Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the next year, 743, Liutprand broke out against the exarchate: and Eutychius, the exarch, with the archbishop of Ravenna, and the other cities of Emilia and the Pentapolis, had no better resource than to beseech the Pope to succour them. The Pope, accepting the request, sent two legates to the king with gifts, beseeching him to cease hostility with the Ravennese. But they accomplished nothing.

Then the Pope left Rome to the government of the Duke Stephen, and, with his train of clergy, went in person to Ravenna. The archbishop met him fifty miles from the city. The people welcomed him with cries, “to the shepherd who left his own sheep to deliver us who were about to perish”. But the Pope insisted upon going on to Pavia itself, in spite of the objections of king Liutprand to receive him. Disregarding every risk, he reached the Po on the 28th June, where he met the Lombard nobles sent to attend him; and, on the 20th, he celebrated Mass on the feast of the chief Apostle in the church of St. Peter, called the Golden Ceiling, wherein was the shrine of St. Augustine: whose body Liutprand himself had brought from Sardinia.

King Liutprand then received the Pope with great honour in his palace. The Pope pressed him not to attack the province of Ravenna, but to restore its cities. The king, after great resistance, consented to leave the province of Ravenna as it was before. The king then accompanied the Pope to the river, and sent his chief captains with him on his return, who restored the territories of Ravenna, and the castle of Cesena.

So the Pope disarmed a second time the most powerful of the Lombard kings, and saved the exarchate for the empire. From that time Liutprand lived in peace with the Romans and the Ravennese. He did not live to receive the report of the ambassadors whom he had sent to Constantinople to inform the emperor of the peace thus given to Ravenna. He closed in the next year, 744, his reign of thirty-two years, the longest in the Lombard series, and that in which the Lombard kingdom most developed its power. It must be confessed that the power of religion was great over the mind of Liutprand. He reverenced Pope Gregory II. under the walls of Rome: he listened to the voice of Pope Zacharias in the interviews of Terni and Pavia. At the bidding of the Vicar of Christ, he more than once stopped himself in the middle of his victories, and renounced the greatest desire of his heart.

Hildebrand, Liutprand's co-regent, and successor, maintained himself only a few months, and had to resign the crown before the end of the year 744 to Rachis, duke of Friuli. A good understanding seemed to be established with the Pope under a king renowned for piety, married to a Roman, who made rich offerings to the Church. Peace was assured with the Roman duchy. But after a few years Rachis also was in conflict with the exarchate. In 749 a new war burst out in central Italy. The king of the Lombards came in great wrath and with a valiant army to besiege Perugia. Then once more Pope Zacharias appeared. Attended by some clergy and chief people of Rome he went to the camp at Perugia. His gifts and his prayers so prevailed with King Rachis that he consented to raise the siege of the city and return in peace to Pavia. But the king had been so moved by the words of Pope Zacharias that after a few days he resigned his kingdom. With his queen Tassia and his daughter Ratruda he came like a pilgrim to Rome to venerate the tomb of St. Peter and to ask admission among the clergy. The Pope cut off the long hair of the Lombard king, gave him with his own hands the clerical tonsure, and vested him, as well as his wife and daughter, in the habit of St. Benedict. He retired, by the Pope's suggestion, to Monte Cassino, which had been restored by the abbot Petronax from its ruin towards the end of the sixth century. With him also retired the prince Carloman, younger brother of King Pipin, and a Benedictine as well as Rachis. Pope Zacharias greatly loved that monastery, enriched it with gifts and books, and exempted it from all episcopal jurisdiction, subjecting it immediately to the Holy See.

The three pacific victories gained by Pope Zacharias, twice over King Liutprand and once over King Rachis, victories due to the dignity of the Vicar of Christ and his Christian virtues, had raised to the highest point the estimation of the Romans for the Holy See. Is it possible to conceive a greater contrast that that presented by Leo III. and his son Kopronymus on the one hand, and the three pontiffs, the second and third Gregories and Zacharias, on the other; or between the governments of the blinding, scourging, maiming, and torturing sovereigns of the East, and the pastors ruling with beneficence and risking their lives for their flock in the West? Thus had the Popes become the protectors of desolated Italy; therefore had the Kings Liutprand and Rachis offered their royal mantles at the shrine of St. Peter. We are come now to the last and crowning incidents of this contrast.

On the resignation of Rachis the true Lombard spirit had raised his brother Aistulf to the throne. In June, 749, he was elected at Milan. Almost immediately thereupon a series of regulations showed that other political principles than those of Rachis had obtained the mastery. The presents made by the last king after his abdication were declared invalid; commerce with the Romans forbidden. The fortresses in the Alpine passes were strengthened. The army was put on a new footing. Presently Aistulf marched upon the exarchate. In July, 751, he was in Ravenna. Every imperial possession in the northern and midland Adriatic provinces fell into his power. Only Rome then was wanting to Aistulf's ambition. Hitherto no barbarian had been able to fix his seat there. His dreams were to reach all the power of the ancient emperors in Italy, and so verify the proud title of “king of all Italy” which a hundred and fifty years before Agilulf had inscribed upon his crown. He named his palace at Pavia “the palace of Italy,” and an inscription has been found, “Aistulf, in the name of Christ, by God's will Imperator Augustus, in the fourth year of his reign”.

No help came from Byzantium, where the emperor Constantine Kopronymus, after putting down a pretender to his throne, was only occupied with Iconoclast troubles. For a long time no opposition was perceived; when the last exarch fell into the Lombard king's power Rome seemed to be the sure prey of him who had won Ravenna.

At that moment when the last authority of the empire threatened to disappear a new bond was knitted between Rome and the West as token of the world's changed situation. Pipin, son of Charles Martell, on the point of taking the idle sceptre from the hand of the last phantom-king of Merovingian race, turned to Pope Zacharias with the request that he would approve this great change. This is one principal mark of the immense moral power wielded by the Pope in the middle of the eighth century that the mayor of the palace in the Frankish empire sought his sanction to change his deputed into immediate royal authority. The Pope thus called upon exercised his supreme judgment in this highest secular matter. He decided that it was lawful for him who fulfilled the royal duty to be king rather than for him who only bore the name. In these words he deposed the Merovingian and recognised the Carlovingian dynasty, and the nobles of the Franks assembled in diet accepted his judgment. Pipin was proclaimed king of the Franks in 752 on the field of Mars at Soissons. Some but not all accounts say that St. Boniface, at the head of the German episcopate, three years before his martyrdom, gave the Church's sanction to the political act, in accordance with the judgment of the Pope.

This momentous judgment of Pope Zacharias, given at the end of 751, was one of his last acts. He died on the 14th March, 752. The last words of Anastasius respecting him are an epitome of his life and character. Having recorded his general deeds of kindness and munificence, he adds: – “Embracing and fostering all as a father and good shepherd, and absolutely allowing none to suffer tribulation in his times, the people entrusted to him by God lived in great security”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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