I say this was largely due to the appalling exhaustion and ruin of Italy in the Gothic war; but there was something else which we must not forget. The Gothic war was a religious war. The Arianism of the Goths had really threatened our civilisation. But the Lombards were largely mere heathens. Their heathenism was not at all dangerous to us as a heresy must always be.[1] Therefore Italy never roused herself from her exhaustion, one might almost say her indifference. It was only her material well-being that was at stake, her future was safe. Her great attempt against the Lombards was a spiritual effort, was an effort for their conversion, and their final discomfiture, wrought not from within the peninsula, but from over the Alps, did not involve their expulsion from Italy, but was seized upon as the opportunity for the re-establishment in name and in fact of the Western Empire, and for the great crowning of Charlemagne by the pope in S. Peter's church.

[Footnote 1: It was not the paganism of the Italian Renaissance but the heresy of the Teutons which destroyed the unity of Europe in the sixteenth century.]

Italy, and with Italy Europe, were, then, saved from nothing less than death when Narses finally disposed of Totila in the Apennines in 552; but that war which had a result so very glorious had materially ruined the country.

From this general bankruptcy one city certainly escaped; that city was Ravenna, which since the year 540, when she had opened her gates to Belisarius, had been free from attack, and had more than ever been established as the capital of the West. That position was secured to her, as I have already said, by her geographical position, which now that Constantinople had reasserted the claim of the empire to Italy established her more than at any time in her history as the necessary seat of military and administrative power; and from Ravenna as from the citadel the whole of the second part of the Gothic war was waged by the imperialists. As we might expect the true nature of that war is immediately manifested in her history at this time.

It would seem that very shortly after the occupation of Ravenna by the imperialists in 540, the re-edification of the city and its splendid embellishment was begun. The church of S. Vitalis begun by S. Ecclesius (c. 521-532) was finished and gloriously adorned with mosaics by S. Maximianus (c 546-556), and not long after S. Apollonaris in Classe begun by S. Ursicinus (532-536) was completed and adorned by the same great bishop.

But this eagerness to mark and to express in such glorious monuments as these the great victory for Catholicism and civilisation that was then in the winning becomes even more manifest after the death of Totila and the end of the war. To the S. Agnellus and to the Church of Ravenna Justinian "rectae fidei Augustus" gave all the substance of the Goths, according to the Liber Pontificalis,[1] "not only in Ravenna itself, but in the suburban towns and in the villages, both sanctuaries and altars, slaves and maidens, whatever was theirs. S. Mater Ecclesia Ravennas, vera mater, vera orthodoxa nam ceterae multae Ecclesiae falsam propter metum et terrores Principum superinduxere doctrinam; haec vero et veram et unicam Sanctam Catholicam tenuit Fidem, nunquam mutavit fluctuationem sustinuit, a tempestate quassata immobilis permansit. Therefore S. Agnellus the archbishop reconciled all the churches of the Goths, which in their time or in that of King Theodoric had been built or had been occupied by the false doctrines of the Arians.... He thus reconciled the church of S. Eusebius which Unimundus the (Arian) bishop had built in the twenty-third year of King Theodoric. In the same year he reconciled the church of S. Georgius (S. Giorgio ad Tabulam fuori delle Mura) ... the church of S. Sergius which is in Classis and of S. Zenone which is in Caesarea." In Ravenna itself he reconciled the churches of S. Theodorus (S. Spirito), S. Maria in Cosmedin (the Arian Baptistery), the church of S. Martin (S. Apollinare Nuovo) which Theodoric had built, which was called Caelum Aureum and which Agnellus re-decorated with the mosaics of the Martyrs and Virgins we see and the effigies of Justinian and himself.

[Footnote 1: Agnellus, Liber Pontificalis (ed. Holder-Egger. P. 334) ad vitam Sancti Agnelli.]

Such was the work achieved in the fortunate capital. But ruined Italy awaited a more necessary, if less splendid, labour. This can have been nothing less than the resurrection of the country, which, in those eighteen years of war, can have become little less than a desert; and, as we might expect, all Italy desolate and depopulated looked to Justinian to succour her in her misery if she was not to perish under her ruins and her debts. The first step in that work was undertaken in the very year of the peace, in the August of the year 554, and it took the form of a solemn "Pragmatic Sanction" addressed to Narses and to Antiochus, the Prefect of Italy,[1] in Ravenna. It had for its object the social peace of Italy, the re-establishment of order out of the chaos of the Ostrogothic war; and it is significant of the true position of affairs that this decree asserts that it is issued by the emperor in reply to the petition of the pope.

[Footnote 1: The fact that it was addressed to both surely seems to show that Narses at this time only held a military power in Italy. This is interesting as touching the discussion later on of the genesis of the exarchate.]

It consists of twenty-seven articles, and first establishes what is to be considered as still having authority in that tempestuous past; what part of it is to remain and to be confirmed and what is to be utterly swept away. Thus the emperor confirms all dispositions made by Amalasuntha, Athalaric, and Theodahad, as well as all his own acts—and these would include Theodoric's—and those of Theodora. But everything done by "the most wicked tyrant Totila" is null and void, "for we will not allow these law-abiding days of ours to take any account of what was done by him in the time of his tyranny."[1] Totila had indeed most cruelly attacked the great landed proprietors whom he suspected of too great an attachment for Constantinople; he had attacked them in their persons and in their wealth. With a single stroke of the pen Justinian, as it were, effaced all the ordinances of the tyrant and rendered again to their legitimate masters, as far as it could be done, their lands, their flocks, their peasants, and their slaves which had been taken from them, or which fear had caused them to alienate.

[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, op. cit. vi. pp. 519-520.]

Such were the political achievements of the decree. Nor were its financial provisions less far-reaching. Something had to be done to meet the crisis resulting from the enormous quantity of debt. Everywhere Justinian undertook great public works, and tried to repair the destruction caused by the war; but it is probable that in reality he achieved very little. He had enriched the Church; he had re-established the great proprietors in their lands and their rights, but the industry and commerce of Italy, save perhaps at Ravenna and at Naples, he could not restore. And we seem to understand that the mere lack of men left whole districts of Italy uncultivated and desert.

As for the administrative and legal clauses of the decree, they gave the Italian—the Roman as he is called—the right to have his suit heard by a civil judge instead of a military official. This established the security of the Italian against the barbaric hosts the imperial armies had brought into the country. But perhaps more important, and certainly more significant, is the twelfth clause of the decree which relates to the way in which the Judices Provinciarum are to be appointed. "We order," says Justinian, "that only fit and proper persons able to administer the local government shall be chosen, and this by the bishops and chief persons of each province from the inhabitants of that province." This clause was soon proved to contain so much wisdom that in 569 by Justinian's successor it was extended to the provinces of the Eastern empire.

In all this we recognise the work of the great reformer who had already produced the Corpus Juris Civilis, consisting of the Institutes, Digest, Code, and Novellae, which more than anything else he did—and he did everything—determined that Europe, which he had secured for ever, should be a Roman thing established upon Roman Law. But are we also to see in this great man the creator of the exarchate, that citadel of the empire in Italy which was to endure, though almost all else perished, till Charlemagne appeared and the empire itself suddenly re-arose, armed at all points and ready for battle? It might seem that we are not to attribute that great scheme to Justinian, but rather to a later recognition of the force and reality of the disasters that so few years after his death descended once more upon Italy.

When Narses at the head of the armies of Justinian had in 554 conquered the Goths and possessed Italy, the administrative divisions of the peninsula would seem to have remained almost the same as they had been in the time of Honorius. Indeed the re-entry of Italy within the empire was accompanied by no important change in the provincial divisions of the peninsular because there was no necessity for it. Narses, who ruled just eleven years in Ravenna, was never known by the title of exarch. On the contrary, Procopius and Agathias call him simply the general-in-chief of the Roman army [Greek: o Romaion strataegos], and pope Pelagius calls him Patricius et Dux in Italia, and others, among them Gregory the Great and Agnellus, simply Patricius. But it is obvious that there was something new in the official situation and that certain extraordinary powers were conferred upon Narses. And it is the same with his successor Longinus. All the texts that mention him, including the Liber Pontificalis, call him Praefectus. But the transformation from which the exarchate arose was more obscure and far more slow than any official reform of Justinian's could have been. It is in part the result of the new condition of the country, which Justinian had had to take into account, but it is much more the result of the progress of the Lombard conquest and the new necessities of defence, which not one of the three great men who had restored Italy to the empire lived to see.

For Belisarius and Justinian both died in 565, and Narses, who was recalled in that year by the foolish and insolent Sophia, the wife of the new emperor Justin II., seems to have died about 572.

It is difficult to determine to which of these three great and heroic figures Italy, and through Italy, Europe, owes most, but since it was Justinian who chose and employed them we must, I think, accord him, here too, the first place in our remembrance.

Belisarius, who had fought the first great war so gloriously against Vitiges, and for so long and with so little encouragement had opposed Totila in the second, is of course one of the great soldiers of the world and perhaps the greatest the empire ever employed. His capture of Ravenna, by stratagem it is true, but against time and, as it were, in spite of the emperor, brought the first Gothic war to an end, and would, had he been left in Italy a few months longer, have prevented all the long drawn out agony of the second. As it was his achievement, and his achievement alone, made that second war something better than the hopeless affair it seemed for so long, and though he himself to all appearances made little headway against Totila, it was his series of heroic campaigns, in which he refused despair, that made the ever glorious march of Narses possible, and the final crushing of the barbarian in the Apennines after all but the crown of his endeavour.

