CHAPTER X.

THE LAST YEARS OF GREGORY.

 

The peace of 599, though not final, marks the transition to a different, and more settled, state of affairs in Italy. Hitherto war had been the relation between the Empire and the Lombard invaders: henceforward peace, though doubtless a turbulent and often interrupted peace, prevailed. Both Empire and Papacy now recognized the fact that the presence of the intruders, however unwelcome and ‘unspeakable' they might be, was no mere passing misery; that there was no hope of expelling them from the peninsula; little prospect even of inducing them to accept the nominal subordination of foederati; that they were settled in Italy as the Franks and Burgundians were settled in Gaul, and the Visigoths in Spain; and that the only thing now to be done was to defend the fragments of coast line, and the chain of posts along the Flaminian Way, which still owned the sway of the Roman Republic.

It would seem therefore that no more fitting place could be found for ending the history of Lombard Invasion, and beginning that of Lombard Rule in Italy, than this same year 599, which has also the advantage of coming at the close of a century. But there are two men, an Emperor and a Pope, whose names have occurred so frequently in my later pages, that for their sakes I shall include in this period the few years by which their lives overlap the six hundredth year from the birth of Christ.

One consideration, which probably weighed with the Emperor in favour of the peace so long urged by Gregory, and so long refused by him, was the fact that the Avars, those Huns of the sixth century, were keeping up desultory but worrying hostilities in the provinces south of the Danube; twice besieging the key-city of Singidunum (Belgrade), invading Dalmatia, and on one occasion (597) penetrating as far south as Thessalonica. There was probably some connection between these invasions and an embassy which the great Chagan of the Avars sent to Milan in order to ‘make peace,’ by which we are probably to understand a treaty of alliance with King Agilulf. The movements of these Tartar swarms evidently exercised a powerful influence on the politics of Europe at this time, and, as in the days of Attila, a century and a half previously, inclined the earlier invaders of the Empire to seek for peace with one another and with ‘the Republic'. Issuing westwards from their quarters in Pannonia, they invaded Thuringia, and waged grievous war with the Franks, who were now over-lords of that country.

As with the Empire so also with the Franks, harassed by these sons of the wilderness, King Agilulf concluded a treaty of peace which was perhaps in their case a treaty of alliance. As we have seen, all the kings of the Franks were now in their infancy. Guntram, the uncle, king of Burgundy, had died in 593: Childebert, the nephew, in 596. His two children, Theudebert II and Theodoric II, ruled in Austrasia and Burgundy. Their grandmother Brunichildis, expelled from Austrasia by the nobles, swayed the sceptre of Burgundy as regent over her infant grandson, and it was of course by her influence, though in the name of Theodoric, that a ‘perpetual’ peace was concluded between the Lombards and the Franks of the southern kingdom.

The Lombard king had in truth need of peace with his foreign foes in order to deal with domestic treason. Or perhaps we should state cause and effect in a different relation, and say that the conclusion of peace and the relaxation of the grasp on the forces of the State which the ‘war-power' gave to the king, brought its opportunity to rebellion. Three dukes revolted: the irrepressible Gaidulf of Bergamo, already twice pardoned; Zangrulf of Verona, and Warnecaut, who was perhaps duke of Pavia. All were defeated and slain by the energetic Agilulf, who wisely forbore from leaving Gaidulf under temptation to a fourth act of treason.

To Gregory the conclusion of the long wished for activity, peace brought in one sense rest, in another an immense increase of labour. Now was the time, when the roads were clear, and the Papal messengers could travel in safety, to order the affairs of the Churches, many of which had been lapsing into anarchy under the pressure of the times. Never probably, during the whole pontificate of Gregory, was the Papal chancery so busy as during this year of restored peace, 598-599. Of the 851 letters which make up the collection Gregorii Epistolae, 238, or more than one quarter of the whole, belong to this year.

A great number of these letters are addressed to the defensores, and relate to disputes about boundaries, the recovery of fugitive slaves, the administration of the estates of deceased persons, and matters of that kind. Many also are addressed to the sub-deacons, who had charge of the Papal Patrimony. The affairs to Sicily occupied a large amount of the Pope’s attention, now no longer fixed with anxious gaze upon swords of the Lombards. In Naples party-spirit was running high between two groups of citizens, and a grasping bishop was claiming privileges which properly belonged to the ‘patron’ of the city. In Gaul there were the ever recurring difficulties, the licentious lives of the clergy, the wide prevalence of simony, the impossibility of getting the bishops to assemble in a synod; an impossibility which was probably due to the fact that the majority of them were conscious of deeds of their own, which would not bear the light of a judicial investigation. These are some of the subjects which were touched upon in the 240 letters of ‘the Second Indiction.’

