
the attack upon the Lateran, and induced the garrisons in all the castles
of the Roman territory to refuse obedience to the exarch. When Isaac heard
this, that all the army of Italy had taken the oath to Mauritius, he sent
Donus as commander with an army to Rome. Thereupon the Roman army gave up
Mauritius, and joined Donus. Mauritius took asylum at St. Mary of the
Crib.(24) He was taken out and sent with an iron collar about his neck, as
well as the others implicated in the insurrection, to the exarch at
Ravenna: but, before he arrived there, was beheaded, and his head carried
to Ravenna and impaled. Isaac kept the other conspirators in prison,
collared in the same way, but they escaped execution by the death of Isaac
himself. Isaac was buried in the beautiful church of St. Vitale, in
Ravenna, and his epitaph is preserved in Greek, and being a picture not
only of the man, but of his time, is worth transcribing. It runs thus:—

“Here lies one, a brilliant commander, who for six years, preserved Rome
and the West without injury for our serene lords, Isaac, the fellow-worker
with emperors, the great ornament of all Armenia, where he was of
illustrious race. Upon his death in great renown, his wife Susannah mourns
over her loss like a chaste dove, the loss of a husband who gained glory
by his labours both in the East and in the West, for he commanded the army
of both.”

Isaac may be considered as the ideal exarch, and by contemplating his
deeds, we may attain to a knowledge of the race of exarchs, viceroys of
Italy, and images, in common clay, of their masters in marble, towards
whom, for 200 years, St. Gregory and his successors had to exercise the
virtue of loyalty.

Upon the accession of Constans II., in 642, the patriarch Pyrrhus, under
suspicion of complicity with the empress Martina in the poisoning of the
emperor Heraclius Constantinus, fled to Africa. His place was taken by
Paulus, a still more zealous Monothelite. Pyrrhus, coming to the West,
which was unanimous in rejecting that heresy, represented himself to have
been convinced by the eloquence of the Abbot Maximus, in an African
Council in 645, and came to Rome to lay the confession of his faith at the
feet of the Apostle Peter. Pope Theodorus received the repentant patriarch
with great ceremony in the Vatican Basilica before the assembled clergy
and people, to whom he solemnly condemned his own errors. But, when he
went to Ravenna, Pyrrhus fell back again. Pope Theodorus thereupon
condemned him in a Roman Council.(25)

In 646, the African bishops, in four councils, had condemned the
Monothelite doctrine with the Ecthesis. Pope Theodorus, in accordance with
the wish of these African Councils, admonished the new patriarch, Paulus
II., at Constantinople, to return to the faith of the Church. Paulus sent
a long answer,(26) in which he expressed the Monothelite doctrine. Pope
Theodorus condemned him after his nuncios at Constantinople had in vain
endeavoured to draw from him an orthodox confession. At the same time Pope
Theodorus named Stephen, Bishop of Dor, Apostolic Vicar for Palestine,
with the charge to resist the heresy which Sergius, Bishop of Joppa, was
spreading, and to depose the bishops intruded by him. The patriarchal
chair at Jerusalem was, in fact, vacant, and the patriarchate laid waste
by this usurper. Hence the Pope took charge of it. So afterwards John of
Philadelphia was appointed Apostolic Vicar.

Paulus did not give way. He moved the emperor Constans II. in 648 to issue
a new doctrinal decree, drawn up by himself, called the Typus, which was
to take the place of the Ecthesis, and prepare in another way the spread
of Monothelite error. It was to forbid under the severest secular
punishments any dispute respecting One or Two Operations in our Lord or
One or Two Wills. In itself it seemed intended to quiet the westerns, but
in the actual state of things only for the prejudice of Catholics. Maximus
the Confessor shewed that in it truth and error were alike intended to be
suppressed. The eastern bishops were again compelled to subscribe. Those
who refused were persecuted, even the papal legates. Their altar in the
Placidia palace was destroyed, and they were forbidden to celebrate, and
severe ill-treatment added.

While the Greek emperor, led by his patriarch Paulus, was issuing his
edict concerning the Christian faith, Muawia, as general of the third
chalif, Osman, with a fleet of 1700 ships, great and small, being already
in possession of Syria, had made a descent on Cyprus, occupied the city of
Constantia, subjected and laid waste the whole island.(27)

Pope Theodorus is recorded in the book of the Popes as “a lover of the
poor, large-handed, kind to all, and very merciful”.





CHAPTER II. POPE MARTIN, HIS COUNCIL, AND HIS MARTYRDOM.


    Martinus prærogativa martyrii ter maximus nuncupandus.

    Baronius, Tom. viii., Preface.


In the mean time Pope Theodorus, having during the seven years of his
pontificate maintained the faith against the aggression of the Byzantine
emperor and patriarch with the same resolution as his predecessors, Popes
Severinus and John IV., died on the 13th May, 649, and was buried at St.
Peter’s. His death occurred just after the Typus had been issued, and
perhaps before he had seen it. On the 5th of the following July, Martin
was chosen to succeed him.(28) Martin was then a Roman priest, had been a
nuncio at Constantinople, a man distinguished by his virtue and knowledge,
as well as by his personal beauty. By the fifteenth letter of this Pope we
learn that the Roman clergy would not wait for the imperial consent to his
consecration, and so in due time the Greeks pretended that he had taken
possession of the episcopate irregularly. This pontiff, one of the most
remarkable and vigorous that ever sat on the throne of St. Peter, although
aware of the penalty imposed by the emperor Constans, in his Typus, shrunk
not the least, but was rather kindled with greater zeal to summon
immediately a council of the Bishops of Italy, which met on the 5th
October in this year at the Sacristy of the Lateran Basilica.

Anastasius,(29) the librarian, gives the following narrative of events
which now took place concerning Pope Martin:—

“In his time Paulus, bishop of Constantinople, inflated with the Spirit of
pride against the holy Church of God, presumed in his audacity to go
against the definitions of the Fathers. Moreover he took pains to veil his
own error for the seduction of others, so that he induced the emperor also
to set forth the Typus for the destruction of Catholic belief. In this he
deprived of their strength all the voices of the holy Fathers by the
expressions of the worst heretics, laying down that one should confess
neither One nor Two Wills or Operations in Christ our Lord.

“In defending his own perversion he did a deed which no former heretic had
ventured to do. He pulled down the altar belonging to our Holy See(30) in
the chapel of the Placidia palace, prohibiting our nuncios from offering
therein to God the adorable and immaculate Victim, or receiving the
sacraments of communion. These nuncios by command of the apostolic
authority had enjoined him to desist from his heretical intention. They
also bore witness in suffering diverse persecutions with other orthodox
men, and venerable priests, some of whom he imprisoned, some he banished,
some he scourged. Well nigh the whole world being thus disturbed, many of
the orthodox brought up complaints from various places to our Apostolic
See, intreating that the web of all this malice and destruction might be
rent by the Apostolic authority, so that the disease of their Ecthesis
might not break up the whole body of the Catholic Church. Then most
blessed Martin, the bishop, sent and assembled 105 bishops in the city of
Rome, and called a Synod according to the institution of the orthodox
Fathers in the church of the Saviour at the Lateran episcopal palace.
Bishops and priests sitting, deacons and the whole clergy standing, they
condemned Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, patriarchs of
Constantinople, who presumed to mix up their innovations with the
immaculate faith. That is, in their haste to exclude this, they dressed up
a confusion of heretical dogmas against God’s Catholic church, for which
they were smitten with anathema. This council now forms part of the
Church’s archives. And the Pope causing copies to be made, sent them
throughout the East and West, placing them in the hands of the orthodox
faithful. At that very time the emperor sent into Italy his chamberlain
and exarch Olympius, to be viceroy of the whole land. His commands
were:—‘You are to carry out what Paulus, patriarch of this heaven defended
city, has suggested to us. And if you find the province itself agreeing in
the Typus set forth by us then lay hold of all the bishops, landed
proprietors, dwellers, and strangers, and let them subscribe it. But, if,
as Plato, the patrician, and Euphranius have suggested to us, you can
carry with you the armed force there, we command you to lay hold of
Martin, who was nuncio here, in the imperial city. And afterwards let all
the churches read afresh the orthodox Typus, because it has been made by
us, and let all the bishops in Italy set their names to it. But if you
find the armed force opposed, keep it secret till you have got possession
of the province, and are able to have on your side the army of the Roman
city, and of Ravenna, that you may be able to execute our commands as soon
as possible.’ The said Olympius, coming to Rome, found the holy Church of
Rome united with all the bishops of Italy, whether priests or clergy, and
wishing to execute the commands received he tried, by help of the army, to
make a schism in the Church. This took a long time, and Almighty God did
not permit him to accomplish what he was trying to do. Seeing then that he
was overcome by the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of God, he thought
it necessary to veil his bad intention, and to accomplish what he had not
been able to do with the armed hand in heretical fashion at mass in the
Church of God’s Holy Mother, the Ever-virgin Mary, at the Crib. For while
the holy Pope was giving him communion he had instructed one of his guards
to murder him. But, Almighty God, who is wont to protect His orthodox
servants, and to deliver them from all evil, Himself blinded the eyes of
the swordsman of the exarch Olympius, and he was not allowed to see the
Pontiff at the moment of giving communion, or the kiss of peace, that he
might shed his blood and subject to heresy the Catholic Church of God. The
soldier attested this afterwards on his oath to several. So Olympius,
seeing that the hand of God protected the holy Pope Martin, thought it
necessary to agree with him, and to disclose the commands which he had
received. Then having made peace with the Church, he collected his army
and went to Sicily against the Saracens who were there. And through the
sin a great destruction fell on the Roman army, and then the exarch died
of disease.”

In the Council of the Lateran, held by Pope Martin in 649, the Pope
carefully examined the whole history and documents concerning the attempt
of the patriarch Sergius, and the emperor Heraclius, and the succeeding
patriarchs at Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch, to alter the faith
of the Church. The imperial documents, the Ecthesis of Heraclius, composed
by Sergius, the Typus of Constans II. composed by the sitting patriarch,
Paulus, both of them one after the other imposed by violence on the
eastern episcopate, letters from many bishops, documents, in fact, of
every kind, were subjected to careful reading. The Council drew up twenty
canons which it imposed under anathema. The Pope at the head of the
Bishops, subscribed in these words: “I, Martin, by the grace of God,
Bishop of the holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the City of Rome,
ordain and subscribe this definition, confirmatory of the orthodox faith,
and condemning Sergius, formerly Bishop of Constantinople, Cyrus, Bishop
of Alexandria, Theodorus, Bishop, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, also, Bishop of
Constantinople, together with their heretical writings”. Then follow the
signatures of the Bishops of Italy, the Archbishop of Aquileia and Grado
first, the Archbishop of Milan adding his assent afterwards.

Pope Martin also wrote to the emperor Constans II., sending him the acts
of the Council, together with a Greek translation. Thus, with the utmost
force, and with the presentiment of hard trials, he strove to prevent the
further spread of Monothelite error. He also declared himself against the
heretical patriarchs, Peter of Alexandria and Macedonius of Antioch,
deposed Paul, Archbishop of Thessalonica, and provided for sending
Catholic bishops and clergy to the East.

In these events, we have this very striking fact, that within eleven years
after the death of Pope Honorius in 638, we find four Popes his immediate
successors, Severinus, John IV., Theodorus, and Martin, opposing two
emperors, Heraclius, and his grandson, Constans II., censuring three
patriarchs of Constantinople, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paulus, besides other
eastern patriarchs, and the last of them solemnly condemning “the impious
Ecthesis and still more impious Typus,” and all manner of heretical
expositions, whether made by patriarchs, or imposed by emperors. There can
be no doubt that all these four Popes had been clergy of Honorius himself,
and as little doubt that they were maintaining the doctrine which he held.
There is no appearance that any one at Rome was the least inclined to the
Monothelite heresy, and the insidious manner in which it was propagated by
those who held it is conspicuous on every occasion. Nor must it be
forgotten that the publication of this judgment of Pope Martin fulfils all
the conditions of a judgment _ex cathedra_.

But the events which now took place are of so great an importance for all
subsequent time that it seems necessary to enlarge upon the epitome of
them just given, and to draw out the full range of their bearing, not only
on the doctrine of the Church, but on its government at the time.

We are witnessing a deliberate attempt by successive patriarchs of
Constantinople to alter the faith of the Church as it had been laid down
at the Council of Chalcedon. And not this only, but to make the mouth of
their emperor the instrument for disseminating their heresy, and to use
the whole material power of that emperor as despotic lord of Rome to
overthrow the defence of the faith by the Roman See, the superior
authority of which, at the same time, neither emperor nor patriarch
denied. This attempt continues during forty years from the death of Pope
Honorius in 638, and in the whole of that time, it was the constancy of
the Roman See, the purely spiritual power of the successor of St. Peter,
in the midst of the greatest danger and a helpless temporal position,
which preserved the life of the Church, and foiled the Byzantine
oppressor, together with the underplay of the Byzantine patriarch.

I take from the Acts of the Lateran Council of 649 the following:—

“Pope Martin said, ‘Let the copy of the Typus lately composed against the
orthodox faith, by persuasion of Paul, Bishop of Constantinople, be
brought before our consideration’.

“Theophylact, first of the notaries of the Apostolic See, said, ‘I bear in
my hands the copy of the Typus ordered by your Beatitude’.

“Pope Martin said, ‘Let it be read in the presence of the holy Council,
that we may accurately examine its meaning’.

“Theodoras, regionary notary of the Apostolic See, read it thus,
translated from the Greek into Latin.” It must be remembered that the
following are words of the emperor, spoken in that character.

“Since we are accustomed to do everything and to consider everything which
concerns our Christian polity, and especially whatever touches the purity
of our faith, through which we look for all our prosperity, we recognise
how greatly our orthodox people has been disturbed. Some of them maintain
One Will in the dispensation of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ,
and His One Operation in divine and human things. Others maintain Two
Wills and Two Operations in the same dispensation of the Incarnate Word.
The one support themselves by saying that our Lord Jesus Christ, because
of the One Person, wills and operates both divine and human things in the
two natures, without confusion, and without separation. The others say,
because in one and the same Person two natures are bound together without
division, their distinction from each other remains, and according to the
quality of the natures one and the same Christ operates both what is
divine and what is human. Hence our Christian polity has been led into
much variance and strife; the parties do not agree, and thus it is injured
in many ways. Led therefore by Almighty God, we thought it fit to quench
the flame of dissension thus enkindled, and not allow it further to feed
upon human souls. We therefore proclaim to our subjects, who continue in
orthodoxy, and the immaculate Christian faith, and belong to the Catholic
and Apostolic Church, that it is no longer open to them to introduce any
question, strife, or contention with each other concerning One Will or One
Operation, or Two Operations or Two Wills. This we command, not as taking
anything away from the pious belief of the holy approved Fathers
concerning the dispensation of our Incarnate God the Word, but intending
to put a stop to further contest on account of the said questions, and in
these to follow and be satisfied with the sacred Scriptures and the
traditions of the five holy Ecumenical Councils, and the simple
unquestioned usages and expressions of the holy approved Fathers. Their
dogmas, canons, and laws are those of the holy Catholic and Apostolic
Church. Add to them nothing of your own: take from them nothing: interpret
them not according to your own view, but keep the form which existed
everywhere before the contention upon these questions arose. None then
laid down One Will or One Operation, or Two Wills or Two Operations, under
any contention.... Now to ensure perfect unity and concord, and to leave
no opportunity to those who would contend for ever, we have ordered the
documents (_i.e._, the Ecthesis) attached to the narthex of the great
church in our imperial city, which contain the questions above mentioned,
to be removed. Now those who transgress these commands will first be
subject to the judgment of Almighty God, and then to the severe imperial
indignation for contempt. If it be a bishop or clerk, he shall be deposed
from his particular rank; if a monk, he shall be banished; if noble or
military, he shall be deposed. If they be private persons, when of rank,
their property shall be confiscated; when of low degree, they shall be
scourged and banished for ever. So that all shall be restrained by the
fear of God, and seeing the punishments respectively threatened, shall
maintain unshaken and undisturbed, the peace of God’s holy Churches.”

As(31) one Bishop of Constantinople, Sergius, composed the Ecthesis, so
another, his second successor, Paul, composed the Typus, but as Sergius
did not give to his work the fitting form of an imperial decree, but the
theological form of a creed, Paul showed himself more skilful, and dressed
his Typus in imperial clothing. Constans himself says that he meant to
restore the peace of the Church by this new decree. There is no reason to
doubt this, since, in tearing down the Ecthesis from the wall of Sancta
Sophia, he plainly purposed to quiet the minds of the Westerns and those
who held with them. It is further clear that while the Ecthesis forbade
contention concerning One or Two Operations, it inconsistently proclaimed
One Will, that is Monothelism. But the Typus consistently rejected not
only One Operation, but One Will. It wished in this to be impartial. This
apparent impartiality is likewise the chief distinction between the Typus
and the Ecthesis, for they are like each other in the main thought, which
is, that the development of doctrine should remain at the point to which
it had come in the five general councils, and that further questions
should not be entered into. However, that impartiality is but a false _via
media_, for it puts the true doctrine of the Two Wills upon the same
footing with the heresy, and forbids both one and the other. Another
distinction between the Ecthesis and the Typus lies in this, that the
Ecthesis only required obedience in general. Constans, on the contrary,
threatened every transgressor of his Typus with the severest civil
punishments, and these he executed with the utmost cruelty.

The Typus is the fifth specimen of doctrinal despotism proceeding from the
Byzantine emperors since the time of St. Leo. In all these the effort was
the same. So far as the relation between the emperor and the Pope is
concerned, the principle at issue is whether the Byzantine emperor, with
the Byzantine patriarch as his chief agent, should dictate the creed and
direct the government of the Church, or the Pope and the bishops.

The first attempt proceeds from Basiliscus, who, by insurrection got
possession of the imperial throne for about twenty months, and in that
short time issued the Encyclikon, in which Timotheus Ailouros, patriarch
of Alexandria, helped him as to the composition, and 500 Greek bishops
were found to accept and praise it. Basiliscus with his wife and children,
was presently starved to death by the emperor Zeno.

The second attempt was by Zeno, when he had recovered the throne, and
fallen into the hands of his patriarch Acacius. He then issued the
Henoticon, which Acacius had drawn up, which was imposed by force on the
bishops, and which Fravita, Euphemius, Macedonius, and Timotheus,
successive patriarchs of Constantinople, submitted to subscribe, the first
under Zeno, the following three under Anastasius. The wisdom and firmness
of successive Popes frustrated this attempt, and Hormisdas finally
obtained a full reparation, and the acknowledgment of his own charge over
the whole Church, by the gift of Christ to St. Peter, which the bishops of
the Apostolic See inherited.

Yet, notwithstanding this most solemn confession on the part of the bishop
of Constantinople, of the emperor, and of the nobles of the East, some
thirty years later, Justinian, having become direct lord of Rome, and
having summoned Pope Vigilius as his temporal subject, to go to
Constantinople, makes a third attempt, and issues to the Fifth General
Council his own “Confession of Faith,” which a recreant court-archbishop,
Theodore Askidas, supplies him with, and which the patriarch of
Constantinople, Eutychius, then, by the emperor’s nomination, presiding
over the Council, as well as the eastern bishops in the Council, receive.
The whole attitude and conduct of Justinian at the Fifth Council show how
deeply this most distinguished of the eastern emperors was imbued with the
doctrinal despotism of his throne. And from that time, the contention of
his successors is still more pronounced, and their temporal power over the
Pope, as their subject, is unsparingly exercised, not to deny his
spiritual supremacy in itself, but to make its exercise subject to their
imperial power, and in this the patriarchs of Constantinople, assuming by
and with the consent of the emperors, the title of Ecumenical Patriarch,
serve their sovereign as the chief instrument for reducing the Church to
servitude. It is to be observed that Justinian conferred this title upon
them in his laws. From that time they one and all clung to it.

The fourth attempt is made by Heraclius at the end of his long reign, when
he had fallen under the influence of Sergius, as his predecessor, Zeno,
had fallen under the influence of Acacius. Not only did Sergius hold the
great see of the capital during twenty-eight years from 610 to 638, but
things recorded of him seem to indicate that he was a man of extraordinary
resolution. He had preserved Heraclius from deserting his capital, and
flying back for refuge to his father at Carthage, after a long series of
defeats from the Persians. He had acted as guardian of his son, and
administrator of the empire during the marvellous six years when
Heraclius, shaking off twelve years of apathy, and going forth in the name
of God, and in publicly uttered commendation of his kingdom to the Blessed
Mother of God, had triumphed over the Great King. Servius finally supplied
him with the exposition, which was to present in seeming concord the
wrangling episcopacy of his eastern empire, and overcome the Roman Pontiff
in his maintenance of the faith.

The fifth attempt was made by Constans II., grandson of Heraclius, for
whom Paul II., patriarch of Constantinople, invested his heresy in fitting
language, and presented it in the Typus as an imperial decree which all
were to accept under punishment to property, freedom, or life. And Pope
Martin I. had to fight the old battle of the Church as a subject to a
sovereign who was at once without mercy and without scruple.

The Typus is the perfect specimen of the theologising emperor, who begins
by attributing to himself the charge over the whole Church, and puts
himself precisely in the place of the Pope and the bishops in formulating
the true Christian doctrine, wherein he claims the initiative, and the
ultimate decision.

It need only be added that in all this succession of attempts to deprive
the Church of God of her liberty, and the Pope of that guardianship of the
faith which alone is adequate to its maintenance, the successors of
Constantine departed essentially from the position which the first of
Christian emperors took at the first General Council. He did not sit in
that Council. He placed himself with the sword of empire at the entrance
to guard the approach. He made the decrees of the Council laws of the
Roman empire; but he acknowledged that the power to make them rested in
the bishops alone.

Nor would it be unhistorical to note that in proportion as the emperors,
whose seat was Byzantium, encroached upon the liberty of the Church, and
sought domination over the successor of St. Peter, in whose prerogatives
that liberty was seated, their temporal empire declined. The despotism
which flung itself with insolence and violence against the Church became
odious to its own subjects. We shall see an instance of this which almost
passes belief when the patriarchate of St. Athanasius embraces the Moslem
conqueror, to escape the Byzantine sovereign, and terms the defenders of
the Christian faith Melchites, that is, Royalists, because, while they
rejected the Eutychean heresy, they were likewise loyal to the eastern
emperor.

Let us see how Pope Martin meets this attempt. No sooner is he invested
with “the great mantle,”(32) than he summons a Council to meet in the
basilica of Constantine, then called the Church of the Saviour, now St.
John Lateran, adjoining the papal palace, the Mother Church of Rome. He
called this council in order to judge the doctrine which two emperors,
using two Byzantine patriarchs, and at the same time used by them, seek to
impose upon the Church, instead of the doctrine of St. Leo the Great,
accepted and set forth at the Council of Chalcedon. It held from the 5th
to the 31st October, 649, five sittings. It was attended by 105 bishops,
chiefly from Italy (excluding the Lombard dominion), Sicily and Sardinia,
with some African, and a few foreign. The acts have come to us complete,
both in Greek and Latin, the former being the proper language of the two
documents, the Ecthesis and Typus. I give the following epitome of the
Pope’s speech to the Council:—

“Christ has commanded pastors to be watchful: this concerns us also, and
especially must we watch over the purity of the faith, since certain
bishops, who do not deserve this name, have lately sought to spoil our
confession of belief by new invented expressions. Everyone knows them,
since they have come forward openly to injure the Church: such are Cyrus
of Alexandria, Sergius of Constantinople, and his followers, Pyrrhus and
Paulus. Cyrus eighteen years ago taught in Alexandria One Operation in
Christ, and published from the pulpit nine heads of doctrine. Sergius
approved this, issued somewhat later the Ecthesis under the name of the
emperor Heraclius, and taught One Will and One Operation, which leads to
One Nature of Christ. The Fathers distinctly taught that Operation answers
to Nature, and whoever has like Operation must likewise be of like Nature.
Since then the Fathers teach Two Natures in Christ, it follows that Two
Wills and Operations are united without mixture and without division in
one and the same Incarnate Word. That both are naturally one thing is not
possible. Pope Leo also taught Two Wills, and so holy Scripture indicates.
So Christ wrought what belonged to the Godhead corporeally, since He
manifested it through His flesh animated by a reasonable soul; but what
belonged to the Manhood, He wrought by the Godhead, since He took upon Him
freely for our sake human weaknesses, that is, sufferings, but without
sin. Cyrus, in issuing his nine heads of doctrine, Sergius, in issuing the
Ecthesis, contradicted the doctrine of Leo, and of the Council of
Chalcedon. But Pyrrhus and Paulus spread the error more widely; in
particular, Pyrrhus by threats and flatteries seduced many bishops to
subscribe his impiety. When he had afterwards come to shame, he came
hither and presented to our Holy See a writing in which he anathematised
his former error. But he returned as a dog to his vomit, and was therefore
rightly deposed. But Paulus went even beyond his predecessor; he confirmed
the Ecthesis, and contradicted the true doctrine.

“Therefore he also was deposed by the Holy See. Specially imitating
Sergius, to cover his error he counselled the emperor to issue the Typus,
which annuls the Catholic doctrine, denies to Christ properly all will and
all operation, and therewith likewise each nature, for nature is shown by
its operation. He has done what hitherto no heretic has dared; he has
destroyed the altar of our Holy See in the Placidia Palace, and forbidden
our Nuncios to celebrate thereon. He has persecuted those nuncios because
they exhorted him to give up his error, as well as other orthodox men,
imprisoning some, banishing others, beating others. As these men (that is,
Sergius and the rest) have disturbed well-nigh the whole world, complaints
both written and oral have come to us from various sides urging us to put
down the falsehood by apostolic authority. Our predecessors have both by
writing and by their nuncios tried to correct them, but without success.
We have, therefore, thought it needful to convoke you, to consider
together with you them and the new teaching.”(33)

Pope Theodorus had named Stephen, Bishop of Dor, in Palestine, to be
Apostolic Vicar in that province. He was the prelate whom the patriarch of
Jerusalem, Sophronius, had sent to Rome in the time of Honorius to solicit
support for the faith of that Pope, and to set before him the dangerous
state of affairs. He was introduced in the Lateran Council at its second
sitting, and read to it the following memorial:—(34)

“To the holy Apostolic Council held by the grace of God and the regular
authority of most blessed Pope Martin presiding, in the great city of the
elder Rome, for the confirmation and defence of the definitions received
from our fathers and councils, I, Stephen, Bishop, and sitting in the
first see of the council under the throne of Jerusalem, make the following
report:—Jerusalem was in peace and tranquillity when the tempest broke
upon it. For first of all Theodorus, Bishop of Pharan, then Cyrus, Bishop
of Alexandria, then Sergius, Bishop of Constantinople, and Pyrrhus and
Paulus, who succeeded him, set up afresh the doctrine of the heretics
Apollinaris and Severus. By these men the whole Catholic Church has been
thrown into confusion. I speak to your supreme see, which is set over all
sees, for the healing of every wound, for this it has been accustomed to
do with power from of old and from the beginning by apostolical authority.
Since Peter, the great head of the Apostles, was manifestly invested not
only with the keys of heaven to open to those who believe and to close to
those who disbelieve the gospel, but he first had the charge to feed the
sheep of the whole Catholic Church—to convert and confirm his spiritual
brethren of the same order, as he received this dignity over all, given to
him providentially by God Himself for our sakes incarnate.

“Knowing which things, Sophronius, of blessed memory, formerly patriarch
of Christ’s holy city, took me and placed me on the holy spot of Calvary,
and there indissolubly bound me with these words:—Thou shalt answer to God
Himself who on this spot chose to be crucified for us, when He comes at
His glorious epiphany to judge the living and the dead, if thou delayest
and disregardest His endangered faith, for I myself am bodily prevented
from doing this by the Saracen invasion which has come upon us for our
sins.(35) Go, then, swiftly from end to end of the earth, until thou reach
the Apostolic See in which the foundations of our holy doctrines rest. Not
once, not twice, but again and again make known to the holy men there what
is being here mooted, until with apostolic prudence they bring forth
judgment to victory, and effect, according to the canons, a complete
annulment of these innovating doctrines. Shuddering at the adjuration put
on me in this most holy spot, remembering also the episcopal dignity
granted to me by God, further bearing in mind the entreaties from almost
all the bishops of the East and their Christian people, agreeing with
Sophronius, who is now among the saints, as first of the Episcopal Council
of Jerusalem, I gave no sleep to my eyes nor slumber to my eyelids in
fulfilling this command. This now is the third time that I take refuge at
your apostolical feet, beseeching you, as all beseech you, to help the
faith of Christians in its danger. The enemy pursue me from place to place
to have me imprisoned and delivered to them in fetters, but the Lord has
saved me from my persecutors. Nor has God failed to the prayers of His
supplicants, but has raised up your predecessors, the apostolic prelates,
to no slight exertions in correcting these men, though they would not be
softened, and now he has raised up the most blessed Pope Martin.... I
beseech you, therefore, not to despise the earnest entreaties of the
orthodox bishops and peoples throughout the East, and of my now sainted
lord Sophronius, brought to your blessedness now by me the least of all.”

In further sittings of this Council abundant testimony from the Greek and
Latin fathers was presented to show how contrary to them was the teaching
which the emperors and the patriarchs of Byzantium were seeking by crude
force to impose on bishops and people. In the end the Council passed
twenty canons fully setting forth the true doctrine, and condemning the
heresy as contrary to what had been taught up to that time: especially
“the most impious Ecthesis which was made by Heraclius, formerly emperor,
under persuasion of Sergius, against the orthodox faith”; and with it “the
atrocious Typus lately drawn up by the most serene prince, the Emperor
Constans, against the Catholic Church, by persuasion of Paulus”.

In(36) rank this council stands near to the General Councils; its twenty
canons being issued by Pope Martin under anathema upon matters of faith
are as binding on the Church now as when they were first published. The
creed of this Council is a simple repetition and exhibition of the creed
of the Council of Chalcedon, until we come to the addition which at once
transfixes the heresy and sets forth the faith. After the words “we
believe one and the same only-begotten Son, God, the Word, our Lord Jesus
Christ,” the addition runs, “and we believe as Two Natures of the same,
united without confusion, so likewise Two Natural Wills, the divine and
the human, and Two Natural Operations, the divine and the human, for the
perfect and unfailing assurance that He is truly perfect God and perfect
Man in very deed, one and the same our Lord and God, Jesus Christ, willing
and working divinely and humanly our salvation, as the prophets of old and
our Lord Jesus Christ Himself taught us, and the creed of the holy fathers
handed down, and in general all the holy universal Councils and the whole
band of approved doctors in the Catholic Church. This, in agreement with
them all according to their inspired teaching, we one and all confess and
define.”

Among the documents read at the Lateran Council was one from the whole
African episcopate addressed to Pope Theodorus three years before, in 646,
in the following titles: “To our most blessed Lord, seated in the
apostolic headship, the Father of Fathers, Theodorus, most holy Pope and
Chief Shepherd of all Prelates, Columbus Bishop of the first See of the
Byzacene Council, and Reparatus Bishop of the first See of the Mauritanian
Council, and with us all the bishops of the three Councils of Africa.” It
is to be noted that the Archbishop of Carthage is not mentioned, for
Fortunatus was elected somewhat later to take the place of a Monothelite.
“No one can question that a great and neverfailing spring of grace wells
forth from your Apostolic See, enriching all Christians. Thence in
abundance rivulets come forth, irrigating the whole Christian world,
whence, O Father of Fathers, in honour of most holy Peter, your Apostolic
See has been appointed, by divine decree in a peculiar and unique manner,
to search into and to treat the sacred doctrines of the Church, receiving
which as truly handed down it is the most necessary function of the high
priest of that supreme and apostolic See to certify.” Then the African
bishops, by quoting, made their own that famous answer given by Pope
Innocent I. to the African bishops in the time of St. Augustine, 230 years
before. “This obedience,” they proceed, “we humbly render to your
apostolic supremacy, and beseech the Pope to do away with the hateful
novelty which has sprung up in the Church of Constantinople.”

This letter has a double interest, being one of the last recorded acts of
the ancient African episcopate, which was already in conflict with the
Mohammedan assault, and about fifty years later was entirely swept away.
It would be difficult to find stronger words than it uses to describe the
Papal authority and the special gift which it recognises as belonging to
the See of Peter by divine ordinance.(37)

Several of the letters written by Pope Martin after the Lateran Synod
testify his zeal to overthrow the Monothelite heresy. Among these is his
answer to the just-quoted letter,(38) which he addresses to the Church of
Carthage, and all the bishops, clergy, and laity subject to it. He praises
them for the synodical letters drawn up by the Church’s glorious orator,
Augustine, through the Holy Ghost, to his Apostolic See, alluding to that
great confession of his(39) Primacy which we have in the letters of the
Saint, and which, he says, their words repeat, and so he presents to them
the acts of the Lateran Council.

Particularly remarkable is the Pope’s letter(40) to the bishops under the
Sees of Jerusalem and Antioch, that is, the patriarchates which had fallen
under Mohammedan domination. He announces to them that, after due
examination, he had condemned “the Exposition of the Emperor Heraclius,
and the formula of the present serene emperor,” and he deplores the havoc
which heretics had made in the East, irregularly setting up a false bishop
at Antioch, the heretic Macedonius, and another, Peter, at Alexandria. The
Pope adds that in his anxiety to build up the Church of God, which they
were laying waste, he had, according to the power given him by the Lord in
the person of blessed Peter, ordered his brother John, Bishop of
Philadelphia, to supply his place in all ecclesiastical matters through
the East, and to create in all cities episcopally subject to the Sees of
Antioch and Jerusalem bishops, priests, and deacons, and he begs them as
sons of obedience “to help our Vicar set by Apostolic authority”.

The Bishop of Thessalonica, in the course of 200 years since St. Leo and
the succeeding Popes had made him their Vicar for the great province of
Eastern Illyricum, had become a prelate of very high rank. Paul was
actually bishop, but he favoured the new heresy, and the Pope, after
warning him in vain,(41) wrote deposing him, unless he received without
the least omission everything which had been synodically ratified and
defined at the Council. At the same time he wrote to the people of
Thessalonica, enjoining them to have no society, agreement, or connection
with such a man.

Thus, in the case of any diocese, whether that of a simple bishop, or a
primate, or a patriarch, the Pope does not hesitate to tell their several
diocesans that they are set free from all duty of obedience to one
condemned by him. No act can show the superior authority of the universal
Primate more strongly than this. St. Gregory the Great had said that all
bishops were equal when performing their respective work in their own
diocese; but if that work is not duly performed, he knows of no bishop who
is not subject to the Apostolic See. The power of the Primacy is
essentially for edification of the whole Church, and so is exerted
whenever the Church and the faith of the Church are anywhere in danger.
The acts of St. Martin I. at a crisis of singular danger follow exactly
the rule of St. Gregory. If an emperor supports heresy, he condemns his
act, though he may be a lawful sovereign; if a patriarch is false to the
faith, he sets a vicar of his own to appoint fresh bishops in the
patriarchate. If his own vicar sins against the power which appointed him,
he dissolves the primary bond according to which the people of that
diocese is bound to their own bishop.

But the supreme authority of the Roman See is indicated most plainly in
the encyclical letter issued by the Pope. It is addressed(42) “Martin,
Servant of the Servants of God, by grace Bishop of God’s holy Catholic and
Apostolic Church of the Romans, together with the Synod of Bishops here
canonically assembled with us for the confirmation of the true dogmas of
the Catholic Church, to those who have inherited the like precious faith
as we of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, through the laver of
regeneration, who sojourn in holiness and justice in every part of His
dominion, our brethren the bishops, priests, deacons, heads of
monasteries, monks, ascetics, and to the whole sacred plenitude of the
Catholic Church”.

I give the main contents of this letter thus addressed to the whole world
to announce the decision of the Council by Pope Martin. It expresses in
every line, supported by constant quotations of Scripture, the solicitude
of the Pope for the maintenance of the doctrine concerning the Person of
the Lord which had been held from the beginning. “Our predecessors, the
Pontiffs of Catholic memory, have not ceased to admonish the innovators to
recede from this their heresy. Bishops from various provinces, and, what
is more, general synods, have not only by their own writings called upon
them to amend their heresy, but conjure our Apostolic See to exercise its
regular authority, and not to suffer to the end this innovation to make a
prey of the churches. Meeting, therefore, in this Roman most Christian
city, we have confirmed by our sentence the holy Fathers; we have
anathematised the heretics with their most depraved doctrines, the impious
Ecthesis and the most impious Typus, in order that all you who dwell over
the whole earth, recognising that these things have been piously done by
us for the safeguard of the Catholic Church, may carry them out together
with us.” “The Lord says, every kingdom divided against itself shall not
stand, and every sentence, every law divided against itself shall not
stand; and if the Typus destroys the Ecthesis, and the Ecthesis destroys
the Typus, the one asserting that our Lord has one will and operation, the
other denying it, then both are divided; and how shall the heresy stand,
being shown to be invalid and empty by itself, rather than destroyed by
us?” This, the never-ending refutation of heresy, runs through the whole
letter, and against it is set “the manifestation of God through apostles,
prophets, doctors, and the five Universal Councils, whose decrees are the
law of the Catholic Church”. “Behold the Judge stands before the door
joyfully promising crowns to those who suffer for His sake.”

Thus the Lateran Council of 649, presided over by Pope Martin, who directs
all the proceedings, who informs the emperor of the condemnation of the
Typus, composed by this emperor’s own patriarch, and issued by himself as
a law, who addresses an encyclical letter to all bishops and their people,
summing up its acts, who writes to various provinces, and in particular to
the eastern patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, appointing his vicar
over them, gives us in full detail a picture of the discipline existing in
the Church just at the middle of the seventh century. As to doctrine, the
Lateran Council stands precisely on that set forth two hundred years
before at the Council of Chalcedon by the great authority of St. Leo. In
condemning the Monothelite heresy, espoused by two emperors and three
successive patriarchs of Constantinople, it alleges the tradition of the
Fathers from the beginning, and the doctrinal decrees of the five
Councils, then accepted as General. During these five centuries the East
has been agitated almost without ceasing by the efforts of the Eutychean
heresy and its last progeny, the Monothelite, to overthrow the true faith
concerning the Incarnation, on which the whole economy of human salvation
rests. The eastern patriarchates have utterly failed to secure the
occupants of the sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and
Constantinople, from the prevailing error. Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria,
and Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, are the chief patrons of this
error. After them, Pyrrhus, and then Paul, are using the utmost power of
the emperor from their seat in the capital to impose it by force: and the
ecumenical patriarch especially is using it as a lever against the Roman
Primacy, and in drawing up decrees of doctrine fathered by the imperial
power is practically denying the Roman Primacy to be the guardian of the
Christian faith, and striving to transfer that guardianship to himself,
always under the wing of the emperor. Had the Popes yielded to the
Ecthesis or the Typus, both the faith of the Church would have been
altered, and its government transferred from Old Rome to Roma Nova. St.
Martin, as the first act of his pontificate, plays this most remarkable
part of summoning a Council which defeats this double aggression. And the
moment at which it is done may be marked as that in which the temporal
weakness of Rome touches its lowest point. The subsequent treatment of the
Pope, which I have now to mention, is an incontestable proof how entirely
he was exposed to the machinations, the violence, and the despotic tyranny
of his enemies, especially to the malevolent union of emperor and
patriarch. Yet it is to be observed that neither emperor nor patriarch
even affects to deny the authority of St. Peter’s successor; what they
attempt to do is to control and subject him in the exercise of it.

History is silent as to events in Rome from the end of the Council of 649
to 653. What the exarch Olympius, by special command of the emperor
Constans II. did while it was being held, has been narrated above.
Olympius was dead, but another exarch, Theodore Kalliopas, was sent from
Constantinople to execute the work in which Olympius had failed. On the
15th June, 653, Kalliopas came to Rome. Concerning his purpose, Pope
Martin himself wrote to his friend Theodorus in these words:(43) “Your
charity has desired to know how I was carried away from the See of the
Apostle, St. Peter, like a solitary sparrow from the house-top. I am
surprised at your question since Our Lord foretold of evil times to His
own disciples: for ‘there shall be then great tribulation, such as hath
not been from the beginning of the world until now; and unless those days
had been shortened, no flesh should be saved. But he who perseveres unto
the end shall be saved.’ Therefore that you may know how I was removed and
carried off from the city of Rome, you shall hear no false report. Through
the whole time I knew what was preparing. And taking with me all my
clergy, I remained by myself in the church of our Saviour, named after
Constantine, which was the first built and endowed in all the world by
that emperor of blessed memory, beside the bishop’s palace. There we all
stayed by ourselves from Saturday, when Kalliopas entered the city with
the army of Ravenna, and the chamberlain Theodorus. I sent them some of
the clergy to meet him, whom he received in the palace,(44) and thought I
was with them. But, finding I was not, he mentioned it to the chief
clergy. Because it was our purpose to do him homage,(45) but on the next
day, which was Sunday, we would present ourselves and salute him, as on
that day we could not. On Sunday he sent men to that church, suspecting
that there was a great multitude there, being Sunday, and he reported
that, being very tired with his journey, he could not come that day, but
we should certainly meet the next day, ‘and we will do homage to your
Holiness’. Now I myself had been very sick from October to that 16th of
June. On Monday then he sent at dawn his chartular and certain attendants,
and said, ‘You have prepared arms and you have armed men inside, and you
have heaped up a quantity of stones for resistance. This is not necessary;
do not allow any such thing.’ I heard this myself, and to remove their
suspicions, thought it necessary to send them all over the episcopal
palace, that, if they saw arms or stones, they might themselves give
evidence. They went and found nothing, upon which I suggested to them that
they had always acted thus, and proceeded against us by intrigue and false
accusation, as when, at the coming of the infamous Olympius, they said
that I might have repelled him by arms. Now I was lying in my bed before
the altar of the church, and scarcely half-an-hour later the army came
with them into the church. All were covered, bearing lances and swords,
shields, and bows ready bent; and they did things there which are not to
be uttered. For, as when the winter wind blows violently, the leaves fall
from the trees, the candles of the church were struck down, and resounded
in their fall upon the pavement. And the clash of arms sounded like a
horrible thunder in the church, together with the vast number of broken
candles. Upon this their sudden inroad, order was issued by Kalliopas to
the priests and deacons who surrounded me, that I had, in violation of
rule and law, taken undue possession of the bishop’s office, and was not
worthy to be in the Apostolic See, but was by all means to be sent to this
imperial city, and a bishop elected in my stead. This has not yet been
done, and I trust will never be done; since, in the absence of the
pontiff, the archdeacon, the archpriest, and the first notary take his
place. I have already told you the acts which had been doing concerning
the faith. But, as we were not prepared for resistance, I thought it
better to die ten times over than that anyone’s blood should be shed in
vain. And this was done without risk to anyone, after many evils
displeasing to God had been effected. So I gave myself up at once to be
taken before the emperor without resistance. I must admit that some of the
clergy cried out to me not to do this, but I did not listen, lest murders
should instantly take place. But I said to them: Let some of the clergy
necessary to me, bishops, priests, and deacons, and, indeed, such as I
choose, come with me. Kalliopas answered: By all means let such as will
come. We use compulsion on no one. I answered, My clergy are in my own
hands. Some of the priests cried out: We live and we die with him. Then
Kalliopas himself and these who were with him began saying, Come with us
to the palace. I did not refuse, but on that same Monday went out with
them to the palace. On Tuesday all the clergy came to me, and many had
prepared to sail with me, and had already put their baggage on board; some
others also, both clergy and laity, were hastening to join us. On that
same night then, preceding Thursday, the 19th June, about the sixth hour,
they carried me from the palace, thrusting back all who were with me in
the palace, and without even things necessary for my journey and for me
when here, and they took me from the city with only six pages and a single
drinking vessel. We were put on board a bark, and about four hours after
dawn reached Porto. As soon as we left Rome the gates were closed, and
kept closed that no one might go out and reach us at Porto before we
sailed thence. Thus we were compelled to leave at Porto all the goods of
those who had put them on board, and the same day we departed. On the 1st
July we came to Miseno, where was the ship, that is, my prison. Now I met
with no compassion, not in Miseno only but also in Calabria; nor in
Calabria only, which is subject to the great city of the Romans, but in
many islands in which we were detained for our sins as long as three
months, save only in the island of Naxus, for there we spent a year, I was
allowed to take two or three baths, and was a guest in a house. And now
for seven and forty days I have not been allowed to wash in warm or cold
water. I am sick and cold through and through; for both on board and on
land to the present hour my stomach has allowed me no rest. When in my
hunger I am about to take something, my whole body is so shaken that I
cannot take anything to strengthen nature. I have an utter disgust against
what I have. But I believe in the power of God, who beholds all things,
for when I am relieved from this present life all my persecutors will be
called to account, so that at least they may be drawn to repent, and so
converted from their iniquity. God preserve you my very dear son.”

The allusion above concerning the things done as to the faith is explained
in a former letter to the same friend, wherein he says: “When I left the
Lateran Church, where armed men had shut me in, they cried out in the
presence of the exarch, Whoever says or believes that Martin has changed
or will change one iota of the faith, let him be anathema. And whoever
remain not in their orthodox faith to death, let them be anathema. When
Kalliopas heard this he began to excuse himself that there was no other
faith than what we held, and that he had no other. And I would have you
know, most dear brother, concerning the faith, and likewise those
calumnies which they are putting out against the truth, that by the help
of your prayers, and those of all faithful Christians who are with you,
whether living or dying, I will defend the faith of our salvation, and as
St. Paul teaches, ‘to me to live is Christ, and to die gain’. But as to
those false accusations which heretics are newly making, casting aside the
truth of Christ our God, what truth can they speak to men who resist God’s
truth? Therefore, I make answer to you, dearest brother, by Him Who will
judge this world by fire, and render to every one according to his work, I
never sent letters to the Saracens, nor how they should understand a
certain tome, nor ever sent money, except some alms to servants of God
going thither, to whom we gave a little for their needs, by no means for
the Saracens. And as to our Lady, the glorious ever-virgin Mary, who
brought forth Jesus Christ our God and Lord, whom all holy and Catholic
fathers call the Mother of God, inasmuch as she bore the God-man, unjust
men have borne false witness against me—rather against their own souls.
Whoever does not honour and worship her who is blessed above every
creature and human nature save Him who was born of her, the venerable
ever-virgin Mother of our Lord, let him be anathema both in this world and
in the next. But men who seek occasion throw up scandals for the offence
of many. God preserve you, most loving son.”

In addition to these letters of the Pope himself, we also possess from the
hand of a contemporary(46) “a narration of the deeds done cruelly and
without respect of God by the adversaries of truth to the apostolic
confessor and martyr Martin, Pope of Rome”. Concerning this the writer
says: “Some incidents I learnt from others; of very many I was an
eye-witness”. He speaks with horror of the swords drawn against the Pope
as he lay sick on his couch in the Lateran Basilica; how the preacher of
truth was torn from his apostolic throne by the powerful of this world who
were worthy of such a ministry; how he was carried off secretly in a small
vessel; how, as his ship touched at various places, the bishops and
faithful brought him gifts, which the brutal guards laid their hands upon,
abusing those who brought them, and saying: If you love him you are
enemies of the State. “When at last that blessed man reached Byzantium on
the 17th September, the guards left him from morning until the tenth hour
lying in his couch on the ship, a spectacle to angels and men. For a
number of men came to him—wolfish from their manners I should call them—as
I conjecture hired to do against the holy Pope things which should not be
mentioned to Christians. Now I remained on the shore walking up and down
the whole day, mourning over him whom I saw in such a state; and hearing
what some heathens said against him, I was ready to expire with grief.
About sunset a certain scribe named Sadoleva came with many warders. They
took him from the ship and carried him in a portable chair to the
guardhouse, Prandiaria, and shut him up under strict charge that no one in
the city should know that he was kept in guard. Thus the holy apostolical
remained without exchanging a word with anyone for ninety-three days. On
the ninety-third day they took him early out of guard and put him in the
fiscal’s cell. They had summoned the whole Senate to meet. They had him
brought in upon his chair, for he was ill from what he had suffered on
board and the long imprisonment. The fiscal, who presided with the other
chief persons, eyed him from a distance, and bade him rise from his couch.
Some attendant said he could not stand. The fiscal called out in a fury,
and some one of the warders, Let him stand up, though he be supported on
both sides. This was done. Then the fiscal said: Speak, wretch, what harm
has the emperor done thee? Has he taken anything? Has he oppressed thee?
But he held his peace. Then the fiscal said to him with imperious voice:
Answerest thou nothing? Now shall thy accusers come in. Then many accusers
were brought in against him. But they were all sons of falsehood, and
disciples of those who killed our Lord Jesus Christ. But they contradicted
the holy man, as they had been told; for their words were arranged and
prepared. Now some of them tried to speak the truth, but those who
directed this conflict got disturbed, and began to threaten them violently
until they were induced to say what told for the death of this just man.
When the Pope looked at them as they entered to bear witness, he said with
a smile: Are these the witnesses? That is the rule. Some of these had been
with Olympius. They were sworn on the Gospels, and so bore witness. The
first of all the accusers was Dorotheus, patrician of Sicily. He swore
that if Martin had fifty heads he ought not to live, since he alone
subverted and destroyed all the West, and was in fact in the counsel of
Olympius, and an enemy who slew the emperor and the Roman civilisation.
When that just man saw them coming in and swearing unsparingly, out of
compassion to their souls he said to those who presided: For God sake do
not make them swear, but let them say what they please on their simple
word; and yourselves, do what pleases you. Why should they lose their
souls by swearing? One witness came in and said that the Pope had
conspired with Olympius, and tampered with soldiers to make them take an
oath. When he was asked if this was true, he answered: If you will hear
the truth, I will tell you. And he began to speak: ‘When the Typus was
made and sent to Rome by the emperor—’ At these words he was stopped, and
Troilus cried out: Do not introduce before us matters of faith; you are
now on trial for treason, since we are both Romans, and Christian, and
orthodox. Would to God, said the Pope; but on that day of tremendous
judgment you will find me a witness in this also. As the witnesses were
accusing, Troilus, the prefect, said to him: What a man art thou to have
seen and heard the attempts of Olympius against the emperor, yet not to
have forbidden him, but to have consented with him. To whom the Pope
instantly replied: Lord Troilus, tell us when George, as you know and we
have heard, who had been a monk, and was become a magistrate, entered into
this city from the camp, and said and did such and such things, where were
you and those with you to offer no resistance, though he harangued you and
banished from the palace such as he chose? And again, when Valentine, at
the emperor’s command, put on the purple and sat by his side, where had
you gone? Were you not here? Why did you not forbid him to meddle with
things not belonging to him? Did you not all take part with him? How was I
to stand against such a man who wielded the whole force of Italy? Did I
make him exarch? I entreat you by the Lord to do quickly what is your
pleasure to do with me. For God knows that you bestow on me the greatest
of gifts by whatever death you kill me. The fiscal enquired of one of the
officers, Sagoleva: Are there many more witnesses? There are many, my
lord, he said. But the presidents, being foiled by the holy man standing
before them, because the Holy Spirit supported him, said it was
sufficient. A certain Innocentius was turning into Greek the Pope’s words,
and the fiscal, feeling them like fiery darts shot upon them, turned to
Innocentius in a fury: Why do you translate his words? Repeat them not.
And rising with his assessors he went in to report to the emperor what he
chose. But they led the holy apostolic man, seated in his chair, away from
the cell of judgment—I should rather say from the hall of Caiphas—and put
him in the middle of a court opposite the imperial stable, where all the
people used to meet and await the entry of the fiscal. The guards
surrounded him, and it was a sight striking awe into the crowd. Presently
they placed him in the open, that the emperor might look at him from his
dining-couch, and see what followed. Now there was a great multitude of
people crowded together as far as the hippodrome. So they placed the most
reverend man in the middle of that open space in presence of the whole
Senate, propped up on both sides. Suddenly there was a great press, and
the fiscal issuing from the emperor, with the doors of the dining-room
opened, ordered all the people to make way for him. And, coming up to the
holy Martin, the Apostolicus said to him: See how God has led thee and
delivered thee into our hands. What hope hadst thou in struggling against
the emperor? Thou hast deserted God, and God has deserted thee. And the
fiscal calling on one of the warders standing by ordered him instantly to
take away the mantle of the chief pastor of all Christians, who had
confirmed the orthodox confession of the holy Fathers and Councils, that
is, the Faith, and had canonically and in council put under anathema the
authors of the new error, the new heretics, with their impious doctrines.
So when the warder had torn away his mantle and the straps of his sandals,
the fiscal delivered him over to the prefect of the city, saying: Take
him, my lord prefect, and immediately cut him in pieces. At the same time
he bade all who were present anathematise him, which they did, but only
about twenty souls. But all who saw this deed, and knew that there is a
God in heaven who beheld what was being done, went away disturbed, with
eyes cast down and in great sorrow.

“Then the executioners taking him, stripped off the pallium of the
sacerdotal stole, and rending the sides of his garment, which was woven
from the top throughout, put iron chains upon his holy neck, and dragging
his whole body violently, did not allow him to rest a moment and recover
himself, but led him from the palace, making a show of him and
dishonouring him through the midst of the city to the pretorium. And the
sword was borne before him. Now, that blessed one was in great and
unspeakable pain. He was utterly worn out and without strength, ready to
expire from the pressure of sufferings and his emaciation. Nevertheless,
rejoicing in hope, he was comforted in the Lord, and the greater the
affliction and violence with which he was dragged along, the more that
Just One followed with serene countenance and unbroken spirit. He had but
one garment, which was rent from top to bottom, and no girdle; but he was
girded with faith and the grace of the Lord. You might see a man so full
of God subject to such disgrace that his flesh might be seen naked. When
the people saw many things which happened they groaned and sobbed. But a
few of those ministers of Satan rejoiced and mocked, and shaking their
heads, as is written, they said, Where is his God, and where is his faith,
and where is his teaching? And when he had come to the pretorium in this
dishonour, and surrounded by the executioners with drawn swords, they cast
him into a prison with murderers, and about an hour later carried him
thence to the guard-house of Diomedes, in the court of the prefect. But
they drew him in his fetters with such haste and force that his legs and
thighs were torn, and blood shed in ascending the stairs of the
guard-house, which were very ragged, rough and steep. Now the blessed one
was very nigh to escape the tortures of the present life by expiring
before the sword came when he had no strength to mount the steps with the
men dragging him. When at last they got him somehow into the guard-house,
after many falls and risings again, they put him on a bench clothed in
fetters. For when he was delivered by Caiphas, that is, the prefect, to
Pilate(47) to be crucified, immediately when the executioners were
stripping him, he suffered greatly from the cold, for it was a bitter
season. They put on him the heaviest iron fetters, and there was no man of
his own to help him, save one young cleric, who stayed with him in
custody, and stood weeping over his master, like Peter. The chief warder
also was fastened to him, it being the custom that a criminal condemned to
the sword should be bound to the chief warder.

“Now, there were two women, a mother and a daughter, who kept the keys of
the guard-house. These witnessed the unendurable suffering of that holy
man (for besides all his other punishments he was shivering with cold) and
out of compassion sought to show some mercy to him and to cover him, but
did not venture because of the warder who was bound to him. For they
thought that the order for his execution would come at once. But after
some hours when some soldiers below had summoned the chief warder he went
down, and one of these women, touched with pity, came, and folding in her
arms the champion of Christ and apostolic father, carried him and rested
him on her own bed, carefully covering him and wrapping him. Now he
remained to the evening without uttering a word. But in the evening
Gregorius, the eunuch, prefect of the chamberlains, sent his majordomo
with a little food to refresh him, saying, Faint not in your tribulations;
we trust in God you will not die. The blessed one groaned at this increase
of his troubles. Immediately they took off his fetters.

“The next day the emperor went to the patriarchal palace to visit the
patriarch Paul, for he was near death. The emperor told him all that had
been done to the holy man. But Paul groaned, and turning his face to the
wall he said: Woe is me, this also has been done to multiply the judgments
upon me. The emperor asked why he said this. He replied: Is it not
miserable, my Lord, that pontiffs should suffer such things. Then he
earnestly adjured the emperor that the past sufferings were sufficient,
and that he should bear no more. When this was heard by that apostolical
man, who did not receive what he was expecting, he was not pleased with
that promise, but was made quite sad, for he was longing to finish a good
fight, and to depart unto Him Whom he desired.

“The patriarch Paul died, and Pyrrhus who had been patriarch before him
was trying to recover his seat, but the retractation which he had offered
to the Pope Theodorus was brought up against him. The emperor sent an
officer, an assistant of the fiscal, to examine Pope Martin about it.
Demosthenes entering said to the Pope: See in what great glory you were,
and to what you have reduced yourself. Nobody did this to you, but you did
it to yourself. The Pope made no answer except, Glory and thanksgiving for
all things to the sole immortal King. His majesty, said Demosthenes, has
instructed you thus: inform us of what passed in the case of the
expatriarch Pyrrhus here, and at Rome afterwards. Why did he go to Rome?
Was it by order, or of his own accord? The Pope answered, Of his own
accord. Demosthenes said, How did he draw up that paper? Under any one’s
compulsion? The Pope replied, Under none but of himself. Demosthenes said:
When Pyrrhus came to Rome, how did Pope Theodorus, your predecessor,
receive him? as a bishop? The Pope replied with tranquillity, And why not?
Before Pyrrhus came to Rome, blessed Theodorus wrote hither, that is to
Paul, who had acted unfittingly, and invaded another’s see. When
afterwards Pyrrhus came to Rome, to the threshold of St. Peter, how should
not my predecessor receive and honour him as a bishop? Demosthenes said,
That is most true. But where did he get what was most needful for his
support? The Pope said, Clearly from the Roman patriarchal palace. The
assistant remarked: What sort of bread was given to him? The Pope said, My
Lords, do you not know the Roman Church? For I tell you whoever in however
poor a plight comes hither to lodge, all things for his need are given
him, and St. Peter sends away none who come without his gifts; the best
bread and various wines are given both to him and to his attendants. If
this is done in the case of the abject, when one comes in the honour of a
bishop, what treatment should he receive? Demosthenes said, We have been
informed that Pyrrhus was forced to make that statement at Rome, that he
bore wooden fetters, and suffered much. The Pope replied, Nothing of the
kind was done. For unless some are kept in their place by fear, they
cannot speak out the truth. There are many at Constantinople who were then
at Rome, and know what took place there. The patricius Plato survives, who
was then exarch, and who directed some of his men then to Pyrrhus at Rome.
Ask him if I speak falsely about this. But why enquire further? I am in
your hands. Do with me what you will. As God allows, it is in your power.
If you cut me to pieces, as when you delivered me to the prefect, you
ordered, I do not communicate with the Church of Constantinople. I am
here: examine me, and try, and you will find by experience the grace of
God and of His faithful servants. Again Pyrrhus was mentioned, who had
been so often anathematised, and stripped of the sacred honour.
Demosthenes and his assistant were astonished at the tranquil Pope’s
boldness and constancy for Christ unto death. For this his chalice of
passion was ordained. The attendants also were amazed: they made a copy of
all which the blessed man had said and retired.

“Now the most reverend Pope passed in that same guard-house of Diomedes
eighty-five days after the first ninety-three, that is, in all one hundred
and seventy-eight days. Then Sagoleva the scribe came, saying, I am
commanded to take you hence, and to remove you to my house, and after two
days to conduct you whither the fiscal shall command. The Pope asked
whither he was to be taken; the other refused to say. Then the holy man
asked that he might be allowed to remain in the same guard-house until he
was banished, and might be taken direct from it, which also was refused
him. But about sunset the venerable Pope said to those who were in the
prison: Approach, brethren, and let us take leave; behold he is at hand
who will take me hence. And as he said this they each drank of the
chalice. And rising with serene countenance, with much firmness and
thanksgiving he said to one of those present dear to him: Sir, my brother,
come and give me the kiss of peace. Now the heart of that brother, as he
told me himself at that very time, was, I conceive, such as the heart of
that disciple who watched his Lord upon the cross. And as he was giving
the kiss of peace to the most holy Pope, through the depth of their
affection they shed a flood of tears. But all present broke into a
terrible lamentation. The blessed man distressed at this, besought them
not to do so, looking at them undisturbed. And placing his venerable hands
upon his head, said with a smile: Sir, my brother, this is good, this is
seasonable—should you act thus? Is it for our peace? Rather you should
rejoice over me now. To whom the brother with deep contrition answered:
Servant of Christ, God knows. I rejoice in the glory with which Christ our
God has deigned that you should suffer all these things for His Name’s
sake; but I am sad for the perdition of all. Then all paying him their
respects retired. So the scribe coming forth at once took him away and
brought him to his own house. It was said then that he was banished to
Cherson, and a few days afterwards we learnt that the holy Apostolical man
had been carried thither in a vessel secretly.

“Upon his arrival he wrote a letter after a few days to a most dear friend
in Byzantium, one of those who loved him for the Lord’s sake and for his
right faith. And this our father was in banishment and great tribulation,
and on account of his many and severe bodily sicknesses, and the every way
defective supply of that country, where nothing was to be found,
particularly bread, which they knew by name, but not in fact, asked for
certain things to be sent him. Thus he wrote, attesting upon oath that a
small bark touched there, carrying a little wheat in exchange for salt,
and they were scarcely able to get a bushel of wheat for four coins, and
that with much entreaty. That holy soul wrote that he was suffering
various distresses there, not only from his own body, but through the
oppression of those who ruled there, under direction from the lord in
Byzantium, so that he was dying miserably. I then, your humble and sinning
servant, beseech you, Fathers honourable in God, since I have declared to
you what I myself saw and most carefully heard from others, that is, the
trials pressing on our most blessed Pope for his right confession in
Christ our Lord, and for his anathema uttered upon the new heretics. Short
as is my account out of many things, but the best I could send you, do you
for your part set forth these things to those who have zeal for God’s
worship, and beseech them to imitate him, and to maintain the traditions
of the holy fathers, as he has done, and to hold no communion with those
of an opposite mind. Entreat also for me, your unworthy servant, the
writer, that, together with him and with you, I may find mercy from Christ
our Lord for ever. Amen.”

We possess two letters written by the Pope from the Crimea to his friend
in Byzantium, which would seem to be the letters referred to by the writer
I have just quoted. In them the Pope declares the extreme need of
necessaries for life, in which he suffers. In the first he says, “If St.
Peter thus supports strangers at Rome, what shall we say of ourselves, who
are his proper servants, and at least for a time ministered to him, and
are in such a banishment and affliction”. In the second his words are
still more pressing: “I am astonished at the inattention and want of
compassion of all who once belonged to me, of my friends and relations who
are so utterly forgetful of my misery and care not to know, as I find by
experience, whether I am or am not upon the earth. Much more still do I
wonder at those who are of the most holy Church of the Apostle Peter,
since they have taken such pains for their own body and member—that is,
for their affection to us—that we may be without solicitude. For if the
Church of St. Peter possess not gold, at least, by the grace of God, it is
not without wheat and wine and other necessaries whereby at least to show
a moderate care of us. What fear has fallen upon men that they should not
do the commands of God? Have I appeared such an enemy to the whole fulness
of the Church, and an adversary to them? But may God, who wishes all men
to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth by the intercession
of St. Peter, establish their hearts in the orthodox faith, and confirm
them against every heretic and person adversary to our Church, and
maintain them unshaken, especially the pastor who is now declared to rule
them, so that failing, declining, surrendering no whit of the things which
they have writtenly professed in the sight of our Lord and his holy
Angels, they may, together with my humility, receive the crown of justice
belonging to the orthodox faith from the hand of our Lord and Saviour
Jesus Christ. As for this my poor body, the Lord Himself will care as it
pleases Him to order, whether for sorrows without end or for moderate
relief. For the Lord is at hand, and for what am I solicitous? I hope in
His mercy that He will not long delay to finish my course, as He has
appointed.”(48)

The “present pastor,” whom Pope Martin thus seems to recognise was Pope
Eugenius, elected at Rome in his lifetime, through dread, it is said, of
the clergy there that the Emperor Constans II. would force upon them some
Monothelite of his own to sit in the See of Peter.

The last scene is thus described, as appended to the foregoing narrative:—

“The most holy thrice blessed Apostolical, Martin the Pope, a true
confessor and martyr of Christ our God, died in his banishment in the
Crimea, according to his own petition to our Lord God, offered to Him with
tears at the moment that he disembarked and trod that land—that is, that
in it he might finish his life, fighting the good fight, finishing his
course of martyrdom, keeping the good faith, on the 16th September, the
day on which in the year’s course the most precious and blessed memory is
kept of the martyr Euphemia, guardian of the orthodox faith.(49) He was
buried about a stadium outside the walls of the city of Cherson, in the
Church of Our Lady, the most chaste, immaculate, most excellent of all
creatures, the fullest of grace, the maker and giver of joy, the
ever-Virgin Mary, Mother of God. By the intercessions of which Virgin and
confessor may Christ our true God and Saviour, who came forth from her for
the human race in a manner ineffable and without seed, guard and protect
us, and all faithful hearers, and all the people whom He has acquired unto
sincere faith and practice, in peace and charity, and all justice to the
end.”

So Pope Martin I. gave up his life for the faith of Christ and for the
independence of the Church, and no less for that guardianship of both
which is vested in the Holy See. For he was thus treated because he held a
Council at the Lateran expressly condemning an imperial document of the
reigning sovereign called a Typus, and as Pope placed it under anathema,
and published his Encyclical “to the whole sacred plenitude of the
Church”. And he was condemned as a traitor, exactly repeating the passion
of his Lord, as he sat in the seat of him to whom our Lord said, Follow
thou Me. And further, he followed his great predecessor, Pope Clement I.,
the personal friend both of St. Peter and St. Paul, and the third
successor of St. Peter, dying in the Crimea, where St. Clement died by
command of the great heathen emperor Trajan, as St. Martin died by command
of Constans II., a successor of Constantine, and by his office as
“Christian prince and Roman Emperor” the first son and defender of the
Church.





CHAPTER III. HERACLIUS BETRAYS THE FAITH, AND CUTS HIS EMPIRE IN TWO.


We left the emperor Heraclius carrying back the true Cross in triumph to
Jerusalem from its captivity under the Persian fire-worshipper, whose
empire he had wounded to death. This was in the year 629, in the
pontificate of Honorius, and in that act the emperor seated at Byzantium,
on the throne of Constantine, at the head of the empire which was the
proper creation of Constantine, seemed to have made himself the champion
of the faith which is embodied in the Cross. Had Heraclius then died it
would have been with a halo not only of human but of Christian glory
surrounding his head. But he survived during twelve years in which his
inertness, considered by some to be unexplained, suffered the eastern
empire to undergo irreparable losses. These, moreover, came from a foe of
whose mere existence he was indeed conscious, but of whom he had no fear
at the time of that triumphal entry into Jerusalem. An obscure Arabian
raider was striving to gain a mastery among some savage tribes in that
little known peninsula. The lord of the golden city, seated as queen of
Europe and Asia on broad-flowing Hellespont, would hardly deign to cast
his eyes upon an incursion of southern robbers, made on an empire which
for three hundred years had been watching war-clouds big with tempests
from the north, or matching itself with difficulty against the restored
Sassanid kingdom. This at last was beaten down. Might not Constantinople
hail in security the return of an emperor who had conquered Persia? But
we, looking back over the ages, may think that the act of Heraclius
replacing the Cross in the Holy City and in the church which Constantine
had built over the sepulchre of Christ may be called with much truth the
last act of the real Cæsarean empire, inasmuch as during the twelve
succeeding years it lost for ever its greatest provinces to the very foe
whose advent as a conqueror Heraclius had not even suspected.

We have now to follow briefly one of the greatest revolutions which has
ever occurred in human affairs. It is a revolution which not merely sets
up one kingdom instead of another, or alters the persons of individual
rulers; but which changes human society to its very depths, provides a
different standard of morals, and, so far as it succeeds, but only so far,
reverses the course of Christian civilisation, and undoes in certain
countries the greatest conquests which the Christian Church had obtained
for the good of the human race. Not States only are changed, but fathers
and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters: in fine, Græco-Roman
heathenism has disappeared, but instead of it arises a religion borne on
the shoulders of a temporal rule, and a legislation compared with which in
certain respects that old heathenism was pure and benignant. The
revolution reaches in fact man’s belief in the nature of God Himself: and
a change of belief in the nature of God involves a change in all His
relations to His moral creatures, and in their relations to each other.
The creature in all action reproduces what it holds concerning the
Creator. The religion of self-sacrifice springs from a God who sacrifices
Himself: the religion of self-indulgence from a God from whose worship
sacrifice has been expunged.

It(50) appears that even before the triumphal entry of Heraclius into
Jerusalem with the recovered cross he had met in the Persian campaigns, in
622 or 623, with a certain bishop named Cyrus, then holding the see of
Phasis, in Armenia. But Cyrus himself had for years before been in
communication with Sergius, the powerful patriarch of Constantinople, the
guide and inspirer of the emperor. Sergius had held the see of the capital
since the year 610, in which the accession of Heraclius took place. It had
been all along his dream to reconcile the various monophysite sects which
troubled his master’s empire. In the political point of view such a
reconciliation could not but appear very important. In Egypt alone the
Monophysites numbered about six millions, against three hundred thousand
orthodox.(51) How deeply their national feeling was mixed up with their
heresy is shown by the name of Melchites or Royalists, which they gave to
their opponents. The patriarch Sergius and the emperor Heraclius fell upon
the device of gaining the heretical party, not only in Egypt, but in the
Eastern empire generally, to at least an outward union with the orthodox
by introducing the formula “One Operation” as a theological expression for
the acts of our Lord. St. John of Damascus(52) describes in his treatise
on heresies the 99th as that of the Monothelites “who derived their origin
from Cyrus of Alexandria, and their strength from Sergius of
Constantinople. These men maintained two Natures in Christ, and one
Person, but assert one Will and one Operation, by which they destroy the
duality of natures, and strongly adhere to the doctrines of Apollinarius.”
Now Sergius, uniting great ability and strong character to his position as
bishop of the capital city and minister of the Emperor Heraclius,
dominated his mind. Heraclius exerted himself greatly to disseminate the
formulary of these two patriarchs. His purpose was that of drawing
together his own distracted empire. This purpose of Heraclius is carried
back so far at least as the year 628. Nay, at the beginning of his
campaign against the Persians he recommended it. How much more when by the
peace of the year 628 he recovered the provinces which had been taken from
him.(53) It would seem that the faltering of Heraclius in the faith, which
he was willing to subject to a deceptive compromise the doctrine of the
incarnation itself, was coincident in time with the opening of the
Mohammedan era, the hegira or flight of Mohammed from Mecca, which marks
his assumption of the claim to propagate by force a conquering religion.
That claim was in a few years to cost Heraclius the half of his empire. It
is certain that about the year 630 he promoted Cyrus to be patriarch of
Alexandria. He also put a certain Athanasius of like doctrine into the see
of Antioch, and thus three patriarchal sees at once were in favour of the
heresy. And Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius commending it as a wonderful
mode of restoring unity to the Church in the East.

Cyrus drew up nine heads of doctrine, by which he thought that he had
reconciled the Theodosians and other powerful sects in Egypt. His
announcement was received with exceeding joy by Sergius at Constantinople.
Sergius wrote to Pope Honorius describing the action of Cyrus in these
words: “Certain dogmatic heads were agreed upon between the two sides, in
consequence of which those who but yesterday were parted into divisions
and acknowledged the wicked Dioscorus and Severus as their ancestors, were
united to the one most holy Catholic Church, and all the people of
Alexandria, beloved by Christ, and besides this we may say all Egypt and
Thebais and Libya, and the other dioceses of the Egyptian province, became
one flock of Christ our true God. They who were until then to be seen an
innumerable multitude of divided heresies, now, by the good pleasure of
God and the zeal well-pleasing to Him of the most holy prelate of
Alexandria, have all become one, with one voice and unity of spirit,
confessing the true doctrines of the Church.”(54)

Such was the picture set before Pope Honorius by the patriarch Sergius,
then in the height of his credit as bishop of the imperial city and prime
minister of the emperor, in the year 633, when Abu Bekr was elected the
first of the chalifs to carry on the power of Mohammed, who had died a few
months before. A few years after this supposed reunion of all, these same
Egyptians welcomed submission to Omar, the second chalif and successor of
Abu Bekr, as lord of Egypt, who would, as they thought, be more favourable
to them than Heraclius.

And the successor of St. Peter was deceived into believing that the
picture drawn by Sergius was a true statement.

But before the union described in such terms by Sergius had been
completed, a man had come to Alexandria, who was to protest in the face of
the whole world against this compromise to which the Catholic faith was
being subjected. This was Sophronius, a monk of high repute, to whom the
patriarch Cyrus showed the articles of union, while they were as yet
unpublished. Sophronius threw himself at the patriarch’s feet, and
conjured him most earnestly not to announce them from the pulpit, as they
manifestly expressed the heresy of Apollinaris. Sophronius did not succeed
with Cyrus, but carried a letter from him to Sergius at Constantinople, to
whom it would seem that Cyrus directed him as the chief supporter and
exponent of the doctrine which Sophronius rejected.

All that Sophronius was able to obtain from Sergius was that both
expressions concerning the action of our Lord, as God-man, that is, the
One Operation, or the Two Operations, should be equally avoided.
Sophronius on his return to Jerusalem, was elected patriarch, and as such,
presently issued his synodical letter. This is almost the most important
document(55) in the whole Monothelite struggle: a great theological
treatise, which embraces the Trinity and the Incarnation, and fully sets
forth the doctrine of the Two Operations in Christ. Copies of it were sent
to all the patriarchs. The copy sent to Sergius has come down to us among
the acts of the 7th session of the 6th council. Out of the copy in the
acts I will here quote some few of the very words in which the great
champion of the faith states the doctrine. It is that which St. Leo
defined at the Council of Chalcedon, for which Pope S. Martin offered his
life in sacrifice, for which the Popes preceding and following him
suffered trials and persecutions without end, which four successive
patriarchs of Constantinople endeavoured to overthrow, and for their
incessant quarrels over which, three eastern patriarchates, with their
bishoprics, were delivered over as a prey to the hordes of the false
prophet.

Sophronius(56) addressing his colleagues began with regretting that he was
advanced to the pontifical throne from a very humble state against his
will. Begging his fathers and brethren to support him, he noted that it
was an apostolic custom throughout the world that they who were thus
advanced, should attest their faith to the colleagues preceding them.
After this introduction, Sophronius threw his words into the form of a
creed, in which the first part dwelt upon the Trinity. He then, at greater
length, set forth his belief in the Incarnation. How God the Son, taking
pity upon the fall of man, by His own will, and the will of His Father,
and the divine good pleasure of the Spirit, being of the infinite nature,
incapable of circumscription and of local passage, entered the virginal
womb, resplendent in its purity, of Mary the holy, the God-minded, the
free from every contamination of body, of soul, and of mind;(57) the
fleshless took flesh, the formless, in His divine substance, took our
form; the eternal God becomes in truth man. He, who is in the bosom of the
eternal Father is bosomed in a mother’s womb. He who is without time
receives a beginning in time. Then, passing to the point in question, he
went on: Christ is One and Two, One in Person, Two in Natures and their
natural attributes. On this account, One and the same Christ and Son, and
Only-begotten is found undivided in both natures. He worked physically the
works of each nature according to the essential quality or natural
property which belonged to each. This He could not have done, had He
possessed, as One only Person, so One only Nature, not compounded. For
then, the One and the Same would not have completely done the works of
each Nature. For when has Godhead without body worked naturally the works
of the body? or, when has a body without Godhead worked works which
substantially belong to the Godhead? But Emmanuel, being One, and in this
Oneness both, that is, God and Man, did, in truth, the works of each
Nature; being One and the Same, as God He did the divine, as Man the human
works. Being One and the Same, He works and He speaks the divine and the
human.(58) Not one wrought miracles, and another did human works, and
suffered pains, as Nestorius meant, but one and the same Christ and Son
wrought the divine and the human according to each, as St. Cyril taught.
In each of the Two Natures He had the two powers unmingled, but undivided.
As He is eternal God, He wrought the miracles; as He was Man in the last
times, He wrought the inferior and human works.

The answer to the Synodical letter of Sophronius, made by Sergius at
Constantinople, was not to receive it, but to draw up his own Ecthesis,
and prevail on the emperor Heraclius to stamp it with the imperial
signature, and proclaim it as the faith of his empire. Before the Ecthesis
was brought to Rome in December, 638, Pope Honorius had died in the
preceding October. Sophronius had commissioned the chief bishop of his
patriarchate, Stephen of Dor, as we have already seen, to carry his appeal
to Honorius, in the See of Peter. And now it is time to turn to those
events which were in the meanwhile happening in the eastern empire.

In the three hundred years from Constantine to his twenty-second
successor, Heraclius, the empire which he had set up in the fairest city
of the world had developed into a double despotism. It is difficult to say
whether that despotism pressed more severely on the religious or on the
civil well-being of its subjects. As to each, it is requisite to say
something. The gravity of the events which took place within ten years
demands it; while in their permanent effect that gravity most of all
consists. The immediate result was most rapid and unexpected, yet a long
train of action during the three hundred years preceding had led straight
up to it, and a period of four times three hundred years has since
witnessed its evolution.

