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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter IX. The Making Of Christendom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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