In one letter addressed by the Pope to the pay-master Donellus, entreating him to come without delay and pay the half-mutinous garrison of Rome their wages, we have a sentence which sounds like the sigh of an Italian patriot of our own times under Austrian domination. “We grieve to hear that you have been troubled by sickness: but we trust in the Divine compassion that He, who has made you to love our miserable and depressed Italy, will both restore to you bodily health, and reward you with eternal life.” The same letter concludes—‘The city of Rome, doubtless owing to our sins, is so reduced by the languor of various diseases, that there are hardly men enough left to guard the walls'. And in another letter of about the same date, the Pope says:—‘Such grievous febrile languors have attacked the clergy and people of this city, that scarce any man remains, free or slave, able to undertake any charge or duty. From the neighbouring cities also we hear daily reports of destructive mortality. And how Africa is being wasted by disease and death you doubtless know more accurately than we, as being closer to the scene of events. They, too, who come from the East report yet more terrible desolations there. All these things point to the approaching end of the world'. We hear from Paulus that this pestilence was especially severe at Ravenna and all along the sea-coast (probably therefore ravaging Roman Italy more grievously than the mountainous interior which was in the hands of the Lombards); and that in the following year a terrible mortality laid waste the inhabitants of the district round Verona.

Gregory himself, though he apparently escaped the fever, was more cruelly than ever racked by gout. We may perhaps infer that the busy energy of the summer of 599, during all of which time he was fighting against this persistent enemy, brought him at last to so low a point that work became almost impossible; for the 240 letters of ‘the Second Indiction’ are succeeded by only twenty letters in the following year; one of the poorest harvests in the whole collection. He himself says to his correspondents1 in Sicily,

“For my sins I have now for eleven months been able only very rarely to rise from my bed. Such are the pains inflicted upon me by gout and other infirmities, that life is to me the heaviest of punishments. Every day I faint with the pain and wait with sighing for the remedy of death.” And again, in a later letter, July 600, addressed to the Patriarch of Alexandria, he says:—

“I received last year the very sweet letters of your Holiness, which I have not hitherto been able to answer, on account of my exceeding sickness. For behold! it is now all but two years that I have been confined to my bed, and so tortured with the pains of gout, that scarcely on festival days have I been able to rise for the space of three hours to celebrate the rites of the Mass. Then I am forced to lie down, in such severe pain, that only an occasional groan enables me to bear my agony. This pain in my case is sometimes gentle, sometimes intense, but never so gentle as to depart, nor so intense as to kill me. Hence I am daily dying, and daily driven back from death.”

So the two years of peace wore away in Italy. There were fears of an invasion of Alamanni, but they were not fulfilled. The dukes of Benevento and Spoleto seem to have come in to the peace, and to have lived on friendly terms with their Roman neighbour. It is even thought by some that Arichis, the duke of Benevento, renounced his Arianism, and became a member 0f the Catholic Church; but this is perhaps too large an inference to draw from the fact that in the only letter which the Pope addressed to him, and which was probably written in the year 599, he accosts him ‘as in truth our son.’

At length the two years' peace came to an end. Notwithstanding the anxious fears of Gregory, it would perhaps have been renewed by Agilulf, for the perfidious act of the Exarch, who thought by the seizure of a hostage to force the Lombard king to renew the peace on less favourable terms. A daughter of Agilulf by his first wife was dwelling with her husband Gottschalk at Parma, of which place Gottschalk was probably duke. It may have been owing to the security born of the two years' peace (though we are not expressly told that this was the case), that the princely couple were taken unawares by the soldiers of Callinicus, who suddenly appeared before the city, and carried them off to Ravenna.