Let us take first this pressure of despotism on religion. In speaking of
Constantine I noted that there were in him two very distinct periods of
his rule after he became a Christian. The first precedes his acquisition
of the whole empire in 323; the second follows in the fourteen years from
that time to his death. But in this second period the change, which dates
from the moment at which he becomes sole emperor, is yet gradual. At the
first General Council, in 325, the calling of which is agreed to by the
Pope and the eastern patriarchs, but springs from himself, he acknowledges
both in word and conduct that the Christian Church is the kingdom of
Christ, and that its government lies in the hands of those who receive a
divine consecration thereto from Christ. They are the witnesses of His
doctrine, which they maintain and promulgate in virtue of that
consecration. Upon this doctrine their judgment is final. Constantine
never in thought submitted to any power but the Catholic Church. The
thought of warring sects was abhorrent equally to the soldier, the
conqueror, and the legislator. Yet before his reign closed, at the age of
sixty-three, he had been seduced in his conduct from this high tone of
action by the counsels of the Court bishop, Eusebius; he had restored
Arius and persecuted Athanasius. He had selected the bishops who were to
attend local councils, while he stretched the powers of such local
councils beyond their competence. He had in fact advanced with his
imperial sword into the Church’s Council Chamber, and claimed to be a
judge of her doctrine. And his kingdom was forthwith divided(59) among
three sons, none of whom as rulers at all represented their fathers
majesty, while one, Constantius, became after not many years the sole
ruler, and as such propagated the heresy of the day, and practised
encroachment on the doctrinal independence of the Church. Constantius was
cut off in his forty-fourth year, receiving clinical baptism from the
hands of an Arian on his death-bed. In twenty years after his death the
imperial power passes through two new families, and when a third is called
in to support a falling empire, Theodosius has fifteen years given to him
in which to save the empire from imminent destruction and the eastern
Church from heresy. The victory of that Arian heresy during fifty years
had so deranged that eastern episcopate, that no one but a saint and
champion of the faith, such as St. Basil,(60) could venture to describe
its condition. From the death of Theodosius, in 395, the eastern empire
passed through fifteen successors to Heraclius, and in that succession
there are ten changes of family. One daughter of an emperor, who was
himself a successful insurgent, conferred the empire twice, both times on
the most worthless of men, as much marked for their civil misgovernment as
for persecution of the Church. But with every step in the succession it
may be noted that the original independence of the Church, as recognised
by Constantine and by his successors down to the Emperor Leo I. in a long
series of imperial laws,(61) fell more and more into the background. Each
general who by slaughtering his predecessor mounted the eastern throne
assumed at once the bearing of the lord of the world: with the purple
boots he put on the imperial pride. The Roman Primacy was indeed
acknowledged by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and no less by the
Emperor Marcian, the husband of the Theodosian heiress. But twenty-five
years after that Council the western Emperor was abolished. From that
moment the sole Roman Emperor was seated at Byzantium. At once an eastern
schism was set up by the Bishop of the Capital. Rome was in the possession
of Teuton Arians, who impaired the freedom of the Papal election, and made
the imperial confirmation of it a custom. And when at last an honest
general, who had entered the army as an Illyrian peasant, and risen from
the ranks to the throne, had discountenanced the schism, condemned four
successive bishops of his own capital, and acknowledged in amplest terms
that the Pope’s power was supreme, and also that it consisted in descent
from St. Peter, the eastern emperor forbore, indeed, to deny the Primacy,
but his endeavour was to control its action by making the spiritual
subject to the civil power. This was the outcome of Justinian’s long reign
from 527, to 565. And the fatal conquest of Italy and Rome, making the one
to be a captive province, and the other to be the garrisoned city, but not
even the capital of a captive province, aided Justinian in acts to undo
the reverence which in words he testified to the successor of St. Peter.
In eighty-five years, from 553 to 638, the occupant of the eastern throne
had advanced from holding a Council at Constantinople without the Pope’s
consent, to presenting at Rome a doctrinal decree for his signature. A few
years afterwards, when the Pope called a Council, and condemned the
decrees of two emperors as heresy, and three successive bishops of
Constantinople as the heretics who supported it, the grandson of
Heraclius, Constans II., tried the Pope as guilty of high treason before
the Senate of Byzantium, and crowned him with martyrdom in exile. Step
from Pope Vigilius a captive guarded at Constantinople in 553, to Pope
Martin sentenced there as a traitor in 655, and dying in the Crimea a
martyr. That step will mark the advance of eastern despotism and the peril
of the Church’s independence.

But it may be said that from the time Nestorius is deposed as guilty of
heresy made by himself from the see of the capital in 431, to the
publication of the imperial Ecthesis as a rule of faith in 638, the
eastern patriarchates have been swaying backwards and forwards between the
two opposing heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches: Syria is the parent of
one: Egypt of the other. Through these two centuries the bishop of
Byzantium has pursued under the emperor’s never-failing patronage a
uniform course of self-aggrandisement. In this he was greatly helped by
the extinction of the western emperor, when his master at Constantinople
became the sole representative of the Roman name—that Christian king and
Roman prince to whose honour so many Popes from Felix III. onward so
vainly appealed. That very prince became step by step their most dangerous
enemy. The first act immediately upon the extinction of the western
emperor—who was the natural defender of the Holy See—was that a Byzantine
bishop, Acacius, set himself up as the leader of the whole eastern
episcopate. Pope Gelasius told the bishop of the day that he had no rank
in the episcopate except that he was bishop of the capital: that a royal
residence could not make an apostolic See. The new family of Justinian,
ascending the eastern throne, was compelled by the internal state of the
east, to acknowledge the Roman Primacy. Justinian never broke from that
acknowledgment, but he termed his own bishop ecumenical patriarch in his
laws: and every Byzantine bishop clung to the title given by an absolute
sovereign. In the time of Pope Gregory the Great, a hundred years after
the decree of Pope Gelasius, recording the pre-eminent rank and order of
the three original Petrine Sees, of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch, the
Byzantine bishop is allowed to be a patriarch, Alexandria and Antioch have
fallen under him. They themselves have been throughout all the intervening
time the seats of violent party spirit, the spirit of the two conflicting
heresies, striving for masterdom, disturbing succession in the sees, and
ready by any obsequious act to get on their side the bishop of the
capital, who dispenses the smiles of the emperor. Against all primitive
order that bishop is found to consecrate his subordinate patriarchs at
Alexandria and Antioch: to put down one and to raise another. When his
usurpation was fresh and still incomplete, the patriarch Theophilus could
persecute St. Chrysostom for the wrong done to Alexandria; but the
patriarch Cyrus, made for his subserviency to Heraclius and Sergius to sit
in the seat of St. Athanasius, addresses Sergius as “My Lord,(62) the
thrice-blessed Father of fathers, the ecumenical patriarch, Sergius, the
least of his servants,” and his acts are as humble as his words.

It is clear that the eastern patriarchal system had fallen from intrinsic
corruption before the joint operation of Byzantine despotism and the
ambition of the bishop of the capital, who bought every accession to his
own power and influence by acting in ecclesiastical matters as the
instrument of the imperial will. This fall was complete before the events
which mark the last ten years of the reign of Heraclius as a time of
unequalled and irretrievable disaster both to the Church and to the State.

Yet something must still be added to portray that civil condition of the
State which led on to this disaster. In all this time the city of the
emperor’s residence had been exhausting of their wealth—by the terrible
severity of the imperial taxation—the provinces subject to it. Egypt and
Syria lived under a perpetual oppression no less than Italy and Rome.
Every distinction, every favour, which Antioch, when Queen of the east,
may have brought to Syria, had long migrated to the banks of the
Bosphorus. All the national feeling of Egypt was aggrieved by the ruler
who treated the dower of Cleopatra—the imperial gem of Augustus—as a
storehouse to be plundered at pleasure. And the national spirit was
intensified to fever heat by the hatred of Byzantium on the part of the
Eutychean population, forming the vast majority in the whole country.

Thus the wide eastern empire instead of worshipping in union of heart and
gladness of spirit that transcendent mystery in which is throned the
grandeur and the mercy of the Christian dispensation, instead of falling
in prostrate adoration before that vision of condescending love which the
angels desire to look into, broke itself into endless conflicts in
disputing about it, until the mystery of grace became a rancorous jarring
of ambitious rivals. During more than 200 years this suicidal conflict was
engaged in ruining the resources of a vast dominion, which in the hands of
a Constantine or a Theodosius, with the spirit of a St. Leo to guide them,
would have been impregnable to every enemy. Had emperor and people been
faithful to the Council of Chalcedon, and to the authority which they
admitted to be based on a divine promise made to St. Peter, neither the
disunited hordes of the North, nor the far inferior savages of the South,
nor even the impact of the great Sassanide empire would have availed to
overcome the Roman power. This last and greatest enemy Heraclius had
subdued. He went forth in the name of the Crucified One whom Chosroes had
called upon him to disavow, and won the fight. Yet even as he was carrying
back the Cross and entering the Holy City in triumph, Heraclius had become
a traitor to him whom he was professing to honour. He had already
conceived, under an evil influence and by the inspiration of the patriarch
at his right hand, a compromise of doctrine which he thought would induce
the rebellious Egyptian people to return to his allegiance. He hoped also
that the same compromise would exorcise the Nestorian spirit at Antioch.
They who did not agree were to be drawn into an appearance of agreement by
an ambiguous formula. And the See of the Apostle Peter, last and greatest
witness of the true doctrine, was to be forced into accepting the deceit,
and ratifying it for the old truth by submitting to an imperial decree,
which, independent of the heresy contained in it, was a violation of the
Church’s liberty.

The fifty years which run from 628 to 678 contain the various acts of one
prolonged attempt by the Byzantine emperors to enforce their religious
despotism on the Pope in the shape of the Monothelite heresy. The two
standard-bearers of the heresy are two patriarchs, Sergius at
Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria. Precisely at this time the
Mohammedan power appears upon the scene. While Heraclius is brooding over
the compromise of Sergius for reuniting an empire dislocated by heresy,
Mohammed is purposing the foundation of an empire resting on material
force. While Heraclius is assuming the right to define the doctrine of the
Church in virtue of his imperial power, Mohammed is constructing a claim
to prophetic rank from which imperial power itself shall emanate. The
Mohammedan claim is the exact antithesis of the Byzantine usurpation: the
rise of a false prophet punishes the attempt among Christians to rule the
spiritual by the civil power.

Upon the death of Mohammed in 632, his companions took counsel together
and elected Abu Bekr to carry on the dominion based upon religion which
Mohammed had invented. They gave him the title of “Chalif of God’s
Apostle”. As the vicar of the new prophet, he was to exert the absolute
power which belonged to the prophet’s office, and of which the civil
sovereignty was an offshoot. This power was rooted in the belief that
Mohammed had been sent by God. The quality therefore of every act
exercised by the first chalif, and by every successor, depended on the
truth of such a mission.

By the choice of Abu Bekr, father of Aischa, the favourite wife of
Mohammed, it was resolved that the succession to the chalifate should be
elective, not hereditary. The most stirring principle of the new power was
that everyone who died for its extension, which was called the Holy War,
should pass at once to paradise. Paradise had been drawn by Mohammed after
his own sensual imagination to suit the taste of a most sensual people.
The empire sought by Mohammed and his followers was to be imposed by
force. Abu Bekr stirred up the sons of the desert to this Holy War,
proclaiming that he who fought for God’s cause should have 700 good works
counted for each step, 700 honours allotted to him, and 700 sins forgiven.

Abu Bekr held the chalifate but two years, dying in 634 at the age of 63
years. But at the very time of his death the pearl of Syria, Damascus,
fell into the hands of his generals, Amrou and Khaled. From Medina the
city of the prophet, and the seat of the chalif, he had sent forth three
armies. Moseilama, a prophet who competed with Mohammed, was destroyed,
the discontented tribes in Arabia itself were reduced to obedience. The
Persian provinces on the Euphrates were attacked. The Roman empire itself
was summoned to accept the new religion, or to become tributary.

Upon the death of Abu Bekr, the chief associates of Mohammed around him
proclaimed Omar as chalif, and entitled him Chalif, and Prince of the
Faithful. In the ten years of his chalifate, from 634 to 644, Omar made
the Mohammedan empire. He had exerted great influence over Mohammed
himself; he had been most powerful with Abu Bekr, who pointed him out for
a successor. The man who had been of violent temper and bloody battles,
now sedulously practised the administration of justice. He gave much, and
used little for himself. He wore a patched dress, and fed on barley bread
and water; he prayed and preached, and ate and slept upon the steps of the
mosque among the pilgrims. There he received the messengers of kings. The
severe chalif, a sworn foe to all effeminacy, strove to train a rude host
to war. Arts he proscribed, even those of house and ship-building. When
the great city of Modain, or Ctesiphon, was taken, he commanded the
library of the Persian kings to be thrown into the Tigris. When some of
his soldiers had put on silken garments which they had looted in Syria, he
rubbed their faces in the mud and tore their garments in pieces. Such was
the man under whom half-armed nomad tribes broke the armies of Heraclius,
and took one after another the cities of Syria.

But on the side of the emperor were divided counsels, distrust, rankling
enmities; Nestorian and Eutychean heretics hating each other, and still
more the sovereign under whom they should have fought as well for a common
country as for a common faith. The fate of Syria was decided in a terrible
battle on the banks of the Hieromax, or Yarmuk. There, the Saracen
generals, Obeidah and Khaled, “The sword of God,” utterly defeated the
Greek army of 80,000 men.(63) Obeidah wrote to the chalif Omar: “In the
name of the most merciful God, I must make thee to know that I encamped on
the Yarmuk, and Manuel was near us with a force such as the Moslem never
had a greater. But God struck down that host, and gave us the victory out
of His overflowing grace and goodness. God has given to 4030 Moslim the
honour of martyrdom. All that fled into the desert and mountains we have
put down; have beset all roads and passes; God has made us lords of their
lands and riches and children. Written after the victory from Damaskus
where I am, and await thy command for the division of the booty. Farewell,
and the blessing and grace of God be over thee and all Moslim.”

After this, city upon city surrendered in affright. In the winter of 636,
Obeidah lay before Jerusalem, from which Heraclius took away the Holy
Cross with himself to Constantinople. At Antioch, in his dismay, he asked
the question why those miserable half naked barbarians, the Arabs, not to
be compared with the Romans in armour, or art of war, beat them in the
field. A veteran answered him that the wrath of God was on the Romans, who
despised His commands, were guilty of every excess, allowed themselves
intolerable oppression and violence.

We do not read that Heraclius made an attempt to relieve Jerusalem, which
yet was besieged during a year. Obeidah wrote to the patriarch and the
inhabitants: “Salutation and blessing to all those who walk in the right
way. We invite you to confess that there is only one God, and Mohammed is
His Prophet. If you will not make this confession, then resolve to make
your city tributary to the chalif. If you delay to do this, I will set my
people upon you, who all love death more than you love wine and swine
flesh. Hope not that I will draw away hence, until, if God please, I have
killed all your warriors, and made slaves of your children.”

The patriarch Sophronius negotiated without hope of earthly aid, and
Obeidah, to save the Holy City, the cradle of prophets, from being
desecrated by blood-shedding, yielded to the Christian wish that the
chalif in person should be asked to receive the keys of the city, and
regulate the conditions of surrender. And in 637 Chalif Omar came from
Medina. As the Commander of the Faithful entered the city, he rode on a
camel, clothed like the poorest Bedouin, and carrying on the same rough
beast a sack of dates, rice, and bruised wheat or maize, also a
water-skin, and a large wooden platter, on which he took his food with his
companions. The terms of capitulation which he granted to the patriarch
remained for long a standard to the Moslem in the like cases. First of all
was the poll tax imposed by the Koran. The inhabitants to be protected and
secured in life and property; their churches not to be pulled down, nor
used by any but themselves. The Christians duly to pay tribute; to build
no new churches either in the city or country; not to prevent Moslim by
night or day from entering the churches. Their doors to be always open to
travellers. The Christian to whom a traveller comes, shall entertain him
three days gratis. Christians shall say nothing against the Koran. Shall
prevent no one becoming Moslem. Shall show honour to Moslim. Shall not
wear garments, or shoes, or turbans, like theirs. Shall not divide their
hair like them. Shall not bear surnames like them. Shall not ride on
saddles. Shall bear no arms, nor Arabic writing on their seals, nor give
away wine, nor sell it. They shall wear the same kind of dress everywhere,
and that with a girdle. They may have no slave who has served a Moslem. No
crosses on the churches; nor ring bells, but only strike them.

The chalif Omar caused himself to be led into all the holy places in the
garb of a pilgrim by the patriarch Sophronius, even to the church of the
Resurrection. There he placed himself on the floor, and the patriarch was
most anxious lest he should practise his own acts of devotion there. With
breaking heart the patriarch quoted to those around him the words of
Daniel, “The abomination of desolation in the temple”.

Twelve hundred and fifty years have borne witness to the truth of that
sorrowful word, and still, “the desolation continues even to the end,”(64)
and the soldier of the false prophet keeps order among Christians before
the sepulchre of their Lord.

Hardly could the chalif Omar be induced to put off his rough garment long
enough for it to be washed, and to take another. But when the time of
Moslem prayer came, he would not say it in the church, lest the Moslim
should seize a church in which their chalif had prayed, but he went to the
steps of the eastern portion of Constantine’s church and prayed there. He
resolved to build a mosque on the spot where Jacob had seen in vision the
ladder, or on which the temple of Solomon stood. He gave a hand himself to
sweep away the rubbish from it. The structure, built in haste, disappeared
suddenly. Theophanes relates that Omar was much confused at the
disappearance of his new mosque. Some Jewish teachers came to him and said
that the structure would only remain if the cross on Mount Calvary, not
that on the Mount of Olives, were removed. Omar did what these men
suggested. Some of his fanatics, in spite of the compact, broke all the
public crosses, destroyed holy images, attacked various churches and
chapels. He gave a special writing to protect the church at Bethlehem
wherein he had prayed, but the Moslim afterwards took possession of this
church and of the portico at Jerusalem, and made them mosques.

Omar returned to Medina. His armies received command to take Ctesiphon,
Aleppo, Antioch. In the summer of 638, Heraclius retired from Antioch to
Constantinople, and as he left, says Abulfeda, cried out, “Farewell,
Syria, farewell for ever”. When Antioch in August, 638, surrendered,
Mesopotamia as well as Syria fell into the hands of Omar, and all Roman
land up to the Taurus belonged to the chalif, no imperial force could meet
him any longer in the field. Egypt and Persia were open to him.

It was the year when Heraclius published the Ecthesis at Rome. In three
years more came the doom of Egypt. Amrou was one of the most valiant and
able among the generals of Omar. He asked for leave to attack Egypt, and
meanwhile marched to its borders. When the chalif’s answer came, he first
passed the borders, and then opened it. He found written, “If this letter
reaches thee before thou treadest the soil of Egypt, go back; if thou art
already on it, go forward”. Amrou went on. Battles he fought, especially
at Babylon, near Cairo. But the Copts throughout helped him, and the Greek
forces were beaten.(65) Amrou had travelled as a merchant in Egypt, and
knew the dispositions of its inhabitants, and that the vast majority were
so fervent in the Eutychean heresy that they were inclined to look with
favour on the new Mohammedan unity of the Godhead, rather than to defend
their country against the Saracenic invasion for the good of the hated
Melchites, and their emperor at Constantinople. Omar sent Amrou a
reinforcement of 12,000 men, and the Copts, being monophysites, made peace
with the Arabs, and promised the tribute of a moderate poll tax of two
drachmas, from which old men, women, and children, were exempt. There are
said to have been six millions to pay this tax.

To Mukankas, a Copt, the governor under Heraclius, his spies reported the
life of the Arabs in the camp of Amrou. “We were among men to whom death
is dearer than life; who trouble themselves little about earthly greatness
or worldly enjoyments. They sit on the ground, and eat kneeling; their
commander is in no way distinguished from the rest. Especially they do not
distinguish between great and little, nor between masters and slaves. When
the time of prayer comes, no one remains behind. Each washes himself and
prays with the deepest devotion.” To the reproaches of Heraclius his
governor, Mukankas, answered: “It is true the foe is not near so numerous
as we are, but one Mussulman outweighs a hundred of us. They yearn after
martyrdom, since it leads to paradise, but we hang upon life and its joys,
and fear death.” The Copts in general accepted the terms made by Mukankas;
the Greeks did not. At length Amrou, after four engagements, in which the
Copts assisted him with provisions and the building of bridges, advanced
upon Alexandria, whither the Greeks had retired.

Alexandria is said to have been besieged during fourteen months, and to
have cost the lives of 23,000 Arabs. It was never cut off by sea from
assistance. The Arabs had neither besieging engines nor a fleet. But
Heraclius, who was dying of dropsy, instead of sending a fleet to save the
last hold which he had upon Egypt, sent a bishop to make terms with Amrou
for his retirement. “Bishop,” said the Saracen leader, “do you see that
obelisk? When you have swallowed it I will retire from Alexandria.” The
city fell in 640, and since Omar had the library of the Persian monarchs
at Ctesiphon thrown into the Tigris, there is no reason to doubt the fact
recorded that he fed the 4000 baths of Alexandria during six months with
the treasures of Greek literature. An uninterrupted peace since the
destruction of the Serapeium, 240 years before, had allowed that city in
the world which was most devoted to literature and the richest in commerce
ample time to collect the greatest of libraries. The double destruction
suits exactly the character given to Chalif Omar by Arab historians.

Amrou was not allowed, by Omar’s prudence, to live as governor of Egypt at
Alexandria. Fostat—that is, the Tent—where he had dwelt during his siege
of Babylon, developed from being the seat of his government to the present
Cairo. But to the west Amrou extended the Saracen dominion over Barca and
Tripolis.

Omar reigned ten years, a Chalif at whose words of rebuke his strongest
commanders quailed, and he ruled a kingdom which he stretched in these ten
years from Tripolis to the Indus; from the Caspian Sea to the Cataracts of
the Nile. He destroyed the Sassanide empire; and the sword of Mohammed,
wielded by his second chalif, cut in two the empire of Heraclius. With the
loss of Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, the successor of Constantine was
reduced to shelter himself behind the walls of Byzantium from the Saracen
host, which perpetually plundered his provinces from the Bosphorus to
Mount Taurus. During the Roman dominion of many hundred years that vast
territory had been in climate, as Herodotus a thousand years before had
said of it, the garden of the earth. It had, further, been studded with
cities rich in monuments of Greek civilisation. Afterwards these came to
be ruled by bishops, many of whom descended from the preaching of St.
Peter and St. Paul. Now all this territory lived in anguish at the thought
of Moslem incursion. Only the invention of the Greek fire, kept a secret,
saved Byzantium itself from suffering in the latter half of the seventh
century the doom which fell upon it in the fifteenth.

Chalif Omar had pressed his captive provinces with heavy tributes. A
Christian artisan, who was made to pay four drachmas a day for taxes in
Kufa, journeyed to Medina to plead for remission before Omar in person. It
was refused. He followed the chalif to the Mosque, and dealt him, as he
prayed, a deadly blow. Omar died, having named, when mortally wounded, the
six eldest companions of the prophet to choose his successor.

Heraclius died at Constantinople in 641. The chalif Omar reigned from the
death of Abu Bekr, in August, 634, to November, 644. Before him had died
the most cruel of Arabian commanders, Khaled.(66) He who buried alive
captive enemies murmured on his sick-bed, “I have been in so many battles,
and received so many wounds, that there is scarcely a whole place in my
body; and now I must die on a bed as an ass dies on his straw”. Jezdeberg,
the last of the Sassanide princes, was hopelessly beaten, and in 651
closed, under Mussulman extinction, the dynasty which since 226 had
renewed the battle of Persia for empire with its old rival Rome. The great
city of Madain or Ctesiphon was destroyed, and Mohammed, the chalif’s
governor in Persia planted Kufa as a military city on the right bank of
the Euphrates, three days journey from Bagdad. Omar learnt that his
governor Mohammed had built himself a stately palace over against the
chief mosque at Kufa. This he had adorned with a magnificent gateway taken
from the palace of Chosroes at Ctesiphon. In wrath Omar wrote: “the kings
of Persia have gone down from their palaces to hell: the Prophet rose from
the dust of the earth to heaven. I have ordered the bearer of these lines
to burn down thy palace at once, lest thou miss the way of the Prophet for
that of the corrupt Persian.” The palace was burnt. Omar knew how to
destroy, and they record of his ten years that thirty-six thousand cities,
villages, or castles were taken and wasted, and fourteen thousand
Christian churches burnt or changed into mosques. History, I believe, has
not recorded how many thousand Christian women were delivered over as a
prey to the Arabian savages, to whom he promised paradise as a reward for
dying in battle against the unbelievers. This was the Mohammedan
martyrdom. Omar sought to impress a holy character upon the savage deeds
which the hordes marshalled by him to victory or martyrdom practised
without scruple. In setting up the colossal kingdom which he founded
during the ten years of his chalifate he covered the earth with heaps of
slain in the name of the most merciful God. He is said to have established
judges in the chief cities of his empire, who should administer justice
according to the written or traditional precepts of Mohammed. He had great
care for the security of all the lands subject to him. “If,” he said, “a
shepherd on the banks of the Euphrates or the Tigris have one of his sheep
stolen, I fear that I shall one day have to give an account for it.”(67)
He is praised by Mussulmen for his great qualities as sovereign. But he
cared less to spread Islam from Arabia over all the world than to enrich
Arabia at the cost of all the world. Foreign nations were to be put in
chains, but not ennobled and bettered. They were to encounter not
preachers, but tax-gatherers. His rulers might inflict any oppressions on
those who were not Mussulmen, provided they sent the fruits of their
oppression to him at Medina. At the same time he fed on barley bread, and
had but one cloak for the summer and another for the winter, both well
darned. But let us turn to his family life. Little of it is known, but
that he had seven marriages—three in Mecca, four after the exit to Medina,
one of them being with a daughter of Ali—and that he had two slave
concubines who bore him children. Two other wives he tried to get. A
daughter of Otba refused him because he kept his wives jealously shut up.
But Asma, a daughter of Abu Bekr, disliked the barley bread and camel’s
flesh of his household. He sought her in vain by the help of Aischa. Not
obtaining her, he turned to Amm Kolthum, a daughter of Ali and Fatima, and
granddaughter of Mohammed. Ali said to him, “My daughter is too young to
marry”. Omar would not believe it, upon which Ali sent his daughter to him
in a single vestment. Omar drew back her veil, and wished to draw her to
him. But she escaped, and fled to her father, and told him of Omar’s
conduct. Ali then said to him, “If thou wert not chalif, I would tear out
thine eyes”. But Omar sought her again before comrades of the highest
rank, grounding his proposal on what Mohammed had once said: “Every
relationship and connection ceases at the Day of Judgment, except one
contracted with me”. Ali went home, and said to his daughter: “Go back to
Omar”. She rejoined: “Wilt thou send me again to this old voluptuary?” Ali
replied, “He is thy husband”.(68)

But though in the last years of Omar Ali became his father-in-law, no
friendly relation seems ever to have existed between them. Ali had been
the first in all Mohammed’s battles; by Omar he was made neither commander
nor governor. But in Mussulman remembrance Omar stands as the greatest of
their rulers, because of the vast power and extension to which under him
Islam attained.

Let us see what Omar in his chalifate did to Constantine’s empire and the
Christian faith.

When in 610 Heraclius was drawn from his father’s governorship of Northern
Africa to end the cruelties of Phocas, the great mass of the eastern
empire still stood, threatened indeed by Avar Chagans on the north, and by
the restless Persian empire on the east. But the whole coast of Northern
Africa, Egypt and Syria, the realm from Antioch to the end of the Euxine
on the east, and to Stamboul on the west, as well as the great country
south of the Danube, stretching from the Euxine to the Adriatic and down
to the south of the Morea, each of which last would make by itself a noble
monarchy, remained intact, and if the eastern despot held his head a
little lower than Justinian’s head had been held, it needed still but a
Constantine or a Theodosius to breathe conquering force as well as
maintaining power into that vast body which still called itself Roman.
Instead of a true life and a royal will directing that life it had nothing
but Greek arts wielded by Oriental despotism. In ten years the sons of the
desert, half clothed and fed on barley bread, invoking the God of
Mohammed, discomfited the disciplined hosts of the Lord of the world, and
carried into dishonour and apostacy the women and children of great
provinces. Egypt since the battle of Actium had been the most
carefully-guarded province of Augustus and the emperors who came after
him. It ceased at once and for ever to be Roman. Not only was there a
change in the civil power, but its six millions of Monophysites preferred
the crescent under Amrou, as Omar’s lieutenant, to the cross enthroned
with Heraclius at Constantinople. Antioch ceased to be Roman, and with it
Syria and Mesopotamia. Beyond these the vast regions of Persia fell into
the hands of Omar, and were ruled for the present from an Arab city
Medina, unknown till then beyond Arabian limits. The outposts of Omar were
at Mount Taurus, looking thence with desire over the vast historic region
sprinkled with stately cities up to the banks of the Bosphorus. These
immense regions were lost suddenly but they were also lost permanently. In
ten years they were forfeited by possessors who had held them for seven
hundred, and after twelve centuries and a half they remain in the hands of
the false religion which took them by force and keeps them against
recovery by Christians.

Wonderful besides the suddenness of the stroke was the inadequacy of the
instrument to the effect produced, the blindness of the time before the
coming revolution. Neither St. Gregory among the saints one generation
only before it came, nor Heraclius returning a conqueror over the Great
King within ten years of the Saracenic catastrophe, anticipated that there
were southern hordes extreme in ignorance, devoid of art, and without
political sense or experience, but lying in the hand of Providence to take
possession of lands with ancient culture and a thousand years of civilised
history. St. Gregory indeed had witnessed himself such ruin, and followed
two centuries of such disasters, which had stripped Italy of her crown of
cities, that he thought the world itself was coming to an end. But the
establishment of a great southern empire, founded by vagrant tribes till
then known only as robbers, never presented itself to his mind. That they
would go forth and conquer with a new war-cry, directed especially against
the Cross of Christ, was as little in his thoughts.

By the year of Omar’s death there was a new empire ruled by a man from an
unknown Arabian town, in the name of a man who had died twelve years
before, and claimed to be a prophet, the special herald of one God. In the
belief thus set up, it was no other than this God who had invested not the
prophet only, but the chalifs who came after him with supreme power, not
civil only, but religious, and supreme simply because it was religious,
and exercised in the name of this new God. And the empire so set up
included already the vast dominions of the Great King, and fully one half
of the empire which Justinian had left.

But greater yet was the difference which separated this empire from all
that had preceded it. Omar ruled with absolute power as chalif of
Mohammed, whose right to power of any kind, civil or religious, lay only
in his office of prophet. The Roman emperor ruled because he was lord of a
subject-confederacy of nations, which the Roman arm and the Roman mind
had, bit by bit, subdued and wrought together, and which, when so
constituted, had been deposited entire by secular warranty in his single
hand. But Mohammed ruled, and after him the chalifs, because he was “the
Apostle of God,” by a divine commission, whole and entire, from which
civil and religious authority equally emanated, but in which the religious
was the root of the civil. Such was the power which the companions of
Mohammed in the first election of Abu Bekr, launched upon the world, and
which, as second chalif, Omar received. And in the spirit of this, he
ruled the huge empire of conquest, which stretched from the African
Tripolis to the end of Persia, and from the southernmost point of Egypt to
the Cilician Taurus, engulphing Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. No
portion of this power did Omar wield without assuming to represent the
person who made himself, or was made by others, his followers, the last
and highest of the prophets; who was willing indeed to acknowledge Jesus,
the Son of Mary, in the number of prophets, but only on the condition that
the prophetical list was closed in himself, that it pointed to himself,
and was crowned in himself. The Mohammedan war-cry, to die for which was
to be a martyr, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet,”
was at once the denial of the Christian Trinity, and of Christ’s
Redeemership. All those who bore it, fought for it, died for it,
proclaimed an absolute hostility to the Christian faith, and a definite
substitution of another faith for it, and another person on whom that
faith rested. This was the empire personified in Omar; and this, in the
ten years from 634 to 644, seized upon the southern half of what had been
the inheritance bequeathed by Constantine to his successors. The new realm
was ruled by Omar with singleness of purpose and unbending resolution to
make the Mohammedan standard victorious over the cross, to dethrone Christ
for Mohammed.

Was the blow to the empire equally a blow to the Church? The severance of
provinces so vast, so populous, so rich in natural productions, from
Heraclius, was in itself depriving the lord of the world of legs and arms;
but more dangerous than any material privation was the setting up an
empire with a definite creed, in which religious conquest was by far the
most powerful ingredient. The war-cry, “There is no God but God, and
Mohammed is his prophet,” meant the earth and all that is in it, its
fruits, and above all, its women, belong entirely to the followers of
Mohammed. They who do not either become his, or pay tribute to him, have
no rights. Their children become slaves, their wives and daughters
captive. These begin to be the absolute possession of the Mohammedan
conqueror; if he dies in battle, rewards of martyrdom, so won, for his
successors: if he lives, adornments of his life, which he pleases God by
accepting.

As to the treatment of Christian countries, Omar, in the capture of
Jerusalem, had supplied a rule and standard which for the present was
followed at least in profession. Christians were not treated as idolaters:
they were taken into covenant. We are told that the tribute was so
moderate that the first Egyptians and Syrians who accepted it, thought
that they had made a favourable transfer of themselves from Byzantine to
Mohammedan lordship.(69) The Byzantine had perpetually interfered with
their religious convictions, and domineered over their ecclesiastical
appointments. Mohammedans, in the disdain of superior power resting on
their exclusive possession of truth, kept entirely aloof. Once their own
lordship established and acknowledged, they allowed their subjects a
certain freedom of action within the lines of Omar’s covenant. It is
probable that they began by so doing, nor is it easy to account for the
rapid and continued submission of provinces, such as Syria and Egypt,
without the willingness of their inhabitants to accept the change be taken
into account. But it is certain that the Christian religion drooped more
and more under the shadow of Mohammedan domination.

Antioch fell under it in 637. From that time forth, the so-called
patriarch began often to live at Byzantium. The patriarchate, which, down
to the heresies of the third and fourth centuries, had probably, in
Christian population, in learning, in the distinction which its bishops
enjoyed each in their own city, been the most flourishing portion of the
Church, began to decline. The deposition of St. Eustathius, in 330, cost
its capital a schism of nearly a hundred years. The partisanship of its
patriarch with its countryman, Nestorius, prejudiced both its rank and its
unity. What proportion of its once eleven provinces and 161 bishops
belonged to it at the time of the Mohammedan invasion might be difficult
to ascertain. But how great and wide its circuit was is shown by the
instance of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, which, though an undistinguished
see, contained in it no less than eight hundred parishes,(70) and was
under Hierapolis, as seat of the Metropolitan.

After 638, the Antiochene patriarch never more lifted his diminished head
as the holder of one of the three great Petrine Sees, whom St. Innocent I.
and St. Gregory I. had acknowledged with themselves as representatives of
St. Peter.

In all this, we behold the consummation of a fearful history, and I will
take the words of one who witnessed the northern wandering of the nations
to illustrate, rather perhaps, to account for, the much more terrible
wandering of the nations in the south. It was more than two hundred and
forty years before this new kingdom arose that St. Jerome, from his
solitude at Bethlehem, addressed a friend. It was in the year immediately
succeeding the death of the great Theodosius. His rapid view of the
generation which had just passed will inspire many thoughts. He is
consoling the bishop, Heliodorus, for the loss of his nephew, the priest,
Nepotian, a dear friend of his own: “and why,” he says, “am I trying to
heal a wound which time and thought, as I believe, have already soothed?
Why do I not rather bring before you the miseries of royalty so near to
us? Our time has such calamities that it were well not so much to mourn
one on whom this light has ceased to shine as to congratulate the escape
from such misfortunes. Constantius, the patron of the Arian heresy, in the
midst of preparing for the enemy’s onset, and rushing to the fight, dies
in the village of Mopsis, and, in great sorrow, left his empire a prey to
his foe. Julian, betrayer of his own life, and slaughterer of an army that
was Christian, acknowledged in Media the power of that Christ whom he had
first denied in Gaul. Striving to extend the Roman frontiers, he lost what
they had already gained. Jovian had but a taste of imperial power, and
died suffocated by charcoal fumes: an instance to all men of what human
dominion is. Valentinian laid waste his own native land, and, leaving it
unavenged, broke a blood-vessel and died. His brother, Valens, in the war
with the Goths, was defeated in Thrace, and found a tomb on the spot of
his death. Gratian, betrayed by his own army, and not received by the
cities which he approached, suffered the mockery of enemies: and thy
walls, O Lyons, bear the impression of the blood-stained hand. The young
Valentinian, scarcely beyond boyhood, after flight, after banishment,
after recovering the empire with great blood-shedding, was slain near the
city, guilty of his brother’s death: and his lifeless body suffered the
ignominy of the halter. Then there was Procopius, and Maximus, and
Eugenius, who, when they were in power, struck their opponents with
terror. All stood captives before their conquerors: and suffered that
utmost misery of those once powerful: to be reduced to slavery, and then
slaughtered.

“Some one may say, this is the lot of kings, and lightnings strike high
summits. Pass to private ranks, and only within the last two years. Let us
take but the different ends of three lately Consuls. Abundantius is in
poverty and exile at Pityuns. The head of Ruffinus was carried on a pike
to Constantinople; his right hand was cut off, and, to mark his insatiable
greed, taken begging from door to door. Timavius, hurled suddenly from the
loftiest ranks, thinks it an escape to live nameless at Assa. It is not
the calamities of the miserable which I relate, but the frailty of man’s
condition. It strikes with horror to follow out the ruins of our times. It
is more than twenty years since Roman blood is shed daily between
Constantinople and the Julian Alps. In Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia,
Dardania, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Epirus, Dalmatia, and all the
Pannonias, Goth and Sarmatian, Quade, Alan, and Hun, Vandals and
Marcomans, waste, drag away, and plunder. How many matrons, how many
consecrated virgins, how many free and noble persons, have fallen a prey
to these brutes! Bishops captured; priests and the various ranks of clergy
slain; churches ruined; horses stabled at Christ’s altars; relics of
martyrs dug up. Mourning and death in every shape on all sides. The Roman
world falls in pieces, but our stiff neck is not bent. What spirit, think
you, have Corinthians, Athenians, Lacedæmonians, Arcadians, and all
Greece, in the gripe of barbarians? I have named few cities which were not
formerly strong powers. The East seemed free from these scourges: bad
tidings only terrified it. When lo! last year, from the farthest heights
of Caucasus, wolves, not of Arabia, but of the North, were let loose upon
us. They overran at once great provinces. How many monasteries were
captured! How many rivers changed into human blood! Antioch was besieged,
and the cities which the Halys, Cydnus, Orontes, Euphrates traverse.
Crowds of captives carried away. Arabia, Phœnicia, Palestine, Egypt,
trembling with fright. Had I a hundred tongues and mouths, and a voice of
iron, I could not enumerate all the tortures suffered. I did not propose
to write a history; but in few words to lament our miseries; otherwise,
adequately to set forth these things. Thucydides and Sallust would both be
mute.” The whole period of two hundred and forty years, between the time
when St. Jerome, as a spectator, wrote thus, and the time of the
Mohammedan inroad, is expressed in the words which follow. “It is long
since we felt that we are offending God, but we do not appease Him. It is
by our own sins that the barbarians prevail. It is by our own vices that
the Roman army is conquered. And, as if this was not enough for our
losses, our civil wars have consumed almost more than the edge of the
enemy’s sword. Unhappy we who are so displeasing to God that His wrath
breaks forth on us through the fury of savages. The greatness of the
reality surpasses language: all words are less than the truth.”

For, indeed, the time was come, through the extraordinary wickedness of
two hundred years, when the very sanctuaries from which St. Jerome was
writing, the sanctuaries of the birth and death of Christ, Bethlehem and
Calvary, were to fall, not by a sudden inroad, but a permanent occupation
into the hands of His chief enemies. The time was also come when the see
of the great confessor whose name we identify with the battle of faith
against the world, the see of Athanasius himself, the Pope of the East,
the next in hierarchical order to the Universal Pope, was to fall, and to
fall for ever, from its high estate. “Almost from the death of Athanasius
began the spiritual declension of his see and Church.”—“Pride is not made
for man; not for an individual bishop, however great, nor for an episcopal
dynasty. Sins against the law of love are punished by the loss of faith.
The line of Athanasius was fierce and tyrannical, and it fell into the
Monophysite heresy. There it remains to this day. A prerogative of
infallibility in doctrine, which it had not, could alone have saved the
see of Alexandria from the operation of this law.”(71)

During the ten years of Omar’s chalifate the great patriarchates of
Alexandria and Antioch, and the smaller patriarchate of Jerusalem, which
contained the places of pilgrimage dear to every Christian heart, visited
by the faithful from all lands, not only the birth-place in Bethlehem, not
only Nazareth consecrated by the angel’s announcing of that birth, and by
the secret life of the divine Boyhood and Manhood, but—


    The sepulchre in stubborn Jewry
    Of the world’s ransom, Blessed Mary’s Son.(72)


fell together into bondage under the special enemy of the Cross. In this
bondage the hierarchies of the three patriarchates, as distinct wholes,
almost disappear from history. It is well to consider here the condition
in which they had been even from the time of the Arian heresy.(73) The
declension of Antioch had been of as long standing as the declension of
Alexandria. At the end of the fourth century St. Chrysostom bore witness
to its hundred thousand Christians. But in the course of the fifth the
great third see of the Church lost much of its reputation and power.
Partly it fell into weak hands, as John I., from 428 to 441, who held but
a poor position in the Nestorian conflict, while Domnus II. took part in
the robber council of 447. Then, at Chalcedon, the elevation of Jerusalem
to a patriarchate took from its jurisdiction the three Palestines. But
especially the encroachments of the see of Byzantium told upon it. The
bishops of the royal city claimed to consecrate the already-named
patriarchs. Anatolius ordained Maximus, who was substituted for Domnus II.
when deposed in spite of his subservience to Dioscorus. In this he
disregarded the rights of the bishops of the Antiochene patriarchate, and
the Byzantine bishops forthwith turned that precedent into a right.
Maximus was followed by Basilius, Acacius, and Martyrius. The Monophysite
Peter Fullo formed such a party against the last that he resigned in
despair. This usurper resisted the Emperor Zeno’s condemnation to
banishment, and put himself, first secretly, then openly, as patriarch
against Julian. He so persecuted the Catholics, that Julian died of
sorrow. The Emperor Zeno banished the heretical Peter Fullo to Pityuns. He
was succeeded by the equally heretical John II., Kodonatus. But this
patriarch was deposed in three months by the exertion of the bishops. The
Monophysites already prevailed. They murdered in the sacred place itself
the new Catholic patriarch, Stephen II., and threw his mangled body into
the Orontes. The emperor punished the crime, and Acacius, Bishop of
Constantinople, put in his place Stephen III. Pope Simplicius censured
this violation of the canons, and prohibited it for the future, which did
not prevent Acacius renewing his encroachments when, after the death of
Stephen in 482, he consecrated Colendion. Colendion was afterwards
banished by the Emperor Zeno, and had to yield to the old heresiarch,
Peter Fullo, who kept his patriarchate to his death in 488, and was
succeeded by the equally heretical Palladius. Almost all Syria rose
against the Catholic patriarch Flavian; the monk Severus got hold of the
patriarchate, and kept it for six years. He fled in 519, under the Emperor
Justin I., to Egypt. His successors, Paul II., who resigned in 521 through
fear of an accusation, and Euphrasius of Jerusalem, could no longer secure
superiority to the Catholics. Patriarch Ephrem followed from 526 to 545.
He held a Synod against Origenism. Patriarch Domnus III. took part in the
Fifth Council in 553. He was followed by the distinguished Anastasius I.,
and after St. Gregory I. by Anastasius II. The See remained a long time
vacant. Those who then followed, Athanasius, Macedonius, and Macarius,
were Monothelites. The two latter from the time the Saracens took Antioch,
in 637, resided in Constantinople for safety. After George, who is said to
have subscribed the Trullan Council in 692, the See was vacant forty
years, and the patriarchs had often to endure extortions, ill-treatment,
and banishment.

How well Alexandria had prepared itself for the Mohammedan captivity may
be seen by the following facts. Under the violent Dioscorus the see of St.
Mark not only declined from its distinction when ruled by St. Cyril, but
threw the whole of Egypt into wild confusion by espousing the Monophysite
error. The Catholic patriarch, Proterius, was murdered in 457: and the
heretical Timotheus Ailouros set up by his party instead. He, though
condemned by the emperor, Leo I., to banishment, maintained himself
stubbornly against the Catholic patriarch, Solophakialos. After his death,
Peter Mongus was able to expel the Catholic, John Talaia: and then, from
490 to 538, Alexandria had a succession of five Monophysite patriarchs.
Under Justinian, from 538, during forty years, we find four Catholic
patriarchs. So, again, in Eulogius, the friend of St. Gregory, and John
the alms-giver. But during this time the Monophysites also had their
patriarchal succession, and that even from different sects of the heresy.
The end of it was that the bitterest enmity arose between the Melchite or
Royalist, and the Monophysite party. The former, being a small minority,
held by favour of the Byzantine emperor and his troops in Egypt the
possession of authority. The Copts, being a great majority, considered
themselves oppressed, and welcomed as deliverers, in 638, the conquering
Arabs. The Melchite party sunk so low that their patriarchal place was
vacant during eighty years, and the number of their bishops greatly sank.
After 750, the Christian inhabitants of Egypt were more and more exposed
to Mohammedan brutality. Sharp laws against them were issued:
distinguishing marks and clothes prescribed.

And here not only is the fall of the three patriarchates under conquerors
who strive to destroy the Christian faith to be noted as following upon
two centuries of incessant heresy, but another divine judgment also. No
sooner have the three patriarchs lost their original position, the two
elder as second and third bishops of the whole Church in virtue of their
descent from Peter, and taken definitively a position subordinate to the
upstart at Byzantium, who in the last decade of the fifth century, in the
time of Pope Gelasius, was proclaimed in his Council at Rome no patriarch
at all, than they fall under a domination which is not merely infidel but
antichristian. The aim of the chalifate is to supplant Christ by Mohammed.
The patriarchs, who accepted as superior one who rose above them simply
because he was bishop of the imperial residence, had from that time
forward to live under a despot who reigned in the name of the false
prophet. From being subjects of the Greek Basileus, who, by means of the
bishop exalted by him in successive generations, strove to hamper in the
exercise of his office the successor of St. Peter, even to the point of
making him subject to the guidance of the Byzantine crown in spiritual
matters, which was the meaning of the Ecthesis of Heraclius, they passed
to be subjects of the Mohammedan chalif, who claimed the supremacy of both
powers in the name of the falsehood just invented.

In the diminished territory of Byzantium, which during the rest of the
century after Heraclius could but just keep the Mohammedan conqueror
outside its walls, the bishop of the royal residence became in fact the
sole patriarch. Sergius and Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, the first four of
those so exalted, were branded as heretics by the Sixth Council. Those who
still bore the names of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem appeared at
times, or were deemed to appear, at a Byzantine Council, but the hundred
bishops of the Alexandrine, and the hundred and sixty bishops of the
Antiochene waned and wasted more and more with every generation miserably
spent under the absolute rule of the Prophet’s chalif, who had for
Christians only two modes of treatment, the one a noxious patronage of
their heresy, if such prevailed; the other, persecution of their faith, if
they were faithful and zealous.

From the accession of St. Athanasius to the See of Alexandria in 328 to
the placing Cyrus in that See by Heraclius in 628, exactly three centuries
elapse. In this time the great revolution begun by Constantine, when he
took for his counsellor the court-bishop Eusebius, has full space to work
itself out. His own son, Constantius, “patron of the Arian heresy,” in St.
Jerome’s words, inaugurates in full force the attempt of the Byzantine
monarchs to extend their temporal power over the spiritual. Valens so
persecutes the eastern Church that when Theodosius is called in to save
the empire, he finds the eastern episcopate in the state of ruin described
by St. Basil. Unfortunately, he saw no better means of restoring it, when,
in 381, he invited the bishops of his empire to anxious deliberation, than
by laying the first stone of the Byzantine bishop’s exaltation. An eastern
Council, at his prompting, strives to make that bishop the second bishop
of the whole Church on a false foundation, because Constantinople is Nova
Roma. Every Byzantine monarch adds his stone to the Byzantine bishop’s
pillar of pride. St. Leo exposes and censures the assumption. Pope
Gelasius does not reckon him among the patriarchs. Justinian enacts him to
be ecumenical patriarch, which St. Gregory pronounces to be a title of
diabolical pride: being, in fact, the building of spiritual power on
temporal lordship. In thirty years after St. Gregory, the act of pride
denounced by him receives its full interpretation. The patriarch Sergius
attempts to mould the doctrine of the Church under the authority of
Constantine’s successor: and Constantine’s empire is cut in half by the
chalif of the man who claims all temporal power on the pretence that he
has been invested by God with spiritual power. And two conflicting
heresies, the Nestorian and Eutychean, the latter making its last
development in the Monothelite, have severed the eastern empire into
rivalities so bitter, that the Christians of the several parties hate each
other more than they hate the new Mohammedan pretender. The episcopate,
seen in all its glory and grandeur when first assembled by Constantine in
325, sinks ingloriously under the successors, in Alexandria and Antioch,
of the very prelates who maintained the faith at Nicæa: sinks before
Mohammed, who is seen to complete the work of Arius. The successor of St.
Peter has done his utmost during two hundred years to preserve the eastern
sees of Peter: and in them the whole ecclesiastical constitution formed
for herself by the Church in the ten generations preceding Constantine:
but Alexandria and Antioch have no prerogative of infallibility: they
perish by their own folly: heresy pollutes their sees for generations, and
at last the false prophet’s chalif alternately blights them with the
favour which he shows to their heresy, or wastes them with the oppression
which he has always ready for the faith. As to the great eastern
patriarchate, from its capture by the Saracens in 638, its host of
bishops, at the head of Hellenic cities descending from Alexander’s
empire, becomes, sooner or later, the prey of the Moslem. From the capture
of Alexandria, Egypt becomes Monophysite under what the Copts fancy to be
protection from the chalif, with the ultimate result that the country of
the desert Fathers becomes the heart of the religion denying Christ: and,
with Omar’s entry into Jerusalem, upon his rough camel, with his wooden
platter and his bag of barley, begin the 1260 years of the Holy City’s
treading down by the Gentiles.

Thus the southern wandering of the nations came upon the northern. When it
came, three hundred years of such times as St. Jerome saw and described
had already spread over the earth, sufferings too great for words,
changes, as he says, such as neither Thucydides nor Sallust could express.
But the southern wandering was much more rapid in time, and in effect far
more complete. The ten years of Omar’s chalifate had changed the whole
aspect of the world, had shifted the centre of political power. It had
been at Constantinople: it was shifted to Medina. From Constantine to
Heraclius the empire had taken and enrolled in its armies unnumbered men
of Teuton race. Alaric had been a Roman general: Stilicho and Aetius,
saviours of Rome. This race had also fed the Church with converts of more
stalwart nature than the enfeebled races who needed the infusion of
northern blood even to till their fields, as well as to guard their
frontiers, or to guide their polity. But the southern wandering gave no
soldiers to the empire, and no converts to the Church. There would be no
greater contrast than the two races from which these two great movements
came. The northern barbarian, with all his wildness, could take the
impress of the Church. He had in his woods and marshes, in his
transmigrations and encampments, kept, in no small degree, the original
tradition of the human race. Already Tacitus had noted his regard for
woman as the companion of his life, for the sanctity of marriage, for
monogamy, in the practical guarding of which he put to shame the
degenerate Roman, and still more corrupted Greek. The heroic courage,
natural to him, was an omen of the point which, as Christian martyr, he
might reach. The self-government shown in the original habits of the tribe
was a soil whereon princes and bishops might sit in council to form
governments in which “liberty and empire,” unknown to Byzantine, might
dwell together. These qualities were elements of the social, the
political, even the ecclesiastical life. Far otherwise was the Saracen
type. Savage, rude and ignorant, with no tincture of art or learning: with
habits of unlimited polygamy: with leanings to unmitigated despotism: with
no regard to human life. In courage only was the southern a match for the
northern barbarian. The outcome of his whole character as to the rest was
different: and the religion invented for him was but the barest
development of his natural temperament.

At the death of Chalif Omar, this new antichristian power had taken from
the empire of Heraclius every yard of land formerly under its dominion
from Tarsus to Tripoli: and stood in most threatening attitude over
against all which remained to it: indeed, to the whole Christian name.
Mohammed was its watchword against Christ. The northern wandering had no
such counter watchword. It respected Roman laws and customs when it seized
on Roman lands. It had understanding enough, not only as shown in its
princes, Ataulph and Theodorich, but in a race of officers surpassing not
only Roman courage, but Roman fidelity in the civil and military
administration, to venerate as unapproachable by any wisdom of its own,
the political fabric of which, in so many lands, it confiscated the
resources.

But Omar’s treatment of Greek learning in the library of Alexandria was
the expression of his whole mind towards Christian civilisation. And
Omar’s powerful hand had not only maimed Byzantium, but absorbed Persia.
All this had been done since Heraclius carried back the Cross in triumph
to Jerusalem. The Persian had kept it in its shrine during its captivity
with the seals untouched. The Saracen scorned all which it represented.
The contest of those whom Heraclius would leave in his place was to be
with the Saracens, Omar, Osman, and Ali.

After the Chalif Omar was mortally wounded in the mosque at Medina, he at
first named Abd Errahman for his successor, who declined the chalifate.
Whereupon Omar named six of Mohammed’s companions, together with the same
Abd Errahman to choose a new chalif. They were engaged during three days
in heated contest, since each of the six wished to become the chalif, and
were at last induced with great difficulty by Abd Errahman to accept one
of their number named by him. Thus Osman, at the age of seventy, was
chosen as successor of Omar. His chalifate lasted from November, 644, to
June, 656: during the whole of which, eleven years and a-half, the Saracen
realm was disturbed by internal struggles. Yet external wars continued.
Governors, appointed by Osman, were decried, but they did many successful
deeds of arms.(74) In North Africa, the boundaries of the realm were
extended on from Tripolis as far as Kairawan. In Persia, a governor,
afterwards removed, gained a province. The whole of Persia, which had been
overrun rather than subdued under Omar, was finally conquered under Osman.
An attempt of the Greeks to recover Alexandria and Egypt succeeded for a
moment, but was frustrated by the aid given to the Moslim by the
Monophysite Copts. Parts of Armenia and Asia Minor were taken, and the
island of Cyprus. The Moslim carried their conquering arms to the Oxus,
and slew, in his retreat from a lost battle, the last heir of the kings of
Persia.

In 656, the discontents produced by Osman’s favour of his own family
culminated in an insurrection at Medina, in which the dwelling of the
chalif, after a siege of several weeks, was at last broken open, and the
third Commander of the Faithful, also, like Ali, a son-in-law of Mohammed,
was slain by the eldest son of Abu Bekr, the first chalif. A week after
his death, the third chalif, Osman, was succeeded by Ali, the fourth,
widower of Mohammed’s favourite daughter, Fatima. But the six and a-half
years of Ali’s chalifate were occupied with a violent struggle between him
and Muawiah, cousin of Osman, and governor of Syria.(75) There had ever
been enmity between the family of Haschim, from which Mohammed descended,
and the family of Abd Schems, from which Osman and Muawiah descended. In
the course of the struggle Egypt fell away from Ali to Muawiah; and, in
660, Medina and Mecca paid him homage. Ali’s power, then, was seated only
in Irak and Persia. Civil war pressed so heavily on Islam that three men
resolved to rid it in one day of Ali, Muawiah, and Amrou, as the causers
of all the trouble. Ali was to be assassinated in the mosque of Kufa;
Muawiah in that of Damascus; Amrou in that of Fostat, to terminate a war
carried on, not only in the field, but by mutual imprecations from the
pulpit. But of the three, Ali alone was mortally wounded, Muawiah escaped
with a light wound, and Amrou’s representative was killed instead of him.
Ali died, three days after, on the 24th January, 661. He is said to have
surpassed not only Muawiah, but Abu Bekr and Omar in abhorrence of all
falsehood, in love of justice, in valour and eloquence. In simplicity of
life and generosity, Ali resembled his two predecessors: but, like them
also, the severity which he practised by no means included moral
restraint. He died at sixty-three; after Fatima’s death, and, therefore,
in the latter half of his life, he contracted six or eight marriages,
besides maintaining nineteen slave women, with whom also, after the custom
of that time, he lived.

So the second, third, and fourth chalifs—Omar, Osman, and Ali—perished by
assassination within seventeen years of each other, in 644, 656, and 661.
Let us turn to see what has been doing at Constantinople in these
seventeen years. We have already seen how Omar, in his ten years, had
built up an empire from the spoils of Byzantium and Persia, which, during
the civil wars of his two successors, was yet increased. The seat of its
sovereign power was transferred from Medina to Damascus as soon as Muawiah
was acknowledged as chalif, in the year 661. But during the four chalifs,
from the death of Mohammed in 632 to 660, the immense Mohammedan realm was
governed from Medina.

When Heraclius died in 641, he was covered with defeat, and the chief
provinces of his empire were, day by day, falling away. He left a son,
Constantine, twenty-eight years old, who had been named emperor from his
birth: and, by his second marriage with his niece, Martina, a son,
Heracleonas, nineteen years old, who had been named emperor two years
before, and two younger sons, David and Marinus, named Cæsars, besides two
daughters, who, like their mother, had been named expresses. In his will
he directed his two sons, Constantine and Heracleonas, to reign together
with equal power, and to acknowledge Martina as empress-mother.
Constantine III. was not Monothelite, but orthodox. At his accession he
received a letter(76) from Pope John IV., maintaining the true doctrine,
and also that his predecessor, Honorius, answering a question put to him
by the patriarch Sergius, “taught concerning the mystery of the
Incarnation, that there were not in Christ, as in us sinners, opposing
wills of the mind and the flesh: and for this, certain persons, trusting
to their own meaning, threw out the suspicion that he had taught there to
be the only one will of the Godhead and the Manhood, which is altogether
contrary to the truth”. This the Pope proceeds to prove at length. And he
ends by saying that he finds a certain document, contrary to Pope Leo, of
blessed memory, and the Council of Chalcedon, has been issued, to which
bishops are compelled to subscribe. This was the Ecthesis of Heraclius.
And he entreats the new emperor, as guardian of the Christian faith, to
command this document to be torn down, and, as a first sacrifice to God,
to scatter from His Church every cloud of novelty. So, if he regard the
things of God, may the Lord, whose faith is preserved in purity, preserve
his empire from the nations trusting in their ferocity.

But the emperor, Constantine III., died 103 days after his father,
poisoned, as eastern historians say, by his step-mother, the empress
Martina: with which crime they also inculpate the patriarch Pyrrhus. She
then reigned with her son, Heracleonas; but not for long. An insurrection
deposed her: both she and Heracleonas were maimed and banished, and
Constans II., son of Constantine III., and grandson of Heraclius, at
twelve years old became emperor, under tutelage of the council. The answer
given to the letter of Pope John IV. was that the Ecthesis affixed to the
door of churches should be removed.

But the empire was torn to pieces by the strife of the various heresies
contending for mastery. The patriarch Pyrrhus, who had succeeded Sergius
in the see of Constantinople, and in the patronage of his heresy, found it
expedient on the deposition of Martina to leave his see. He appeared in
Africa, and had a great controversy with Maximus in the presence of the
African episcopate in 645. He acknowledged himself to be defeated: and
went to Pope Theodorus at Rome, where he renounced the Monothelite heresy,
and was received by the Pope as bishop of the capital. But he returned
presently, at the instance of the exarch of Ravenna, to the errors which
he had renounced.

In due time the emperor, Constans II., produced the Typus to take the
place of his grandfather’s Ecthesis. And, when Pope St. Martin held his
great Council at Rome in 649, Constans burst into fury, and, as above
recorded, afterwards caused the Pope to be kidnapped, to be tried at
Constantinople, and to be condemned for high treason; finally, to perish
of want in the Crimea.

With Pope St. Martin, Maximus had been the great defender of the faith. It
is time to give some record of his life, his labours, and his reward.

Maximus sprung about the year 580 at Constantinople from an old and noble
family. There were few of rank superior to his relations. He had great
abilities, received an excellent education, and became one of the most
learned men in his time, and the ablest theologian. The emperor Heraclius
drew him against his wishes to the court, and made him one of his chief
secretaries. But, in the year 630, his love for solitude, as well as his
observance of the wrong bias which the mind of Heraclius was taking, led
him to withdraw from court. He resigned the brilliant position which he
occupied, became a monk in the monastery of Chrysopolis, that is, Scutari,
and, on the death of its abbot, was chosen unanimously to succeed him.
Henceforth to the end of his life, at the age of eighty-two, he became, by
word and deed, a champion of the Catholic faith against the Monothelite
heresy. In 633, he went with Sophronius, then a simple monk, to
Alexandria, and joined him in entreating the patriarch, Cyrus, to desist
from promulgating the new heresy. Against this, Sophronius, having become
patriarch of Jerusalem, published his synodical letter quoted above.
Maximus went on to the west, visiting Rome and Carthage, and rousing the
African bishops against the heresy. He showed his great dialectical skill
in a contest with Pyrrhus, then the deposed successor of the patriarch
Sergius. Pyrrhus even accompanied him to Rome, and renounced the heresy
before Pope Theodorus.

Maximus continued at Rome to use all his efforts against the heresy, and
counselled Pope Martin to call the Lateran Synod, and formally condemn it.
As the Ecthesis of Sergius had been composed against Sophronius, and then
the Typus—drawn up by the patriarch Paul, and imposed by the will of the
emperor Constans II.—had been substituted for it at Constantinople, the
Council of the Lateran which in 649 condemned both, excited the bitterest
wrath of the emperor. Three men had especially in his mind counter-worked
all his endeavours to impose his will as the standard of faith upon the
Romans and the bishops. These three men were Sophronius, patriarch of
Jerusalem, who had died shortly after the surrender of his city to Omar,
Pope Martin, and the Abbot Maximus. How he avenged himself on the Pope St.
Martin has been already described.

About the same time at which the Pope was carried off to Byzantium, in
653, Maximus also was seized, with his two disciples, both named
Anastasius, one a monk, the other a Roman priest, who had been a nuncio.
They were carried also to Byzantium, and thrown into prison. After the
Pope had been judged by the senate, and condemned to death for high
treason, Maximus and his disciples were also brought to trial.

Maximus had distinguished himself by a great number of writings. He is
considered the greatest theologian of the seventh century. He has kept a
very high rank through all the centuries which have followed him. After
the death of Sophronius, the intellectual combat against the Monothelite
heresy rested mainly upon him. The very high rank which he had held as a
minister of Heraclius, conjoined with his scientific defence of the truth,
made him the most conspicuous person in the Church after the martyrdom of
Pope Martin, whose friend, counsellor, and supporter he had been, and his
unbending constancy under the severest tortures has given him among the
Greeks the name of “the Confessor.”

Part of a letter(77) is extant from him to a certain Peter, a man of high
rank, who had entreated him to meet and resist the patriarch Pyrrhus in
the African conference. With regard to him Maximus says: “if Pyrrhus will
neither be heretical, nor be so-called, let him not satisfy this or that
individual. That is superfluous and unreasonable; for just as when one is
scandalised in him all are scandalised, so when one is satisfied all
surely will be satisfied. Let him then hasten to satisfy before all the
Roman See. When this is satisfied all men everywhere will accept his
religion and orthodoxy. In vain he speaks who would gain me and suchlike
as me: and does not satisfy and implore the most blessed Pope of the holy
Roman Church, that is, the Apostolic See, which has received and holds the
government, the authority, and the power of binding and loosing over all
the holy Churches of God in the whole earth in all persons and matters
from the Incarnate Word of God Himself, and likewise from all holy
Councils according to the sacred canons. For with him the Word who rules
the celestial virtues, binds and looses in heaven. For if he thinks that
others must be satisfied, and does not implore the most Blessed Pope of
Rome, he is like the man who is accused of homicide, or any other crime,
and maintains his innocence not to him who by law is appointed to judge
him, but without any use or gain strives to clear himself to other private
men who have no power to absolve him.”

Yet more remarkable, if possible, is another testimony which this great
martyr, born and bred at Constantinople, and up to the age of fifty a
minister of the eastern emperor, who bears the greatest name among the
theologians of the seventh century, has left behind him. It was apparently
written at Rome after the completion of the Lateran Council in 649, which
he mentions in it, and numbers with the five preceding ecumenical
Councils. It runs thus:—

“All(78) the ends of the world, and all therein confessing the Lord with
pure and upright faith, gaze stedfastly upon the most holy Church of the
Romans, its confession and faith, as upon the sun of eternal light. They
expect the brightness which ever lightens from it, in the doctrine of
Fathers and Saints, as, guided by a divine wisdom and piety the six
Councils have set it forth, drawing out with greater distinctness the
Symbol of the Faith. For from the beginning when the Incarnate Word of God
descended to us, all churches of Christians everywhere possess and hold as
the only basis and foundation that greatest of churches, as against which,
according to the promise of the Saviour, the gates of hell never prevail:
as which possesses the keys of the right faith and confession of Him: as
which discloses the real and only religion to those who approach it
religiously, while it shuts up and stops every heretical mouth loudly
speaking iniquity. For they are seeking without labour and apart from
suffering, O wonderful patience of God which endures it!(79) by two words
to pull down what has been established and built up by the Creator and
Ruler of all things, our Lord Jesus Christ, by His disciples and apostles,
by all the sequence of holy Fathers, Teachers, and Martyrs, who offered
themselves up by their words and deeds, their struggles and labours, their
toil and blood-sheddings, and lastly, by wondrous deaths, for that
Catholic and Apostolic Church of us who believe in Him. They would annul
that mystery of right Christian worship with all its greatness, its
brightness, and its renown.”

Pope Martin, who held this great Council, at which Maximus was present,
supporting the Pope with all his learning, had been seized, as we have
seen, in his own city and church, in the year 653, four years after it. At
the same time, Maximus, being about 73 years old, was seized at the same
place, and deported to Constantinople, and upon his arrival was taken
straight from the ship, naked and without sandals, together with his two
disciples and companions, and they were put into different prisons by five
officers and their attendants. Later, when the proceeding against the Pope
had been; closed, Maximus was brought into the palace before the whole
senate and a great crowd.(80) He was placed in the middle of the hall, and
the fiscal angrily addressed him with the words, “Art thou a Christian?”
Maximus replied, “By the grace of God I am”. “That is not true.” “Thou
mayest say so, but God knows that I am a Christian.” “And if thou art a
Christian, how canst thou hate the emperor?” asked the judge. “But,”
replied Maximus, “how is this known to thee? Hatred, like love, is a
secret affection of the spirit.” “It is become plain by thy deeds that
thou hatest the emperor and his realm, for it is only thou who hast
delivered Egypt and Alexandria and the Pentapolis, Tripolis and Africa
into the hands of the Saracens.”

These accusations fell to the ground, as the false witnesses brought could
not maintain them. But the end of this trial was to condemn Maximus and
his two companions to a separate and severe exile.

The Pyrrhus whom Maximus had so far prevailed over in the famous
conference held in Africa in 645, that he had renounced his heresy to Pope
Theodorus, and been received by him in St. Peter’s, who had then fallen
back through the influence of the exarch, and been excommunicated, had
succeeded in regaining the see of Constantinople, upon the death of
Paulus, the author of Typus. After a few months, he had died in the summer
of 655. He was followed by Peter, whose synodal letter, sent to Rome to
Pope Eugenius, is said to have been so dark on the subject of heresy that
the clergy and people would not suffer the Pope to celebrate Mass in the
Church of St. Mary until he had promised not to accept this letter.

Later in the summer, Maximus was again brought into the judgement hall of
the palace, where the two Monothelite patriarchs—Peter of Constantinople
and Macedonius of Antioch, then living in the capital—were present. “Speak
the truth,” said Troilus to him, “and the emperor will have mercy on thee,
for if one of the accusations be proved juridically against thee, thou
wilt be guilty of death.” Maximus declared they were all false; that he
had submitted the Typus to anathema, not the emperor. The Lateran Council
was asserted to have no force for he who held it has been deposed,
“Deposed he was not,” said Maximus, “but expelled.” Maximus and his
companion, Anastasius, were sent to different banishments.

A year later, a fresh attempt was made to break down his resolution. Paul
and Theodosius, two men of consular rank, and Theodosius, Bishop of
Cæsarea, the latter as commissary of the patriarch, Peter, the former two
of the emperor, reached the imprisoned confessor on the 24th August, 656.
Every effort was made to induce Maximus to accept the Typus, and enter
into communion with the see of Constantinople.

The terms which Maximus required were reported to the emperor, and fresh
commissaries, the patricians, Troilus and Epiphanius, and the same bishop,
Theodosius, sent again to Maximus.(81) “The Lord of the world sends us to
thee,” said Troilus, “to inform thee what it pleases him to require. Wilt
thou obey his command or not?” Maximus requested that he might hear the
command. They required that he should first answer the question. Maximus
said, “Before God and Angels, and you all, I promise, what the emperor
commands me, in respect of earthly things, I will do”. At length
Epiphanius said, “The emperor by us informs thee: since all the West and
all the perverse-minded in the East look to thee and make contention
because of thee, since they will not submit to us in faith, the emperor
wills to move thee that thou enter into communion with us on the basis of
the Typus issued by us. We will then personally go out to Chalce, and
embrace thee, and offer thee our hand and, lead thee to the cathedral with
all honour and pomp, and place thee by our side where the emperors are
wont to sit, and we will then partake of the life-giving Body and Blood of
Christ, and declare thee again for our father: and there will be great joy
not only in our own residence, but in all the world. For we are well
assured that if thou enterest into communion with this holy see, all who
have divided themselves from our communion on thy account will unite
themselves to us again.”

Then Maximus turned to the bishop and said to him with tears:—“My good
lord, we are all awaiting the Day of Judgment. You know what we drew out,
and agreed upon respecting the holy Gospels, the life-giving Cross, the
image of our God and Saviour, and the all-holy ever-virgin Mother who bore
Him.” The bishop cast down his eyes, and said to him, in a lower
voice:—“What can I do, since the emperor has chosen something else?”
Maximus said, “Why did you and those with you touch the holy gospels, when
you could not bring about the promised issue? Indeed, the whole power of
heaven would not persuade me to do this. For what answer shall I give, I
say not to God, but to my own conscience, that for the glory of men, which
has in it no substance, I have forsworn the faith which saves those who
cling to it.”

At this word they all arose, their fury overmastering them: they pushed
and scratched and tore him; they covered him with spittle from his head
downwards, so that his clothes reeked, until they were washed. And the
bishop, rising, said, this ought not to be done, but his answer only
should be heard, and then be reported to our lord. For religious matters
are done in different fashion from this. The bishop could scarcely induce
them to desist. They took their seats again, and reviled him with
indescribable insults, and imprecations. Epiphanius said furiously,
“Malefactor and cannibal, speakest thou thus, treating us and our city and
our emperor as heretics? We are more Christian and orthodox than thou art.
We confess that our Lord and God has both a divine will and a human will,
and an intellectual soul, and that every intellectual nature has by
nature, Will, and Operation, since motion belongs to life, and will to
mind: and we know Him to have the capacity of Will not only in the
Godhead, but also in the Manhood. Nor do we deny His Two Wills and Two
Operations.”

The abbot, Maximus, answered:—“If you so believe, as the intellectual
Natures and the Church of God, why are you compelling me to communicate on
the terms of the Typus, which merely destroys those things?” “That,” said
Epiphanius, “has been done for accommodation, that the people may not be
injured by these subtleties.” Maximus said:—“On the contrary, every man is
sanctified by accurate confession of the faith, not by its destruction, as
put in the Typus”. “I told thee in the palace,” said Troilus, “that it did
not destroy, but bade silence be kept that we may all live in peace.”
Maximus answered:—“What is covered in silence is destroyed. The Holy
Spirit says by the prophet:—‘There are no speeches nor languages, where
their voices are not heard’: a word not spoken is no word at all.” Troilus
said: “Keep in thy heart what thou wilt; no one prevents thee”. Maximus
answered, “But God did not limit salvation to the heart when he said:—‘He
that confesseth Me before men, I will confess him before My Father in
heaven,’ and the Apostle, ‘With the heart we believe unto justice, but
with the mouth confession is made to salvation’. If then God, and God’s
prophets and apostles bid the great and terrible mystery which saves all
the world to be confessed by holy voices, there is no need that the voice
which proclaims it be in any way silenced, in order that the salvation of
those who are silent be not impaired.”

Then Epiphanius, speaking most harshly, said, “Didst thou sign the
writing?” he meant the Lateran Council. Abbot Maximus said, “Yes, I
signed”. “And how didst thou dare to sign, and anathematise those who
confess and believe as the intellectual Natures and the Catholic Church?
In my judgment thou shalt be taken into the city, and be put in chains in
the forum, and the actors and actresses, and the women that stand for
hire, and all the people shall be brought, that every man and woman may
slap thee, and spit in thy face.” Abbot Maximus replied:—“Be it as thou
hast said, if we have anathematised those who confess Two Natures of which
the Lord is, and the two natural Wills and Operations corresponding to Him
who is both God and Man. Read, my Lord, the acts and decree, and if what
you have said is found, do all your will. For I, and my fellow-servants,
who have subscribed, have anathematised those who, according to Arius and
Apollinarius, maintain one Will and Operation, and who do not confess our
Lord and God to be intellectual in each of those Natures of which, in
which, and which He is: and, therefore, in both of them having Will and
Operation of our salvation.”

They said, “If we go on treating with this man, we shall neither eat nor
drink. Let us go, and take food, and report what we have heard. For this
man has sold himself to the devil. They went in and dined, and made their
report, it being the eve of the Exaltation of the life-giving Cross in the
year 656.”(82)

The next day, Theodosius, the Consul, came out early to the aforesaid
Abbot Maximus, and took away all that he had, and said, in the emperor’s
name:—“Since thou wilt not have honour, it shall be far from thee. Go to
the place thou hast thought thyself worthy of, suffering the judgment of
thy disciples, him at Mesembria, and him at Perberi.” The patricians
Troilus and Epiphanius had said:—“We will bring the two disciples, him at
Mesembria, and him at Perberi, and put them, too, to the proof, and see
the result. But learn, Sir Abbot, that, when we get a little relief from
this rout of heathens (that is, the Saracens), by the Holy Trinity, we
will bring you to terms, and your Pope, who is now lifted up, and all the
talkers there, and the rest of your disciples: and we will _cook_ you all,
each in his own place, as Martin has been cooked”. And the Consul
Theodosius took him and committed him to soldiers, and they took him to
Perberis. It is not known how long what is called the second exile of St.
Maximus lasted, which ensued after he had thus resisted the offers of the
emperor.

At a later time, he was brought from Perberis, with his disciple,
Anastasius, back to Constantinople.(83) A Synod, there held,
excommunicated them both, as well as Pope St. Martin, St. Sophronius, and
all the orthodox.(84) The second Anastasius, who had been a Nuncio, was
also brought, and the Synod passed on all three the sentence:—“As the
Synod has passed against you its canonical sentence, it only remains that
you be subject to the severity of the civil laws for your impiety. And
though no punishment could be proportionate to your crimes, we, leaving
you to the just Judge in respect of the greater punishment, grant you the
indulgence of the present life, modifying the strict severity of the laws.
We order that you be delivered to the prefect, and by him taken to the
guard: that you be then scourged; that in you, Maximus and Anastasius, and
Anastasius, the instrument of your iniquity, the blaspheming tongue be cut
out to the roots, and then your right hand, which has served your
blaspheming mind, be cut off: that thus deprived of these execrable
members, you be carried through the twelve quarters of this imperial city,
and then be delivered to perpetual banishment and prison, to lament for
the remainder of your errors.”

This sentence was carried out by the prefect. St. Maximus was then
transported to Lazika, in Colchis: the other two to different castles. As
Maximus, from weakness, could neither ride nor bear a carriage, he was
borne on a sort of bed made of branches to the Castle of Schemarum. St.
Maximus foretold the day of his death, which took place on the 13th
August, 662, when he was eighty-two years old. At that moment the chalif
Muawiah had about completed the first year in which he had fixed the seat
of the Saracenic empire at Damascus: and the “rout of heathen” from which
the Byzantine Consul had anticipated deliverance, held in peril during the
whole of Muawiah’s reign to 680 the imperial city on the Bosphorous, where
“the lord of the world” usually resided.





CHAPTER IV. CHRISTENDOM AND ISLAM.


We are now come to the greatest of contrasts and oppositions in human
history—to the Church of Christ, the foundress of nations, and to Islam,
her counterfeit and opponent; to the law which went forth from Jerusalem
and struck its perpetual root in Rome, and to the force which went forth
from Mecca, tarried for a while in Damascus and Bagdad, and then encamped
in the city of Constantine. Two reigns which never have ceased and never
can cease to counterwork each other, the reign of the Word and the reign
of the Sword.

In the twenty-eight years which run from A.D. 632 to 661 of the four
chalifs, Abu Bekr, Omar, Osman, and Ali, the sword has severed from the
throne of Constantine its fairest provinces, and conquered besides a
territory, the whole mass of which exceeded the Roman empire at its
greatest extension. The sword of Mohammed’s successors in doing this has
inflicted deadly wounds on the Christian patriarchates and dioceses
subjected to the new dominion. It has also reduced the unsubdued portion
of the eastern empire to tremble for its future existence: it has made the
whole West, already in possession of the Teuton family of races, gather
itself together, and prepare for a death struggle with the advancing
enemy.

It is necessary to consider in his personal life the man who gives name to
this immense movement, who raised the banner which flouted the Cross and
wrote upon that banner the symbol of human enjoyment against that of
divine abasement. The facts of his life which I wish to note are
especially those which are reproduced in his religion. They pass beyond
the sphere of the individual because they reappear incessantly in the
history of twelve hundred and fifty years, and affect nations of the south
and east which dwell from the Atlantic Ocean to the extremities of China.

Mohammed(85) was born in April, 571, in the city of Mecca, of a family
possessing spiritual rank in that home of ancient pilgrimages for the
Arabian tribes. But the branch to which he belonged was poor. His father,
Abdallah, died about the time of his birth. His mother, Aminah, born in
Medina, was so poor that she could scarcely support a nurse for him. His
mother died when he was six years old. His grandfather then took care of
him, but died also after two years. From that time his uncle, Abu Talib,
provided for him, but was so poor likewise that the orphan child was
presently reduced to tend sheep, whereas the rich class at Mecca was
largely engaged in traffic with their caravans, which visited Abyssinia,
Southern Arabia, Syria, Egypt, and Persia. Mohammed is said in his youth
to have twice visited Syria, probably as a camel driver. But it is said
with greater certainty that at twenty-five he entered the service of a
rich widow, Chadidja, and journeyed for her in South Arabia. He afterwards
married her, and then for the first time became sufficiently rich to turn
the thoughts which slumbered within him to higher subjects than procuring
his daily bread.