Of his master, the great emperor, it is not for me to speak since to this day his works speak for him. The thirty-eight years of his reign are the most brilliant period of the later Roman empire, and if the military triumphs he conceived were the work of Belisarius and Narses we must attribute to him alone the magnificent conception, the tireless energy, and the heroic purpose which established the great pillars of the Corpus Juris Civilis which is the legal foundation of mediaeval and of modern Europe, the basis of all Canon Law and of all Civil Law in every civilised country. Of his great ecclesiastical polity perhaps we must speak with less enthusiasm, though not with less wonder; while his glorious buildings remain only less enduring than his codification of the laws. If in Ravenna we are most nearly and splendidly reminded of him in S. Vitale, we do not forget that he was the creator of perhaps the greatest ecclesiastical building left to us, the mighty church—lost to us now for near five hundred years—of S. Sophia in Constantinople. On the whole we see in Justinian the greatest of all the emperors save Augustus, and perhaps Constantine. Nor can any later state show us so great a ruler.

Justinian in his Italian designs had been very well served by Belisarius, nor were his ideas less splendidly carried out by Narses. Indeed, in many ways the eunuch was the better instrument and especially in administration. He ruled in peace in Ravenna as I have said for eleven years, devoting himself to the resurrection of unhappy Italy. In this we may think he was as successful as the shortness of the time of his rule would allow. The catastrophe that put an end alike to his work and to the regeneration of Italy was the death of Justinian. In that very year, 565, the great eunuch was deposed, an insulting recall reached him from the empress Sophia, and he retired to Rome, where he passed the few years that remained to him in retirement, and died there, it is thought, in 572.

A curious and certainly an unproved accusation hangs over his name. It seems that his government of Italy was not wholly grateful to the Italians, who it must be remembered were ruined and whom many years of eager self-denial would hardly render solvent again. Now the business of Narses was to achieve this solvency and to pay out of Italy some sort of interest upon the enormous sums Justinian had disbursed for the great war. If he incurred the hatred of the Italians it would not be surprising, nor would it lead us to accuse him of tyranny. "Where Narses the eunuch rules," they said, "he makes us slaves." This cry came to the ears of the emperor for whom it was meant. No doubt, being a fool, he was anxious to be rid of Justinian's pro-consul. However that may be, Narses was recalled, the empress, it is said, sending him a message to the effect that as he was a eunuch she would appoint him to apportion the spinning to the women of her household. To this Narses is reported to have replied, doubtless with much the same smile as that with which he had greeted the equestrian display of Totila, that he would spin her a thread of which neither she nor the emperor Justin would be able to find the end. In the course of time this mysterious threat, which was probably never uttered, was said to refer to the enormous catastrophe which within three years of Narses' recall fell upon Italy—the Lombard invasion. And Narses, who had employed the Lombards in the last campaign against Totila, was said to have revenged himself by inviting them into Italy to possess it.

The accusation rests upon no good authority, and is altogether unlikely when we remember how great a part of his life had been devoted to the incorportion of Italy within the empire. But there is this much truth in it we may perhaps think; that had the great eunuch been left in command, Alboin would not have dared to come on, and if he had dared, would have found an army and an Italy ready to fling him back into his darkness.



IX

THE CITADEL OF THE EMPIRE IN ITALY

THE LOMBARD INVASION

It was upon the second day of April 568, upon the Monday within the octave of Easter, that Alboin set out to cross the Julian Alps, to descend upon an Italy which even the great Narses had not been able, in the short sixteen years of peace he had secured her, to recover from the utter exhaustion of a generation of war. No army awaited him, no attempt was made to crush his rude and barbarous army in the marches, he was unopposed, save that the bishop of Treviso begged him to spare the property of his church, and presently the whole province of Venetia, with the exception of Padua, Mantua, and Monselice, was in his hands. Those who could, doubtless fled away, for the most part to that new settlement in the Venetian lagoons which was presently to give birth to Venice and which had been founded by those who had fled from Attila; but there were many who could not flee. These came under the cruel yoke of the invader. Perhaps Alboin spent the winter in Verona, perhaps in Friuli; wherever it was, he but prepared his advance and still no one appeared to say him nay. By the end of 569 all Cisalpine Gaul with Liguria and Milan, except Pavia, the coast, Cremona, Piacenza, and a few smaller places, were in his hands. Indeed, in all that terrible flood of disasters we hear of but one great city which offered even for a time a successful resistance. This was Pavia, naturally so strongly defended by the Po and the Ticino. Alboin established an army about it, and swore to massacre all its inhabitants since it alone had dared to resist him. Pavia fell to the Lombard, after a three years' siege, in 572; but Alboin was prevented from carrying out his vow, and not long after Pavia became the capital of the Lombard power in Italy.

Meantime, those three years, during which Pavia held her own, had not been wasted by the barbarian. He crossed the Apennines, we may believe as Totila had done, by the old deserted way to Fiesole, brought all Tuscany under his yoke and a great part both of central and of southern Italy, establishing there two "duchies" as the centres of his power at Spoleto and Benevento. Then he returned to take Pavia, all this time besieged, and in the same year, 572, it is probable that Piacenza fell also, and Mantua. All Italy was in confusion, the system of government re-established by Narses broken; the work of Justinian's reconquest seemed all undone. That it was not wholly undone, that it lived on and was at last re-established, we owe to two great facts: the conversion of the Lombards to Catholicism by Gregory the Great and the establishment of the exarchate, the entrenchment of Roman power and civilisation in Ravenna. Let us consider these things.

The Lombards were barbarians and therefore pagans or Arians, but their Arianism was of a different kind from that of the Huns, different even from that of the Ostrogoths. Indeed, though the Lombards may be called Arian, for indeed such Christianity as they possessed was wholly Arian, they were but little removed from mere heathenism. It is true that they sacked churches, slaughtered priests, and carried off the holy vessels everywhere as they came into Italy; but they did this, it would seem, not from a sectarian hatred of the Catholic Faith, but from mere heathenism. As pagans, heathen or semi-heathen, they might be converted, and thus their advent was ultimately less dangerous to our civilisation than the conquest of the Ostrogoths threatened to be. I do not mean to suggest that that advent was without danger. It was of course full of dreadful peril, but that peril was chiefly material and not spiritual; it could destroy, but not create; moreover, since in the main it was pagan, it could only destroy material things.

It is unthinkable that the Italy of the sixth century was for a moment in danger of losing its Faith, of being dechristianised. That, all things considered, in the third fourth and fifth centuries there had more than once been a real danger of the victory of some heresy, and especially of that subtle Arianism, the forerunner of Mahometanism, which all the invaders professed, and most of them so bitterly, we know; as we know that with the hard won victory of the Catholic Faith the whole of the future was safe; but that in the Italy of the sixth century the Faith was in danger from a horde of semi-pagan barbarians is not to be thought of. To this extent, and it is three parts at least of the whole, the Lombard invasion was less perilous than those which had come and passed away before it. Once more, the Catholic church was to be victorious, but in a different fashion. It cast out the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, and the Ostrogoths from Italy, for it could not convert them; the Lombards it converted and they remained. It converted them because they were rather heathen than Arian, and the victory was won by that great Gregory who, seeing our forefathers in the Forum of Rome, and loving them for their bright hair and open faces—non Angli sed Angeli si Christiani—sent S. Austin to turn them too from their pagan rites and gather them into the fold of Christ.

But there was something else beside the fact that the Lombards were pagan, and therefore to be converted, which was a part of the salvation of Italy.

It is possible that the Lombards might have been as Catholic as the Franks and yet, barbarians as they were, have destroyed civilisation in Italy, have broken the continuity of Europe, have obliterated all our traditions, and altogether undone the great work of Justinian. It is possible, but it is highly improbable; that it was impossible we owe to Ravenna.

Ravenna was impregnable and her seaward gate was always open. During all the years of the Lombard domination she was the citadel of the empire in Italy, the seat of the prefect and the exarch, the imperial representatives.

It must be grasped that even after the fall of Ticinum in 572, as the Byzantine historian tells us, perhaps no one, and certainly no one in Ravenna, regarded the invasion as anything but a passing evil like all the other barbarian incursions. No one believed Italy to be irrevocably lost; on the contrary, everyone was assured that the lost provinces could soon be delivered again.

This may explain, though perhaps it cannot excuse, the passive attitude of Longinus, the successor of Narses, who in Ravenna represented the emperor in Italy, perhaps till the year 584. We know nothing of any attempts he may have made to stem the barbarian flood, and indeed the only incident in his career with which we are acquainted is romantic rather than military or political. For when Rosamond, the queen of the Lombards, murdered her husband Alboin in his palace at Verona, because he had forced her to pledge him in a goblet fashioned from the skull of her father, she fled away with her stepdaughter Albswinda, the great Lombard spoil, and her two accomplices, Helmichis her lover and Peredeus the chamberlain, and came to seek shelter in Ravenna. It seems she had written to Longinus and he, perhaps, hoping for some political advantage, and certainly full of the tales of her beauty, sent a ship up the Po to bring her to him with her two companions. When he saw her he found that rumour had not lied, and longing for her, suggested that she should kill Helmichis and marry himself. Whether from fear or ambition she did this thing, and slew her lover with a cup of poison as he came from the bath. But he, even as he drank understanding all, suddenly forced the same cup upon her, and standing over her with a naked sword forced her to drink; so that they both lay dead upon the pavement.