It seems to have been a felon stroke, and it utterly missed its aim. Far from being intimidated by his daughter’s danger, Agilulf was roused to a more vigorous prosecution of the war. He made overtures for a fresh league with the Chagan of the terrible Avars, and sent him shipwrights, from the Italian ports under his sway, to help him to construct ships for warlike operations against Thrace. Agilulf himself then moved against the great city of Patavium (Padua), which till this time had successfully resisted the arms of the Lombards. He succeeded in kindling a conflagration by means of fiery bolts hurled into the city. The garrison saw that they could no longer hold the place, and surrendered to Agilulf, who, honouring their bravery, allowed them to depart uninjured to Ravenna. The city itself, we are told, was levelled with the ground; the second time within two centuries that this fate had befallen the proud city of Livy.

At this time the ambassadors who had been sent to the Chagan of the Avars returned, announcing that he had graciously concluded a perpetual peace with the Lombards. The great barbarian sent also an ambassador of his own, who proceeded to the courts of the Frankish kings, and announced to them his master's pleasure that they should dwell at peace with his Lombard friend.

The next year was a prosperous one for Agilulf. The Lombards, with their Avar and Sclavonic allies, entered Istria, which they laid waste with fire and sword. In the Po valley, the arms of the Lombards achieved a signal success by the reduction of the Mountain of Flint (Monselice), which had been one of the few islands rising above the flood of barbarian conquest.

There was great joy also in the new palace at Modicia (Monza), which Queen Theudelinda had built and adorned with paintings of the victories of the Lombards. Here in this barbaric Versailles, Queen Theudelinda, after eleven years of married life, gave birth to her firstborn son, who was named Adalwald, and who was baptized according to the Catholic rite by Secundus of Trent, the historian to whom Paulus was indebted for most of his knowledge of this period. This was a signal triumph for Catholicism. Agilulf's predecessor had sternly forbidden the Lombard nobles to have their children baptized by Catholic bishops, and now King Agilulf himself, though probably still making profession of Arianism, permitted his own son to be held over the baptismal font by a Catholic ecclesiastic.

The year of Adalwald’s birth also witnessed the reconciliation of the two great dukes, Gaidwald of Trent, and Gisulf of Friuli, who had before been estranged from Agilulf, if not actually in rebellion against him, but who now came in and submitted themselves to his rule.

Meanwhile there was a change in the occupants of the Imperial palace at Constantinople and of the Exarch’s palace at Ravenna. The year 602 saw downfall of the Emperor Maurice, with circumstances which will shortly be related, and also saw the removal of Callinicus, who was replaced as Exarch by Smaragdus, the same capable, but somewhat headstrong official, who had been recalled from Ravenna thirteen years before for his too harsh treatment of the Istrian schismatics. The recall of Callinicus at this juncture may have been connected with the revolution at Constantinople, but seems sufficiently accounted for by the conspicuous failure of his dastardly blow at the family of the Lombard king, and by an actual defeat which he is said to have suffered under the walls of Ravenna.

The change of rulers did not, however, make any difference in the fortunes of the war. The year 603 beheld the most triumphant of all the campaigns of Agilulf. Going forth from Milan in the month of July, he laid siege to the city of Cremona. There were among his troops a number of Sclavonic barbarians, whom his great ally, the Chagan of the Avars, had sent to serve under his banners. On the 21st of August Cremona was taken, and, according to Paulus, was levelled with the ground. It is hardly likely, however, that the Lombard king would thus utterly destroy a large and wealthy city just added to his dominions. It seems more probable that it was only the fortifications that were destroyed, as in the case of the African and cities taken by Gaiseric. From Cremona he marched against its old neighbour Mantua, beat down its walls with battering-rams, and entered the city on the 13th of September, having admitted the garrison to an honourable surrender, and allowed them to return to Ravenna. He also captured the little town of Vulturina, the position of which is unknown, but which was probably situated upon the northern bank of the Po, not far from Parma, for we are told that the garrison in their flight from Vulturina set the town of Brixellum on fire. Brixellum (now Brescello) was the town on the south bank of the Po, about ten miles from Parma, which as the reader may remember, the Alaman Droctulf had long held for the Empire against the Lombards. It was, however, at last surrendered to King Authari, and, as a Lombard town, was now set on fire by the fleeing garrison of Vulturina.