His marriage with Chadidja lasted till he was fifty years of age, when he
lost her and at the same time his uncle Abu Talib. During the whole period
of his marriage with Chadidja, who was much older than himself, he lived
in close union with her—what seems to have been, at least in regard to
this relationship—a virtuous and religious life. Mohammed’s education had
been much neglected. His country at the time was in a most uncivilised
condition, destitute of science, arts, and letters. Bardship alone was in
repute, and for this Mohammed had no gift, though he had a great gift of
oratory. The art of writing was little diffused; it is doubtful whether
Mohammed even in his later years possessed it. He was acquainted with
Jewish and Christian doctrines only by oral information. The great
authority of St. John of Damascus says that he lighted upon the Old and
New Testaments by conferences with an Arian monk, and thus drew up his own
religion. He was about forty years of age when he began to carry out a
design to restore what he thought the religion of Abraham, and to destroy
the idolatry into which his countrymen had fallen. He met with small
success and much opposition in this attempt until in the eleventh year of
the mission which he claimed as prophet, and the fifty-first of his life,
a most marked change in his personal conduct and in the conditions of his
life took place.

The chief men at Mecca had generally refused to receive him as a prophet
and to accept the reformation of religion which he proposed to them. In
his first years he had confined his revelations to his nearest relations
and friends. He had gained Abu Bekr and his young cousin Ali, an uncle
Hamza, named for his valour “the Lion of God,” and above all, Omar, at
first his opponent, but when converted the most energetic character among
all the companions of the prophet, and the strongest support of Islam. On
the whole, however, things had gone so far against him that he retired
secretly, together with Abu Bekr, from Mecca to Medina. This event, termed
The Flight, took place in September, 622, from which year his followers
count their time. It may be taken as indeed the time in which his full
character as prophet came forth to light. Henceforth he appeared rather as
the preacher of a new religion than as the restorer of what he called the
religion of Abraham.

The most important principle laid down by him from the time of his
migration from Mecca to Medina was that he then first permitted in the
name of God war against unbelievers. He afterwards made this a holy duty.
It was considered the first of virtues to fight the enemies of Islam. To
those who fell in such a battle he promised the highest joys of paradise;
to those who rejected him he threatened a shameful death by the
disposition of God.(86)

Upon his first settlement in Medina, which afterwards changed its original
name of Jathripp into this new name, signifying the city, he built a
mosque and arranged worship, in which a short prayer was offered five
times a day. He sought at first to gain over the Jews residing there, and
marked Jerusalem as the _Kiblah_, that is, the point to which the face
should be turned in prayer, and the tenth day of the first month as a fast
day, and allowed Jewish converts to keep the Sabbath.(87) But when he
found that the Jews would receive a Messias only of the race of David he
became their bitterest enemy. Later he appointed Mecca instead of
Jerusalem as the Kiblah, the month Ramadhan as fasting time, and Friday as
the day of rest.

His first campaigns, when he could scarcely bring a few hundred men into
the field, for the inhabitants of Medina had not yet joined him, but had
only granted him protection, were but predatory attacks on the caravans of
Mecca, which came near Medina. But when the Meccans grew prudent, and
either defended their caravans with a strong escort, or sent them round by
bye-paths to Syria, Mohammed planned a plundering attack in one of the
holy months, when every Arab deemed himself secure. This is the beginning
of a number of actions which, though he was not endued with a delicate
moral sense, he must have known to be bad, and only ordered, or at least
approved, for the sake of the end aimed at, chastisement of the heathen,
and breaking in upon their commerce. What Mohammed did was to call his
follower Abdallah, to give him a sealed packet, and instruct him to go to
South Arabia with twelve companions. He was not to open the packet before
the third day, and then fulfil the order it contained. Abdallah obeyed,
broke the seal on the third day, and found only the words: Go with thy
companions to the valley of Nachlah (south-east of Mecca), and there wait
for the caravans of Mecca. Words which Abdallah interpreted to mean that
he should fall upon these caravans. This he accomplished without
difficulty. Two men were taken prisoners, one killed, and the whole lading
carried as plunder to Medina. Mohammed had plainly used this short and
sealed packet to cut off all explanation with Abdallah respecting an act
of rapine in the sacred months, so as to be able to put away the
responsibility from himself, as might be needed. Even the Moslim at Medina
had but one cry of reprobation over this desecration of the sacred months.
Mohammed at first disavowed Abdallah as having gone beyond his command,
for he had not told him to attack the caravans in the sacred months. But
when he found himself considered no less the author of this deed, and as
he did not mean for the future to secure to Mecca four tranquil mouths for
its commerce, Koran verses were published in which war against unbelievers
was excused at every time, because they committed the much greater sin of
driving the prophet out of his country.(88)

The attempt to exculpate Mohammed from the guilt of the blood murderously
shed in falling upon this caravan is made the more difficult because his
biographers speak of many other murders ordered by him even in the case of
women, and extol him for such things. It may be noted that in the last
time before his flight he was no longer true and sincere. Thus he recorded
the whole history of the Old and New Testament prophets, adorned with many
Jewish and Christian legends, which he maintained, as was his wont, to
have been revealed to him by the angel Gabriel. This did not impose upon
the inhabitants of Mecca, who were right in ascribing his knowledge of
these things to intercourse with foreign informants less illiterate than
himself.

The first proper fight between Mohammed and the Meccans took place in the
second year of the Hegira at Bedr, a station between Medina and Mecca.
Mohammed had gone out with somewhat more than 300 men to surprise and
plunder certain rich caravans on their return from Syria. Abu Sofian, the
head of the Omeiad line, led these caravans, and had notice of Mohammed’s
purpose. He sent an express to Mecca inviting his townsmen to despatch an
armed escort to defend their property. Before these, 900 strong, arrived,
Abu Sofian, knowing that Mohammed lay in wait for him at Bedr, succeeded
in passing round this place by directing his caravans in security along
the coast road. When news that their goods were safe reached the Meccan
camp, a portion of the escort, which had taken arms only through fear of
losing their property, wished to return. The rest, bitter enemies of
Mohammed, and also fighting men, preferred to advance upon Bedr. This was
resolved upon, but many in the force persisted in returning to Mecca. The
same hesitation prevailed in the prophet’s camp: which had come out
intending to plunder, not for a fight with an enemy still continuing to be
in number. But yet greater was the fear of showing cowardice, and so
striking the new faith with the hardest blow. So they came to a bloody
conflict, in which the disciplined Medinese prevailed over the Meccans
whom their commercial habits had partly enfeebled. They carried off rich
plunder. Mohammed did not himself fight: he was praying in a hut until he
sank exhausted, and when he recovered consciousness, announced a victory
to his friends obtained by the aid of celestial warriors. This first deed
of arms laid the basis for a rapid increase of Mohammedanism. It gave the
poor community spoil in arms, in horses, and in camels, and in no little
ransom for the prisoners taken. It strengthened their confidence,
increased their following, and encouraged them to further enterprise. The
Jewish tribe Keinuka was their first prey. It was compelled to
unconditional surrender, and would probably have been entirely massacred
if a free retreat had not been obtained for it by Abd Allah, the head of
an Arabian clan dwelling in Medina, with whom these Jews had been in
former alliance. But all their goods went to the Moslem. At this time
occur many slayings of particularly hated or dangerous enemies of Islam.
So Mohammed inflicted a great terror which reduced to silence individual
opponents, and carried waverers into the bosom of Islam, which promised
them security.

But, in the meantime, the Meccans were not idle. Both interest and honour
required them to avenge the defeat at Bedr. Abu Sofian, in the year 625,
the third of the Hegira, appeared at the head of 3000 men, and occupied a
camp to the east of Medina. Mohammed wished to confine himself to the
defence of the city, but his more fanatic followers denounced this conduct
as cowardice, and he was compelled to march out with about a thousand men,
of whom nearly a third were commanded by Abd Allah: This man, a secret
enemy of Mohammed, returned back into the city. The Moslim, however, in
spite of their small number, fought with effect at Mount Ohod, north of
Medina, until the bowmen, who were ranged against the enemy’s horsemen,
deserted their post, and the impetuous Chalid fell upon their retreat. A
panic seized the believers, so that they sought safety in flight. Mohammed
himself was wounded, and sank to the ground, so that a report of his death
was spread, which added to the discomfiture of his host. But a faithful
henchman recognised him by the eyes alone, in spite of mail-coat, helmet,
and visor, and brought him to safety, while the Meccans, believing his
death, cared not to pursue the other fugitives, and were retiring. Only
after the battle was ended, Abu Sofian learnt that he was still alive.
Mohammed, the day after the battle, in which he lost 70 men, pursued the
enemy for some distance, only to show that he was not discouraged. The
defeat at Ohod lessened Mohammed’s reputation as much as the victory at
Bedr had raised it. The only considerable gain which Mohammed, in the
fourth year of the Hegira, could offer to his believers to make up for the
losses suffered, was the expulsion of the Jews of the clan Nadir, who had
lands and many strong castles near Medina. They surrendered these, and as
there had been no battle, Mohammed confiscated their property, and
bestowed it on his party of fugitives from Mecca. At the end of this year
he appeared near Bedr with a larger force, to show that he was not afraid
to defy Abu Sofian, who had threatened a fresh attack after the battle at
Ohod. But the Meccans were not ready, and, moreover, would not fight on a
bad year. Towards the end of the fifth year, in 627, they appeared again
under Abu Sofian, about ten thousand strong, with their allies, out of
various Bedouin clans before Medina. The Medinese could hardly set 3000
men against them, and were, in general, down-hearted, fearing an attack
besides from the Jewish clan, Kureiza. This time Mohammed maintained his
plan not to meet the enemy in the open field, but only to defend the town.
By the advice of a Persian he drew a broad trench about it. Slight as this
defence was, it sufficed, in the Arab ignorance of the art of siege, to
keep the enemy from an attack in force. Bad weather ensued, and Mohammed
succeeded in sowing distrust of each other among the confederates, so that
they retired after doing nothing. But, though the siege of Medina had cost
Mohammed little material loss, his reputation as warrior and as prophet
had suffered greatly, as at Ohod. Instead of following the Arabian custom,
to offer battle, he had cowered behind walls and trenches. Again he turned
first against the Jews, who had entered into negotiations with the
Meccans. After a few weeks, he compelled them to surrender. These were of
the clan Kureiza, formerly confederates with the second large Arabian clan
domiciled in Medina. They hoped, through the mediation of this clan, to
get as good conditions as the clan Keinuka had obtained through Abd Allah.
But the head of this clan had been wounded during the siege of the city,
and when Mohammed appealed to his judgment, he condemned to death the men
whose number ran from 600 to 900, and their wives and children to slavery.
Mohammed had this hard sentence executed immediately in the marketplace of
Medina. This expedition was followed by others against hostile Bedouin
clans. Thus the bad impression left by the siege was gradually effaced. So
at the end of the sixth year of the Hegira, 628, Mohammed was able to
resolve, at the head of his friends, as well believers as heathen Arabs in
alliance with him, on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He issued a solemn invitation
to join this pilgrimage. It met with small acceptance. He had issued it in
the name of God, and so was obliged to carry it out, though it was
attended by an inconsiderable number, as to which the accounts vary
between 700 and 1400 men. He had to trust to the Arab reluctance to shed
blood in the sacred months, though he had himself violated one sacred
month by murder and robbery. Finding the Meccans resolute to forbid him
entrance into their city, he had to halt on the border of the holy
territory. After long treating, agreement was made that he should retire
for that year, but should be allowed in the following year to pass three
days in Mecca on pilgrimage. The Meccans, for the sake of their commerce,
were as anxious for peace as Mohammed, and so a truce for ten years was
struck, which yet had this favourable condition for them, that, while
their fugitives were to be given up, those of Mohammed might be secure in
Mecca.

This repulse of the prophet and his companions from the holy city and its
temple was deeply felt, yet there were advantages obtained by this
seemingly dishonouring truce. Mohammed appeared at least to be recognised
by the proud city as an equal power. Now he might send out his
missionaries into every part of Arabia, make proselytes and conclude
alliances, and the right to enter Mecca the next year with those who
believed in him was something gained which perceptibly advanced his claim
among the Arabians. To increase his strength, enrich his followers, and so
enlarge their numbers and efface by a new victory the bad impression which
the failure of the pilgrimage had caused, he attacked the Jews of Cheiber,
who had lands and several castles four or five days’ journey north-east of
Medina. These were successively stormed and sacked, and all that the rest
could do was to surrender to the conqueror on condition that they should
serve him for the future as tenants who should give him half the produce
of the land. So by the conquest of other Jews he was able to increase the
number of his troops.

In the year 628-629 which passed between the failure of the pilgrimage to
Mecca, and the subsequent pilgrimage carried out according to the treaty,
several attacks on the Bedouins took place. The number of his believers
and allies increased, and the thought was more and more developed in
Mohammed that Islam must by degrees be accepted as the only true religion
not only by all Arabians but by all the nations of the earth. Even before
he had obtained possession of Mecca he sent messengers to the neighbouring
princes of Persia, Byzantium, and Abyssinia, as well as to the Christian
governor of Egypt, and to several Arabian chiefs subject to Byzantine or
Persian sovereignty, inviting them to be converted to his faith. These
embassies had no result, and were rejected with more or less harshness.
Only the Greek governor of Egypt gave them a friendly reception, and
without being converted to Islam sent the prophet costly presents, among
them two slave women, of whom one, Mariam, so greatly charmed Mohammed
that for her company he neglected his wives.

For the man who had been faithful to his old wife Chadidja until her
death, when he was past fifty years of age, had from the time that he came
forward, not merely as the restorer of a primitive religion which had
suffered corruptions, but as the herald of a new religion, say from the
date of the Hegira itself, espoused about a dozen wives,(89) some for love
and some for policy, to make alliance with families of repute. Among these
was Aischa, daughter of Abu Bekr, whom he took when scarcely out of her
childhood, a daughter of Omar, and a sister of Abd Allah, who had been
disgraced by the violation of a sacred month. The Koran limits the number
of lawful wives to four, but Mohammed himself was to be an exception. At
the time polygamy in Arabia had no restriction, and as public opinion was
not shocked, his wives had to submit. But when Mariam, the Abyssinian
slave, assumed the position of a dangerous rival, they complained to their
families, and showed their contempt to the faithless husband. He promised
to quit the favoured slave, but he dwelt with her for a month apart from
his wives and then produced verses of the Koran, dispensing him from his
promise respecting Mariam, and threatening his wives that if they
continued in their disobedience he would take instead of them more
submissive wives and virgins.

But a more important incident in the domestic life of Mohammed was to
occur, which showed how entirely he was led away by sensual passion.(90)
He had fallen in love with Zeineb, the wife of Zeid, formerly his slave,
then his adopted son, and one of the most attached among his followers.
Zeid perceived this and was willing to cede her to the man who was not
only his prophet but his benefactor. The prophet took her, and added her
to the number of his wives. But the Arabians, though they practised
unlimited polygamy, did not allow to marry the wife of an adopted son,
whom they considered in the light of a real son. Mohammed felt the
scandal, and produced a passage from the Koran. In it he declared in the
name of God the custom hitherto entertained of treating adopted children
as really children to be foolish, and for the future even sinful. Then he
spread the belief that Zeid’s divorce from his wife had taken place
against his own advice; he makes God remind him in a following verse how
notwithstanding his own love for her he had counselled Zeid to keep her;
and how even after the divorce, he had shrunk, through fear of men, from
espousing her until God had expressly commanded it,(91) and this for two
reasons, first, to shew that he who acts after the will of God should not
heed the tattle of men; and secondly to give by his own example the more
force to the newly-enacted law in regard of adopted sons; a law, he added,
which earlier prophets, whom he takes care not to name, had promulgated.

But this marriage(92) also led to further revelations in the Koran, which
entirely severed the wives of Mohammed from the male world: and also
separated the other believing women by a thick veil from the eyes of
strangers. Mohammed’s jealousy stretched even beyond the grave, and he
forbade second marriage to his wives even after his death. The object was
to restrict them from all life in public to their own homes, and even
there, to intercourse with their own sex, or only their nearest male
relations. In spite of their polygamy, the wife had hitherto among the
Arabians been the companion of their life: Mohammed reduced her to be a
house-slave. She became in Islam a holy thing, indeed: but a holy thing
kept under veil and bolt, and guarded not by her own virtue, but by
eunuchs, from desecration.(93)

Mohammed’s invitation to the governor of Egypt, followed by the gift of
the slave woman to Mohammed, led to disastrous consequences in Islam to
woman’s position. The prophet called in God to sanction man’s lordship
over woman: the first time in history that such a corruption claimed a
divine sanction.

In the eighth year of the Hegira, January, 630, Mohammed obtained
possession of Mecca. To avenge a rupture of the existing truce, he broke
with 10,000 men into the neighbourhood of the city, which admitted him
both as its temporal lord and as the prophet of God, without a fight. He
received the homage of its inhabitants on one of the city’s hills, and
their oath to follow him in all wars against unbelievers. At the same
time, he declared Mecca to be again a holy city, in which God had allowed
him alone to shed blood, which, for the future, was never to be.(94)

After gaining this possession of Mecca, Mohammed issued in the ninth Sura
of the Koran what amounted to a new law of nations, and a new practice of
war. From that time forward none but Mohammedans were to enter the holy
city of Mecca and its circle: but likewise, outside of this, idolaters
were to be exterminated, Jews and Christians were only to be suffered,
when they paid tribute, and humbled themselves.(95) “O true believers,
verily the idolaters are unclean: let them not therefore, come near unto
the holy temple after this year. And if ye fear want by the cutting off
trade and communication with them, God will enrich you with His abundance,
if He pleaseth, for God is knowing and wise. Fight against them who
believe not in God, nor in the Last Day, and who forbid not that which God
and His Apostle have forbidden, and profess not the true religion of those
to whom the Scriptures have been delivered, until they pay tribute by
right of subjection, and they be reduced low. The Jews say Ezra is the son
of God, and the Christians say Christ is the Son of God. This is their
saying in their mouths: they imitate the saying of those who were
unbelievers in former times. May God resist them. How are they infatuated!
Besides God, they take their priests and their monks for their lords, and
Christ, the Son of Mary; only they are commanded to worship one God only.
There is no God but He. Far be that from Him which they associate with
Him. They seek to extinguish the light of God with their mouths: but God
willeth no other than to perfect His light, although the infidels be
averse thereto. It is He who hath sent His Apostle with the direction and
true religion, that He may cause it to appear superior to every other
religion, although the idolaters be averse thereto.”

This Sura was the last in time of those issued. “It(96) bears the stamp of
much reflection and careful execution.” In March, 631, Mohammed had sent
the greater pilgrimage to Mecca, under guidance of Abu Bekr. This Sura was
published on the chief day of the pilgrimage, and “its promulgation
committed to Ali,(97) who rode for that purpose on the prophet’s
slit-eared camel from Medina to Mecca, and, standing up before the whole
assembly at Al Akaba, told them that he was the messenger of the Apostle
of God unto them”. Thus it establishes the definitive position of Mohammed
in regard to all other religions, and the exclusiveness of his own claim.

In the last days of Mohammed, when the religious capital of Arabia had
been taken by him, and this new law of war had been published, embassies
from all parts of Arabia streamed to him, for to the Arabians there
remained no choice between the Koran and the sword. He may be considered
as the lord by conquest of Arabia, and moreover as one who pretended to
issue in the name of God and as His sole apostle a new world-religion.
Scarcely more than a year after this proclamation of war against what he
chose to consider idolatry he died on the 8th June 632, at the age of 63
lunar or 61 solar years.

When we review the ten years which elapsed from the Hegira to the death of
Mohammed, the following points are salient.

The imposition of religious belief by force becomes more and more the main
principle of Mohammed. As he increases in power the principle is set forth
with greater distinctness. He began as a citizen of Mecca by trying to
persuade his relations and friends. With some he succeeded. His kinsmen
gave him a partial support rather of clanship than of faith. But he found
it expedient to fly from his native city, and the flight marks to all
future time the beginning of his assumption not only to be a prophet, but
in that character to publish a new religion. The Flight is the Mohammedan
era as the birth of Christ is the Christian. At the end of the ninth year
the proclamation against idolatry in the ninth Sura, the last in time of
the whole series, marks the completion of the parent idea. Mohammed
declares himself the apostle of God, as such alone charged “with the
direction and true religion,” while Christians, though they are commanded
“to worship one God only, associate Christ the Son of Mary with Him”.
Whereas Mohammed declares Christ to be indeed one in the series of
prophets, the last before himself; but himself to be the prophet who
completes the chain. Thus he enacts that Christians can be safe before his
people only in one of two ways, either by forming part of them, that is,
by taking Mohammed instead of Christ, or by submitting to pay tribute, and
to the humiliations which accompany tribute. Thus the parent idea is the
messiahship of force.

It may be noted that it comes out in a profession of faith drawn
especially to exclude the association of the Son of Mary with God. Thus
Mohammed crowns the work which Arius attempted three hundred years before.
After the restless heresies in which the Greek mind had fluctuated during
these three centuries, the greatest enemy to the Greek empire and faith
was set up on that very negation of the godhead of Christ with which those
heresies had begun. Fifty years of Arian success, in which the emperors,
Constantius and Valens, take a large part, inspired and supported by
Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and Demophilus, four successive bishops of
Byzantium, cause that disorganisation of the eastern Church which St.
Basil described as its ruin. Fifty years of patronising the Monothelite
heresy, in which the emperors Heraclius and Constans II. bear the largest
part, supported by four Byzantine patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paulus,
and Peter, beginning in 628, mark the rise and accompany the establishment
of the Mohammedan empire and creed. Honorius dies before the heresy is
presented for acceptance in Rome in the imperial Ecthesis. Ten Popes
succeeding Honorius, in spite of the temporal distress which surrounds
them, oppose to the utmost the Byzantine heresy and despotism in the midst
of whom one gloriously lays down his life and is martyred by the eastern
emperor as guilty of high treason. This is the connection between Arius
and Mohammed, who appears as the divine punishment and remedy for
Byzantine successors of Constantine who would confiscate the liberty of
the church, and for state-made patriarchs who foster and formulate heresy.

Secondly, the revelations which Mohammed professes to receive from God he
professes also to be brought to him by the Angel Gabriel. Nor is he
ashamed to make this angel serve him in actions of the utmost turpitude.
Thus when the governor of Egypt bestows on him the slave-girl Mariam, he
falls so desperately in love with her that his proper wives, including his
favourite, the girl-wife Aischa, the daughter of his chief adherent, Abu
Bekr, revolt. The prophet is embarrassed and summons the Angel Gabriel to
his aid. Forthwith a passage of the Koran preaches to the discontented
wives obedience in the name of God, and the prophet threatens that if they
continue to be insubordinate he will dismiss them and find others more
obedient and submissive. Nor is even this the lowest depth of infamy. For
when he violates even the customs of the Arabs around him, loose as they
were, and favourable to the selfishness of the stronger sex, and takes the
wife of his most faithful follower and adopted son, he calls in Gabriel to
justify the adultery in the name of God, and to enlarge to any extent
which the prophet may choose his exclusive privilege of taking wives. It
would be difficult to say how the stamp of imposture could be fixed on the
Koran with more convincing force than by this association of an angel and
of God himself with acts which are contrary to the universal natural law.

Thirdly, it may be remarked that as to polygamy, since it was the custom
of the Arabians in his time to practise it without restraint, Mohammed
might be considered as neither better nor worse than his countrymen, who
had so corrupted the purity of the original law of marriage. This might be
allowed if we were considering Mohammed simply as a Saracen of that time.
But we are considering him in the light in which he put himself forward as
the apostle of God, the one apostle who was to set forth the one God:
“there is but one God and Mohammed is his prophet”. It is in this
character that he did what no one had ever done before. Polygamy had crept
in, “through the hardness of men’s hearts,” but Mohammed attempted to set
by his appeal to God and his use of the Angel Gabriel a divine sanction
upon this great corruption, and upon the unlimited concubinage which he
practised himself, and authorised in others. Thus St. John Damascene a
hundred years after his time used of him these indignant words: “This
Mamed put together many foolish things. Thus in the writing entitled
‘Woman’ he lays down the law that a man may openly take four wives, and a
thousand concubines if he can, as many as he can subject to himself(98)
besides the four; and he may divorce when he pleases and take another. And
he made this law for the following reason.” Then St. John narrates the
case of Zeid and his wife in these words: “Zeid had a handsome wife; Mamed
fell in love with her. As they sat together Mamed said, God has charged me
to take thy wife. Zeid answered: Thou art the apostle, do as God told
thee. Or to go further back, he said: God charged me that thou divorce thy
wife. Zeid divorced her. After some days Mamed said: God also charged me
to take her. So he took her and made her an adulteress, and then he
enacted that every one who will may divorce his wife, and after the
divorce, if she return to him, another must marry her first.”(99)

Patriarchs and prophets have sinned, as well as common men; but Mohammed
is the only legislator who has called in God to sanction his sin, and
propagate it among others in the name of God: and he did this under the
title that he was the special apostle of God, sent to propagate the only
true religion. The terrible sin of David stands out as contrary to all his
previous life. He sought pardon for it, and after it became the great
penitent, and humbly bowed his head beneath chastisements as awful as his
own sin. Mohammed exulted in his sin, as deserving of praise and
exceptional privilege.

Fourthly, throughout the ten years, from the Hegira to his death, Mohammed
carried out his own principle of propagating religion by force in his
utter disregard of human life. As soon as he had left Mecca he practised
robbery upon its caravans and killed without scruple those who resisted
the robbery. He tried to make friends with Jewish clans around him, and
when they rejected him for their Messias, slew them by hundreds. He slew
even for private revenge those who stood in his way: and women as well as
men.

These alleged revelations become in Mohammed’s hands the enactments of a
sovereign legislator. He claims them to be words of God delivered to him
by the angel Gabriel. The personal character of Mohammed as developed in
them is, therefore, of the greatest importance. He speaks not only of his
“brother Moses” in the Jewish legislation which he closes, but of the Son
of Mary as the Word and Spirit of God, on whose work he sets the superior
seal of his own mission; and as a matter of fact, those who took his name
had his personal character and actions before them for a standard, as the
Christians had the Son of God. From the moment of his death this fact is
brought out by the conduct of his followers. His chief companions meet and
elect a head whom they call the chalif or successor of the prophet. That
title is the sole source of his authority, which is both religious and
civil, supreme in each, but supreme because it is the transmitted
authority of the Prophet who is not a prophet only, but the “Apostle of
God”. The four points above noted, the propagation of religion by force,
the imposture in the use of the name of Gabriel, the enacting of polygamy
with the superadded license of unbounded concubinage, and the employment
of murder as means of success, mark the intense antagonism between the
character of Mohammed and the character of Him whom he charged the
Christians with associating to God. Instead of the Man, meek and humble of
heart, who said to His disciples that in following His meekness and
humility they should find rest for their souls, we have the man who
ordered the believers in him to beat down all idolaters that did not
profess, “There is one God, and Mohammed is His prophet,” and made death
in battle against them to be the martyrdom which he chose for his people.
Instead of the Man who said, “If I had not done among them the works which
no other man hath done, they would not have sin,” we have the man who
answered the appeal made to him for miraculous works in testimony of his
mission, by disclaiming the power to do them. Instead of the Virgin’s Son
who set up the virginal life, and propagated His faith by the teaching and
example of those who followed it, we have the man who forged a divine
permission for the grossest polygamy and an unlimited concubinage obtained
by successful war. Instead of the Man who reverenced above all men the
sanctuary of human life, we have the man who murdered without scruple
those who did not accept his mission.

As to the nature of the kingdom which each of these two set up, the One in
His last words to His disciples on the night of His sacrifice said, “The
kings of the gentiles lord it over them, and they that have power over
them are called beneficent, but you not so: but he that is the greatest
among you let him become as the younger, and he that is the leader as he
that serveth”. In accordance with this precept, just as Mohammed was
preparing to appear as the prophet, the greatest among Christians took as
the symbol of his spiritual rule for his title, Servant of the servants of
God: and so Chalid, the chief fighter, under Mohammed, Abu Bekr, and Omar,
was termed “the sword of the swords of God”. The prophet in the Sura
proclaiming his religion pronounced force to be the instrument of
spreading it, and in doing this blood was to be shed like water: and from
his time his chalifs have practised the slaughter of as many as they
chose. Nor is this confined to enemies, but his religion has considered
his own subjects thus slaughtered as witnesses of the prophet’s claim. To
be killed by order of the chalif is to the believer a title of honour, and
the sacrifice of so many a day to his order a sacrifice to his religion.

The pretension put forward by Mohammed in the ninth Sura has been fully
accepted by his people from the beginning. He is their apostle, and
accordingly from his life they have taken and woven into their own in
every age the employment of force, the imposture of a man’s invention put
in an angel’s name, the right to take away life at the pleasure of the
ruler, but above all, polygamy and concubinage. The sensual life of
Mohammed began exactly at the time when, discarding persuasion as the
instrument of converting unbelievers, he began to propagate by force his
pretended mission as a prophet. The deterioration in the moral life
coincides with the time when he passed from the character of one who
sought to restore the religion of Abraham to the very different character
of one who sought to introduce a new and universal religion. Moreover,
this sensual life of the founder has likewise infected with a moral
pestilence all those parts of Asia, Africa and Europe, wherein his
followers have prevailed. The man who from fifty to sixty years of age was
multiplying young wives, moving them to jealousy with a slave concubine,
seizing the wife of an adopted son, in virtue of a feigned divine decree,
and making a special license to himself as the prophet of God to marry as
many wives as he pleased, and whose wives he pleased, has corrupted all
the generations of those who profess his religion. But more than in any
others this corruption is apparent in those who rule in the prophet’s
name. Omar, Osman, and Ali, the second, third, and fourth chalifs,
followed Mohammed closely in this corruption of domestic life. Ali, the
husband of his favourite daughter, equalled her father in his wives, as
likewise Osman, the husband of another daughter. Every Mohammedan prince,
as a rule, follows the founder of his dynasty and creed, and thus, as the
race of the Virgin Mother reproduces in every age the example of her whom
all generations call blessed, and her Divine Son has planted in her the
tree of chastity, of which He is Himself the first fruit, and which takes
root in an honourable people, and as every work of superhuman charity
grows upon that tree, and the sex lost in Eve is glorified by Mary, so the
Mohammedan line is equally true to its origin. To the very end of the long
night of heathenism, on which the coming of our Lord dawned, monogamy
still survived in the noblest descendants of Eve. The German had it and
the Roman, and there were ages in which those races, heathen though they
were, honoured woman, and maintained the sanctity of marriage, before it
was exalted into a sacrament, and before the foundation of human society
was consecrated by the blessing of the Redeemer, given in the touch of His
Blood. The degradation of woman in every age and every people during the
1250 years of Mohammedan domination, is the special stamp of the various
peoples who have borne his name. I take the example highest in position
and worst in character. To the precept of Mohammed, enforced by his own
conduct, we owe it that in Constantine’s own city the very chalif who
represents him continues without marriage to practise an unbounded
concubinage. Thus from generation to generation the race of Othman—which
can scarcely be called a family—has been continued, and enabled to reign
over the fairest countries of the globe, Christian during many hundred
years, for a period almost as long as the long descended lines of Capet
and Hapsburg have subsisted in honourable marriage. Concubinage has
provided it with children, and fratricide has prevented rivals down to the
time of Sultan Mahmoud. When he succeeded to the throne, stained in every
generation with such crimes, he was the only survivor of his race. Out of
the previous history a Turkish annalist(100) records without astonishment,
for it was an ordinary incident, that in a tumult which had taken place at
the funeral of Sultan Murad III., nineteen brothers of the Sultan Mohammed
III., all innocent and guiltless, were strangled and added to the company
of martyrs. From the life of Mohammed himself has sprung a despotism
without limit, a cruelty which scorns natural affection, and a sensuality
without example.

As the personal life on earth of the Son of God is seen in the religion
which He planted, and in the history of the people which He formed and
maintains, so the personal life of the man Mohammed is seen in the
religion which bears his name, and in the people which have carried it on.
It is only to elucidate this thought that I have selected these
particulars of the Arabian’s life, and as a prelude to the contrast which
the religions themselves present.

A few months after his return from the great pilgrimage to Mecca in 632,
Mohammed was preparing a third campaign against the Byzantines, which
however could only be executed after his death. A word must be said as to
his exact position at the moment of his death. In the ten years which
follow immediately the Hegira, the original camel driver, who became
husband of Chadidja, and lived with her virtuously to her death, pursued
the life of a freebooter, which had many alternations of failure and
success. In his character of prophet, “the apostle of God,” he aimed at
material power, and scrupled not to pursue it by deceit, robbery, and
murder, all exercised as means of converting men to the worship of one
God, the almighty and “most merciful”. He had fifteen months before his
death so far prevailed as to obtain mastery over the city which he had
left as a fugitive. It was in a certain sense the capital of Arabia, and
he was claiming and in a great degree receiving the homage of all
Arabians. But other men who also called themselves prophets, such as
Moseilama, were his rivals. The subjection of Arabia was by no means
complete at the time of his death. The German historian—himself of the
Jewish race and religion—from whose careful study of Mohammedan writers I
have taken many of the incidents above recorded, says that with the
exception of his weakness in his relations to the female sex, in regard to
which he claimed the privileges allowed to him as a special favour from
God, he gave a fair example to his people. There was the greatest
simplicity as to his dwelling, his clothing, and his food. He was so
unassuming that he not only refused every external mark of honour from his
companions, but declined every service even from his slaves which he could
perform himself. He was often seen in the market place buying food,
mending his clothes in a miserable little room, or milking a goat in his
court. Every one could approach him at all hours, whether in the street or
in his dwelling. He visited all the sick, and showed sympathy to every
sufferer, and was also magnanimous and indulgent where policy did not
otherwise require. His generosity and benevolence, and also his care for
the common good were boundless, so that in spite of the many presents
which he received from all sides, and the rich plunder which came to him
from his wars, he left little property behind him, and treated even this
as belonging to the State. After his death it was not given to his
daughter Fatima, his only heiress, the wife of Ali. He had other sons and
daughters besides Fatima, on the number of whom tradition varies. They all
died before him. We may name only Rukejja and Umm Kolthum, whom the future
Chalif Osman successively espoused, both by his first wife Chadidja; and
also Ibrahim son of the Coptic slave Mariam, whose early death the prophet
sorely lamented. But this historian treats the bringing in the Angel
Gabriel as the bearer of his revelations to have been a deceit throughout.

The power which Mohammed claimed rested entirely on the truth of his
assertion that God had committed to him a prophetical office, carrying
with it the promulgation of a new and universal religion. The absolute
falsehood of this assertion is contained in the invention of the Angel
Gabriel. The Jewish historian whom I have quoted fully admits this
imposture, just as St. John Damascene made it a reproach a hundred years
after Mohammed’s time. The virtues above mentioned, what are they but the
beautiful spots of the tiger’s skin veiling the ferocity of the beast?
Mohammed by the confession of his friends would appear to have had two
intense passions, one for sweet odours, the other for women. Thalebi
commenting on the 5th Sura records how ten zealous disciples used often to
meet and pray in the house of Osman.(101) They watched through the night
and had resolved to prepare themselves for paradise by chastity and
mortification. Mohammed did not approve of it, and preached to the people
that it was no way his mind that those who professed Islam should abstain,
like Christian priests and religious, from women and from eating flesh,
and from sweet odours; should debar themselves from sleep, and practice
hardships. Fighting was his monkhood. Abulfeda says he openly confessed as
to himself, “Two things attract me and carry me away: women and sweet
odours. My joy is in these two pleasures, and they make me more
prayerful.” In fact Mohammed was never so pious as when he took a new
wife; while he deserted them all for the Coptic slave-girl Mariam. And the
Koran told him that he was right.

What were pharisaic prayings in the market place to the devotions of
Mohammed? He called upon all with whom he came in contact to accept the
one God, and Mohammed as his prophet, on pain of being exterminated, and
he delivered up to the pleasure of the Mohammedan fighter as many female
captives as any one could take, over and above the four wives whom he
allowed to all. These captives were not the victims of angry passions in
men maddened by a furious conflict, but the avowed and justified reward of
those who might, if slain in battle, have been martyrs, but instead were
victorious. The very worst corruption(102) which we meet with in the idol
worship and demon worship of Greeks and Romans was the shamelessness which
pandered to all lusts of the flesh under cover of religion. But Mohammed
added to this corruption. In virtue of his Koran the most infamous
passions were allowed not in belief of false gods, themselves models of
impurity, but in worshipping the one holy God. In all this the example as
well as the word of the religious founder had gone before, and his people
followed it from age to age.

Mohammed then at the time of his death was a successful robber in a
country wherein the tribal life was in a state of great confusion and
incessant changes, and the ancestral religion had degenerated into a rude
and senseless idolatry. The race which occupied Arabia—the whole people
which claimed Ishmael the son of Abraham for their ancestor—was devoid of
order and of culture, of art or science, and had not affected the history
of the world beyond its own boundaries. That the lord of Byzantium on the
one hand or the lord of Ctesiphon on the other contemplated permanent
danger to their realms from the incursions of such a race can as little be
supposed as that Europe now is in fear of subjugation from a host of
Caffres or Zulus, people, in personal bravery, resolution and bodily
strength, equal probably to what the Saracens then were.

In Omar’s chalifate(103) he had sent an army of 30,000 men, under one of
Mohammed’s eldest companions, to compel the Persians on the Euphrates to
become Mohammedans. They had placed themselves under the last heir of the
royal race, the young and valiant Jezdejerd. When the embassy requiring
them to accept Islam or tribute came, the heir of the great king said to
them mockingly: “You came hither as traffickers and beggars. Your food was
green lizards; your drink salt water; your dress rough camel’s hair. Now
you would force upon us a hateful religion. Hunger pushes you on; so I
forgive you. Go back and I will load your camels with corn and dates. If
you disdain a generous offer, punishment shall find you in Persia.” Then
the old sheick Mughira answered undismayed: “What thou sayest of our
misery is true. So great was our poverty that we fed on worms, snakes, and
scorpions. The hair of our camels and our goats we worked into a covering
for our nakedness. Our faith consisted in perpetual war and robbery. We
put even our daughters to death to escape supporting them. Then God took
pity on our miserable state, and sent us through His holy prophet the book
of the true faith. It commands us to make war against the heathen, to
change our poverty and our misery for riches and power. Take then our
religion which binds you to no other burdens than all the faithful bear.
Or pay the tribute of the heathen. Will you do neither, arm yourselves to
fight.”

Such was the people among whom Mohammed arose. The spirit which he wakened
speaks in the words of the poetess Chansa, with which she sent her four
sons to battle. “By God, the only one, ye are the sons of a man as ye are
the sons of a woman. I have not deceived your father; I have not brought
your uncle to shame, nor stained your race. Ye know what rich reward God
has promised to Moslim for war against the unbelieving. Bethink you that
the eternal dwelling is better than this place of sojourn.” All her four
sons fell in battle. Chansa cried: “Praise be to the Lord who has made me
a name through the martyr-death of my sons”. The words of this mother
breathe the whole spirit which made Islam a conquering power.

Mohammed had died without leaving any indication as to whom he wished for
his successor. His chief adherents, Abu Bekr, father of his wife Aischa,
in whose residence he had died, his sons-in-law Ali and Omar, with their
several parties, met together. Omar put aside his own claims, and had
influence sufficient to procure the election of Abu Bekr, and to frustrate
that of Ali. Severe as the struggle to obtain the chalifate was, at the
moment it brought with it greater burden than dignity.(104) Mohammed had
spread his belief more by bribery, deceit, and violence than by
conviction. Many provinces of Arabia after his death were shaking it off.
Aischa’s own words were, “when the apostle of God died, the Arabs were
deserting him; the Jews and Christians raised their head; the hypocrites
no longer concealed their hypocrisy, and the Moslim were like an abandoned
flock on a cold winter night”. Abu Bekr’s prudence and Omar’s energy put
an end to the rivalry of pretending prophets and Bedouin reluctance of
taxation. In March, 633, revolt in Arabia was overthrown, and the first
chalif could execute the injunction of Mohammed to spread Islam beyond the
Arabian peninsula.

The choice of a chalif not in the family of Mohammed to carry on his newly
made realm and religion with armed hand was of the utmost moment to both.
In idea realm and religion were one and the same thing. And the choice
indicated that force was the power which ruled both. Abu Bekr had not only
been chosen by the influence of Omar, but during his short chalifate of
two years had that most resolute of all Mohammed’s companions behind him
to support, inspire, and perhaps control him. When the companions met upon
his death in 634 Omar’s star was in the ascendant; and in the ten years of
his chalifate he won in the opinion of his people the highest name which
any Mohammedan ruler has attained. In truth, he made the empire. At the
first choice of Abu Bekr for chalif it was but a horde of robbers in a
province hitherto without name in history; when twelve years later Omar
died by the hand of an assassin, it already rivalled the greatest empires
of the world. To feel the profound contrast between the kingdom of Christ
and the kingdom of Mohammed, we need but to consider the course of the
first twelve years from the death of each founder. When the sword of Herod
fell upon St. James, the son of thunder, the first of the apostles who was
to seal his faith with his blood, and so fulfil his acceptance of his
Lord’s chalice, the kingdom of Christ had been preached among labours and
trials innumerable. No one had yielded submission to it but in obedience
to the inward dictate of conscience, and every one who so accepted it had
suffered loss so far as this world is concerned. It was from imminent
peril of death that when St. James, probably then the second in rank and
influence of the apostolic band, was put to death, the first of all
escaped from prison under angelic guard and went into another place to
found the Roman Church. A martyrdom undergone by one apostle and a
martyrdom postponed by another marked the setting up of St. Peter’s
pastoral staff in the capital of the Cæsars. The Christian people were
everywhere then a poor, distressed, and praying people; hardly
distinguished by the imperial Roman from the provincials of Judea, whom
among all his subjects he most disliked. When Omar died, Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Alexandria had fallen beneath his arms; the sepulchre of
Christ was in his power; the patriarch of the holy city trembled lest the
chalif of Mohammed should desecrate it to be a mosque by praying in it.
Every Mohammedan convert received honour and wealth; everyone not
converted to Mohammedanism risked honour and life, wife and child. The
Christian martyr shed his blood on the scaffold; the Mohammedan martyr
died in the heat of battle, and his companions received for the danger
which they had risked and overcome the persons and goods of the conquered.
Omar’s empire stretched for thousands of miles over Africa and Asia; his
authority was that of the prophet, who wielded civil power as an appendage
of the spiritual, because, as he held, there could not be two swords in
one sheath. The chief apostle exercised one of the greatest of his
acts—that of choosing the capital of the Christian faith—when he was
flying from a tyrant put in Jerusalem by the caprice of a Roman emperor.
The arms were spiritual in one kingdom and material in the other;
exercised with the long suffering of an apostle in one, with the
unquestioned despotism in the other of a ruler who triumphed over souls by
destroying bodies. The fundamental opposition which marks the two kingdoms
is seen in strongest evidence during the first twelve years in each.

Hitherto, in human history, there is one man and one man only, who has
matched himself with the Son of God: and not only matched himself, but
declared that he was the superior; that the commission given to the Son of
Mary was subordinate to the commission given to the Son of Abd Allah: that
the prophet Jesus led up to the prophet Mohammed. It is certain that in
the Mohammedan religion its prophet occupies the place which in the
Christian religion is occupied by our Lord. But when this is said, it must
be said with the understanding that “Mohammed’s religion is a Judaism
built stiffly on an abstract unity of God, stripped of its Messianic
character, and of all the deeper spiritual elements which belong to that
character”.(105) When it is said that Mohammed has matched himself with
Christ, it must be added that he has first stripped Christ of the divine
Sonship, and placed Him simply as a prophet in a series of prophets, the
last and greatest of whom is Mohammed himself. He has denied the Blessed
Trinity: he has termed the honour paid by Christians to the Son, idolatry;
he ranks Christians as idolaters for offering it, as being incompatible
with the unity of God. He denies the Incarnation on the Arian ground, that
it is impossible for the one only Nature to generate or be generated. He
has denied the fall of man, equally as he denies his restoration. He
denies the passion of Christ, for unfallen man needs no such sacrifice as
that of the Son of God offered upon the Cross. In the system set up by him
there is no sacrifice. In that point of singular meaning it stands alone
among the religions of the earth. Accordingly there is no priesthood.
Mohammed claimed to exercise the prophetical and in it the regal power;
but not the sacerdotal. There is none such in his religion. Such as it is,
on an infinitely lower level than the Christian, Mohammed is the centre of
it. From the Jewish and the Christian religions he took prayer, fasting,
and almsgiving, likewise the doctrines of primary import, the unity of the
godhead, the resurrection of man in body as well as spirit, to a final and
eternal judgment of reward or punishment. That which came from himself is
purely bad; a corruption affecting all the relations between the sexes,
and reducing all those who live in his religion to a far worse condition,
as respects those relations, than experienced by those who lived in Greek,
or Roman, or German heathenism, at their worst. As the personal life of
Mohammed, from the time of his claim to be the prophet of a new religion,
was in this respect infamous, so is his religion. All that the Christian
faith and Church, by the sufferings of unnumbered martyrs, and the wisdom
of great pastors, who are the honour of human nature, had done in 600
years for the restoration of marriage, the creation of woman’s worth and
dignity, the whole fabric of the Christian home, the whole offspring of
Nazareth, Bethlehem, and Calvary, Mohammed, by word and example, strove to
overthrow. He embodied in his religion the revenge of Asia and Africa upon
Christian purity: and the hand which established a pure Arian doctrine, as
to the Godhead, destroyed the Christian wife and child, husband and
father, so far as its malignant influence extended. So it was at the
beginning: so it has been through the 1260 years: so it is now.

The whole movement of Mohammed was to establish a counter kingdom to that
of Christ, of which he who lived as a sensualist from fifty to sixty years
of age is the standard. His chalifs were its continuators. And while his
instrument was conquest, the bait which keeps each successive generation,
and defies the approach of the Christian faith, is the indulgence of those
sensual enjoyments which marked the life of the founder from the time of
the Flight, which has equally marked the conduct of the ruler and the rich
during all the twelve centuries. The Mohammedan peasant may have a
virtuous home, for the harem is beyond his means: he may be sparing,
sober, and honest: but where is the Mohammedan ruler or rich man whose
inner life will bear inspection? As Roman law stopped before entering the
slave apartment, Mohammedan law stops before entering the women’s
apartment: while the mark of the chalifs supreme dignity is to have no
wife, but concubines, in the very words of St. John Damascene, a thousand
if he please. Has any false religion ever shown such a mark of imposture?
or is any opposition to the Son of God so deep as this, so universal in
its effect upon the whole character?

About a hundred years after the time of Mohammed there lived at the court
of the chalif of Damascus the man who ranks as the last great Father of
the eastern Church: who, indeed, anticipated in some degree in that Church
the position afterwards held by St. Thomas Aquinas, in the West.(106) His
father, Sergius, though a fervent Christian, held high office in the
Syrian court. He purchased and set free captive Christians, and among them
was a Thalian monk, named Cosmas, learned in theology and philosophy.
Cosmas became teacher of his benefactor’s son, John: and gave him such an
education, that upon the death of his father the chalif made him one of
the chiefs of his council, while Peter, bishop of Damascus, charged him to
defend by writings the Christian truth against unbelievers.

He must have known well the religion of the chalif, in whose court he was
a high officer. He thus speaks of Mohammed. “Down to the time of Heraclius
the Saracens were avowed idolaters. Afterwards a false prophet arose among
them, named Mamed. He lighted upon the Old and New Testament, and as the
result of confabulations with a certain Arian monk constructed a heresy of
his own. He gained by the appearance of piety influence with his people,
and pretended that a Scripture was brought down to him from heaven. Having
put together in his book certain most absurd statements, he delivered to
them a worship.

“He says there is one God, the Creator of all things, who is neither
begotten nor begetting. He says that Christ is the Word and Spirit of God,
a creature and a servant: and that He was born without a father from Mary,
the sister of Moses and Aaron. For, says he, the Word and Spirit of God
entered Mary, and she bore Jesus a prophet and servant of God. The Jews
wickedly wished to crucify Him: they seized and crucified His shadow. But
Christ Himself, he says, was not crucified, nor did He die. For God took
Him to Himself into Heaven, for He loved Him. And this, he says, that when
Christ ascended into Heaven, God asked Him: ‘Jesus, didst Thou say, I am
the Son of God, and God?’ And he says, Jesus answered, ‘Lord, pardon me.
Thou knowest that I never said it, nor am too proud to be Thy servant. But
men that were transgressors wrote it, that I said this word, and they lied
against Me, and are in error’. And God answered and said to Him: ‘I know
that Thou didst not say this word’. Now he said many other portentous and
ridiculous things in this Scripture of his, which he pretends to have been
sent down to him from God. Now when we allege, who is the witness that God
gave him a Scripture? Which of the prophets foretold that such a prophet
was to arise? Moses received the law from God in the sight of all the
people, when he appeared on Mount Sinai, in cloud, and fire, and darkness,
and storm. And all the prophets from Moses onwards foretold the coming of
Christ, and that Christ is God, and that the Son of God would come in the
flesh, and would be crucified, and die, and rise again, and that He is the
Judge of the living and the dead. And when we ask, why did not your
prophet come so, others bearing witness to him. Why did not God, as He
gave the law to Moses in the sight of the people on the smoking mountain,
give the Scripture which you speak of to him in your presence, that you
also may be assured. They answer, God does what He will. We reply, that we
know well. But we ask how the Scripture came down to your prophet. And
they answer, the Scripture came down upon him when he was sleeping.

“Again we ask, how is it, when in this Scripture of yours he enjoined to
do nothing, and to receive nothing without witnesses, that you did not ask
him, first show by witnesses that you are a prophet, and have come forth
from God, and what Scripture bears witness to you? They are mute through
shame. Since you may not marry without witnesses, nor market, nor possess,
nor take an ass or beast of burden without witness. Wives, indeed, you
have, and possessions, and asses, and all the rest through witnesses.
Faith alone and Scripture you have without a witness. He who gave you this
has no security whatever. No witness preceding him is known: but he
received it asleep. They call us associators, because we bring in an
associate to God, when we say that Christ is the Son of God, and God. We
reply, prophets and Scripture have handed this down to us. You, as you
assert, acknowledge prophets. If we are wrong in saying that Christ is Son
of God, it is they who have taught it and delivered it to us.”

The objection here made in general, that Mohammed had no witness to his
mission, and none to the assertion that his Scripture came from God, has
received no answer. Indeed, not only is there no witness that the Koran
was given by God, or by the agency of the prophet Gabriel, but the
condition in which it was left by Mohammed at his death supplies the
strongest internal evidence that the Scripture was an imposture. This is
the account given by the historian of the present day, who has used thirty
years of his life to study, and compare Mohammedan writers on their
prophet.(107)

“The Koran is the Arabic name for the Mohammedan Bible, or collection of
discourses held by Mohammed in the name of God, in his quality as inspired
prophet, which, as he asserts, were partly communicated through the angel
Gabriel, partly revealed to him immediately by God through dreams or
visions. But the Koran is not, like the Bible, a book drawn up in
chronological order, or according to the variety of its contents, but a
mixing up of hymns, prayers, dogmas, sermons, casual writings, narratives,
legends, laws, and orders of the day, with many repetitions and
contradictions. This comes because Mohammed himself made no collection of
the revelations given singly to him during a course of twenty-three years.
It is probable that it was not even his wish that all of them should be
kept, since a great number of them had only a transitory meaning. Likewise
he had undertaken so many alterations in his doctrines and laws that he
had reason to shrink from handing them all down to posterity. In fine he
certainly wished to retain up to his death free room for modifications and
additions which might be necessary. But after his death all fragments of
the revelation were thrown together, even when they had been repealed by
others, or were already issued in different form. All portions of the
Koran, scattered in different hands, inscribed on parchment, palm-leaves,
bones, stones, or other rough materials for writing, were collected—or
even such as lived only in the remembrance of his companions and
disciples—and were divided, mostly without regard to their contents, or
the time at which they had been revealed, into greater or smaller
chapters, Suras; and thus the actual Koran, with all its defects, was
made. It is only by an accurate knowledge of the circumstances of
Mohammed’s life, and the language of the Koran, in some degree possible to
restore the chronological order of its several parts. By the help of
Mohammed’s Arabian biographers, some of whom go back so far as the second
century of the Mohammedan era, it is possible to determine the date of
such sections as relate to historical events. Where this is not the case,
the character and form of the revelation serve to direct. Mohammed in his
first time appears more as a reformer, later as the founder of a new
religion, at last as prince and legislator. In the first period he was
carried away by inward enthusiasm: his language has a rhythmical movement,
with true poetic colouring. In the second period a calmer consideration
takes the place of excited fancy; he is more rhetorician than poet: his
words spring rather from an understanding wide awake, not sparkling, as
before, with warmth of heart. In the third period the language sinks to
sober prose, not only in ordaining laws, issuing injunctions, or narrating
campaigns, but when he paints, as before, God’s Almightiness, the wonders
of creation, the terrors of the last judgment, or the joys of paradise.

“The Koran was first collected by the chalif Aim Bekr. This collection is
said to have been occasioned by the death of many acquainted with the
Koran in the war against the rival prophet, Moseilama, and the fear that
there would soon no longer be men who had learnt it by heart and
understood it. A certain Zeid who had served the prophet as secretary was
charged to collect the revelations, and when he had completed his work, he
gave it over to the chalif, from whose hand after his death it passed into
that of his successor, Omar. Omar left it to his daughter Hafsah, widow of
Mohammed. Zeid’s work aimed merely at providing a copy of all the
scattered fragments. No thought seems as yet to have been taken to arrange
them in order or to divide them into chapters. This collection had as yet
no public authority, for other fragments were in circulation, which varied
from it more or less, so that there were often disputations about the true
reading of particular passages. To meet this state of things, so dangerous
to the unity of the faith and the law, Chalif Osman caused a new edition
of the Koran to be prepared. The collection made by Abu Bekr formed the
basis of this. Osman sent copies of this edition to the chief cities of
the subject provinces, and caused all versions varying from it to be
destroyed. The division of the Koran into 114 chapters dates from Osman.
In this, however, as above remarked, neither subject nor order of time was
sufficiently considered. The sequence was generally determined by the size
of the chapters, the larger being put at the head, and the smaller at the
close. The Koran of Osman now stood for the ground text of the divine
revelation. If later further copies led to variations of the text, they
spring from the incompleteness of the Kufish writing, which continued in
use for several hundred years. In this not only were the vowel marks
wanting, but the diacritic points which served to distinguish from each
other several similar letters.

“The Koran contains subjects of highly mixed character. It embraces not
only the whole doctrine and legislation of Mohammed, but likewise a
considerable portion of his life, of his mental and material struggles, as
well as the history of prophets preceding him, and the legends concerning
them.”

Thus in the year 632 a robber who was compelling the whole Arabian people
to submit to his authority had somewhat suddenly died. His companions,
robbers like himself, met together after his death. They proclaimed the
dead chieftain “to be supreme teacher of religion, and, in that capacity,
law-giver over the whole extent of the social, civil, and political
domain”.(108) They elected one of themselves to continue this authority by
the name of chalif, or successor. In this act I note four things. The
successor is not taken out of Mohammed’s family, but by free choice of the
faithful. Secondly, he is chosen as a spiritual head: but this headship
carries in itself the whole temporal power. Thirdly, the place of Mohammed
among his own faithful, corresponds to the place of Christ in his Church,
if we bear in mind all the differences which distinguish the two
communities. Fourthly, the chalif in the Mohammedan community corresponds
to the Pope in the Christian. He is the successor of Mohammed, God’s
Apostle, as the Pope is the successor of St. Peter. The chalif is the
bearer of Mohammedanism, as Mohammed’s vicegerent: the Pope is the bearer
of Christendom, as the vicegerent of Christ, and the spiritual Peter. As
Christ and Mohammed answer to each other in religions radically
antagonistic to each other, so Pope answers to chalif, with the same
requisite differences.

It is to be noted that Christendom and Islam coincide as to the time of
their rise. A Catholic Church there had been through all the six preceding
centuries. But the allegiance of different bodies politic to one Christian
faith and legislation was only beginning when Mohammed arose. The various
kingdoms which the Teuton races were forming in all the countries of the
West drew their common spiritual life from the Pope in Rome. The eastern
emperor was becoming one of many sovereigns who acknowledged the authority
of Peter. If Heraclius thought himself to wield the one sovereignty
displayed by Justinian, he was undeceived before his death. If his
grandson kidnapped a Pope out of his Lateran Church and Palace, and then
martyred him as a traitor to his absolute power, the isles of the West
were looking upon him at the same time as the bestower to them of the
Christian faith, and of all the blessings which that faith brought with it
to their civil life. St. Wilfrid spoke to the Northumbrian king concerning
the doorkeeper of the kingdom of heaven. The king listened and obeyed.
Thus the roots of Christendom were sprouting in France and Spain and
Britain at the moment that Omar guided the suffrages of Mohammed’s
companions to choose the aged Abu Bekr for his successor. From that time
these powers are formed over against each other in perpetual contrast and
antagonism. The union of the two powers in Islam becomes the centre of a
complete despotism. The distinction of the two powers in Christendom—which
Pope Gelasius had marked with so much emphasis to the encroaching emperor
Anastasius a hundred and forty years before—which St. Martin exercised at
the cost of his life in the time of the third chalif—was the pledge and
guarantee to Christendom of authority, supreme but temperate, of spiritual
rule protecting civil liberty. A long succession of Popes—at the mercy of
eastern despots as to civil matters—maintain their spiritual independence
and their guidance of that new assemblage of nations in a common
Christendom through the terrible seventh century. At the same moment
Northern Africa, and Egypt, and Syria fall passively into the hands of the
chalifate, and Byzantium loses the half of its power and trembles for its
own existence.

How vast in its importance for future ages the establishment of the
chalifate upon the death of Mohammed was, may be seen from the following
considerations.(109) It cannot be denied that the absolutely despotic form
of government in lands under the sway of Mohammed has been created by the
influence of the religion. It has indeed often been maintained that the
genius of Asiatic peoples specially produces this form of rule. But states
which are not Mohammedan rest on quite a different basis: and their rulers
are or were subject to great and essential limitations. A Hindu king who
reigned under the laws of Manu could not break through the immunities of
the Brahmins, or the separation of the castes. An emperor of China, though
he be called the son of heaven, and his throne be approached only with
forms of the deepest submission, can name no officer except according to
the list of candidates provided by the learned order. Not so the Princes
of the Faithful. Two elements here concur to produce the most complete
form of despotism: the mixing together or more properly unification of the
spiritual and the temporal power; and the military power resting on
conquest. According as the theocratic or the military principle prevailed,
the sovereignty would take a distinct colouring: the despotism assume a
milder or a sterner aspect. When, as in the case of the Arabian chalifs,
and in a certain degree of the Turkish sultans since Selim, the religious
character prevailed, and the political power, in accordance with the
original spirit of Islam, appeared only as an issue and endowment of the
spiritual, the unconditional submission would take more of a religious and
conscientious devotedness. Then the dynasty, clothed in the divinity which
hedges a king, could enjoy greater stability and security: the ruler
himself, reminded ever of his consecrated character, of the duties and the
higher responsibility which lay upon him, would make through regard for
the prescriptions of religion a more moderate use of an authority in
itself unlimited. Where, on the contrary, the spirit of an arbitrary
military lordship prevailed, as in most of the kingdoms formed after the
overthrow of the chalifate in Central Asia, the blind obedience of the
subject would rather be the result of fear and custom. An attempt to
overthrow the possessor of supreme power, with the self-same violence by
means of which he had raised himself to it, would appear at once as
allowable and attractive. Thence would follow more frequent change of
dynasty, indifference to it on the part of the population, continual
suspicion, and tyrannical exercise of even the bloodiest means to put down
every opposing force.

Thus the government of the Ottoman kingdom did not take that character of
brutal tyranny which marks the history of Persia. The Persian king is so
absolutely lord of the life and property of his subjects, that a sentence
even issued in a drunken revel without the least formality receives
immediate execution. A Persian proverb truly says: To be near the shah is
to be near a burning fire. The general view that a king is naturally
tyrannical and unjust has passed into the very language, so that a
complainant for the strongest expression of the wrong which he has
suffered says: He played the king over me. Thus the learned in the law
maintain that the king’s commands are superior to the right of nature,
they only yield to a positive divine command. The lordship of the Ottoman
sultans, though resting on the same principle of unlimited power, appears
on the whole milder and more moderate. Here too, as the founder of the
line declared, all property belongs to the sultan; here also “the slave’s
neck is thinner than a hair,” and all subjects rank as the sultan’s
slaves, and even call themselves so: here too the sultan’s mother calls
her son “my lion” or “my tiger,” and Moslim name the sultan not only “the
Shadow of God,” or “the Refuge of the World,” but also “the Executioner,
the Slayer,” since he alone possesses the absolute right over the life of
all. Turkish doctors ascribe to him also a holy character not to be
effaced by any immorality. If his actions shew a scorn of all admitted
conceptions of justice or prudence, yet in force of a Mohammedan fiction
it is assumed that he does much or most of this in consequence of a divine
suggestion, and therefore that his motives can neither be discerned nor
judged by men. In the same spirit the learned in the law maintain that the
sultan can put to death every day fourteen persons, without giving reason,
or lying under imputation of tyranny. Whoever receives death without
resistance from his hand or by his order becomes thereby a martyr, and
many of his servants are said to have striven after the honour of such a
death as a secure pledge of eternal happiness. A tyrannical power such as
this as a rule naturally strikes those only who stand near the throne. The
members of his own family, the higher officers of state, fall victims to
it. The mass of the people seldom feels such direct effects of their
despot. Here the principle holds, the higher the dignity, the more perfect
the confidence, the greater the danger. The grand visiers, the other
selves of the sultans in temporal matters have experienced this. A hundred
and eighty statesmen have held this highest office of the kingdom from
1370 to 1789: most of them therefore scarcely more than two years. Many
have been executed after a short time. One of the most esteemed Mohammedan
princes, Soliman the Magnificent, executed during his government, one
after the other, most of the men on whose shoulders he had laid the most
important works and the highest offices of his kingdom. An instinct of
obedience, an inclination to unconditional absolute subjection under
absolute authority prevails among Mohammedans, to which the utmost cruelty
appears endurable, the utmost perversity natural.

It must be added that the Sultan of Morocco unites the spiritual, and the
temporal power, as sheriff, that is descendant of the prophet through
Hosein and Ali. He is a despot as absolute as the king of Persia. All
depends upon his will. He makes, alters, suppresses, and restores laws. He
changes them according to his humour, convenience, or interests. Here
there is no body of Ulema, no Mufti clothed with an authority independent
of the sovereign, no divan, colleges, or ministerial departments. All
follows the single command of the ruler.

The nature of the supreme authority in these three Moslem empires speaks
at the present day of its origin in the person of Mohammed.

What we see is this. The misuse of Cæsarean power in applying to the
Church of God, which from the beginning by divine order was independent, a
supremacy in spiritual things not belonging to the civil ruler, is allowed
by Divine Providence to call forth a far more terrible despotism, in the
guise of a false prophet who invents a religion of which he is to be the
apostle, and then claims all power, spiritual and temporal, as belonging
to him in the character of apostle, and the use of force as the means of
propagation. That despotism is allowed to seize for permanent occupation
the richest provinces of the eastern empire, and to make its capital in
fear of perpetual subjection. But it is also used to check the imperial
usurpation over the Church, and to begin an era, now lasting for twelve
centuries and a half, in which two religions, and two forms of government
springing from these religions, stand over against each other in perpetual
and irreconcilable opposition.

The structure of the Church was vehemently shaken by the earthquake(110)
which attended the pouring out of Islam upon the south-eastern and
southern countries of the former Roman empire. It had to be seen whether
the whole fabric would maintain itself upon its foundation of rock when
such mighty portions of its structure were torn by main force away. Moslem
writers say, when the locust swarm darkened vast countries, they bore on
their wings these Arabic words:—“We are God’s host, each of us has nine
and ninety eggs; and if we had a hundred we should lay waste the world
with all that is in it”.

The hundredth egg has never been granted, but if the assassin’s stroke had
not carried off Chalif Omar in 644, and again Chalif Osman in the year
656, and again Chalif Ali in the year 661, perhaps the desolation might
have been fully accomplished; as also if the chalifate, created by
election in 632, had not become within thirty years a mere hereditary
kingdom, in which rival pretenders and rival families exhausted the
strength of Islam by perpetual conflicts. The empire of the sword has also
illustrated the divine decree: “All that take the sword shall perish with
the sword”.





CHAPTER V. OLD ROME AND NEW ROME.


The seizure of Pope St. Martin in his Lateran Church by the exarch of
Ravenna, Kalliopas, under order from the Emperor Constans II., his secret
deportation to Constantinople, his trial before the Senate as guilty of
high treason, his condemnation to death, and subsequent death in the
Crimea from hardship or starvation, with the election of Pope Eugenius
during his lifetime by the Roman clergy through dread of a Monothelite
being forced upon them by the Byzantine; all this marks probably the
lowest point of civil depression and helplessness to which the Papacy was
ever reduced in those momentous three centuries which run from Genseric to
Aistulf, from 455 to 755. The emperor who committed acts so mean,
perfidious, and cruel was reigning over an empire already cut in two by
the sword of Mohammed’s chalif. How little he had heeded the chastisement
we learn from an incident in the trial of the great eastern confessor, St.
Maximus, which I have already recorded, but to which I recur that I may
exhibit the full insolence of the eastern despot, as well as his
blindness. Theodosius, the consul, coming straight out from the emperor’s
cabinet, with the condemnation of Maximus in his hand, addressed him in
these words:(111) “Learn, Sir Abbot, that when we get a little relief from
this rout of heathens (that is, of the Saracens who had stripped Constans
of Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North Africa as far as Kairowan), by the
Holy Trinity we will bring you to terms, and your Pope, who is now lifted
up, and all the talkers there, and the rest of your disciples; and we will
_cook_ you all, each in his own place, as Martin has been cooked”.

These words were spoken on the 14th December, 656.(112) The Pope Eugenius
was the Pope alluded to in them, and it is inferred from them that he
rejected those terms of union which the emperor was seeking to impose and
which the nuntios were willing to accept. The martyrdom of St. Martin had
taken place on the 16th September of the preceding year, 655.

It was the providence of God that the chalif himself never allowed the
sworn protector of the Church who sat on the eastern throne to execute
this threat. Rather he was all through this century in dread lest the
Mohammedan, having fixed his throne at Damascus, should advance it to
Constantinople. It was again the providence of God that Constantinople
itself should not fall during this time of its utmost weakness, and so
open the whole of northern Europe to Mohammedan domination. The city of
Constantine was then the material rampart which stopped the impetuous
current of Saracen invasion to the north. The chalif Muawiah, who reigned
over the immense Saracen empire from 661 to 680, was strong enough
continually to beat the Emperor, to ravage his Asiatic territory, to
advance towards his capital, but he was never able to take it. The advance
of the seat of the Saracenic empire from the remote Medina to the near and
beautiful Damascus, the paradise of eastern cities, dwelling in its
perpetual garden among ever-flowing waters of Abana and Pharpar, was
itself a sign how the empire had fallen. A religion founded on the denial
of the Christian faith, of which it was, moreover, the special rival, had
full possession of the once Roman and Christian East. Muawiah became
chalif on the death of Ali in 661. He had conducted the civil war against
Ali, which distracted for five years the Saracen power, with the forces of
Syria, as its governor; and when he became supreme made it the capital of
his empire.

Constans II., having crowned with martyrdom the greatest confessor of the
West, Pope Martin, and the greatest confessor of the East, St. Maximus,
resolved in the year 662, to visit the West. The tyranny of Constans in
regard to the Pope was not completed even by his treatment of St Martin.
When he had condemned this Pope, but before he had caused his death he is
supposed to have compelled the Roman clergy to elect another Pope. This
was Eugenius, who was recognised in the year 654 for Pope, while St.
Martin was yet alive.(113) Whether the urgency and threats of the imperial
ministers overcame at length the constancy of the clergy, or whether, as
is more probable, they feared to see some heretic sent by the emperor to
occupy the throne of St. Peter, they elected Eugenius, by birth a Roman, a
person of great goodness and holy life, who held the See two years and
eight months. The synodical letter of Peter, the fourth Monothelite
patriarch of Constantinople in succession was sent to him, but being
obscure in its expressions about our Lord, was sent back with
indignity.(114) It would seem that the exceeding danger of the time caused
the election and consecration of Pope Eugenius in the lifetime of St.
Martin, to pass for legitimate. Eugenius died in 657, and was succeeded by
Pope Vitalian, after a vacancy of a month and 29 days.

Pope Eugenius had not acknowledged either of the patriarchs Paulus or
Peter by writing to them, but Vitalian sent his nuntios to Constans to
announce his accession to the papacy by his synodical letter. Constans
received them graciously, acknowledged the privileges of the Roman Church,
and sent by them to St. Peter at Rome a copy of the gospels bound in
golden covers and studded with diamonds. Vitalian, says Anastasius,
preserved in all respects the ecclesiastical rule and vigour.

Constans had a brother named Theodosius, whom he forced to become a
deacon, and he had repeatedly received from his hands the chalice of the
Lord’s Blood. Afterwards he caused him to be murdered. He was said to have
often dreamt of his victim, offering him a chalice full of blood, with the
words: “Brother, drink”. The stings of conscience and the hatred of the
people for his cruelty and his protection of heresy, were supposed to
drive him from his capital.

The book of the Popes under its notice of the life of Vitalian says:(115)
“In his time the emperor came from the royal city by coast to Athens,
thence to Tarentum, Beneventum, and Naples. At Rome he arrived on the 5th
July. The Apostolical went out with his clergy to the sixth milestone from
the city to receive him. The same day the emperor went to pray at St.
Peter’s, and offered his gift. On Saturday he went to St. Mary’s and also
offered his gift. On Sunday he went in procession with his army to St.
Peter’s. All went out with wax candles to meet him, and he offered on the
altar a golden woven pall, and Mass was celebrated. Again on Saturday the
emperor came to the Lateran, took a bath, and dined in the Julian
basilica. On Sunday there was a station at St. Peter’s, and after
celebration of Mass the emperor and the pontiff took leave of each other.
Twelve days he remained in the Roman city. Every bronze statue which
ornamented the city he took down, nay, and he unroofed of its brazen tiles
the Church of Blessed Mary at the Martyrs, and sent all things which he
had taken to the royal city. Then on Monday he left Rome and returned to
Naples. Then he went by land to Rhegium and entered Sicily. He lived in
the city of Syracuse, and caused much affliction to the people, the
inhabitants or proprietors of Calabria, Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia, by
his exactions during many years such as had never been.(116) He separated
even wives from their husbands, and sons from their fathers, and they
suffered many other unheard of things, so that a man had not hope of life.
They took even the sacred vessels and ornaments of God’s holy churches,
and left nothing.”

The visit of Constans to Rome casts a strong light upon the condition of
things in a century concerning which we are singularly destitute of
detailed information.

When Constans landed with a certain force at Tarentum, he found the
Lombards in possession of the duchy of Beneventum. A legend said that
their king Autharis after a bold march through the Peninsula to the
Straits of Messina, had spurred his horse into the sea and exclaimed,
“This shall be the Lombard boundary”. But his successors had never made
good the words of Autharis. Naples and Amalfi, Sorrentum, Gaeta, and
Tarentum had imperial governors. Alboin however made a duchy of Beneventum
which then included the ancient Samnium and Apulia, and portions of
Campania and Lucania. It was a stronghold of Lombard robbers in southern
Italy. Constans tried to expel the young duke Romuald. But he failed, and
hearing that King Grimoald was approaching to aid his son, he went to
Naples, left at Formiæ, the present Mola di Gaeta, 20,000 men, and marched
on Rome by the Appian Way.

Pope Vitalian went out to meet him as legitimate Roman emperor. It was
true that ten years before he had seized Pope St. Martin in his church,
and carried him off by stealth to trial, suffering, and ultimate martyrdom
in the Crimea. It was true likewise that while holding St. Martin in
prison, he had repeated the evil deed committed by Justinian’s empress
Theodora, a hundred and sixteen years before, and compelled the Roman
clergy under threat of worse things to elect a new Pope while the Pope was
living, though in this case the elected was himself blameless and
excellent. It is true, also, that later still he had treated the great
confessor Maximus with equal cruelty. But these crimes did not prevent his
being the actual emperor to whom loyal submission was due from the great
throne of justice in the earth. It would seem also by the mode in which
Constans had received the nuntios who bore Pope Vitalian’s synodical
letter, announcing his accession, and by the superb present which he sent
back in acknowledgement, that somehow a better spirit prevailed at the
moment towards the Pope. We are met indeed by the fact that the
Monothelite patriarch Peter held the see of Constantinople for twelve
years from the death of the re-established Pyrrhus in 654, to his own
death in 666, being the fourth heretic in succession from Sergius in the
see of the royal city. Constans approached Rome at the head of an army. He
made his offerings as emperor to the three great churches of Rome, the
Lateran, St. Peter’s and St. Mary Major. The Pope was completely at his
mercy. He lodged in the imperial palace on the Palatine, which, however
great its desolation, was able at least to receive him. In his twelve days
sojourn he laid his hands upon every bronze statue which he thought worth
plundering: and he stripped of its costly roof the church which his
predecessor sixty years before had given to the Pope, dedicated to the
Mother of God and all Martyrs.

Such a visit accompanied by such acts give a lively picture of the regard
entertained by a Byzantine emperor for the city which gave him his title.
It sums up the hundred and ten years of abject servitude into which all
Italy had fallen since the capture of the city by Narses under Justinian.
We have the contemptuous despot, the long-suffering Pope, the half-ruined
powerless city. Three hundred and six years had passed since the
degenerate son of Constantine, when he came to Rome in 357, was amazed at
the beauty of its great buildings, the forum of Trajan, the theatre of
Pompey, the unequalled Flavian amphitheatre. But in Constans the memories
of Rome were dead: he robbed the last relic of its grandeur, Agrippa’s
pantheon, nor was he ready to reverence the protection of the Blessed
Virgin over the Church dedicated to her by the Pope on receiving it as the
gift of a preceding emperor. These last spoils he had embarked for his
royal city, but they were detained at Syracuse, and on its capture shortly
afterwards by the Saracens fell into their hands.

But before this event the life and misdeeds of the emperor Constans II.
had come to a sudden end. He was living in Ortygia, the sole remaining
quarter of that once princely city, wherein Achradyna, Tyche, Neapolis,
and Epipolæ lay desolate. He had entered his bath one day, and received in
it a blow on his head by his attendant, whether a slave, or a conspirator.
His courtiers when they at length came in found him dead. The Greek
chronologist Theophanes alleges as a reason for this event that after his
murder of his brother he became greatly hated at Constantinople, both for
his persecution of Pope Martin and Maximus, “that most wise confessor,
whose tongue he cut out, and whose hands he cut off, and condemned many of
the orthodox with tortures, banishments, and confiscations, because they
would not submit to his heresy”. In his dread he had wished to transfer
his residence to the West, but this his counsellors prevented. His
treatment of the Sicilians was so bad that some in despair went to settle
at Damascus, though it had become the capital of the chalif.

So lived and so died the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., “Roman
emperor and Christian prince”(117) from 642 to 668, in the times when the
chalifs of Mohammed, Omar, Osman, Ali, and Muawiah carved the Saracen
realm out of the empire which Heraclius had possessed, and out of the
kingdom of the “Great King,” whom Heraclius, when bearing the standard of
the cross had brought low. If Heraclius treated Syria and Egypt as
Constans treated Rome and Italy, is not the wonder diminished that in the
ten years of Omar the structure of Roman power which had lasted seven
centuries was overthrown, and those provinces had received a Mohammedan
instead of a Byzantine master? Muawiah at Damascus cherished the Syria
which at Antioch the lord on the Bosphorus had ground down with taxes. The
Rome also which Constans, when he had been welcomed as its emperor, left
stripped of its last ornaments was regarded with veneration by the
farthest isle of the West, which it was winning at once to civilised and
to Christian life. An English authority tells us that five years after the
visit of Constans, Pope Vitalian, in the twelfth year of his pontificate,
on the 26th March, 668, consecrated a monk of Tarsus, then living at Rome,
learned both in secular and divine literature, speaking both Greek and
Latin, of holy life, and venerable in age, being sixty-six years old. Thus
Theodore was sent to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He was received in his
passage through France by the Archbishop of Arles, and the bishop of
Paris. He reached his see in the following year, 669, and sat in it full
twenty-one years.(118) St. Bede’s account of him says that he went over
the whole island, wheresoever there were English, was received by all most
cordially, and obeyed, when he gave them a right order of life, and the
canonical celebration of Easter, which he spread abroad. St. Bede adds
that he was the first among the archbishops whom the whole Church of the
English consented to obey. His friend Adrian, who had recommended him to
the Pope, and accompanied him from Rome, attended him in England: they had
a large number of disciples, whom they instructed not only in theology,
but in music, astronomy, and arithmetic. St. Bede wrote forty years after
the death of Theodore, and says, “Even at this day there survive persons
taught by them, who know the Greek and Latin languages as well as their
own. Nor from the time the English came to Britain were there ever happier
times, since, possessing kings most valiant and at the same time
Christian, they were a terror to all barbarous nations; and the vows of
all men tended to the joys of the heavenly kingdom but newly revealed to
them; and all who wished to be instructed in the sacred lessons had
masters ready to teach them.”

Constans was succeeded by his son Constantine IV. after he had put down in
Sicily a short-lived rebellion. He did not imitate his father’s violent
deeds: he did not wish to maintain by force the Typus, which was still in
legal existence. Pope Vitalian had done him service in his struggle with
the usurper, and made use of his favourable sentiments to proceed with
more decision against the Monothelites.

The Monothelite patriarch Peter had died in 666, two years before
Constans. The three following patriarchs, Thomas II., John V., and
Constantine, inclined to orthodoxy. They occupied together only nine
years, from 667 to 676. The Sixth Council left their names in the
diptychs. Yet so great was the power which the Monothelites possessed in
the capital that Constantine Pogonatus, though not a Monothelite, and much
wishing to be reconciled with the Roman Church, thought it dangerous at
the beginning of his government to alter the state of things; and the
Typus, as law imposed by the State, was not abrogated. The next patriarch,
Theodore, in 670 was again Monothelite, and he was, though moderate
himself, induced by Makarius, patriarch of Antioch, to erase from the
diptychs the names of all the Popes since Honorius.