Albswinda and the Lombard treasure, the spoil of the cities of Italy, were sent with Peredeus to Constantinople. And it may be that it was in them Longinus hoped to find his political advantage; in this, however, he was deceived. It is true that a pause in the Lombard advance followed the death of Alboin, and that Cleph, his successor, was soon murdered. But the pause in the advance, though, through it all, Rome was blockaded, was due to the fact that Authari, the heir to the Lombard throne, was but a boy. Nevertheless, this interval was used by Constantinople to despatch Baduarius, the son-in-law of the emperor Justin, to Italy with an army, but without success; and in 578, the year in which Justin died, the Lombards were bought off from Rome with imperial gold, only to turn upon the very citadel of the empire in Italy, Ravenna itself. In the year 579 Faroald, duke of Spoleto, fell upon Classis, and took it and spoiled it.

This, however, was but an isolated effort, and though the Lombards held Classis, they achieved little else in Italy till after Authari was chosen king in 584.

In the following year Smaragdus, as we may think, was appointed to succeed Longinus and apparently with new powers, and three years later, in the very year that the heroic Insula Comacina was taken by the Lombards, Classis was recovered for the empire.

The Lombards had then been ravaging Italy for twenty years, an extraordinary change had come over the provinces that Justinian had so hardly recovered, and this change is at once visible in the imperial administration in Italy. The exarchate appears.

It has been maintained by many historians that the great reform of which the establishment of the exarch and the exarchate is the result was the work of that very great reformer Justinian. It was worthy of him; but the Italy he knew and saved was not in need of any change in her administrative divisions which, as I have said, remained under Narses almost the same as they had been in the last days of the Western empire.[1]

[Footnote 1: For what follows cf. Diehl, Etudes sur l'administration Byzantine dans l'Exarchat de Ravenne (1888).]

The transformation out of which the exarchate arose was slow and obscure, not the work of a great creative mind, but of necessity. It was the result of many causes which it is not difficult to name; they were the progress of the Lombard conquest, the condition imposed upon the unconquered parts of Italy by that conquest, and especially the new necessity for defence imposed on the imperial power.

It is obvious that the result of the first ten years of that conquest was a complete destruction of the limits of the old Roman provinces of Italy. A new grouping of territories was not only necessary but was already forming itself under the pressure of the conquest and its terror. The regions which had escaped the barbarians were drawing together without any regard for the ancient provincial divisions and were grouping themselves about the cities, where the resistance, such as it was, was concentrating itself, and where the imperial administration had taken refuge.

If we confine ourselves for the moment to Italy north of the Apennines, we shall find that in the old province of Liguria the vicar of the prefect of the praetorium had fled from Milan to Genoa, and that about that city the debris of the old province was slowly re-assembling itself. In Venetia we shall find that the governor had departed to Grado, and about this town as a centre the eastern part of the old province was gathered. The western part of that province, cut off from its capital, attached itself by force of circumstances to what remained of Aemilia and of Flaminia, whose neighbour she was, and these fragments of the ancient provinces all together grouped themselves about, or found their centre in, Ravenna, the capital of Flaminia and the residence of the prefect of Italy.

In these new groupings the great pre-occupation and the supreme interest are defence—the defence of civilisation against the barbarian.

Now, it was to regulate this new state of affairs that the exarchate was created; or rather the exarchate was the official acknowledgment of a state of affairs that the disastrous invasion of the Lombards had brought about. The new order was established at the end of the reign of Justin II. (565-578) under a new and supreme official. Without doing away with the prefect of Italy the emperor placed over him as supreme head of the new administration the exarch[1] who was both the military commander-in-chief and the governor-general of Italy; and, since the chief need of Italy was defence, without entirely suppressing the civil administration, he placed at the head of each of the re-organised provinces a certain military officer—the duke.

[Footnote 1: For the discussion of the derivation of the title "Exarch," see Diehl, op. cit. pp. 15-16.]

The earliest document that remains to us in which we find definite mention of the exarch is the famous letter, dated October 4, 584, of pope Pelagius II. to the deacon Gregory, his nuncio in Constantinople. It is probable that the exarch at this time was Smaragdus, but it is extremely improbable that he was the first to bear the new title. This it would seem was a much nobler and more notable person.

It will be remembered that in the year 575 Baduarius, the son-in-law of the emperor, had appeared in Italy at the head of an army, had been beaten by the Lombards, and a little later had died, probably in 575.[1] This man was not only a great Byzantine official, but the destined successor of Justin and one of the first personages of the empire. It is obvious, if at such a moment he commanded the imperial armies in Italy, he was supreme governor of the province And it seems certain that it was to mark the amalgamation in him of the two offices, military and civil, that the new title of exarch was created.[2]

[Footnote 1: Migne, lxxii. 865; Joannes Biclarensis, s.a. 575; cf. Hodgkin, op. cit. v. p. 195, and Diehl, u.s.]

[Footnote 2: "It is only an hypothesis," says M. Charles Diehl, the originator of this theory, "but it explains how, between the prefect Longinus (569-572) and the exarch Smaragdus (584) was produced in the years 572-576 the administrative transformation out of which rose the exarchate."]

At the same time as the central government took on a new form the provincial administration was re-organised. Before the year 590, this had been certainly achieved. Istria, as we have seen, was divided from Venetia and formed a new and a special government. In Flaminia Rimini, which till now had been a part of the same province as Ravenna, was detached and became the capital of a new government in which a part of the Picenum, Ancona, and Osimo were involved. While the exarchate properly so called, that is the region of Ravenna from which Rimini and Picenum were now separate, formed a new province under the direct authority of the governors-general of Italy, that is to say, of the exarch of Ravenna. By the year 590, then, we see Italy thus divided into seven districts or governments: (1) the Duchy of Istria, (2) the Duchy of Venetia, (3) the Exarchate to which Calabria is attached, (4) the Duchy of Pentapolis, (5) the Duchy of Rome, (6) the Duchy of Naples, (7) Liguria.

Geographically the exarchate of Ravenna was bounded on the north by the Adige, the Tartaro, and the principal branch of the Po as far as its confluence with the Panaro. Hadria and Gabellum were its most northern towns in the hands of the imperialists. The western frontier is more difficult to determine with exactitude; it may be said to have run between Modena and Bologna. On the south the Marecchia divided the exarchate from the duchy of Pentapolis whose capital was Rimini. The Pentapolis consisted of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, and Ancona upon the sea and of the five inland cities of Urbino, Fossombrone, Jesi, Cagli, and Gubbio; while the great towns of the exarchate were set along the Via Aemilia and were Bologna, Imola (Forum Cornelii), Faenza, Forli, Forlimpopoli, and Cesena.

Such then, before the year 590, was the new imperial administration in the Italy formed by the Lombard invasion.



In the year after the recapture of Classis from the Lombards, that is to say, in 589, the exarch Smaragdus was recalled. He had apparently become insane and had been guilty of extraordinary violence towards the patriarch of Aquileia and three other bishops whom he dragged to Ravenna. His successor was Romanus who held office till 597. In the same year, 589, Authari was married at Pavia to Theodelinda, who was to be so potent an instrument in the conversion of the Lombards and therefore in the salvation of Italy. And in the following year, 590, pope Pelagius II. died, and Gregory the Great was chosen to succeed him.

With the advent of the new exarch a brighter prospect seemed for a moment to open for Italy. In the first year of Romanus's appointment the imperialists regained the greater part of the cities of the plain; they re-occupied Modena, Reggio, Parma, Piacenza, Altinum, and Mantua. But the strength of the Latin position in Italy lay, and continued to lie, in the two great imperial cities, Ravenna and Rome. Little by little this position had crystallised and now a new state appeared, a state which in one way or another was to endure till our day and which our fathers knew as the States of the Church. With the two cities of Ravenna and Rome as nuclei, this state formed itself in the very heart of Italy along the Via Flaminia which connected them. It cut, and effectually, the Lombard kingdom in two, and isolated the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento from the real Lombard power in Cisalpine Gaul, with its great capital at Pavia; and indestructible as it was, it absolutely insured the final success of the Catholic Faith, the Latin nationality, and the imperial power, the three necessities for the resurrection of Europe.

This achievement was in the first place due to three great personalities: to Justinian who had succeeded in establishing the imperial power with its capital at Ravenna, and whose work had such life in it that, in spite of every adverse circumstance, it was able to develop and to maintain itself during more than two hundred years and uphold the imperial idea in Italy until the pope was able to re-establish the empire in the West as a self-supporting state; to Gregory the Great in whom we see personified the hope and strength of the papacy and the Latin idea which it was to uphold and to glorify; and to Theodelinda, that passionately Catholic Lombard queen, who was able to lead her Lombards into the fold of the Roman church, and who in her son Adalwald by her second husband Agilulf, whom she had raised to the throne, presented the Lombard kingdom with its first Catholic king, and had thus done her part to secure the future.

Of these three powers those of Ravenna and Rome were, of course, by far the more important; for indeed the conversion of the Lombards was, rightly understood, but a part of the work of Gregory. Yet though both were working for the same end they did not always propose to march by the same road. In 592, for instance, the pope, seeing Naples the capital of the little isolated duchy upon his southern flank very hard pressed, proposed at all costs to relieve it; but the exarch Romanus, perhaps seeing further, was not to be moved to the assistance of the peasants of Campania from the all-important business of the defence of central Italy and the Flaminian Way, the line of communication between Ravenna and Rome. He proposed to let Naples look after itself and at all costs to hold Perugia. Gregory, however, who claimed in an indignant letter of this date (592) to be "far superior in place and dignity" to the exarch, proceeded to save Naples by making a sort of peace with the Lombard duchy of Spoleto. It is possible that this peace saw the Lombard established in Perugia, which was the Roman key, till now always in Roman hands, of the great line of communication between Rome and Ravenna. However that may be, Gregory's peace not only aroused great anger in Constantinople, but brought Romanus quickly south with an army to re-occupy Perugia, Orte, Todi, Ameria, and various other cities of Umbria. But Romanus had been right. His movement southward alarmed Agilulf, who immediately left Pavia, and crossing the Apennines, we may suppose,[1] as Totila had done, threatened Rome itself. Then, however, he had to face something more formidable than an imperial army. Upon the steps of S. Peter's church stood the Vicegerent of God, great S. Gregory, who alone turned him back and saved the city.