The fortune of war was so evidently going against the Imperial arms that, in September of this year, Smaragdus was glad to make peace with Agilulf. Hostilities were to cease for eighteen months, till the 1st of April, 605. King Agilulf evidently retained all his conquests, and—most striking confession of Imperial failure—his daughter was restored with her husband and children. The princess returned to her home of Parma, but the story of her captivity had an unhappy ending. She died in child-bed almost immediately after her return from Ravenna. Would that we knew more of this strange and pathetic little incident in the meagre annals of the time! The princess, whose very name is hidden from us, dwelt probably for two years and a half with her husband and children in captivity at Ravenna. How gladly would we hear something of the effect which the imperial and ecclesiastical splendours of the city by the Ronco produced on the daughter of the Thuringians; of her relations with the two Exarchs who successively ruled there; of the terms of her captivity, whether easy or severe; of the Exarch's announcement to her that she was free; of the scene of her restoration to her father's arms, and of his emotions when he heard that a mightier than the Exarch had carried her off into the captivity from which there is no returning!

The total effect of these operations of 601-603 was greatly to enlarge the Lombard boundary. The whole valley of the Po was now in the possession of the invaders; the communication by land with the cities of the Venetian lagunes was cut off; there was now no Imperial city of importance in Italy north of the latitude of Ravenna. No change of frontier occurred for a generation of equal extent with that which followed on the abduction of the daughter of Agilulf.

We have followed the course of events in Italy down to the autumn of 603; but we must now return to the close of the preceding year in order to notice the revolution which, in November, 602, was accomplished at Constantinople.

From his correspondence with Gregory, the reader will probably have already formed a fair estimate of the character of Flavius Tiberius Mauricius Augustus. He was neither a bad nor a foolish man, but he often did the right things in the wrong way, and he had not that power of achieving personal popularity which has been possessed by many rulers of far inferior capacity. A skilful general and author of a book of some authority on Strategics, Maurice was nevertheless unpopular with the army. An orthodox Churchman, he, nevertheless, on account of his quarrel with Pope Gregory, earned a bad name in ecclesiastical history. Inheriting an exhausted treasury from his lavish predecessor Tiberius, he failed to make his subjects understand that ‘his poverty, and not his will, consented' to retrenchments which they thought mean and unworthy of the Imperial dignity. In civic politics Maurice leaned to the faction of the Blues, which seems to have been weaker than that of the Greens, and at a critical period of the revolution he unwisely armed both factions in order to form a city-guard against the mutinous soldiers. The remote cause of his downfall appears to have been his refusal (in the year 600) to ransom 12,000 soldiers (possibly deserters), who were in the power of the Chagan of the Avars, and who, being unransomed, were put to death by the barbarian. This refusal, which was perhaps due in part to absolute poverty, in part to notions of military discipline, like those which prompted the well-known speech of Regulus to the Roman Senate, sank deep into the hearts of the soldiery; and when, in 602, Maurice issued orders that to save the expense of their rations the Danubian army should spend the winter in the cold and inhospitable regions inhabited by the Sclavonians, the long-suppressed anger of the legions burst into a flame. They defied the Emperor's power, refused to cross the Danube, and raising one of their officers, the centurion Phocas, on a shield, after the fashion of the barbarians, they saluted him, not indeed as yet with the title of Imperator, but with the only less splendid name of Exarch.

The full details of the revolution need not be given here, as they belong rather to the history of the East than of Italy, and they have been already to some extent anticipated in connection with the history of Germanus Postumus, the great-grandson of Theodoric, and the great-nephew of Justinian, who was for a time an unwilling candidate for the Imperial dignity, but who was eventually put to death by the usurper, after he had used that venerated name as a cloak for his own ambition.

It may not, however, be out of place to give the outlines of the story of the fall of Maurice as it is told by Joannes Diaconus, who probably preserves that version which early obtained credence in Italy.

Through the barbarous and obscure Latinity of the biographer we can discern something of the internal struggle in the Emperor's mind, distracted between his duty to the State and his fear for the safety of his soul if he continued in opposition to the Pope. “Most of covetous and most tenacious of Emperors,” (says the Deacon),—Maurice perceived that Gregory, who had been raised to the pontificate by his vote, no longer needed the Emperor’s defence against the tumults of the time, but relied on spiritual help, on the force of the canon law, on his own holiness and prudence to overcome the dangers by which he was surrounded. While partly admiring his courage, Maurice was drawn away more and more to hatred and detraction of the great Pontiff, and at length wrote him that sharp letter of rebuke for wasting the stores of corn [and listening to the peace propositions of Ariulf], to which Gregory replied in the famous letter beginning ‘In serenissimis jussionibus’ which was quoted in an earlier chapter.