Pope Vitalian, after an admirable pontificate of fourteen years and a
half, had died in 672, and was succeeded by the Roman, Adeodatus, who sat
four years, and he by Pope Donus, also a Roman, in 676. Donus died in 678,
and was followed by Agatho, a Sicilian of Palermo.

During seven years, which end in 678, the Emperor Constantine was fighting
a battle of life or death with the Saracen chalif Muawiah for
Constantinople itself. Every year during several months the Saracen fleet
was in the waters of the Bosphorus. They had taken the city of Cyzikus and
wintered there, renewing the contest in the spring. During seven years
they continued to do this. Had they taken the city the whole Christian
empire in the East would have fallen. It is hard to limit the ruin which
would have ensued to the Christian Church. But in weighing the events of
this century the extreme peril in which the Church lay through the furious
outburst of the Saracens should not be forgotten. On this occasion the
Greek fire is said to have been first used. By it, as water would not
extinguish it, many ships and their crews were destroyed. After this
conflict of seven years, the Saracens having lost a great multitude of
men, at last retired, owning that they were defeated. Their fleet in
retiring met with a great tempest, and in a battle also which took place
with three imperial commanders the Saracens lost 30,000 men. Muawiah, the
chalif, treated for peace with the emperor, and it was concluded on
glorious terms for the empire. This victory led the northern Avars also to
treat the emperor with deference.(119)

Thus the emperor was enabled to execute his wish for the restoration of
communion with the West. He addressed a letter to Pope Donus on the 12th
August, 678, requesting him to send commissioners to Constantinople to
make arrangements for a Council to be held there. Pope Donus had died in
678 and this letter was received by his successor, Agatho. He desired the
whole West on this occasion to be called to council, and for that purpose
caused particular synods to be held everywhere. During this year Theodore,
the patriarch of Constantinople, was deposed, it is not known on what
grounds, but he was indisposed to union with the West. In his stead George
was chosen, who at first was on the Monothelite side, but, instructed by
the testimonies of the Fathers and the synods at Rome, which were read in
the Sixth Council, he attached himself strongly to the orthodox.

Pope Agatho, waiting for many bishops, among them English, to come to
Rome, only held in March, 680, his synod of 125 bishops in preparation for
the Council to be held in Constantinople, and to name legates to attend
it. This was a great Council of the western patriarchate, which had been
preceded by smaller Councils in the several provinces, as, for instance,
Milan. Agatho and the council sent two letters to the emperor, which
developed the creed of the Church according to the Lateran Council of 649,
and signified its acceptance as necessary to all believers. The priests
Theodore and George, the deacon John, and the sub-deacon Constantine were
appointed legates for the Roman Church; the Bishops Abundantius of
Paterno, John of Porto, and John of Reggio as deputies for the Council;
and the priest Theodore to represent Ravenna. Agatho described these
commissioners, not as learned theologians, for the confusion of the times
made such very rare. His words run, “How can perfect knowledge of the
Scriptures be found in men who live in the midst of heathens and get their
support by manual labour with the greatest difficulty? but we maintain
whatever has been defined by our apostolic predecessors and the Five
Councils in simplicity of heart as the unambiguous faith descending from
our fathers”.(120)

Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, had been invited by the Pope to attend
his Council at Rome, but was unable to come. In the preceding year, 679,
St. Wilfrid, Bishop of York, was heard at the Lateran on his appeal in a
Council of 16 bishops and restored to his see.(121)

The legates were honourably received in the capital and lodged in the
Placidia Palace. After their arrival on the 10th September, 680, the
emperor invited the patriarch George, of Constantinople, and through him
Makarius, of Antioch, to call to council the metropolitans subject to
them. At first the court had not thought of the sees of Alexandria and
Jerusalem, which were under Saracen domination. But before the Council
entered on deliberation two regular priests, Peter and George, were found,
the first to represent Alexandria, the last to stand in the place of
Theodore, vicar of the patriarchate of Jerusalem. It would seem that it
was as well through this representation of the other sees, as also because
of what Pope Agatho had done, that the Council which now met, though it
had not been the original purpose of the emperor, from its beginning was
marked as ecumenical, and afterwards took rank as the Sixth of these with
the Five preceding.

The Council was held from the 7th November, 680, to the 16th September,
681, in the hall called the Dome of the Imperial Palace, under the
presidency of the papal legates and the imperial presidency of honour. The
Emperor, with many officers of State, was present at the first eleven
sessions, and with them directed the external order of business; but both
he and they were carefully distinguished from the members of the Council,
whose numbers did not at first reach a hundred, but afterwards rose to
174.

In the first session, the 7th September, the Roman deputies, in an address
to the emperor, desired that those who represented the Byzantine Church
would declare the origin of the innovation which had existed in it for
more than forty years. Macarius and his associates appealed to the earlier
General Councils and to the Fathers. Thereupon the acts of the Council of
Ephesus were read. There was found in them nothing in favour of the
Monothelites, for the words of Cyril, that the will of Christ was
almighty, could only be referred to His divine nature. In the second
session, on the 10th November, the acts of the Council of Chalcedon were
read, which were entirely unfavourable to the heresy. Macarius in vain
attempted to insist on the words “theandric operation” without determining
their meaning. On the reading the acts of the Fifth Council, at the third
sitting, the 13th November, the writing of Mennas to Vigilius and two
alleged letters of the latter were admitted to be spurious. The
Monothelites could show nothing for themselves out of the General
Councils. They had now to seek proof from the writings of the Fathers.
They begged for time, and, on the proposition of George of Constantinople,
the letters of Agatho and the Roman Council were ordered to be read, which
occupied the fourth session, on the 15th November. In the fifth and sixth
sessions, of the 7th December, 680, and the 12th February, 681, Macarius
proposed passages from the writings of Fathers in behalf of his doctrine,
but it was shown that they were mostly falsified or imperfectly quoted or
indecisive. At the seventh session, 13th February, 681, the Roman
collection of passages from the Fathers in support of the doctrine of Two
Wills and Two Operations was read against the others. George and Macarius
received copies of them. While Macarius remained obstinate, George was
convinced of the correctness of the doctrine set forth in the papal
letters, and on the 17th February he gave in a confession to the Roman
legates in which the Two Wills and the Two Operations were expressly
acknowledged. When, then, the emperor at the eighth session, on the 7th
March, questioned the bishops on their accession to the letters of Agatho,
not only George of Constantinople admitted this, who requested and
obtained from the emperor the reinsertion of Pope Vitalian into the
diptychs of his Church, but also Theodore of Ephesus, Sisinnius of
Heraklea, Domitius of Prusias, and other bishops, mostly in the
jurisdiction of Byzantium, five also from that of Antioch. On the
contrary, Macarius put in a confession directed against “the godless
heresy” of Maximus. The examination of the patristic passages put in by
him began, which was continued in the following session of March 8,
wherein Macarius took no more part. He and his pupil Stephen were deposed
as falsifiers of the faith and teachers of error. At the tenth session,
the 18th March, the testimonies put in by the Roman legates were, after
collation with the manuscripts of the patriarchal archives, found correct,
and a confession agreeing with the declaration of Agatho was delivered by
Theodore, Bishop of Melitene, and others. As the close of the eleventh
session, the 20th March, in which at the instance of the representative
from Jerusalem, the letter of St. Sophronius to Sergius, and, at the
instance of the Roman legates, four passages of Macarius and his pupil
Stephen were read, the emperor announced that as he was prevented from
further attendance at the sessions by state business, four officials of
rank would henceforth represent him. But, besides, the chief matter was
already settled. Old and New Rome were again united in belief.

At the twelfth sitting on the 22nd March a number of writings were read
which Macarius had transmitted to the emperor, but the emperor sent on to
the Council unread. Among them were contained the letters of Sergius to
Cyrus and Honorius, and the answer of the latter. These documents were
collated with the manuscripts of the patriarchal archive, and found to
agree. Thereupon in the thirteenth session, on the 28th March,
condemnation was passed upon the heads and favourers of Monothelitism, on
Theodore of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, Peter of
Constantinople (the three patriarchs next following, of whom nothing
heretical was found, were spared), as likewise upon “Honorius of Rome, who
followed Sergius and confirmed his teaching”. The synodal letter of
Sophronius was acknowledged as orthodox. In the fourteenth session, on the
5th April, at which also the newly-elected Catholic patriarch of Antioch,
Theophanes, was present, the falsifications in the Fifth Council, the
writing ascribed to Mennas and the two suppositious letters of Vigilius,
were laid under anathema. On the octave of Easter, the 14th April, John,
bishop of Porto, celebrated Mass in the emperor’s presence at Sancta
Sophia according to the Latin rite. The monk and priest Polychronius, who
already in the fourteenth session had been accused by Domitius, bishop of
Prusias, as a deceiver of the people, was brought before the Council at
its fifteenth session on the 26th April. He desired in confirmation of the
Monothelite doctrine to raise up a dead man. He was allowed to try in
order to undeceive the people. He laid his confession of faith upon a dead
body which was brought in, and whispered for two hours long into his ears,
of course without effect. As he was not shaken in his attachment to the
heresy, he was deprived of his rank as priest, and excommunicated. In the
sixteenth session, which was held, after a long interval, on the 9th
August, a Syrian priest, Constantine of Apamea, wished to get the doctrine
recognised that there were in Christ two operations belonging to the
Natures, but only one personal Will of the Word: that besides this Christ
had once indeed also a natural human Will, but that He laid aside this at
the crucifixion together with flesh and blood. The Council condemned this
doctrine as savouring of Manichean and Apollinarian heresy, issued
anathema against those whom it condemned, and resolved to publish a
confession of faith, which was considered at the seventeenth session of
the 11th September, and solemnly proclaimed at the closing session on the
16th September, in presence of the emperor. In this, after agreement
declared with the five preceding General Councils, it was proclaimed that
there are to be received in Christ Two Natural Operations and Two Natural
Wills undivided, inseparable, unchangeable, and unmixed, which are not
contrary to each other, since the human will follows the divine and is
subject to it, is indeed deified and exalted, but not removed or
extinguished. Neither of the Two Natures can be without operation or
without will. The Council thanked the emperor in a special address for his
labours to bring about the peace of the Church, requested that five
accredited copies of the decree of faith should be provided for the five
patriarchal sees, and in a special letter to the Pope besought the
confirmation of their decrees by him.(122) Besides this very brief summary
of the eighteen sessions of the Sixth Council, it is requisite to take
notice of certain documents which were either presented to the Council by
the legates, as their commission from the Pope, or proceeded from the
Council or the emperor at its conclusion.

Pope Agatho had committed to his legates a long letter to the emperor. One
passage from it may shew how plainly he set forth the authority of the
Apostolic See and its inerrancy in matters of faith. He lays down the
doctrine which opposes the Monothelite heresy, not as a matter for
discussion, but as absolutely determined. “St. Peter,” he says, “received
the charge to feed the spiritual sheep of the Church by a triple
commendation from the Redeemer of all Himself. By his help this
apostolical Church of his never turned aside from the way of truth to any
error. The whole Catholic Church and General Councils followed in all
things his authority as that of the chief of the apostles. This is the
true rule of faith, which in prosperity and adversity the spiritual mother
of your empire, the Apostolic Church of Christ, has kept unswervingly,
which, by the grace of Almighty God, will be proved never to have erred
from the path of apostolic tradition. It has never yielded to the
corruption of heretical novelties, but as from the beginning of the
Christian faith it has received from its authors the chief apostles, it
has continued spotless according to the divine promise of the Lord our
Saviour Himself, which He spoke to the chief of His disciples in the
gospel: ‘Peter, behold Satan has sought to sift you, but I have prayed for
thee,’ etc. Let your clemency consider how the Lord and Saviour of all,
whose the faith is, who promised that the faith of Peter should not fail,
charged him to confirm his brethren, which it is known to all that the
apostolic pontiffs, my predecessors, have ever confidently done.”

A more peremptory assertion cannot be made than this, and it is made by a
Pope to an emperor, on the occasion of calling a General Council. It is
carried by his legates, as ambassadors carry the commission of their
sovereign. The answer(123) which the Council sent at its conclusion to the
Pope shows how it was received. It ascribes to the Pope in fullest terms
the position which he claimed, beginning in these words: “Greatest
diseases require the greatest remedies, as you, most Blessed, know; and
therefore Christ our God, whose power created, whose wisdom provides all
things, has appointed your Holiness as a skilled physician to meet the
contagion of heresy by the force of true belief, and to impart the vigour
of health to the members of the Church. We then, having read through the
letters of a true confession sent by your paternal Blessedness to the most
gracious emperor, leave to you what is to be done; to you who hold the
first see of the universal Church, standing on the firm rock of faith. We
recognise your letters as written from the supreme head of the apostles.
By them we have cast out the heretical sect which has lately set up its
manifold error. According to the sentence previously passed upon them, we
have cast out Theodore, bishop of Pharan, Sergius, Honorius, Cyrus, Paul,
Pyrrhus, and Peter. We have sent what we have done, and these things will
be learned from those who represented you, Theodore and George, priests;
John, deacon; and Constantine, sub-deacon. They state accurately the
doctrine which they have approved, which we beseech your paternal Holiness
to set your seal upon by your honoured rescript.”

Is it possible to accept in more express terms the authority claimed by
the Pope in his letter to the emperor, including that descent from Peter,
to whom the promise made by our Lord is made the source and the guarantee
of the authority? Is it possible more fully to acknowledge his right to
confirm, in their own words, “to set his seal” on their proceedings?

But the Council also congratulated the emperor on the work over which as
sovereign he had presided. Its success they attribute to the Pope in these
words: “The highest of all,(124) the first apostle fought with us; for we
had for our supporter, who by his writing set forth the mystery of
theology, his imitator and the successor of his chair. The city of Rome
the elder presented to you a confession dictated by God, and caused the
daylight of belief to rise from the West. Paper and ink it seemed, but
Peter spoke by Agatho.”

This address is signed first by the three legates, Theodore, George and
John, “holding the place of most Blessed Agatho, universal Pope of the
City of Rome,” next by “George, by the mercy of God bishop of
Constantinople, New Rome”—thirdly by Peter, a priest, holding the place of
the Apostolic See of Alexandria; fourthly by Theophanes,(125) by the mercy
of God bishop of Antioch, Theopolis; fifthly by George, the priest,
representing Theodore, not bishop but representing the See of Jerusalem.

Thus these two patriarchates could only shew two priests to record their
agreement.

The emperor issued an edict(126) in which he set forth a most carefully
drawn creed. He also addressed a letter(127) to Pope Leo, who had
succeeded Agatho. He mentions how the legates of the Pope had been
received, how every authority of Scripture and the preceding Councils had
been carefully examined; “moreover we beheld as it were with the eyes of
our mind the chief of the apostolic choir, the Peter of the first see,
setting forth the mystery of the whole dispensation, and addressing us in
the words of Christ: Thou art Christ the Son of the living God. For his
sacred letter portrayed to us the whole Christ, which we joyfully and
sincerely received and folded him in our arms as Peter himself. God has
done glorious things and preserved to us the faith entire. How should He
not in that rock in which He founded the Church Himself, and foretold that
the gates of hell, the snares of heretics, should not prevail against it?
Act therefore as a man and be firm, gird thyself with the sword of the
word, and sharpen it with divine zeal. Be the firm champion of the right
faith; study to cut short every heretical talk or attempt as of old Peter
struck off with the sword the sense of Jewish hearing, prefiguring the
deafness of the legal and servile synagogue. The condition of the whole
Roman polity is tranquillised with the tranquillity of the faith. We
exhort therefore your most sacred headship(128) to send at once your
nuntio to our royal city, that he may dwell here and in all emergent
matters, dogmatic, canonical, or simply ecclesiastical may express the
person of your Holiness.

“Farewell in the Lord, most blessed, and pray the more earnestly for our
realm.”

We have, therefore, on this great occasion a complete concurrence of three
authorities; of the Pope in addressing an eastern emperor in prospect of a
General Council, of that Council itself answering this address of the
Pope; of the emperor in his letter to the Pope by his legates returning to
him from the Council; and it is to be noted that the Pope does not assert
the nature of his authority as descending by a divine grant to Peter and
exercised in virtue of it during six centuries with any greater emphasis
than the emperor and the Council acknowledge it.

In the meantime Pope Agatho had died on the 10th January, 681. The see
remained vacant eighteen months, during which the Council ended. Leo II.
was consecrated the 17th August, 682, and his short pontificate ended the
3rd July, 683. To him the letter of the emperor was carried, and he
discharged the office of confirming this Council, as St. Leo had confirmed
that of Chalcedon, and of bringing it to the knowledge of the West.

The letter to the emperor, in which Leo II. confirms the Sixth Council, is
a document extending over nearly six folio columns.(129) It shows
throughout the Pope’s great anxiety for the exact maintenance of the
faith, and how severe had been the struggle with the heresy which had been
upheld by two emperors and by four successive patriarchs of the imperial
city. The Pope draws out in it a creed of the utmost minuteness in regard
of the contested doctrine, the Person of our Lord in His Two Natures. He
repeats his acknowledgment of the Five preceding General Councils as
handing down one continuous doctrine from the beginning, and joins with
them the Council just held as witness of the same doctrine; and he
likewise joins the heretics during several hundred years from Arius, in
one anathema, which closes with the inventors of this new error—that is,
“Theodore, Bishop of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul,
and Peter, who lurked like thieves in the See of Constantinople rather
than sat as guides;(130) nay, and also Honorius, who did not set himself
to hallow this Apostolic Church by the teaching of the apostolic
tradition, but allowed it, being spotless, to be stained by a profane
betrayal”. These words, by which St. Leo expressed how far he assented to
the condemnation of Honorius by the Council, have a light thrown upon them
by the words which he used in making known the condemnation of the
Monothelites to the Spanish bishops, when among the condemned he included
Honorius, “who did not extinguish the flame of heretical doctrine when it
first arose, as was the office of the apostolic authority, but by
neglecting fostered it”.(131) And, again, in announcing the confirmation
of the Council to the Spanish king, Erwig, he says of Honorius, “who
allowed the spotless rule of the apostolic tradition, which he had
received from his predecessors, to be stained”.(132)

It may be noted that St. Leo II. does not enter into the matter contained
in the letters of Honorius; does not express agreement with words which
passed in the Council that “they were opposed to apostolic belief, to the
declarations of Councils, and of all the approved fathers,” that “they
agreed with the false doctrines of heretics”; he does not repeat the
reproach that Honorius, by proof of his letter to Sergius, agreed in all
respects with his meaning, and confirmed his godless doctrines. “Be it
sufficient for us to know that if the name of Pope Honorius appeared in
those sentences it certainly was not because he really taught or held the
Monothelite heresy, but solely because with too great allowance he did not
rebuke it, nor set himself to strangle it at its beginning, insomuch as
undoubtedly that manner of action had given great encouragement to the
favourers of those errors.”(133) I quote two further judgments of the
present day, that “the letters of Honorius contain nothing heretical,” and
that “in fact no error of faith whatever is found in those letters of
Honorius”.(134) The anathema which lies on the memory of Honorius, who
lived in renown and was buried in honour in St. Peter’s, is a warning
given by the Holy See itself to everyone who sits in that chair to weigh
well both words and conduct, and guard both from the slightest negligence
in matters of doctrine. Honorius died before the Exposition of Sergius was
published or presented for his acceptance. Had he lived to judge of it
those who study the history of the time succeeding down to the Sixth
Council cannot doubt that he would have censured it as his successors
censured it.

The Sixth Council closes a crisis of danger to the faith of the Church
than which no greater is to be found in all history. The years from 638,
in which Honorius died, to 682, in which his successor St. Leo II.
approved the doctrinal decision of the Council, and further, allowed the
conduct of a predecessor to be condemned, are occupied by ten successors
of Honorius, every one of whom with the utmost zeal condemned the heresy
which was supported by two emperors, wielding absolute power, and by four
successive patriarchs of Constantinople, besides patriarchs of Alexandria
and Antioch. All these put ecclesiastical authority at the service of
these emperors to carry out their will. Heraclius and Constans II. were
not theologians, and it required theological skill to construct concerning
the Person of our Lord a heresy which could present itself to the
fastidious Greek mind, clothed in proper expressions of a language lending
itself with unsurpassable accuracy to every variation of thought. Cyrus,
made for his first suggestions, by the grateful monarch, patriarch of
Alexandria, was so good as to provide Heraclius with doctrinal decrees
intended to make the disloyal sects of Egypt believe that they could
express their own false doctrine in words which might pass for an assent
to the Council of Chalcedon and the doctrine of St. Leo. When the
patriarch Sophronius denounced the error and appealed to Rome and Pope
Honorius in words which after twelve hundred years sound like a trumpet’s
call, Sergius being patriarch of Constantinople, the bosom friend and most
trusted counsellor of Heraclius, holding the see of the Golden City for
eight and twenty years, living and dying, too, in the greatest renown as
an orthodox bishop, approached Pope Honorius with insidious language,
totally disguising the real state of things in the East. He wished the
Pope to believe that Cyrus of Alexandria was winning the proud and
tumultuous sects of Egypt to Catholic union with the doctrine of St. Leo,
which Honorius held with the utmost fidelity. Not only did he write
letters, but he constructed a document to which he induced the emperor to
set the imperial seal and require it to be signed by all bishops, and
especially by the bishop of Rome. The document was intended to introduce
that heresy formulated by Cyrus, which Sophronius exposed and refuted.
Pope Honorius died in October 638, and never saw this document. Sergius
got it passed by his Council at Constantinople, but died himself in
December of the same year. Pope Severinus was elected to succeed Honorius
before the end of the year 638, but his consecration was delayed by Greek
intrigues for nineteen months, in the hope of obtaining his assent to the
document drawn up by Sergius. This was found to be hopeless. The exarch
then contented himself with plundering the Lateran treasury. Pope
Severinus was at length consecrated, and sat for two months and six days,
in which time however he condemned the Ecthesis. He was succeeded by two
Popes, John IV. and Theodore, who behaved with the same decision and
fortitude. But a new emperor had succeeded, after a frightful revolution,
at twelve years of age; and a new patriarch of Constantinople was ready to
draw up a new document for the heresy. It was met by another Pope, whose
first act was to call a great Council at the Lateran, to condemn the
heresy under anathema, and the two documents, of which the first was
fathered by Heraclius, and the second by Constans II. For this act of
courage St. Martin four years afterwards was stolen from Rome, judged at
Constantinople as a traitor by the senate, and sent a prisoner to die of
famine, as is believed, in the Crimea. The emperor, having Rome in full
possession, used such means that Eugenius was put into the see while St.
Martin was still living as a condemned criminal. But Eugenius could not be
compelled to accept the heresy of the Byzantine monarch and patriarch.
There follow five Popes, Vitalian, Adeodatus, Donus, Agatho, and Leo II.
At length, when Constans had perished miserably in his bath at Syracuse,
his son Constantine broke the line of heretical emperors. But he found in
truth the heresy so embedded in his capital that he was obliged to act
with great caution. After repulsing a Mohammedan attack upon his capital
which lasted seven years, and was overcome only by the aid of the Greek
fire, when if the city had been taken the Greek empire would have ended,
and the patriarch of Constantinople have shared the lot of his brethren at
Alexandria and Antioch, the emperor was enabled to invite Pope Donus to
hold a Council at Constantinople which should terminate this long
struggle. It was a struggle in which the whole West followed the Pope, but
much of the East was in favour of the heresy. Pope Agatho had succeeded
Donus; he accepted the request of the emperor, he had Councils held
through the West, and a full patriarchal Council at Rome. So he appeared
by his legates at Constantinople, and was welcomed with the words, “Peter
has spoken by Agatho,” as 230 years before they cried, “Peter has spoken
by Leo”. But Agatho also died before the Council had finished its work,
and the tenth successor of Honorius, Leo II., during his short pontificate
of ten months, set his seal upon the Council, and endured to censure a
predecessor for neglect of his office, and for allowing by that neglect a
heresy to obtain a temporary success. Ten Popes in succession, one of them
actually martyred, all of them vassals of absolute sovereigns, had during
all this interval of forty years alone prevented the heresy being forced
upon the Church. Four patriarchs of Constantinople in succession had
fostered it; and four were together condemned. They were condemned, not
for negligence in allowing others to spread the heresy, but as its
originators; as advisers and mouthpiece of emperors, all whose power had
been bent by them to extort approval of it from Popes, who in their civil
position were helpless subjects in a “servile” province, but in their
religious character were successors of St. Peter.

Now at the time the western emperor ceased to exist seven Popes succeeding
St. Leo defended his doctrine against two emperors, Zeno and Anastasius,
and foiled all the efforts of Acacius to use the eastern jealousy and the
pride of the royal city, and exalt his see above the control of St.
Peter’s successor, until the seventh Pope, Hormisdas, then a subject of
the Arian Gothic king, Theodorich, compelled the eastern emperor, the
patriarch, the bishops, and the court, to confess his supreme authority,
as successor of St. Peter. Seven Popes then stood neither hesitating nor
fluctuating: over against them in that time stood seven bishops of
Constantinople, one originator of the whole schism, others yielding to the
emperor’s will even against their own wishes. It was a contest of 44 years
with an oriental despotism, waged by Popes the subjects of Arian Goths.
They alone maintained the faith of the Church, as embodied in the decrees
of the Council of Chalcedon, and saved the East.

Now, again, there has been a struggle for 44 years, in which ten Popes,
subjects of the eastern emperor, and liable as such to be summoned by him
to his capital, where one of them was indeed condemned to death, stood
likewise as one man. They dwelt in a Rome no longer recognised as the head
of the empire. Of this whole seventh century the special historian of the
city says that for Rome it was “the most frightful, the most devastating
of all”.(135) Civil power was not in their hands. Their election itself
had to be confirmed by the exarch as representing the emperor, or by the
emperor himself. The first of the ten, Pope Severinus, had to wait
nineteen months for it, after which he sat two months. The last of the
ten, St. Leo II., began to sit eighteen months after the death of his
predecessor, St. Agatho, and then only sat ten months. During the whole of
this period, from the death of Honorius in 638, to the ratification of the
Sixth Council in 682, the yielding of any one of these ten Popes would
have carried with it the subjection of the whole church to the Monothelite
error. They saved the East, they saved the Royal City, the seat of all
power, in spite of its four patriarchs condemned as heretics. That
Heraclius and Constans did not destroy the faith in the seventh century is
as much their work and merit as that Zeno and Anastasius did not destroy
it in the fifth. Perhaps the test which by the force of circumstances was
applied to the Popes from the time Rome was governed from Constantinople
as a captive city in the second half of the sixth and the whole of the
seventh century was even more severe than that applied to them in the
fifth. Their condition was more helpless, inasmuch as the Byzantine
subjection was heavier than the Arian Gothic control, while the pillaged
Italy of the exarchs was wretched, and the prosperous realm of Theodoric
guarded jealously the last remains of imperial grandeur. He at least was a
king in Italian Ravenna and Verona, and Rome was both great and dear to
him. But Justinian and those who followed him were task-masters on the
Bosphorus, who placed a tax-collector at Ravenna to wring out the last
drop of Italy’s blood, and plunder, as occasion served, the treasury of
the Church in the Pope’s Lateran Patriarcheion.

In what consisted the power by which twenty-nine Popes from Pelagius I. in
555, to Gregory II. in 715 bore so fearful a strain? Solely in one thing:
in the belief that the throne of St. Peter had been fixed at Rome, and
that St. Peter had received by a direct gift from Christ, and his
successor had inherited, the charge to feed and govern the universal
Church. The five times captured Rome lived on in this belief, and was
become the city of the Popes. The eye of a conqueror, legislator and
ruler, had chosen with a wisdom which all posterity has acknowledged the
fairest and the strongest of cities for the seat of his power. He made it
a royal residence; he could not make it an apostolic see. When at length
his city fell, the empire fell with it. In the day of its pride it sought
to trample on the elder Rome by the privileges of new Rome. The second of
these attempts was foiled by the ten successors of Pope Honorius.

The danger to the Christian faith in these fifty years which begin, it is
to be noted, at the death of Mohammed and the election of a chalif in his
stead, has been touched upon; but the danger to the empire must not be
dissociated from it. All the tyranny, the extortion, the spiritual
encroachment of the empire could not sever the links which bound it to the
Church. Heraclius had been warned by his former minister Maximus how
perilous to his empire his meddling with the creed would be.(136) “It is
not a time for such things,” he said. “It is a time of blood on account of
our sins, not of theologising; a time of lamentation, a time of imploring
God’s mercy, not of sophistical contradiction, moving Him to greater
indignation.” The Greek(137) chronographer in the ninth century marks the
rise of the Arabian enemy as a scourge of Christian sins. He traces the
whole calamitous series of events to the seduction of Heraclius, by a
certain Athanasius, full of native Syrian guile, whom he promised to make
and did afterwards make patriarch of Antioch: Heraclius was confused by
his use of new terms. He consulted Sergius, and also Cyrus, then bishop of
Phasis. He found the three agree. He followed them. He translated Cyrus
from Phasis to Alexandria. Then Heraclius issued an imperial edict on
doctrine. When Constans had succeeded as emperor another imperial edict on
doctrine, drawn up by another bishop of Constantinople, appeared, which
St. Martin condemned in his Council at Rome. Then the emperor Constans,
full of wrath, carried St. Martin and St. Maximus to Constantinople,
tortured them and banished them to the Chersonese, and punished many of
the western bishops besides. But Agatho, being elected Pope, and moved by
the zeal of God, also summoned a holy Council and put under ban the
Monothelite heresy. Upon all his narrative the conclusion of Theophanes
is: “The Church being thrown into disorder by emperors and impious
bishops, Amalek the child of the desert rose up to scourge us, the people
of Christ. The Roman army met with a great defeat on the Yarmuk. There
followed the capture of Palestine, of Cæsarea, of Jerusalem, then the loss
of Egypt, then the captivity of inland and islands, and all Romania; the
utter destruction of the Roman force in Phœnicia, the dissolution of all
Christian peoples and places, which did not cease till the persecutor of
the Church perished miserably in his bath in Sicily.”

Thus when the Sixth Council met at Constantinople not only had the emperor
Constantine the Bearded declined far from the position held by Justinian,
at the time in which he made Rome a garrison city in a servile province, a
hundred and thirty years before, but his empire was not half so great as
that of his great grandfather Heraclius, after the triumph of the Persian
war. Not only were Syria and Egypt, and all Roman land on the side of
Persia, and northern Africa as far as Kairowan, lost to the empire, but it
had just escaped utter destruction by repelling the fleet of Muawiah after
a conflict of several years from the waters of the Bosphorus. And the
great and abiding difference to the eastern monarch was that he had lost
this vast amount of territory to an enemy who had put the propagation of a
different creed, antagonistic in its first principles to the Christian
faith, into the hands of a single man. That single man, a chalif, wielding
an absolute civil power, appertinent to the prophet’s spiritual authority,
had fixed the seat of his dominion in the heart of Rome’s former domain in
the East. The Mohammedan now moved upon Constantinople from his basis at
Damascus. He had advanced upon Sicily likewise, and had taken Syracuse in
669, and from that time forth southern Italy had to dread his descent upon
its coasts. By his union of spiritual and civil power in his person as
chalif, he had now the whole Saracen force by land and sea at his command.

What were the Avars of the North or the Persians of the East compared to
this new enemy, whose war-cry was, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed
is His prophet”; whose meaning was, “There is no Christ, and no Mother of
God, and no saints and no sacrifice, no kingdom in heaven to be gained by
penance and humility. But there is the reign of a prophet on earth;
receive his successor and you shall be our equals, refuse him and you,
your wives and your children will be the captives of his sword.”

These were the wounds struck by the Monothelite heresy on the Christian
Church and the eastern empire in the first fifty years which ran from the
death of Mohammed.

Constantine IV. died in 685, leaving the throne to his son Justinian II.
He had reigned since the murder of his father in 668, and the whole course
of his reign showed a very favourable contrast with that of Constans II.
But greater still, if possible, was to be the contrast presented to his
government by that of his son, who succeeded at a most immature age, and
showed himself without counsel, self-command, and reason in all that he
did. He was the first of several bad and incapable rulers. His tyranny
deprived him of the throne after ten years. He was deposed with the
Byzantine penalty of an amputated nose. Upon this deposition, in 695, the
following twenty-two years produced seven revolutions, putting the
imperial power into new hands and new families. One of these violent
changes replaced Justinian II., maimed and dishonoured as he was, after a
banishment of ten years. But he had learned no prudence, and the
inhumanity of his last six years in his second reign exceeded that of his
first reign.

In those first ten years from 685 to 695 events happened of importance to
the Church, which also illustrate the spirit dominant at Constantinople.
The condition of the empire required the strictest union with the West. It
was pressed severely by the Mohammedan advance. To meet this effectually
the reconciliation which had taken place at the Sixth Council was needed
to be wisely and temporately maintained. But Justinian II. summoned a
Greek Council to meet in the same hall of his palace, called the Dome, in
which that Council had been held. It passed a number of canons on
discipline, many of which were injurious to the West and only calculated
to increase the mutual estrangement. Inasmuch as the Fifth and Sixth
General Councils had passed no canons of discipline, this Council held in
692 was to complete that omission. It called itself the Quinisext. The
later Greeks even confounded it with the Sixth Council, others contented
themselves with saying that “it was held five or six years after it, and
by nearly the same Fathers”. It issued a hundred and two canons on
discipline. “It seemed as if the bishops of this Council in their disgust
at the undeniable superiority of the Roman Church in matters of faith, in
which its authority had always at last prevailed and determined the issue,
were bent on making good their right of autonomy at least in matters of
discipline, and sought to avenge themselves by disapproving Roman customs
for that superiority burdensome to Greek vanity.”(138) As a matter of fact
these canons had the effect of widening the breach between Latins and
Greeks. It is true that in the eighth century all Greeks did not yet count
them ecumenical, but in the Iconoclast contest they gained great
consideration, and in the ninth century scarcely a Byzantine doubted any
longer that they were ecumenical.(139)

The chief value of this Council now lies in the picture which it presents
to us of the actual state and temper of the eastern Church at that time,
the closing ten years of a century about which we possess so little
detailed information. I am here concerned especially with two things—one,
the position of the emperor as regards both the Pope and the Church; the
other, the position of the patriarch of Constantinople; on both this
Council casts light.

As to the emperor, not only was it convoked(140) by his command and
assembled in a hall of his palace, but its canons were subscribed by the
emperor first with the imperial vermilion, and the second place was left
vacant for the Pope’s signature.(141) Then followed the subscriptions of
Paul of Constantinople, Peter of Alexandria, Anastasius of Jerusalem,
George of Antioch; on the whole, of 211 bishops, or their representatives,
all Greeks and Orientals, including Armenians. It styled itself
ecumenical, and the emperor tried to impose it as such. In its address to
the emperor it said by that it was called(142) by him “to restore to order
the Christian life, and root out the remains of Jewish and heathen
perversity,” while it ended by addressing to him the words, “as thou hast
honoured the Church by convoking us, so also be pleased to confirm what we
have decreed”.

As to the Bishop of Constantinople, this Council said in its 36th canon,
“renewing the decrees of the Second and Fourth General Councils, we decree
that the see of Constantinople enjoy the same prerogatives as that of old
Rome, and in ecclesiastical matters be as great as it, counting as the
second after it. After it comes the see of Alexandria, then that of
Antioch, then that of Jerusalem.”

In order to comprehend what this canon gave to the see of Constantinople,
it is requisite to bear in mind the actual condition of the eastern Church
at the time. We are now at the year 692, that is full fifty years since
the other eastern patriarchates fell under Saracen dominion.(143) They had
become more and more powerless. They depended upon the alms and the
support given to them from Constantinople. In fact at this time the
archbishop of the Grecian capital was the only real patriarch in the
diminished empire. The courtiers of Constantinople, as we have seen thirty
years before in the persecution of St. Maximus, affected to consider the
conquests of the Saracen barbarians as transitory. Since then
Constantinople itself had only been saved by hurling the Greek fire on the
assailing Saracen fleet. A shadow only of their old right remained in the
Saracen provinces of Alexandria and Antioch; they had still their old
names. These were put down for them, if, as is supposed, they were not
present at this council, because there were none at the moment. Four years
later Carthage was taken by the Saracens; within eight years the whole
Roman domination in Africa to the Atlantic was at an end. The empire had
not yet lost everything in the West, for there were still some Byzantine
troops and possessions in Italy. The Pope still acknowledged the emperor
as his sovereign; and to Pope Sergius the emperor Justinian II. sent these
canons, with the request that he would sign them. It is obvious that the
position given in them to the bishop of Constantinople was no longer mere
rank as in the first step taken in this direction by the Council of 381
under the great Theodosius. It was a higher jurisdiction similar in the
East to that which the Pope held in the West. The Byzantine conception, as
shewn in this Council, is clearly that the emperor was head of the Church,
who, as he did it the honour to call it together, so he did it the further
honour to confirm its decrees. Not, as in the case of the first
Constantine, that he should make them laws of the empire, over and above
their intrinsic spiritual force, as canons of those to whom Christ had
committed the government of His Church, but that the emperor’s signature,
in the same way as he created a law in civil matters, made a canon in
spiritual.

So ten years after the emperor Constantine IV. in the Sixth Council and
the Council itself asked from the Pope for the confirmation of its
decrees, his son Justinian II. required the Pope as his subject to accept
as one of five patriarchs, three of whom it may be said were nonentities,
a position of subjection to himself in the spiritual domain. The place
left for the Pope’s signature _after_ that of the emperor and _before_
that of the bishop of Constantinople graphically represents the idea which
Justinian II. was seeking to impose. The Pope was to sign as patriarch and
first of the five, not as the successor of St. Peter, who in virtue of his
Primacy “set his seal,” according to the expression of the Sixth Council,
on the whole. In the Trullan canons, the Byzantine idea having evolved
itself with undeviating encroachment during three centuries, appears
complete. Its completeness is shewn in two things. Constantine IV. asked
the Pope to confirm the Council; his son Justinian confirms it himself,
and the council which he would confirm exhibits an eastern primacy seated
at Constantinople. It admits not only the priority, but in a certain sense
the superiority of the Roman primacy; but it would keep both the eastern
and the western primacy under the imperial control. The eastern primacy
would make itself the chief instrument of this control, and so practically
put itself above the western.

As has been seen above, the emperors through four patriarchs of their
capital tried during forty years to force the Monothelite heresy on the
Popes. In like manner from the Trullan Council they tried to force the
Greek discipline and the eastern primate upon the Popes. Had they
succeeded the ambition of the Byzantine prelates would have reached its
full success.(144) The imperial residence on the Bosphorus would have
taken the place of old Rome. The city of Constantine, fighting for very
existence with the ever-advancing Mohammedan, tried this last stroke in
its hour of greatest weakness.

Turning to Rome at this time we find a very rapid succession of Popes, for
which we have no information enabling us to account. They are also
frequently Greeks or Orientals; and here the suspicion arises that the
exarch of the emperor had influenced the election in the hope that some
national feeling might affect them in the administration of their office.
St. Agatho, who died in January, 681, was a Sicilian of Palermo, St. Leo
II., who succeeded in 682 and died 683, was likewise a Sicilian. The next,
Benedict II., a Roman, sat only from June, 684, to May, 685; his
successor, John V., a Syrian, of Antioch, only from July, 685, to August,
686, and Conon, a Thracian, from October, 686, to September, 687. The
following election was remarkable. There were two parties among the
electors(145)—one for the archpriest Theodore, the other for the
archdeacon Paschalis. Both were in the Lateran palace. Here both sides
agreed to elect the priest Sergius. One of the rival candidates, Theodore,
did him homage at once; the other, Paschalis, very unwillingly, and he
secretly called in the exarch from Ravenna to his aid. The exarch, John
Platina, came suddenly to Rome. He convinced himself that the choice of
Sergius was canonical and that of the large majority, but as Paschalis had
promised him a donation of a hundred pounds’ weight of gold, he insisted
upon being paid this sum from the Church’s treasury. Sergius was obliged
to submit, and thereupon was consecrated in December, 687, and sat till
701.

Pope Sergius was born at Palermo, of Syrian parentage, his father having
settled there from Antioch. He had come to Rome in the time of Pope
Adeodatus, had recommended himself by his ability, and had passed through
the various ranks of the clergy. His eastern parentage did not prevent his
offering as strenuous an opposition to the heretical suggestions of the
Greek emperor as his predecessors had shewn.(146) One and the same spirit
lived in all the Popes: the will and the genius of government. The natural
quality of the old Romans had been transfigured by the supernatural gift
belonging to the Church. The restless spirit of Byzantium, inexhaustible
in the production of new theological doctrines, which at least maintained
a continuous interest on the popular mind, tried in vain all the arms of
Greek sophistry and dialectic skill against the rock of Peter. They
recoiled from the sturdy Roman understanding and only helped the Popes in
their work of massing the western fabric of concentrated discipline.

The rank of Rome(147) as the holy city, reverence for the head of the
universal Church, veneration of the apostle Peter, had mounted higher and
higher at this time in the West. If St. Peter had already enjoyed, at the
period of the Gothic denomination, a worship which impressed the Greeks,
his influence now had become more decided, characteristic, and world-wide.
It dwelt not so much on his martyrdom, on his high rank as an apostle, but
rather on his being the founder of the Roman Church and its see. The
invisible saint in heaven was the possessor in title of many domains and
patrimonies on earth: the theocratic king of Rome. He had begun to
consider its people as his own, he counted upon its political government,
which he transmitted like a celestial fief to the Popes his successors.
His golden tomb at Rome in a Basilica radiant with gold had gradually
become the symbol of the Church and of the salvation which the world
received from this his institution. Pilgrims from the furthest lauds now
streamed to venerate it. The Anglo-Saxons especially, in the glow of their
first conversion, were impelled by a passionate yearning to Rome. At the
moment that the East sent its pilgrims to Mecca and Medina, swarms of
pious pilgrims from Gaul, Spain, and Britain descended the Alps to cast
their eyes upon eternal Rome and prostrate themselves before St. Peter’s
tomb, which had become the sanctuary of the West.

In the year 689 the young king of Wessex, Cadwalla, excited the greatest
admiration. After many battles at home, he sheathed his sword and
undertook the long journey to Rome to receive baptism from Pope Sergius
himself. There on Easter eve the long-haired barbarian king was seen in
the white dress of the illuminated at the porphyry baptismal font of the
Lateran, with the wax candle in his hand, and received the name of Peter.
He lived but eight days after, and was buried in the atrium of St.
Peter’s, with a long inscription, still extant. It said how King Cadwalla,
for the love of God, left his throne, his family, his country, all that
the valour of his ancestors and his own had gained him, coming far over
land and sea as a royal guest to behold Peter, and Peter’s see. He died at
thirty years of age, in the reign of the Lord Justinian, in the second
year of the pontificate of the apostolic man, Pope Sergius.

Cadwalla’s appearance at Rome was a prelude to those long centuries
wherein the Teutonic West would bow before the spiritual authority of the
Pope. Twenty years later two other Anglo-Saxon kings, Conrad of Mercia,
and Offa of Essex, came to Rome, not to be baptised, for they were already
Christians, but to change the royal robe for the monkish cowl. Their long
hair was cut off and dedicated to the apostle, and after living as monks
under the shadow of the Vatican, they received a grave in the atrium of
the Basilica, as a pledge that they had entered the company of the saints.
It was not long before Rome had a Saxon colony in the neighbourhood of the
Vatican.

Sergius raised a monument to St. Leo the Great in St. Peter’s itself. It
was the first example, as hitherto the Popes had either been buried in the
cemeteries outside the walls or in the atrium of the Basilica. But from
the time that in 688 Pope Sergius had translated the body of St. Leo into
the transept itself, and raised an altar over it, other very distinguished
Popes received the like honour.

But Pope Sergius also received a special messenger from his lord Justinian
II. He had sent the canons of the eastern Council of 692, held in his
palace, to the Pope, requesting him to sign them on the line left vacant
between his own signature and that of his patriarch. The Greeks were above
all things anxious to obtain their acceptance by the Pope. This was
refused by Pope Sergius, who forbade the acts of the Council to be
published. Upon this the emperor sent a high officer to Rome, who carried
off to Constantinople John, bishop of Porto, and Boniface, counsellor of
the apostolic see. But he did not stop with this. He sent likewise the
captain of his guards, Zacharias, with orders to seize the Pope and deport
him to Constantinople.(148) But by the mercy of God, and help of Peter,
prince of the apostles, who guarded his own Church, the heart of the army
of Ravenna, and also of the duchy of Pentapolis (that is the five cities,
Ancona, Umana, Pesaro, Fano, and Rimini), was moved not to allow the
Pontiff of the Apostolic See to go up to the royal city. And when the
soldiers had assembled in a multitude from all sides, Zacharias the
guardsman, in fear and trepidation lest he should be killed by the angry
crowd, besought the Pope that the gates might be closed, but he himself
took refuge with the Pope, and besought him with tears, that he would take
pity on him and not suffer him to be killed. Now the army of Ravenna had
entered by St. Peter’s gate, and reached the Lateran palace in its ardour
to catch sight of the Pope, who was said to have been taken away in the
night, and put in a vessel. The gates of the palace, both upper and lower,
had been shut. They threatened to tear them down unless they were opened.
The guardsman Zacharias, in his extreme terror and despair, had crept
under the Pope’s bed. He had lost his senses, but the Pope comforted him,
and came out and seated himself on the basilic of St. Sebastian, in the
seat called “under the apostles,” where with mild words he turned away the
wrath of the soldiers and people, but they would not leave the palace
until with mocks and gibes they had turned the guardsman out of Rome.

So after forty years Justinian II. had repeated the worst deed of his
grandfather Constans. Had Pope Sergius been taken to Constantinople the
same lot awaited him there as had befallen his martyred predecessor Pope
Martin. Yet in the interval the emperor’s own father had acknowledged in
the amplest terms the authority of St. Peter’s successor. But the people
of Rome as well as the emperor’s own army at Ravenna and in central Italy
had learnt rather to defend the Pope than to yield to an unjust outrage.

Justinian, at this time beaten in the field by Saracens and Bulgarians,
was anxious to improve the beauty of his palace, by constructing a
magnificent fountain and esplanade, from which he could better view the
party of the Blues which he favoured. Now a church stood in the way of
this enlargement, and he called upon Callinicus, who had succeeded Paul as
patriarch in 693, to use the prayers customary when a church was pulled
down. The patriarch replied that he had prayers for the building of
churches, but none for their demolition. The emperor insisted, and
Callinicus so far yielded as to use the prayer, “Glory be to God, now and
for ever more, who allows and endures even this”. After which the church
was pulled down.

Three years afterwards the tyranny of Justinian met with its reward. He
had prepared a massacre, in which also the patriarch would have been
included. The patrician Leontius, a general of merit, had been imprisoned
for some years. He was set free and ordered to Greece. On his way he
lamented his fate to some friends. They advised him to rise against the
emperor. He presented himself at the prætorium, gained admission in the
emperor’s name, overpowered the officer in command, set free the prisoners
under his charge, some of the best men in the city who had been confined
there for six or even eight years. Leontius then with his friends marched
through the streets, inviting all Christians to Sancta Sophia. He went to
the patriarch who knew that he was involved in the sentence of death
intended by Justinian. The patriarch accompanied Leontius to the
baptistery where a great multitude had assembled and uttered these words:
“This is the day which the Lord has made”. It became the signal for a
general insurrection. The people rushed to the hippodrome. Thither in the
morning Justinian was brought. His nose and tongue were both maimed, and
he was banished to the Crimea. And Leontius reigned in his stead.

But Leontius was not fortunate in war. He had dethroned by this sudden
revolution the fifth sovereign in the line of Heraclius. In three years an
army which dreaded punishment because it had not saved Carthage from the
Saracens rebelled against him; he was deposed by another officer, Apsimar
or Tiberius II., who lasted seven years from 698 to 705. At that time the
banished and maimed Justinian was enabled by help of the Bulgarians to
recover possession of Constantinople.(149) Then began the time of
vengeance not only on the two usurpers, as he deemed them, who had sat
between them ten years on his throne, but on all who had supported them.
Leontius and Apsimar were carried in chains through all the streets. Then,
as the games in the circus were proceeding and the people crowding to
them, they were thrown prostrate before the emperor who was seen seated
with a foot on the neck of each, while the crowd as they went by shouted,
“Thou hast trodden upon the asp and the basilisk, and trampled on the lion
and the dragon”. When the games were over Justinian removed his foot from
the necks of his fallen rivals, and dismissed them to be beheaded. The
patriarch Callinicus he deprived of sight, and banished to Rome, and put
in his stead Cyrus, a monk, who had foretold his restoration. He slew a
vast multitude of civilians and soldiers. He tied men up in sacks, and
threw them into the sea. He invited men to a great banquet, and as they
rose from it had them hung or beheaded. In the meantime, while these
events took place at Constantinople, Pope Sergius had closed in honour his
pontificate of thirteen years and eight months, in September, 701. The
native soldiers of Italy had defended him against the attempt of
Justinian, and during all his pontificate he refused to recognise the
Trullan canons. He was succeeded in less than two months by another Greek,
Pope John VI. At the time Tiberius Apsimar was emperor, having dethroned
Leontius. He ordered his exarch Theophylact to proceed to Rome. He was
supposed to come with a bad intent against the Pope. Italian troops from
the provinces flocked to Rome, and the city also rose against him. The
Pope again, as in the time of Pope Sergius, ordered the gates to be
closed; induced the Italians to retire from Rome, and saved the exarch.
Without troops himself he possessed a greater influence over the Italians
than the exarch. This Pope also induced the Lombard Duke of Beneventum to
retire from an attack on Campania, in which he had done much harm. Pope
John from the treasury of the Church redeemed his captives. We hear
nothing of the exarch giving help either to defend or to ransom the
emperor’s subjects.

After little more than three years John VI. was succeeded by another
Greek, John VII. He was consecrated in March, 705. In the autumn of that
year Justinian II. regained his throne. He sent at once two Metropolitans
to Rome, to urge the Pope to accept the Trullan canons. The Pope returned
the canons in silence. He did not accept the Council of 692 any more than
his predecessors. He died in 707, and was followed by Sisinnius, a Syrian,
who sat but 20 days, and his successor Constantine, also a Syrian, was
consecrated in March, 708, the seventh Pope in succession who came from
Syria or the Greek empire.

In the year 709, Justinian II. wreaked his vengeance on Ravenna, stored up
during the ten years of his banishment, whether it was that their
opposition with that of Pope Sergius had rankled in his mind, or that they
had rejoiced at his fall, or, at any rate, that they had not been faithful
to him. Now, at length, he sent the patrician Theodore, who commanded the
army in Sicily, with a fleet against them. The chief people of the city,
including the archbishop Felix, were enticed by the general to his ship,
where they were received by twos in his tent. They were then seized,
gagged, and put into confinement below. The Greeks landed, burned and
plundered the city, and killed many. The chief captives were carried to
Byzantium, and brought before the emperor, who sat on a throne studded
with emeralds, and wore a diadem of pearls embroidered with gold. As soon
as he saw them, he ordered them to execution, contenting himself with only
blinding archbishop Felix, and banishing him to Pontus.(150)

Intense was the hatred of Byzantium kindled in Italy by such deeds.(151)
It was at this time that Justinian II., by an imperial letter, summoned
Pope Constantine to his capital. The Pope obeyed the command, and set sail
from Porto on the 10th October, 710, accompanied by a considerable
attendance. After he had left Rome, the exarch, John Rhizocapus, came, in
the emperor’s name, to Rome, and put to death four of the chief officers
of the papal court, and “going to Ravenna, there for his most foul
misdeeds perished by a most ignominious death”.

Pope Constantine passed by Naples and Sicily, and wintered at Otranto.
Here he received an imperial order, requiring the magistrates to treat him
wherever he went with the same honour as the emperor himself. When he
reached Constantinople, the young son of the emperor, the highest
nobility, the patriarch Cyrus, with the clergy, and a great multitude,
came out seven miles to meet him. The Pope, wearing the dress which he
wore at Rome in great ceremonies, entered the city with his train, riding
the imperial horses richly caparisoned. They were taken in triumph first
to the royal palace, and then to the Pope’s own abode at the Placidia
palace. Justinian, being at Nicæa, sent him a letter full of thanks, and
begged the Pope to meet him at Nicomedia. When they met, the emperor,
wearing his crown, threw himself at the Pope’s feet, and kissed them. They
then embraced to the great joy of the people.

It appears that the Deacon Gregory,(152) the next successor of Pope
Constantine, was attending on him, and that he answered with great ability
certain questions put by the emperor. They are supposed to have referred
to the Trullan canons. They were not confirmed. The later practice(153) of
the Roman Church, with regard to these canons, continued to be to suffer
those only to hold, which were not contrary to the decrees of the Popes
and the western discipline. On the Sunday, the Pope celebrated Mass before
the emperor, who received Communion from him; besought him to pray that
his sins might be forgiven, renewed all the privileges of the Roman
Church, and left the Pope free, to return home. That return was delayed by
the frequent sicknesses of the Pope. At length, however, he reached Gaeta
in safety, where a great number of clergy and of the Roman people met him,
and he entered Rome in joy in October, 711.

But the Pope had left behind him, and counselled in vain, an emperor bent
on his own destruction. Justinian had conceived a furious hatred against
the town of Cherson. He had sent a large fleet against it. Its chief men
were taken away and cruelly tortured. The fleet itself was afterwards
utterly wrecked by a tempest: upon which Justinian prepared another, under
fresh commanders, who were instructed to inflict fresh cruelties. In the
end the people of Cherson was driven into revolt. They proclaimed emperor
Bardanes, one of the commanders of the fleet. Another officer, a
chamberlain of Justinian, whom he had frightfully injured, and who
expected to be killed by him, joined in the revolt. He was sent by
Bardanes to seize Justinian, persuaded the soldiers to desert him, fell
upon him, and, with his sword, cut off his head, which he sent at once to
Bardanes, who forthwith despatched it by the same soldier to Rome. And
thus the extinction of the race of Heraclius was signified to the West by
the exposure of his head. His only son, Tiberius, a boy of ten, had
already been slaughtered like a sheep.(154)

Thus it was that Pope Constantine, three months after his return to Rome,
received tidings that Justinian was killed, and that Philippicus Bardanes
had taken his place. In these days(155) theology had so penetrated every
relation of life that every emperor, on his accession, was accustomed to
send his profession of belief to the highest bishops of his empire. That
of Philippicus unhappily signified to the Pope that he was a Monothelite.
Thereupon Pope Constantine, in council, refused to accept his letter.

In fact, the Armenian officer who had at length put an end to the life and
crimes of Justinian II., had no sooner obtained recognition as emperor,
than he resolved to overthrow the Sixth Council, and establish the heresy
which it had condemned. In the year and a-half, during which he reigned,
he caused a council to meet at Constantinople. He deposed the patriarch
Cyrus, who would not yield to his wishes: and put in his place the deacon,
John, who was more submissive. This council, whose Acts were buried with
the emperor, and whose numbers are not known, ordered the Monothelite
heresy to be subscribed by all. Most of the bishops, with miserable
cowardice, gave way to the will of the court. Among the number is said to
have been even Germanus, then archbishop of Cyzicus, and afterwards, as
patriarch of Constantinople, a firm defender of the faith. Only a few
bishops, like Zeno of Sinope, resisted. The copy of the Acts of the Sixth
Council, kept in the palace, was burnt. At Rome, the Pope’s rejection of
the new emperor’s creed was taken up by the people with the utmost zeal.
They would not receive his image in the church, nor bear the mention of
his name in the Mass, nor tolerate his coin.

But, in eighteen months, his own profligate life caused him to be deposed.
Two officers of high rank, one of them commanding the forces in the
neighbouring provinces, determined to rid the empire of such a master. An
emissary of theirs, entering on Whitsun eve suddenly by the golden gate,
with a company of soldiers, gained admittance to the emperor’s chamber,
and carried him off unconscious from the effect of a drunken carouse on
his birthday. They took him to the hippodrome, and there blinded him. On
the next day, being Pentecost, the people were assembled in the great
church, and Artemius, the first secretary, was crowned, and his name
changed to Anastasius. On the following Saturday, he punished with
blindness the two conspirators who had so treated his predecessor.(156)

Thus Rome and the East were suddenly delivered from a revolution which had
fallen upon them with equal suddenness, a fresh domination of the
Monothelite heresy. All acts done by the government of the fallen
Philippicus were annulled, and the Sixth Council solemnly proclaimed
afresh by clergy and people at Rome. There was great rejoicing at the fall
of Philippicus, and the rise of Anastasius, who sent to the Pope a letter
containing his orthodox belief.

It is to be noted also that the patriarch of Constantinople, John VI., who
had been put into the place of Cyrus by Philippicus, had joined in the
emperor’s acts against the Sixth Council, and led the council which
rejected it, now wrote to Pope Constantine to excuse himself for having
yielded to force. He began the letter with these words:—(157)

“God, who has constructed the magnificence of visible things as a mark of
His own Godhead and power, has specially in the formation of man, the most
honoured of the sensible creation, shown His glory and wisdom, so that the
prophet cried out, ‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me’. Now, the
Maker of our nature, designing the head to be over the whole body, placed
in it the most important of our senses, and caused all the movement and
perfection of the other limbs to spring from it, and be preserved in it.
If one of these meet with loss or injury, it is not left without care, but
the head shows a natural sympathy even to the extremest parts of the body,
and heals the local suffering by the hand’s ministry and the eye’s
guidance, the aid of which it does not refuse as useless. With this we can
compare your own apostolical pre-eminence, counting you, according to the
canons, as the head of the Christian priesthood.(158) And so with reason
we ask of you to be released from the discouragement which has fallen on
the body of the Church by the pestilent exercise of tyrannical power.”

The patriarch further beseeches the Pope to pardon his fault that under
this stress he had rejected the doctrine of the Sixth Council, in the
words: “Since you are the disciple and the successor of him who heard from
the Lord, ‘Simon, Simon, behold Satan has sought to sift you as wheat, but
I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not: and thou when thou art
converted confirm thy brethren,’ you are a debtor to supply what is needed
for the correction which confirms, and also to show a sympathetic
kindness”.

Pope Constantine is the fifth and also the last Pope who paid a visit to
Constantinople. As these visits cast an important light upon the condition
during two hundred years under which, being acknowledged as successors of
St. Peter, they exercised as subjects in the civil order their supreme
authority in the Church, I think it belongs to the matter now treated to
refer to the facts and results of each visit. Pope John I., who sat from
523 to 525, was a subject of King Theodorich, and was summoned by him to
Ravenna. There he was compelled, much against his will, to go with three
senators on an embassy to the emperor Justin I. Theodorich was most
indignant that the emperor had required Arians in his empire to give back
their churches to the Catholics. He threatened the Pope that if this
treatment was not reversed he would drown Italy in blood.(159) So the
Pope, being sick, went with the senators to Constantinople. On their
arrival the whole city went out with wax lights and bannered crosses in
honour of the blessed Apostles, Peter and Paul, for the Greeks testified
that from the time of Constantine and St. Silvester they had never merited
to receive a successor of St. Peter. Then the emperor Justin, doing honour
to God, threw himself to the ground upon his face and worshipped the most
blessed Pope John. Pope John and the senators besought him with many tears
to accept their legation. The emperor rejoiced that he had been found
worthy to see in his kingdom a successor of St. Peter and was gloriously
crowned by his hands.

When they returned with success to King Theodorich at Ravenna they found
that he had imprisoned the two illustrious senators, Symmachus and
Boethius; he put the Pope likewise in prison, and so the bishop of the
first see suffered affliction in ward, and died of want. Ninety-eight days
after his death in prison the heretical King Theodorich by the will of God
suddenly died.

Ten years after this, in 535, the same Book of the Popes records that Pope
Agapetus, being the subject of Theodatus, King of the Goths, was sent by
him on embassy to the emperor Justinian. Theodatus had put to death the
Queen Amalasunta, daughter of Theodorich, who had herself given him the
crown. He hoped that the Pope might save him with the emperor. The Pope
was received with all distinction. But he found a heretic seated on the
see of the capital, whose orthodoxy the emperor defended. And the emperor
said to the Pope, “Either agree with us or I will have you banished”. The
Pope replied: “Sinner that I am, I came to Constantinople to see the most
Christian Emperor Justinian. I find instead a Diocletian. But I do not
fear your threats. But that you may know that your bishop does not belong
to the Christian religion, let him confess there to be Two Natures in
Christ.” Then the Bishop Anthimus, being cited by the emperor, would never
confess in answer to the question of Pope Agapetus that there are Two
Natures in our Lord Jesus Christ. So the Pope prevailed. The emperor with
joy submitted himself to the Holy See, and worshipped Pope Agapetus; he
expelled Anthimus from his communion and banished him, and besought the
Pope to consecrate Mennas in his stead. This was done. The Pope was taken
ill, and died after two months at Constantinople. He was buried with a
greater concourse of people than had ever attended the funeral of emperor
or bishop. His body was carried back in triumph to Rome and buried at St.
Peter’s.(160)

Shortly after Justinian added the direct sovereignty of conquest to that
respect, whatever its extent may have been, with which Rome and the Popes
regarded the sole emperor who since the abolition of the western emperor
in 476 represented the Roman name, though seated on the Bosphorus. Pope
Vigilius in 547 was his subject, and as such summoned by him to
Constantinople, whither he went with the same reluctance as his two
predecessors at the command of Theodorich and Theodatus. The emperor’s
purpose was to force the Pope to set his seal upon a doctrinal edict of
his own. At first Justinian humbly besought his blessing, and embraced him
with tears. But this soon turned to persecution, and seven years of
perpetual humiliation for the Pope followed. Deceived, isolated,
imprisoned, deserted, he did not surrender the faith. St. Peter in his
person was not overcome, but he was discredited, and it required forty
years, crowned by the wisdom and fortitude of St. Gregory, to restore the
full lustre of the Holy See.

After a hundred years and a succession of fourteen Popes, St. Martin held
a great Council at Rome in 649, in which he passed anathema upon the
heresy of two eastern emperors, grandfather and grandson. In requital for
this the grandson had him seized in his Lateran Church itself, carried
secretly to Constantinople, judged by the senate there for high treason,
condemned to death, and finally suffered him to die of starvation in the
Crimea. As Pope John I. gained his crown of martyrdom by the first visit
of a Pope to Constantinople, so Pope Martin gained the like crown by the
fourth.

About thirty years after this a General Council was held in which the
heresy which St. Martin had placed under ban was condemned afresh; and it
was called by the wish and command of the then reigning emperor, son of
the very man who had persecuted St. Martin to death, and in it the largest
acknowledgments of St. Peter’s succession at Rome were made to St.
Martin’s successors.

Yet, ten years afterwards, this man’s son, then emperor, tried to repeat
upon Pope Sergius the crime of the grandfather committed on Pope St.
Martin. That his attempt was baffled, the life of his messenger saved by
Pope Sergius, and the messenger dismissed in most ignominious flight, was
owing to the Italian troops of the emperor rising in defence of the Pope.
They would not allow him to be taken to the capital on the Bosphorus.

In another ten years the usurper Apsimar had despatched another exarch,
Theophylact, to carry Pope John VI. to Constantinople that he might be
induced to give the consent which Pope Sergius had refused to the canons
of the Trullan Council. This attempt also was frustrated by the flocking
of Italian troops to Rome in defence of the Pope.

Last is the visit of Pope Constantine, in which two things are remarkable.
The very emperor who had attempted to kidnap Pope Sergius in 693, being on
the eve of the extinction which was to fall on the line of Heraclius, in
710 invited Pope Constantine to visit him, ordered him everywhere to be
received with royal honours; when they met, fell, though crowned, at his
feet to kiss them, and sent him back in highest honour. And presently the
patriarch of Constantinople, begging of him to be condoned for a grievous
fault, drew a picture of his supremacy the functions of which he compared
to those which the Creator in His wisdom has given to the head in the
human body. I will venture to say that no western mind has expressed with
greater force or tenderness the office which belongs to him who sits in
the see of the chief apostle than was done by the tenant for the time of
that see of New Rome, which for more than three centuries had been
striving to rival and depress the elder Rome.

The emperor Anastasius, so strangely chosen from a first secretary to
succeed a fallen usurper, and undo his establishment of heresy, was both
orthodox and blameless in conduct, and strove to defend his much
endangered empire. He had armed a fleet, but it rebelled and killed its
commander. The end of a civil war, lasting six months, was that Anastasius
retired of his own accord on condition that his life should be spared: he
became a monk and priest and was banished to Thessalonica. He had reigned
two years and a half.

Anastasius, some time after his retirement, made, when Leo III. was
established on the throne, an attempt to regain it. For this he was
publicly executed at Constantinople. So he was added to his predecessors,
Leontius, Apsimar, and Justinian II., making the fourth of the seven
emperors reigning from 685 to the accession of Leo III. in 717, to whom
the throne was a scaffold.

Theodosius III., a good man but an incapable ruler, had in vain tried to
escape the crown imposed on him by the rebellious fleet. After a year the
general of the army of the East, a soldier of great capacity and vigour,
was advancing to dethrone him. The senate and patriarch advised him to
resign. His private property was secured to him on condition that both he
and his son became priests. Theodosius III. yielded possession of a throne
from acquiring which he had fled, and lived in peace at Ephesus. He gave
himself up to good works, and when he was buried in St. Philip’s Church he
had ordered the single word _health_ to be engraven on his tomb: a silent
intimation that he was the sole among Leo’s six predecessors who had
escaped unhurt, and no less that he found in death the healing of all
sorrows.

In the year 717 Leo the Isaurian mounted the throne thus vacated, and
entering by the golden gate on the 25th March, 717, was crowned in Sancta
Sophia by the patriarch Germanus, after he had taken before him the oath
to maintain the faith of the Church intact.

On the 8th April, 715, Pope Constantine died, after a pontificate of seven
years, “a strenuous and successful defender of Rome’s orthodox faith, and
a worthy predecessor of greater successors, under whom Rome was delivered
from the Byzantine yoke”.(161) After forty days St. Gregory II. became
Pope on the 19th May, 715.

Between the two Popes St. Gregory I. and St. Gregory II. lies a period of
111 years, marked with disasters to the Christian people and religion such
as no preceding century can show. At the death of St. Gregory I. in 604,
all the shores of the Mediterranean were in possession of Christians. The
authority of the eastern emperor extended from Constantinople over Asia
Minor, Syria, and the region up to the Euphrates, Egypt, and the long
range of Northern Africa, embracing the present Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers,
and Morocco, to the Atlantic. The beginning of Christian kingdoms, looking
up with filial affection to their spiritual Father in Rome, was apparent
to the eye of the first Gregory. Gaul and Spain and Africa, lately
recovered by Justinian, had a network of spiritual provinces, in which
each Metropolitan received from Rome the pallium, the token of apostolic
authority and unity. St. Gregory himself had added to these by the mission
of Augustine, and the chair of unity founded at Canterbury. Full as these
countries were of violence, mutual aggression, and unsubdued ferocity, the
Teutonic invaders had nevertheless accepted the law of Christ from Rome,
and the first principles of human order had been fused with their natural
traditions of freedom. Above all, the Arian heresy had been dispossessed,
and there was no appearance of a religion counter to the Christian
arising. In every city of a vast region the bishop was regarded by his
people with veneration, the very source of which lay in a power which he
held by imposition of hands. A spiritual head to those around him, he was
himself a link in the chain of that universal hierarchy the head of which
was at Rome.

At the accession of Gregory II. the whole coast line from Cilicia at least
to Mauritania on the Atlantic, had been lost to the Roman empire, and in a
very great degree to the Christian Church as well. It was all now in the
occupation of a single power, the head of which was termed the successor.
The successor that is of the Arabian who had set himself in the place of
Christ, who had conquered the Christians in this vast range of territory,
and would allow them to live only on tenure of subjection. Instead of the
remnant of primeval tradition which formed the mythology and influenced
the customs of the northern tribes at the time of their descent on the
western empire, the Arabian prophet and his successors had impregnated
their people with a furious and fanatical belief to be imposed by force.
It was a chief part of that belief that it ought to be imposed by force on
all outside. And they who fell in such a holy war were held to be martyrs,
as indeed they witnessed and imitated the life of Mohammed from the time
of the Hegira. Thus the possession of the world was attached to the
profession of one God and Mohammed as his prophet. In the century next
after the death of the prophet those who retrace the deeds of his
followers must admit that every possible disregard of human life and of
the things most hallowed in Christian society had been shown by them in
the construction of a kingdom now stretching from the Atlantic to the
Indus. The religion under whose inspiration all this had been done, was
framed in essential antagonism to the Christian faith. For indeed the
mystery on which the Christian faith rested, that the Son of God had
assumed human nature for the redemption of man, was denounced by it as
derogatory to the very conception of God. Mohammedans proscribed
Christians as associators of a creature with the Creator. This association
they called idolatry. The northern wandering of the nations might receive
Christian belief and be formed into a Christendom. The southern wandering
of the nations, since it rested on a prophet the personal antagonist of
the Christian founder, could only substitute Islamieh for Christendom.

This it had done over the empire which as we have seen was constructed at
the time St. Gregory II. became Pope, and Leo III. after six revolutions
became emperor at Constantinople.

Between the two Gregories twenty-four Popes occupied the throne of St.
Peter, from Pope Sabinian to Pope Constantine. Of these three only,
Honorius, Vitalian, and Sergius, sat over ten years each; the three
together occupied forty-one years, leaving seventy years in the gross for
the remaining twenty-one pontificates. But a considerable portion of these
years must be deducted for the time which intervened between their
election, and the allowing of their consecration by the consent of the
emperor or the exarch as his viceroy. In that interval Greek arts were
applied, to induce the Pope elect to consent to some thing desired by the
emperor. Thus Pope Severinus on the death of Honorius was kept out of his
see for nineteen months and sixteen days, to obtain, if possible, his
consent to the doctrine put forth by Heraclius in the Ecthesis. In this
manner the pontificate of Severinus was reduced to two months and three
days, in which he found time to condemn the emperor’s Ecthesis. So again
on the election of St. Sergius in 687, the exarch hurried down from
Ravenna to prevent it if possible; but he was too late, and could only
plunder the Church’s treasury of one hundred pounds weight of gold. These
are samples, but the action continued over the whole period. Historians
remark that the seven last Popes who sat during it were all Greeks, and
conclude that the emperors thought compliance might be hoped for in such
cases. This series of seven began with John VI. in 685. The seven Popes
were all faithful not to the exacting demands of emperors, but to the
charge of St. Peter, and during the thirty years in which they occupied
the Holy See seven revolutions of emperors took place at Constantinople.
Three emperors perished by public execution; a fourth was only blinded; a
fifth having become a priest, and attempted to regain the throne was then
executed as a traitor by its actual tenant. The worst of the six was the
fifth emperor in the line of Heraclius, whose head was sent to Rome as a
ghastly but indisputable witness that Italy was delivered from his
tyranny.

During the whole one hundred and eleven years Italy was governed as a
province which had no civil rights. I recur to the words of St. Agatho in
his letter(162) to the Sixth Council for the importance of his
acknowledging the sad condition of learning, as a result of the miserable
danger and uncertainty of the time. Not often does a Pope say of his own
legates, “How should they who gained their daily bread by manual labour
with the utmost hazard, possess accurate and abundant learning?” But he
gave assurance that “with simplicity of heart and without faltering they
maintained the faith handed down from their fathers, making their one and
their chief good that nothing should be diminished, nothing changed, but
the words and the meaning both kept untouched”.

Whatever pomp and glory remained to the empire was centered in
Constantinople. Rome and the Pope were powerless as to material strength.
So St. Martin, when accused at his trial of favouring an enemy of the
emperor, replied: “What was I to resist an exarch, without any force of my
own?” At that time Constantinople was probably the greatest as well as the
richest city in the world. When Constans II. eight years after visited
Rome he swept away whatever works of art pleased him for the further
adornment of his capital. In the four centuries down to Leo III. which
elapsed since the consecration of the capital by its founder, every
successor had made it a point of honour to improve the beauty and increase
the strength of the imperial residence.

Thus those twenty-four Popes from the first to the second Gregory were
dwelling in a Rome which continued to exist only as the seat of their own
primacy, drawing successive generations to it, and visited year by year
through the pilgrims who came to it from all parts of the world, since
they sought the tomb of the chief apostle when the sepulchre of the Master
was enthralled by the Saracen. Beside that tomb they stood with Roman
fortitude against Byzantine fluctuation. Heraclius published an Ecthesis,
and Constans II. a Typus. Ten Popes condemned both, and then Constantine
IV. humbly admitted that both were worthless. He further undid the heresy
of four successive patriarchs by putting them under anathema. He received
as the living Peter the successor of one whom his father had stolen from
Rome and martyred in the Crimea; just as his son Justinian fell at the
feet of Pope Constantine, after he had tried to repeat the crime of his
grandfather Constans on the person of Pope Sergius. So in 680 Theodore,
then patriarch of Constantinople, urged on by another patriarch who lived
at Constantinople since his own Antioch was become a spoil of the Saracen,
expunged from the diptychs the names of all the Popes after Honorius to
his own time. Theodore was himself deposed while the Sixth Council sat,
and Macarius, his adviser, was deposed by that Council, but Theodore lived
to be restored and to die as patriarch with a sounder faith than he had
shown at the beginning. It is remarkable that after the four Monothelite
patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, who were condemned at the
Sixth Council, three patriarchs, Thomas II., 667-8, John V., 669-674, and
Constantine I., 674-6,(163) “leant to orthodoxy,” and so escaped the
censure of the Council, while Theodore was heretical from 678 to 680, and
orthodox when restored from 683 to 686.

Thirty years after the Sixth Council the patriarch, John V., after
presiding at the council summoned by the Emperor Philippicus, who
attempted by it to re-establish the Monothelite heresy, besought pardon of
Pope Constantine as the head whose function it was to heal all the wounds
of the body. I know not what proof of the Roman primacy surpasses in
force, to those who have eyes to see, this proof arising from the
alternate persecution and confession of Byzantine emperors and patriarchs,
compared with the unbending fortitude and unalterable faith of the
twenty-four Popes in that long century when Rome served as a slave in the
natural order, and was worshipped in the spiritual kingdom as a sanctuary.





CHAPTER VI. AN EMPEROR PRIEST AND FOUR GREAT POPES.


The Sixth General Council had been held in 680, and on the union of the
East and West the long and obstinate Monothelite heresy had seemed to be
extinguished with all the authority wielded by the Pope at the head of a
General Council. Yet thirty years after this event the fifth emperor of
the line of Heraclius was dethroned and beheaded by a usurper; and the
first act of the insurgent when seated on the throne of Constantine was to
call a council of his own eastern bishops at Constantinople, which at his
command attempted to abrogate the Sixth Council and to set up again as the
proper faith of the Church the heresy which it had condemned. And this act
of Philippicus Bardanes met with nothing like an adequate resistance from
the eastern bishops. It is true that the patriarch Cyrus, refusing to
comply with the wishes of the new emperor, was deposed by him, and a more
obsequious successor, the deacon John, put in his place. But even
Germanus, then archbishop of Cyzicus, yielded to the storm, and thus a
bishop of imperial blood, who four years afterwards was himself placed in
the see of Constantinople, who held it during fifteen years, and then was
deposed because he would not yield to the heretical measures of another
emperor, is said to have been subservient to the will of Philippicus
Bardanes.

No incident can show more plainly the pretensions of the eastern emperor
and the weakness of the eastern bishops than the fact that the first act
of an Armenian officer when he had, by the murder of his sovereign, put on
the imperial buskins on which the eagle of the Roman power was
embroidered, consisted in an attempt to alter the faith of the Church, and
that the alteration was supported by the bishops whom he had convened.
Philippicus himself was a worthless sensualist, whose reign was put an end
to in eighteen months by another revolution. Two more transient emperors
passed to the dishonoured throne, and then appeared a third, who reigned
twenty-four years, and has left his mark on history.

Leo III. was a soldier of great courage and considerable skill. He was of
low birth in the province of Isauria, but worked his way through the
various grades of the army until he became the most highly reputed of its
generals at a moment when a succession of seven revolutions had seemed to
portend the coming extinction of the empire. Besides its internal
dissensions, it was hard pressed by the chalif Solomon, who was making
every preparation for the final conquest of the capital. When by the
cession of the good but impotent Theodosius III. the Isaurian officer
obtained the crown, sodden as it were with the blood of three successive
emperors, it might have seemed that the last hour had come of the great
city whose ramparts had served as the only sufficient bulwark against the
Mohammedan torrent of conquest. Leo III. thought not so. His first act was
to defeat the chalif and cast back his invading host. The eastern empire
breathed afresh under his resolute spirit and strategic skill, and learnt
to meet not ingloriously the Saracen in battle. Ten years of success had
given to its ruler some rays of the glory which had shone upon the older
emperors.

It is of the year 726 that the most learned of Italian historians(164)
speaks in these words: “This year Leo, the Isaurian, began a tragedy which
convulsed the Church of God and laid the foundations for the loss of Italy
to the Greek emperors. Theophanes, Nicephorus, and other historians tell
us that a submarine volcano had broken out in the Ægean Sea and cast up a
quantity of pumice stone on the adjoining coast. This natural incident had
produced the greatest alarm. Moreover, a perfidious renegade named
Bezer,(165) who had embraced the Arabian superstition, had nestled himself
in the imperial court, and succeeded in making the emperor believe that
God was enraged with the Christians on account of the images which they
had in their churches and venerated. No doubt abuses did exist in the
veneration of these images, as have since appeared among the Moscovites,
united to the Greek Church. But such abuses neither were nor are a reason
to abolish these images, for, as men of great knowledge have proved, the
use of images and a well-regulated veneration of them is not only lawful,
but greatly fosters piety in the Christian Catholic people. Now the
emperor Leo, infatuated by his own great penetration of mind and seduced
by this evil counsellor, practised a usurpation upon the rights of the
priesthood, and published an edict ordering that from that moment all the
sacred images should be forbidden and removed through the territory of the
Roman empire. He called the kissing them or venerating them idolatry. This
was the beginning of the Iconoclast heresy. This rash and iniquitous
prohibition excited great commotion among his subjects. The larger part
detested him as heretical, as holding Mohammedan sentiments, and the more
because it was known that he held in abomination the sacred relics, and
denied the intercession of the saints with God—that is, attacked beliefs
established in the Church of God. He also impugned thereby the profession
of faith which he had made when he assumed the imperial throne, refusing
to listen to the judgment of bishops who are chosen by God for guardians
of the doctrine which belongs to the faith. Though we have not the letters
written by him to Pope Gregory II. about abolishing the sacred images, and
the pontiff’s answers to him, yet the sequel plainly shows that he sent to
Rome the above-named edict, and that the holy pontiff not only opposed it,
but wrote with kindled feelings to the emperor about it, inducing him to
give up this sacrilegious design.”