[Footnote 1: All that Paulus Diaconus, Hist. Lang. lib. iv. cap. 8, says is: "Hac etiam tempestate Romanus Patricius et Exarchus Ravennae Romam properavit. Qui dum Ravennam revertitur retenuit civitates, quae a Langobardis tenebantur, quarum ista sunt nomma: Sutrium, Polimartium Hortas, Tuder, Ameria, Perusia, Luceolis et alias quasdam civitates. Quod factum cum regi Agilulfo nunciatum esset statim Ticino egressus cum valido exercitu civitatem Perusium petiit ..."]

The truth of all this would appear to be that Gregory was really working for peace. The Lombards were in a fair way to becoming Catholic, and as such they were no longer really dangerous to Italy. The real danger was, as the pope saw, the prolongation of a useless war. Two years later, in 595, we find Gregory writing to the "assessor" of the exarch enjoining peace. "Know then that Agilulf, king of the Lombards, is not unwilling to make a general peace, if my lord the patrician is of the same mood.... How necessary such a peace is to all of us you know well. Act therefore with your usual wisdom, that the most excellent exarch may be induced to come in to this proposal without delay, and may not prove himself to be the one obstacle to a peace so expedient for the state. If he will not consent, Agilulf again promises to make a separate peace with us; but we know that in that case several islands and other places will necessarily be lost. Let the exarch then consider these points, and hasten to make peace, that we may at least have a little interval in which we may enjoy a moderate amount of rest, and with the Lord's help may recruit the strength of the republic for future resistance."[1]

[Footnote 1: Gregory, Ep. v. 36 (34), trs. Hodgkin, op. cit. v. p. 382.]

It is obvious from this letter that the pope and the emperor no longer understood one another, and it is not surprising that the one thought the other a fool and told him so. Doubtless the emperor recalled the long and finally successful war against the Ostrogoths, in which Belisarius had always refused, not only terms of peace other than unconditional surrender, but even to treat. That policy had been, at least from the point of view of Constantinople, successful. From the point of view of the papacy and of Italy, it had had a more doubtful result, but the fact that the Ostrogoths were Arians had satisfied perhaps both, and certainly the papacy, that a truce could not be thought of.

From the imperial point of view things remained much the same in the Lombard war as they had been in the war with the Ostrogoths. From the papal and Italian point of view they were very different. To begin with, the Lombards were fast accepting the Catholic Faith, and then if Italy had suffered in the Ostrogothic wars, which were everywhere eagerly contested by Constantinople, what was she suffering now when the greater part of the country was open to a continual and an almost unopposed attack? "You think me a fool," the pope wrote to the emperor. In Ravenna the papal envoy was lampooned and laughed at. Then in the end of 596 the exarch Romanus died.

Romanus was succeeded by Callinicus (Gallicinus) in whom the pope found a more congenial and perhaps a more reasonable spirit. By 598 an armistice had been officially concluded between the imperialists and the Lombards, and at length in 599, after some foolish delays in which it would appear that the pope was not without blame, a peace was concluded. Gregory, however, for all his reluctance at the last, had won his way. Henceforth it would be impossible to regard the Lombards as mere invaders after the pattern of their predecessors, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns, and Ostrogoths. They were, or would shortly be, a Catholic people; they held a very great part of Italy; they had entered into a treaty with the emperor not as foederati but as equals and conquerors. Gregory the Great had permanently established the barbarians in Italy, and in his act, the act be it remembered of the apostle of the English, of the apostle of the Lombards, we seem to see the shadowy power that had been Leo's by the Mincio suddenly appear, a new glory in the world. The new power in the West, the papacy, which thus shines forth really for the first time in the acts of Gregory, unlike the empire, whether Roman or Byzantine, will know no frontiers, but will go into all the world and compel men to come in as its divine commission ordained.

In Italy from the time of the peace with the Lombards (599) onwards what we see is the decline of the imperial power of Constantinople and the rise of the papacy. And this was brought about not only by the circumstances in which Italy and the West found themselves, but also by the character of the imperial government.

When Justin II. disappeared in 578, and made way for Tiberius II., he was already a madman, and though Tiberius was renowned for his virtues, he reigned but four years, and in 582 Maurice the Cappadocian sat upon the throne of Justinian and ruled for twenty years not unwisely, but, so far as Italy was concerned, without success. It was he who was at last brought to make peace with the Lombards and thus for the first time to acknowledge a barbarian state independent of the empire in Italy. He and his children were all murdered in 602 by Phocas, a centurion, whose shame and crimes and cruelties doubtless did much to weaken the moral power of the empire face to face with the papacy.

The peace of 599, the usurpation of Phocas in 602, and the death of Gregory the Great in 604, close a great period and stamp the seventh century in its very beginning with a new character.

That character is in a sense almost wholly disastrous. Those vague and gloomy years, of which we know so little, are almost unrelieved in their hopeless confusion. It is true that Italy had found a champion in the papacy which would one day restore the empire in the West, as Justinian himself had not been able to do; it is true that already Arianism was defeated if not stamped out. But it is in the seventh century that Mahometanism, the greater successor of the Arian heresy, first appears; and it is in the seventh century that it first becomes certain that East and West are philosophically and politically different and irreconcilable. The whole period is full of disasters, and is as we may think the darkest hour before the dawn.

As I have said, the history of those disastrous years is everywhere in the West vague and confused, and this is not least so in Italy and Ravenna.

Ravenna as always remains the citadel of the imperialists in Italy and the West, and as such we must regard her, passing in review as well as we may those miserable years in which she played so great and so difficult a part.

When the Emperor Maurice was assassinated with his family in the year 602, Callinicus was, as we have seen, exarch in Ravenna, but with the usurpation of Phocas that Smaragdus who had already been exarch and had been recalled, perhaps for his too great violence, in 589, was again appointed. He seems to have ruled from 602 to 611. In the last year of the government of Callinicus an attempt had been made by the exarch to force the Lombards to renew the two years' peace established in 599, and on better terms, by the seizure of a daughter of Agilulf's, then in Parma, with her husband. They were carried off to Ravenna. But the imperialists got nothing by their treachery. Agilulf at once moved against Padua and took it and rased it to the ground. In the following year Monselice also fell to his arms, and though after the murder of the emperor Maurice in 602 the exarch Callinicus, the author of the abduction, fell, and Smaragdus was appointed by Phocas, the hostages were not returned, and in July 603, Agilulf, after a campaign of less than three months, had possessed himself of Cremona, Mantua, and Vulturina, and probably of most of those places which the imperialists had re-occupied in Cisalpine Gaul in 590. Smaragdus was forced to make peace and to give up his hostages. The peace he made, which left Agilulf in possession of all the cities he had taken, was to endure for eighteen months, but it seems to have been renewed from year to year, and when in 610 Phocas was assassinated and with the accession of Heraclius (610-641) Smaragdus was again recalled and Joannes appointed to Ravenna, the same policy seems to have been followed.

Joannes Lemigius Thrax, as Rubeus, the sixteenth-century historian of Ravenna, calls him, ruled in Ravenna from 611 to 615, and in the latter year was assassinated there apparently in the midst of a popular rising, though what this really was we do not know. His successor, the eunuch Eleutherius (616-620), seems to have found the now fragmentary imperial state in Italy in utter confusion, and indeed on the verge of dissolution. Naples had been usurped by a certain Joannes of Compsa, perhaps "a wealthy Samnite landowner," who proclaimed himself lord there, and it is obvious that even in Ravenna there was grave discontent. Eleutherius soon disposed of the usurper of Naples, but only to find himself faced by a renewal of the Lombard war, which he seems to have prevented by consenting to pay the yearly tribute which perhaps Gregory the Great had promised when he made a separate peace with the Lombard in 593, when Rome was practically in the hands of the barbarian. It was obvious that the imperial cause was failing. That the exarch thought so is obvious from the fact that in 619 he actually assumed the diadem and proclaimed himself emperor in Ravenna, and set out with an army along the Flaminian Way for Rome to get himself crowned by the pope Boniface V. But the eunuch was before his time; moreover, he was a defeated and not a victorious general. At Luceoli upon the Flaminian Way, not far from Gualdo Tadino where Narses had broken Totila, in that glorious place his own soldiers slew him and sent his head to Heraclius.

Of his immediate successor we know nothing—not even his name,[1] but in or about 625 Isaac the Armenian was appointed and he ruled, as his epitaph tells us, for eighteen years (625-644). Isaac's rule was not fortunate for the imperialists. He is probably to be acquitted of the murder of Taso, Lombard duke of Tuscia, but it is certain that Rothari, the Lombard king in his time, "took all the cities of the Romans which are situated on the sea-coast from Luna in Tuscany to the boundary of the Franks; also he took and destroyed Opitergium, a city between Treviso and Friuli, and with the Romans of Ravenna he fought at the river of Aemilia which is called Scultenna (Panaro). In this fight 8000 fell on the Roman side, the rest fleeing away."[2]

[Footnote 1: Mr. Hodgkin (op. cit. vi. 157) suggests that the predecessor of Isaac was that Euselnus who, as ambassador for Constantinople, persuaded, or is said to have persuaded, Adalwald, King of the Lombards since the death of his father, Agilulf (615), to slay all his chief men and nobles, and to hand over the Lombard kingdom to the empire; but was poisoned, it is suggested, by Isaac in Ravenna, whither he had fled when he had killed twelve among them. Ariwald succeeded him (625).]