The boldness of this reply moved Maurice both to admiration and to anger, and he would probably have proceeded to some act of tyrannical oppression against the Pope, but for a strange scene which was enacted in the streets of Constantinople. A certain man, clothed in monastic garb, and endued with superhuman energy, walked, bearing a drawn sword in his hand, from the Forum to the brazen statue of the gladiator, proclaiming to all the bystanders that the Emperor should die by the sword. (The biographer's manner of telling the story leaves us in doubt whether he is describing a supernatural appearance or the bold deed of some enthusiast.) When Maurice heard this prediction he at once forbore all further acts of violence against Gregory, and set himself with earnestness to avert the coming judgment. He sent not only to Gregory, but to all the Patriarchs, bishops, and abbots in his dominions messengers bearing costly gifts, money, tapers, and frankincense, accompanied by his written petition, to which he besought them to add their suffrages, that it would please God to punish him for his sins in this life, and to deliver him from endless torment. This for long was the burden of his tearful prayer. At length one night in his slumbers he saw himself standing with a great multitude by the brazen statue of the Saviour, at the brazen gate of the palace. Lo! a voice, a terrible voice, issued from the mouth of the Incarnate Word, ‘Bring Maurice hither and the ministers of judgment brought him, and laid him down before the Judge. With the same terrible voice the statue said, ‘Where dost thou wish that I should requite to thee the ills that thou hast wrought in this world?' ‘Oh! Lover of men,' the Emperor answered, ‘Oh! Lord, and righteous Judge, requite me here, and not in the world to come.' At once the divine voice ordered that ‘Maurice and his wife Constantina, with their sons and daughters, and all their kinship, should be handed over to Phocas the soldier'. When the Emperor awoke, he sent a chamberlain to summon his son-in-law Philippicus, whom he had long suspected of treasonable designs upon the throne. Philippicus came in, trembling, having taken, as he supposed, a last embrace of his wife Gordia, and having fortified himself with the Holy Communion. When he entered the Emperor's sleeping apartment, and, according to custom, prostrated himself at his feet, Maurice raised him up, and, performing the same prostration, said, ‘Pardon me, I pray, for I now know, by a revelation from God, that thou hast harboured none of the evil designs against me, of which I suspected thee. But tell me if in all our armies thou knowest a man who passes by the name of Phocas'. Then Philippicus, after long musing, answered, ‘One man called Phocas I do know, who was lately named procurator by the army, and who was murmuring against your rule'. ‘What manner of man is he?' said the Emperor. “Young and rash,” answered Philippicus, “but timid withal.” Then said Maurice, “If he is timid, he will also be a murderer.”

While he was still in doubt and fear over this business an Imperial messenger1 brought back the answer of some holy hermits to whom he had been sent—"God has accepted thy repentance. Thou and all thy house shall be saved, and shall have your dwelling with the saints above, but thou shalt fall from the throne with disgrace and danger.”

When Maurice heard these words he thanked God and continued his acts of penitence. His covetousness, however, he could not eradicate, and thus it came to pass that he ordered his troops to winter in perilous places, crossing over the Danube to seek their food at the risk of their lives in the country of the Sclavonians, that they might not eat their rations at the expense of the State. These orders were conveyed to the general Peter (brother of the Emperor), who, summoning his officers, said, “These orders of the Emperor that we should winter in the enemy’s country seem to me too hard. I am placed in a most difficult position. Disobedience to orders is disastrous, but obedience seems more disastrous still. Nothing good comes out of avarice, which is the mother of all the vices; and that is the disease under which the Emperor is now suffering, and which makes him the author of such grievous ills to the Romans.”

Then came, as has been already said, the open mutiny of the army, their elevation of Phocas on the shield, his proclamation as Exarch. The mutineers offered the diadem successively to Theodosius, son of the Emperor, and to Germanus, the father-in-law of Theodosius, who both refused it, and acquainted Maurice with the offer that had been made them. Germanus, however, seeing that he had roused the Emperor's suspicions, took refuge in the church of the Theotokos. Maurice looked upon his son as a traitor, and ordered him to be flogged, and he then sent many persons to draw Germanus forth from the shelter of the church of St. Sophia, to which he had removed from that of the Theotokos. The multitude, however, would not permit Germanus to be removed, and broke out into shouts of invective against Maurice, calling, him a Marcionite heretic. Unnerved by the tumult, Maurice went on board a swift cutter with his wife and children, and reached the sanctuary of the martyr Autonomus, on the Bithynian coast. Meanwhile Phocas arrived at the palace of the Hebdomon, outside the gate of Constantinople, and, after some little dallying and delay, during which the claims of Germanus to the vacant throne were advocated by the Blue faction, Phocas himself was proclaimed Emperor.