Though the letters thus mentioned no longer exist, we possess letters from
Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo shortly after, which present to us the
clearest and most authentic picture of the Iconoclast contest. Both the
contention of the emperor and the censure of the pontiff are there
expressed in the words used at the very moment of the struggle. I shall
follow them accurately and in so much detail as to show the interests
which were then at stake.

In the person of St. Gregory II., after several Popes of eastern descent,
a Roman had again reached the pontificate.(166) He was acquainted with
Constantinople, to which place he had accompanied his predecessor, Pope
Constantine. His experience in political things was as great as his grasp
of theological knowledge was firm. He had dealt with Greeks and Lombards,
not only in ecclesiastical affairs, but as counsellor, as arbitrator, and
as party concerned in disputes. He adorned the churches of Rome, but he
likewise strengthened her fortifications on the Esquiline. When, in the
year 717, a considerable portion of the city had been dangerously flooded,
and in the quarter of the Via Lata the water had risen eight-feet high,
the poor people found support and consolation in the Pope. During many
years there had been peace between Church and Empire as also between the
Roman See and the patriarchate of the imperial capital. The first years of
Leo III. promised nothing but good. Born of low birth in the mountains of
Isauria, and destitute of education, he had risen by his valour step by
step, and was in command of the Anatolian army when called to succeed
Theodosius III. His reign of four and twenty years would have been
fortunate had not the dogmatising fancies which seemed to be inherited by
the most various natures on the Byzantine throne taken possession of him.
Through them he kindled a conflict which set East and West in commotion,
and completed the rent between them.

It was about the year 727, the twelfth year of his own pontificate, and
ten years after the accession of Leo III., when the acts of the eastern
emperor caused St. Gregory II. to address the following letter to
him.(167)

“The letter of your God-protected majesty and fraternity we have received
by the augustal officer of the Guards, and we likewise keep it securely in
the holy church close to the confession of the holy and glorious Peter,
prince of the apostles, where likewise are kept the letters of your
predecessors who reigned in the love of Christ. In this letter you well
and piously, as befits a Christian emperor, professed that you would keep
without fail the injunctions of our holy fathers and teachers. It is
first, and remarkable, that the letter is yours and not another’s, sealed
with the imperial seal, and subscribed within in vermilion, by your own
hand, as is the wont of emperors to subscribe. Therein you professed with
the clearest piety our blameless and orthodox faith. You wrote, ‘he who
moves and pulls down the boundaries of the fathers is execrable’. On
receiving this we uttered hymns of thanksgiving to God, for God assuredly
has given you the throne. You were running well. Who then has rung an
alarum in your ears, and perverted your heart like a twisted bowstring,
and turned your eyes backwards? During ten years by the grace of God you
went well. You never spoke of the holy images. Now you say they take the
place of idols, and that those who worship them are idolaters. And you are
bent on sweeping them away, and clearing the land of them. And you fear
not the judgment of God in bringing scandals into the hearts of men, not
of the faithful only, but of the faithless too. Christ charges you not to
scandalise one of the little ones, and for a small offence to depart into
everlasting fire, and you have scandalised the whole world, as if you
could not endure death, nor make an evil confession. You have written that
‘we should not worship things made with hands, nor any kind of likeness,
as God said, neither in heaven nor on earth; and show me, if you please,
who has charged us to reverence and worship things made with hands. Then I
will confess that is God’s command’. And why, you that are emperor and
head of Christians, did you not enquire of those who had the knowledge of
experience? You might have been satisfied by them concerning what things
made by hands God spoke, before stirring up, confounding, and disturbing
humble people. But you thrust away, and denied, and cast out our holy
fathers and teachers whom, with your own hand and in writing, you
professed to obey and follow. The holy and inspired fathers and teachers
are our scripture, our light and our salvation. The six Councils held in
Christ have commanded us, and you do not accept their testimony. We are
compelled to write to you in rude uncultured words, since uncultured and
rude you are. But truly they carry the power and the truth of God. We
entreat you in God’s name to cast aside the haughtiness and pride which
beset you, and gently and humbly give us your attention. May God lead you
to the truth of what He has said. He was speaking of idolaters who had
possession of the promised land. They worshipped animals in gold and
silver and wood; they worshipped the whole creation, and all winged birds.
Their cry was, ‘These are our gods and other god there is not’. It was for
these devilish things, made by the hand, injurious and execrable, that God
condemned their worship. For since there are things made with hands to the
service and glory of God, whose will it was to introduce His own holy
people of the Hebrews, as He foretold to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give
them the land of promise, and to make the Israelites possessors and
inheritors of the possessions of idolaters, and to crush and utterly wipe
out those generations because they had polluted the land and the air by
their transgressions, God warned His people beforehand not to fall into
their modes of worship. He selected two men of the Israelite people,
blessed and hallowed them for the execution of works wrought by the hand,
but for the glory and service of God, as a memorial to those generations,
Bezaleel and Eliab, of the first tribe of Dan. God said to Moses, ‘Cut out
two tables of stone and bring them to Me’. He brought them, and God, with
His own finger, wrote upon them the ten life-giving and immortal words.
Then God said: ‘Make cherubim and seraphim, and a table, and cover it
within and without with gold: and mark an ark of incorruptible wood, and
put thy testimonies into the ark for a memorial to your generations, that
is, the tablets, the urn, the rod, the manna’. Are these fashions and
resemblances made by hand, or are they not? But they are for the glory and
service of God. That great Moses, full of fear, in his desire to see a
likeness and resemblance, not to be deceived, besought God, saying, ‘Lord,
show me Thyself manifestly, that I may see Thee’. And the Lord answered,
‘If thou seest Me, thou wilt die. But pass into the hole of the rock, and
thou shalt see My hind parts.’ God showed to him in a vision the mystery
hidden from the beginning of the world. But in our generations, in the
last days, He showed Himself to us manifestly, both His front and His hind
part, entire. When God saw the race of men perishing to the end, taking
pity on His own creation, He sent forth His Son, begotten before time.
And, coming down from heaven, He entered the womb of the holy Virgin Mary.
The true Light shone forth in her womb, and, instead of human generation,
the Light became flesh. And He was baptised in the River Jordan, and us
also He baptised. He began to give us pledges of knowledge, that we might
not be deceived. And, entering into Jerusalem, into the Upper Chamber of
holy and glorious Sion, to the mystical supper, He delivered to us His
holy Body, and gave us to drink His precious Blood. There also He washed
our feet; we drank with Him, and we ate with Him, and our hands felt Him,
and He became our companion. And the Truth was manifested to us, and the
error and the mist which encompassed us fled away and vanished. And their
‘voice went forth into all the world, and their words to the end of the
earth’. Then men from the whole world came flying as eagles to Jerusalem,
as the Lord said in the gospels, ‘wheresoever the body shall be, there
shall the eagles also be gathered together’. Christ is the Body: the high
flying eagles are men who worship God and love Christ. Those who saw the
Lord, as they saw Him, drew His portrait. Those who saw James, the Lord’s
brother, as they saw him, drew his portrait. Those who saw the
proto-martyr, Stephen, as they saw him, drew his portrait. In a word,
those who saw the faces of the martyrs who poured forth their blood for
Christ, drew them. And men in all the world, beholding, gave up the
worshipping of the devil, and worshipped these not with absolute, but with
relative, worship. Which of the two seems to you, O emperor, right, to
worship: these images, or those of the devil’s error? When Christ was
present at Jerusalem, Augar, then king of the Edessenes, hearing of His
wonderful works, wrote to Christ: and Christ, with His own hand, sent him
an answer, and His own holy and glorious face. Send to that not made with
hands, and behold it. Multitudes of eastern peoples flock thither, and
worship. Many other such things not made with hands exist, which the hosts
of Christian pilgrims possess, whose daily worship you overlook.(168) Why
do we not examine and depict the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? Because
we know Him not, and it is impossible to examine and depict the nature of
God. Had we beheld and known Him as we did His Son, Him also we might have
examined and depicted, and you might call His image, too, an idol.

“We entreat you, as brethren in Christ, enter again into the truth, which
you have left. Cast aside pride, destroy your self-assurance, write to all
and everywhere, raise up again those whom you have scandalised and
blinded, though, insensible as you are, you hold this for nothing. The
charity of Christ knows that, when we enter the church of the holy Prince
of the Apostles, and behold his portrait, compunction comes on us, and,
like rain from heaven, a flood of tears comes down. Christ made the blind
to see; you have blinded those who saw well, and have made them stumble,
little as you think of it. You have reduced men to ignorance, stopped
their fair running, deprived them of their prayers. Instead of vigils,
prayerfulness, and zeal to God, you have dissolved the poor population in
sleepiness, slumbering, and carelessness. They have lost their head. And
you say that we worship stones, and walls, and boards. Not so, O emperor.
But to rouse memory and feeling, to raise up the dull, rude, and untaught
mind, by their names, their invocation, their features. Not as gods, as
you assert: far from it: for we do not place our hopes in these things. If
it be a picture of our Lord, we say, ‘O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,
help us and save us’. If it be of His holy Mother, we say, ‘Holy bearer of
God, Mother of the Lord, intercede with thy Son, our true God, to save our
souls’. If it be of a martyr, ‘Saint Stephen, who didst shed thy blood for
Christ, by thy confidence as proto-martyr, intercede for us’. So we say,
in the case of every martyr who suffered martyrdom. Suchlike are the
prayers which we address through them. It is not, as you assert, O
emperor, that we call the martyrs gods. Put away those evil thoughts of
yours. I charge you, save your own soul from the scandals and the
imprecations which you receive from all the world: for even the little
children make a mock of you. Go to the children’s schools, and say, ‘I am
he who pull down and drive away pictures’. They will answer by throwing
their slates at your head: and what you have failed to learn from the
wise, you will be taught by the simple.

“You write, ‘Ozias, the Jewish king, took out of the temple, after eight
hundred years, the brazen serpent: so have I, after eight hundred years,
expelled the idols from the churches’. Truly, Ozias was your brother, and
had your self-conceit, and tyrannised over the priests of that day, just
as you do. For holy David carried that serpent into the temple with the
sacred ark. What was it but a brazen work consecrated by God for those who
were then suffering from the bite of serpents: that an image might be
shown to the people of the prime suggester of sin to the first creature
formed by God, Adam and Eve, this was set up for the healing of sins. But
you, as you boast, after eight hundred years, have cast out from the
churches the blessing and consecration of the martyrs, and, as you fairly
confessed at first, of set purpose and without necessity, and, lastly, by
the subscription of your own hand, put upon your own head their curse.

“Now we, as holding supreme and undoubted authority from St. Peter the
chief, were minded to rebuke you, but since you have brought the curse
upon yourself, keep it and share it with your advisers. See to what extent
you have broken in upon the edification and good course of others. The
charity of Christ knows this. When we enter a church ourselves and behold
the picture of our Lord Jesus Christ’s wonderful deeds and of His holy
Mother bearing in her arms and nursing our Lord and our God, and the
angels standing round them and chanting the Holy, Holy, Holy, we do not
leave that church without compunction. And, again, who is not touched with
compunction and moved to tears when he beholds the baptismal vessels and
the circle of priests surrounding, and the mystical supper, and the blind
recovering their sight, and the raising of Lazarus, and the healing of the
leper and the paralytic, and the multitude reclining on the grass, the
baskets and the remnants taken up, and the fragments, and the
transfiguration on Mount Thabor, the Lord’s crucifixion, His burial, His
resurrection, His holy ascension, and the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who
that beholds the history of Abraham, and the knife approaching the throat
of his son, is not moved to compunction and tears? In a word, all the
sufferings of our Lord. It were better for you, emperor, if the choice
were offered you, to be called a heretic than the persecutor and destroyer
of the histories, the pictures, the images, the sufferings of our Lord.
Yet to be called a heretic would be thy misery and thy loss. Let me tell
you the difference. The heretic is said to be known, when he is known only
to few. The scandals he gives are dark, the thoughts perplexed and hard to
discern. Those who enforce them and are destitute of humiliation soon fall
by their own ignorance and confusion of mind. Their condemnation is not so
great as yours. You have openly pursued things well observed and
conspicuous as light. You have stripped naked the churches of God. As the
holy fathers clothed and adorned them you have left them bare and
tattered. And that, too, when you had no less a pontiff than the lord
Germanus, our brother and fellow priest. You should have taken his counsel
as that of a father and teacher, as aged and experienced in matters both
of Church and State. He is ninety-five years old: he has served one after
another patriarch and emperor. He was never dispensed with, for his
utility in both these services. You disregarded him and called to your
side that transgressing fool the Ephesian, the son of Apsimar, and his
like. For the lord Germanus and the then patriarch George, having informed
and persuaded Constantine, the son of Constans, the father of Justinian,
to write to us at Rome, he wrote to us under sanction of an oath, and
proposed to us fitting men that there should be an ecumenical Council.
‘Nor will I,’ said he, ‘sit with them as emperor, nor speak as having
control, but as one of them; and as the pontiffs enact I will execute. And
those who hold the right we will receive, and those who hold the wrong we
will cast out and banish. If my father perverted anything in the pure and
blameless faith, I will be the first to lay him under anathema. For it was
by the grace of God that we sent to you; and the Sixth Council was held in
peace.’ O emperor, you know that the dogmas of holy church belong not to
kings but to pontiffs, and require to be infallibly determined. For this
reason pontiffs have been set over the churches, who abstain from secular
matters, and kings equally abstain from matters of the Church and take
charge of what is in their hands. The agreement of Christ-loving kings and
of faithful pontiffs is one power when their administration is ruled by
peace and charity.

“You have written in favour of an ecumenical Council being held. To us it
seems unadvisable. You are he who prosecutes, insults and destroys the
images. Give way, and grant us silence, and the world will be at peace,
and scandals will cease. Suppose that we listen to you, that bishops have
met together from all the world, that the Senate and Council have sat.
Where is the devoted Christian emperor who is wont by custom to sit at the
Council, to honour those who speak on the right side, to reject those who
err from the truth, when you, the emperor, waver, and speak with the
tongue of barbarians? Know you not that your attack upon the holy images
is a work of contention, arrogance, and pride? At a moment when the
churches of God enjoyed unbroken peace you raised up dissensions,
enmities, and scandals. Be quiet, rest, and there is no need of a Council.
Write to every one and everywhere throughout the world which you have
scandalised by saying that Germanus, patriarch of Constantinople, and
Gregory, Pope of Rome, have erred respecting the images, and we will bear
you scatheless for the sin of your mistake, as having received from God
authority to loose things in heaven and things on earth. God is our
witness that we have presented all the letters which you have written to
us to the ears and hearts of the kings of the West, pacifying them in
respect of your soul, praising and magnifying you in respects of your
former government. Hence they welcomed your imperial letters with the
honour due from kings when they had not yet heard of your evil attack upon
the images. When they heard and were assured of this, that you had sent
Jovinus, your officer of the guards, to destroy the statue of our Saviour,
called the Witness, by which many miracles have been worked, many women of
fervent zeal, such as the ointment-sellers, were present, beseeching the
guardsman not to do it. He heard them not, but planted a a ladder, and
mounted it, and with three blows of his axe shivered the face of the
Saviour. The women could not bear that impious act. They drew away the
ladder, clubbed him, and put him to death on the spot. You, zealous for
evil, sent and slew there I know not how many women, in the presence of
competent witnesses from Rome, from France, from the Vandals, from
Mauritania, from Gothia, and generally from all the countries comprising
the interior of the West. When these returned each to his own land and
told the story of your revolutionary and childish deeds, they tore down
your laurelled letters and defaced your countenance. Lombards and
Sarmatians and other peoples towards the north overran unhappy Decapolis,
they took your very metropolis, Ravenna, deposed your magistrates, and
appointed their own. And they are minded so to do to imperial possessions
adjoining us, and to Rome, while you are not able to defend us. These are
the results of senseless folly. Yet you frighten us and say ‘I will send
to Rome and break in pieces the image of St. Peter, nay, and bring up in
fetters their bishop Gregory, as Constans did to Martin’. And yet you
should know and be assured that the pontiffs who in series sit at Rome for
the sake of peace are as a middle wall and a fence to the East and to the
West, the arbitrators of concord. And the emperors, your predecessors,
struggled hard to maintain this peace. And if you bluster and threaten us,
we have no need to fight you. Let the Bishop of Rome retreat twenty-four
stades into Campania and go you, pursue the winds. Our predecessor, the
pontiff Martin, sat for peace-sake exhorting. Thus it was that the evil
Constans, erroneous in his belief as to the Holy Trinity, and throwing in
his aid to the then heretical pontiffs, Sergius and Paul and Pyrrhus, sent
and kidnapped him and tyrannously brought him up to Byzantium. After many
cruelties inflicted he banished him, as he inflicted many on Maximus the
monk also, and his disciple Anastasius, and banished them to Lazika. And
Constans, their banisher, was murdered, and died in his sin. And the
count, who was the chief of his household, being assured by the bishops of
Sicily that he was a heretic, buried him secretly in the church, and his
course was ended in his sin. But for the blessed Martin, the city in which
he was banished bears witness to him, Cherson, and the Bosphorus, and all
the North, and the dwellers in the North, by flocking to his tomb and
receiving cures.

“May the Lord think us worthy to go the way of Martin, but for the help of
the many we are willing to live, and live on. For all the West has its
eyes fixed upon our humility, if we be not such, but they have a great
faith in us, and upon him whose statue you threaten to destroy and sweep
away, the blessed Peter, whom all the kingdoms of the West look upon as a
god upon earth. And if you venture to try the truth of this, the kings of
the West are ready even to avenge the easterns whom you have wronged. But,
we beseech you in the Lord, turn away from these revolutionary, childish
actions. You know that you are not able to defend Rome, the very head of
your royalty, unless perhaps the mere city from its nearness to the sea
and a fleet. As I said before, if the Pope go two miles and a half out of
Rome, he fears nothing from you. One thing is our grief: savages and
barbarians are civilised; you that are civilised become savage and
barbarous. In full assurance of faith the whole West makes its offering to
the holy Prince of the Apostles. And if you send to pull down the statue
of St. Peter, look, we tell you beforehand, not on us be the bloodshed
which will follow. On thy neck and head let it fall. We have just received
an entreaty from the far West, from one called Septetus, desiring by the
grace of God to see our face, that we may give him holy baptism. To avoid
the reproach of neglect and slackness we are preparing for the journey.

“May God cast his fear into your heart and bring you back to the truth
after the evils which you have inflicted upon the world. Let me receive
your letter announcing your conversion. May the God who came down from
heaven, and entered into the womb of the holy Virgin, the Mother of God,
for the salvation of men, dwell in thy heart and cast out at once those
who dwell in thee and have put in scandals; and may He bestow peace upon
the Church of all Christians for ever and ever. Amen.”

To this letter of Pope Gregory II. to Leo the Isaurian must be added a
second, written at some time between the date of the first, in 727, and
the date of the Pope’s death in 731. Indeed from some expressions in the
second we may infer that it was sent very shortly after the first.(169)

“We have received by our legate Rufinus the letter of your God-defended
Majesty and Brotherhood in Christ. Indeed it is a burden to my life that
you have not changed, but persist in the same evils—not having a Christian
mind, nor being a follower and imitator of our holy and glorious
wonder-working fathers and teachers. Indeed, foreign teachers I do not
bring into the field, but those of your own city and country. Are there
wiser than Gregory the wonder-worker, and Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory
the theologian, and Basil of Cappadocia, and John Chrysostom? not to speak
of thousands upon thousands like to them of our holy fathers and teachers
inspired by God. But you have rather followed your self-assurance, and the
passions of your own heart, when you wrote, ‘I am priest as well as
emperor’. This indeed, the emperors before you showed both in word and
deed by planting and caring for the churches; in conjunction with the
bishops seeking out the truth with the desire and zeal of orthodoxy. Such
were the great Constantine, the great Theodosius, the great Valentinian,
and Constantine the father of Justinian II., the man of the Sixth Council.
Those emperors governed in the spirit of religion, assembling councils in
unity of mind and purpose with the bishops, searching out truth of
doctrine, and so establishing and adorning the holy churches. These are
priests and emperors; they showed it by their action. But you from the
time you took the empire have not kept to the end the boundaries set by
the Fathers. You found the churches arrayed in embroidered robes, fringed
with gold; you stripped off their ornaments and left them in nakedness.
For what are our churches? Are they not things made with hands—stones,
wood, straw, at best? But they were adorned by pictures and histories,
portraying the wonders of the saints, the sufferings of our Lord, and of
His holy and glorious Mother, and of the holy Apostles. On these histories
and pictures men spend their substance.

“Fathers and mothers, bearing in their arms little children fresh from
baptism, leading the youth and those who have come in from the heathen,
point with their finger to the histories, build them up in faith, and
carry their minds and their hearts aloft to God. You have deprived the
poor of these things, and have plunged them into idle talk, gossip, songs,
castanets, pipings, and trifling. Instead of thanksgiving and glorifying
you have taught them to babble. Have your portion with the speakers of
idle words.

“O emperor, listen to our humility, and cease. Follow holy Church as you
found and received it. Dogmas belong not to emperors, but to bishops. It
is we who have the mind of Christ. One is the discipline of the Church’s
commands; another, the perception of secular things. That military,
ill-omened, rude mind, which you have for secular management, you cannot
use for the spiritual treatment of doctrine. I point out to you the
difference between palace and church, between emperors and pontiffs.
Acknowledge it, and save yourself, and be not contentious. Were any one to
take from you the royal robes, the purple, the diadem, the mantle, the
several marks of rank, you would seem, in the sight of men, unseemly,
shapeless, worthless; so you have made the churches. As you would then be,
you have stripped the churches, and reduced them to tatters. For, just as
the pontiff has no authority to enter the palace, and to make royal
appointments, so the emperor has no authority to enter into the church, to
make elections of the clergy, to consecrate and handle the symbols of the
sacred mysteries, nor even to participate in them without the priest. Let
each of us remain in the vocation wherein he was called by God. O emperor,
do you see the difference between bishops and kings? If any one sins
against you, O emperor, you confiscate his house, and leave him naked of
all but his life, and, at last, you hang or behead him, or banish him, and
make him a stranger to his children, and all his relations and friends.
Pontiffs do not this. But if any one has sinned and confessed, instead of
hanging and beheading, they put upon his neck the gospel and the cross,
they guard him in their treasury, banish him to where the deacons and
catechumens attend, put fasting on his stomach, vigil on his eyes,
thanksgiving on his tongue. And when they have well disciplined and
chastised him, they set before him the precious Body of the Lord, and give
him to drink His holy Blood. And having restored him to be a vessel of
election, cleansed from sin, they help him forward, pure and blameless, to
the Lord. Emperor, do you see the difference between church and palace?
Emperors who have reigned piously in Christ have neither disobeyed nor
afflicted pontiffs. You, O emperor, transgressor and perverter, wrote with
your own hand and subscribed, that he who removes the boundaries of the
Fathers is accursed. Therein you condemned yourself, and separated the
Holy Spirit from you: you punish and tyrannise over us with the soldier’s
arm of flesh. We, unarmed and undefended, having no earthly and carnal
armies, invoke the sovereign ruler of all creation, Christ, whose seat is
in heaven, who leads the hosts of the heavenly powers that He may send to
you a demon, according to the Apostle’s words, to ‘deliver over such a one
to Satan for the destruction of the flesh,’ that the spirit may be saved.
See, O emperor, into what a depth of shamelessness and inhumanity you have
thrust yourself. You have cast your soul into abysses and precipices,
because you would not humble yourself, nor bend your stubborn neck. For,
when bishops, by good instruction and teaching, are able to present kings
to God blameless, and exempt from errors and faults, they lay up a store
of praise and glory before Him for the great Resurrection, when God will
make manifest our hidden deeds in the presence of His angels. We, the
humble, will then be ashamed, not to have reclaimed you through your
disobedience. The pontiffs, before us, who each, in his own time, present
their emperors to God, shame our poverty, in that we do not, in our days,
present an emperor in honour and glory, but one disgraced and counterfeit.
Once again we invite you: repent and be converted: enter into the truth:
maintain what you found and received: give honour and glory to our holy
and renowned fathers and teachers, who, following God’s guidance, opened
the blindness of our hearts and eyes, until they recovered sight. Your
letter said, ‘Why was nothing said about images in the six Councils?’ Most
true, O emperor, neither was anything said about bread and water, eating
or not eating, drinking or not drinking. From the very beginning these
things were given for the life of man. So, too, were images handed down.
Bishops carried them into councils. No traveller, loving Christ and God,
went on a journey without pictures, as men of virtue, and in God’s favour.
We pray you become bishop at once, and emperor, as you wrote. If, as
emperor, you are ashamed to call yourself to account, write to all the
countries which you have scandalised, by saying that Gregory, the Pope of
Rome, has erred in the matter of images, and also Germanus, the patriarch
of Constantinople. Then we take upon ourselves the guilt of your sin, as
those who have received from the Lord authority and warrant to loose and
to bind things on earth and things in heaven. And we will make you without
charge as to this. You refuse. We, as those who shall give account to
Christ our Master, have exhorted, have instructed you, as we were taught
by the Lord. You recoiled: you refused to obey us, weak as we are: and
Germanus, your bishop: and our fathers, the holy and glorious
wonder-workers and teachers. You followed men perverse and rotten, erring
from truth of doctrine. Take your portion with them. As we wrote to you
before, we, by the grace of God, are following the road to the interior of
the West for those who seek baptism. I have sent thither bishops and
clergy of our holy Church. Their princes have received them, and bow their
heads to be illuminated. They ask for me in person to receive them. On
this path, by God’s grace, we are bent: that we may not be condemned for
neglect.

“May God grant you understanding and repentance to return to the truth
which you have deserted, and restore the humble populations to Christ, the
One Shepherd, and to the one fold of orthodox churches and priests. And
may our Lord and God grant peace to the whole world now and for ever and
ever. Amen.”

These letters, which I have given entire, were written at the end of the
third decade of the eighth century. They mark the breaking out of the
Iconoclast persecution. They seem to me to give a complete picture not
merely of the personal character in the two great factors of the time,
Pope St. Gregory II. and the Isaurian emperor, Leo III., but of the power
and influence of the Pope and the bishops in the spiritual life, and of
the eastern ruler in the civil commonwealth. What the Pope claims, he puts
forth in the most distinct language, and through all his letters it comes
out that his predecessors have ever both possessed and exercised it. It is
matter of simple history. Again we see incidentally from the words which
he uses regarding the images and pictures, that, when he wrote, they were
as much part of the Church’s ritual as the prayers. To expel them from the
Church was at once a complete interference with the inner life and conduct
of Christians, and also had the effect to make at least in appearance the
sacred places themselves synagogues and mosques, instead of habitations
wherein Christ, His holy Mother and the saints had a dwelling. The
conjunction of tyranny with impiety in Leo’s attempt is made manifest.

Again, the relation between kings who rule the secular commonwealth, and
the Pope, who, with the bishops throughout the world, presides over the
one fold of Christ, is marked as simply and also as decisively as words
can mark it. The Pope recognises in the amplest terms the temporal king as
God’s minister in his own domain, not a mandatory appointed by the people,
who might be called to account by the people, and be deposed at its will,
but the image of God, and one who administers the authority of God for the
government of human society. As simply and as distinctly he mentions
himself as holding, by express grant of God, power to bind and to loose
things in earth and things in heaven. The king has no more power to enter
the Church and touch the things of God therein than he himself has to
enter the palace, and make appointments in matters of State. But there is
this great difference—he has to answer for the conduct of kings in
spiritual matters. Kings have to answer for how they treat him; but cannot
call him to account for his administration of the divine power committed
to him. In all things that concern sin the spiritual supremacy is
complete. Its giver is God alone, and to God alone it is subject. This
root of the spiritual power is brought out by the whole tenor of his
words, in which the exact mediæval relation of the two powers is
implicitly contained. The supreme minister of God in temporal things is
the first son, but likewise the subject of the Church in spiritual things.
In all this Pope Gregory II. in the year 727 may be said exactly to repeat
what Pope Gelasius said in the year 494, both unarmed Popes speaking to
emperors, lords of armies and absolute in civil power.

The relation between East and West is also very distinctly stated. The
East lies crouching almost helpless beneath an unalloyed despotism, whilst
all the nations of the West look up to St. Peter in Rome “as a God upon
earth”. When this was written just ninety years had passed since the
sepulchre of Christ had fallen into subjection to the infidel and no less
anti-Christian Saracen. The pilgrims who could no longer go to the
sepulchre of Christ went to the sepulchre of the fisherman, and saw in the
statue of St. Peter in his own Basilica the symbol of Christ reigning. But
likewise all the kings of the West looked upon the successor of St. Peter
as no less seated on the throne of justice, of peace, of concord, of
charity, than as the supreme oracle of the Christian faith. What the
patriarch Sophronius had said of him in the agony of the holy city before
the impure Omar, the nations of the West knew and felt him to be. As Leo
III. threatened to destroy the statue of Peter, so they went to him for
baptism, so their kings were already buried in peace beneath the shadow of
the Vatican. In 716, the year before the accession of Leo III., Theodon,
Duke of Bavaria, came to Rome, being the first German prince who made a
pilgrimage to the tomb of the apostles, as later on in 726, the very year
in which the nefarious proceedings of Leo III. began, Ina, king of Wessex,
with his queen Ethelberga came and began the school of the English in
Rome, and made his land tributary to the Romescot.(170) So Constantine the
Bearded had acknowledged the authority which his successor was trying to
diminish, while he sought to reduce the Christian Church, instinct with
the presence, the miracles, the sufferings of our Lord, His Mother, and
His Saints, to the bareness of the Jewish synagogue and the Mohammedan
mosque.

It may be observed also that the Pope associates his own office with that
of bishops throughout the world, especially with that of Germanus, as
bishop of the imperial city. In his mind the bishops belong to the Pope,
and the Pope no less to the bishops. There is no jealousy of them in his
supremacy, nor of him in their subordinate jurisdiction. He censures Leo
III. for not consulting his patriarch, Germanus. The authority which he so
clearly describes is one and the same in the whole episcopate, where St.
Gregory II. himself according to the language used three centuries before
of St. Leo the Great is “princeps episcopalis coronæ”.

All these things come out not in the way of controversy but in an
uncontroversial and authoritative exhortation of a Pope to an emperor. The
Pope is clad in spiritual armour only in the midst of a captive province;
the emperor is the master of fleets and legions behind the walls of
Constantine.

No history written afterwards at a distance of time could set forth these
things with so great a force as the words of a Pope issued to the chief
actor in a desperate struggle at the very beginning of the conflict. The
immediate result is to be noted. In the year 730 the emperor, finding that
he could not make Germanus, the nonagenarian patriarch of Constantinople,
further his design in stripping the churches of their ornament, deposed
him and put a compliant instrument in his stead, Anastasius, a priest and
officer of the great Church, who held the see three and twenty years to
the time of Leo’s son Kopronymus, with what effect and what ending will be
afterwards seen. St. Gregory II. died in 731. In the four years which
elapsed from the first letter to his death he was rewarded for it by the
emperor Leo in five attempts to have him murdered. All these attempts were
frustrated by the fidelity of those about the Pope, and by the awakened
solicitude of the Italian people, who saw in Leo the most cruel and
remorseless of tyrants, in Gregory not only the champion of their faith,
but the defender of their temporal well-being, of every moral as well as
religious liberty.(171)

The Greek chronographer, Theophanes, the main part of whose life belongs
to this same eighth century, calls Pope Gregory II. “the most holy
apostolic man, the assessor(172) of Supreme Peter in his chair,
conspicuous in word and deed”. His resistance to the rude soldier on the
eastern throne won him great praise from the subjects of that throne. The
rude soldier met him only with scorn and violence, as he met the murmuring
of his people. Greece itself had taken arms in defence of its violated
churches. Leo, by means of the Greek fire, destroyed the fleet of the
insurgent Cyclades, and punished with the utmost severity his opponents in
the capital. He carried on with greater violence the attack on the images.
In many cases it passed on to the relics. The patriarch Germanus made one
more attempt to persuade the emperor. He reminded the emperor of the oath
taken at his coronation to maintain the faith of the Fathers. This brought
matters to an open breach. St. John of Damascus attests that “the blessed
Germanus, distinguished in his life and his words, was scourged and
banished”. Another Greek historian, Cedrenus, adds that the emperor called
him an idolater and struck with his own hands the patriarch of ninety
years, who laid upon the altar of the great church the omophorion, the
symbol of his rank, and departed into exile, with the words, “If I am
Jonas, cast me into the sea, but I cannot touch the faith without a
General Council be held”. Germanus had sat for fifteen years; St. John
Chrysostom and he the noblest who ever sat on that perilous throne. He
retired to his paternal house, and did not cease his courageous struggle
against the Iconoclast. He died in most extreme old age, it is supposed in
740.

The destruction of the images proceeded with brutal violence. Leo was not
content with destroying them, but likewise ruined the finest works of art.
The new patriarch, Anastasius, priest and syncellus of Sancta Sophia, who
had played the traitor to the man in whose place the emperor had intruded
him, acted with the emperor in all his violence. Bishops were persecuted
as idolaters, and above all the monks, who practised painting. The schools
directed by them perished almost entirely. Leo is even said to have burnt
the famous library with the twelve monks and their superior who presided
over it. The imperial edict found no execution in the East only, under
Saracenic domination, where the great theologian, John of Damascus, openly
opposed the Iconoclasts, as the Pope had; like whom he censured the
imperial despotism in religious matters. “It belongs not to kings,” said
he, “to lay down laws for the Church. The Apostle said, ‘God has placed in
the Church first apostles, then prophets, thirdly, pastors and teachers
for the perfection of the Church’; he did not go on to say kings. And,
again, ‘Obey those set over you and be subject to them, for they watch
over you, as those who will give account for your souls’. And further,
‘Remember your prelates, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose
faith follow, considering; the end of their conversation’. Not kings, but
apostles and prophets, pastors and doctors spoke the word to you. When God
had commanded David concerning building Him a house, He said afterwards to
him, ‘Thou shalt not build Me a house, because thou art a man of blood’.
The Apostle Paul cried out, ‘Tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to
whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour’. To kings belong
prosperity of the body politic; the regimen of the Church to pastors and
teachers. This, brethren, is the invasion of a robber. Saul rent the
mantle of Samuel. What was the retribution? God rent the kingdom from him
and gave it to David, the meekest of men. Jezabel persecuted Elias; swine
and dogs licked up her blood, and harlots washed themselves in it. Herod
slew John, and died eaten up of worms. And now the blessed Germanus,
illustrious in life and word, has been scourged and banished with many
other bishops and fathers, whose names we know not. Is not this a robber’s
act? ‘The Lord, when scribes and Pharisees drew near to tempt Him, that
they might entangle Him in His talk, and asked Him, is it lawful to give
tribute to Cæsar. He answered, bring Me the coin: when they brought it He
said, whose image is this? They answered, Cæsar’s. And He said, Give then
to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, and to God the things of God.’ We yield to
you, O emperor, in the things that are secular, tribute, custom, gifts. As
to these our substance is in your hands. But in the regimen of the Church
we have pastors who have spoken to us the word, and have formed
ecclesiastical legislation; we remove not the ancient boundaries which our
fathers have set us, but we hold to the traditions as we have received
them. For, if we begin to pull about in the smallest thing the structure
of the Church, the whole will come to pieces bit by bit.”(173)

While Leo III. was thus violently proscribing and executing the defenders
of the Church’s rights in the East, St. Gregory II. at Rome censured his
interference with the faith, but maintained his sovereignty as emperor in
Italy. He had much ado to keep the peoples of Italy within imperial
allegiance. When Anastasius, the intruded heretical patriarch of
Constantinople, sent the letter announcing his succession to Gregory, the
Pope rejected it. The personal acts of the emperor against his life did
not move him from his settled purpose. The guardsman Marinus was sent as
duke to Rome with orders to kill the Pope, or at least to take him
prisoner. He could do nothing. A second attempt was made by the Duke
Basil, in conjunction with the chartular Jordanes and the sub-deacon John.
A third under the exarch Paul, who caused troops to march against Rome.
Romans and Tuscans encountered them and made them retreat. Duke Basil had
to save his life by taking refuge in a monastery. The Romans frustrated
the further attempts of the exarch, and compelled the Pope to assume the
full government of Rome, while the emperor intended to depose him and put
a compliant tool in his place. Venice, Ravenna, and the five cities of the
Pentapolis, under support of the Lombards, chose themselves dukes,
renounced obedience to the exarch, and declared themselves for the cause
of the Pope. The purpose of the Italians was to choose themselves a new
emperor and advance upon Constantinople. Only the fidelity and the
prudence of the Pope, who still hoped for the emperor’s amendment,
prevented the execution of this project.

The Lombard king, Liutprand, thought it was just the opportunity for which
he was waiting to extend his monarchy in central Italy. Exhilaratus,
imperial prefect at Naples, with his son Adrian, got possession of part of
Campania, and set the people against the Pope; but the Romans attacked
them, and after a furious battle slew them both. They chased the duke
Peter from Rome. In the territory of Ravenna it came to a fierce struggle
between the Italians on the Pope’s side and the imperials, in which the
exarch Paul lost his life. The Lombards took many cities, especially in
the Pentapolis, and well nigh put an end to the imperial dominion there.
King Liutprand advanced as far as Sutri, took it, but a hundred and forty
days later bestowed it upon the Apostles Peter and Paul, that is, the
Roman Church. This was in the year 727. It is reckoned by some the first
beginning of the State of the Church.(174)

Then it lay in the hand of the Pope to put an end to Byzantine dominion in
central Italy. The exarchate was in Liutprand’s possession. Had Gregory
II. come to terms with him, the Pope would have obtained a free hand over
the duchy of Rome. It already refused tribute to the emperor; in arms
repulsed his troops, frustrated the repeated attempts upon the freedom and
life of Gregory II., and bound itself under oath to protect him. The city
of Rome expelled the imperial duke, and seems to have given itself a
municipal government. It was the desire of the cities on the Adriatic to
substitute an orthodox for an heretical emperor. Had the Pope put himself
at the head of this revolt, the emperor’s power was at an end. He did it
not. He maintained the purity and the freedom of the faith against
imperial interference; but he urged the population to continue their
allegiance to the sovereign. No stronger proof of this can be given than a
letter of the Pope to Ursus, doge of Venice, in these words: “Gregory, the
bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Ursus, duke of Venice. Since by
sinful action the city of Ravenna, the head of all, has been captured by
that unutterable race of Lombards, and our son, the noble lord the exarch,
is, as we know, sojourning at Venice, your nobility should support him,
and maintain his cause, as we do, that the city of Ravenna may return to
the former condition of the sacred commonwealth, as belonging to the
domain of our lords and sons, the high emperors Leo and Constantine. So by
the help of the Lord we may be able to remain firm, by zeal and love to
our holy faith, in the commonwealth and the imperial service. God preserve
you in safety, beloved son.”(175)

This conduct could not fail to endanger the Pope’s position with king
Liutprand. In the year 728 the strangest scene of this perplexed time took
place. The Lombard king appeared with his host before Rome. Pope Gregory
II. visited him in his camp, and exercised such influence over him that
the king desisted from the siege, went as pilgrim to the Apostle’s tomb,
and left as gifts there his crown, his arms, and his mantle.

Such events as these fill up the last four years of Gregory II. The result
was what we might expect. Lord of Rome the emperor was called; Pope
Gregory II. became in fact a glorious beginning of the papal rule. Not
reckless force, not ambitious struggle and self-seeking formed the basis
of this rule, but the free voice of the population in return for real
protection, for duty steadfastly fulfilled, for never-failing courage,
firm belief, and holy life. Put on the one hand the struggles, the fierce
enmities, the treacheries, the revolts, the scenes of blood, the shifting
of parties evoked by the Iconoclast storm in Italy and Rome, threatened by
the two antagonists, Greeks and Lombards; and on the other hand the great
activity of Pope Gregory II. in his own spiritual domain. And then
estimate the Pope who repulsed Leo III. in his attack upon the Church’s
indefeasible rights, but maintained him as emperor; who fostered St.
Boniface, enabling him by erecting a united hierarchy to lay the
foundation of a Germany, one and Christian. We may fairly place the second
Gregory by the side of the first for prudence, for courage, for insight,
for the sagacity of a ruler in the person of a saint. The great annalist
has even said of him, “If what he wrote were extant, and what he did had
been more carefully recorded, he would be thought no less than Gregory the
Great”.(176)

On the 11th February, 731, St. Gregory II. closed a pontificate as
renowned in its present action, as fruitful in its results. While the
clergy and laity stood beside his coffin, they chose his successor, who
was consecrated thirty-five days later, when the consent of the exarch was
brought from Ravenna, this being the last time it was given by a viceroy
of the Greek emperor.(177)

Concerning this Pope, Anastasius writes:—“Gregory III., a Syrian by
nation, son of John. He sat ten years, two months, and twenty days. A man
most meek and most wise, well instructed in the holy Scriptures, knowing
both the Greek and Latin tongues. He knew all the psalms by heart, in
their order, and was exceedingly skilful in their meaning by his long
study of them. He was a polished speaker, an exhorter to all good works, a
favourite popular preacher, a maintainer of the Catholic and Apostolic
faith immutilate, who, by his fatherly warnings, ceased not to strengthen
the hearts of the faithful, a fearless and zealous defender of orthodoxy:
a lover of poverty, providing solicitously for those in want, not only
with piety, but with careful pains. Redeemer of captives, generous
supporter of orphans and widows: a lover of the religious life, so, by
God’s help, he reached the sacred order of the priesthood. Upon him the
Romans, moved from the highest to the lowest by an inspiration from
heaven, while he was absorbed in devotion beside the coffin of his
predecessor, suddenly laid their hands and chose him for pontiff. It was
in the times of the emperors Leo and Constantine, in the midst of that
persecution which they set up, for the casting down and destruction of the
sacred images of our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Mother of God, of the
apostles, and all saints and confessors. The same most holy man issued
writings with the vigour of the Apostolic See, like as his predecessor of
holy memory had done, to move them to repentance, and to put away this
error.”

Anastasius then records how the emperor had imprisoned his messenger in
Sicily. “Whereupon the pontiff, with greater zeal, attended by the
archbishops of Grado and Ravenna, with other bishops of the western part,
to the number of ninety-three, held a Council at the sacred confession of
St. Peter’s most holy body, with all the clergy and the people, and passed
a decree, that if henceforth there be any who, despising those who
faithfully retain the ancient usage of the Apostolic Church, pull down,
destroy, profane, or blaspheme the veneration of the Sacred Images, that
is, of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, of His Ever-Virgin Mother, the
immaculate and glorious Mary, of the blessed apostles, and of all saints,
he be debarred from the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is,
from the unity and structure of the whole Church. This they all solemnly
confirmed with their subscriptions.”(178)

While the emperor replied to the Council’s decree by imprisoning the papal
bearer of it for a year in Sicily, the position of Pope Gregory III. was
one of great difficulty in respect to the Lombard duchies of Benevento and
Spoleto. They desired to be set free from their loose connection with King
Liutprand, who, on his part, desired their complete subordination to
himself. To the Pope their maintenance was of great importance. Thence
arose a web of party-shiftings, treaties, and counter treaties, which
encompasses the whole later history of the Lombard kingdom.

The archbishop of Ravenna had taken part in the Council at Rome, and his
city was as much opposed to the emperor’s godless attempts as was Rome.
Leo III. resolved to be avenged upon the Pope and Italy. He put a great
fleet under the command of the Duke Manes, and ordered him to sack
Ravenna, to treat the cities of the Pentapolis as rebels, to march on
Rome, to destroy the images there, to treat without mercy those who
attempted to defend them, to seize the Pope, and bring him in fetters to
Constantinople. But storms deranged these plans. A hurricane fell upon the
fleet as it was in sight of Ravenna. Part of it was sunk with all the
crews: part managed to reach an arm of the Po, close to the city. Manes
disembarked troops from it, and went against Ravenna. The people took
arms, with the bishop at their head: whilst the women and old men went in
sackcloth and ashes through the streets in supplication; the young marched
out against the enemy, and drew him into an ambuscade. The Greeks flew to
their ships, many of which were sunk, and the 26th June, 733, was kept as
a perpetual festival in Ravenna: while, for six years out of hatred to the
Greeks the conquerors would eat no fish from that arm of the river.

Leo became furious at this reverse: he redoubled his cruelty on the
defenders of images, and since he could hurt the Roman Church in no other
way, he confiscated all the possessions of the Church in his realm. In the
words of Theophanes,(179) “That opponent of God, roused to a greater
madness, and indulging further in his Arabian mind, imposed capitation
taxes on the third part of Calabria and Sicily. Moreover, he ordered to be
paid to the public treasury the so-named patrimonies of the holy chief
apostles honoured at Rome, three golden talents and a-half, which had been
paid of old to the churches, and he subjected to inspection and enrolment
the male children, as Pharaoh did of old to the Hebrews: what not even his
teachers, the Arabs, had done to the Christians in the East.”

But he did a great deal more and a worse thing not noted by Theophanes. By
an arbitrary act of secular despotism he severed from the jurisdiction of
the Roman patriarch not only Calabria and Sicily, but the ten Illyrian
provinces, Epirus, Illyricum, Macedonia, Thessaly, Achaia—that is present
Greece—Dacia, Mæsia, Dardania, Prævalis, and attached them to the
patriarchate of Constantinople. By this act its jurisdiction became
co-extensive with the eastern empire, and the patriarch ecumenical in that
sense of the Greek word which considered their own empire as pre-eminently
the world, the land that is inhabited by men, as contra-distinguished from
the land foraged by barbarians.

The patriarch to whom this honour accrued was that Anastasius who had been
put by force into the place of the deposed Germanus, and was afterwards
scourged and deposed by the same force under Leo’s son and successor,
Kopronymus.

Calabria and Sicily returned to the jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch
when the eastern emperor lost his dominion in them. The other provinces
remained under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the gift of an
heretical emperor to a patriarch raised by him as his instrument to the
ecumenical throne and at last deposed by his son as an instrument of
little value.

In this act we see the completion of the aggression begun in the year 381,
which attempted to give to the see of Constantinople the second rank in
the Church. The sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem have sunk under
it, but they have fallen into Saracen domination, and are little more than
names; the diminished empire has in its capital the only real patriarch,
and seeks to indemnify him for eastern losses by severing ten provinces
from the patriarchal jurisdiction of Rome, under which they had been from
the beginning of the Christian hierarchy. And Nova Roma, halved it is true
in its secular extension, and trembling at the perpetual aggression of the
Mohammedan chalif, beholds at length its patriarch standing over against
the elder Rome as the chief instrument of imperial despotism in spiritual
things.

Leo III. consciously completes the structure which Theodosius unwittingly
began. The exaltation of the see of the capital is from beginning to end
the work of imperial power, and this special character bears out to the
full the denunciation of it by St. Gregory the Great in his own time, when
he called the bishop’s assumed title “a name of blasphemy and diabolical
pride, and a forerunner of anti-Christ”.(180)

Further, the acts of Leo III. in 733 are unanimously viewed by historians
as having a large effect in the deliverance of Italy from the eastern
sovereignty, and his arrogation of the power to sever from the Pope,
patriarch, a large extent of provinces is viewed no less as a prelude to
the great schism between the East and West. The remaining years of Gregory
III. are filled up with his embarrassing position between the Lombard
duchies of Benevento and Spoleto and Liutprand aiming at uniting Italy in
a Lombard monarchy, whereby the Pope should become his subject as before
he had been a subject of the Goths. From the moment when king Liutprand
resumed more decidedly his plan against the Greek possessions and
therefore against the duchy of Rome, he was bound to endeavour to end the
independence of the two outlying Lombard duchies. But at the same time the
alliance between these duchies and the papacy became a political
necessity.

In the year 738 Liutprand took the field. He began with incursions into
the territory of Ravenna, and invited the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento
to attack the duchy of Rome. They refused, since, as Pope Gregory III. in
one of his letters informs us, they had declared that they would not take
the field against God’s holy Church and her people, with whom they had
entered into covenant. Thereupon the king made war against his disobedient
liegemen. While he laid waste the possessions of the Church in the
territory of Ravenna, he sat down before Spoleto in the spring of 739 with
a considerable force. Duke Thrasimund could not resist and fled to Rome.
In June the king entered Spoleto. He compelled Benevento to receive his
nephew Gregory for duke. At the same time he drew the exarch to his
interest, to whom the Pope’s independence had long been odious. The
confused accounts of annalists and historians make it difficult, if not
impossible, to establish particular events in chronological accuracy. And
the greatest uncertainty lies upon one of these events which is of
particular importance, since it would secure for us an adequate reason for
the Pope’s conduct. Liutprand is said immediately after the taking of
Spoleto to have appeared before Rome, demanding that the fugitive duke
should be delivered up to him. Encamped in the meadows of Nero, beside the
Vatican, he plundered St. Peter’s, laid waste the neighbourhood, and made
many Romans prisoners. It is certain that he took four cities in the
Tuscan part of the Roman duchy, Amelia, Ortes, Bomarzo, and Bleda, as
hostages for Duke Thrasimund.

The Pope was in the utmost danger of being speedily swallowed up by the
encircling Lombard monarchy. Another siege of Rome, perhaps its capture,
was to be immediately expected. The Lombard duchies were unable to repulse
the Lombard king: for defence the emperor was impotent. He could send a
fleet to ravage the imperial metropolis of Italy; he could not defend the
ancient mistress and maker of his empire: from whom he still took a title,
which seemed a mockery. The Lombard threatened to dethrone Leo and make
the Pope his subject. The dread of sacrificing the Church’s independence
drove St. Gregory III. to the last and sole remaining refuge.

The relations(181) of the Franks to Rome had been various since the
emperor Maximian had received the Salian Franks into the number of Rome’s
allies. After the victory over Syagrius, near Soissons, Clovis had raised
up the Gallic-Frankish kingdom upon the ruins of Roman and Visigoth
dominion. When baptised by St. Remigius, Clovis had become the first
Catholic king in the midst of northern peoples attached to Arianism. This
had brought him into manifold connection with the Holy See. In the time of
Pope Gregory II., the conversion to the faith of Germany, from the Rhine
as far as Saxony and Thuringia, not only relied for support, but had its
root in the Frankish kingdom, and bound it still closer with the Papacy.
There were also connections of another sort. As far back as the year 577,
the emperor Justin II., conscious of his own impotence, had given to the
messenger from Rome, soliciting help against Lombard aggression, for
answer, either to seek to gain one of the Lombard dukes, or, if that
failed, to draw the Franks to make a diversion by an expedition into
Italy. The emperor Mauritius had himself made use of these means. From the
year 584, king Childebert had been induced, by Byzantine invitation and
gold, to undertake four campaigns against the Lombards. But it was
reserved to a stronger family than his to co-operate in producing a great
change south of the Alps. At the head of a people formed by the
conjunction of various races amalgamated out of Germans, Gauls, and
Romans, there grew up, in spite of sundry partial divisions, the mass of a
mighty monarchy, north of the Alps. The weakness of the larger number of
the kings who succeeded Clovis caused the chief officers of the crown to
increase in strength. The lower the Merovingians sank, the higher rose the
sons of Pipin, from the banks of the Meuse, until they equalled and
outgrew the effete race. By the end of the first quarter of the eighth
century, Charles Martell, Major Domus, first of the Austrasian, and then
of the Neustrian-Frankish realm, had all power in his hands. In October,
732, he had won a greater merit from all the West than, perhaps, even
Aetius and the Visigoth kings had gained. They had repulsed the vast
Mongol mass at Chalons: he, by Tours, in a bloody battle, had set bounds
for ever to the advance of the Arabians, overflooding Gaul after the
conquest of Spain. He threw them back upon the uttermost south of Gaul,
from which, after many a battle, they were forced to recross the Pyrenees.

To Charles Martell, shining in the lustre of that great victory which
saved the West from Mohammed, as Leo III. prevented his entrance into
Constantinople, the beleagured Pope turned from the cruel yet impotent
tyranny of Leo, and the pretension of the encroaching Lombard. And his own
words, at the moment of trial, will better express his situation than any
others which can be put in his mouth:—(182)

“We have thought it necessary to write again to your Excellency for the
excessive grief which is in our heart, and for our tears, confiding that
you are a loving son of St. Peter, prince of the apostles, and ours also,
and that from reverence to him you will listen to our charge for the
defence of God’s Church, and his own peculiar people: we, who can no
longer endure the persecution and oppression of the Lombard race. They
have taken from us all the lights in St. Peter’s Church, which were given
by your relations or yourself. Next to God, we take refuge in you: for
this the Lombards oppress and make a mock of us. St. Peter’s Church is
stripped, and reduced to utter desolation. But we have rather confided the
details of our sorrows to your liegeman, the bearer of this, which he may
present by word of mouth. O my son, may the Prince of the Apostles deal
with thee now and in the future life before our Almighty God, as thou
disposest and contendest with all speed for his Church and our defence,
that all nations may know your fidelity, your pure intention, the love
which you bear to the Prince of the Apostles, to us, and to his peculiar
people, by your zeal and your defence of us. And by it you will also gain
eternal life.”

Either with this letter, or before it, the Pope had sent to Charles
Martell the keys of St. Peter’s Confession, together with rich presents.
His messengers were received with great honour, but no actual help in
soldiers came. It is supposed that Charles Martell was then engaged,
together with Eudo, Duke of Aquitania, in expelling the Saracens from
Southern France.

The acts of Leo III., as an open enemy of the Pope’s spiritual power, by
his completion of the Byzantine patriarch’s usurped jurisdiction in the
year 733, as above described, thus precede, by about five years, the
appeal made to Charles Martell, by Gregory III., in the face of the
advancing Lombard king, Liutprand, on the one hand, and the absence of any
protection by the emperor on the other.

Such was the uncertain position of things when, in the year 741, the three
great actors were withdrawn from this life, Leo III., on the 18th June,
Charles Martell, on the 24th October, Gregory III., on the 27th November.

Of what this most noble Pope did for Rome, Anastasius gives a long
account. If the Romans loved and admired him as a cardinal priest, they
loved and admired him no less as Pontiff to the end. While fully
acknowledging still the sovereignty of the eastern emperor, a man as
unworthy of the loyalty which bound the Pope to him, as a sovereign could
be, the Pope neither by his heresy nor by his tyranny was induced to
renounce him. He did, indeed, one great and momentous act. He sent to
Charles Martell the keys of St. Peter’s Confession, conjuring him in the
name and person of the Apostle, to save his city from the Lombard robber:
the city which its sovereign was neither able nor willing to save: the
city on which the robber was descending with the utmost force. It is
supposed that Charles Martell was engaged in battle with the Saracens in
Southern France at the time. The Pope sent a second time, to the great
leader, the Hammer of the infidel, the Liberator of the Christian. What
took place is not exactly known: but the Lombard king, Liutprand, retired
in the month of August, 739, from the siege of Rome with his army to
Pavia, and helped Charles Martell against the Saracens, who had again
invaded Provence. Then also Rome was saved by her pontiff from becoming a
Lombard prey.

Once more towards the end of 741, Liutprand was preparing a new expedition
against Rome and its duchy, when Rome lost, on the 27th November, St.
Gregory III., its pontiff, prince, and champion. At Constantinople, Leo
III. had been succeeded by his son, Kopronymus, whom the Greek Zonaras
calls, “a cub more cruel than his sire”. Rome seemed covered by a terrible
tempest: France had been deprived not a month before of Charles Martell.
All minds were in fearful expectation, when a star of peace appeared on
the horizon. There rose up one who, by the force of his mind and the
unsparing risk of his own person, was to preserve Italy during ten years
from the destruction which seemed impending.

Upon the death of Pope Gregory III., the Roman chair was filled in four
days. The usual three days having been devoted to the solemn funeral of
that Pope, the electors, on the fourth day, which was Sunday, the 2nd
December, met in the Lateran palace, and immediately united their votes on
the person of Zacharias, and he was consecrated the same day. Two things
combined to bring about this rapid election and ordination, one the
extraordinary merit of the elected, the other the extreme urgency of the
public need, as Rome, with its provinces, was threatened by King
Liutprand. The confirmation by the exarch, that token of imperial
oppression, was not waited for. Zacharias was the last of those
illustrious orientals of whom a series at this time occupied the Roman
Chair. Though born in Italy, being a native of the Calabrian city, St.
Severina, he was Greek by lineage. Of him and of his predecessor, Photius
himself, the leader of the Greek schism, has left written, “How could I
pass over in silence the two Roman prelates, Gregory and Zacharias, who
were eminent for their virtue, who contributed to increase the flock of
Christ by their teaching full of divine wisdom, who were even conspicuous
by the divine gift of miracles?” Of Zacharias, the character given by
Anastasius is, “a man most meek and gentle, adorned with every goodness, a
lover of the clergy and all the Roman people, slow to anger and quick to
mercy, rendering to no man evil for evil, nor punishing according to
desert, but from the time of his ordination made kind and tender to all:
so that he returned good for evil to his former persecutors, both
promoting and enriching them”. During ten years, Zacharias, by his wisdom
and personal influence, kept at bay the three Lombard kings, Liutprand,
Rachis, and Aistulf, who seemed on the point of completing the
long-fostered ambition of their people by the absorption of Rome into a
barbarian kingdom. The whole time is a contest of mind against matter, of
right against encroachment. We learn, by the very words of these Popes,
that even in the eighth century the radical opposition between Romans and
Lombards continued still as in the time of the first invasion under
Alboin. The end of the Lombards was to make themselves lords of all Italy:
that of the Romans, to prevent themselves passing under a barbarian yoke.
True peace there could never be between them. A truce, liable at any time
to be broken, was all that could subsist.

Three times at least in the ten years of his pontificate, Zacharias
repeated, with Lombard kings, the action of his great predecessor, Leo,
with Attila. Liutprand, after thirty years of reign, was consolidating his
kingdom by the reduction of the two Lombard dukedoms, Spoleto and
Benevento. Bent upon gaining Rome, when he had subdued Spoleto, free from
the check of Charles Martell, secure of the East by the contested
succession to Leo of his son, Kopronymus, Liutprand was at Terni. Thither
Pope Zacharias resolved to go in person, accompanied by a train of clergy.
Liutprand received the Pope with great honour, and the result of a long
interview was that he agreed to restore to the Pope four cities of the
Roman duchy which he had taken. He likewise gave back the patrimony of
Sabina, which he had seized thirty years before, and made peace with the
Roman duchy for twenty years. The Pope returned as it were in triumph to
Rome, was received with exultation, and ordered a procession of
thanksgiving from the Church of St. Mary of the Martyrs, that is, the
Pantheon, to St. Peter’s. This was in his first year, 742.

But the next year, 743, Liutprand broke out against 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 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 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 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”.

At once clergy and people proceeded to a new choice, but the Stephen whom
they chose lived but three days, and died before consecration. “Then,”
says Anastasius, “the whole people of God met in the basilica of St. Mary
at the Crib, and beseeching the mercy of our Lord God, and with the good
will of our Lady, the holy ever-virgin Mary, Mother of God, they elected,
with one mind, another Stephen, a man preserving the tradition of the
Church with inviolable constancy, swift to help the poor, a firm preacher,
a most valiant defender of the fold in the strength of God.” Immediately a
great persecution against the city of Rome and its adjoining cities broke
out from the savage king Aistulf. Three months after his consecration, the
Pope sent two legates, his brother, Paul, and another, with large gifts to
move the Lombard king to a treaty of peace. The king made a peace for
forty years, but in four months, treading oath and treaty under foot, he
pretended that the city of Rome, with all its province, was subject to
him, and that all the inhabitants should pay him yearly a capitation tax
of a gold solidus. The Pope sent to him two fresh legates, whom the king
received, but refused all conditions, and ordered them to return to their
monasteries without seeing the Pope.

At the end of this year, an imperial legate came to Rome with two _sacred_
letters(184) from the emperor, one for the Pope, the other for Aistulf. In
it he asked the Lombard king to restore the lands of the Commonwealth,
unjustly taken by him. The Pope immediately sent on his brother, Paul,
with the imperial Silentiarius, to Aistulf at Ravenna. The king scorned to
listen either to emperor or Pope, but he added a messenger of his own, to
go to Constantinople, and make some proposition to the emperor. The two
legates, John the Silentiarius, and Paul, the deacon, returned to Rome,
and reported to the Pope that they could do nothing. Then the Pope,
convinced of the evil purpose of the king, sent to the imperial city his
own messengers, in company with John the Silentiarius, “beseeching the
imperial clemency that, as he had already often written to him, he would
come with an army to defend by every means all this part of Italy, and
would deliver this city of Rome and the whole Italian province from the
fangs of the son of iniquity”.(185)

In the meantime, “that most atrocious king of the Lombards burst into
fury, threatening that he would slay all the Romans with one sword if they
did not submit to his sovereignty”. The Holy Father called all the Roman
people together, and walked in procession with them with naked feet,
hearing in his arms the image of our Lord still venerated in the chapel
_sancta sanctorum_. This he carried from the Lateran Church to Santa Maria
Maggiore, the clergy and people chanting litanies and intercessions; and
Aistulf’s broken treaty of peace was affixed to a lofty cross, and formed
part of the procession.

This legation from Pope Stephen II. took place in the year 753. The
emperor Constantino Kopronymus was not the man to save Italy from the
Lombards. To the repeated requests of the Pope he sent no other help than
imperial letters, charging him to induce Aistulf to restore the provinces
he had taken from the empire, and to Aistulf in the same sense, calling
him to undo his diabolical aggression.

The emperor also left the Pope free to unite himself with any one who
could defend him. It was a natural right in such a case: but the imperial
sanction made it more easy of success.

“Then,” says Anastasius,(186) “the most holy man having, in vain, sought,
by innumerable presents, to conciliate that pestilent king for the flocks
committed to him by God, that is, for the whole army at Ravenna and all
the people of that province of Italy, of which he was in possession, and
seeing especially that there was no help from the imperial power, as his
predecessors of blessed memory, the second and third Gregories and
Zacharias, begged help from the king of the Franks against the oppressions
and invasions which they had suffered in this Roman province from the
abominable Lombard race; so he in like manner, by the inspiration of
divine grace, sent in his deep sorrow a letter by a foreign hand to Pipin,
king of the Franks.” Thus from 726, the beginning of the Iconoclastic
heresy and tyranny of the emperors Leo III. and Kopronymus, the Popes
acknowledged the Byzantine sovereignty until in 753 the direct attack of
the Lombard king Aistulf upon Rome, and the attempt to make himself
sovereign of the Popes of Rome and of the territory called its duchy,
together with the impotence of the Byzantine emperor to defend his own
subjects, and the Pope himself vainly entreating succour from him,
compelled Stephen II. “to turn his thoughts from the East to the
West”.(187)

While the Lombards were pressing Rome and all its fortified places, Pipin
replied to Stephen’s entreaty for succour by sending the Bishop of Metz
and the Duke Autchar to accompany him in his journey to France. “Then the
same most blessed Pope, trusting in the mercy of our almighty God, went
out of this city of Rome to St. Peter’s on the 14th October, and many
Romans followed him and people of the neighbouring cities, and weeping and
crying, they would hardly let him go on. But he, trusting in the strength
of God and the protection of the holy Mother of God and the chief apostles
for the safety of all, weak as he was in body, began that laborious
journey, commending all the Lord’s flock to Peter, our Lord, the good
shepherd and blessed Prince of the Apostles.” As he drew near to Pavia
that most wicked king Aistulf sent him messengers, ordering that he should
on no account ask for the restoration of Ravenna and its exarchate or the
other places of the commonwealth which Aistulf or his predecessors had
invaded. The Pope replied that nothing should induce him not to ask it.
When he reached Pavia and was received by the king he made him many
presents, and ceased not with many tears to ask him for the restitution of
what he had taken. He could obtain nothing. The Frank legates pressed that
he might be allowed to go on to France. The king asked the Pope if he
desired it. The Pope avowed it, and the king gnashed his teeth, and sent
his satellites repeatedly in secret to turn him from it. The Frank legates
at last succeeded in obtaining permission for him to go forward.

On the 15th November, attended by the bishop of Ostia and a large train of
clergy, he left Pavia, and continued his journey. He reached the valley of
the Rhone by Aosta and the Mons Jovis, where about two hundred years later
Bernard of Menthon founded the monastery which has given its new name to
the mountain, and he rested at length at the abbey of St. Maurice, now one
of the oldest existing monasteries.(188)

Stephen II. was the first Pope who crossed the Alps. The few Popes who had
up to that time travelled outside Italy had been banished, as St. Clement
by Trajan to the Crimea, or St. Liberius confined by Constantius I. at
Berea in Thrace, or St. Silverius banished by Belisarius to Patara; St.
John I., St. Agapetus, and Vigilius had by royal orders gone to
Constantinople. St. Martin had been taken thither a prisoner by Constans
II., and Pope Constantine, ordered by Justinian II. to go thither, had
been courteously received by him.

Now at the call of duty, but with his own free consent, Stephen II.
crossed the Alps and took refuge in France, to consolidate an alliance
with the most potent kingdom of the West, full of importance for that
Christendom which the see of St. Peter, and that alone, was creating. As
the eastern emperor had nothing for him but to impose heresy and execute
tyranny, the king of the Franks, hearing news of his approach, sent a
splendid train under his eldest son Charles to convoy him. That was a
memorable day when Stephen and Pipin met at the royal villa of Pontigny,
near Chalons, on the Marne, not far from the field of battle where Attila
three hundred years before failed to make Europe a Mongol empire. Now the
union of Stephen and Pipin saved it from a Mohammedan enthralment.

The long-suffering loyalty of so many Popes was at length exhausted. The
deliverance of the Holy See and their flock from the intolerable Lombard
yoke, a usurpation both upon their natural right and their divine
commission to rule the people of God, combined with their desertion by the
eastern emperor, whom, in despite of the most inhuman government during
two hundred years ever practised by men called Christian, they had
acknowledged and maintained, led Stephen II. to inaugurate a new political
order of things. His request, accompanied with many tears, to Aistulf at
Pavia to restore to “the commonwealth” of the empire the exarchate and to
forbear grasping Rome, a request which the Lombard cast away in scorn, led
the Pope, feeble as he was, to risk all the dangers of the Alpine passes,
as well as to seek in France, where alone it could be found, an arm strong
enough to save Italy both from Lombard and from Byzantine.

The king of the Franks, besides his eldest son Charles, had sent Fulrad
the abbot and Rothard the duke to conduct the Pope from the monastery of
St. Maurice, whom they brought with all his retinue to the king with great
honour. “When,” says Anastasius, “the king heard of the most blessed
pontiff’s approach he hastened to meet him with his wife, his sons, and
his chief men. Advancing three miles from his palace called Pontigny, he
dismounted from his horse, and with great humility threw himself on the
earth, together with his wife, his children, and his chieftains, and so
received the Pope. He also walked for some space to a certain spot guiding
the Pope’s horse.” Then the papal train went on together with the king to
the palace, rendering thanks to God in hymns and spiritual songs. It was
the feast of the Epiphany, and Pope and king sat side by side in the
oratory, when the Pope with tears besought the same most Christian king
that by a treaty of peace he would arrange the cause of St. Peter and the
commonwealth of the Romans. And the king satisfied the Pope by oath that
he would to the utmost listen to all his requirements and restore the
exarchate of Ravenna and the other rights and territories of the
commonwealth.

“It being winter, he then caused the Pope with all his retinue to take up
his abode in the abbey of St. Denys, near Paris. King Pipin, going to
Quiersy and there assembling all the nobles of his royal power, inflamed
them with the words of so great a father, and ordained with them to fulfil
what, under favour of Christ, he had decreed with the most blessed Pope.”

By this solemn compact between the Frank realm and the Holy See, the king
bound himself, should he be victorious, to give over to St. Peter, and in
him to Pope Stephen, and his successors, all the places of the exarchate,
and of those lands which had belonged to the empire, of which the Lombards
had taken possession. If we are to follow the text of the contemporaneous
statements and later references, Pipin considered this act not as a
donation, but a restitution. Those for whom this restitution ensued were
so blended together in the view which results from Pipin’s subsequent
declarations that to separate them seems impossible.(189) The one party is
the Roman Commonwealth, which here takes the place of the empire, without,
in its essence, containing any other idea, for empire is but one form of
commonwealth; the other party is the Roman Church. There is no reference
here to the duchy of Rome, the territory belonging to the city according
to the Byzantine departmental administration. The Pope conferred on the
king the title of Roman Patricius, a title which Pipin accepted simply in
its true meaning, understanding by it protection of the Church, as he
afterwards named himself merely Defensor or Protector of the Church.

Stephen, in the meantime, was staying at the Abbey of St. Denys, near
Paris, for a long time dangerously ill, in consequence of his sufferings
during his journey, and also of his great anxiety. On the 28th July, 754,
he anointed in this abbey Church, afterwards the resting-place of the
kings of France, Pipin and his wife, Bertrada, with their sons, Charles
and Carloman. So, for the first time, the hand of a Pope touched the
youthful head of that Charles, who, in riper age, was destined to act with
such force on the fortunes of the western Church.

When the negotiations between the king of the Franks and Aistulf led to no
result, the Frank army began its march. The Lombards were defeated near
Susa, at the foot of Mont Cenis, and presently Pipin stood before Pavia.
Thereupon Aistulf consented to peace. He promised to surrender Ravenna,
and divers other cities: he bound himself no longer to oppress Rome and
her territory. But scarcely was the covenant made, and the Frank host
withdrawn, and the Pope returned to Rome, which he entered before the
conclusion, having been welcomed in the meadows of Nero by the exulting
people, when king Aistulf repented of his concessions. Not only did he not
give up a palm of land in the exarchate: he broke again into the Roman
territory, took cities, laid waste the country. In this distress wore away
the year 755. With New Year’s Day, 756, the king began the siege of Rome.
He shut in the city on three sides. On the height of the Janiculum the
Tuscans were encamped. Aistulf, with his main force, lay beside the
Salarian and neighbouring gates: the Beneventans shut in the southern
gates. His attacks upon the walls were repulsed. Every one took part in
the struggle. Abbot Warnehar, the Frankish minister, put on armour and
worked day and night upon the walls. The whole country round, with its
churches, villas, and dwellings, was mercilessly wasted. The Lombards made
a desert round Rome. Letter after letter the Pope sent to Pipin.

The Father and Head of the Christian family was in the utmost possible
danger of beholding the spiritual rights of his see and the people which
he loved and cared for, subjected to the half barbarous domination of
intruders, who, for nearly two hundred years, had forced themselves upon
Italy. In those two centuries the possession of Rome, and lordship over
it, had been the coveted prize first of their heathen, and then of their
semi-Christian ambition. The rule of the Goth, much nobler in his natural
character, and much less savage, had yet failed, even under the genius of
Theodorich, to amalgamate itself with Roman thought, law, and usage. The
strong hand of the great Gothic king had seemed to tame it: as soon as he
was gone, it corrupted his grandson, and murdered his daughter and
heiress, Amalasunta, too good and noble for her people. But the prospect
of having to submit to an Aistulf, and his ferocious nobles, was worse
than the Gothic servitude had been, which yet had subjected the free
election of their Father and Pontiff by the Roman clergy and people to a
foreign domination. And this domination from Odoacer to Leo III. regarded
not the good of the Church, but the ends of Byzantine or Lombard.

What, in this day of terror, Pope Stephen wrote to Pipin bears so strongly
impressed the inmost belief of his own heart and of the Church at the time
that I quote it in part.

“Peter, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ, Son of the living God,
and in me the whole Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church of God, the head
of all the Churches of God, founded upon the firm rock in the blood of our
Redeemer, and Stephen, bishop of the said Church, to the most excellent
kings, Pipin, Charles, and Carloman, to the most holy bishops, abbots,
presbyters, monks, also to the dukes, counts, armies, and people of
France, grace, peace, and valour be abundantly ministered to you by our
Lord God for the rescue of that holy Church of God and its Roman people
entrusted to me, from the hands of persecutors.

“I, Peter, the apostle, having been in the absolute choice of supernal
clemency called by Christ, Son of the living God, to illuminate the whole
earth—who hold you for my adopted children to defend from the hands of
adversaries this Roman city, and the people committed to me by God, and
likewise the house in which, according to the flesh, I rest, to deliver it
from the contamination of the heathens: but likewise our Lady, the Mother
of God, ever-virgin Mary, adjures, admonishes, and commands you: and with
her the thrones and dominations, the whole army of the celestial host;
also, the martyrs and confessors of Christ join in the adjuration, that
you may grieve for that city of Rome, entrusted to us by the Lord God, and
for the Lord’s flock dwelling in it, and deliver it with all speed from
the hands of the persecuting Lombards, who are perjured with so great a
crime. Hasten and help before the living fountain, whence you have been
consecrated, and born again, be dried up.”(190)

The siege(191) had entered into the third month when tidings came that the
king of the Franks was on his way to answer the appeal of Pope Stephen. In
April, 756, he passed Mont Cenis. Again the enemy did not venture to
defend the Alpine passes. It would seem that Aistulf had not expected so
early a movement. The siege of Rome was broken up. The siege of Pavia took
its place. Pavia yielded sooner than Rome. Pipin was still in camp before
the city when a mission from the Greek emperor appeared to desire the
surrender to the empire of the lands which had been or were to be taken
from the Lombards. Here was seen in what sense the king of the Franks had
understood the word “restitution”. The eastern deputies promised rich
presents to Pipin,(192) if he would give back Ravenna and the other cities
and fortresses of its territory to the empire. The king of the Franks
replied that for nothing on earth would he suffer those cities to be taken
from the rule of St. Peter, the jurisdiction of the Roman Church, or of
the pontiff of the Apostolic see. He declared upon oath that for no man’s
favour had he repeatedly entered into this conflict, but only for the love
of St. Peter and the pardoning of his sins, adding that no amount of
treasure could persuade him to take away what he had once given to St.
Peter.

Then Aistulf, in fear of losing everything, asked for peace. The Frank
nobles in the army who had previous connections with the Lombard, managed
the agreement. Aistulf not only ratified the previous contract, but
surrendered the third of his treasure, and promised the payment of a
tribute which had been paid in the time of the dukes. Pipin presented to
the Pope a solemn document respecting the gift of the conquered territory.
The Abbot of St. Denys, accompanied by the Lombard Commissioner, with full
powers, executed the agreement and the royal will. Upon arriving at Rome,
he laid the keys of the cities ceded by the Lombard upon the tomb of the
Prince of the Apostles. The exarchate and the Pentapolis, and a large
portion of Umbria, were to belong to the Roman Church, and partly then,
and partly later, came into its actual possession, on one side from
Comacchio, in the swampy lowlands along the Adriatic coast, down to what
was afterwards the mark of Ancona; on the other side as far as Narni, not
far from the confluence of the Nera and the Tiber, where the duchy of Rome
began. That it did not need. If the distant emperor exercised nominal
authority there, the virtual authority had long belonged to the Pope, who
ruled there with acceptance of the people.

It was the summer of 756. About the end of the winter Aistulf died through
a fall from his horse, hunting. After his death ensued a struggle for the
throne. The monk Rachis strove again for the sovereignty, which
Desiderius, duke in Tuscany, contested. It is not clear how parties in the
Lombard kingdom had been so transformed that he who had been compelled
once to quit the throne for yielding to Rome now was unsuccessful against
a competitor favoured by Rome. But this one bought his victory dearly. He
renounced in favour of the Church several cities not mentioned by name in
Pipin’s gift, from Ferrara and Bologna down to south of Ancona. At the
same time Spoleto and Benevento put themselves under protection of the
Pope and the king of the Franks, as the dukes and nobles swore fidelity.
“This change is of the hand of the Lord,” wrote Pope Stephen to Pipin at
the beginning of 757.

In the course of a few years a new State, the State of the Church, had
been founded.(193) For a new State it was, even if its connection with the
empire was not dissolved. Its geographical position in the centre of the
Peninsula and touching both seas, enhanced its importance. The moment was
great and decisive. The times of the Roman empire were fulfilled. East and
West had more and more decidedly parted, as well especially on the field
of theological science as on the field of political formations. Agreement
had become impossible unless the West was willing to give up its
civilising mission. Italy’s political formation was closely bound up with
that mission. The Gothic domination had fallen inasmuch as it had been
powerless to assimilate land and people. The Lombard people, inferior in
energy and in warlike qualities to the Goths, in its late attempt to unite
Italy under one sceptre, had failed less through the weak resistance of
the last remains of the Roman empire than through the deep-lying failures
of its political and military constitution. These showed themselves soon
after its permanent occupation to the south of the Alps by its parting
into numerous military fiefs, with slight internal connection. Moreover,
the instability of relation between the two nationalities from the
beginning made almost impossible the task which Liutprand and Aistulf had
set themselves. Attempts to assimilate in life, custom, and law had
followed a long period of barbarous oppression, when the hand of the
Church had already enfolded conquerors and conquered. These attempts had
there produced a reaction which threatened to undo what had been
accomplished. After two hundred years of settlement the Lombards were
still held to be strangers. Not to mention numerous other tokens of this,
it has a deep meaning when under the successor of Pope Stephen “the whole
Senate and all the people of the God-protected city of Rome” write to king
Pipin concerning the extension of this province “rescued by you out of the
hand of the heathen”.(194) The national Italian elements made their
complete effect sensible in the State of the Church, and secured its
establishment in opposition to that temper of aliens represented by the
Lombards. The new temper was not one-sided and exclusive, but
assimilating, and therefore certain of development and progress. Never has
a State arisen under circumstances so remarkable, in the midst of a
violent shock, yet with so general a concurrence. It was due to the
consistently-pursued management of a series of distinguished men as the
result of their moralising influence. This did not limit itself to the
populations immediately participating in it, which had found steady
advocates and actual protectors in the Popes, notwithstanding the extreme
need and oppression suffered by them. It embraced the whole Christian
world. The Church absolutely required secular independence in order to
maintain in living energy this moralising influence, to fulfil this her
great mission. This necessity must appear clear to every one if there were
in the history of Italy and the Papacy no other period than that of the
last Lombard times, or that following when the Carlovingian rule was
falling to pieces. The foundation of the temporal power was no artificial
plan devised by Gregory II. for himself and his successors when he began
the great battle against the Iconoclasts. It was a necessity in the
world’s history, developing itself rapidly, yet step by step, out of the
situation of things both in politics and religion. And as if it should not
want a legitimate title also, the new formation rose at a moment when,
independently of action on the part of the Popes, the whole claim of the
empire practically disappeared in the centre of Italy. It was recognised
by the Popes alone even when scarcely anything more remained of it than a
mere form and name.