[Footnote 2: Paulus Diaconus, cf. Hodgkin, vi. 168.]



Nor was this all. It is in Isaac's time that the growing jealousy of the empire in regard to the papacy for the first time breaks into flame. Isaac, who as exarch had the right to "approve" the election of the pope, on the accession of Severinus (638) sent Maurice his chartularius to Rome as his ambassador. This Maurice it seems was eager against the papal power, and finding an opportunity in Rome suddenly seized the Lateran and its wealth at the head of "the Roman army," and wrote to Isaac that he might come and enjoy the spoil. The exarch presently arrived in Rome, resided in the Lateran during eight days, banished the cardinals, and proceeded to steal everything he could lay his hands on in the name of the emperor, to whom he sent a part of the booty. A little later Maurice attempted to repeat his rape, but doubtless hoping to enrich himself he began by repudiating Isaac, who then dealt with him, had him brought northward, and beheaded at a place called Ficulae, twelve miles from Ravenna; but before he could decide what punishment to mete out to Maurice's accomplices the exarch himself died, "smitten," as it was said, "by God," and the exarchate was filled apparently by Theodore Calliopas (644-646).

Theodore Calliopas was twice exarch. Of his first administration we know nothing at all; but in 646 he was succeeded by Plato (646-649), whose name we learn from a letter of the emperor Constans II. to his successor Olympius (649-652), who had been imperial chamberlain in Constantinople. Theodore Calliopas was then again appointed and ruled in Ravenna for eleven years (653-664).

We have seen the empire and the papacy politically at enmity and certainly bent on attaining different political ends in Italy and the West, and this is emphasised by the economic condition of Italy which the empire taxed heavily. Philosophically Constantinople had never perhaps been very eagerly Catholic—or must one say papal? But now at this dangerous moment a doctrine definitely heretical was to be officially adopted there and supported by emperor and patriarch with insistance and perhaps enthusiasm. Heraclius, the grandfather of Constans II., had asserted the Monothelete heresy which maintained that although Christ had two distinct natures yet He had but one Will—his human will being merged in the divine. The patriarch of Constantinople, always jealous of the popes, eagerly upheld this doctrine which the papacy continually and consistently denounced. Now Constans II. cared for none of these things. He refused to allow that either pope or patriarch was right, but as though he had been living in the sixteenth instead of the seventh century gravely announced that "the sacred Scriptures, the works of the Fathers, the Decrees of the five General Councils are enough for us;" and asked: "Why should men seek to go beyond these?" Roundly he refused to allow the question to be either supported or attacked.

Now the whole of the West was very heartily with the pope in sentiment; but save for the bishops of Italy he stood alone against the great patriarchates of the East. Nevertheless, he refused to be silent and to obey the emperor. Therefore Olympius, Constans' chamberlain in 649, came to Italy as exarch with orders to arrest the pope and bring him to Constantinople: this it seemed to him a prudent thing to do; he was to judge for himself. Olympius decided it was not a prudent thing to do. He found the Italian bishops and the people eagerly Catholic. There is a story that he attempted instead to take the pope's life as he said Mass, but this is probably untrue, for we find pope and exarch presently excellent friends. He went on into Sicily to meet the first invasion of the Saracens in that island, and died there of the pestilence.

Theodore Calliopas was appointed exarch for the second time as his successor in 652. He had either less sagacity or less scruple than his predecessor, for in the following year he appeared with an army in Rome. He found the pope ill and in bed before the high altar of S. John Lateran. He surrounded the church and entered it with his men, who were guilty of violence and desecration. But the pope, to save bloodshed, surrendered himself to the exarch, shouting as he emerged from the church, "Anathema to all who say that Martin has changed a jot or tittle of the Faith Anathema to all who do not remain in his orthodox Faith even to the death." Through the tumultuous and weeping city the pope passed to the palace of the exarch upon the Palatine Hill. He entered it a prisoner and was presently smuggled away on board ship to Constantinople, where he was examined and condemned to death, insulted in the Hippodrome, and his sentence commuted to imprisonment and exile to Cherson, where he died in 655.

The controversy slumbered. Before long, surely to the amazement of the West, the emperor landed in Italy at Tarentum with the object of finally dealing with the Lombards, for Rothari was dead. It is said he asked some hermit there in the south: "Shall I vanquish and hold down the nation of the Lombards which now dwelleth in Italy?" The answer was as follows, and, rightly understood, contained at least the fundamental part of the truth: "The nation of the Lombards," said the hermit after a night of prayer, "cannot be overcome because a pious queen coming from a foreign land has built a church in honour of S. John Baptist who therefore pleads without ceasing for that people. But a time will come when that sanctuary will be held in contempt, and then the nation shall perish."[1]

[Footnote 1: Diaconus. v. 6; cf. Hodgkin, op. cit. vi. 272. Paulus adds that the prophecy was fulfilled when adulterous and vile priests were ordained in the church at Monza and the Lombards fell before Pepin.]

That prophecy contained the fundamental truth that since the Lombards were Catholic it was not possible to turn them out of Italy. But Constans heeded it not. He marched on, besieged Beneventum, was not successful, and went on to Rome, and himself spoiled the City. From Rome he returned southward to Naples and Sicily, where in 668 he died.

All that time Gregory was exarch. He had succeeded Theodore Calliopas in 664, and he ruled till 677. We know little of him save that he appears to have attempted to confirm Maurus, archbishop of Ravenna, in his "independence" of the Papal See.[1] This Maurus was undoubtedly a schismatic and Agnellus tells us that he had many troubles with the Holy See and many altercations. Indeed the position of the archbishop of Ravenna can never have been a very enviable one and especially at this time when the breach between pope and emperor, papacy and empire, was continually widening. Always the archbishop of Ravenna, as the bishop of the imperial citadel in Italy, must have been tempted to follow the emperor rather than the pope, and more especially since, personally, he might expect to gain both in power and wealth that way.

[Footnote 1: That was the "Privilegium," whatever it was worth and whatever exactly it meant, conferred by Constans II. Constantine Pogonatus, the successor of Constans, is still to be seen in S. Apollinare in Classe the "Privilegium" in his hands in mosaic. See infra, p. 208.]

The exarch Gregory was succeeded apparently by a certain Theodore whose contemporary archbishop in Ravenna was also a Theodore. He ruled it seems for ten years, 677-687, and built near his palace an oratory, or a monastery, not far from the church of S. Martin (S. Apollinare Nuovo), and was, according to Agnellus, a pious man, presenting three golden chalices to the church in Ravenna and composing the differences of his namesake the archbishop and his clergy.

Theodore in his turn was succeeded by Joannes Platyn (687-701). Two years before his appointment in 685 Justinian II. (685-695) had succeeded to the imperial throne, and in that same year pope Benedict II. died. John V. succeeded him and reigned for a few months, when there followed two disputed elections, those of Conon and of Sergius. In the latter Joannes Platyn the exarch played a miserable and disastrous part. For he suddenly appeared in Rome as the partisan of Paschal, the rival of Sergius, who had obtained his support by a promise of one hundred pounds of gold if he would help him to the papal throne. On his advent in Rome, however, the exarch found that he must abandon Paschal and consent to the election of Sergius, in which all concurred. He refused, however, to abandon his bribe which he now demanded of the new pope. Sergius replied that he had never promised anything to the exarch and that he could not pay the sum demanded. And he brought forth in the sight of the people the holy vessels of S. Peter, saying these were all he had. As the pope doubtless intended, the Romans were enraged against the exarch, the money was scraped together, and the holy vessels rescued.

In all this we see the growing distrust and hatred of Constantinople, which the taxation had first aroused on the part of the Italian people and their champion the papacy. These feelings were to be crystallised by the extraordinary and tactless council that the emperor convened in 691, in which the empire attempted to avenge the defeat it had sustained at the hands of the papacy in regard to the Monothelete heresy. The council, which was mainly concerned with discipline, altogether disregarded Western custom and the See of Rome, and especially asserted that "the patriarchal throne of Constantinople should enjoy the same privileges as that of Old Rome, and in all ecclesiastical matters should be entitled to the same pre-eminence and should count as second after it." The pope promptly forbade the publication of the decrees of this council which he had refused to sign. Then the emperor sent a truculent soldier, one Zacharias, to Rome with orders to seize Sergius and bring him to Constantinople as Martin had been arrested and dragged away. It only needed this to make the whole situation clear once and for all.

For it was not only the people of Rome who rose to prevent this outrageous act. When Zacharias landed in Ravenna, the citadel of the empire in Italy, the "army of Ravenna," no longer perhaps Byzantine mercenaries, but Italians, mutinied and determined to march to Rome to defend the pope. As they marched down the Flaminian Way, the soldiers of the Pentapolis joined them, a Holy War, a revolution, declared itself, and for this end: "We will not suffer the Pontiff of the Apostolic See to be carried to Constantinople." This curious mob of soldiers, gathering force and recruits as it marched with songs and shouting down the Way, hurled itself against the walls of the Eternal City, battered down the gate of S. Peter which Zacharias, afraid and in tears, had ordered to be closed, and demanded to see the pope who was believed to have been spirited away in the night on board a Byzantine ship like his predecessor Martin. Zacharias took refuge under the pope's bed, and Sergius showed himself upon the balcony of the Lateran and was received with the wildest enthusiasm.

