Part 16

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.

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.

THE PAPAL STATE

PEPIN AND CHARLEMANGE