CHAPTER VII. ROME’S THREE HUNDRED YEARS, 455-756 FROM GENSERIC TO AISTULF,
BETWEEN THE GOTH, THE LOMBARD, AND THE BYZANTINE.


I propose to give a continuous review of the Roman pontiff’s position in
the city of Peter from the plundering of imperial Rome by the Vandal
Genseric in 455 to the siege of papal Rome and desolation of the Campagna
by the Lombard king Aistulf, beginning January 1, 756. This attack was
followed in that year by the enfranchisement of Rome and the gift of the
exarchate by Pipin, king of the Franks, to St. Peter and his successors,
when he laid the keys of the cities surrendered by the Lombards on the
tomb of the Prince of the Apostles.

Three hundred years of suffering unbroken and of glory unsurpassed which
preceded the passage of the Roman pontiff from servitude to sovereignty.

The sun of imperial Rome set for ever when the degenerate grandson of the
great Theodosius, great grandson also of Valentinian, whose name he
covered with infamy, perished by the stroke of an assassin in the Campus
Martius, the result of a life in which he imitated the crime of Tarquin.
But Tarquin’s crime led to Rome’s freedom, the crime of Valentinian III.
brought the end of the imperial city, and the substitution of a Rome built
upon revealed truth and eternal justice for the Rome of secular pride and
unjust conquest.

In these three hundred years the brother Apostles, the fisherman and the
tentmaker, took the place of the robber brothers, Romulus the slayer, and
Remus the slain, when the twelve centuries of augured dominion were
exactly fulfilled, and in the time of St. Leo the Great the twelve
vultures had had their full flight.

The three hundred years begin with the formal acknowledgement of St. Leo’s
primacy, as consisting in the descent from St. Peter, bearer of the keys
and feeder of the flock, made to him by the Council of Chalcedon in the
letter soliciting the confirmation of their decrees by him; a letter to
which the eastern emperor Marcian, husband of the noble grand-daughter and
heiress of Theodosius, adds his own request for confirmation, and with his
wife, St. Pulcheria, in his character as the head of the temporal power,
acknowledges St. Leo, the Pope, as “the very person entrusted by the
Saviour with the guardianship of the vine”.

The three hundred years end with the Pope emerging a temporal sovereign
from the Iconoclast persecution. The eastern empire also has fulfilled its
work in these three centuries, and the soldier of fortune, who, at the end
of many revolutions has become the successor of Marcian, has ridden his
warhorse into the Church of God, and attempted to substitute himself as
its governor for the successor of St. Peter, to dictate its creed, and
interfere with its worship. In recompense he is expelled from the Italy
which he and his predecessors had stripped and sacrificed during two
hundred years. Then the crown of temporal sovereignty is added to the
papal mitre of spiritual power, which Leo the Isaurian had sought to
displace. And, moreover, the “advocate of the Church,” who, “as Christian
prince and Roman emperor,” had used _against_ the Church the very
God-given power which it was his first duty to use _for_ her, was on the
eve of seeing the same powerful race which had enfranchised Rome and
dowered the Roman See exalted to the imperial throne in the face of both
the Byzantine and the Saracen. The emperor of the East had lowered his
dignity to the poor ends of ambition, and the task of degrading God’s
Church. In Leo the Isaurian, and in his son Kopronymus we see, in fact,
that the man who sits on the throne of the first Christian emperor is
become the chief enemy of the Church. The deeds of Heraclius and Constans
II. had given adequate cause for the Divine Providence to allow the rise
of Mohammed and the severance of its eastern and southern provinces for
ever from the empire of Constantine and Theodosius. Thereupon Leo and his
son Kopronymus interpreted the lesson thus given as entitling them to meet
the assumption of the prophet-emperor enthroned in the Damascus which had
ceased to be theirs with equal arrogance in the counter assumption to be
emperor-priest. The enemy from Mecca had seized Both Powers in his claim
to be prophet; the enemy at Byzantium seized both as emperor. Civil power
was the appendage to Mohammed, but became the root of spiritual authority
to Leo the Isaurian.

Let us now retrace the period of civic disaster which the Popes
encountered from the last years of St. Leo the Great. The following may be
considered the main causes:—

First of all is the domination, not of barbarians only, but of heretical
barbarians, as Pope Gelasius termed Odoacer.(195) In that passage of his
letter the Pope says that when “Odoacer occupied the realm of Italy he had
enjoined things to be done which were not lawful, but to which we, by the
help of God, would, as is well known, not submit”. He speaks in the name
of his see, but what the acts alluded to were we do not know. The
domination of Odoacer and of Theodorich after him was Arian. It lasted at
least sixty years, from 476 to 536. It was the policy of Theodorich to
treat Rome well, in its civil aspect. He fostered the Senate, keeping it
in quiet subjection to himself. He professed to treat Italian and Goth on
equal terms. As long as the Acacian schism lasted, which effectually
prevented unity of action between the emperors Zeno and Anastasius and the
Popes who had ceased to be their subjects, but who regarded the Roman
emperor with all the consideration required by Roman loyalty to the head
of the Roman name, the Gothic king observed this conduct of neutrality;
but when a new emperor, Justin I., had acknowledged all the demands of
Pope Hormisdas and began to act as a Catholic emperor, Theodorich dropped
the mask and appeared as he was, the head and bond of the whole Arian
league in the West. Pope Symmachus died in 514. The Acacian schism at that
time was in full force; the emperor Anastasius full of enmity and deceit
against the Pope. Theodorich allowed Hormisdas to be elected Pope after a
vacancy of the see for one single day. Hormisdas died in 523, and a
vacancy of six days only ensued, when Pope John I. was allowed to be
freely elected. In the meantime the acts of the emperor Justin I. roused
the full Arian spirit in Theodorich. He allowed Pope John I. to be freely
elected, which did not prevent him from compelling that Pope to go as his
ambassador to Constantinople in order to gain indulgence for the eastern
Arians. And he uttered the threat that he would fill Italy with blood if
his demands were not complied with. And when Pope John I. came back
crowned with honours rendered to him as the first Pope who had ever
visited the eastern capital, Theodorich threw the Pope into prison, and he
never came out alive from the royal dungeon at Ravenna.

This fact throws back a full and disastrous light upon the whole Arian
domination in Italy. A poet of our day has put in the mouth of the doomed
Gothic princess, the royal-hearted Amalasunta, words of her father:—


    “I never loved that Apostolic Throne!”(196)


the truth of which is a striking epitome of history. No Arian ruler
_could_ love that Apostolic Throne. But we learn from the fact what the
Popes must have gone through from the period when Rome fell under the rule
of northern condottieri to the expulsion of the Goths under Belisarius and
Narses. It is impossible that one who denied the Godhead of the Master
should look, with love and veneration, upon the successor of the Disciple.
If the Shepherd of shepherds be not God Himself, the Shepherd, who acts in
His name, will not be received, as invested with supreme and universal
spiritual power.

Let us examine the connection of Arian domination over Rome and Italy, as
exercised, first, by Odoacer, and, secondly, by Theodorich, with the
eastern throne’s position and claim.

Odoacer exercised the authority which he held in Rome and in Italy, with
the approval of the emperor Zeno. He compelled the Roman Senate to send to
Zeno at Constantinople the insignia of the western emperor’s dignity,
together with the declaration that a western emperor was no longer
required; and that one emperor seated at Constantinople was sufficient. In
return, he was invested by Zeno with the title of Patricius of Rome. It
may be said that Zeno could do nothing else at the time: and that
Odoacer’s power was really the power of the sword. Nevertheless, the
emperor of the East had become the sole Roman emperor. The Popes
acknowledged him as such, and continually called upon him to discharge the
duty of protection to the Church of God, which belonged to the head of the
Roman Commonwealth. A few years later, Zeno wished to be delivered from
the near neighbourhood of the stirring Gothic king, Theodorich. He
commissioned Theodorich to lead his people into Italy, and take possession
of it. Five years of terrible conflict ensued between the Herule and the
Goth. They inflicted great sufferings on the Italian cities. The Goth
prevailed. Ravenna was taken. There was a compact made between Theodorich
and Odoacer. A banquet ensued, and in it Odoacer was slain. The first act
of Theodorich was to send an embassy to the emperor Anastasius, who had
succeeded Zeno, asking for the crown of Italy from his hands. He was
acknowledged by Anastasius as the ruler of Italy, and as ruling it in the
imperial name. Theodorich became more and more powerful, and if he did not
expressly renounce the emperor’s over-lordship, he acted, in all respects,
as the sovereign of Italy, and of the great dominion which he had attached
to it. But the Byzantine sovereignty in Italy was never resigned in the
purpose of the emperor. When, after 33 years of rule, Theodorich expired
in 526, and Justinian speedily succeeded his uncle, Justin I., the Gothic
rule showed evident signs that it had been built up by the extraordinary
skill and energy of a single man, but had entirely failed to assimilate
the Roman and the Gothic elements in a stable union. When Justinian
conquered the northern provinces of Africa, and Rome, the old seat of the
empire, by the arm of Belisarius, he was, in his own mind, only recovering
his own, and reassuming what Zeno and Anastasius had _lent_ to Odoacer and
Theodorich. This was the mind of every Byzantine sovereign from the date
of the western empire’s extinction in 476, or rather it was not
extinguished to them, but _they_ had become its lords. Herule, and Vandal,
and Goth, and Frank, and Burgundian, and whatever else those northern
savages called themselves, they were only encamped on the sacred Roman
soil, which belonged indefensibly to the emperor who sat at
Constantinople, the heir of Constantine’s Rome.

What has just been said will supply us, as I believe, with a key to the
whole conduct of the eastern emperors. I will review it under three heads:
first, Byzantine despotism as exhibited in secular government: secondly,
Byzantine despotism as pushed into theological doctrine: thirdly,
Byzantine despotism, as laying claim to the government of the Church. The
three together make up the thing which has received the name of
Byzantinism.

The first vacancy of the Holy See, after the extinction of the western
emperor by the death of Pope Simplicius, in 483, witnessed the beginning
of the Acacian schism. The connection of that schism with the making Zeno
sole Roman emperor I have already traced in a former volume. It also marks
the beginning of the aggression by the civil power ruling Rome with the
title of Patricius bestowed by Zeno, but really with the unrestricted
power of the barbarian sword, upon the freedom of Papal election.

When, on the death of Pope Simplicius in 483, they were assembled at St.
Peter’s for the election of his successor, Basilius, prefect of the
prætorium, and patricius, representing also king Odoacer, rose and said
that the late Pope had given Odoacer the most earnest charge to guard
against any injury being done to the Church, upon his own death, by being
present, and sharing in the election. Odoacer(197) did not go so far as to
claim authority to _confirm_ the election. No such power was then
recognised either in the eastern emperor, or in the actual ruler of Rome.
Pope Gelasius was elected in 492; Pope Anastasius in 496; they were chosen
in Rome; they took possession of the chair of Peter immediately upon their
election; they then informed the emperor of their accession, or received
first congratulations from him.

Pope Symmachus in 498 followed Pope Anastasius. And here acts of great
importance took place. The Acacian schism had then divided the East from
Rome. Zeno, in order to unite the Monophysites with the Catholics, had
drawn up an ambiguous formulary of union called the Henotikon. The emperor
Anastasius was most desirous to maintain this formulary. He also wished to
recover union with Rome. When the Senator Festus came to Constantinople on
the embassy of Theodorich, he promised the emperor that he would induce
Pope Anastasius to accept this formulary. But Festus, returned to Rome,
found Anastasius dead, and Symmachus chosen by the greater part of the
clergy to succeed. He saw that there was no chance of inducing Symmachus
to accept the formulary. But Festus was able to raise a schism, and set
up, as Antipope, Laurentius. After great troubles, which lasted four
years, Symmachus was established: but neither the emperor nor Theodorich
exercised or claimed authority to _confirm_ his election.

In 514 Theodorich, the king of Italy, allowed the election of Pope
Hormisdas to take place without interference: and again the election of
Pope John I. in 523. But upon the death of that martyred Pope in 526,
instead of his former indulgence, a state of suspicion and anger against
Rome had taken possession of the mind of Theodorich. He imposed upon the
Romans the choice of Pope Felix IV. It is supposed that at this time he
enacted that in future no one should ascend the papal chair without the
confirmation of himself and his successors.(198) Thus only can it be
explained that after this, on the death of a Pope the Apostolic Chair
remained vacant sometimes for months, and a large sum had to be paid into
the Gothic treasury for the deed of confirmation.

Very shortly after the death of Pope John I., and the fellow-victims,
Boethius and Symmachus, Theodorich died, and was succeeded by his
grandson, Athalarich, eight years old, under the tutelage of his mother,
Amalasunta. During her regency Pope Felix IV. died in 530. The electors
were divided into a Gothic-Roman and a national-Roman party.(199) The
candidate of the former, Bonifacius II., and of the latter, Dioscorus,
were both elected two days after the death of Pope Felix, and both
consecrated on the following Sunday: and so without any confirmation from
Ravenna. But the death of Dioscorus after twenty-eight days prevented a
schism, and Boniface was fully recognised as Pope. Boniface, in dread of
troubles which would arise at his death, ventured to summon the clergy to
St. Peter’s, and laid before them a decree to subscribe: upon which he
declared the deacon Vigilius to be his successor. But feeling speedily
that this act was contrary to the existing laws of the Church, he called a
second assembly of the clergy, the senate, and the people of Rome,
declared himself to have violated the freedom and sanctity of the Papacy,
and caused in their presence the paper nominating Vigilius to be burnt.

The next election took place in 532, according to the usual conditions.
The young king, Athalarich, was made to defer the confirmation of Pope
John II. for two months.(200) The state of Rome in the meantime was
frightful. Every man sought to plunder the goods of the Church. The Senate
had passed a decree strictly forbidding the alienation of church goods by
candidates for the Papacy. It was disregarded: and the only resource for
the new Pope was to appeal to the king and beg him to confirm the senate’s
decree. Athalarich decided that the decree should be inscribed on a marble
tablet, and set up in front of the court of St. Peter’s. But the Gothic
king’s help was purchased dearly, and the fee for confirming a Pope was
established at 3000 gold pieces.

Such in fifty-one years was the result of Odoacer meddling with the Papal
election. Not only had the right to confirm been allowed to the civil
ruler of Rome, but a heavy money payment had been imposed for the
confirmation, and delay superadded.

In that year, 534, the young King Athalarich perished at the age of
eighteen by his own excesses. The Queen Amalasunta speedily lost her
power. She nominated her cousin, Theodatus, of the royal blood of Amali,
king. He repaid her by allowing her to be murdered. His name and character
became odious to the Romans. On the death of Pope John II. in 535 he
allowed the free choice of the Roman Agapetus to take place in seven days.
But he exercised great tyranny over the Romans. He forced Pope Agapetus to
go to Constantinople as his ambassador. When that Pope died, as we have
seen, in the eastern capital, he imposed on the Romans the choice of
Silverius as Pope, threatening with death any one who did not consent to
his appointment.

This is the briefest possible record of how the original liberty of the
Roman clergy and people to elect the Pope was treated by the foreign Arian
rulers, Odoacer, Theodorich, Athalarich, and Theodatus. Then the emperor
Justinian became by right of conquest immediate lord of Rome, and seized
without scruple upon the appointment and confirmation of the Popes. The
act of his empress Theodora, in her violent deposition of Pope Silverius,
is the first specimen of Byzantine conduct when it enters by right of
conquest upon Italian territory. That the Romans had every reason to wish
for the extinction of foreign, which was also heretical, domination, must
be clear to every one who follows history in its detail. But likewise the
example with which Byzantine domination in Italy opens will suffice to
represent to us in a living picture the permanent relation of the Popes to
the eastern or Greek empire. If arbitrary(201) violations of the freedom
of Papal election by the Gothic kings may be given as the exception, it
became by frequent repetitions under Justinian the rule. As the
patriarchal see of Constantinople had long been given only to select Court
favourites, and taken away from the occupants at every change of imperial
inclination, the same plan was pursued henceforth with the filling of the
Apostolical See. The emperor issued his edict: the Romans and the Pope
were expected to obey. Not even the domain of the Faith was kept free to
the Pope. In this also the attempt of the emperors was to lower the chief
dignity of the Church to be the echo of their commands.

From Justinian onwards the Byzantine emperors claimed and exercised the
right to confirm the papal election.(202)

When the ill-treated Vigilius died at Syracuse, returning from his unhappy
sojourn of eight years at Constantinople, Justinian caused the archdeacon
Pelagius, who had been nuncio at Constantinople, to be elected his
successor. In like manner John III. in 560, and Benedict I. in 574 were
elected under pressure from the emperor. But in 568 the Lombards came into
Italy, and at the death of Benedict I. in 578 they were pressing Rome so
severely that no one could undertake the journey to Constantinople to ask
for imperial confirmation. So the Book of the Popes says, “Pelagius,(203)
a Roman, was consecrated without the command of the emperor, because the
Lombards were besieging the City of Rome, and Italy was greatly laid waste
by them. There was such calamity as had not occurred in memory of man.” In
590 St. Gregory the Great waited six months for his election to be
approved at Constantinople. What use was made by the eastern emperor of
the right to confirm the Papal election from the time of St. Gregory to
the breaking out of the Iconoclast persecution has already been recounted.
The last instance of this degrading mark of servitude was the confirmation
of Pope Gregory III.’s election in 731 by the exarch of Ravenna. From that
time forth the Popes elect were no longer confirmed by the emperor or his
delegate; and in 756 the hand of a western ruler made them sovereign
princes, and the much injured Italy was relieved from eastern oppression
so far at least as regarded Rome and the central and northern provinces.

What took place at the death of a Pope was after this fashion. The
representation of the see was vested in the three chief officers; the
primicerius of the notaries, the archpriest and the archdeacon informed of
the fact the exarch of Ravenna. They addressed their letter thus: “To the
most excellent and distinguished lord, long to be preserved by God for us
in the discharge of his supreme office, N., ex-consul, patricius, and
exarch of Italy, N., the archpriest, N., the archdeacon, N., the
primicerius of the notaries, keeping the place of the holy Apostolic See”.
The exsequies of the late Pope took place, and a three days’ fast and
prayer preceded the act of election. In this act took part the higher
clergy with the whole spirituality, the more important magistrates of the
city, the nobility, the deputies of the people, and such Greek troops as
might be present in the city. When the election was completed the elect
was conducted in solemn procession to the Lateran, where he received the
first homage of the people. The electors subscribed the decree of election
which in the meantime had been prepared, and laid it up for future record
in the archive. A second shorter copy was sent to the emperor at
Constantinople, which ended with the words:(204) “wherefore we, all your
servants, in our sorrow beseech that the piety of our masters may
favourably receive the entreaties of their servants, and by their grant of
their permission would allow the desires of their petitioners to take
effect for the good of their empire by their own command. So that in
virtue of their sacred letters we, being under the same pastor, may
solicit without ceasing the almighty God and the Prince of the Apostles,
who has granted the appointment of a worthy governor of his Church, for
the life and empire of our most serene masters.”

Yet more submissive is the tone of the letter to the exarch. After the
election has been fully described, it continues: “This being so, most
exalted God-protected master, we yet more earnestly entreat that by God’s
quick operation inspiring your heart you would give command to adorn the
Apostolic See with the perfect consecration of our father and pastor, as
by the grace of Christ happily and faithfully discharging your execution
of the imperial supremacy, so that we, your humble servants, seeing our
desire more rapidly fulfilled, may be enabled to return unceasing thanks
to God, to the imperial clemency, and to your admirable government willed
by God. Thus, by the appointment of the Pontiff of the Apostolic See, our
spiritual pastor, we may pour forth continual prayers for the life and
safety and complete victory of our most Christian masters. For we know
that the prayer of him whom by God’s will we elect to the supreme
pontifical dignity, will propitiate the divine power, and obtain for the
Roman empire all the success which it can desire. It will also preserve
your own power, under God’s protection, for the ruling of this captive
Italian province, for the protection of us, all your servants, and for the
continuation of long deeds of arms.”(205)

The three Papal officers also informed the archbishop of Ravenna, the
magistracy, and the Roman nuntio there, of what had taken place,
beseeching their assistance that the confirmation of the election might
speedily be given. When this arrived from Constantinople and Ravenna, the
Pope elect received consecration. The seven regions of Rome were
represented in a procession which conducted him from the sacristy of St.
Peter’s to the Confession of the Prince of the Apostles, where he recited
his profession of faith. Thereupon Mass began to the Gloria, the bishops
of Albano and Porto led him to the bishop of Ostia, who was seated in an
elevated chair. They held the gospels over his head, and said the first
and second prayer. Then the bishop of Ostia completed the proper
consecration, while the archdeacon laid the pallium upon him. After this,
the new Pope ascended the papal throne, gave his blessing to all the
priests, and proceeded with the sacrifice of the Mass.

A papal vacancy was reckoned from the burial of the deceased Pope to the
consecration of the Pope elect.

This power of confirming the election of a Pope, in complete derogation
from the original liberty, which had only once been broken by the tyranny
of the first Constantius, in the year 355, down to the Arian occupation of
Rome by Odoacer, appears to have been exercised from the last days of
Theodorich in 526 down to Pope Gregory III. in 731. The emperor
Constantine the Bearded, had, after the Sixth Council, suffered Pope
Benedict II., in 684, to be freely elected: but his son, Justinian II.,
reimposed the yoke.

The weight of imperial pressure upon Rome had been considerably affected
by the Lombard occupation of the northern provinces of Italy, beginning in
568. The capture of Italy as a province, won for Justinian by the conquest
of Narses, was only completed in 555. In thirteen years the Lombards
entered upon the country which the Goths had well nigh reduced to ruin.
Lombard aggression ran well nigh side by side with Byzantine oppression
for two centuries. Right in the midst of both the Apostolic See was
placed. In 596, the great St. Gregory complained that he had been keeping
watch and ward against these new northern robbers for twenty-eight years,
which is the second arm of Byzantine oppression.

The exarch, in the judgment of the despotic Justinian and his successors,
was a viceroy of all Italy, planted in the fortress of Ravenna, one side
of which was guarded by the sea, the other by marshes. Thence Theodorich
ruled: there he was buried: and the Byzantine only felt secure in the
Gothic stronghold. Defenceless Rome was stretched out beneath his feet in
central Italy, or, if it had a defence, it was that the deathless spirit
of the Apostolic See lived within the walls of Aurelian, and animated by
its guardianship the often broken and rudely repaired towers of the
world’s ancient mistress. The exarch was the choice instrument of the
emperor’s despotism. St. Gregory, in his fourteen years’ struggle with all
the elements of civil dissolution, accounts the exarch Romanus as his
worst enemy. He was always ready to combine with the Lombard, then in the
depths of savagery and ignorance, against his own lord’s liege vassals in
Rome. Thus St. Gregory unbosoms himself to Sebastian, bishop of
Sirmium:—“Words cannot express what we suffer from your friend, the lord
Romanus. I would say, in a word, that his malice towards us surpasses the
swords of the Lombards. The enemies who destroy us seem to us kinder than
the magistrates of the Commonwealth, who wear out our thoughts by their
ill-will, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to
have the care of bishops and clergy, of monasteries and people, to watch
carefully against enemies in ambuscade, to be exposed even to suspicion by
the deceit and ill-will of rulers—the labour and the sorrow of this your
brotherhood can the better weigh by the purity of your affection for me
who suffer it.”(206) These words may fitly introduce us to the Byzantine
exarchate as a government. In the thirty years succeeding St. Gregory, the
exarch appears as the great manager of Papal elections: from which his
least hostile act would be to extort a fee as great, at least, as that
laid down in the last Gothic time as 3000 gold coins. Now and then, as
opportunity offered, he would enjoy the greater luxury of plundering the
Lateran treasury of the Church at his leisure: as done by the exarch Isaac
in 638, who was immortalised for the deed in the inscription of his tomb
at Ravenna, as the most faithful servant of his most serene masters at
Constantinople. The exarch Olympius, in 648, received from his master,
Constans II., the higher commission to murder St. Martin, as he was giving
holy Communion. But the attempt was frustrated, as was believed at the
time, by a divine intervention. However, the exarch Theodore Kalliopa,
sent for the special purpose, succeeded in carrying off Pope St. Martin,
as he lay ill before the altar of the Lateran, five years later in 653,
and placing him in the hands of Constans II., to be condemned for high
treason, in that he had not waited for the confirmation of his election by
Constans, but, instead, had condemned his heresy in the great Council
which he summoned at Rome. In the interval of twenty-five years, from the
death of St. Martin to the opening of the Sixth Council, the exarchs were
faithful to the imperial tradition until Constantine the Bearded renounced
the heresy of which his father, Constans, and his grandfather, Heraclius,
had been the chief supporters, while they were nursed in it by a
succession of Byzantine patriarchs. But when Justinian II. had followed,
the exarch John Platina, in 687, hurried from Ravenna to Rome to hinder
the election of the great pontiff, Sergius. Finding it accomplished, he
was obliged to content himself with fining the new Pope to the extent of a
hundred pounds’ weight of gold, that being the bribe which the
unsuccessful candidate had promised him if he would come to Rome to secure
his election. Four years afterwards, Justinian II., unable to induce Pope
Sergius to accept the decrees of his Council in Trullo, or to accept the
place for his signature of them which the emperor had provided in a line
between his own signature and that of his patriarch, sent Zacharias not an
exarch, but a guardsman, to repeat, if possible, in the person of Pope
Sergius, what had been done forty years before in the person of Pope St.
Martin. But, instead, the emperor’s own troops caused the guardsman to
tremble for his life. His only place of refuge was under the bed in the
Pope’s own chamber: the Pope’s intercession alone saved the imperial
emissary from a fatal outburst of Italian wrath. Yet ten years later,
under the upstart emperor Apsimar, in his short reign, another exarch,
Theophylact, was again repulsed from his execution of an intended attack
on the Pope by Italian soldiers. Once more, when Pope Constantine, obeying
an imperial letter of the restored Justinian II., had left Rome for
Constantinople, several chief Papal officers were summarily executed at
Rome. Thus the five attempts on the life of the Pope Gregory II. made by
exarchs or guardsmen, at the bidding of the emperor Leo III., in his
Iconoclastic fury, were but the consistent continuation of the spirit
shown by the exarchs, and fostered and supported by the emperors, from the
time of St. Gregory’s adversary, the Lord Romanus.

During these two hundred years, from the first inroad of the Lombards,
nothing could be more embarrassing than the civil position of the Popes.
Beside the main body of the Lombards, occupying the great plain of North
Italy, with their capital at Pavia, there were two duchies, one of
Spoleto, immediately to the north of Rome and its territory, and another
of Benevento, holding a considerable portion of Italian territory near
Naples. This city, with other seaports, continued in possession of the
empire. The Lombard kings were evermore trying to bring their outlying
duchies into closer obedience to the royal power. Again the fortress and
territory of Ravenna, the imperial metropolis, lay further to the north,
touching the Lombard possessions. The Lombards, when they came into Italy,
were so little advanced in political science of government, so little
coherent among themselves, that at one time they were divided among
thirty-six chiefs, so many heads of robbers and devastating bands,
barbarous and un-Christian. There can be no doubt that the aim of the
Lombard kings from the beginning had been to make themselves masters of
Rome, and to rule the whole of Italy as a kingdom. The example and success
of Theodorich was fresh before them. Justinian’s success under his
generals Belisarius and Narses was even younger than the glory of the
great Gothic king. Gregory the Great had laid a foundation for
christianising the Lombard people in his friendship with the great and
good Queen Theodelinda. In process of time they had become Catholic. Their
king, Liutprand, had caused the relics of St. Augustine, which had been
carried from Africa to Sardinia during the Vandal persecution, to be
brought to his capital city, Pavia, where the shrine of the greatest of
the fathers still abides in honour. Pope Zacharias, by his personal
dignity, prevailed over both Liutprand and Rachis. But the contest for the
dominion of Italy went on in spite of reverence for the Apostolic See. The
people were Catholic, but tumultous and stubborn. After a long-continued
struggle of various success, the king Liutprand seemed to be on the point
of incorporating the Spolentine and Beneventan duchies, of closing upon
Rome, and expelling the emperor from Ravenna. Upon his death, and the
retirement of Rachis, Aistulf was uniting all the Lombard force for the
attainment of their purpose from the beginning, to expel the emperor from
Italy, and to make the Pope a Lombard subject. He went so far as to put a
poll-tax on the Roman duchy, and to style himself king of Italy. There the
Carlovingian hand arrested him: and the keys of the cities which the
Lombard had won from the Byzantine, and Pipin from the Lombard, laid by
the gift of Pipin on the tomb of the chief apostle, signified to all men
that his successor had become a temporal prince, after forming Rome in the
centre of a captive province from a heathen city into a spiritual capital
during the unceasing calamity of three centuries. We have scarcely any
record of the indescribable sorrows which the Lombard in his aggressive
policy, and the Byzantine in his continuous resistance, made up of
treachery and bribery added to insufficient military power, inflicted on
the cities and the people of Italy: nor of what the Popes endured in their
loyal acknowledgment of their duty as subjects, and their unbroken
tenacity in maintaining the faith and government of the Church against the
succession of adventurers who mounted the Byzantine throne. These
culminated in the seven revolutions terminated by that of Leo III. Then
the strong man, armed, rode his charger right into the Church of God and
strove to add the Popes of Rome to the number of patriarchs whom he
raised, deposed, blinded, and executed as he pleased. He made them
ecumenical and trod upon them when so made, with the heel of the imperial
buskin. And now we come from the first oppression in confirming the Pope,
and the second in reducing him to a captive vassal, to the third of
subjecting him as the chief teacher of the Church to the lay power of the
emperor.

As we look back we see the whole mind of Justinian photographed in his
imperial legislation. When he had to speak to the bishop of his capital
his language ran: “To the most holy and blessed Archbishop of this
Imperial City, and Ecumenical Patriarch”—the core of the title was “Bishop
of this Imperial City,” its corollary “Ecumenical Patriarch”. To him the
bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were to submit any appeal
from the provinces subject to them. Rome was not to be deposed from the
prior rank acknowledged once for all by the eastern monarch and episcopate
at the termination of the Acacian schism, in which act Justinian himself,
as the ruling nephew, had taken notable part: but there was to be at
Constantinople a similar patriarch, whom the whole eastern world should
obey. From him the eastern bishops were to learn the mind of the emperor,
just as, when they attended the court, he introduced them to the imperial
presence. The emperor would honour him by using him as his chief
ecclesiastical minister, who held the portfolio of doctrine. The laws
which all the world was to receive bore this exaltation of the imperial
bishop in their bosom. And it must be confessed that in St. Gregory’s time
the patriarchal title which Pope Gelasius had utterly refused to the
Byzantine bishop a century before, had been conceded to him in St.
Gregory’s practice: the patriarchal title, but not the ecumenical. Of the
patriarchs, when speaking of a fault to be condoned, he wrote, “if any of
the four patriarchs had done this we could not pass it over,” and
Constantinople must be added to Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to make
up this number of four: but of the assumed title of ecumenical, he wrote
that it was diabolical, and the forerunner of anti-Christ.

But another part of Justinian’s conduct is no less salient. He is not the
first, indeed, but he is the chief of the theologising emperors. The
disastrous assumption of dictating doctrine, and deciding in theological
controversies, which, at the moment of the fall of the western empire, the
insurgent Basiliscus had begun during his short-lived reign, and Zeno
continued, and Anastasius reinforced, was taken up with far greater force
by Justinian. He laboured during eight years just at the middle of the
sixth century to exhibit Pope Vigilius at Constantinople as the first of
_his_ five patriarchs: he made the bishop of his capital hold a General
Council without the Pope: he imposed his own doctrinal lucubrations upon
that Council. He raised in the minds of the western bishops suspicions and
fears as to Pope Vigilius being forced to become his instrument. The
patriarch Epiphanius, who had weakly yielded to him, he afterwards
deposed. Pope Vigilius escaped at last to die at Syracuse on his return to
Rome worn out with the “contradiction of sinners” which he had
experienced. In his person St. Peter had been a captive; seeds of schism
and distrust had been scattered by Justinian in the West: which it
required all the wisdom, the energy, and the patience of the great St.
Gregory a generation later to overcome and root out. The following
theologising emperors, Heraclius, Constans II., Justinian II., the poor
phantom Philippicus Bardanes, and lastly Leo III., were only completing
and crowning Justinian’s double work, of making an ecumenical patriarch,
and an emperor behind him, the ultimate judge of doctrine.

But had Leo III. succeeded in his attempt to grasp spiritual and temporal
power in one hand, the Church of God would have come to an end. The whole
future of the world was touched by the issue of this conflict.

It is to be remarked how immovable the Popes were, not only in the
maintenance of Christian doctrine pure and proper, but likewise in the
maintenance of that relation between the Two Powers which Christian
doctrine requires as one of the conditions of its own action in the world.
What on this subject Pope Gelasius in the last decade of the fifth century
had said to the emperor Anastasius, now after two hundred and thirty years
Pope St. Gregory II. was saying to the Iconoclast emperor Leo. In the
interval Italy had been governed by the Byzantines, so far as they
possessed it, during two centuries as a subject province, the captive of
its spear; Rome had lived through it only in virtue of the Pope’s primacy.
The eastern empire having been false to the faith in its emperors and in
many of its bishops, but especially in four successive patriarchs of
Constantinople, had been cut in two, and one half of it given over to an
anti-Christian religion to rule with unrestricted violence. And now the
diminished emperor, who had just saved his capital from the Mohammedan
chalif, had been seduced by Jewish and Mohammedan principles to sweep the
Christian churches in his remaining dominion, from Sancta Sophia to the
least country church, free of Christian symbols, beginning with the most
sacred image of the Redeemer(207) which adorned the gate of his own palace
as the witness for the need of the oppressed. Then St. Gregory II. stood
up against Leo III. exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gelasius, had
resisted the emperor of the former day. Syria and Egypt and North Africa,
and, still greater shame and peril, Spain had become Mohammedan. The Pope
stood, in 727, where he had stood in 495. In the interval all these
countries had fallen: but St. Gregory II. could tell a furious tyrant that
all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as “a god upon earth”—that
he could not execute his threat to pull down the statue of St. Peter,
which the Christians of that day reverenced in his basilica at Rome, which
the Christians of eleven centuries have reverenced since in the same
place, and put their head under the Apostle’s foot as the acknowledgment
of the dignity with which Christ invested him.

St. Gregory II. told Leo, the Isaurian, that his own imperial dignity was
itself of divine institution, as the organ of human government: while the
ecclesiastical dignity was of divine institution, in virtue of that divine
intervention by which alone men become sons of God. The answer of the
tyrant was five times to attempt the Pope’s life, as that of a rebellious
vassal whom he was entitled to put under ban, and efface as a _natura
ferina_. But the issue of this contest was that three Popes, St. Gregory
II., St. Gregory III., St. Zacharias, equally great, wise, and prudent,
maintained intact their Primacy: that their successor, Stephen II., was
the first Pope who crossed the Alps; that he consecrated the Carlovingian
dynasty, and was accepted in Rome triumphantly as her king. In this series
of acts he had also broken the chains of Italy, and a Pope presently
following, who had ceased to be an eastern vassal, was to create a
counterpoise to the chalif of Mohammed in an emperor, not Byzantine, but
Roman, not grasping illicit power in the spirit of Saracenic pride, but as
a type of Christian monarchy placed at the head of lawful government, not
a perversion of Constantine and Theodosius, but the loyal spirit of both
embodied by a divine consecration.

During the reigns of Leo III. and his son, Constantine Kopronymus, and the
times of the Popes Gregory II., Gregory III., Zacharias, and Stephen II.,
certain events take place in the East and the West respectively, which, by
their striking contrast with each other, while they coincide in the time
of their happening, remarkably express and sum up the course taken by the
three centuries which we are considering. Despotism matures in the East,
and barbaric savagery triumphs: freedom, order, the majesty of nations
growing into one faith, dawn upon the West.

In 727 the yet existing letters of Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo
exhibit that monarch as thoroughly possessed with the claim to govern the
Church as he governs the State. In this he is as thoroughly encountered by
the Pope, who calls up against him the unbroken tradition of the Church
during the seven centuries, and reminds him of the sad misfortunes of
those emperors who had attempted to carry their civil authority into the
domain of revealed truth. The great eastern teacher, St. John of Damascus,
then living in the Syrian court of the chalif, lays this down in language
as peremptory as that of the Pope. The guilt of Leo III. is heightened by
the fact that he had before him in the history of his own realm during the
hundred years preceding him the rise of a religion essentially opposed to
the Christian faith, which he was professing himself to purify. Its force,
ever exercised against Christians with the utmost virulence and cruelty,
was centered in the fact that its chief deduced all civil authority from
the prophetic office of its founder. But while the kingship of Mohammed,
as inherited by his chalifs, began with his attempt to found a religion,
Leo, in continuing and advancing to their utmost tension the interferences
of Justinian with the spiritual order, was undoing the ancient laws of the
empire for a hundred and fifty years, from the time of Constantine to that
of Zeno. His own patriarch, Germanus, chose rather to lay his omophorion
on the altar, and depart into exile than sanction and accept Leo’s
usurpation in sacred things. The whole liberty, and with it the whole
existence of the Church, were comprehended in the resistance maintained by
Pope Gregory, and attested by patriarch Germanus as a victim. Gregory II.
followed, in giving to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, but to God the things of
God, the whole line of his predecessors. Leo III. imitated wrongly the
chief antagonist of the Christian name; but Mohammed was at least
consistent with his original falsehood. In this his religion itself was
contained. Likewise the whole work of Christendom was embodied in the
victorious defence of Gregory against the consummation of eastern
despotism.

The acts which followed by Pope and by emperor agreed with their several
principles. Gregory III. on his accession at once endeavoured to bring the
emperor to a better mind. But Leo had already deposed Germanus, and put
Anastasius, a docile instrument, in his stead. The Pope called a council
at Rome, which entirely supported the freedom of the Church. Leo turned to
brute force. He sent out a great fleet with the commission to destroy his
own metropolis, Ravenna, then to advance upon Rome, seize the Pope, and
carry him away captive, as eighty years before St. Martin had been taken.
Five years after this violent act of despotism, which the winds and seas
had frustrated, Pope Gregory III., pressed hard by the advancing arms of
the Lombard king, Liutprand, besought the great conqueror, Charles
Martell, to take up his defence. He appealed to the piety of the Frank
leader in behalf of St. Peter, a piety extinct in the Roman emperor’s
breast. Two years later Pipin had succeeded to the power of Charles
Martell, and intimated in the strongest manner the veneration for the
Apostolic See felt by the Frank people, in asking Pope Zacharias to
pronounce as Pope that Pipin might duly be elected king of the Franks.
Zacharias gave his decision: and the diet of the kingdom at Soissons bore
out to the full the sentence of Pope Gregory II. in his letter to Leo
III., that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as a god upon
earth. Pipin became king of the Franks by the diet of the Franks accepting
the decision of Pope Zacharias in 752, when in 733 the rough Isaurian
soldier thought only of subduing the predecessor of Zacharias, Gregory
III., by a dungeon in Byzantium after the mode of Constans II. with St.
Martin. But even yet the contrast is not complete.

Not only had Leo III., in his wrath at being foiled by the elements,
confiscated the patrimonies of the Church in the southern provinces of
Italy which he possessed, and in Sicily, and in his realm generally, but
he interfered with the immemorial spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope as
patriarch, and assigned to his own patriarch at Constantinople the
privileges which by the appointment of St. Leo had been given to the great
metropolis, Thessalonica. This jurisdiction the patriarchs of
Constantinople had coveted for centuries. Theodosius II. had tried to give
it them by an imperial decree: but it was rescinded. Anastasius, who had
been substituted for Germanus in 730, received the ill-omened gift in 733.
The giver’s son, Kopronymus, afterwards punished by blindness this unhappy
man, but sent him back thus blinded to occupy his see during ten years;
made him crown his son, and only in 753 Anastasius, becoming once more a
servile persecutor of images, terminated the episcopate which he had so
ingloriously received in 730. On the other hand, Pope Stephen II.,
successor of Zacharias, in spite of bodily weakness and continual danger,
crossed the Alps, crowned Pipin, his wife and his sons, in the Abbey of
St. Denys, in 754, and so consecrated the Carlovingian race. The rising
monarchy of the Franks exulted in that very dignity of St. Peter’s
successor, which the Byzantine monarch was striving to subject to his own
will.

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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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.

The next day, a day of games in the circus, his beard, eye-brows, and hair
were torn out; he was dressed in a short woollen smock without sleeves,
put backwards on an ass, and led through the circus by a nephew whose nose
had been cut off. The parties of the circus reviled him and spat on him.
At the end of the circus he was thrown down, trodden under foot, and put
upon the stone which terminated the circus to be exposed there, so long as
the games lasted, to the jeers of the riders as they passed. He was then
thrown into prison, where he lay almost forgotten to the 15th August of
the following year, 768. That day was the last of his sufferings. The
emperor sent two patricians to him to ask what he thought of the emperor’s
belief and the doctrine of the council. The sufferer, to the last a
courtier, thought by a submissive answer to alleviate his punishment. He
replied: “The emperor’s belief is holy, and the council has issued a holy
confession”. The patricians said at once: “That is just the admission
which we wished to have from thy godless mouth. Nothing more remains for
thee but death.” They then pronounced his condemnation, and led him into
the amphitheatre, where his head was struck off. It was fastened by the
ears to the mile-stone, where it served the mob three days for a
spectacle. The body was dragged to the Pelagium, a spot where the church
of St. Pelagia had stood, which the emperor had pulled down, to make a
court where the bodies of the condemned were thrown after execution; in
the same way as on the other side the water he had pulled down St.
Andrew’s church to make a place of execution. The body was also said to
have been dissected for the good of science.(210) This was the reward
which the patriarch received for having sacrificed his faith and
conscience in giving sanction to his master’s impieties.

This degradation by Kopronymus of the man whom he had made and called
ecumenical patriarch, and to make him had persisted in his father’s
overthrow of the Church’s order from the beginning, by an act of despotic
power breaking into her constitution, is it not also a token of the
condition into which the most ruthless tyranny had reduced the episcopate
of that eastern realm? Those bishops who, at the bidding of an adventurer,
successful for the moment and presently swept away, had met at
Constantinople in 710 to overthrow the Sixth Council and the faith of the
Church; and again, the three hundred and thirty-eight who had met at the
same place at the bidding of Kopronymus to make the whole order of divine
worship subject to his will, did the spirit of St. Basil, St. Athanasius,
St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria live in them still, or were they
in possession indeed of unquestioned episcopal rank and all the powers
which belong to consecration, but in fact the most abject minions of the
most debased human will—the will of a Byzantine despot? The will of one
fined already of one half his empire by the divine Hand which raised up
the most abject of savages to punish a debased Christian realm. Yet ruler
after ruler had not received the lesson which faith derives from
chastisement. Leo III. surpassed his predecessors, and his son surpassed
the father, in imitating the arrogance of a false theocracy. He carried
his civil autocracy into interference with the doctrine and the worship of
the Church. This interference the laws of his own empire warned him
against, as cited by St. Gregory II. in the examples of the greatest
emperors.

It is not too much to say that the despotism wielded by those who occupied
the Byzantine throne from Justinian to Kopronymus had eaten out the
courage and dulled the sense of divine things which we admire in the
Fathers of the fourth century. Athanasius denounced a Constantius, and
Basil a Valens, but the eastern bishops of the eighth century crouched
before Leo and Kopronymus, and if there had not been a succession of
Popes, in whom the spirit of St. Leo lived on, and the doctrine of St. Leo
was maintained, the Church herself would have yielded to the most debasing
despotism ever seen. But it must not be forgotten that the bishops of the
West were faithful to the teaching and emulated the stedfastness of the
Popes. A despotic patriarch, nominee and instrument of a despotic emperor,
made a servile episcopate. A martyr Pope, such as St. Martin, likewise
made an army of martyrs. The several character of bishops in the East and
West completes the contrast which we have been drawing out.

In the patriarch Constantine the ecumenical patriarchate received its
completed form. Kopronymus chose him; took him by the hand, presented him
to the 338 bishops who held an illicit and heretical council at his
bidding; having used him for his purposes, deposed, beheaded him, treated
his lifeless body with extreme dishonour.

In the same Kopronymus, the two hundred years of secular lordship begun by
Justinian’s conquest of Rome came to an end. He had disregarded the appeal
of Pope Stephen to defend his own dominion from the Lombards. Pipin had
deprived them of that dominion, and then bestowed it upon St. Peter.
Kopronymus asked Pipin to give it back to him. Pipin refused, and after
thirty-four successive Popes had endured a dominion which began with the
deposition of St. Silverius by a shameless woman, and perhaps cannot show
a single act of generous defence in return for loyal service during two
centuries, the attempt inaugurated by Justinian, and finished by
Kopronymus, to reduce the successor of St. Peter to a patriarch whom they
might treat as the patriarch Constantine was treated, failed finally and
for ever. Stephen II., an infirm old man who had crossed the Alps at the
risk of his life, deserted by Kopronymus and threatened by Aistulf, sat at
the grave of the chief Apostle, Prince as well as Bishop of Rome, and the
Christian faith was not left to be determined by soldiers of fortune on
the throne of Byzantium, but saved by and for the guardianship of the
living Peter.

From Metrophanes,(211) the first recorded bishop of Byzantium, not yet
Constantinople, in the time of the Nicene Council to Methodius, in the
year 842, when the Iconoclast contest came to a final end, fifty-eight
bishops sat on the chair of the Greek capital. The first was simple bishop
of a suffragan city to the Thracian metropolis of Heraclea. As soon as
Constantine in the year 330 had consecrated his new capital as Nova Roma,
there began a continual exaltation, the work of the eastern emperors for
their own purposes; after four centuries the bishops of Constantinople had
in 733 reached the culmination of their hopes by receiving from the
emperor Leo III. ten provinces out of the Roman jurisdiction, and twenty
bishoprics of his own birth-land, Isauria, previously belonging to the
patriarch of Antioch. They were in a Greek sense ecumenical, not because
their authority extended over the world, but because by imperial gift it
had become conterminous with that portion of the world which was
considered by the Greek emperor the habitation of men,(212) that is, his
subjects. The original and true patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch
had fallen under Mohammedan domination. So likewise had Jerusalem, which
attained patriarchal rank only in the middle of the fifth century. The
name of each as patriarch was carefully maintained, especially for
appearance in the list of Greek councils, but in each case, and for
hundreds of years, it was little more than “magni nominis umbra”.(213) Of
the fifty-eight bishops of the capital many have gained for themselves
imperishable honour, many are venerated in the number of the saints by
Greeks and Latins, and looked up to as intercessors and protectors, others
have at least left behind them in one or other respect a distinguished
memory. But more than a third, one and twenty, are branded as heretics or
favourers of heresy. Almost as many were for various reasons deposed,
partly by heretical, partly by orthodox emperors. Several, also, of them
received at the same time dishonouring treatment, such as Kallinikus,
Anastasius, and Constantine. In three cases, those of St. Chrysostom,
Eutychius, and Pyrrhus, deposed prelates, were restored, a case which much
oftener recurs in later Byzantine history.

In the fourth century the names of Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and
Demophilus in the see of the capital are marked as supporters of the Arian
heresy. In the fifth century the Nestorian heresy springs from its author
in the very chair of Constantinople. Fifty years later the Acacian schism
springs in like manner from the ambition of its author in the same chair,
and the names of four successors, Fravitas, Euphemius, Macedonius II, and
Timotheus are struck from the diptychs of their own church, when the
schism was terminated under Pope Hormisdas. In less than twenty years
after this, Anthimus, put into the see of the capital by the intrigues of
the same empress Theodora who violently deposed Pope St. Silverius, was
deposed by Pope Agapetus in his visit to Constantinople, as a Monophysite
heretic. In the sixth century the Monothelite heresy was owing mainly to
the political intrigues of Sergius, sitting for twenty-eight years in the
see of Constantinople, also the prime minister and guide of the emperor
Heraclius; he and his three successors, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, were the
main-stay of that most insidious and stubborn heresy, which for forty
continuous years kept the Church in peril, and strove to overthrow the
efforts of ten Popes to maintain the faith, and brought one of them to die
a martyr under the rule of Constans II. But in the seventh and eighth
centuries, the most terrible Iconoclast persecution found in six bishops
of Constantinople its main support, in that they put to the service of the
emperors Leo III. and Constantine Kopronymus, Leo V. and Theophilus, these
immense ecclesiastical powers with which the emperors themselves had
invested them over the eastern bishops. The single patriarch had himself
become a despot in wielding the tyranny of the civil despot as his chief
instrument. These six ecumenical patriarchs wielded their authority under
Iconoclast emperors for a long time: Anastasius I. from 730 to 753;
Constantine II. from 754 to 766; Nicetas I. from 766 to 780; then an
orthodox sovereign brought with him an orthodox council. The patriarch
Tarasius and union with the West might seem to have secured a deliverance
from a renewed reign of the Iconoclast violence. On the contrary, three
succeeding patriarchs, Theodotus from 815 to 821; Antonius I. from 821 to
832, and John VII. from 832 to 841, did what they could to carry out the
wishes of their masters for that heresy.

Such was the conduct, as guardian of the faith, of the line of
pseudo-popes set up by state policy at Constantinople, in virtue of the
pretension that the bishop of Nova Roma should enjoy equal rights with the
bishop of Old Rome.

It is to be noted that in this period the whole doctrine concerning the
Person of our Lord Jesus Christ went through the most complete sifting and
discussion in the Councils of the Church. During it, from St. Silvester to
Gregory IV., seventy pontiffs sat in the chair of Peter. They lived in
full five hundred years of perpetual struggle. One after another “apparent
diræ facies inimicaque Troiæ numina”—Arius in the foreground heralding
Mohammed in the rear; Nestorius and Eutyches tearing the unity of the
Church on opposite sides; an able bishop of Constantinople seizing the
moment of Rome’s temporal captivity under Arian strangers to raise his see
to parity: the East well nigh devoured by opposing sects. After this, an
insidious Byzantine couple, Heraclius and Sergius, emperor and patriarch,
covering up deep wounds with ambiguous words, and sacrificing the empire
by their sacrifice of the faith; and lastly, emperors who disregard things
human and divine, and mark their mastery over doctrine by the subversion
of worship, a Leo III. and a Constantine Kopronymus. All secular power is
in the hands of Nova Roma which Constantine has set up to be the Christian
city from its cradle: the seven greater hills to take the place of the
hills by the Tiber, and in these very hills of Constantine from age to age
the evil vision nestles—his successor and his patriarch are the chief
performers in this ever recruited drama of heresy. But through all these
attacks the seventy successors on St. Peter’s throne have kept the
doctrine of the Church, that is the doctrine of the Incarnation itself,
one and unchanged. The infidel has trampled upon Alexandria, Antioch, and
Jerusalem; but while the old Christendom has sunk from debased nations
into Saracen serfdom, a new Christendom has arisen among Teuton settlers,
making their first steps in national life. Nova Roma has been false to the
purpose for which Constantine founded it; and Old Rome has found among
those whom the rival counts as barbarians, one more faithful as well as
more powerful than she has been. Charlemagne stands at the end of the
vista which Constantine begins. Of the two, does he not merit most in the
Church of God?

But to estimate at its due value this long series of historic facts, it
must be remembered that during at least three centuries of this period,
the seventy Popes work as captives, the fifty-eight bishops of
Constantinople work as the right hand of emperors. From the time indeed
when St. Silvester passed from the catacombs to the Lateran palace, to the
time when the Vandal robbers desolated Rome under the eyes of St. Leo, the
Popes were not captives. They had severe persecution at times to undergo:
especially under Constantius I., the whole fifty years of Arian trial were
a special test of their fortitude, their clear undoubted maintenance of
the Godhead of our Lord, their unfaltering trust in their apostolic right.
But so long as there was a Christian western emperor he had a regard to
the Apostolic See of the West: even a Valentinian III. could acknowledge
St. Leo in an imperial edict in 447 as “Principem episcopalis coronæ”;
words which present the very idea of St Peter’s majesty, as the root, the
bond, and the crown of the episcopate. But with the inroad of barbarians,
as soldiers of fortune and civil masters of Rome, another time begins. And
when to barbarous manners and brute force was added the Arian spirit, a
period ensued which was calculated to test to the utmost the dowry of
truth bestowed on the Apostolic See. Justinian as a civil ruler may be
deemed worse than Odoacer, worse even than Theodorich. What the Popes did,
they did often after being nominated without free election, often with the
postponement of their confirmation after election (as when after the death
of Pope Honorius, Pope Severinus had his three years diminished to two
months, in the hope of Heraclius to bend him to the Monothelite heresy),
sometimes with unjust depositions, as St. Silverius by Theodora, as St.
Martin by Constans II., as St. Sergius attempted by Justinian II., as John
VI. attempted by Apsimar, the emperor of a day: again by unlawful
substitution for a living Pope, as Eugenius to St. Martin, when condemned
but not yet martyred. Then again the eleven years preceding the great Pope
Sergius from 676 to 687 witness the appointment of six Popes. At this time
there is a series of Popes who show eastern lineage, as if the emperor’s
hand were busy in the choice of them. But no one of them fails, and St.
Sergius and St. Gregory III., both easterns, are of the very greatest and
most stedfast in the whole time of Popes.

Add to this that the civil condition of these Popes, from the entrance of
the Lombards to the end of the exarchs, was often most perilous. It was
plaintively alluded to by St. Agatho in addressing the Sixth Council, when
forty years after the death of Honorius he set forth in most absolute
language the unfaltering integrity of faith which had marked the Apostolic
See to his own time, language; which the Council accepted.

It is to be noted that a Pope, whose election had been long delayed by the
mere arbitrary will of emperor or exarch, as soon as he was consecrated,
entered into the full possession of his unrestricted rights. The exarch
who had power to delay, who had power to plunder the Lateran treasury of
the Church, as Isaac and John Platina did, had no power to lessen the
dignity of St. Peter’s succession when once acknowledged. Even Vigilius is
admitted to have emancipated himself from the thraldom of Theodora; and
Eugenius, forced upon the Romans by the tyranny of Constans II., was a
blameless Pope, who did not yield to the heresy of Constans.

What manner of men were they who were loyal vassals to the most iniquitous
rulers, and when solicited by their own faithful peoples to break an
abhorred yoke yet held them back, and adhered to those who gave them
neither protection nor justice? They did not rule as Satraps in a kingdom
worn down to prostration by centuries of arbitrary power, but were
acknowledged as sitting in the apostolic throne of Faith and Justice by
rough lords from the North, to whom obedience in spiritual things was a
Christian virtue learned with great difficulty by those who inherited a
natural independence. Interminable intestine quarrels among the western
potentates, who yet accept the voice of an unarmed Pope as the interpreter
of faith, and the most upright arbiter of human justice, are a proof the
more how deeply the rule of St. Peter had sunk into the western mind.

What guarantee of truth can be offered by the course of human things if
this be not one? That is the testimony of the three centuries from
Genseric the Vandal to Aistulf the Lombard. The testimony of Teuton
conquerors, who burn what they once worshipped, and worship what they once
burnt, who enter on their dominion as spoilers and develop into Christian
monarchs. The testimony of Constantine’s imperial successors, who own the
papal succession to St. Peter, while they try to bend it to their will,
and in the attempt subject half their empire to an anti-Christian tyranny.
Lastly, the testimony of St. Leo the Great and fifty-one successors to the
time when St. Leo III., invested with civil sovereignty, employed the
acknowledged greatness of his spiritual power to restore the empire which
the first Leo saw sinking in ruins.





CHAPTER VIII. FROM SERVITUDE TO SOVEREIGNTY.


The first land possession(214) of the Roman See appears to have been the
Cæsarean palace of the Lateran, the gift to it of the emperor Constantine,
in gratitude to God for having conquered the heathen empire at the Milvian
Bridge. It noted the impression on the conqueror’s soul of the divine
sign, _in this prevail_. Therein St. Silvester took up his abode, and in
it was built the Cathedral Church of Rome and of the world. For a thousand
years it remained the abode of the Popes—the centre of the Church’s
visible life, whence her spiritual jurisdiction radiated, the proper
residence of one hundred and sixty Popes, from St. Silvester to B. Pope
Benedict XI.

It is not a little to be noted that the original root of the Pope’s
temporal power was his unique spiritual power, that the gift of
Constantine foreshadowed the empire of Charlemagne; that the first
Christian emperor removed the Pope from the catacombs to a Cæsarean
palace; that the second emperor received back from the Pope that imperial
title and power which so many successors seated in Constantine’s Nova Roma
had used so cruelly against the successor of St. Peter, whom yet they
acknowledged. And still the Lateran Basilica bears on its front in
barbarous Latin the title no less true than proved,


    “Dogmate Papali datur ac simul Imperiali,
    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,
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
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 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.

The position of the Popes from the time of St. Gregory to the beginning of
the State of the Church is thus described by a Jewish writer forty years
ago.(218) “The Popes were usually the helpers out of every need. They
supplied the money required for the payment of the troops, and for the
requisite provisionment, to keep off the ever-impending threatenings of
scarcity. They also frequently redeemed captives. Now as the Protector
always exercised a decisive influence on the protected, and the distant
emperors distinguished themselves as much by their neglect, as the Vicars
of Christ by their activity in the interest of Italy, and especially of
the seven-hilled city, nothing was more natural than that the estimation
of those who were so often its preservers advanced more and more. Thus
they soon came in fact to stand at the head of almost all secular matters
in and about Rome, with almost sovereign power. That was especially the
case since the pontificate of the great Gregory I., a Pope truly venerable
both for his very distinguished mental gifts, and for his far-stretching,
sound, practical discernment, and his inflexible will. These were the
reasons enabling him to assume a freer political position towards the
Greek imperial court than his predecessors.”

It has been computed(219) that the Popes were in all landlords of 1360
square miles, that is 870,400 acres, in the time of Leo the Isaurian, and
that these lands produced to them 200,000 gold soldi in money, and 500,000
in kind. And if we add to this computation the very great secular powers
which the policy of Justinian had placed throughout his empire in the
hands of the bishops, we may form some notion of the secular authority
wielded by the Popes before they obtained the technical rank of
sovereigns, according to modern definition of that word. Constantine’s
gift of the Lateran palace may be considered the starting point which the
continual generosity of so many succeeding generations extended, as has
been recounted, until the unanimous voice of his people, delivered, as
they hoped, from the Lombard burden, saluted Stephen II. on his return in
756, not only as Papa, but as Dominus Urbis.

Under the year 752, when Aistulf had attacked the exarchate and occupied
the city of Ravenna, and was turning his arms against the Roman duchy and
the cities depending on it, Muratori writes: “From what we have hitherto
seen, although the Greek emperors had their ministers in Rome, yet the
principal authority of government seems to have been seated in the Roman
Pontiffs. They with the power and majesty of their rank and with the
accompaniment of their virtues tranquilly governed that city and duchy,
defending it moreover vigorously, when need arose, from the claws of the
Lombards.”(220)

Such was the position of the Pontiffs before that definitive rejection of
the Byzantine sovereign made by Stephen II. when he was left naked to the
assault of Aistulf by the cowardice or the impotence of Constantine
Kopronymus. From his return in 756 he and his successors after him became
kings as well as Popes of Rome. Scrupulous as the two Gregories, Zacharias
and Stephen himself had been up to the time of the compact with Pipin,
never after did any Pope acknowledge the Byzantine as his civil sovereign.

Never could an Italian of those ages have given to the Goth or the Lombard
that heartfelt devotion which they felt for the perpetual defender of the
Italian people, who was seated in the centre of Italy at once the champion
of the Christian faith, and representative of Rome’s old Commonwealth. The
Byzantine slave-master revolted the Roman heart; the Arian politician
revolted the Christian faith: but in the Roman see St. Sergius the Syrian
emulated the courage of St. Martin the Roman, and St. Gregory III., also
Syrian, was in no quality behind his predecessor St. Gregory II. the
Roman. Is it any wonder that by the end of the seventh century when a
Justinian II. tried to repeat on the person of St. Sergius the wickedness
practised by his grandfather upon St. Martin, his own soldiers rose
against the guardsman whom he had deputed to this atrocious work, and
recognized in the Pope the defender of all which they held dear, whether
in the natural or the supernatural life.

And, again, had not the seven revolutions at Byzantium—ending in the
exultation of a rough soldier who was able in the field, but ignorant in
doctrine—given a sufficient lesson to the Italian peoples to cast off a
force which disregarded all right in the natural order, and the whole
tradition of faith in the supernatural realm of revealed truth?

That is the consummation which we have been following during a whole
generation, from 726 to 756.

I will here insert the judgment of another historian, upon the gift of the
exarchate, made by Pipin to St. Peter, in the person of the Popes:—(221)
“To question the rightness of this donation is unreasonable and
preposterous. Since the reconquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, Rome
was regarded at Constantinople simply as a province, not as a member of
the realm, or not as, what it had originally been, the seat of empire. On
what could the right of Greek tyrants be founded constantly to receive
back, even at second hand, conquests which they were able neither to
govern nor to maintain? The assertions of some late historical writers
seem to pre-suppose that all Europe, as far as the Rhine and the Danube,
were placed by God for ever under the Byzantine yoke, and that the shaking
off this yoke was an unpardonable injustice. Rome did under her bishops
what peoples did under their kings. Rome took her opportunity to free
herself from the yoke of foreign dominion and unnatural relations. No
prince, no people of Europe has any other claim upon its soil to show than
this and the centuries. Both tell for Rome. Before this testimony, the
lesser but yet valid right disappears, that the Greek emperor had
confiscated the Papal possessions situated in Lower Italy, and that
nothing was more natural than that it should take the compensation which
presented itself. The other question which has been also proposed, whether
the office of a teacher and bishop of the Christian community can be
united with a secular administration, had been long before answered. _Rome
owed its actual existence solely to the protection of its bishops._ They
had found their best right of sovereignty in the gratitude of the people,
and long before the donation of Ravenna, they had been, if not in name,
yet in fact, princes in Rome.”

At the beginning of the year 756, Aistulf, the most aggressive of Lombard
kings, had strictly invested Rome, ravaged its campagna, and destroyed the
churches therein, while he devoutly exhumed the bodies of martyrs to
transport them to new shrines in Pavia. In the spring of that year he
surrendered his capital to the king of the Franks, and submitted to all
the conditions imposed on him by Pipin. In the autumn, by a sudden stroke
of God, he died out hunting. At the beginning of the year 757, Desiderius,
by the help of the Pope, Stephen II. had succeeded to the Lombard throne,
itself spared by Pipin, and these great changes are recorded in an extant
letter of Pope Stephen, a hymn of gratitude and praise, to Pipin, who had
placed the keys of the recovered cities, forming the new created State of
the Church, on the tomb of St. Peter. Great is the contrast between the
letters of 756, written to Pipin, in the height of Rome’s distress and
danger, and this letter from the first Pope-king to his benefactor.

“Words(222) cannot express, most excellent son, our delight at your work
and your life. For we have seen miracles in our days wrought by the divine
power. For the Roman Church, the holy mother and head of all the churches
of God, the foundation of the Christian faith, which was groaning under
the attacks of enemies, now through you, has been translated into the
fulness of joy and security. Thus, by your work, and in our exultation, we
rejoice to exclaim with the angels, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth peace to men of goodwill’. This time last year we were wounded and
afflicted on all sides: now, in our deliverance through you, we cry out.
‘This change is by the hand of the Most High,’ and, again, ‘In the
evening, there shall be weeping, but in the morning joy’. What heart is
there so stony that, knowing what your goodness has done, would not break
into praise of God and affection to your excellency. This I am wont to say
to those who come hither from all the nations of the earth: and I
perpetually pray to God for your welfare, and that of the whole nation of
the Franks. What can I call you but a new Moses and a glorious David, for,
as they delivered the people of God from the oppression of the heathen, so
have you the Church of God. May the Lord, the beauty of justice, bless you
and your children, Charles and Carloman, my spiritual sons, appointed by
God kings of the Franks, and patricii of the Romans.”

He then goes on to beg Pipin to execute fully all that he had promised to
St. Peter by oath. He mentions specially Imola, Ferrara, Ancona, Bologna,
with their complete territories; and begs him to favour the new king,
Desiderius, if he restore, as he had promised, fully the _justitia_, which
we may translate sovereignty, “to the Holy Church of God, or Commonwealth
of the Romans, St. Peter, your protector”. He also prays him that the Holy
Catholic and Apostolic faith may be preserved by him from “the pestilent
malice of the Greeks”. He ends with the prayer:—“O victorious king, may
God, in all your acts, extend His right hand over you, your queen, and
mine and your dearest sons: and, as He has given you the royal power in
this life, may you also hear the divine promise, ’Come, blessed of my
Father, you have fought the good fight, you have finished your course, you
have kept the faith; so take the crown laid up for you, and the kingdom
prepared for you from the foundation of the world’”.

A few days after this letter, that is, on the 24th April, 757, Stephen II.
closed in peace his course on earth. He died in the Lateran patriarchal
palace, acknowledged by all as king of Rome: and attended by his brother,
Paul, who was to be his successor. He was buried with extraordinary
honours in St. Peter’s. In his short pontificate of five years he set the
crown upon the work of his three great predecessors, Gregory II., Gregory
III., and Zacharias, and is counted among the most illustrious of the
Popes. He closed the seven centuries of Popes who were subjects: he opens
the eleven centuries of Popes who have been kings. From the Pope who was
crucified on the Roman hill to the Pope who died a king in the patriarchal
Lateran palace, 93 in number, enemies have tried to deface the memory of
two—but the voice of impartial history regards those rulers of the Church
with unalloyed gratitude as men who, through trials and difficulties
unsurpassed, kept the faith of the Church inviolate. That the city of Rome
existed in their day, and exists now, is due to the pastoral staff of St.
Peter, planted in its soil, which became, in the hand of Stephen II., the
most gracious, the most prolific, the most honoured of sceptres.

Stephen II. was succeeded immediately by his brother Paul, who had been
the chosen companion of his counsels and anxieties during the severe
trials of his pontificate, ending so gloriously. It was the first instance
of a brother to the Pope succeeding to his chair. He had been brought up,
like his brother Stephen, in the Lateran patriarchal palace from the time
of St. Gregory II., and was made a cardinal deacon by Pope Zacharias. “He
was meek and very merciful, never rendering evil for evil to anyone.”(223)
He sat from 757 to 767, ten years and a month. During the whole time the
closest union was maintained between the Holy See and King Pipin. A series
of letters from the Pope to the king is extant, testifying the affection
and the confidence which existed between them. It was by the influence of
Pope Stephen II. that the new king of the Lombards, Desiderius, was
accepted by that people after the untimely death of King Aistulf. He bound
himself strictly to carry out the compact at Pavia between the Franks, the
Lombards, and the Romans, in virtue of which, at the subjection of King
Aistulf to Pipin, the Lombard monarchy continued to exist. The reign of
Desiderius from 757 until he was finally overthrown and deposed by Charles
in 774 shows a repetition of attempts by fraud or by violence to evade the
conditions which he had bound himself to accept. Already, in 757, Pope
Paul I. wrote to King Pipin: “We(224) make known to your Excellence that
we have hitherto received nothing of those things which by our legates we
committed to your charge, for, according to their wont, those perfidious
and malignant Lombards, persisting in great arrogance of heart, are by no
means inclined to restore the justice of St. Peter”. The possession of the
cities and territories of Imola, Bologna, Osimo, Ancona, and Umana were in
question. In the next year, 758, Desiderius ravaged with fire and sword
the Pentapolis. Then he attacked the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento,
which had put themselves under the protection of the Pope and the king of
the Franks.

At another time the Greek emperor Kopronymus was bent upon recovering
Ravenna and the Pentapolis, and upon attacking Rome itself. Desiderius met
his agent and wrote to the emperor, exhorting him to send an army into
Italy, and promising that he with all his Lombards would help him to
recover Ravenna, and whatever else he desired.(225)

Through the whole ten years of Paul’s pontificate, this king Pipin
discharged with fidelity his office of Roman Patricius, that is, the sworn
defender of the Holy See. It was this protection alone which enabled the
Pope to maintain his newly founded State against the perpetual wiles of
the Lombard, as well as against the Greek enmity. As to Kopronymus, the
Iconoclastic heresy was the furious passion of his whole life. Pope Paul
wrote to King Pipin:(226) “You know well how those most nefarious Greeks
pursue us only to destroy and tread under foot the orthodox faith and the
tradition of the fathers”.

When Pope Paul I. died, in 767, his pontificate of ten years had been
throughout agitated by the perpetual oscillations of king Desiderius,
alternating acts of devotion with acts of hostility, promises with
violations of them, restitution of rights with fresh acts of
plundering.(227) Scarcely had Paul I. closed his eyes when the duke Toto,
a very powerful baron of the Roman Tuscany, conspired with his three
brothers, Constantine, Passivus, and Paschalis, to get possession of Rome
and the papacy.(228) Toto and his party, while preparation was being made
for the solemn obsequies of Paul I. and the due election of his successor,
broke into Rome, suddenly elected his brother Constantine, a layman,
introduced him by violence into the Lateran palace. He seized upon George,
bishop of Palestrina, and compelled him to confer minor orders upon
Constantine. The next day he was made deacon by the same bishop, and on
the following Sunday Toto, attended by a large body of armed men, carried
the intruded Constantine to St. Peter’s, where the three suburbican
bishops, the said George of Palestrina, and the bishops of Albano and
Porto, gave him episcopal consecration. In such fashion Constantine seated
himself in the chair of Peter; he forced the people to make oath of
fidelity to him. Thus the layman of a week before, thrust upon the clergy
and people of Rome by the rudest violence, held possession of the
Apostolic See for thirteen months. He wrote lying letters to King Pipin,
who was not deceived by them. But Rome was filled with conspiracy and
unrule.

A year after this event, in July, 768 the intruder Constantine was
deposed, his brother Toto killed, while a second pretended Pope, named
Philip, set up for the moment, was driven away. By the exertions of
Christophorus, first of the seven Palatine judges, and his son Sergius,
Stephen III., a Sicilian, and at the time cardinal priest of St. Cecilia,
was duly elected Pope. He sat during three years and six months, in the
course of which great events took place. His first act was to send Sergius
to King Pipin and his sons, beseeching him to depute a number of Frankish
bishops to Rome to hold a council there with him, and to make regulations
which might prevent the recurrence of violence so deplorable.

Sergius found king Pipin dying. He expired at St. Denys on the 24th
September, 768. There he was buried and afterwards his monument bore the
inscription, “Pipin, the king, father of Charles the Great”. He left his
states, with the consent of the nobles and bishops, between his sons
Charles and Carloman, who were crowned and anointed on the same day, 9th
October, 768, Charles at Noyon, Carloman at Soissons. Pipin died aged
fifty-five, having ruled France for twenty-seven years, ten as Mayor of
the palace, seventeen as king of the Franks.

The legate Sergius proceeded at once to the kings, Charles and Carloman.
They granted all which he desired. They gave him twelve Frankish bishops
well instructed in the scriptures and the holy canons, the archbishop of
Sens, the bishops of Mainz, Tours, Lyons, Bourges, Narbonne, Rheims,
Langres, Noyon, Worms, and two others with sees of names unknown. These
bishops came to Rome in April, 769, and Pope Stephen III. assembled
bishops from Tuscany, Campania, and the rest of Italy, and held a council
in the Lateran Basilica. Among other decrees they passed one under
anathema: “that no laymen, nor any one save a cardinal, deacon or priest,
ascending through the distinct degrees, be promoted to the honour of the
sacred pontificate”.(229) The Pope, all the priests, and the Roman people,
prostrate on the pavement, deplored the sin they had committed in
receiving Communion from the unhappy intruder, Constantine, who had been
deprived of sight during the wild struggle which attended his deposition,
and now in most abject guise confessed his crime before the council, and
was condemned to penance.

In this terrible outburst of ambition and crime, which showed but too
clearly to what sudden dangers Rome was exposed, the two great officers,
Christophorus, the first of the seven Palatine judges, and his son
Sergius, had done their utmost to prevent the usurpation, and in the end
delivered the Holy See from the intruder Constantine. Desiderius had taken
no part in the intrusion of the anti-pope. He even assisted Christophorus
and Sergius in removing him. But in doing this a Lombard priest,
Waldepert, sought to set up another anti-pope, and lost his life. After
the due appointment of Stephen III., the master stroke of the Lombard
king’s policy was to sever, if he could, the two Frank kings from
friendship with the Holy See, and so sooner or later to get possession of
Rome. He proposed in 770 a double marriage; on one side the marriage of
his daughter Desiderata or Ermengarde either with Charles or with
Carloman; on the other that of their sister, the princess Gisela, with his
son Adelchis. The queen mother, Bertrada, set her hand to accomplish the
first. There is a most earnest letter from Pope Stephen III. to the kings
Charles and Carloman, entreating them not to stain the noble Frank race,
the most eminent of all, by a connection with the faithless and perfidious
Lombard. “You have likewise,” he said, “by the will of God, and the
command of your father, contracted lawful marriages with excellent royal
ladies out of your own people, conspicuous for their nobility and beauty.
It is not lawful for you to repudiate them. To take other wives would be
an impiety. Heathens only can so act. Forget not, most illustrious sons,
that you received holy unction from St. Peter’s successor, that your
father of glorious memory listened to the injunctions of our predecessor
Stephen, and forebore to separate from your mother, Bertrada, and be
mindful of your repeated promise to St. Peter and his successor that you
would ever be friends of our friends and enemies of our enemies. Would you
now bind yourselves to our enemies? For the faithless people of the
Lombards, which ceases not to attack the Church of God, and make
incursions on our province of Rome, is our manifest enemy.”(230)

Nevertheless the queen mother, Bertrada, carried out her design, and the
king Desiderius seemed to attain the summit of security, so far at least
as this, that though his son Adelchis did not obtain the princess Gisela,
Charles took his daughter Ermengarde. He also sent her back to her father
the next year, and his friend and secretary, Eginhard, has left
unexplained the cause of this repudiation. No historian has thrown light
upon this particular in the history of Charles, either how he came to
brave the anathema of Pope Stephen III. by deserting a lawful wife, or how
he came to send back in a year the unhappy princess whom he had unlawfully
taken, or how we find Hildegarde acknowledged as his lawful wife from 771
to her death in 786. The blot remains unerased upon the memory of him who
was otherwise the greatest of the Christian emperors.

With the marriage—if it is to be so called—of his daughter with Charles,
Desiderius seemed to have reached well nigh the end of his ambition.
Christophorus and his son Sergius had put an end to the usurpation of
Constantine, were the heads of the national Roman party,(231) and the soul
of Pope Stephen III.’s government. Desiderius in a visit to Rome managed
to set the Pope against them. He had a Lombard party there, at the head of
which was a certain Paul Afiarta, high in the Pope’s service.
Christophorus and his son Sergius both lost their lives. They had urged
the king of the Lombards to restore to the Holy See the rights which he
kept back. Desiderius was infuriated by their conduct(232) and strove to
destroy them.(233) Desiderius was encamped outside of St. Peter’s. A
company of Lombard soldiers dragged the two victims, who had been taken
out of St. Peter’s, to the gate of the city, at the bridge: tore out their
eyes, of which outrage Christophorus died in three days: Sergius survived
in prison during two years, that is, to the death of Pope Stephen, when he
was most atrociously murdered by order of Paul Afiarta.

But now the whole course of history was altered by a death which occurred
on the 4th December. Carloman died in the flower of his youth, leaving
behind him two very young children by his wife Gilberga. Charles was
called by the unanimous vote of the Frank magnates to rule the whole
kingdom of the Franks increased greatly as it was by the late conquests of
Charles in Aquitania and Gascony. Two months later, 1st February, 772,
Stephen III. closed his pontificate of three years and a half. The Pope
before his death had discovered how grievously he had been deceived by
king Desiderius, to whom his two chief servants and ministers had been
sacrificed. Desiderius kept none of the promises which he had made on the
occasion of his coming to Rome: and when the Pope reminded him of them by
a special embassy, mockingly replied:(234) “The Holy Father Stephen might
have been contented that I delivered him from his two tyrants
Christophorus and Sergius, and did not need to demand the rights of St.
Peter. If I had not helped the Holy Father, great ruin would have fallen
upon him, since Carloman, king of the Franks, the friend of both, was
ready to bring an army to Rome to avenge their death, and carry away the
Pope captive.”

The repudiation of his daughter, Ermengarde, and the rupture of the
desired alliance between Desiderius and Charles, terminated the good
fortune of the Lombard king. From that time he seemed to lose his vigour
of mind, and political insight. He continued to pursue, without check, the
design of Aistulf, which he had now fully made his own, to become master
of Rome. But he had to deal with other adversaries. Eight days after the
death of Pope Stephen III., he was succeeded by one of the greatest
pontiffs who ever sat on the throne of St. Peter. Adrian, the son of
Theodorus, was born in Rome of a very noble family, one of the most
powerful in the city. Losing his parents early, he was brought up by a
relation named Theodotus, Primicerius of the Roman See. He was
distinguished from his youth by his purity of life, and his singular
personal beauty. Pope Paul I. had placed him among the clergy, Pope
Stephen III. created him a cardinal deacon, in which office his zeal,
eloquence, learning, and management of affairs endeared him to the Roman
people. On the very day of the Pope Stephen’s death he was proclaimed
unanimously his successor, and in eight days consecrated. He showed at
once the vigour of mind and promptitude of execution which rendered his
reign illustrious, and it continued nearly to twenty-four years, a period
which no Pontiff reached in the seven hundred years from St. Peter before
him, nor in the thousand years after him, until, at the end of the
eighteenth century, it was slightly passed by that Pontiff who died a
confessor, exiled, persecuted, and forlorn at Valence, in that land of the
Franks, with whose greatest king Pope Adrian was bound in the closest
personal friendship.