In that revolution was destroyed all hope of the Byzantine empire in Italy. A new vision had suddenly appeared to those whom we may call, and rightly now, the Italian people. The long resurrection of the West, the greatest miracle of the papacy, was upon that day secured for the future. And henceforth the mere appearance of the exarch in Rome was regarded as an insult and a declaration of war.

In the year 695 Justinian II. was deposed and mutilated by Leontius, but he was to appear again as emperor ten years later when Sergius was dead and John VII. sat on the throne of Peter. Pope John reigned but for three years, in which he was successfully bullied by Justinian. He was then succeeded by Sisinnius, who reigned for a few months, and then by Constantine who ruled for seven years (708-715). The archbishops of Ravenna had certainly not dared openly to side with the imperial party and the exarch during the revolution, but, with the restoration of Justinian, archbishop Felix (708-724) felt himself strong enough to oppose the pope when he categorically required of him an oath "to do nothing contrary to the unity of the Church and the safety of the empire." He had, however, chosen a bad time to set himself against his superior, who in the minds of all was the champion of Italy.

Justinian II. had by no means forgotten the injuries he had received at the hands of the Ravennati: "ad Ravennam," says Agnellus, "corda revolvens retorsit, et per noctem plurima volvens, infra se taliter agens; heu quid agam et contra Ravennam quae exordia sumam?" "What can I do against Ravenna?" What he did was this. Theodore the patrician, one of his generals, was despatched with a fleet to Ravenna by way of Sicily. He proceeded up the Adriatic and when far off he saw the great imperial city, he first, according to Agnellus, lamented its fate, "for she shall be levelled with the ground which lifted her head to the clouds;" and then having landed and been greeted with due ceremony, set his camp on the banks of the Po a few hundred yards outside the city walls. There he invited all the chief men of the Ravennati to a banquet in the open air. As two by two they entered his tent to be presented to their host they were bound and gagged and put aboard ship. Thus all the nobles and Felix the archbishop were taken and the soldiers of Theodore entered Ravenna and burned their houses to the ground.

Theodore took his captives to Constantinople where they were all slain save Felix, who, however, was blinded. Later he returned to Ravenna, was reconciled with the Holy See, and died archbishop in 725.

It would appear that all this happened when Theophylact (702-709) was exarch, though Theodore the patrician may have superseded him for a moment on his arrival. The exarch in 710 was Joannes Rizocopus, and in that year pope Constantine visited Constantinople with the future pope Gregory II. in his train. They met in Rome, the pope about to set sail, the exarch on his way to Ravenna, where he was apparently assassinated in a popular tumult, "the just reward of his wickedness." The people of Ravenna then elected a certain Giorgius as their captain, and all the neighbouring cities, Cervia, Forli, Forlimpopoli, and others, placed themselves under his government and turned upon the imperial troops. We know very little of this revolution, what directly was the cause of it, or how it was suppressed; but it is clear that the exarchate, if it did not actually perish, was from this time forth for all intents and purposes dead. Three more exarchs were to reign in Ravenna, but not to govern. In 713, Scholasticus was appointed and remained till 726. He was followed by Paulus (726-727) who attempted to arrest Leo III., was prevented by the joint action of the Romans and the Lombards, and met his death at the hands of the people of Ravenna; and by Eutychius (727-752) who it seems saw the fall of Ravenna before the assault of the Lombard Aistulf. He was the last representative of the Byzantine empire to govern in Ravenna or in Italy.

But the fall of the imperial power in Italy was not the work of the Romans or of the Lombards. It fell because it had ceased to be Catholic.

We have seen the invasions of the Visigoths and the Huns fade away into nothing; we have seen the greater attempt of the Ostrogoths to found a kingdom in Italy brought to nought. One and all they failed for this fundamental reason, that they were not Catholic. The future belonged to Catholicism, and since it is only what is in the mind and the soul that is of any profound and lasting effect, to be Arian, to be heretic, was to fail. The great attempt, the noble attempt of Justinian to refound the empire in the West, to gather Italy especially once more into a universal government, succeeded, in so far as it did succeed, because the circumstances of the time in Italy forced it to be a pre-eminently Catholic movement. When that movement ceased to be Catholic it failed.

Let us be sure of this, for our whole understanding of the Dark Age depends upon it. Justinian's success in Italy was a Catholic success. What had always differentiated the imperialists from the barbarians since the fall of the old empire was their Catholicism. Justinian, a great Catholic emperor, perhaps the greatest, faced and outfaced the Arian Goths. He succeeded because his cause was the Catholic cause. But when his successors had to meet the Lombards they soon found that, for all they could do, they had no success. The Lombards, never very eagerly Arian, were open to conversion, slowly they became Catholic, and from the day they became Catholic there was no longer any hope of turning them out of Italy. It is only what is in the mind that is of any fundamental account. Face to face with such a thing as religion, race is as a tale that is told. But though all hope of turning the Lombards out of Italy ceased with their conversion, and the plan of Justinian, with nothing as it were to kick against, was thus rendered a thousand times more difficult, it did not become utterly hopeless and impossible till the empire, the East, that is, Constantinople, fell into heresy and ceased itself to be Catholic. It was the gradual failure of Constantinople in Catholicism that disclosed the pope to the Italians as their champion. It was this failure that raised up even in the imperial citadel, even in Ravenna, men and armies passionately antagonistic to the emperor, passionately papal too. During a hundred years this movement grew till, in the eight century, the coup de grace, as we might say, was given to the Justinian plan by the Iconoclastic heresy.

The Iconoclastic decrees of the emperor Leo are said to have appeared in Italy in the year 726. Leo was an adventurer from the mountains of Isauria. He was, so Gibbon tells us, "ignorant of sacred and profane letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with the Jews and the Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with an hatred of images." It was his design to pronounce the condemnation of images as an article of faith by the authority of a general council. This, however, he was not able to do, for he was at once met and his iconoclasm pronounced heretical by the greatest of all opponents, the pope—Gregory II.

Gregory had been elected to the papacy in 715 upon the death of Constantine. He was a man of great strength of purpose and nobility of character. Upon the Lombard throne sat Liutprand whose boast it was that "his nation was Catholic and beloved of God," and who acknowledged the pope as "the head of all the churches and priests of God through the world." These three men were the great protagonists who decided the fate of the empire in Italy.

The Lombards though they were thus Catholic had certainly not ceased to make war upon the empire. In this ceaseless quarrel, for instance, they had, perhaps about 720, possessed themselves of Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, and not long after of the fortress of Narni upon the Flaminian Way, and a little later, about 752, Liutprand himself laid siege to Ravenna, apparently without much result, though Classis seems to have suffered pillage. But if Ravenna did not then fall it was because the emperor's Iconoclastic decrees had not then reached Italy. They appear to have arrived in the following year and immediately the whole peninsula was aflame. "No image of any saint, martyr, or angel shall be retained in the churches," said Leo, "for all such things are accursed." The pope was told to acquiesce or to prepare to endure degradation and exile. Then, says Gibbon, surely here an unbiassed authority, "without depending on prayers or miracles, Gregory II. boldly armed against the public enemy and his pastoral letters admonished the Italians of their danger and their duty. At this signal Ravenna, Venice, and the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis adhered to the cause of religion; their military force by sea and land consisted for the most part of the natives; and the spirit of patriotism and zeal was transfused into the mercenary strangers. The Italians swore to live and die in the defence of the pope and the holy images; the Roman people were devoted to their Father and even the Lombards were ambitious to share the merit and advantage of this holy war. The most treasonable act, but the most obvious revenge, was the destruction of the statues of Leo himself; the most effectual and most pleasing measure of rebellion was the withholding of the tribute of Italy and depriving him of a power which he had recently abused by the imposition of a new duty."

The life of the pope was attempted by the imperial officials and the exarch appears to have been privy to the plot. The Romans rose and prevented the murder by slaying two of the conspirators, and when the exarch attempted to arrest the pope the very Lombards "flocked from all quarters" to defend him. In Ravenna itself there was revolution; Paulus the exarch was slain it seems in 727, and Ravenna apparently swore allegiance to the Holy See. Leo sent a fleet and an army to chastise her; "after suffering," says Gibbon, "from the wind and wave much loss and delay, the Greeks made their descent in the neighbourhood of Ravenna; they threatened to depopulate the guilty capital and to imitate, perhaps to surpass, the example of Justinian II. who had chastised a former rebellion by the choice and execution of fifty of the principal inhabitants. The women and clergy in sackcloth and ashes lay prostrate in prayer; the men were in arms for the defence of their country; the common danger had united the factions, and the event of a battle was preferred to the slow miseries of a siege. In a hard-fought day, as the two armies alternately yielded and advanced, a phantom was seen, a voice was heard, and Ravenna was victorious by the assurance of victory. The strangers retreated to their ships, but the populous sea-coast poured forth a multitude of boats; the waters of the Po were so deeply infected with blood that during six years the public prejudice abstained from the fish of the river; and the institution of an annual feast perpetuated the worship of images and the abhorrence of the Greek tyrant."

So Gibbon, following Agnellus whose account is obscure and perhaps altogether untrustworthy. What is certain is that Liutprand was advancing against the empire in war; that he took Bologna and without difficulty made himself master of the whole of the Pentapolis.

