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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter VII. Rome's Three Hundred Years, 455-756 From Genseric To Aistulf, Between The Goth, The Lombard, And The Byzantine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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