Possibly Maurice might have been left unmolested in his sanctuary, but for the injudicious cry of the offended Blues at the coronation of the new Empress Leontia:—"Begone: understand the position: Maurice is not dead.” An officer was sent to Chalcedon to slay the Emperor and his four younger sons; Theodosius, the eldest, having started on the eastward road to seek the assistance of the Persian king. As each of the young princes yielded up his life, the fallen Emperor, determined to drink the cup of his punishment to the dregs, repeated the verse, “Thou art just, Oh! Lord, and true are thy judgments.” The youngest of the tribe was but a baby, and the nurse, who was rearing him, with ‘splendid mendacity' tried to substitute her own child for the Imperial nurseling, but Maurice, as nobly unselfish, insisted on proclaiming the truth, and gave his own little one to the sword. Last of all, the Emperor himself was slain. His martyr death revealed the essential nobleness of his nature, and seems to demand a merciful judgment on a life marked indeed by many mistakes, but, as far as we can see, stained by no crime.

The young and attractive prince Theodosius, returning from his eastern journey, at its first stage fell into the hands of the usurper's creatures and was slain. The widowed Empress Constantina, her daughters, and Germanus, were put to death about three years afterwards. By the end of 605 there was no scion left of the once flourishing house of Mauricius Augustus.

Too soon the soldiers and the people of Constantinople found out the terrible mistake which they had made in exchanging a just and noble-hearted, if somewhat unsympathetic, ruler for that monster of lust and cruelty, the imbecile and brutal Phocas, whose reign is perhaps the darkest page in all the annals of Byzantium. We are indeed bound to read with some caution the character of a monarch, written by the courtiers of the rival who dethroned him. The dynasty of Heraclius, who in 610 ended the horrible nightmare of the reign of Phocas, wore the imperial purple for the greater part of a century; and we, therefore, ought to treat the history of Phocas, as told by the meagre historians of that century, in something of the same spirit in which modern critics treat the Tudor historians' description of the deeds and character of Richard III; but after every deduction has been made, there can be no doubt that Phocas was a jealous, lecherous and cruel tyrant, besides being intellectually quite unfit to wield the sceptre of a great empire, and that the eight years of his reign were one of the gloomiest and most disastrous periods in Byzantine history.

The death of Maurice took place on the 27th of November, 602. Probably some indistinct rumours of the revolution reached Rome before the formal Embassy, but it was on the 25th of April, 603, that the statues of the August Phocas and Leontia were brought to Rome, accompanied by letters in which the crowned trooper addressed the Senate and People of Rome in terms of the utmost condescension. The clergy and the Senate assembled in the great Julian basilica, near the Papal palace of the Lateran, and shouted the customary acclamations to the new Augustus and the new Augusta. The statues were then carried, by order of the Pope, into the oratory of S. Caesarius, in the Lateran Palace, and erected there; and then Pope Gregory sat down to compose his answer to the Imperial proclamation.

It might have seemed that he had a difficult task before him. He had himself, in the earlier stages of his career, been somewhat indebted to the deceased Emperor’s friendship. Of later years it is true that the relations between them had been much strained, and the angry correspondence of the years 595 to 597 had apparently been succeeded by an angrier silence. But if the Pope's relations with Maurice himself had of late been hostile, with his family he had ever been on terms of friendship. He had written letters of fatherly love and tenderness to the Empress Constantina; he had raised her eldest son, Theodosius, from the baptismal font; he had interested himself in the education of the little occupants of the Imperial nursery. And now Constantina was in forced seclusion; Theodosius, if yet living, was a fugitive; the other princes, down to the youngest of them, had been slain in their innocent childhood by the order of an usurper. And to that usurper Gregory had now to address congratulatory letters on his accession. As has been already said, the task, to an ordinary man of the world, might have seemed a difficult one. To the infinite disappointment and disgust of all honest champions of the great Pope's reputation, it must be admitted that he found in the task no difficulty at all. He could not rise to the level of the Jewish chieftain who poured forth his glorious song of lamentation over the relentless enemy who had fallen on Mount Gilboa. The thought of the desolate widow and murdered infants seems never to have crossed his mind; he only remembered the slights offered to his priestly dignity, the monarch who had dared to call him fatuous; the Patriarch who had used the abhorred word ‘ecumenical'; and, because Phocas had trampled on the man who dared to use the one word and to defend the other, he addressed that murderous usurper with Hosannas like those uttered by the crowd at Christ’s entry into Jerusalem:—