Yet the emperor took no heed. The eunuch Eutychius was appointed as exarch. He appeared in Naples and sent orders to Rome to have the pope murdered; but again the Roman people saved their champion and swore to him a new allegiance. Then Eutychius turned to the Lombards.

He attempted to bribe both Liutprand and the dukes. At first he was unsuccessful, but presently they began to listen to him. Liutprand certainly hoped to make himself king of Italy, and it may be that it was this which Eutychius offered him under the emperor. Moreover, he was jealous, and not without cause, of the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, who had rallied to the pope, and was anxious to have them under his feet. This, too, he may have hoped to attain as King of Italy and the emperor's representative in Italy.

When the pope saw Liutprand march southward with the exarch he must have known that the whole of the future depended upon the outcome of this act. Liutprand presently encamped with his army in the plain of Nero between the Vatican and Monte Mario. There the pope met him and, even as Leo the Great had done upon the banks of the Mincio, and as Gregory the Great had done upon the steps of S. Peter's, overawed the barbarian. Liutprand laid his crown and his sword at the pope's feet and begged, not only for his own forgiveness, but for that of the exarch his ally. The moment of enormous danger passed, the pope received both his enemies; but from that moment it was evident that the Lombards were not to be trusted and must one day feel the weight of the papal arm.

Gregory died in February 731, and was succeeded by Gregory III. who continued his predecessor's Italian policy. The great and terrible danger which had suddenly threatened the whole of papal policy when Liutprand and the exarch approached one another seems to have haunted the third Gregory. His obvious defence was to support the dukes against Liutprand, and this he did. Liutprand marched down against him and seized several towns in the duchy of Rome. It is now that the future begins to declare itself. The pope in his peril, a peril that would presently increase, made an appeal to the great Christian champion, Charles Martel; he appealed to the Franks; in the event, as we know, it was the Franks who saved the situation. In 740, however, Charles Martel refused to interfere; he was the kinsman of Liutprand and his son was a guest at the court of Pavia; that son was to be king Pepin the Deliverer—the father of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the restored West.

That appeal for help was in all probability not made only on account of the threat of Liutprand against Rome. It was obvious and more and more obvious that the imperial power in Italy was about to dissolve. What was to take its place? The papacy? Yes, but the state of Italy, the hostility of Liutprand, the whole attitude and condition of the Lombards, forced upon the papacy the necessity of finding a champion, a soldier and an army. That champion Gregory hoped to find in Charles Martel; his successors found him in Charles's son Pepin and in Charlemagne.

I say the appeal of the pope for help was not made only on account of the Lombard threat against Rome. It was the sudden dissolution of the imperial power that called it forth. In or about 737, the city of Ravenna, as we may believe, was besieged and taken by Liutprand and for some three years remained in his hands, till at the united prayers of exarch and pope the Venetians fitted out a fleet and recaptured it for the empire as we may think in 740.[1]

[Footnote 1: I follow Hodgkin, vi. p. 482 et seq., and Appendix F. Cf. also for discussion as to the date, Pinton in Archivio Veneto (1889), pp. 368-384, and Monticolo in Archivio della R. S. Romana di St. Pat. (1892), pp. 321-365.]

We know nothing of that siege and capture and practically nothing of the splendid victory of the Venetians. But the tremendous significance of the fall of Ravenna, which had been the impregnable seat of the empire in Italy since Belisarius entered it in 540, must not escape us. Rightly understood it made necessary all that followed.

At this dramatic moment the Emperor Leo died, to be followed in 741 by Pope Gregory and Charles Martel. Gregory was succeeded by Pope Zacharias, who in the year of his election met Liutprand at Narni and obtained from him the restoration of the four frontier towns he had taken two years before. But though Rome was thus secured Ravenna was in worse danger than ever, for Liutprand now renewed his attack upon it and it was only the intervention of the pope in person at Pavia that saved the city. Zacharias set forth along the Flaminian Way; at Aquila perhaps near Rimini the exarch met him, and he entered Ravenna in triumph, the whole city coming out to meet him. In spite of the opposition of Liutprand he made his way to Pavia, and was successful in persuading him to give up his attempt to take the once impregnable city and to restore much he had captured. Liutprand was an old man; perhaps he was not hard to persuade, for he was on the eve of his death, which came to him in 744. His successor Hildeprand reigned for six months and was deposed. Ratchis became king, a pious man who made truce with the pope, and in 749 abdicated and entered a monastery. Aistulf was chosen king, and at once turned his thoughts to Ravenna. The crisis so long foreseen, so often prevented by the papacy, came at last with great suddenness. In 751 Ravenna fell and the Byzantine empire in Italy thereby came to an end.

We know nothing of this tremendous affair; we do not know whether the great imperial city, full of all the strange wonder of Byzantium, and heavy with the destiny of Europe, was taken suddenly by assault or after a long siege. We know only that it fell, and that Aistulf was master there in the year of our Lord 751.

A sort of silence followed that fall. In 752 Pope Zacharias died. His successor was never consecrated, but died within three days of his election and made way for Pope Stephen. In the confusion of all things it is said that a party in Rome urged Aistulf to usurp the empire. This was enough; it might have been, and perhaps was, expected. The pope had his answer ready. The heir of the empire in Italy was not the Lombard but the Holy See. Aistulf threatened to invade Roman territory, and, indeed, occupied Ceccano in the duchy of Rome. Again the pope had his answer. That answer was the appeal to Pepin and his Franks. The papacy had found a champion.



X

THE PAPAL STATE

PEPIN AND CHARLEMANGE

The appeal of Stephen, which was to have for its result the resurrection of the empire in the West and the establishment of the papacy as a temporal power and sovereignty, was made in a letter now lost to us, which a pilgrim on his way back to France from Rome carried to Pepin the king of the Franks. In reply to it, the abbot of Jumieges appeared in Rome as Pepin's ambassador to invite the pope himself to cross the Alps.

Meantime two events occurred, which cannot but have hardened the resolve of the pope to find a champion. These events were the occupation of Ceccano in the duchy of Rome by Aistulf and the appeal of the emperor to the pope that he should go to Pavia and attempt to persuade the Lombard king to give up Ravenna and the cities he had lately taken. The appeal of the emperor must have assured the pope, if indeed he had any doubt about it, that the emperor, so far as Italy was concerned, was helpless; while the occupation of Ceccano made it doubly obvious that the Lombard intended, now that the empire was helpless, to be absolute master throughout the peninsula.



Stephen considered what course he should pursue, received two other Prankish envoys in Rome, consented to go to Pavia on behalf of the emperor, and determined at the same time to visit Pepin in the north. He set out for Pavia upon October 13, 753, leaving Rome with a vast concourse of people, which accompanied him some distance along the Way, out of the Flaminian Gate. His mission on behalf of the empire was naturally entirely fruitless, and early in November the pope left Pavia with the hardly won consent of Aistulf to cross the Alps by the Great S. Bernard—a difficult and dangerous business at that time of year—and to meet the Frankish king at S. Maurice in the valley of the Rhone. In the latter he was disappointed. Pepin had been called away to deal with an incursion of the Saxons, and now awaited his amazing visitor at Ponthion in Champagne, but he sent his son Charles, destined to be the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a hundred miles down the long roads to meet the pope, and it was in the company of this youthful hero that upon the Feast of the Epiphany 754 Stephen entered Ponthion at last, and was greeted by Pepin, who cast himself upon the ground before him and walked as his lackey beside him as he rode.

The result of their interview is given in the Liber Pontificalis: "The most blessed pope tearfully besought the said most Christian king that by means of a treaty of peace (? with him the pope) he would dispose of the cause of the blessed Peter and the republic of the Romans, who by an oath there and then (de praesenti) satisfied the most blessed pope that he would obey all his commands and admonitions with all his strength and that it pleased him to restore by every means the exarchate of Ravenna and the rights and territories of the republic."[1]

[Footnote 1: As this is very important I give the original Latin "Ibidem beatissmus Papa praefatum Christianissimum regem lacrimabiliter deprecatus est ut per pacis foedera causam beati Petri et reipublicarae Romanorum disponeret. Qui de praesenti jurejurando eundem beatissimum Papam satisfecit omnibus ejus mandatis et ammonitionibus sese totis nisibus obedire, et ut illi placitum fuerit Exarchatum Ravennae et reipublicae jura seu loca reddere modis omnibus."]

That winter the pope spent at S. Denis, where he solemnly crowned Pepin and his queen, and Charles and Carloman their children, pronouncing an anathema upon all or any who should ever attempt to elect a king not of their house. Upon Pepin too he conferred the title of patrician. Can it be that by this he intended the king of the Franks to be his executor in the exarchate as the exarch had been the executor of the emperor?[1] We do not know; but a little later a document was drawn up in which Pepin declared and enumerated the territories he was ready to secure for the pope. This document, the Donation of Pepin, would seem to have confirmed in detail and in writing the oath he had sworn to the pope at Ponthion. Unhappily the document has disappeared, and we can only judge of its contents by what actually happened.

[Footnote 1: The title patrician was not exclusively borne by the exarch, the Dux Romae, for instance, bore that title in 743.]

The adventure into Italy to which the pope had persuaded Pepin was not universally popular with the Frankish nobles. We find Pepin attempting to gain his end by negotiation with Aistulf, but all to no purpose, and probably in March 755 the Franks set out with the pope at their head to march into Italy to curb and chastise the Lombard.