No sooner was Pope Adrian seated than he struck down that Lombard faction
which the gold and intrigues of Desiderius had planted at Rome. Its head
was Paul Afiarta. In the very last days of Pope Stephen, he had caused the
blinded Sergius to be assassinated, and banished from Rome certain judges,
both of the clergy and the army, that he might have more weight in the
forthcoming election. Adrian, the moment that he was elected, recalled the
judges, and delivered from prison those who had been confined for the like
reason. Desiderius, who desired to keep up appearances with him, sent him
a solemn embassy of the three principal persons in his kingdom,
Theodicius, duke of Spoleto, Tunno, duke of Ivrea, and the Lord Treasurer
Prandulus. Their office was to profess friendship and alliance to the new
Pope. Adrian replied:(235)—“It is my desire to have peace with all
Christians, and even with your king, Desiderius, I will study to remain in
that compact which was made between the Romans, the Franks, and the
Lombards. But how can I trust your king in the matter in which my
predecessor, Stephen, of holy memory, has spoken to me fully of his want
of good faith: how he falsified everything which he promised on oath over
the body of St. Peter, for the rights of holy Church, and only by his own
hostile pleading, caused the eyes of Christophorus and Sergius to be put
out, and worked out his own will upon those two chief men of the Church.
Such is the faith of your king, Desiderius, and how can I trust in a
treaty with him?” In reply, the ambassadors made oath that Desiderius
would fulfil what he had promised to Pope Stephen, and broken. The Pope
thereupon despatched messengers to see that Desiderius fulfilled the
promise. When these reached Perugia, they found that Desiderius had
already taken the city of Faenza, and the duchy of Ferrara, and was
pressing Ravenna with siege. It was only two months after the accession of
Pope Adrian, and presently messengers from Ravenna came supplicating his
help, just as thirty years before, when pressed by the arms of Liutprand,
they had recourse to Pope Zacharias. But now the exarchate was fully
subject to the Pope, and called upon him as part of his own State for
defence. When this conduct of Desiderius was reported to the Pope, he
wrote in the gravest terms to the Lombard king, requiring him to restore
the cities, and upbraiding him with the breach of those very promises
which his own ambassadors had just made in his name. “The king,” he said,
“had taken cities which his predecessors, Stephen II., Paul I., and
Stephen III., had possessed.” Desiderius returned, for answer, “that he
would not restore those cities, unless he first met the Pope”. At the same
time, he had received the widow and young children of the deceased
Carloman, and wanted to induce the Pope to crown them, and so create
division in the Frank empire, and alienate Charles, the Patricius of Rome,
from the Pope, and thus subjugate the city of Rome and all Italy to the
Lombard kingdom.(236) But Adrian stood firm as adamant. One of his two
legates to the king, Paul Afiarta, was in league with the king, and
promised to bring the Pope before him, even if it were with a rope round
him. But, at this very moment, the body of the murdered Sergius was
discovered at Rome. The Pope ordered an inquiry into the circumstances of
his death. At the earnest entreaty of the Palatine judges, among whom
Sergius had been second in rank, and of the whole Roman people, the Pope
ordered the prefect of the city to try for homicide the parties
inculpated. The crime was brought home to the legate, Paul Afiarta
himself, at whose suggestion other highly placed officers had taken the
blind Sergius out of prison, and pierced him with wounds. The Pope ordered
the bodies of Christophorus and Sergius to be taken up and honourably
buried in St. Peter’s. He sent the Acts of the Court to the archbishop of
Ravenna, instructing him to detain Paul Afiarta, when he returned from his
embassy to the Lombard king. Archbishop Leo went beyond the Pope’s
instructions: handed over Paul Afiarta to the chief judge of Ravenna,
before whom he acknowledged his guilt: and, instead of sending the
criminal, as the Pope ordered, in exile to the East, had him executed by
the judge.

Desiderius found himself bereft of his counsellor, Paul Afiarta: he
refused to listen to the Pope’s request to restore his cities. He
committed further outrages and assaults. He rejected repeated letters and
messengers of the Pope. His reply was that, instead of restoring cities,
he would march with his whole army to Rome, and force it to surrender. The
Pope had several of the gates of Rome built up and others carefully
closed, and sent by sea messengers to Charles, begging him to help the
Roman Church as his father had done, and force Desiderius to restore what
he had taken from St. Peter.(237)

Desiderius saw that his attempt to move the Pope to crown the sons of
Carloman was vain; then, with the widowed Gilberga, these sons and the
duke, Autchar, he advanced his troops from Pavia, on the way to Rome, and
informed the Pope of it. Adrian replied, “If the king does not give up the
cities, as he has promised, and fully satisfy us, it is useless for him to
take the trouble to come to us. He shall not see my face.”

Adrian, while awaiting the succour which he had asked from king Charles,
had taken all measures necessary for the defence of Rome. He collected all
the men of war whom he could from the Roman Tuscany, from Campania, from
the duchy of Perugia, from such cities of the Pentapolis as the Lombards
had not yet taken, who, with the Roman soldiers, might suffice to defend
the vast circle of the walls and towers, and sustain a siege at least for
a time. The two basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul, being outside the
walls, were defenceless. The Pope caused them to be stripped of all
precious objects, which were brought for protection within the city. He
had all the doors closed and barred up within: so that, if the Lombard
king attempted an entrance, it would be as a burglar.

These were his acts as a sovereign prince—as pontiff, learning that the
king was approaching the Roman frontiers, he sent to him the bishops of
Albano, Palestrina, and Tibur, with an intimation in his own hand,
adjuring him by all the divine mysteries, and under threat of
excommunication, that neither he, nor any Lombard, nor the Frank Autchar
should set foot on the Roman territory without his leave.

Desiderius had reached Viterbo, the last city of the Lombard Tuscany. He
was, at the head of his army, about to pass the frontier. On receiving the
Pope’s injunction he was struck with confusion and retired back with his
army to his own city, Pavia. As the Hun had listened to St. Leo, the
Lombard also listened to Adrian, and Rome was once more saved by her
pontiff.

When Peter,(238) the legate of Adrian, reached France in the first months
of 773, he found Charles wintering at Thionville, after his first
expedition against the Saxons. He had destroyed the famous idol Irminoul.
It was the beginning of his longest and fiercest war. Now, Pope Adrian
called upon him, as Patricius of the Romans, to defend Rome and the State
of St. Peter against Desiderius, from whom neither peace nor justice could
any longer be hoped. At the same time a Lombard embassy reached him,
professing that Desiderius had already restored every thing to the Pope.
Charles sent three messengers of his own to Rome to ascertain the facts.
They reached Rome just after its deliverance from the fear of a siege by
the retreat of Desiderius from Viterbo. The Pope related to them in order
all the late events: and sent with them other messengers of his own,
conjuring Charles afresh to carry into effect the promises which he had
formerly made with his father to St. Peter, and to fulfil the redemption
of the holy Church of God(239) by compelling the perfidious king of the
Lombards to restore without contest to St. Peter, both the cities and the
other rights which he had taken away. On their way to France the
joint-messengers appeared at the court of Pavia, and, by instruction of
Charles, urged Desiderius peacefully to restore the cities and rights. He
gave an absolute refusal, which they carried to Charles.

Charles sent fresh messengers to Desiderius, and offered him 14,000 gold
solidi, if he would make restitution. All was of no avail. When the
messengers returned to Charles, he brought the whole matter before his
dukes and chiefs, probably at the May diet, and an expedition into Italy
was resolved upon for the autumn. The Frank army was summoned to meet at
Geneva. One part of it Charles sent by the Mons Jovis, the St. Bernard;
the other he conducted himself by the passes of Mont Cenis, the same route
which Pipin had held in 754 and 756. When Charles reached the pass above
Susa, he found it strongly fortified and valiantly defended by Desiderius
in person, and his son, Adelchis. Here it is said the Franks were so long
detained, being unable to break through the Lombard defence, that they
were on the point of retiring, when a secret road was discovered to
Charles, and their flank was turned. The result was a precipitate retreat
of Desiderius to his fortified capital, Pavia, and of his son, Adelchis,
to Verona. From that moment the chief struggle was concentred about these
two cities. Other cities of Upper Italy, such as Turin, Ivrea, Vercelli,
Novara, Piacenza, Milan, Parma, Tortona, and the maritime cities, with
their castles, fell speedily into the hands of the Franks. Charles sat
down before Pavia at the end of September or beginning of October, 773.
That royal city of the Lombards, in the eighth century, was first among
all the cities of Upper Italy, not only for its riches and magnificence,
but for its military strength. Near the confluence of the Ticino and the
Po, it was esteemed almost impregnable. It had resisted Odoacer, and
Alboin required more than three years to take it, which he accomplished
rather by famine than by force. Charles encamped with his army round it,
and completely enclosed it with lines and trenches. He sent for the queen
Hildegarde and her children. He made an attempt to take Verona, but found
it too strong for anything short of a regular siege, defended, as it was,
by the most valiant Adelchis. However, the widowed queen Gilberga, with
her children, who were therein, surrendered themselves to him. They
disappear henceforward from history, and are supposed to have been
confined in Frank monasteries. Charles spent the feast of Christmas in the
camp at Pavia. All we know of these months is the two words of Eginhard,
that he spent them, “much employed”.(240) We may conclude that not only
the siege of Pavia, but the settlement of the numerous cities in North
Italy, which yielded to him, well occupied his time.

But Charles had hitherto never seen Rome, and the feast of Easter, which
fell in that year, 774, on the 3rd April, drew him with a great attraction
to visit the tombs of the apostles, and he resolved to be present for the
Paschal rites. He left therefore his army under the command of his chief
officers and with a great train of bishops, abbots, judges, dukes, and
counts, and a large escort of warriors, took the road of Tuscany, which
probably had been in a great part subdued, and advanced so quickly that he
reached the gates of Rome on the morning of Holy Saturday.

Great was the joy of Pope Adrian to hear of this unexpected visit of
Charles, and his rapid approach. He made the utmost preparation to receive
so great a king, who had likewise the special dignity of Rome’s Patricius,
that is, her sworn defender. He sent out all the judges of Rome to a spot
thirty miles away near the lake of Bracciano, where they awaited him with
banners displayed. At a mile from Rome, near Monte Mario, by order of the
Pope the soldiers under their respective leaders, and the children who
were learning letters, were drawn up to meet him, and bearing in their
hands branches of palm and olive sang welcome to him. The standards of
crosses were carried, as in the reception of an exarch or a Patricius.
When the king of the Franks, Patricius of the Romans, met these crosses,
he descended from horseback with his officers, and walked the rest of the
way on foot to St. Peter’s. There, Pope Adrian, rising early with all the
clergy and people of Rome waited, to receive the king of the Franks at the
top of the steps leading into the court of the Basilica.

At that time there were thirty-five steps in five series of seven each.
When Charles reached these steps, he threw himself on his knees, and so
ascended,(241) kissing separately each one of the thirty-five in the
fashion of a pilgrim. At the top he found Pope Adrian; they embraced each
other, and the king holding the Pope’s right hand they entered the church
together, all the clergy and the monks singing, “Blessed is he who cometh
in the name of the Lord”. When the king with the bishops, abbots, judges,
and all the Franks of his train, came to the Confession, they prostrated
themselves to our almighty God, and rendered their vows to the Prince of
the Apostles, glorifying the divine power in him, who had given them by
his intercession such a victory.

After their prayer the king turned to the Pope and earnestly requested of
him permission to enter Rome, in order to venerate the other churches of
the city, and therein pay his vows. Whereupon the Pope and the king,
together with Roman and Frank judges, descending to the body of St. Peter,
bound themselves by oath to mutual protection. This permission to enter
Rome was granted in after times by the Popes to Roman emperors themselves,
as often as they approached the gates of Rome with armed force. After this
permission received Charles and the Pope rode in solemn pomp from St.
Peter’s to the Lateran, through the whole of Rome. And Charles, in the
Lateran church, witnessed the Pope’s celebration of the baptismal rite to
the catechumens as usual on that day.

So the Romans on that day first beheld the flower of the greatest western
nation passing in the pomp of armed men by their palaces, porticoes,
Capitol, forum, and colosseum, with the greatest champion of Christendom
then in the glory of his manhood at the age of thirty-two years. His
secretary, Eginhard, attests his stature to have been seven of his own
feet, and his whole aspect was full of majesty. When he ascended on his
knees the thirty-five steps leading to St. Peter’s, separately kissing
each, he manifested in his own person the truth of the reply which nearly
fifty years before Pope St. Gregory II. had made to the eastern emperor,
Leo III. Leo threatened that he would tear down the statue of St. Peter.
St. Gregory said that all the nations of the West regarded him as a God
upon earth.

After this Charles returned to the meadows of Nero by St. Peter’s wherein
foreign armies usually encamped. At the following dawn of Easter day the
Pope sent his chief officers and soldiers to conduct Charles in great pomp
to Santa Maria Maggiore, where, with all his Franks, he heard the Pope
sing Mass. After Mass the Pope received him to a banquet at the
patriarchal palace of the Lateran. On the two following feasts the Pope,
according to usage, celebrated Mass on the Monday at St. Peter’s, on the
Tuesday at St. Paul’s, in presence of the king. At the Mass in St. Peter’s
Anastasius mentions that the Pope caused the ceremony called Lauds to be
inserted before the Epistle. It was sung before Popes and emperors at
their accession. It consisted of the clergy dividing themselves in two
bands before the altar, when the archdeacon on one side intoned with loud
voice, “O Christ, hear us!” the other side responded, “Long life to our
Lord decreed by God, Roman Pontiff and universal Pope!” This was repeated
three times; a short litany followed, in which to each invocation made by
the archdeacon, the other side replied, “Give him help”: and it ended with
a triple Kyrie Eleison. With this rite on that Easter Monday of 774
Charles was solemnly acclaimed as Patricius of the Romans. Eginhard in his
“Life” says that Charlemagne would never put on a foreign dress, however
splendid: and that he broke this rule twice only, both times at Rome, the
first at the request of Pope Adrian: the second at the request of his
successor, Pope Leo III., when he wore the long tunic and cloak, and was
shod also in Roman fashion. Now twenty years before, that is, in 754, Pope
Stephen II. had crowned Pipin and his two sons Charles and Carloman kings
of the Franks, and created them also Patricii of the Romans. Charles would
seem to have considered this ceremony a solemn inauguration of this
dignity. It was from this time, 774, that in his public acts he styled
himself king of the Franks and of the Lombards, and Patricius of the
Romans.

In that same week before Charles left Rome he transacted affairs of the
utmost importance with the Pope.

The ecclesiastical hierarchy in France, the rights of metropolitans, and
the other churches had fallen in the last eighty years under great
usurpations, which all the zeal of Pipin had not been able to remedy.
Adrian prevailed on Charles to work a restoration of the ancient state. He
also drew from the archives of the Roman See two authentic codes, one
containing the old order of the ecclesiastical provinces and dioceses in
France; the other, the councils and canons of the Greek and Latin church.
These were of the greatest service to Charles in the synods and capitulars
and wise regulations which he made for the restoration of the Church in
France.

But further, the Pope addressed himself to obtain from Charles the renewal
and confirmation of the promise made in April, 754, by king Pipin and
Charles himself to Pope Stephen II. The king promised not only to
reconquer for the Holy See the exarchate and Pentapolis, then occupied by
Aistulf, but to add to them likewise all the provinces of nearly all Italy
from the Po. That promise was grounded upon the design then entertained by
the Pope and the king to put an end altogether to the Lombard rule. But at
the siege of Pavia, in 754, the Pope and Pipin were so far moved by the
supplications and promises of Aistulf, that they left him the Lombard
kingdom. Giving up that first design, they made with him the treaty of
Pavia, that compact between the Franks, the Lombards, and the Romans,
which during eighteen years was appealed to as the basis of their
political relations. But in this interval the incorrigible perfidy and
ambition of Desiderius, and his obstinate refusal of all terms of
agreement, had last led Adrian and Charles to resume the original
intention of Stephen and Pipin. Charles after forcing the pass above Susa
resolved to pluck up by the roots the Lombard power. Thus the conditions
of 754, having returned in 774, would bring back the first promise of
Pipin, and the compact of Pavia in 756 having been trodden under foot by
Desiderius, and torn at the sword’s point, the compact of Quiersy was
restored to force. It had not been annulled but suspended. Adrian
therefore took the excellent opportunity of Charles’s presence in Rome to
complete the work so well begun by Stephen II. The fresh inauguration of
Charles as Patricius helped to obtain from him a solemn confirmation of
the former compact. His piety and devotion to St. Peter were not less
marked than his father’s, and he assented to the Pope’s desire.

On Easter Wednesday, the 6th April, 774, the solemn act was completed
which Anastasius has left carefully registered in the Liber
Pontificalis.(242) The Pope with all the judges of the clergy and army,
that is, all the ecclesiastical and lay dignitaries of Rome, went to St.
Peter’s, where he was met by Charles with all his train. Here Adrian in a
public speech recorded the acts of kindness and attachment which for so
long had joined together France and the Holy See. He reminded Charles of
the promise which, in April, 754, his father Pipin of sacred memory and he
himself with his brother Carloman and all the Frank judges had made and
sworn solemnly to St. Peter and Pope Stephen II. in the assembly of
Quiersy. That was to assure to St. Peter and all his successors in
perpetuity the possession of various cities and territories of Italy. He
then earnestly exhorted and prayed the king to give entire accomplishment
to that promise. Charles asked that the whole tenor of the promise of
Quiersy should be read before him. Having heard it read, and greatly
approved of it, with his judges, he most willingly accorded the request of
the Pope, he immediately ordered his chaplain and notary Etherius to draw
out another deed of promise and donation exactly similar to the first. In
this he granted to St. Peter the same cities and lands and promised to
give them over to Pope Adrian, marking out the limits. These are, says
Anastasius, as we now read them in the text of donation, from Luni and the
isle of Corsica, by Parma, Reggio, Mantua, and Monselice, embracing the
whole exarchate of Ravenna as it was of old, the province of Venetia and
Istria, the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. This Charles subscribed with
his own hand, and caused it to be subscribed by all his bishops, abbots,
dukes, and counts. After this the king and his nobles, having placed the
deed, first upon the altar of St. Peter, and then within the Confession,
took a terrible oath to St. Peter and Pope Adrian, to maintain every
syllable of its contents, and they placed the deed in the hands of the
Pope. Further, Charles made Etherius write another copy of the same
donation, placed it with his own hand on the inner altar of the
Confession, under the gospels which were wont to be kissed there by the
faithful, that it might remain in most secure guarantee and eternal
memorial of the devotion of Charles and the Franks to the Prince of the
Apostles. Other copies were afterwards made in authentic form by the
proper officer of the Roman Church, which Charles carried with him into
France.

Thus the original compact of Quiersy resumed its legal force, and became
the foundation of political right in Italy. It is true that various
reasons prevented the compact from ever receiving its entire effect, but
it became, nevertheless, the standard which the Popes and the kings of the
Franks kept before them, the archetype on which the public deeds and
covenants renewed afterwards so often in the middle ages between the
emperors and the Holy See were all framed. Adrian in thus claiming and
securing the sovereign rights already acquired by the Roman Church may be
called the second founder, after Stephen II., of the temporal monarchy of
the Popes. Charles in crowning the work of Pipin showed himself not only
worthy of the Roman Patriciate, but of that further dignity to which he
was afterwards exalted by Leo III. In the twenty following years the union
and cordial friendship which bound Adrian and Charles together, maintained
and increased prosperity in the Church, and made closer still the old
alliance of France with the Papacy. Adrian ordered a prayer for king
Charles to be entered in the Roman liturgy, which thenceforward was made
for the Roman emperors, who succeeded him in his office of Protector of
the Church.

The Pope, in taking leave of Charles, predicted to him, in the names of
St. Peter and St. Paul, a quick and complete triumph over their common
enemies, and the total conquest of the Lombard kingdom: “after which,” he
said, “you will render to St. Peter the gift which you have promised him,
and will receive in reward greater and more signal victories”.

And Adrian ordered that in all the monasteries, and the twenty-eight
titular churches, and the seven deaconries of Rome, every day perpetual
prayers should be offered for victory to the Franks.

Thus Charles left Rome, and returned to his camp before Pavia. By the
first days of June, Verona had fallen, notwithstanding all the valour of
the prince Adelchis, and Pavia had yielded. With the submission of the
capital, the few remaining cities, and Lombard lords, accepted Charles for
their king. Thus, in the course of ten months, from September, 773, to
June, 774, Charles effected, with great good fortune and little effusion
of blood, the most brilliant of his conquests. He placed a strong Frank
garrison in Pavia, he sent his counts to govern the various cities and
provinces: in which, however, the chief Lombard dukes were comprised.
Charles did not change the constitution of the kingdom: he did not make it
a province of France. He left its integrity and autonomy. He became
himself king of the Lombards, as before he had been king of the Franks.

One of his first deeds(243) was to restore to the Holy See all the cities
and territories which, in his last years, Desiderius had invaded in the
exarchate, the Pentapolis, or the duchy of Rome. He thus gave back to Pope
Adrian full and pacific possession of the whole State of St. Peter, such
as it was after the donation of Pipin. This was the chief, if not the
sole, occasion of the war. It would be the first fruit of the victory.
That he performed what he had promised is attested by his secretary,
Eginhard: “Charles did not rest from the war which he had begun until he
had restored to the Romans all which had been taken away from them. ‘The
end of this war was the subjection of Italy: and the restitution to
Adrian, ruler of the Roman Church, of the things which had been seized by
the Lombard kings.’ ”(244) Other contemporary annals of the year 774 say:
“This year Pavia was surrendered to the Franks: and Desiderius was carried
into France, and the lord king Charles sent his counts through all Italy:
he joyfully restored to St. Peter the cities owed to him, and having
arranged everything, came speedily into France”. His return filled France
with triumph.

“The Lombards(245) had been governed by their kings with good laws and
exact justice, but they afterwards received better treatment under
Charlemagne, a monarch who, in loftiness of mind, in power and rectitude
of judgment, surpassed all Frank and Lombard kings.” But this encomium on
the good laws and exact justice of the Lombards belongs only to their
treatment of themselves, for the Romans(246) looked with horror upon the
ignominious servitude with which Aistulf and Desiderius threatened them.
These kings sought to crown that semi-barbarous occupation of North Italy
during two centuries by throning themselves in Rome, and making the Pope
their vassal. Aistulf sank before Pipin, and Desiderius before Charles.
The oppressors of the Pope were swept away: his champion and protector,
Charles, went on henceforth from victory to victory.

That the transition(247) of the lands secured to the Pope into the
relation of vassals to a sovereign was a matter of time is explained by
the insufficient material force at the command of the Pope, the love of
independence in the population, their power to resist, and the general
conditions of the time. Thus, from a letter of Adrian to Charles, in 787
or 788, we learn that he announced to the king how he had received the
cities of Toscanella. Bagnorea, and Viterbo, and requested from him the
tradition of Populania, and Rosella, near Piombino. Later, he shows him
that he had not yet received them, though two messengers of Charles had
been charged with their delivery. Thus it required fresh efforts on the
part of the Franks, and fresh reminders on the part of the Pope, to obtain
the complete execution of the gift. This does not show that Charles was
unwilling to keep his word: but it does show the difficulty of the matter.
It was a great undertaking to pacify the population in a number of cities,
and to subject the great and the small proprietors in them to the papal
lordship. Adrian had reason sometimes to express the wish to the king that
it might be accomplished in their life-time. Sometimes Charles’s own
Commissioners were not trustworthy, were disinclined to the Pope, were
liable to be corrupted or deceived, or made mistakes in executing their
commission. In March, 781, Charles came again to Italy, celebrated Easter
on the 15th of April at Rome, treated with the Pope, had his little son,
Pipin, four years old, baptised, and made him, after the Pope had anointed
him, king of the Lombards. The duchies of Spoleto and Benevento were to be
vassal lands of the Pope. The distance of the latter from the Franks, the
connection of the Duke Arichis with Desiderius, and the nearness to the
Greeks, who occupied Gaicta, and other parts of Campania, caused special
difficulties here. This gradual acquisition of the territories promised by
Charles in 774 occupied a number of years; but in them Adrian had every
reason to praise the good faith of Charles and the Franks.

From the time that all dependence on Constantinople was broken off, the
sovereign authority of the Pope appears entire.(248) In all dealings with
Pipin and the Franks, in the compact of alliance at Quiersy, in the two
peaces of Pavia, in 754 and 756, between the Franks, the Romans, and the
Lombards, the Pope appears as the sole actor and supreme arbiter of Rome’s
fortunes. He alone confers on Pipin and his sons the dignity of Patriciate
of the Romans, thereby binding him to an armed defence of Rome and its
State. To the Pope alone Fulrad consigns at St. Peter’s the keys and the
hostages of the cities of the exarchate. The Pope covenants with
Desiderius the conditions for his elevation to the Lombard throne; demands
of him the surrender of the cities not yet restored: guards against the
schemes of the Lombards and the Greeks to take away the sovereignty of the
Holy See; treats with the king of the Franks to frustrate them. He
continually sends his ambassadors into France, usually prelates, sometimes
dukes and Roman magnates. The kings of France send to him their
messengers; treat with him of all public affairs of Italy. The people of
Spoleto, Reate, and elsewhere, when at the fall of Desiderius they
voluntarily became subjects of the Roman State, swear fealty to St. Peter
and the Pope. In a word, in all political acts, in all concerning the
government and defence of the State, the Pope alone speaks and acts in his
own name with supreme and independent authority. No representative of the
Senate or Roman people is seen at his side, clothed with proper and
distinct authority. On the contrary, in the very gravest questions of
State, no decree of the Senate, no plebiscite, no form of citizen suffrage
is so much as hinted at. This is inexplicable had Rome been governed as a
republic, or if its citizens had had any part of sovereign authority.

With this the language of the Pope himself exactly agrees. He speaks as a
king of the cities and provinces of the Roman State. “The territories of
our cities, and the patrimonies of St. Peter;” “our city of Sinigallia;”
“our castle of Valens;” “this our city of Rome,” “our city of Civita
Vecchia;” “our city of Castle Felaty;” “our territories of the exarchate;”
“this our province;” “they are attempting to withdraw from our dominion
our cities of Campania, from the power and dominion of St. Peter and
ours;” “we have resolved to send thither our main army;” “in all the parts
which lie under the dominion of the holy Roman Church;” these and such
like expressions occur everywhere in the letters of the Popes to the Frank
kings. These also are no less frequent and significative. “The holy Church
of God and its peculiar people;” “the Roman Church and all the people
subject to it;” “our people;” “the people entrusted to us;” “all our
people of the Romans of that province;” “our people of the commonwealth of
the Romans”. These expressions the Popes used without doubt or reserve in
public letters to the Frank kings and nation. Adrian, in a letter to
Charlemagne,(249) declares his will to maintain and exercise in the
exarchate and Pentapolis exactly the same power which Stephen II. had
received. “Our predecessor distributed all appointments in the exarchate,
and all who ruled received their orders from this city of Rome. He sent
judges to right all who suffered wrong, to reside in that city of
Ravenna.”

The interests of the Romans and the Franks, of the Papacy and the Frankish
kingdom, of Adrian and Charles, became in this period blent together.(250)
An indivisible unity and sincere alliance existed between them. They were
the result of that great visit of Charles to Rome in 774. When that visit
took place, Charles was almost at the beginning of that wonderful career
which has placed him at the head of modern history. By the death of his
brother Carloman two years before, the whole Frank inheritance came into
his hands. In the three years since 768, when Charles and Carloman had
been crowned on the same day as kings of the Franks, but in different
cities, there had been dissension between them, and had Carloman lived, it
was to be feared that the young strength of the greatest western monarchy
would have been turned against itself, instead of being gathered up
together against the Saracen enemy who was bent on the conquest of the
world. But now the single hand of Charles wrought it to a unity of power,
moderation and wisdom, which first became conspicuous on this visit to
Rome. By this act of spontaneous devotion he may be said to have
inaugurated the unequalled success which afterwards attended on him. From
that time, forty-two years of reign were appointed to him, in which he
became greater and greater. The root may have been that first visit which
he made to Rome, shortly after that Pontificate of Adrian began, in answer
to his appeal. They became from this time fast personal friends. It is to
be observed with what magnificent loyalty Charles took up, repeated, and
ratified in his own person, the act of his father, Pipin, made twenty
years before. That act of Pipin is almost unique in history. When Stephen
II. came to him at Pontigny in 754, Pipin promised him _for __ the love of
St. Peter_ to defend the city and duchy of Rome from the intruding Lombard
king, Aistulf, and so not to _give_, but to _preserve_ its sovereignty to
St. Peter, as throned in his successors, alike from Lombard robbery and
Byzantine neglect and impotence. He promised also to recover the exarchate
of Ravenna, and the province on the Adriatic called the Pentapolis,
already taken by Aistulf from the Byzantine, and in his occupation, and to
_give_ them an inheritance to St. Peter. Also, he received the title of
Patricius of the Romans, then bestowed upon him by Stephen II., with the
engagement and the right of protection carried by it. His sons Charles and
Carloman, then children, were associated with him in these promises, and
in the dignity of Patricius. The nobles of the Franks assembled in diet
gave their sanction to these things: Pipin accomplished them. He would not
take to himself a palm of ground in that rich territory which he partly
preserved for St. Peter alone, and partly bestowed upon him. Rome and its
duchy he preserved; the exarchate and Pentapolis he bestowed. Stephen II.
_reigned_, when he returned to Rome, in 756, and his brother, Paul I.,
after him. The Lombard kingdom, from the taking of Pavia in 756, continued
by Pipin’s permission. The last Lombard king, Desiderius, repaid all this
by perpetual encroachment upon the cities given to St. Peter. The Lombard
faithlessness is repeatedly dwelt upon in the contemporary writings of the
Popes Stephen II., Paul I., Stephen III., and especially Adrian I. Charles
had listened to the solemn appeal of Adrian to right him. He came to Rome,
and the greatest warrior of the West ascended as a pilgrim on his knees
the thirty-five steps which led to the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles.
He was welcomed at St. Peter’s Confession as Patricius, in the way that
Popes and emperors alone, upon their accession, were welcomed. And before
he left Rome, at the request of the Pope, he ordered his father’s deed to
be read before him; in the midst of his princes, and with their consent,
he re-affirmed it: and he guarded the throne of Adrian as Patricius during
that pontificate, which, until seventeen hundred years from St. Peter had
elapsed, had no equal in length. In all this Charles equalled and repeated
the generosity of his father.

How greatly the Popes esteemed the deeds of Pipin and of Charlemagne is
witnessed perpetually by the letters of the day contained in the Codex
Carolinus.(251) In them the Frank king is constantly likened to Moses and
to David, who delivered the people of Israel from Egyptian bondage and
heathen oppression. He is called perpetually, “our helper and defender
after God,” “the guardian of holy Church,” “the liberator of the Christian
people,” “the ransomer of the Roman Church, and all the people subject to
it”. To him is attributed the prosperity and security of Rome and the
whole province of Roman Italy, which is said to be redeemed by him. No
tongue can express or praise sufficiently his benefits. God alone can
reward him. All nations must acknowledge his defence of the Church of God,
and magnify him for it over all the kings of the earth.

The effect of the Pipinian donation, confirmed in so splendid a manner by
Charles, had two results at once of inestimable value: one to free the
Popes and the inhabitants of Italy from the perpetual invasion, threats,
and devastation of the Lombards. Thrice since the assault of the emperor
Leo III., in 726, upon the faith and internal government of the Church,
had Rome been in the utmost peril of subjugation, once by Liutprand, then
by Aistulf, lastly by Desiderius. What would have been the condition of
the Pope under such a king as Aistulf or Desiderius, seated at the
Capitol? He could only expect a servitude far worse than had ever been
suffered under the vice-cæsars of Ravenna, or the cæsars of
Constantinople. The original Roman empire had been broken into a multitude
of independent kingdoms. That changed condition of the Christian society
of itself required that there should be lodged in its head a greater
independence of the civil power. The hand of Charles, coming down upon the
hand of Pipin, assured to Adrian the legal recognition of a sovereignty
sufficiently large to secure him in the guardianship of the faith which
was the chief work of St. Peter’s See in every age. And so the misery
which the rudest barbarian horde began in 568 was stayed at last in 774:
and if Gregory the Great, in his time, complained that he had been for
thirty years keeping watch and ward against Lombard violence and intrigue,
the four great pontiffs, Gregory II., Gregory III., Zacharias, and Stephen
II., witnessed the last access of their attempt at domination, and the
royal city of Ravenna acknowledged in Pope Adrian, not only its spiritual
head, but its temporal sovereign.

At the same time the second inestimable benefit of deliverance from the
eastern despotism, fastened upon Italy since the time of Narses, took
place. Some slight sketch of what the exarchate had been to Italy has been
attempted. At last those two hundred years of misery were closed: the
universal consent of the peoples of central Italy accepted with delight
the Papal sovereignty. From the time of Justinian to Stephen II.—perhaps
it should rather be said from the time of Leo the Great, the Popes alone
had cared for Italy. They alone had possessed the power, the wisdom, and
the charity to meet, in some degree at least, the calamities which rained
down upon that land, reduced to the condition of a “servile province”.
Forty years after St. Gregory the Great, in the middle of the seventh
century, a Pope had been torn from his sick bed, laid before the altar in
the Lateran Basilica, carried to Byzantium, judged by the senate as a
traitor for the exercise of his spiritual rights, and left to die of
famine in the Crimea.(252) In the middle of the eighth century if we plant
ourselves, and look through the events of two or three centuries, a
certain fact comes out clearly. No one can assign the precise point of its
completion, but it is seen attested by a multitude of indications. The
Popes in gradually taking an acknowledged sovereignty, only yielded to the
long and ardent desire of the peoples at whose head they stood, no less
than to the stringent demand of public necessity. The feeling of the
subject here answered to the fact in the prince: that is, as the Popes
were princes by actual necessity so long before they had the name and
solemn right to it, so the Romans, and the Italians of the exarchate and
the Pentapolis were spontaneous subjects of the Popes long before they
bore the legal title. A mutual attraction joined the two together. The
Popes through charity for the public good began to exercise in behalf of
an ill-treated or a deserted population the part of provident civil
governors; the people from gratitude and affection clung more and more to
the Popes. The ever increasing calamities and the common trials which
pressed on the Popes and the Italians in those miserable times, partly
caused by the Byzantine emperors, partly by the barbarous Lombards, drew
them more closely together, until the Popes found themselves sovereigns,
and the people found themselves subjects, in a complete civil society. But
the character of that society was indeed paternal: and as the civil bond
sprung from a spiritual fathership, Pipin and Charlemagne named with the
name of St. Peter himself the State which their love and reverence for him
had partly preserved and partly created.





CHAPTER IX. THE MAKING OF CHRISTENDOM.


Among the events of history, as the historic mind would ponder them, or
the judgments of God, as the Christian mind would interpret them, there
are none greater than the two which for some time past I have been
attempting to narrate or to contemplate. One is the wandering of the
nations on the north of the great inland sea: the other is, the wandering
of the nations on its south. Having reached the last year of the eighth
century, we may cast a glance back upon both, and unite, if it may be, in
a single picture the action upon both of a power which owed its
institution only to the greatest fact of all facts concerning our race,
the assumption of human nature, the soul and body of man, in His own
Person, by the Creator of all things, the Son of God. That power existed
only in virtue of certain words uttered and a certain will exercised,
during His life upon earth. As the last of His thirty-three years was
beginning, He had said to a man: Thou art the Rock, and upon this Rock I
will build My Church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
How far did the gates of hell advance upon the Church of God in the four
hundred years which elapsed from the death of the great Theodosius?

When he closed his eyes in the year 395, the great empire of Augustus in
the East and West was still intact. The fifth and the sixth centuries may
be said to be filled by the fall of that empire in the West. I have
required ten chapters to give even a slight account of the effects
produced upon the Christian Church by the wandering of the northern
nations to the time of St. Gregory the Great. But the seventh and eighth
centuries are filled with the pouring out of the Mohammedan flood upon the
Christian people, which had more or less remained after the wandering of
the northern nations ended in their settlement. It is another convulsion
equal in its range and perhaps still greater in its effects than that
which made Teuton tribes the masters of Gaul and Spain and Britain, of
Germany, of Italy, and Illyricum. The peoples of the north had struggled
for hundreds of years to break the barriers of the Rhine and the Danube,
and in their savage ferocity and tameless independence wrest the South, so
long coveted, from the civilised but degenerate Roman. The prize, which
they had almost reached in the third century, was saved from their grasp
until the fifth by a succession of brave and able generals invested with
imperial power. But the Teuton could both admire and receive the law and
the religion of the empire which he overthrew. Far otherwise was it, when
a savage tribe of Arabia, kindled to white heat by a fanatic and false
belief, burst upon a despotic empire in which Christian faith and morality
were deeply impaired. It needed but the third decade of one emperor’s
reign to abrogate the Roman sovereignty held during seven hundred years
over Syria and Egypt, and to establish the sway of a false prophet, the
bitterest enemy of the Christian faith, over the very city which contained
the sepulchre of Christ. “The law had gone forth from Sion and the word of
the Lord from Jerusalem,” and thither all Christian nations sent a host of
pilgrims to kindle anew their faith and love before the shrine which had
held for a day the source of all that life, the Body of the God-man. Now
that shrine, with all the memorial places of the Divine Life upon earth,
fell into hands whose work it was to set up instead of the Christ, a man
of turbulent passions and unmeasured ambition: instead of the Christian
home, the denial of all Christian morality: instead of a Virgin Mother
placed at the head of her sex, and unfolding from age to age the worth and
dignity of woman, the dishonoured captives of a brigand warfare. All this
took place within ten years after the death of Mohammed, and by the end of
the reign of Heraclius, when the greatest triumph ever won by a Roman
emperor over the rival Persian monarchy was followed by the most
ignominious defeat from a troop of Arabian robbers, and the permanent
abandonment of Roman territory. During the sixty following years, not only
had Antioch and Alexandria, as well as Jerusalem, become Mohammedan, but
the last fortress of Christian power in the East, the impregnable city of
Constantine, trembled repeatedly at the approach of Saracen hosts, being
rescued rather by its matchless position, its strong walls, and the
invention of the Greek fire, than by the superior valour of its defenders.
At the end of that seventh century, the whole northern coast of Africa had
passed away from Roman to Saracenic rule: from the Christian faith to its
Mohammedan antagonist. In ten years more, the Saracen banner crossed over
the straits of Gibraltar, and the Church of Spain fell under its
domination. At this time the eastern empire, diminished as it had been,
passed through severe revolutions. It seemed that from intestine
dissension and the despotism of one crowned adventurer after another, the
remnant of the eastern realm, which during seventy years could hardly
maintain itself against Saracen aggression, was coming of itself to an
end. In this uttermost extremity at Constantinople, a soldier had risen
from the ranks to be a trusted general, and when the empire received him
for its chief, a long prepared attack by the chalif on his capital was
beaten back successfully by Leo III. In the time of the chalif Walid, who
reigned from 705 to 715, the Arabian flag floated over the walls of
Samarcand: its conquest had stretched to the foot of the Himalayas. His
governor in Africa, Musa, had carried the bounds of his empire to the
Atlantic ocean. The single city of Ceuta owned still the Byzantine sway.
And the Christian count, Julian, for a private wrong, betrayed to the
Saracen the city entrusted to his charge. Musa added almost all Spain to
the Saracen domain. Constantinople had been besieged in 668, and saved
under Constantine the Bearded; it was saved again in 718, under Leo III.
These two deliverances, with the fact that it had not been taken in all
the interval from the time of Heraclius, may be termed the only checks
received from Christians by the Mohammedan conquest in the whole period
from the death of Mohammed. Had it succeeded in gaining Constantinople
when it gained Toledo, it is difficult to see how the universal
enthralment of the Christian faith under the almost insufferable tyranny
of the Arabian false prophet could have been prevented.

Thus when St. Gregory II. succeeded to the throne of Peter in 715, and Leo
III. to the throne of Constantine in 717, the position of the Christian
Faith before Islam seemed to stand in terrible danger.(253) The sons of
Mohammed, lords of Asia, Egypt, Africa, and Spain, were besetting, with
long prepared fleet and army, the last remains of the Greek power in
Constantinople on the East, and on the West had only to look to the
conquest of France. If they became masters of France, there was no
strength left to resist them, neither Italy divided between Lombards,
Greeks, and the old inhabitants, subjects of one or the other, nor Germany
divided among various peoples. The whole world seemed to be reserved for
the anti-Christian kingdom of Mohammed: all nations about to pass under
the hard servitude of a conquering Arabian tribe, instinct with hatred to
the Christian life; all women to become slaves of man’s passion: all
reason to endure subjection to a lie imposed by the scimitar. What we have
since seen of Mohammedan rule in Asia and in Africa during twelve hundred
years, seemed then on the point of becoming the general doom.

That was the time chosen by the eastern emperor, after a reign of ten
years, to attempt the imposition of a fresh heresy upon Pope Gregory II.
The man who was formally bound by his position as Roman emperor, and by
the oath taken at his coronation to defend the Church as it had come down
to him from the seven preceding centuries, was filled with a desire to
remodel the practice of that Church in all its worship. He advanced claims
which were not only an invasion of its independence by the civil power,
but in themselves rested only upon the practice and the sentiments of the
Church’s two great enemies, the Jew and the Saracen. The Jew abhorred the
relative worship paid to the images and pictures of our Lord, of His
Mother, and of the saints, because he utterly denied the fact of the
Incarnation, which these images and pictures were ever presenting in the
daily worship of the faithful. The Mohammedan shared this abhorrence,
because he denounced the Christian as an idolater for his belief in our
Lord, as Son of God. Leo III. took up the mind of the Jew and the Saracen
into his own rude and unformed nature, and bent the whole force of the
imperial power to subdue the Pope to his will. Spain had just fallen into
Mohammedan hands: and the lord at Damascus ruled from the Atlantic to
Samarcand. Under his rule, which was the bitterest ignominy to every
Christian, lay more than half the empire which Justinian had left. Then,
in 726, a contest, the most unequal which can be conceived, began between
Pope Gregory II. and the emperor Leo III. It continued fifty years under
Leo and his son, Kopronymus, who died in 776. In the course of it, Leo
sent a great fleet against the coast of Italy, whose commander was
instructed to take and plunder Ravenna, to proceed to Rome, to put down
all opposition to the imperial heresy, and to carry Pope Gregory captive
to Constantinople, after the fashion used in the preceding century to Pope
St. Martin. Pope Gregory II. endured to his death the joint heresy and
tyranny of the eastern lord, and induced the irritated populations of
Italy still to keep allegiance to him. His successor, Pope Gregory III.,
used the same forbearance. Pope Zacharias for ten years went on enduring,
while the Frank nation accepted, on his judgment, a new dynasty. For
twenty-eight years, from 726 to 754, no amount of wrong could induce four
successive Popes to throw off the allegiance which had pressed upon Italy
as a servile province since the conquest of Justinian. At length, the
fourth Pope, Stephen II., was deserted in his utmost need by the emperor
himself: was threatened with a Lombard poll tax laid upon Rome, and the
position of vassal to an Aistulf in the city of St. Peter. Then the
eastern servitude at last dropped, and the issue of the most unequal
combat, begun in 726, was terminated by the compact ratified at Quiersy in
754, and carried out at Pavia in 756. This compact secured to Pope Stephen
and his successors the position of sovereign princes in Rome, and the
territory attached to it. In 756 Pope Stephen II. re-entered Rome as its
acknowledged civil sovereign. Yet, in the eighteen years following this
event, the last king of the Lombards renewed the ambition of Liutprand and
Aistulf, to become the lord of Rome, and the renewal of Pipin’s gift by
Charlemagne, in 774, alone closed the momentous contest which, beginning
in 726 with an attack on the unarmed Pope, ended in the deliverance of
Italy from the most cruel of thraldoms, and made the Pope, who had long
been Rome’s only support and benefactor, its temporal as well as its
spiritual head.

At the time of that event, more than four centuries had passed since
Constantine, in 330, consecrated his city on the Bosphorus to be Nova
Roma, pursuing his idea to found a capital which should be Christian from
its birth, and the centre of a great Christian empire. Five years before
the Church had met for the first time in General Council. The object of
its meeting was to refute and censure an attack upon the Godhead of its
Founder, and the place at which it met was a city immediately on the
Asiatic side of the strait, on which what was then Byzantium stood. The
position taken by Constantine was to guard with the imperial sword the
chamber in which the Church’s bishops sat, to accept their decrees as the
utterance of Christ himself, and to add the force of imperial law to the
spiritual authority which he acknowledged them of themselves to possess.

From the baptism of Byzantium as Nova Roma in 330, fifty years succeed to
380, in which Constantinople becomes the chief seat of the very heresy
condemned by the Church at the Council of 325. Its see is sought after
immediately as the prize of worldly ecclesiastics in the East. Eusebius,
the man who presently became its bishop, deceives Constantine into
fostering the heresy which he abhorred: its bishop, Macedonius, was the
docile servant of the emperor Constantius in his attempt to change the
faith of the Church: its bishop, Eudoxius, nurtured the emperor Valens in
the same heresy. But the succession of Popes in Julius, Liberius, and
Damasus, frustrated these efforts of the bishops of Nova Roma in the first
half century of its promotion: and when Theodosius sat on the throne of
Constantine, with his colleagues, Gratian and Valentinian, their law of
380 called upon their peoples “to hold the religion which is proved to
have been delivered to the Romans by the divine apostle, Peter, since it
has been maintained there from his time to our own”.(254)

But the terrible effects wrought upon the eastern episcopate by the Arian
assault had not been finally overcome. The next attack upon the Person of
our Lord proceeded from the eloquent Syrian, Nestorius, who had been put
in the see of Constantinople. It required all the energy of Pope Celestine
and the patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, to overcome that heresy which still
attacked the Incarnation, and was supported by court favour at the eastern
capital, and the jealousy of its emperor for his bishop. It is remarkable
that the First Council at Ephesus, in 431, should have been followed by a
Second Council at the same place in 447. This second Council was, so far
as its convocation and its constitution went, regularly entitled to be a
General Council. Its decree was in favour of an opposite heresy to that of
Nestorius, on the same subject of our Lord’s Person, and its originator
was the monk Eutyches, in high repute at the head of a monastery at
Constantinople. The Council after its completion was rejected, and the
heresy overthrown, by the single arm of St. Leo the Great. The whole
Church at Chalcedon accepted his act and acknowledged his Primacy. But
this Monophysite heresy had driven its roots deep into the Greek mind.
During two hundred years, to the time of Mohammed himself, its effects may
be traced, corrupting the unity of belief in the eastern patriarchates,
encouraging perpetual party spirit, breaking constantly the succession of
bishops in the hierarchy. In the time of St. Leo, the patriarch Proterius,
who succeeded the deposed Dioscorus, was murdered by the Monophysite
faction. A few years later the bishop of Constantinople used this heresy
for the purpose of exalting his see against Rome, which had just been
deprived of its emperor, and its government left in the hand of
barbarians, who were also heretics. Thus supported by imperial power,
Acacius brought about a schism which lasted for thirty-five years. The
resistance of seven Popes, the last of whom, Hormisdas, obtained the full
result which his predecessors had sought for, frustrated this second
century of Byzantine aggression upon the faith and government of the
Church.

Indeed, so striking and unquestionable was the submission of the Byzantine
sovereign, and the recognition by the Byzantine bishop of the Papal
authority, that from this time forth a somewhat new course was pursued by
the eastern emperor and patriarch in regard to that authority. The purpose
of Justinian in his subsequent reign was, while he acknowledged in very
ample terms the papal primacy, to subject it in its practical execution to
his own civil power. Thus when he had become by conquest immediate lord of
Rome, he summoned Pope Vigilius to attend him at Constantinople. During
eight years he subjected him to perpetual mortifications. He issued
doctrinal decrees and required the Pope to accept them. His laws fully
admitted the Pope’s rank; he never denied his succession from St. Peter:
but his pretension was to make the five patriarchs use their great
authority in submission to himself; and he included the first of the
patriarchs in this overweening claim, as his namesake Justinian II. signed
his council in Trullo at the head of all, and left a line between himself
and the patriarch of Constantinople for the signature of Pope Sergius,
which was never given.

The result of Justinian’s oppression of Pope Vigilius was to create
temporary schisms in some parts of the West, through dread of the bishops
that something had been conceded to the usurpation of the civil power. Not
until the time of Gregory the Great could the Apostolic See recover the
injury thus inflicted. But Justinian did much more than persecute a
particular Pope. I think it may be said with truth, that from the conquest
of Italy under his generals, Belisarius and Narses, it was the continual
effort of the Byzantine emperors to subject the Papacy to the civil power
in the exercise of its spiritual supremacy. From Justinian to Constantine
Kopronymus—a period of more than two hundred years—that is the relation
between the Two Powers which the eastern emperors carried in their minds
and executed as far as they were able.

The fourth century of Nova Roma’s exaltation opened with the strongest
assertion of this claim which had yet been seen. The able and unscrupulous
Sergius had become patriarch of Constantinople, and was prime minister of
the emperor Heraclius. The whole East was teeming with Monophysite
opinions, and every city, in proportion to its size and dignity, torn with
party conflicts arising out of dissension respecting the Person of our
Lord. Sergius thought he had devised a remedy by that Monothelite
statement which, as he imagined, enabled him to present in a more
conciliating form the old heresy put down by St. Leo and the Council of
Chalcedon. He led the emperor Heraclius to publish this heresy in the
imperial name. Then four successive patriarchs of Constantinople were
found to put all their spiritual rank at the service of two emperors,
Heraclius and Constans II., to formulate the heresy, and force it, if
possible, on the Popes. Ten successive Popes resisted—one to martyrdom
itself—and after a struggle of fifty years, Popes Agatho and Leo II. at
the Sixth Council—when the eastern emperor for the moment became orthodox,
and his patriarch and bishops followed him—condemned and expelled the
heresy. But this fatal attempt of Sergius and Heraclius had been exactly
coincident with the rise of Mohammed. The Greek contention respecting the
Person of Christ had lasted three hundred years, from the Nicene Council,
when the success of the false prophet led vast countries, once the most
flourishing of Christian provinces, to yield to the human authority of a
robber, and to put him in the place of the God-man whom by their works
they had so often denied. And so the fourth century from the exaltation of
Nova Roma had been completed.

Yet still it was reserved for the fifth century to Constantinople, at a
time of its extreme humiliation, when for ninety years it had only just
obtained from a new and undisclosed invention the power to keep the
all-conquering Saracen outside its walls—to make its final and most
absolute attack upon the elder sister whom it acknowledged as the leader
of the Christian faith. Syria and Egypt and Africa and Spain were gone,
and the Persian monarchy, for so many hundred years the rival of the
Roman, equally was absorbed in the enormous Saracen dominion, and the
cities of Asia Minor were in daily dread of the same foe prevailing over
their religion and desecrating their homes. Such was the condition of
things when the yet remaining Christian emperor assumed over the Christian
Church the power of Mohammed’s chalifs in the territory which they ruled
in Mohammed’s name. Another fifty years occur in which, when after the
orthodox patriarch Germanus had been forced to lay the insignia of his
rank on the altar of Sancta Sophia and depart, three Iconoclast patriarchs
in succession, Anastasius from 730 to 753, Constantine from 753 to 766,
and Nicetas I. from 766 to 780, placed themselves at the disposal of their
emperors to corrupt the faith and subject the government of the Church,
until at the Seventh Council once again an eastern emperor became
orthodox: and an eastern orthodox patriarch followed again in Tarasius;
and Adrian I. was received as Pope, being no longer a vassal of
Constantinople, but a sovereign prince.

Upon these antecedents ensued the temporal sovereignty of the Pope. What
is the witness of history to the spiritual action of the Popes during this
long period of 426 years, from 330, when Byzantium became Constantinople,
to 756, when the people of Rome welcomed with universal jubilee the return
of their Pope, Stephen II., as sovereign?—when again in 774 Charles at the
beginning of his great career approached St. Peter as a pilgrim, and
renewed to him his father Pipin’s act of munificent piety.

Let us follow the course of the heresies which, during four centuries and
a half from the Nicene Council in 325, to the defeat of the Iconoclasts at
the Seventh Council, attacked the faith of the Church. They turn upon the
Person of our Lord: upon that mighty fact of the Incarnation which filled
all men’s minds. The Arian denied that He was God; the Nestorian and
Monophysite sought in opposite methods to deal with His two natures. The
Monothelite pursued the question to its inmost point as it touched the two
natures in the operation of the Will; his error in its root was especially
Eutychean. When the question began the original eastern patriarchates of
Alexandria and Antioch were in their primal state and glory. They held
their descent from Peter, like the See of Rome. Like the Apostolic See
their chairs were at the head of a great mass of bishops, Antioch in
particular having a crowd of metropolitans governing important provinces,
who looked up to the great see of the East, who, when the patriarchate was
vacant, voted for the election, as they received from him the confirmation
of their own election. Alexander in the mother see of Egypt had been the
first to condemn his own insurgent priest, Arius, and at the Nicene
Council he was attended by his deacon, Athanasius, who was soon to succeed
to his place, and raise during his episcopate of forty-six years the See
of St. Mark to its loftiest renown. Eustathius, at the same Council, the
twenty-fourth bishop of Antioch, was a noted confessor, and with Alexander
contributed to its decision; while Pope Silvester threw the whole weight
of the West, which had no doubt as to the Godhead of Christ, in favour of
the same result. As yet Constantinople was not; and the See of Jerusalem,
though highly honoured, was in the hierarchy a simple bishopric suffragan
to the metropolitan of Cesarea. There could be no controversy more
reaching to the inmost heart of faith in the Church than that which
concerned the Person of the Lord. Taking the four centuries and a half as
a whole we find that the eastern patriarchates failed under the trial. The
first of them, Alexandria, had for its two greatest teachers Athanasius
and Cyril, both doctors of the Church, both renowned in their defence and
illustration of the doctrine that God became man. But no sooner had Cyril
died than his see became the centre of the Monophysite error. Almost the
whole Christian people of Egypt followed its bad lead, and when the
Saracen chief took Egypt and Alexandria in the name of Mohammed he found
support rather than opposition in the mass of the Christians, who, in
their bitter party hatred, called the remnant of Catholics still remaining
Melchites or Royalists as the most opprobrious epithet they could devise.
And in process of time, under Omar and his successors, the country of
Athanasius has become the heart of Mohammedan learning and zeal.

Scarcely less melancholy is the history of Antioch and its twelve
provinces of metropolitans, with their 163 bishops.(255) Eustathius was
speedily deposed by the Arian faction, even before Athanasius, and during
ninety years a perpetual schism preyed upon the dignity of the great
eastern see. In the fifth century it was unable to prevent the advance of
Constantinople. It fell a speedy prey to the Mohammed’s chalif, and from
that time the man who bore the name of its patriarch was often a dependent
and pensioner at the eastern capital. Jerusalem had succeeded in obtaining
the patriarchal dignity at the Council of Chalcedon. But in less than two
hundred years Omar polluted its holy place by his presence, and the most
stirring voice uttered by its patriarchs is that cry of its noble
Sophronius, bidding his chief bishop go to the throne of Peter, “where the
foundations of holy doctrine are laid,” and invite the sitter on that
throne, who was Honorius, to rescue the faith imperilled by his brother
patriarchs, Sergius at Constantinople, and Cyrus at Alexandria, leaders of
the Monothelite heresy.

When therefore the emperor Constantine Kopronymus, in 754, took by the
hand Constantine whom he had chosen to be ecumenical patriarch, and
presented him as the elect of the emperor to the Council of more than
three hundred bishops, whom he had convoked to sanction his own heresy,
while twelve years afterwards, as the sequel of many torments, he executed
him and had his body dissected; we may say that the eastern patriarchs had
utterly failed to defend either the faith or the hierarchy of the Church.
Mohammed did not appear to complete the work of Arius, until the
descendants of those who condemned Arius in 325 had obscured by
interminable disputes during three hundred years what their spiritual
ancestors had declared to be the faith of the Church. The causes of this
failure had been internal. There had been great bishops in the East during
this period. Chrysostom had sat in Constantinople, suffered, confessed,
and been exiled before Nestorius, who sat there also, and was exiled for
his heresy. Germanus, in the same see, did not yield to Leo III., and in
that worst time confessed, and his place was forthwith taken by
Anastasius, who subscribed all Leo’s evil will. Kopronymus strove to
exterminate the monks, who suffered every extremity for their maintenance
of the faith. But as the main result the Byzantine despotism had overcome
the eastern episcopate. I do not know how more telling proofs of that evil
victory could be shown than that Philippicus Bardanes, in 711, during his
ephemeral reign, should be able to assemble a council at Constantinople,
which he required to restore the Monothelite heresy, condemned at the
Sixth Council, and scarcely met with an episcopal opponent; and again that
Kopronymus could assemble another large council in 754, to establish his
Iconoclast aggression, which was received without dissent.

How then was the faith preserved during these four hundred and sixty
years?

From Pope Sylvester to Pope Stephen II. we count sixty-one Popes. In that
long period of time the doctrine of the Godhead and the Person of Christ
with all its manifold consequences was fully drawn out. The variation
which had been seen in the patriarchal and episcopal sees of the East was
never found at Rome. All political and external help may be said to have
failed the Popes. They lost their own western emperor, and the sole
remaining eastern emperor turned against them. More also, he set up
against them a new bishop who at the beginning of the time did not exist,
the bishop of the eastern capital. The eastern lord added from generation
to generation rank and influence to this bishop. He made him his own
intermediate instrument of communication with all the bishops of his
eastern realm, to whom it had been the continual policy of Justinian and
his successors to grant great political privileges, making them in large
degree partakers of civil authority. They sought to rule the East
throughout its manifold divided interests by the authority of the local
bishops; and they sought to rule the bishops themselves by their own
patriarch. Rome, from being the head of the Roman monarchy at the
beginning of the period, ceased to be the capital even of a “servile”
Italy, the captive of Belisarius. The Popes passed through Odoacer,
Theodorich, Theodatus, also Vitiges and Totila, also Liutprand, Aistulf,
and Desiderius. Their elections, when made, were delayed in their
recognition, or even controlled in their choice. They saw a crowd of
northern raiders take possession of the whole West, and at one time the
very heresy which at the beginning of the period had been condemned by the
Church, was in possession of all the governments of the West but that of
the Franks, and had for the chief ruler of its councils and the head of
the regal league against the faith of Rome the greatest man whom the
northern tribes can show during their time of immigration, and he had made
Italy powerful and respected, and cultivated Rome with extreme solicitude.
When St. Silvester sat in St. Peter’s chair, Rome was the single capital
of the whole empire; when St. Leo sat there he witnessed the fall of the
West, but stood imperturbable before Attila and Genseric; when St. Gregory
sat there, he divined from the temporal ruin and desolation of Rome, which
he saw perishing piecemeal around him, that the world’s last time was
coming. When St. Martin sat there, he was torn from his sick bed by the
eastern master to die in the Crimea; when St. Gregory II. sat there, the
same eastern master threatened to break in pieces the statue of St. Peter
in his Basilica. But in all the four hundred and sixty years from the
first to the second Nicene Council, the witness of Rome to the Divine
Person of her Lord was clear and distinct. Neither the greatest nor the
worst of her opponents had subdued that witness, or rendered it faltering
or indistinct. For this reason it was that the Pope, whose life the
Iconoclast soldier, when clothed with the imperial purple, five times
attempted, could reply to his threat, that all the West looked upon St.
Peter as a God upon earth; that the one Teuton king before whose
victorious reign that of Theodorich is pale and colourless, ascended on
his knees the steps before St. Peter’s tomb, laid upon the altar over his
body the gift of temporal sovereignty, and went forth from that moment the
predestined civil head of that new Christendom which St. Peter had made
out of the northern adventurers.

Taking in all this time the simple witness of history, I ask if in it the
words of our Lord to Peter were not palpably fulfilled: “Thou art the
Rock, and upon this Rock I will build My Church”. If the Rock had not
been, each one in this long line of heresies would have destroyed the
Church. The line of St. Athanasius was not infallible; the line of St.
Ignatius of Antioch was annulled after frequent falls by the Mohammedan
captivity; the line of Byzantium had some saints, but was prolific in
heretics, and the last utterance of Jerusalem before it fell, when the
Saracen ascetic voluptuary trod its courts, was uttered by its patriarch
from Calvary itself, when he adjured his messenger: “Go swiftly from end
to end of the earth, until thou reach the Apostolic See, in which the
foundations of our holy doctrine rest”.

The state of the eastern Church from the Council of Chalcedon to the final
assault of the emperor Leo III. upon the whole fabric of Church government
is one continual descent. It has certain recoveries, as the cessation of
the Acacian schism, in 518; as the reversal of the Monothelite tyranny,
under Constantine Pogonatus, in 680; as the repudiation of the still
greater Iconoclast tyranny a century later, at the Seventh Council in 787,
under Pope Adrian and the patriarch Tarasius. But even General Councils
were attacked by eastern emperors in the last excesses of their overgrown
domination. As Philippicus Bardanes got together a great Council in 711 to
denounce the Sixth Council, so the Emperor Leo the Armenian had deposed an
unbending patriarch, Nicephorus, in 815, supplied his place with the
yielding Theodotus, and found another council in the same year to
anathematise the work of the Seventh Council. Three more Iconoclast
patriarchs—Theodotus from 815 to 821, Antonius I. from 821 to 832, John
VII. from 831 to 841—close this evil list of heretical bishops. The feast
of orthodoxy was established in 842. The incessant attempts of the Greek
emperors to meddle with the faith took presently another development. They
could no longer oppress as their subject a sovereign Pope. When they could
not oppress him, they learnt to deny him. In less than another generation
the schism of Photius began.

Such was the first century running from the time that Leo the Isaurian
made, in 733, his creature Anastasius ecumenical in the sense that all the
remaining Greek empire was put under his patriarchal jurisdiction. But it
is plain that long before this, the Greek empire, so far as its own
episcopate was concerned, had ceased to possess any inflexible rule of
doctrine. The most venerable of its authorities, the original patriarchs
of Alexandria and Antioch, had yielded before the Nestorian and
Monothelite storms; had perpetual interruptions in their succession,
sometimes had a double succession—one Catholic, another Monophysite—had
submitted to the State-patriarch set over them at Constantinople; and
being found in this condition by the Mohammedan flood, had seen their
former dignity all but overwhelmed in its swelling waves. The western
Church, which from the time of the northern wandering of the nations had
been visited by unnumbered catastrophes, had, on the contrary, possessed
in its bosom exactly that inflexible rule of doctrine which the East
wanted: a rule of doctrine not imposed by civil despotism, but the very
root as well as the bond of its episcopate. The Ostrogoth had made his
kingdom in Italy, and the Visigoth his kingdom in Spain; the Frank, the
Burgundian, and many more set up realms in France and Germany, whose
limits were in perpetual fluctuation; seven or eight little Saxon kingdoms
were dividing in Britain the old Roman unity. These Teuton tribes had two
qualities in common—great personal valour and the most persisting spirit
of division. Endless were the intestine quarrels and separations between
those of the same northern race, who in political condition had hardly
passed the tribal state. Every invading army whose commander became a king
in the conquered territory had its own local interests, but none of that
great political sense which had nurtured the empire of the Cæsars. The one
Ostrogoth who had such a sense had grown up a hostage at Constantinople,
and though it is said that he could not read, had certainly divined and
carried off with him into the Italy which he captured the imperial secret
of government: that is, the force of unity, justice, and subordination of
the part to the whole; and Theodorich had come to the conclusion that he
could not make Italian mind and Gothic manners coalesce in the structure
of a kingdom. His device to rule them equally and separately scarcely
lasted for his life. After ruling with equity, he died in remorse. No
stronger instance of this great defeat can be found than the custom of the
Merovingian race to the end. Their monarchy was in their eyes a family
property. When their father died they took the throne as a part of the
paternal inheritance. It was not delivered down in whole as a mighty trust
of the nation itself. If there were several children, their swords cut the
patrimony into slices, and each carried off his bit, like a wild beast. No
political sense presided here. The sole solicitude of each was that his
lot might not be of less value than his brother’s.(256)

There exists no history giving in detail the most wonderful event of these
troubled centuries—that is, the process by which the Arian heresy, which,
in the time of Theodorich, had possession of all these peoples—except the
Franks, and the Saxons, who were pagans—finally became Catholic: a
conquest of the northern warriors which one of the greatest enemies of the
Christian faith seems to consider a more wonderful deed than the conquest
of the former Roman world, so far as it was achieved at the time of
Constantine’s conversion.

At Rome the Pope sat through all these centuries, the visible
representative of all that was good in the Roman empire, of law, justice,
order, besides holding in himself the inflexible rule of faith. The Chair
of Peter had no rival in the West, the eldest of its bishops looked up
with reverence to his single and immemorial pre-eminence. Their local
influence had in each of them its weight with their own people. For
instance, St. Gregory of Tours was of an old senatorian Gallic family: all
the interests of the population around him, whether Frank or Gallic, known
to him as a native of the soil. In this double position much nearer and
dearer to him was the Petrine descent, by consecration of which he
maintained as bishop the Christian faith. Thus in the see of Tours he
protected the temporal rights of his people, and resisted in particular
the violent acts of king Chilperic. The faith itself was to him the strong
exemplar of political sense: the one family of Christ bore in its very
bosom the society of nations. He could not say the creed without feeling
that the centre of faith was the natural centre of all humanising
influence. The Saxon bishop in Northumberland would recognise the Saxon
bishop in Kent in spite of intervening Mercia. The episcopate set up among
the German tribes by St. Boniface in the name of the Popes, was the form
of such unity as afterwards led these separate tribes to coalesce in an
empire. And they coalesced with such difficulty as to show that without
the spiritual bond they would have remained in their original antagonism.

In the last century of Merovingian rule the inapt government and private
vices—if a king’s vices can ever be called private—had inflicted a very
great injury both on the civil and the ecclesiastical administration of
the great Frank empire. The intercourse in writing between the Popes of
the sixth century with the Frank rulers had been greatly interrupted in
the seventh. While perpetual domestic murders and sensual crimes polluted
the royal family, the nobility had become disordered; national councils
were suspended, and in too many sees the bishops no longer answered in
character to those who, in the time of Gregory the Great, had built up
Gaul. At that moment there sprung from two great nobles of Austrasian
Gaul, Arnulf, afterwards bishop of Metz, and Pipin of Landen, a family
whose saintly virtues as well as their nobility raised it to great power.
In 673 Pipin d’Herstal, who by his father descended in the second degree
from Arnulf, and by his mother from Pipin of Landen, was mayor of the
palace, and the degenerate blood of Chilperic and Fredegonde was put to
shame by the chief minister of the kingdom. The race of Clovis was dying
out in sensual cruelty: the family of Arnulf was raised up to take its
place. In forty years, Pipin d’Herstal, as mayor of the palace, used the
royal power with such effect as greatly to restore the unity of the
kingdom. After his death and an interval of trouble his son Charles, in
707, united in his hands all the power of the Franks. It was just a
hundred years from the death of Mohammed, when, in 732, the Saracen army
having under his chalifs conquered all the East and the South, and
over-run Spain, had only one more battle to fight with the bravest nation
of the West, in order to trample the cross under their feet. The flood had
passed the Pyrenees, and advanced over prostrate Aquitaine to Poitiers,
which it had taken. As it issued from that city, the bastard son of Pipin
d’Herstal, still mayor of the palace in name, but sovereign of the Franks
in fact, met it with the rapidly collected warriors whom he had so often
led to victory. Then, it is said, the Saracen and the Christian hosts for
seven days watched each other; the Arabs on their light horses and in
their white mantles, the Franks with their heavy iron-clad masses. On the
eighth day, a Saturday at the end of October, the Arabs left their camp at
the call of the Muezin to prayer, and drew out their order of battle.
Their strength was in their horsemen, and twenty times they charged the
Frankish squares, and were unable to break them. An Arab writer says: “Abd
Errahman, trusting to his fortune, made a fierce attack. The Christians
returned it with as much firmness. Then the fight became general and
continued with great loss on both sides. Assault followed upon assault
until four o’clock in the afternoon. The Frankish line stood like a wall
of iron.” Then a cry for succour was heard from the Arab camp. Duke Eudo
with his Aquitains and Basques had surprised those left to guard it.
Disorder and panic arose among the Saracens. Charles saw and ordered the
whole line to advance. The wall of iron moved and all fell before it. Abd
Errahman passed from rank to rank to check the flight, and did wonders.
But when, struck by many lances, he fell from his horse, disorder and
flight prevailed. They burst into the camp and expelled Eudo. Night came
on, and Charles kept his army in its ranks on the plain, expecting a fresh
battle on the morrow. On that morrow the Franks saw the white tents, but
the Arabs had fled under cover of the night. The booty was great. The
Franks report that there was no pursuit; the Arabs, that the Christians
pursued their victory for many days, and compelled the fugitives to many
battles, in which the loss was great, until the Moslem host threw itself
into Narbonne.(257)

In that battle Charles merited his title of “the Hammer”. Had he or his
Franks blenched upon that day, Europe would have become Mohammedan, as
three hundred years before in the battle of the nations by Macon it would
have been the prey of the Mongol, had Attila prevailed. Carcassonne and
Nimes and all southern France had yielded. But the hammer of Charles
descended on the Saracen anvil. His son, king Pipin, carried on his work
in southern France, and his grandson Charles, before his death, had become
lord of an united realm from the Ebro to the Eyder. Islam never advanced
further in the West. As France in the fifteenth century owed its
deliverance to the maiden of Arc, so in the eighth, not Gaul only, but all
the West would seem to have owed its inheritance of the Christian name to
the four great men whom Providence raised up in the family of Arnulf of
Metz, and Pipin of Landen. Pipin, the mayor of the palace, Charles the
Hammer, Pipin the king, and Charlemagne, are four continuous generations
from grandfather to greatgrandson the like of which I know not that any
other family can produce.

An old man so feeble that he had hardly strength to cross the Alps, and
was almost killed by the exertion, laid his hand on the head of Pipin, and
the mayor of the palace became king of the Franks. The hand was the hand
of St. Peter. Forty-six years later the same hand will be laid upon the
head of his son; and the king of the Franks will become emperor of the
Romans; and the Saracens who felt the arm of one Charles in the battle by
Tours, will feel another Charles rise up before them to meet the Moslem
lord of the southern and eastern world on equal terms.

After Charles left Rome,(258) at Easter, 774, as above narrated, attempts
were made against him by the Lombard dukes, and Adelchis, the son of
Desiderius. In spite of the Saxon wars he was in upper Italy at the end of
the winter of 776: he prevailed over his opponents, sent his counts to the
various cities, and protected the State of the Church. At the end of 780
he was again at Pavia, and he celebrated the feast of Easter on April 15,
781, at Rome. Here Pope Adrian crowned his son Pipin king of Lombardy, and
the youngest, Louis, king of Aquitania. All seemed to go well. Greek
messengers from the regent Irene, widow of Leo IV., brought proposals of
agreement and treaty. During this longer sojourn the new arrangement of
the Lombard kingdom would be completed. Frankish counts took the place of
the old dukes, whose relation to the central power had been far looser
than that of their successors was made.

The introduction of the royal missi and their action upon the
administration of law likened subject Italy much more to the other states
of Charles. The position of the native population was not essentially
altered, but the improvement of the laws helped them. Charles all the
while was carrying on war after war with the resisting Saxons, enlarging
the Christian domain by founding bishoprics as far as the Weser and the
Elbe, taking the Spanish marches from the Arab, and the eastern marches
from the Avars, uniting the dukedom of Bavaria with his kingdom, and
carrying out that mighty work of civilisation which has made his name
immortal for its religious institutions, its legislation, and the
encouragement which he gave to literature.

Early in the year 787 Charles was again with Pope Adrian at Rome. In a
rapid campaign he reduced to his obedience Arichis, duke of Benevento, who
was married to a daughter of Desiderius; and returning once more spent
Easter with Adrian. It was the last meeting between those two fast
friends. On Christmas day, 795, Adrian closed a pontificate of nearly
twenty-four years. Three years before Rome had been desolated by one of
its most fearful inundations, and the Pope had gone about in a boat
succouring the needy. This pontificate was both in its spiritual and
temporal consequences most brilliant.(259) Adrian possessed every quality
which should adorn a great Pope, a tender and active piety, a zeal the
ardour of which was tempered by wisdom: a union of goodness and
resolution, so that in the exercise of his charge he combined the
affection of a father with the authority of a teacher, and the vigilance
of a Pope. Charles mourned for him both as a friend and father. He had an
inscription of thirty-eight verses engraved in golden letters on the black
marble stone which covered his tomb. He had Masses said for his soul in
all churches; and dispensed great alms in distant lands, especially to
England. In his letter to Offa, king of Mercia, he wrote:—“We have sent
you these alms begging intercession for the Apostolic Lord Adrian, not
that we doubt, that that blessed soul is at peace, but to show our faith
and affection for a most dear friend”. It cannot be doubted that Adrian’s
influence upon the great king, since he first came to Rome in 774, had
prepared him for the future exaltation which he was to receive in that
same church of St. Peter, the steps of which he had ascended on his knees
twenty-six years before. The day after Adrian’s death, Leo III. was chosen
his successor. He was by birth a Roman, and brought up in the patriarchal
palace, and is described by contemporaries as learned, eloquent, and
beneficent.

From the gift of king Pipin to Pope Stephen II., when the keys of the
cities surrendered to him were laid upon the altar over the body of St.
Peter, to the repetition of that gift by Charles in 774, and again from
that most solemn action of Charles to the year 800, no difference in the
relation of the Pope to the king of the Franks took place. In the first
instance, in the year 754, Charles had been made Patricius of the Roman
Church together with his father, and had as such taken on himself its
protection and defence. Therefore the Popes took pains, in particular Leo
III., that the Romans acknowledged under oath this relation, binding
themselves to observe the rules which their Patricius should make for the
security of the Church. No conclusion can be drawn from this, as to an
overlordship of the king of the Franks in the territories assigned to the
Pope. Pope Adrian and Leo III. sent to Charles a standard together with
the keys of St. Peter’s tomb.(260) The jurisdiction which the king of the
Franks exercised in Rome as Patricius was not an overlordship; it was
necessary for his office as Protector. But now an extraordinary event took
place. In the year 799, three years after the accession of Leo III., a
tumult broke out which in its savage violence surpassed that under Stephen
III. On April 25, St. Mark’s day, the Pope was conducting the solemn
procession ordered by St. Gregory the Great, from the Lateran to St.
Lorenzo in Lucina. A band of conspirators broke out of the Flaminian way,
not far from the Church of St. Silvester. At their head were two nephews
of the late Pope Adrian: Paschalis, the Primicerius, that is, the first of
the seven Palatine judges, and Campulus, the treasurer, another of them,
both in immediate attendance on the Pope. Leo III. was thrown to the
ground, and an attempt made to tear out his eyes and his tongue. He was
dragged into the Church of St. Silvester, and thence taken to the
monastery of St. Erasmus on the Cælian.

The conspirators had not succeeded, as they hoped, in blinding the Pope.
His wounds were wonderfully healed. His friends rescued him on a dark
night from his confinement in the monastery, and brought him safely to St
Peter’s. A large number of the people and clergy surrounded him. The Frank
duke came from Spoleto with a hurriedly collected troop, took him from St.
Peter’s, and carried him to Spoleto, where again bishops, priests, and
laity surrounded him with congratulations.

When Charles heard of these events in Rome he caused the Pope to come into
his kingdom. He was in the act of marching against the Saxons. At
Paderborn he learnt of the Pope’s approach. He sent to him(261) archbishop
Hildebald, his chaplain; the Count Anochar and his son Pipin, with many
counts, and a considerable force to escort him, while he set in order the
whole army for his reception. When the head of the Church appeared all
fell on their knees to receive his blessing. Charles dismounted, tenderly
embraced the oppressed fugitive before his army, and accompanied him to
the cathedral.

Leo remained several days in the camp at Paderborn to consult with the
king about the state of things at Rome, and what measures should be taken
to meet them. No doubt it was felt that the powers of the Patricius at
Rome must be increased, to give security in the future to the Pope.

The conspirators had acted with great violence at Rome, and sent to the
king a list of accusations against the Pope.

The Pope returned to Rome accompanied by the archbishops of Cologne and
Salzburg, and a large escort of Frank bishops and nobles. All the clergy,
senate, people, soldiers, the schools of foreigners, Franks, Friesons,
Saxons, and Lombards, also the chief matrons of Rome came out to Ponte
Molle to meet him, with standards and crosses, attended him to St.
Peter’s, where he sang High Mass, and the next day he re-entered the city,
and took again possession of the Lateran.

In the summer of the following year, 800, Charles left his capital,
Aix-la-Chapelle. At Mainz he announced his intention to go to Rome, that
he might punish those guilty of the ill-treatment of the Pope. It was his
fifth campaign in Italy. He stayed seven days in Ravenna, which was now in
the Pope’s possession. At Mentana, twelve miles from Rome, the Pope went
out to receive him. The next day, the 24th November, he came to St.
Peter’s, where the people waited for him in the usual order.