“Glory to God in the highest—to Him who according to the Scripture changeth times and transferreth kingdoms. For He hath made all men to perceive that which He deigned to speak by the mouth of His prophet:—“The Most High ruleth in the kingdoms of men, and giveth it to whomsoever He will”. In the incomprehensible providence of Almighty God the destinies of our mortal lives alternate one with another. Sometimes, when the sins of many have to be punished, one is exalted, by whose sternness the necks of his subjects are pressed under the yoke of tribulation; and this we have experienced in our own long afflictions. Then again, when the merciful God decides to cheer the sorrowing hearts of many by His own consolation, He raises one man to the height of power, by whose tender compassion He pours the oil of His own gladness into the hearts of all men. With this abounding gladness we are persuaded that we shall soon be refreshed, we who do already rejoice that the kindness of your Piety has arrived at the summit of Imperial greatness. “Let the heavens rejoice and let the earth be glad.” By your benign actions may all the citizens of our Republic, till now so grievously afflicted, regain their cheerfulness of soul. Under the yoke of your rule may the proud minds of our enemies be pressed down. By your compassion may the contrite and dejected hearts of your subjects be raised up again—may the power of the heavenly grace make you terrible to your enemies; may your piety make you merciful to your subjects. In your most happy days may the whole Republic have rest, an end being put to those ravages of peace which are made under the guise of law. May the ambuscade of testaments, may the pretence of voluntary gifts exacted by violence be done away. Let all men have once again secure possession of their own property, that they may enjoy without trembling that which they have honestly acquired. Under the yoke of a pious Emperor let liberty be fashioned anew for every man. For this it is which makes the difference between the kings of the nations and the Emperors of the Republic, that the former are lords of slaves, and the latter of free men.

“But we can say all this better in prayer than in exhortation. May Almighty God in every thought and word hold the heart of your Piety in the hand of His grace, and whatever is to be done with justice, whatever is to be done with clemency, may the Holy Spirit, inhabiting your breast, direct you to these things, so that your Clemency may be made sublime by your temporal reign, and that after many years have run their course you may attain to the Heavenly Kingdom.”

Again two months later, in sending an apocrisiarius to represent him at the Imperial Court, the Pope continued in the same strain of virulent abuse of the fallen, and fulsome flattery of the reigning, Emperor:—

“I delight to think, with a grateful heart, what praise is due to Almighty God for removing the yoke of our sadness, and bringing us to days of liberty under the pious rule of your Imperial kindness.

“That your Serenity did not find a deacon from the Apostolic See dwelling in your palace according to ancient custom, must be ascribed not to my negligence, but to our sore need. For as all the ministers of our Church shunned and declined such hard times [as had to be endured by our apocrisiarius at Constantinople], I could not lay upon them the burden of going to the royal city to abide in the palace. But as soon as they knew that, by the disposing grace of Almighty God, your Clemency had arrived at the summit of the Empire, they who had hitherto trembled, were now eager in the promptings of their joy, to hasten to your feet. But as some of them are prevented by the infirmity of age, and others by the cares of the Church, from undertaking this duty, I have chosen the bearer of these presents [Bonifacius], who is the first of all our defensor of long tried diligence, and fit by his life, faith, and manners, to wait upon the footsteps of your Piety. I have therefore ordained him deacon, and sent him with all speed, that he may at a fitting time convey to your Clemency tidings of all that is going on here. May your Serenity deign to incline your pious ears to him, and so be the more quickly moved to pity our affliction, by hearing from him the true relation of it. For in what fashion we have now for the long space of thirty-five years been oppressed by the daily swords of the Lombards, and how their inroads have afflicted us, no words of ours are adequate to express.