The great army of Pepin crossed the Alps by the Mont Cenis, and in what was little more than a skirmish upon the northern side of the pass defeated the Lombard army and proceeded to invest Pavia and ravish the country round about. Aistulf, who was rather an impetuous than a great soldier, had soon had enough and was ready to entertain proposals for peace. A treaty was made in which he agreed "to restore" Ravenna and divers other cities, and to attempt nothing in the future against Rome and the Holy See. This having been decided, the pope took leave of Pepin, who returned to France, and went on his way to Rome.

The pope had won and had really established the Holy See as the heir of the empire; but Aistulf was by no means done with. He forgot alike his treaty and his promises. "Ever since the day when we parted," the pope writes to Pepin and the young kings, his sons Charles and Carloman, "he has striven to put upon us such afflictions and on the Holy Church of God such insults as the tongue of man cannot declare.... You have made peace too easily, you have taken no sufficient security for the fulfilment of the promises you have made to S. Peter, which you yourselves guaranteed by writing under your hand and seal...."

But the Franks were deaf. An expedition to crush the Lombards was a laborious and an expensive business, and Pepin had much to occupy him at home.

In January 756, however, Aistulf, mad from the start, laid siege to Rome, and for three months laid waste the farms of the Campagna, S. Peter's patrimony. Narni was taken and indeed all seemed as hopeless as ever. Then the pope took up his pen and as the successor of the Prince of the Apostles wrote a letter as from S. Peter himself and sent it to the three kings, Pepin, Charles, and Carloman, to the bishops, abbots, priests and monks, the dukes, counts, armies, and people of Francia. Gibbon thus summarises this extraordinary and dramatic epistle: "The apostle assures his adoptive sons the king, the clergy, and the nobles of France that dead in the flesh, he is still alive in the spirit; that they now hear and must obey the voice of the founder and guardian of the Roman Church; that the Virgin, the angels, the saints, and the martyrs, and all the host of heaven unanimously urge the request, and will confess the obligation; that riches, victory, and paradise will crown their pious enterprise; and that eternal damnation will be the penalty of their neglect, if they suffer his tomb, his temple, and his people to fall into the hands of the perfidious Lombards."

Pepin could not be deaf to such an appeal. He again crossed the Mont Cenis, and again the Lombards were as chaff before him. On his march to Pavia he was met by two envoys from Constantinople who had ill-treated, detained, and outstripped the papal ambassador. They besought Pepin to restore Ravenna and the exarchate to the empire, but he denied them and declared roundly that "on no account whatsoever should those cities be alienated from the power of the blessed Peter and the jurisdiction of the Roman Church and the Apostolic See, affirming too with an oath that for no man's favour had he given himself once again to this conflict, but only for love of S. Peter and for the pardon of his sins; asserting, also, that no abundance of treasure would bribe him to take away what he had once offered for S. Peter's acceptance."[1]

[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, op, cit. vii. p. 217.]

Pepin marched on; Pavia was besieged, Aistulf was beaten to the dust. A treaty was drawn up in which the Lombard gave to "S. Peter, the Holy Roman Church, and all the popes of the Apostolic See forever" the Exarchate, the Pentapolis, and Comacchio. An officer was commissioned to receive the submission of every city, and their keys and the deed of Pepin's donation were placed upon the tomb of S. Peter in Rome. The papal state was founded; where the empire had ruled so long there appeared the heir of the empire, the papacy "sitting crowned upon the grave thereof."

The cities that with their contadi and dependencies thus formed the temporal dominion of the pope were, according to the papal biographer, twenty-three in number; Ravenna first and foremost, then Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia (but not Ancona) that had formed the old Pentapolis. To them was added La Cattolica. The whole of the inland Pentapolis—though Fossombrone is not mentioned—Urbino, Jesi, Cagli, Gubbio—passed to the pope as well as the following places: Cesena and the Mons Lucatium, Forlimpopoli, Forli, Castro, Caro, S. Leo, Arcevia, Serra dei Conti, the Republic of S. Marino, Sarsina, and Cantiano together with Comacchio and Narni. A few months after all this was accomplished, in December 756, Aistulf, "that follower of the devil," as the pope called him, died.

Every state that is nearing dissolution is the prey of civil discord. So it was with the Lombards. Ratchis, who had more than seven years before become a monk, claimed the throne; so did Desiderius, "mildest of men." Pope Stephen supported the latter on condition that Ancona, that last city of the Pentapolis, Osimo which dominated it, and Umana, together with Faenza, Imola, and Ferrara, were "restored" to the papacy. Desiderius agreed and became king, but failed, as the Lombards always failed, to keep his promise, for though he handed over Faenza, Bagnacavallo, and Gavello, he withheld Imola, Bologna, Ancona, Osimo, and Umana; this was in 757, the year of Stephen's death.

In the same year Pope Paul I. seems to have visited the chief city of his new state, Ravenna, mainly perhaps on ecclesiastical business, for the archbishop Sergius was by no means a loyal subject and had only been brought to heel when nothing but submission was left open to him. He had then, according to Agnellus, promised to deliver to the pope all the "gold, silver, vessels of price, hoards of money," and so forth stored up in Ravenna. Agnellus tells a long and incoherent tale of the way the pope obtained this treasure and of certain plots to murder him therefor. All that seems fairly certain is that in the first year of his reign pope Paul I. visited Ravenna. Indeed the chief difficulty of the papacy at this time must have been the occupation of the state it had won so consummately. How were the popes to make good their somewhat shadowy hold upon Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, and those other strongholds in central Italy and Aemilia?

That they were not to hold them easily was soon evident. The empire was plotting to win Pepin to its side, and when that failed again, rumours of an imperial invasion reached Rome. Politically all relations ceased between Constantinople and Rome about this time; for though the pope in reality had long ceased to be a subject of the emperor, when he had possessed himself of the exarchate even theory had to give way to fact. Nor was the papacy more fortunate in its relations with Desiderius. The pope's object was doubtless to keep the Lombard kingdom weak, if not to destroy it. The first step to that end was obviously to encourage the achievement of a real independence by the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, which, again, bordering as they did upon the duchy of Rome, would be easier to deal with if they stood alone. There can be little doubt that the pope fostered the sleepless disaffection of the dukes, but when their revolt matured Desiderius was able to crush it, laying waste the Pentapolis on his way. He was then wise enough to visit Rome and to arrange a peace which was only once broken during pope Paul's pontificate: in 761 when Desiderius attacked Sinigaglia.

It was easier, however, for the pope to arrange successfully a foreign policy than to administer his new state. No machinery existed for the secular government by the Holy See of a country so considerable; nor was this easy to invent. The pope was forced to fall back upon his representative in Ravenna, namely, the archbishop. Now the archbishops of Ravenna had always been lacking in loyalty. Ravenna and the exarchate were governed in the name of the pope by the archbishop, assisted by three tribunes who were elected by the people. This government was never very successful, for at every opportunity, and especially after the resurrection of the empire in the West, the archbishops were eager to consider themselves as feudatories of the empire. This was natural and it may be worth while briefly to inquire why.

Because Ravenna had for so long, ever since the year 404, been the seat of the empire in Italy, the bishops of that city had acquired extraordinary privileges and even a unique position among the bishops of the West. As early as the time of Galla Placidia, the bishop of Ravenna had obtained from the Augusta the title and rights of metropolitan of the fourteen cities of Aemilia and Flaminia. It is true that the bishop continued to be confirmed and consecrated by the pope—S. Peter Chrysologus was so confirmed and consecrated—but the presence of the imperial court and later of the exarch encouraged in the minds of the bishops a sense of their unique importance and a certain spirit of independence in regard to Rome. Of course the Holy See was not prepared to cede any of its rights; but the spirit of disloyalty remained, and presently the bishop of Ravenna at the time of his consecration was forced to sign a declaration of loyalty, in which was set forth his chief duties and a definition of his rights.

After the Byzantine conquest the church of Ravenna, which the empire regarded as a bulwark against the papal claims, received important privileges and its importance in the ecclesiastical hierarchy was greatly increased. Like the bishop of Rome, the bishop of Ravenna had a special envoy at Constantinople and was represented, again like Rome, in a special manner in the councils of the Orient. In religions ceremonies the bishops of Ravenna took a place immediately behind the pope, and in ecclesiastical assemblies they sat at the right hand of the pontiff. There can be little doubt indeed of the Erastianism of Justinian nor of his encouragement of the bishop of Ravenna.

The declaration that the bishops were forced to sign upon their consecration by the pope by no means settled matters. In 648 this declaration itself was in dispute as to its interpretation, for Constans II. had conferred upon the See of Ravenna the privilege of autonomy, and at this time the bishop did not go to Rome for consecration. The Iconoclastic heresy of Constantinople, however, indirectly brought about peace between the pope and his suffragan, for Ravenna was in this whole heartedly Roman.

It was then, by means of an instrument still very uncertain, that the papacy was forced to govern its new state, and in these circumstances, friendly relationship with Constantinople daily becoming more impossible, it is not surprising that we see the pope making an attempt to come to some sort of permanent reconciliation with Desiderius; and indeed when pope Paul died in 767 undoubtedly a peace had been arranged.

All might have been well if pope Paul's successor had been regularly chosen; but a layman Constantine was elected by a rabble at the instigation of his brother Toto of Nepi. Christopher and his son Sergius, who held two of the greatest offices in the papal chancery, decided to call in the aid of the duke of Spoleto to attack Constantine, Rome was entered, and in the appalling confusion the Lombards elected a certain priest named Philip to be pope. Christopher appeared, Philip was turned out, and Stephen III., a Sicilian, was regularly chosen. That was in 768, and in the same year king Pepin died and was succeeded by his two sons, Charles to whom apparently fell Austrasia and Neustria, and Carloman who took Burgundy, Provence, and Swabia.