The king-protector declared that the chief object of his coming was to
clear the Pope from the accusations brought against him, and for this
purpose there was held on 1st December a great assembly at St. Peter’s of
archbishops and bishops, Frank and Roman nobility, before the king and the
Pope. “Then all the archbishops, bishops, and abbots said with one
voice:(262) ‘We dare not judge the Apostolic See, which is the head of all
the churches of God, for by it and by its successor we all are judged. But
itself is judged by no man, as from of old has been the custom, but we
will obey, as the canons require, according to the sentence of the supreme
pontiff.’ Then the Pope said: ‘I follow the example of my predecessors,
and am ready to clear myself of such false accusations’. And on another
day, before the same presence, ascending the ambo, and holding the gospels
in his hands, he said, under oath, with a loud voice: ‘I have no knowledge
of these false crimes which Romans, my unjust persecutors, have imputed to
me, and I never committed them. Whereupon they gave thanks to God in a
litany, and to our Lady the Mother of God and ever Virgin Mary, and to St.
Peter, Prince of the Apostles, and to all the saints of God.’ ”

After these things, on the birthday of our Lord Jesus Christ, all were
again assembled in the same church of St. Peter’s.(263) Charles, at the
request of the Pope, wore his Roman dress as Patricius of the Roman Church
and Commonwealth. That majestic figure, seven of his own feet in stature,
was vested in an inner robe of pure white, hearing over it the purple
mantle which betokened his Frank monarchy. Pope Leo III. celebrated High
Mass in person; Charles knelt on the steps before the altar, his head
bowed in prayer. Then the Pope took the crown which lay on the altar, and
placed it on the head of the king of the Franks, and cried with a loud
voice: “Life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and
peace-bearing Emperor of the Romans!”

And from the Frank and the Roman nobles throughout the church the cry was
echoed back: “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God, great and peace-bearing
emperor of the Romans, life and victory!”

The title was thrice proclaimed before the Confession of St. Peter. And
all the faithful of Rome seeing the great guardianship and affection which
Charles bore to the Roman Church, and its ruler, assented with one accord.
And the same day the Pope anointed with the holy oil Charles and the king
his son.

Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since at the bidding of
Odoacer the Herule and Ariun, the Roman senate had sent a message to the
eastern emperor Zeno, declaring that no western emperor was needed. During
the whole of that intervening period Rome had survived in virtue of St.
Peter’s primacy seated in her. She had subdued the Acacian schism. She had
lived through the Gothic war and the five captures by friends and foes.
During two centuries of Lombard invasion and of Byzantine oppression she
had remained unbroken. Upon the judgment of Pope Zacharias, the most
powerful nation of the West dethroned the unworthy race of Clovis, and
placed a nobler and more religious house on the throne of the Franks.
Another Pope, Stephen II., by his own authority had made the newly
anointed monarch Patricius of the Romans, and he first, and then his son,
during forty years, had in that character protected the sovereignty which
he had partly recovered, so far as regarded Rome and its own territory,
and partly bestowed, so far as regarded the exarchate as a gift to St.
Peter. The external protection had proved to be inadequate to guard the
papal succession in one case, the person of the Pope in another, from
domestic treason. And now the word of the Pope alone summoned up from the
past not only the title but the power of the emperor, and invested with it
the greatest man of all those northern races, who since the time of
Theodosius had subjugated the Roman western empire. Leo III. alone set the
crown on the head of Charles; not the crown which belonged to him as king
of the northern immigrants who had conquered Gaul, but the crown of
Augustus, given by Christ. “To Charles Augustus, crowned of God,” the word
ran. This was the crown which Charles received, and which all the nations
subject to his sway acknowledged, as the gift of St. Peter, seated in his
see of Rome. The first and chief duty of the sovereign so created was to
guard the Church of God. The four hundred years of Teuton immigration
passed by that act into the definitive recognition of a new Christian
people. Thereupon there became a family of nations, whose common life and
law were the one Church of God, whose common territory was named from its
master, Christendom. The eastern emperor in his ardour to impose heresy,
had shown his impotence to protect what Justinian had once acquired, and
Rome which created anew a western emperor was definitively free from any
civil subjection to the eastern.

Three chief aspects of this great act are to be considered: how it
regarded the West; how it regarded the East; how it regarded the enormous
Mohammedan power which stretched from farthest West to farthest East, from
the Tagus to the Indus.

First it is to be noted that the Pope alone made the empire. As Stephen
II. had conferred upon the newly made king of the Franks the office of
Roman Patricius, and with it the jurisdiction in his own State requisite
for the fulfilment of that office, so, where the jurisdiction of the
Patricius had been proved to be insufficient, both by the intrusion of the
anti-pope Constantine into the Papal See itself, and by the ferocious
attack upon Leo III., a reigning pontiff, during a solemn procession in
the streets of Rome, Leo III. created an emperor, who should have a
jurisdiction in Rome over all persons. He did not make himself a vassal,
but in making the emperor he gave judicial rights in the State of the
Church for the carrying out the most important part of the emperor’s
charge, to be Protector of the Roman Church. That Protector was to be
guardian of the whole Catholic Church: and so he bore the name and title,
of all other civil titles the most respected, emperor of the Romans; Rome
alone, re-entering into the right lost in 476, and exercised now by the
voice of her sovereign, gave the title, not drawn from the Franks or
Germans, nor dependent on the Byzantine, rather in itself a speaking sign
that the Byzantine subjection had passed away. The Roman, and the Frank,
and all the subjects of his vast domain accepted Charles as “crowned of
God”. That is, the Successor of St. Peter named him emperor of the Romans.
As he had exalted a mayor of the palace to be king of the Franks, and
Patricius of the Romans, so he had exalted the Patricius to be emperor;
and because he was himself in spiritual things the head of the whole
Church, he had made a particular king to be the advocate and defender of
the whole Church. No one else could do what Leo III. did.

The annalists(264) of that age universally agree that it was Leo III. who
devised and executed the exaltation of Charles to be emperor. The Pope in
a deed granting certain privileges to a monastery, dated on the very day
of his coronation, marks that his grant was made “in presence of our
glorious and most excellent son Charles, whom by God’s authority we have
this day consecrated to be emperor for the defence and advancement of the
universal Church”. Charles himself everywhere said that he was “crowned by
the divine will,” “crowned by God”. Most wise was the intention of Leo,
that the supreme pontiff, the pastor and ruler of all the faithful, should
institute this sacred empire by crowning and proclaiming Charles. It was
thus that the Church and the supreme pontiff determined the peculiar and
essential character, nature, and dignity of this empire. The purpose was
that among the kings there should be one, already most powerful by the
extent of his dominions, to whom besides a special charge and dignity
should be given. This consisted in being the protector and defender of the
Church and the Roman pontiff, and of the whole Christian society, to
promote and spread abroad the Christian faith with all its blessings. The
Church on her side, gave to this prince a pre-eminence over all other
princes. That intimate union, which ought to subsist between the Two
Powers, Spiritual and Temporal, preserving to each its own dignity and
honour, found its practical and supreme expression in that mutual respect
of Pontiff and emperor to each other. Five centuries of the Europe that
was to be born came out of that act of Leo III. on Christmas Day, 800.
Legitimate order and fixed possession were added to the innate courage and
the love for self-government of the Teuton tribes, which thus grew into
nations.

Divide into its chief parts the union thus consecrated before the eyes of
all men, by an authority which all men admitted.

First of all we find the nature of civil government in general
acknowledged by it. During five hundred years from the time of Constantine
this had been upheld with unwavering steadfastness by the Popes. Never had
they acknowledged a rule of despotism. One of the most marked characters
of the Arian heresy was its disposition to exaggerate the civil
sovereignty, admitting in it an absolute rule rather than a divine
delegation, and, extending that absolute rule into the spiritual order of
things. So far already had Arius anticipated Mohammed. Against this
confusion of the Two Powers, and their absorption into one, Athanasius,
Hilary, and Basil, Popes Julius, Liberius, and Damasus had struggled. A
hundred years later Pope Gelasius under Arian thraldom had maintained to
the emperor Anastasius the essential independence of the spiritual power,
and the defence in spiritual things due to it from emperors. When another
emperor, Leo the Isaurian, had intruded, if possible, further into the
fabric of the Church than Anastasius, he was met, as has been seen above,
by St. Gregory II. Now, seventy years later, in the last days of the
eighth century, the Iconoclast storm having broken in vain on the head of
four successive Popes, Leo III. set his seal upon all these acts of his
predecessors. He restored the empire, and in restoring set it forth once
again in its character of the supreme earthly right consecrated to the
defence of the divine right and Christian faith. The marvel was that he
made the head of the Teutonic tribes the guardian of Christ’s religion,
and invested him with the privileges involved in that guardianship which a
succession of degenerate Constantines on the eastern throne had abused.
The chalifs had shaken to its centre the Christian structure in the East;
had stripped the Christian empire of its fairest provinces; had set up
against it a religion of internecine hatred to its faith, of perpetual
pollution to its morals; and the Pope, when the loss of Italy was added to
all its other losses, had established, in the person of Charles, Christian
monarchy in the West. It was no longer an attempt to veneer with Christian
name an empire, all whose bureaucratic despotism was founded in the
heathen subjection of all power to the State, but the establishment in a
great conqueror of an empire whose basis was essentially Christian.
Charles was “Augustus crowned of God, great and peace-bearing emperor of
the Romans,” not an Augustus made by the senate and people of Rome, who
had become in Diocletian the representative of armies, and in Byzantium
continued a succession of dissolute adventurers.

Again, Charlemagne received from the Pope a complete code of Christian
legislation, and as emperor he made it his own, and made it the centre of
civil right. The act which constituted him emperor made Rome itself the
point of a vast circumference of nations. It became for Christian
contemplation what it had been for heathen: Christian voices united with
the heathen. The imperial statute book spoke it out:(265) Rome is our
common country. Already Charles, as Patricius, had received from Adrian I.
a book of the councils and canons accepted by the Holy See. With it beside
him he had restored order and law in the Frankish Church, which the last
century of Merovingian misrule had so greatly impaired. He now added the
imperial dignity and power to that peculiar combination of moderation and
perseverance which marked his character. The harmonious equilibrium of
qualities,(266) excelling equally in the arts of war and the arts of
peace, and united with fidelity to the Church of God, made him the
greatest of Christian sovereigns. Whatever he undertook he pursued with
unfailing ardour. What he began, he finished; carrying on a multitude of
things at once, he gave to each his full attention. In a reign of
forty-seven years he made fifty-three military expeditions, most of which
he led himself; eight years he fought the Avars; and thirty-three the
Saxons. He enacted more laws than all his predecessors united, as well the
Merovingians as the princes of his own family. Age, which brings fatigue
and relaxation to other workers, saw his energies increase, for the
fourteen years from 800 to his death showed his greatest legislative
activity. The man in armour never laid aside his breastplate; his eye
retained its penetration and his hand its vigour till he went down
standing to his tomb, and there the great Christian emperor was found
seated on his throne, with sackcloth under his imperial mantle, hundreds
of years after his death.

To put the laws and customs of the Church in the hands of such a man as
Augustus, crowned of God in St. Peter’s Basilica, was of itself to change
the wandering of the nations into an abode of settled peoples, capable of
growing into the brotherhood of a Christian bond. So Leo III. completed
the work of St. Gregory the Great. In Gregory’s time the Visigothic
kingdom of Spain had been already established on these same principles;
now that it had been overthrown by the Moslem occupation, they were
established on a vaster scale by the central empire of Charlemagne. So the
Church carried her legislative wisdom, gained in the exercise of 800
years, into the civil counsels of princes.

Pipin le Bref,(267) great grandfather of Charles, had restored in France
the great assembly of the Field of May. These assemblies were carefully
held by Charles. Like his predecessors he took no measure and promulgated
no law in opposition to the public wish. At Byzantium the practice which
had triumphed was “the will of the prince has the force of law,” but the
emperor Louis II., in 862, expressed the practice of Charles: “Law is made
by the consent of the people, and the sanction of the king”. Every year at
the Champs de Mai that principle became a reality. The king of the Franks
appeared there the soul and centre of the assembly. He convoked it when
and where he pleased. He proposed the subjects for its consideration, he
gave his sanction to what it passed. He dissolved it at his pleasure. But
it was consulted on all important acts of his government. It gave its
advice with unlimited freedom; it had full right to amend the projects
proposed. Often special commissions composed of the most competent persons
considered what was brought before them; the bishops, ecclesiastical
affairs; the lords, political. The government considered the interests of
the Church with the most constant care. More than one Champ de Mai held by
Charles bears the aspect at once of a council and a parliament. The king
presided, listened, advised. The law which sprang from that familiar
intercourse between king and nation perfectly expressed the harmony which
reigned between an authority which was loved, and an obedience which was
free. There was no written constitution, but it was one power exercised by
sovereign and people. The Capitularies remain the monument of this immense
activity.

The royal commissioners, Missi Dominici, an institution perfected by
Charles, carried everywhere throughout his vast empire a knowledge of the
laws thus passed, and reported to the sovereign how they were kept. By
them the king touched each member of his political body. It was a class of
removable functionaries, entirely under the order of the central power. It
was composed chiefly, but not always, of bishops and counts. They went
four times a year, usually two and two, an ecclesiastic and a layman, to
inspect the district entrusted to them. All authorities were subject to
this inspection. They reported to the sovereign upon all, and conveyed to
him the popular feeling, as well as informed him as to the popular needs.
This institution, together with the Champs de Mai, contributed to the
empire’s unity by maintaining its peace. It checked excesses of power in
the great proprietors.

An account is extant how these commissioners acted in one of the remotest
provinces, that of Istria. They consisted of two counts and a simple
priest. At their arrival they held a public enquiry upon the conduct of
the religious and civil authorities. The patriarch of Grado was obliged to
appear in person, together with all the bishops and counts of the
province. After that they considered the conduct of the duke John. The
patriarch and the duke were alike compelled to give pledges to amend what
had been wrongly done. All felt that Charlemagne himself was behind his
commissioners; and when they departed it was with the full assurance that
their visit had not been in vain. It will be right to take this instance
as representing the government of Charles everywhere, and at all times.
For the first time since the origin of Frank society a power existed, each
of whose acts indicated a resolution to maintain the general good and to
impregnate the whole nation with the spirit of the sovereign.

In all this government the model of the Christian hierarchy was before the
mind of Charles, and in the strength of union with it he worked. What is
so singularly civilising in his power is the extinction in his personal
character as ruler of anything local, bounded, and particular, together
with the maintenance of every right in every place. The Pope was the head
of the Church, and he looked upon himself as the head of the State; the
Pope was surrounded in every province by bishops, his colleagues and
coadjutors; they worked together in one mass. So Charles willed that his
dukes and counts should work with him in one mass for one end, the pacific
unity of his great empire. The act of the Pope(268) in making him Roman
emperor helped him greatly to conceive of himself as the secular head of a
Christian brotherhood of peoples, as the Pope was its spiritual head. But
the act which made him emperor did not give him secular dominion over any
people not already subject to him. For instance, it did not subject to him
the Saxon kingdoms in Britain. He was not territorial, but moral leader
and president in the council of kings; their chief in the defence of the
Church. He did not take from the Greek empress or her successors any
temporal lordship; though the Greek pride long refused to acknowledge him
as an equal. The Pope remained what he had been from the time of Stephen
II., an independent sovereign in the Papal State: he had not given himself
a master in erecting a new empire. In fact we see Leo III. retain the
exercise of his secular sovereignty, and the emperor appear only as
defender of St. Peter’s landed inheritance. Leo III. maintained the right
of his own officers against the interference of some imperial
commissioners, and distinguished accurately the limits of the State of the
Church, from the imperial realm. He took measures against Arab inroads, to
secure his State in full independence. What he needed was the emperor’s
support against the violent party spirit of the time; against such deeds
as the intrusion of a Pope upon the Apostolic See by armed force; against
the assault upon a Pope by conspirators. This the authority of the emperor
in Rome secured. For that he had a jurisdiction, as the Patricius had
before. For this the Romans took an oath to the emperor as well as to the
Pope; to the one as protector and advocate, to the other as temporal lord.

If in all this action Charlemagne had before him the model of the
Christian hierarchy, not only his own vast kingdom, but all the nations of
the West had spread out before them in the forty-six years of his reign,
but especially in the last fourteen, when he had become, by the Pope’s
act, emperor of the Romans, the cordiality of union between the two great
powers of human life, the spiritual and the temporal. The positive and
intrinsic effect of the Holy See as the inflexible rule of doctrine and of
justice on the Teuton features of the several northern tribes was seen
when a man of immense natural capacity wielded so great a power in close
conjunction and amity with it. What can be further than the action of
Charles in the Champs de Mai, in the Missi Dominici, in a legislation
which considered all the needs and desires of the subject, while it was
supreme and final in its authority, from the condition of the northern
tribes when they broke into the empire. The Vandals howled around the
walls of Hippo when St. Augustine was repeating the penitential psalms on
his death-bed; while Charles kept under his pillow St. Augustine’s City of
God, and strove to rule his empire for the maintenance of the Christian
faith. He was accomplishing that union of many nations in one political
bond as members of the same religion which Augustine himself, the most
clear-sighted of saintly historians, was unable to contemplate. The
mixture of earth with iron in the feet of the great heathen statue had
wrought its dissolution; but the Teuton monarch, who mounted on his knees
the steps of St. Peter’s, kissing each separately, at the beginning of his
career pledged his faith to the Pope over the tomb of the chief apostle,
and before it ended he had given a final check to the intestine struggles
of disunion. He had more than equalled the work of Constantine. The great
Roman was indeed personally, though imperfectly, Christian. How much there
was of policy, how much of faith in his conversion is a problem too hard
to solve; but he was baptised on his death-bed, and the delay was probably
of disastrous import to his inward life; and his empire was, in a great
degree, still unconverted and heathen. His latter years were especially
faulty in his practical execution of the relation between the Two Powers.
From his time forward his own special foundation at Byzantium declined
more and more, until the emperor who represented him became, in Leo, the
Isaurian, and his son Kopronymus, the greatest enemy of the Church. But
Charlemagne by his real union with St. Peter’s successor, imparted Roman
order, Christian civilisation, and civil constitution to that mass of
seething peoples. If in the five hundred years succeeding Constantine his
work deteriorated more and more, until the city which he wished to be the
head of Christian empire yielded half of it to the Saracen, and then
became the very seat of schism, the West, in the five hundred years which
followed Charlemagne, saw a family of Christian and Catholic nations
surround the throne of the chief apostle, nations which his Primacy had
called into existence when he placed the imperial diadem on the head of
“Charles Augustus, crowned of God”.

If from the West we extend our view to Charlemagne’s effect on the East,
we find the new order of things which his empire introduced, present him
as the temporal head of the Christian faith in union with its spiritual
head over against the powerless Byzantine emperor. The Pope had ceased to
be a subject, and his word had set a Teuton sovereign on full equality
with the power which had so grievously maltreated Italy during two hundred
years. Never could he have taken such a step had he been still a vassal of
the Greek court, which had not only tyrannised itself, but left the
Apostolic See defenceless to the Lombard aggression for many generations.
The emperor Zeno had made Odoacer Roman Patricius for the subjugation of
Italy and of Rome itself. Stephen II. had made Pipin Patricius for its
delivery and defence of the Holy See. Leo III. had exalted the Patricius
to be emperor for fuller defence. No Roman noble or bandit could resist
the power thus created. The Greek influence in Italy was all but
extinguished; the Roman Church was protected from that violation of its
rights, that plundering of its property, which Cæsar and Exarch had so
often inflicted. For the patrimonies which the Isaurian had confiscated,
the Roman See was thus in another form compensated. The Pope had received
a domain in central Italy, and was in the possession of full independence.
Over against that free life and mounting sap of the West, the East
presented but an image of decay and stagnation.

Harun al Raschid was reigning as chalif at Bagdad when Charles was made
emperor at Rome. His troops advanced to Ephesus and compelled the empress
Irene to pay tribute during a four years’ suspension of hostilities. Again
and again had Moslem armies polluted the Christian cities from Antioch to
the Bosphorus with every iniquity. In 726, they took possession of St.
Basil’s Cæsarea, in the year when the Isaurian was trying to force his
Mohammedan hatred of images on Pope St. Gregory II., and seven years
before he was stripping the Roman Church of its patrimony, and
transferring ten provinces of the Papal patriarchate to the bishop of the
eastern capital. From the death of Mohammed in 632 to the creation of
Charles as emperor of the Romans in 800, was a time of scarcely
interrupted disaster inflicted by the Saracen on the Christian through the
East and the South. The outburst began as we have seen, by the betrayal of
the faith on the part of Heraclius, the sole Roman emperor: Constans II.,
Leo III., and Kopronymus continued this betrayal. Mohammed waxed greater
and greater through this whole period. The Christian successes consisted
in _not_ losing Constantinople, and in saving the south of France after
the loss of Spain. In the reign of Harun al Raschid, that most terrible of
destructions was at its greatest expansion and intensity. Then an emperor
of the Romans was created by the Pope for the special defence of the
Church. Exactly as Harun in his character of chalif was bound to lay waste
and destroy the Christian Church and Faith, Charles was bound to watch
over it. This was the tenure by which he held the empire, and his
successors after him.(269) It was given, not for the glory and distinction
of the wearer, but its true and proper significance lay in the fulfilment
of the duties which the emperor was to discharge as protector of the
Church. All imperial grandeur was an attribute of this duty. Exactly
because the Greek emperor had not fulfilled this duty, the Pope undertook
the renovation of the western Roman empire. It would be an entirely
erroneous view of Leo’s act to suppose that he could have done nothing
else, that he must have made Charlemagne emperor, and by this single
crowning bound himself and his successors to accept every succeeding
emperor. Things in the East had come to that pass, but in the West the
whole empire, in conception and in fact, was the Pope’s work. The office
thus created was a spiritual office, to which the spiritual head of
Christendom should consecrate, anoint, and crown its temporal head. When
there was a new king of the Franks, he was to come to Rome for
consecration as emperor of the Romans: the Pope did not elect the new
king, neither of the Franks then, nor of the Germans afterwards, but he,
and he alone, invested the man chosen king with the title and power of the
Roman emperor.

The chalifate, set up in the false pretension of succeeding a man whose
whole claim to rule was founded on a falsehood, had become the most
terrible despotism which human history had witnessed. It had taken
possession of a very large part of what was Christian territory when it
appeared in the world. Heraclius and his line trembled before it. At the
time when a soldier of fortune closed seven revolutions at Byzantium
Christian Spain was overwhelmed by it. And presently the Isaurian line
helped its onward march by arrogating to itself that intrusion into
spiritual government, which was the very basis of the chalifate. Then the
action of Leo III., on Christmas Day, 800, created in the West a power
adequate to resist the further advance of Mohammedan rule. As long
continued dissension in the faith, decline in Christian morals, and an
ever advancing despotism had given entrance to Saracen conquest, so from
the very tomb of St. Peter, and at the voice of his Successor, arose that
Christian king and Roman prince whom Pope Felix and his successors sought
in vain from the heirs of Constantine. The vileness of oriental despotism
was to meet in conflict Christian monarchy: the union of nations in the
faith to give one spirit to the West: the flood which had almost
overflowed the earth to stop before the Rock of Peter.





INDEX.


_Abu Bekr_, elected the first chalif, 118.

_Adrian I., Pope_, his accession and character, 441;
  replies to the embassy of king Desiderius, 442;
  his cities seized by Desiderius, 443;
  defends Rome against Desiderius, and stops him by interdict, 445;
  calls upon Charlemagne to rescue him, 446;
  whom he receives at St. Peter’s as Patricius, at Easter, 474, 450;
  confers with Charles as to Pipin’s donation, 453;
  receives the renewal of the donation from him, 455;
  visits of Charles to Rome during his pontificate, 497;
  dies in 795, mourned over by Charles, as a father, 498.

_African Bishops_ repeat to Pope St. Martin the words of his predecessor,
            Innocent I., made in the time of St. Augustine, 72;
  acknowledge the special divine gift of maintaining the faith, dwelling
              in the Apostolic Chair, 73.

_Agatho, Pope_, holds councils preparatory to the Sixth Council, 239;
  describes the legates whom he sends to the Council, 239;
  restores St. Wilfrid to his see, 240;
  asserts before the Sixth Council the inerrancy of the Apostolic See,
              245;
  his claims fully admitted by the Council, 247;
  and by the emperor, 249, who calls him “your most sacred Headship,” 249;
  the Sixth Council beseeches him to confirm it, 247;
  dies before the Council ends in 681, 250.

_Aistulf_, king of the Lombards, takes Ravenna in 751, and names himself
            king of Italy, 350;
  attacks the duchy of Rome, and imposes a poll-tax on Rome, 353;
  will not listen to Pope Stephen II. at Pavia, 355;
  yields to Pipin, who besieges Pavia, 360;
  breaks his compact with Pipin, and begins a fresh siege of Rome, 361;
  yields Pavia to Pipin, and submits to his terms, 363;
  invests Rome at the beginning, and dies hunting at the end of 756, 365.

_Alexandrine Patriarchate_, its history from Dioscorus to Mohammed, 144-9.

_Ali_, fourth chalif, 656-661;
  assassinated in the mosque, 153.

_Amalasunta_, allowed to be murdered by her cousin, Theodatus, whom she
            had made king of the Goths, 380.

_Anastasius_, made patriarch on the deposition of Germanus by Leo III.
            336;
  made ecumenical by a tyrannical act of Leo III., 336;
  deposed by his son Kopronymus as a useless instrument, 337.

_Anastasius_, the Librarian, as authority for Roman history, 26;
  his account of Pope St. Martin, 52-5;
  of the visit of Constans II. to Rome, 230;
  his character of St. Gregory III., 332;
  describes his works, 343;
  his character of Pope Zacharias, 345, 352;
  describes the election and character of Pope Stephen III., 352;
  character and letter to Desiderius of Pope Adrian I., 441-3;
  describes Charlemagne ascending the steps to St. Peter’s on his knees,
              450;
  records the donation of Charlemagne in 774, 454;
  and the visit of Pope Leo III. to Charles at Paderborn, 500;
  his exculpation in St. Peter’s and crowning of Charlemagne, 502;
  Justinian II., his captain of the guards sent to seize Pope Sergius,
              272;
  entrance of Pope Constantine into Constantinople, 278;
  the election of Pelagius II. left free because of the Lombards, 382;
  his character of Pope Paul I., 432.

_Antiochene Patriarchate_, history from St. Chrysostom to Mohammed, 143.

_Anastasius_, formerly _Artemius_, and the first secretary, made emperor,
            282;
  is deposed after a civil war of six months, and becomes a priest, 289;
  revolts against Leo III., and executed as a criminal by him, 289.

_Athalarich_, king of the Goths, perishes by his excesses in 534, 380;
  imposes a fine for confirming the Papal election, 380.

_Augustine, St._, his confession of the primacy of the Apostolic See
            praised by Pope St. Martin, 73.

_Bardanes, Philippicus_, reigns eighteen months, and tries to set up again
            the Monothelite heresy, 281;
  deposed and blinded, 282.

_Baronius_, his judgment as to the greatness of St. Gregory II., quoted,
            332.

_Bede, St._, his account of archbishop Theodore, 236.

_Boniface IV., Pope_, consecrates Agrippa’s Pantheon to be the Church of
            “the ever-virgin Mother of God and all martyrs,” 28.

_Brunengo_, I primi Papi-Re and Le Origini della Sovranità Temporale dei
            Papi, quoted continually in the 8th chapter.

_Byzantium_, its despotism the Church’s enemy from the time of St.
            Gregory, 5;
  its patriarch the special rival of the Pope, 6;
  tries for forty years to impose the Monothelite heresy on the Pope and
              the Church, 41;
  five acts of its theological despotism, 61;
  march of this despotism from Constantine to Constans II., 64;
  secular power declines, as spiritual usurpation advances, 65;
  development of its double despotism, civil and religious, from
              Constantine to Heraclius, 110-117;
  its fostering the heretical spirit destroys the empire, 117-118;
  two hundred years of eastern wickedness lead up to the Mohammedan
              conquest, 141, and the destruction of the eastern
              patriarchates, 143-6;
  triple despotism over the Popes,
    1, controlling and confirming their election, 376-385;
    2, the exarchal government, plundering and oppressing, 386-390;
    3, interfering with doctrine, 393-400;
  eastern episcopate demoralised by it, 409;
  its advancement of its bishop from 381 to 733, 337.

_Charlemagne_, sent by his father Pipin to meet Pope Stephen II., 358;
  crowned with his father and brother by Pope Stephen at St. Denys in 754,
              360;
  and made with them Patricius of the Romans, 360, 431;
  becomes with his brother Carloman, king of the Franks, 768, 436;
  marries Desiderata or Ermengarde, daughter of Desiderius, 437;
  sends her back repudiated after a year, 438;
  becomes king of the whole Frank empire, Dec. 4, 771, 440;
  marches into Italy against Desiderius, 446;
  invests Pavia, October, 773, 448;
  enters St. Peter’s and welcomed by Pope Adrian as Patricius, at Easter,
              774, 449;
  confers with Pope Adrian I., 450;
  renews and confirms the pact of Quiersy, 454;
  lays the donation on the altar of the Confession, 455;
  captures Verona and Pavia and becomes king of the Lombards, 457;
  takes time to carry out the donation, but is never unfaithful, 459;
  his visit to Rome in 774 inaugurates his 40 years of triumphs, 463;
  his loyalty in repeating his father’s acts, 465;
  visits to Rome in the pontificate of Adrian I., 497;
  receives Pope Leo III. at Paderborn, 501;
  comes from Aix-la-Chapelle to Rome, 502;
  the Pope acquitted on his personal word in St. Peter’s before him, 503;
  crowned by Leo III. emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day, 800, 503;
  made emperor by the Pope alone, to be protector of the Church, 505;
  this making by the Pope acknowledged by all his subjects, 506;
  it recognises the proper nature of civil government, 508;
  it establishes Christian legislation in the person of Charles, 510;
  his action in the Champs de Mai, 511; his action by the Missi Dominici,
              512;
  makes the Christian hierarchy the model of his civil government, 514;
  how his government civilises the West, 515;
  how his work surpasses that of Constantine, 516;
  how his empire bears on the Byzantine, 517;
  how it stands over against the chalifate, 518.

_Charles Martell_, saves Europe from Mohammed at the battle by Tours, 494;
  second of the four great Carlovingians, 496;
  called upon for aid by St. Gregory III., 339.

_Church, the Catholic_—the one kingdom of Christ in all ages, 2;
  unity of, as necessary as the unity of God, 2;
  want of the idea makes documents unintelligible, 4.

_Constans II._, emperor, charges the exarch Olympius to murder Pope St.
            Martin, 54;
  appoints another exarch, Kalliopas, to kidnap the Pope, 79;
  tortures and puts to death St. Maximus, the Confessor, 159-170;
  forces the election of Pope Eugenius in the life-time of St. Martin,
              226;
  murders his brother, Theodosius, a deacon, 230;
  his visit to Rome described by Anastasius, 230;
  strips Rome of statues, and St. Mary of the Martyrs (the Pantheon) of
              its roof, 233;
  assassinated in his bath at Syracuse, 234.

_Constantine and Charlemagne_, their work on the Church compared, 516.

_Constantine III._, poisoned by the empress Martina, 159.

_Constantine IV._, Pogonatus, 236;
  solicits union with the Pope, 238;
  addresses the Pope at the Sixth Council as the living Peter, 249;
  his position as emperor, 261;
  reigns from 668 to 685, a great contrast to his father, Constans II.,
              262.

_Constantine V._, Kopronymus, emperor, leaves Pope Stephen II. undefended
            at the Lombard invasion, 354;
  Pope Stephen II. ceases to recognise his sovereignty over Rome, 357;
  asks Pipin to restore to him Rome and the exarchate, 364, 411;
  the last eastern emperor who exercises thraldom over Rome, 411.

_Constantine_, ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, so presented to the
            bishops by the emperor in 754, 403;
  banished to Prince’s Island in 766, 405;
  degraded in Sancta Sophia, 407;
  imprisoned, condemned, beheaded, and dissected, 768, 408.

_Cyrus_, made by Heraclius patriarch of Alexandria, 105;
  constructor with Sergius, of the Monothelite heresy, 105;
  supplies Heraclius with heresy drawn out scientifically, 253.

_Desiderius_, last king of the Lombards, 757-774, made by help of Pope
            Stephen II., 433;
  plots against Popes Paul I., Stephen III., and Adrian I., 433-438;
  marries his daughter to Charlemagne in 770, repudiated by him in 771,
              437;
  gets rid of the Palatine judges Christophorus and Sergius, 439;
  encounters and is foiled by Pope Adrian I., 441-446;
  is invested in Pavia by Charlemagne in 773, 447;
  conquered and deposed by him in 774, 457.

_De Vere, Aubrey_, quoted, 373, the sin of Constantine cleaving his
            empire, note, 111.

_Döllinger_, quoted on the purpose of the Greek Council in Trullo, 264;
  analyses Mohammed’s religion and estimates his work, 23, 208;
  sums up the effect of the Mohammedan attack, 224;
  makes absolute despotism the proper offspring of Mohammed, 220-224;
  what Mohammed was named by his companions, 217.

_Eugenius, Pope_, elected in the lifetime of St. Martin, 226, 229.

_Gfrörer_, Papst Gregorius, vii., vol. v. p. 10-11 quoted.

_Gregorovius_ quoted, 25, 26, 28, 29, 37, 45, 257, 269, 270, 280, 290.

_Gregory II._, _Pope_, 19th May, 715, 290;
  extent of the Christian region at his accession, 290-293;
  his character and actions, 301;
  his letter to the emperor Leo III., 302-315;
  shows the bearing of a God Incarnate on the making of images, 306;
  compares the conduct of Leo III. with that of the Jewish king Ozias,
              308;
  effects on the mind of portraying divine actions, 309;
  defines the bounds of Church and State, 311, 317;
  reproves the emperor’s impiety in breaking up an image of Christ, 312;
  laughs to scorn his threats against St. Peter, 313;
  whom all the nations of the West look upon as a God upon earth, 314;
  contrasts Church discipline with State punishment, 318;
  the Pope and the patriarch hear God’s commission to pardon the emperor,
              if penitent, 320;
  these letters, a picture of the time in which they were written, 321;
  especially as to the relation between the Two Powers, 322;
  and the unjealous unity of the Papal and the episcopal authority, 324;
  he rejects Leo’s attack on the faith, but maintains allegiance, 328;
  causes king Liutprand to retire from before Rome, 329;
  Baronius esteems Pope Gregory II. as equal to St. Gregory the Great,
              332;
  he dies in February, 731.

_Gregory III., Pope_, elected in 731,
  his character in Anastasius, 332, 343;
  holds a Council at Rome proscribing the Iconoclast heresy, 334;
  is deprived by Leo III. of the patrimonies in Leo’s realm, and of his
              spiritual jurisdiction in ten provinces, 336;
  keeps king Liutprand at hay from Rome, 339;
  turns for aid to Charles Martell, 341;
  sends him the keys of St. Peter’s Confession, 342;
  dies 27th November, 741, 344;
  having saved Rome from the Lombards, 344.

_Heraclius_, emperor; made of his accession, 9;
  his dynasty reigns for five generations, 10;
  tries to desert Constantinople, 14;
  his twelve years’ inactivity, 14;
  his awakening, 15;
  conquers Persia in five campaigns, 17;
  brings back the Holy Cross to Jerusalem, 21;
  his success as a whole from 622 to 629, 21;
  subscribes and publishes the Ecthesis, 33;
  makes Pyrrhus patriarch of Constantinople, 36;
  triumphs when orthodox, and ruins the empire when heretical, 42;
  the revolution which follows his bringing back the Cross to Jerusalem,
              102;
  he falls into the hands of Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, and of
              Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, 103.

_Hefele_, quoted, 32, 37, 41, 51, 60, 68, 71, 103, 104, 107, 168, 169,
            227, 264, 265.

_Hergenröther_, quoted, 7, 26, 48, 142, 169, 238, 240, 245, 264, 266, 268,
            296, 325, 408, 411, 412, 513.

_Honorius, Pope_, his accession and acts, 30;
  his deception by the patriarch Sergius, 31;
  his death and burial at St. Peter’s, 37;
  censured for neglect of his office by St. Leo II., in confirming the
              Sixth Council, 256;
  five Popes, who had been members of his clergy, condemn the Monothelite
              error, 56-7, 65;
  Muratori, Hergenröther, and Jungmann deny that he is chargeable with any
              error of faith, 252;
  he died before the Exposition of Sergius was presented for his
              acceptance, 253.

_Hoensbroech_, quoted, 424, 425, 426.

_Isaac_ the model exarch, his tomb at Ravenna, 47.

_Jerome, St._, his account of the northern wandering of the nations,
            138-141.

_John IV., Pope_, at his accession, censures the Monothelite heresy, 43;
  defends Honorius against having supported it, in a letter to the
              emperor, 44;
  calls upon the emperor Constantine III. to abolish the Ecthesis of his
              father, Heraclius, 155.

_John, the Almsgiver, St._, last great
  patriarch of Alexandria, 13.

_John VI._, patriarch of Constantinople, asks pardon of Pope Constantine,
            282;
  describes his pre-eminence in the church as that of the head in the
              human body, 283.

_John of Damascus, St._, his record of Mohammed, 211;
  observes that Mohammed has no witness to his truth, 213;
  censures Iconoclasm as the invasion of a robber, 327.

_Justinian I._, embues all his successors with doctrinal despotism over
            the Church, 63;
  his conquest of Italy the source of woe, 113;
  confesses the Primacy of the Pope, while seeking to enthral it to
              himself, 115;
  his persecution of Pope Vigilius during eight years at Constantinople,
              286, 393;
  as lord of Rome by right of conquest seizes on the confirmation and even
              nomination of Popes, 380;
  from his time the Byzantine emperors claimed the right of confirming
              Popes, 381;
  which they exercised down to Pope Gregory III. in 731, 385;
  the maker of the ecumenical patriarchate to hold under the emperor the
              portfolio of doctrine, 392;
  the chief of the theologising emperors, 393;
  moulder of the despotism which ate out the eastern episcopate, 410;
  which began by the deposition of Pope Silverius through his empress
              Theodora and continued to Constantine Kopronymus, 411;
  reduces Italy to be the “servile” province, deplored by Pope Agatho,
              417;
  stands at the head of two centuries in which Byzantine oppression causes
              the Primacy to work in fetters, 503;
  as a civil ruler worse to the Church than Odoacer or Theodorich, 417.

_Justinian II._, succeeds in 685, 262;
  summons a Greek Council in Trullo, 263;
  strives to reduce the Pope to a patriarch, 265;
  claims to confirm the council in Trullo, 267;
  sends his guardsman Zacharias to carry Pope Sergius to Constantinople,
              273;
  forces the patriarch Callinicus to demolish a church, 274;
  is deposed with his nose slit, 275;
  is restored in 705, his tyranny and savage cruelty, 276;
  his massacre at Ravenna, 277;
  summons Pope Constantine to Constantinople, 279;
  falls at the Pope’s feet and acknowledges the privileges of the Roman
              See, 279;
  is deposed, murdered, and his head sent to Rome, 280.

_Jungmann_, quoted, 506—denies that Pope Honorius is chargeable with any
            error of faith, 252.

_Kurth_, quoted, 491, 509. 511.

_Leo II._, _Pope_, August, 682, to July, 683;
  confirms the Sixth Council, 250;
  modifies the condemnation of Honorius, 251-2;
  contrasts the negligence of Honorius with the four patriarchs, Sergius,
              Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, “who lurked as thieves in the See
              of Constantinople rather than acted as guides,” 251.

_Leo III., Pope St._, succeeds Adrian I. in 795, 498;
  attacked in a procession, 500;
  consultation with Charlemagne at Paderborn, 501;
  acquits himself upon his word, 502;
  crowns Charles, king of the Franks, as emperor of the Romans, 503.

_Leo III._, the Isaurian, made emperor, 289, 298;
  begins in 726 the Iconoclast contest, 299;
  destroys the statue of Christ attached to his palace, 312;
  threatens the Pope to break in pieces the statue of St. Peter, 313;
  answers the Pope’s letter by five attempts upon his life, 325;
  destroys the images and lays waste the churches, 326;
  censured by St. John Damascene, 327;
  deposes the patriarch Germanus, 326;
  sends a great fleet against Ravenna and Rome, 335;
  confiscates the patrimonies of St. Peter in his realm, 336;
  severs the Illyrian provinces from the Pope’s patriarchal jurisdiction,
              336;
  takes twenty Isaurian bishoprics from Antioch for Constantinople, dies
              in the year 741, the same year as Charles Martell and Pope
              Gregory III., 343.

_Leo XIII., Pope_, attests the witness borne by history to the Holy See,
            vii.

_Liutprand_, king of the Lombards, 712-744, 229;
  advances on Rome and retires at the Pope’s intervention, 329;
  takes Spoleto, and takes four cities of the duchy of Rome, 338;
  yields to Pope Zacharias at Terni in 743, 346;
  receives the Pope at Pavia, and restores the province of Ravenna, 347-8;
  dies after 32 years’ reign, the greatest of the Lombard kings, 348.

_Martin, Pope St._, his Council and his martyrdom, 51-100;
  condemns four patriarchs for heresy, 53;
  convokes a Lateran Council against the Monothelite heresy, 55;
  directs an encyclical to all bishops and peoples, 56;
  informs the emperor Constans II. that he has condemned his Typus, 56;
  his speech on opening the Lateran Council, 66;
  letter of the African bishops read at the Lateran Council, 72;
  answer of the Pope to it, 73;
  releases the people of Thessalonica from obedience to an heretical
              archbishop, his own vicar, 74;
  appoints a vicar in the eastern patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem,
              75;
  describes his capture in the Lateran Church and deportation to
              Constantinople, 79-83;
  his sufferings described by an eyewitness, 85;
  arraigned for high treason before the Senate of Constantinople, 86;
  dragged through the city as a condemned criminal with the sword borne
              before him, 89;
  confined in the guard-house during 85 days, 95;
  starved to death at Cherson, 97;
  repeats in his death the Passion of Christ, and Constans II, the tyranny
              of Trajan, 100.

_Mary_, the Mother of God, declared by Sophronius, in his synodical
            letter, approved by the Sixth Council, “free from all spot in
            body, soul, and mind,” 108;
  “whoever does not honour and worship her who is blessed above every
              creature—let him be anathema both in this world and the
              next”. Pope St. Martin, the Martyr, 84;
  “the most chaste, immaculate, most excellent of all creatures, the
              fullest of grace, the maker and giver of joy,” 100.

_Maximus_, the Confessor, his life, labours, and martyrdom, 157-170;
  the great opponent of the Monothelite heresy, 158;
  counsels Pope St. Martin to call the Lateran Council, 159;
  his testimonies to the Apostolic See, 160;
  carried to Byzantium, and tried before the Senate, 162;
  rejects the imperial offers of honour, 168;
  tortured and put to death by Constans II., 169;
  traces the danger of the empire to the misconduct of its rulers, 260.

_Menzel, Adolph_, quoted as to the right of Pipin and Charlemagne to make
            the donation, 428.

_Mohammed_, his work described by Dollinger, 23;
  his personal life and character, 172-189;
  change in his conduct after the death of his wife Chadidja, 173;
  proclaims force as the instrument of spreading his religion, 174;
  orders a marauding excursion in the holy months, 175;
  justifies it by verses of the Koran 176;
  his first battle at Bedr, 177;
  is defeated at Ohod, 179;
  defends Medina in a siege and loses reputation, 180;
  puts to death the men of a Jewish clan and enslaves their wives, 181;
  attempts a pilgrimage to Mecca and is forced to retire, 182;
  his polygamy after Chadidja’s death, 183;
  rebukes by aid of the Koran a revolt of his wives, 184;
  takes the wife of his adopted son and justifies it as the command of
              God, 185;
  forbids by the Koran his wives to marry after his death, 186;
  obtains possession of Mecca, A.D. 630, 186;
  issues a new law of nations and war, and dies, 187;
  four principles of his life from the Hegira to his death, 190;
  employment of force to propagate Islam, 190;
  imposture in using the name of the angel Gabriel, 191;
  invents privileges as to the number and choice of his wives, 192;
  his disregard of human life, 193;
  his character as founder of a religion, 194;
  contrast between his character and that of Christ’s, 195;
  how his life has infected the life of his followers, 196;
  degradation of woman in all Mohammedan countries, 197;
  his position at the time of his death, 199;
  his civil virtues, 200;
  effect of the invention of Gabriel on his title to belief, 201;
  at his death simply a successful robber, 203;
  the first twelve years of the Christian faith and the first twelve years
              of Islam, 206;
  holds in the Mohammedan system the place of Christ in the Christian,
              208;
  radical antagonism of that system with the Christian faith, 202;
  his record by St. John Damascene, 211-214;
  character and formation of the Koran, 214;
  Christendom and Islam contemporaries in origin, 218;
  absolute despotism his proper offspring, 219;
  the locust people, 225.

_Monoethelite Heresy_, pioneer of the Mohammedan conquest, 118.

_Muratori_ on the Pope’s position before the donation of Pipin, 426;
  absolves Pope Honorius from any error of doctrine, 252;
  justifies Pope Stephen II. in turning to Pipin for aid, 355;
  describes the government of the Lombard kings, 458;
  describes the tyranny of Constans II., 231;
  describes the massacre at Ravenna by order of Justinian II., 278;
  Leo III., the Isaurian, convulsed the Church with the Iconoclastic
              tragedy, 299.

_Niehues_, Kaiserthum und Papstthum, quoted, vol. i., 434, 436, 437, 446,
            462.

_Nova Roma_, its ecclesiastical conduct, from A.D. 330 to 715, 476-481.

_Odoacer_, Patricius of Rome, by grant of the eastern emperor Zeno, 374;
  did not claim to confirm a Papal election, 377;
  five years of suffering to Italy before he is overthrown, 375;
  slain at a banquet by order of Theodorich, 378;
  results of his meddling with the Papal election, 379.

_Olympius_, the exarch, tries to murder St. Martin at Mass, 53.

_Omar_, the second chalif, 120;
  subdues Syria, 121;
  grants a capitulation to Jerusalem, 121-3;
  led into the holy places by the patriarch Sophronius, 123;
  takes Ctesiphon, Aleppo, Antioch, Alexandria, Egypt, and North Africa,
              as far as Tripolis, 124-127;
  character of his rule, 129;
  the churches he destroyed and the women he captured, 129;
  ascetic in outward bearing, a voluptuary in his life, 130;
  maker of the Mohammedan empire, 131;
  the empire ruled from Medina, 133;
  ruin which he brought on Constantine’s empire and the Christian Church,
              132;
  his union of the Two Powers, 134-135;
  his destruction of the Antiochene patriarchate, 137;
  mortally wounded in the mosque at Medina, A.D. 644, 152.

_Osman_, third chalif, 644 to 656, 152;
  slain by the son of the first chalif, Abu Bekr, 153.

_Patrimonies_ of the Roman Church, the twenty-three in time of Gregory the
            Great, 424.

_Paul I._, _Pope_, 757-767; his new State maintained by Pipin against king
            Desiderius, 433;
  and against Greek as well as Lombard enmity, 434.

_Persian Empire_, strips the eastern empire of provinces from 610 to 622,
            12, 14;
  is conquered by Heraclius from 622 to 627, 18;
  its emperor Chosroes destroyed by his son, 20;
  its ruin, nine emperors in four years, 24.

_Phillips, Kirchenrecht_, quoted, 499, 518.

_Phocas_, the emperor, his character, 7;
  puts to death his predecessor, the emperor Mauritius, and all his
              family, 9;
  his death, 9;
  his war with the Persian emperor Chosroes, 11;
  requires his patriarch to acknowledge the Roman Primacy, 25;
  presents the Pantheon to Pope Boniface IV., 28.

_Pipin-le-bref_; rise of the family of Arnulf and Pipin of Landen, 493;
  his forty years’ work as mayor of the palace, 494;
  first of the four great Carlovingians, 496.

_Pipin_, the king, invites Pope Zacharias to sanction his assumption of
            the royal title, 351;
  elected king of the Franks at Soissons in 752, 351;
  meets Pope Stephen II. at Poutigny in 754, 357;
  promises to restore to the Pope the Lombard captures, 359;
  crowned by Pope Stephen II. in St. Denys’, 360;
  forces king Aistulf to yield at Pavia, 360;
  called upon by Pope Stephen II. in the name of St. Peter, 362;
  relieves Rome by taking Pavia, 363;
  lays the keys of the surrendered cities on the tomb of the Prince of the
              Apostles, 364;
  refuses to be bribed by Constantine Kopronymus to give back these cities
              to him, 364;
  restores Rome to the Pope and gives him the exarchate and Pentapolis,
              365, 400;
  letter of thanksgiving sent him by Pope Stephen II. in 757, 430;
  defends Pope Paul I. from king Desiderius, 433;
  dies in 768, his tomb inscribed: “Pipin the king, father of Charles the
              Great,” 436;
  the Papal monarchy dates from the compact with him at Quiersy, 460;
  the greatness of his benefactions acknowledged in the Codex Carolinus,
              463.

_Popes_, the succession of twenty-four, from 604 to 715, 26;
  the imperial confirmation of their election, 27, 30;
  then ten succeeding Honorius condemn the Monothelite heresy, 41, 56;
  are persecuted for forty years for condemning it, 57;
  the ten immediate successors of Honorius save the Church from heresy
              imposed by Byzantine emperors and patriarchs, 255-256;
  ground of their firmness, belief in the succession of St. Peter, 259;
  the five Popes who go to Constantinople, 284;
  the twenty-four Popes between the first and second Gregories, 295;
  their three hundred years of suffering and glory, A.D. 455-756, 369;
  mode of their election and confirmation under the exarchate, 383;
  their confirmation from 526 to 731, 385;
  their third oppression by the Byzantine lay power seeking to impose
              doctrine, 391;
  constancy of the successive Popes from Gelasius in 492, to St. Gregory
              II., in 726, 394;
  the Papal constancy makes martyrs;
  the patriarchal despotism corrupts the faith and destroys the empire,
              395-396, 409-410;
  fifty-eight Byzantine bishops from Metrophanes, A.D. 325, to Methodius,
              842, of whom twenty-one heretics, 411-414;
  seventy Popes in the same period, all of whom keep one faith, 415;
  the doctrine thus preserved is that of the Incarnation itself, 415;
  the line of subject succeeded by the line of sovereign Popes, 432;
  the Papal line the fountain head of political sense, 491-492;
  Christian Europe born from the alliance between Charlemagne and Popes
              Adrian I. and Leo III., 515.

_Rachis_, king of the Lombards, resigns his kingdom, 349;
  receives the cowl of St. Benedict from the hands of Pope Zacharias, 349.

_Reumont_, quoted, 301, 330, 332, 339, 359, 363, 365, 496, 509.

_Severinus_, _Pope_, his confirmation delayed for nineteen months and
            sixteen days, 37;
  is plundered by the exarch Isaac, 39;
  sat two months and sixteen days, during which he rejected the Ecthesis,
              41.

_Sergius_, patriarch of Constantinople, deceives Pope Honorius, 106;
  draws up his Ecthesis against the doctrine of Sophronius, 33, 35, 109;
  supplies the emperor Heraclius with insidious heretical language, 254;
  condemned by the Sixth Council, 247;
  by St. Leo II., in confirming the Council, as one “who lurked as a thief
              rather than acted as a guide in the See of Constantinople,”
              251.

_Stephen II._, _Pope_, elected in 752, 352;
  resists Aistulf, attacking the duchy of Rome, and imposing a poll-tax,
              353;
  appeals in vain to Constantine Kopronymus to defend Rome, 353;
  appeals to Pipin, king of the Franks, 354;
  leaves Rome for Pavia to persuade Aistulf to desist, 355;
  on his refusal, crosses the Alps to Pipin, 356;
  saves Europe from Mohammedan enthralment by union with Pipin, 357;
  meeting of Stephen and Pipin at Pontigny, described by Anastasius, 358;
  Pipin binds himself to protect the Roman Church and Commonwealth of
              which Stephen makes him Patricius, 359;
  anoints Pipin as king of the Franks in the Church of St. Denys, 360;
  is besieged in Rome by Aistulf, 361;
  writes to Pipin in the name of St. Peter, 362;
  is delivered by Pipin taking Pavia, 363;
  the keys of the cities laid by Pipin on the tomb of the Prince of the
              Apostles,364;
  Pope Stephen II. recognised as head of the Roman State, 365;
  the State of the Church thus created, A.D. 756, 366;
  returns as king to Rome on the death of Aistulf, 756, 429;
  letter of the first Pope-king to Pipin, 430;
  dies in the Lateran palace, acknowledged by all as king of Rome, April
              24, 757, 431;
  in him the line of Popes who are subjects closes; the line of Popes who
              are kings opens, 432.

_Stephen III., Pope_, his pontificate, 352;
  letter to the kings Charles and Carloman, 437.

_Stephen_, bishop of Dor, his memorial to the Lateran Council, 68.

_Sophronius_, patriarch of Jerusalem, appeals from Calvary to the
            Apostolic See under Honorius, as the chalif Omar enters, 69;
  his synodical letter, a chief document against the Monothelite heresy,
              107-109;
  calls the entrance of Omar “the abomination of desolation in the
              temple,” 123.

_Theodatus, King_, tyrannises over the Romans, 380;
  allows the election of Pope Agapetus, 380;
  forces him to go as ambassador to Constantinople, 380;
  imposes the choice of Pope Silverius, 380.

_Theodorich_, the Ostrogoth, his domination Arian, 372;
  his political clemency ends in blood, 373;
  an emissary of the eastern emperor Zeno, 374;
  failed to assimilate the Roman and Gothic elements in stable union, 375;
  allows the election of Popes Hormisdas and John I., imposes that of Pope
              Felix IV., 378;
  did not claim to confirm the election of Pope Symmachus, 377;
  begins with slaying Odoacer: ends by slaying Boethius and Symmachus and
              Pope John I., 375, 378;
  ruled with equity and died in remorse, and with him died the Gothic
              kingdom, 491.

_Theodorus, Pope_, his accession, 46;
  receives the patriarch Pyrrhus, renouncing his heresy in St. Peter’s,
              48;
  condemns him when recalcitrant, 48;
  names an apostolic vicar in Palestine, 49;
  dies and is buried at St. Peter’s, 50.

_Theophanes_, the Greek chronographist, marks the rise of the Arabian
            heresy as the scourge of Christian sins, 260;
  ascribes the conduct of the emperor Leo III. to a Mohammedan temper,
              335-6;
  calls St. Gregory II. “the most holy apostolic man,” 325;
  “the successor of Supreme Peter in his Chair,” 325;
  describes the tyranny of Constans II., 234;
  the murders of Justinian II. and his son, 280;
  the persecution of the monks by Constantine Kopronymus, 403.

_Toto_, the duke, seizes the Papal Chair for his brother, a layman, 431.

_Vitalian_, _Pope_, elected in 657, 229;
  receives as sovereign of Rome the emperor Constans II., 230, 232;
  consecrates Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, 235;
  cherishes the young English Church, 235;
  dies in 672, 237.

_Wandering_ of the nations, the northern and the southern compared,
            149-151.

_Zacharias_, _Pope_, elected and consecrated four days after the death of
            Gregory III. in 731, without the exarch’s confirmation, 344;
  his character by Anastasius, 345;
  during ten years keeps at bay Liutprand, Rachis, and Aistulf, 345;
  in his first year prevails over Liutprand at Terni, 346;
  in his third year prevails over him at Pavia, 347;
  in 749 prevails over king Rachis at Perugia, 348;
  gives him on his abdication the Benedictine habit, 349;
  in 751 resists the seizure of the exarchate by king Aistulf, 350;
  is invited by Pipin, mayor of the palace, to sanction his becoming king,
              351;
  declares that it is lawful for him to depose the Merovingian and become
              king in his stead, 351;
  dies the 14th March, 752, having thrice saved Rome, 352.





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FOOTNOTES


    1 Der Zeit-geist.

    2 It is ever to be borne in mind that at the time of the Council of
      Ephesus the Council of Constantinople in 381 ranked only as a local
      council of Eastern bishops, partially confirmed by Pope Damasus.

    3 Orbis dominus: ὁ Δεσπότης τῆς οἰκουμένης.

    4 Photius, i. 193.

    5 Döllinger, _Muhammed’s Religion_, p. 1.

    6 Gregorovius, ii. 112-3, first edition (afterwards a little altered),
      p. 102.

    7 As such she has merited and received the scoffs of Gibbon in full
      Voltairian foulness.

    8 Gregorovius, ii. 112, 3rd edit.

    9 See the article on this writer’s adventurous life by Card.
      Hergenrölher in the _Kirchen-lexicon_, i. 788.

   10 Gregorovius ii. 113, referring to Pagi, upon Baronius, year 625,
      sec. 17.

   11 See Gregorovius, ii. 105.

   12 Hist., iii. 7.

   13 See Hefele, iii. 267.

   14 See Rohrbacher-Rump, x. 247.

   15 I have shortened this from the original in Mansi, x. 1003, as read
      at St. Martin’s Council.

   16 Noted by Hefele, iii. 159.

   17 Gregorovius, ii. 128. 3rd Ed. From Anastasius, Mansi, x. 675.

   18 From the _Liber Pontificalis_.

   19 From the contemporaneous letter of St. Maximus to the Abbot
      Thalassius. Mansi, x. 677. Rohrbacher-Rump, x. 249.

   20 Stabiles illi et firmæ revera et immobilis Petræ ministri.

   21 See Hefele, iii. 154, 160.

   22 Gallandi, _Bibliotheca veterum Patrum_, Tom. xiii. 33.

   23 Gregorovius, ii. 130.

   24 Sta. Maria Maggiore.

   25 Photius, i. 202-3.

   26 See the whole as read in the Lateran Council of Pope Martin, in
      Mansi, x. 1019-1025.

   27 Gregorovius, ii. 138.

   28 Hefele, iii. 189; Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, anno 649.

   29 Mansi, x., 785-8.

   30 These facts are taken from the words of Pope Martin himself, in the
      Lateran Council.

   31 Hefele, iii, 188. Translated to “cruelty”.

_   32 Inferno_, xix. 69. Sappi ch’io fui vestitio del gran manto.

   33 As the Pope’s speech occupies six columns in Mansi, I have taken
      from Hefele, iii. 190-1, the above, which, he says, contains its
      chief import.

   34 See Mansi, x. 891-901. I have selected parts and omitted
      redundancies.

   35 Ταχέως οὐν ἀπὸ περάτω εἰς πέρατα δίελθε, μέχρις ἂν εἰς τὸν
      ἀποστολικὸν κὸν ἀπαντήσειας θρόνον, ἔνθα τῶν εὐσεβῶν δογμάτων εἰσὶν
      αἱ κρηπίδες. Μὴ ἅπαξ, μὴ δὶς, ἀλλὰ πολλάκις γνωρίζων τοῖς ἐκεῖσε
      πανιέροις ἀνδράσιν πάντα δί ἀκριβείας τὰ ἐνταῦθα κεκινημένα, καὶ μὴ
      ἐνδόσης ἐντόνως παρακαλῶν καὶ δεόμενος, ἔως ἂν ἐξ ἀποστολικῆς
      θεοσοφίας εἰς νεῖκος τὴν κρίσιν ἀγάγωσι, καὶ τῶν ἐπεισάκτων δογμάτων
      τελείαν ποιήσονται κανονικῶς τὴν κατάργησιν.

      The Pope thus solemnly addressed was Honorius. Mansi, x. 895, c.

   36 Hefele, iii. 190.

   37 ὅθεν εἰς τὴν τοῦ παναγίου Πέτρου τιμὴν, ὦ πάτερ πατρῶν, αὐτὸς ὁ
      ὑμετέρος ἀποστολικὸς θρόνος ἰδιοτρόπως ἤτοι μονογενῶς κατὰ θεῖον
      κεκλήρωται θέσπισμα τὰ ἰερὰ τῆς ἐκκλησίας δόγματα διερευνᾶσθαι καὶ
      ἀναψηλαθᾷν. Mansi, x. 920.

   38 Mansi, x. 797-804.

   39 Ep. 186. Quoted in “Formation of Christendom,” vol. v., p. 335.

   40 See Mansi, x. 827-832.

   41 Mansi, x. 834-843, and 843-850.

   42 Mansi, x. 1169.

   43 See the 15th and 14th letters of Pope Martin, written in his
      imprisonment at Constantinople. Mansi, x. 849-853.

   44 By this we learn that the imperial palace on the Palatine was still
      habitable, and occupied by the exarch when he came to Rome.

   45 Quia nos eum voluimus adorare sed cras—cras omnimodis occurremus et
      adorabimus sanctitatem vestram. The same word “adorare” is used to
      express the Pope’s acknowledgment of the exarch, and the exarch’s
      acknowledgment of the Pope.

   46 See Mansi, x. 853-862.

   47 A similar outrage upon another Pope suggests to Dante a similar
      identification of the Disciple with the Master—both speak of
      contemporaneous events; as Constans II. is to Pope Martin so
      Philippe-le-bel is to Pope Boniface VIII.

      Veggio in Alagna entrar lo fiordaliso,
      E nel Vicario suo Cristo esser catto.
      Veggiolo un’ altra volta esser deriso;
      Veggio rinnovellar l’aceto e il fele,
      E tra nuovi ladroni essere anciso.
      Veggio il nuovo Pilato si crudele,
      E cio nol sazia, ma, senza decreto,
      Porta nel tempio lo cupide vele.

      —_Purgatorio_, xx, 85.

   48 Letters 16 and 17, Mansi, x. 861, 862.

   49 So called in allusion to the Council at Chalcedon having been held
      in her church.

   50 See Rump, x. 121-6.

   51 Hefele, iii. 119.

   52 Vol. i. 110.

   53 Hefele, iii. 120.

   54 Letter of Sergius to Honorius, read in the 6th Council. Mansi, xi.
      532.

   55 Hefele, iii. 138.

   56 The synodal letter of Sophronius occupies 24 folio columns in Mansi,
      xi. 461-508. Its chief points are compressed by Hefele, iii.
      139-145, into six pages. I have drawn my quotation partly from
      Hefele, and partly from the original text.

   57 μήτραν εἰσδὺς ἀπειρόγαμον Μαρίας τῆς ἁγίας καὶ φαιδρᾶς καὶ θεόφρονος
      καὶ παντὸς ἐλευθέρας μολύσματος τοῦτε κατὰ σῶμα καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ
      διάνοιαν.—Mansi, xi. 473.

   58 St. Leo’s doctrine is contained in his words to S. Flavian, accepted
      and made its own by the Council of Chalcedon:—“Agit enim utraque
      forma (_i.e._ natura) cum alterius communione quod proprium est”.

   59 Compare A. de Vere, _Legends and Records_, p. 125—

      Arias since then hath died;
      Since then God’s Church is cloven. Since then, since then
      My empire too is cloven, and cloven in five.
      No choice remained. I never was the man
      To close my eyes against unwelcome truth.
      My sons, my nephews, these are each and all
      Alike ambitious men, and ineffectual.

   60 See the letter of St. Basil quoted above in vol. v., 231, _Throne of
      the Fisherman_.

   61 These may be found drawn out in eleven papers of the _Civiltà
      Catholica_ termed “La Chiesa e l’Impero,” 1855-6.

   62 See the letter in the 13th session of the Sixth Council, Mansi, xi.
      561, D.

   63 Damberger, ii. 11.

   64 Daniel, ix. 27.

   65 Damberger, ii. 18-20. Weiss, ii. 517-519-521, for the narrative. See
      also Weil, _die Chalifen_, Omar, 144.

   66 Damberger, ii. 22, for the following paragraph.

   67 Weil, _Geschichte der Chalifen_, i. 139-141.

   68 Weil, _Geschichte der Chalifen_, i. 144.

   69 Weil, _Geschicte der Chalifen_, i. 103-5.

   70 Newman’s _Theodoret_. Page 318.

   71 Card. Newman, _Theodoret_, p. 340, 342.

_   72 Richard II._, ii. 1.

   73 Card. Hergenrother’s articles in _Kirchen-Lexicon_ i. 946, 7, upon
      Antioch, and on Alexandria, i. 519-521, have supplied me with the
      following facts.

   74 Weil, _Islamitische Volker_, 58.

   75 Weil, _die Chalifen_, i. 165.

   76 See this letter in Mansi, x. 682-6.

   77 From the letter “ad Petram illustrem,” Gallandi, vol. xii. p.
      38.—Rump, x. 267.

   78 S. Maximi confessoris Græcorum theologi, tom. ii., Combefis, 672.

   79 That is by attributing _One Will_ to the Two Natures of Christ.

   80 Anastasius, in Gallandi, tom. xiii. 50.

   81 Gallandi, xiii. 71, translated.

   82 Hefele, iii. 323.

   83 Not from Anastasius, the Librarian, but from another source, in
      Gallandi, xiii. 74. See the narrative of Maximus in Hefele, iii.
      215-224.

   84 Held under the patriarch Peter, Photius, i. 206.

   85 Weil, _Islamitische Völker_, p. 2. I have taken from this
      distinguished Orientalist and German historian, who spent thirty
      years in the study of eastern documents, the chief details
      concerning the events of Mohammed’s life, which follow.

   86 Weil, p. 7-24, from whom I have taken the facts which follow.

   87 Weil, _Islamitische Völker_, 8.

   88 Weil, p. 10.

   89 Weil, p. 16.

   90 Weil, p. 17.

   91 Sura 33. Sale, p. 317.

   92 Weil, p. 18; see the 33rd Sura.

   93 Weil, p. 18.

   94 Weil, p. 19.

   95 Sale’s Koran, Sura 9.

   96 Weil, quoted by Rump, x. 88.

   97 Note in Sale’s Koran, 9th Sura, p. 128.

   98 See Sura 33.

   99 St. John Damascene, on the 101st heresy. Vol. I. 114.

  100 Quoted in _Mohammed’s Religion_, p. 23. The annalist is Raima.

  101 From Damberger, i. 394.

  102 Damberger, i. 395.

  103 Weiss, _Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte_, ii. 516.

  104 Weil, _Islamitische Völker_, Abu Bekr, p. 42.

_  105 Mohammed’s Religion_, p. 4.

  106 Nirschl, iii. 612.

  107 Weil, _Islamitische Völker_, 26-29, _der Koran_. Translated.

  108 Döllinger, _Mohammed’s Religion_, p. 7.

  109 Döllinger, _Mohammed’s Religion_, 38-40.

_  110 Mohammed’s Religion_, p. 141.

  111 πλὴν ἵνα ἰδῇς κύρι᾽ Ἀββᾶ, ὅτι μικρὰν ἄνεσιν ἐὰν λάβωμεν ἐκ τῆς
      συγχύσεως τῶν ἐθνῶν, ἀρμόσασθαι ὑμῖν ἔχομεν μὰ τὴν ἁγιαν τριάδα, καὶ
      τὸν Πάπαν τὸν νῦν ἐπαιρόμενον, καὶ πάντας τοῦς ἐκεῖσε λαλοῦντας, καὶ
      τοὺς λοιπούς σου μαθητάς καὶ πάντας ὑμᾶς χωνεύομεν ἔκαστον ἐν τῷ
      ἐπιτηδείῳ αὐτοῦ τόπῳ, ὡς ἐϗωνεύθη Μαρτῖνος.—Gallandi, tom. xiii. 73.

  112 Hefele, iii. 223.

  113 Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, A.D. 654.

  114 Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, A.D. 655.

  115 Mansi, xi. 13.

  116 See Muratori, A.D. 665, who quotes from Paulus Diaconus, lib. 5, ch.
      xi. p. 336 and 366.

  117 The words in which Pope Felix III. addressed Zeno, the first who
      became sole ruler after the cessation of the western empire. See
      above Vol. vi. p. 80.

  118 Hist., iv. 1-2.

  119 The facts from Photius.

  120 Jaffé, p. 167, who refers to Mansi, xi. 179.

  121 See Hergenröther, _Kirchengeschichte_, i. p. 365.

  122 Translated from Hergenröther’s _Kirchengeschichte_, i. 365-8.

  123 Letter of the Sixth Council in answer at its conclusion to the Pope.
      Mansi, xi. 684-688.

  124 Address of Council to emperor, Mansi, xi. 665, C. ὁ δὲ κορυφαιότατος
      ἡμῖν συνηγωνίζετο πρωταπόστολος; τὸν γὰρ ἐκείνου μιμητὴν καὶ τῆς
      καθέδρας δίαδοχον εἴχομεν ὑπαλείφοντα.

  125 Theophanes had been put in the place of Macarius, deposed by the
      Council.

  126 Mansi, xi. 697-712.

  127 Mansi, xi. 716 B.

  128 προτρέπομεν τὴν ὑμετέραν πανίερον κορυφὴν.

  129 See Mansi, ii. 725, etc.

  130 τοὺς τῆς ἐκκλησίας κωνσταντινουπόλεως ὑποκαθιστὰς μᾶλλον ἠπερ
      καθηγητάς.

  131 Mansi, xi. 1050-1055.

  132 Rump, x. 465.

  133 Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, A.D. 681.

  134 Hergenröther, _Kirchengeschichte_, i. 369.—Jungmann, _de Causa
      Honorii Romani Pontificis_, p. 430.

  135 Gregorovius, ii. 112 (3rd edition).

  136 St. Maximus, vol. ii. p. 106.

  137 Theophanes, see the passage p. 506-511; ending with the words
      quoted. It has inaccuracies which prevent citing the whole passage;
      but the spirit of it is both true and of great importance.

  138 Döllinger, _Lehrbuch der Kirchen-geschichte_, sec. 69, quoted by
      Hergenröther.

  139 Photius, i. 217.

  140 Hefele, iii. 313.

  141 The pretention shown in this by the emperor Justinian II. is noted
      by Le Quien, _Oriens Christianus_, i. 140.

  142 Hefele, iii. 300-331.

  143 Photius, i. 221.

  144 Photius, i. 223.

  145 From Anastasius and Gregorovius.

  146 Gregorovius, ii. 205 (1st edition).

  147 Gregorovius, i. 209, 1st edition translated: in the 3rd edition he
      has made omissions and alterations.

  148 Anastasius.

  149 Theophanes, 574.

  150 Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, A.D. 709. Niehues, i. 485.

  151 Anastasius, _Life of Pope Constantine_.

  152 Anastasius, _Life of Gregory_, iv.

  153 Anastasius, in his letter to Pope John VIII., prefixed to the
      Seventh General Council, quoted by Photius, i. 223.

  154 From Theophanes, p. 574-584. I have shortened as much as possible a
      narrative in its details too horrible to repeat.

  155 Gregorovius, ii. 198.

  156 Theophanes p. 688.

  157 Mansi, xii. 196.

  158 τούτοις δὴ τὰ κατὰ τὴν ὑμετέραν ἀποστολικὴν προεδρίαν ἔχομεν
      παραβάλλειν, ἁγιώτατοι, καὶ κεφαλὴν τῆς κατὰ Χριστὸν ἱερωσύνης
      κανονικῶς ὑμᾶς λογιζόμενοι.

  159 Rex Theodoricus hereticus hoc audiens, exarsit in iram, et totam
      Italiam voluit gladio extinguere.—_Book of the Popes_, Mansi, vii.
      599.

_  160 Book of the Popes_ given in Mansi, viii. 845.

  161 Gregorovius, ii. 240 (1st edition).

  162 The letter _Consideranti mihi_, Mansi xi. 234.

  163 Photius, i. 207.

  164 Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, anno 726.

  165 Beserem tot malorum auctorem atque incitamentum. _Historia Concilii
      Nicæni II._—Mansi, xii. 955, a.

  166 See Reumont, ii. 101.

  167 Mansi, xii. 960-974, as read in the Seventh Council.

  168 The reading here is doubtful.

  169 Mansi, xii. 975-981. This letter also was read in the Seventh
      Council.

  170 See _Brunengo Origini_, p. 32, Mansi, xii. 227.

  171 See Photius. i. 234, for the authorities presently quoted.

  172 Πέτρου τοῦ κορυφαίου σύνθρονος. Theophanes, p. 628.

  173 St. John Damasc., _de Imaginibus Orat._, ii. c. 12. Vol. I. p. 335.

  174 See Renmont, ii. pp. 104-5.

  175 Mansi, xii. 244.

  176 Baronius, anno 731, 1.

  177 Reumont, ii. p. 106.

  178 See Rohrbacher Kellner, vol. xi. p. 175.

  179 Theophanes, p. 631. τότε ὁ θεομάχος, ἐπὶ πλεῖον ἐκμανεὶς, Ἀραβικῷτε
      φρονήματι κρατυνόμενος ... ὅπερ οὐδ᾽ αὐτοί ποτε οἵ διδάσκαλοι αὐτοῦ
      Ἄραβες ἐποίησαν εἰς τοὺς κατὰ τὴν ἑῶαν χριστιανόυς.

  180 See above, vol. vi, p. 302.

  181 See Reumont, ii. 108.

  182 From the _Liber Carolinus_, quoted by Mansi. xii. 184.

  183 Brunengo, _Le Origini della Sovranità temporale dei Papi_, p. 106,
      quoting inscriptions recorded by Troya, Codice diplomatico.

_  184 Litteræ divales._

  185 Anastasius, _Vita Stephani Papæ_. Mansi, xii. 521-532, from which
      the following quotations are taken.

  186 Mansi, xii. 524.

  187 Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, 753.

  188 Brunengo, _Le Origini_, etc., p. 135.

  189 Reumont, ii. p. 115.

  190 Mansi, xii. 543. This letter I have much shortened: but nothing
      important is omitted.

  191 Reumont resumed, ii. p. 116.

_  192 Vita Stephani Papæ II._ Mansi, xii. 531.

  193 See Reumont, ii. 118.

  194 “De manu gentium.”

_  195 Epis._ xiii.; Mansi, viii. 60.

  196 A. de Vere, _Legends and Records, Amalasunta_, p. 278.

_  197 Stimmen aus Maria-Laach_, vol. viii. 42-44.

  198 Niehues, vol. i. p. 434.

  199 Niehues, vol. i. p. 436.

  200 Niehues, _Kaiserthum uud Papstthum_, vol. i. 437.

  201 Niehues, p. 446.

_  202 Stimmen aus Maria-Laach_, viii. p. 48. _Die Regierungen und die
      Papstwahl._

_  203 Vita Pelagii Papæ_, ii.—Mansi, ix. 879.

  204 From the _Liber diurnus Romanorum Pontificum_, Tit. iii.

  205 Niehues, vol. i. 462-3.

_  206 Ep._, v. 42.

  207 The statue called Ἀντιφωνήτης, the Answerer, as having miraculously
      answered the appeal of a friendless stranger.

  208 Kellner, vol. ii. p. 363, in the German edition of Rohrbacher’s
      History.

  209 The following four pages are taken from Kellner, p. 407, who has
      drawn the facts from Theophanes, p. 371.

  210 Photius, p. 242, with note 97 from George Hamartolus.

  211 Photius, i. 295.

  212 ἡ οἱκουμένη.

  213 Photius, i. p. 295.

  214 I have in this chapter made continual use of Father Bruneugo’s two
      works, _I primi Papi-Re e l’Ultimo dei Re Longobardi_, and _Le
      Origini della Sovranitá Temporale dei Papi_. They are quoted under
      the _Le Origini_, &c., and _I primi Papi-Re_.

  215 See Gfrörer, _Papst Gregorius VII._, v. 10-11.

  216 See his visit described in chapter vi. vol. v. p. 243.

  217 Hoensbroech, _P. Paul von._—_Eutstehung und Entwicklung des
      Kirchenstaates_ in the _Stimmen aus Maria-Laach_, July 1, 1889.

  218 Hoensbroech quoted from the Jew, Samuel Sugenheim, in his history of
      the rise and formation of the State of the Church, a prize essay
      crowned at Göttingen in 1854.

  219 By Biachini Giovini, quoted by Hoensbroech, p. 18, who gives 85
      German square miles.

_  220 Annali d’Italia_, anno 752.

  221 Adolf Menzel, _Geschichte der Deutschen_, Book III. ch. xvi. 448,
      quoted by von Hoensbroech, p. 34.

  222 Mansi, xii. 546-9. Eleventh letter of the _Codex Carolinus_.

  223 Anastasius.

_  224 I primi Papi-Re_, p. 25.

_  225 I primi Papi-Re_, p. 27.

_  226 Ib._, p. 39.

_  227 Ib._, p. 52.

_  228 Ib._, p. 60-63.

_  229 Anastasius_, Mansi, xii, p. 686.

  230 Mansi, xii. 695-8.

  231 Kellner, p. 475.

  232 Kellner, p. 475.

_  233 I primi Papi-Re_, p. 109, 117.

  234 Kellner, p. 467, from _Anastasius_, who put these words into the
      mouth of Pope Adrian himself, addressing the ambassadors of
      Desiderius. Mansi, xii, 726.

_  235 Anastasius_, Mansi, xii. 726.

  236 From _Anastasius_, textually. Mansi, xii. 727.

  237 Kellner, p. 479.

  238 Narrative chiefly drawn from _I primi Papi-Re_, p. 187, etc.

_  239 Anastasius_, literally.

  240 Totum hiberni temporis spatium _multa moliendo_
      consumpsit—_Annales,_ ann., 773.

_  241 Anastasius_, Mansi xii. 736.

_  242 Anastasius_, Mansi xii. 737.

  243 Brunengo, _I primi Papi-Re_, 241-2.

_  244 Vita Caroli_, M. n. 6. _Fasti Carolini_, found and quoted by Mai.

  245 Muratori, _Annali d’Italia_, a. 774, quoted by Brunengo, _I primi
      Papi-Re_, p. 260.

  246 For the felicity of _Italian_ subjects of the Lombards, see Troya:
      _Della condizione dei Romani vinti dai Longobardi_. Brunengo, p.
      260.

  247 Kellner, ii. 487-9.

  248 Origini, p. 317-319.

_  249 Codex Carolinus_, Ep. (Jaffe) 54.

  250 Rohrbacher-Kellner, p. 489.

  251 From Origini, etc., p. 297.

  252 Origini, p. 271 more or less followed in this page.

  253 Rohrbacher-Kellner, xi. p. 105.

  254 See above, Vol. v. p. 254.

  255 See Vol. v. p. 217.

  256 Kurth, vol. ii. 76.

  257 From Weiss, ii. 537-8.

  258 Reumont, ii. 128-9.

  259 Rohrbacher-Kellner, vol. xi. p. 553.

  260 Phillips, _Kirchenrecht_, vol. iii. 51.

_  261 Anastasius_, Mansi, xiii. 930.

_  262 Anastasius_, Mansi, xiii. 932.

_  263 Anastasius._

  264 Jungmann, _15th Dissertation_, vol. iii. p. 176, translated.

  265 Reumont, ii. 133.

  266 Kurth, ii. 242.

  267 Kurth, ii. 256-8, drawn from.

  268 Hergenröther, _Kirchengeschichte_, i. 507-8.

  269 Phillips, sec. 127, vol. iii. p. 202, 205.