“But we trust in the Almighty Lord, that He will perfect for us those good gifts of His consolation which He has already begun, and that He who has raised up pious rulers for the Republic will also extinguish her cruel foes. May the Holy Trinity long guard your life, that we may have the longer fruition of the blessing of your Piety, which we have so late received.”

At the same time Gregory wrote thus to the new Empress Leontia, who was inhabiting doubtless the very rooms which had witnessed the orisons of the pious Constantina, and echoed to the prattle of the children whom the husband of Leontia had murdered:—

“What tongue can utter, what heart can conceive, the thanks which we owe to Almighty God for the serenity of your Empire, that the hard weight which so long pressed upon us is removed from our necks, and that light yoke of the Imperial majesty which the subjects love to bear, has taken its place? Let glory therefore be given to the Creator of all by the hymning choirs on high:—let thanks be brought by men upon the earth:—because the whole Republic, which has borne so many sorrowful wounds, has now found the fomentings of your consolation.”

Gregory then goes on to pray that God, who holds the hearts of kings in His right hand, may turn the hearts of Phocas and Leontia into His service, and make them as zealous defenders of the Catholic faith as they are benign rulers of the state; that Leontia may be another Pulcheria in clemency—another Helena in zeal for the true religion. As they love the Creator of all, so are they bound to love the Church of that Apostle, to whom it was said, “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build my church.” May they give their relieved subjects joy on earth, and themselves receive, after a long reign, the eternal joys of heaven.

These letters, written in July, 603, are nearly the last that we shall have to notice as proceeding from the pen of the great Pontiff.

In December of the same year he wrote to Queen Theudelinda thanking her for a letter which she had written from Genoa announcing the Catholic baptism of her son Adalwald. The tortures of gout prevented him from replying at that time to the doubts which had been instilled into her mind by her spiritual adviser Secundus, with reference to the ‘Three Chapters' controversy; but he sent the Acts of the Fifth General Council in order to show that nothing had really been done thereat in derogation of the council of Chalcedon. He sent, moreover, certain presents which may have fascinated the gaze of the baby convert.

“We send our most excellent son, Adalwald the king, certain charms, namely, a cross with the wood of our Lord’s cross, a manuscript of the Holy Gospel enclosed in an embroidered case. To his sister, my daughter, I send three rings, two with jacinths and one with an onyx, and I pray you to hand these presents to your children, that so your Excellency may foster their love towards us. Saluting you with fatherly love, we pray you to give thanks to our most excellent son the king your consort, for the peace which has been made. As your manner has ever been, incline his heart by all means to peace in the future, that so, besides your many other good actions, you may earn from God the reward of an innocent people saved, who might otherwise have perished unshriven.”

During all this time the Pope’s bodily infirmities were increasing. His once portly frame was shrunken and withered by the gout, and by the daily worries of his life. Sometimes he was simply tortured with pain, and at other times a strange fire seemed to spread along with the pain through his body: the fire and the pain seemed to fight together, and body and mind alike gave way under the conflict.

In February, 603 he wrote:—‘I live in such wailing and worry that I regret to see the light of each fresh day; and my only comfort is the expectation of death. Wherefore, I beg you to pray for me, that I may be the sooner led forth from this prison-house of the flesh, and that I be not any longer tortured by such agonies.”

It is pleasant to have to record that almost the last letter which we have from Gregory's pen is one which shows his thoughtfulness for others in the midst of his own daily sufferings. In January, 604, he wrote to the bishop of Perugia that he heard that “our brother and fellow ­bishop Ecclesius” was suffering from the cold, because he had no winter garment. He had asked the Pope to send him something, and accordingly Gregory sent a two-ply wrapper, a tunic and a waistcoat, which were to be forwarded from Perugia with all speed to the shivering bishop. ‘Be sure that you lose no time in executing this commission, and write to us at once that you have done it, for the cold is intense.

Soon after writing this letter, the great Pontiff’s long struggle with life was ended. He died on March 11, 604, and was buried on the following day at the east end of the basilica of St. Peter. After the death of the man, who for fourteen years had been indisputably the foremost figure in the Italian peninsula, there was some trace of that reaction which is so often perceived when a commanding personality, such as that of Augustus, of Elizabeth, of Cromwell, is removed from the world; and, strange to say, it was the open-handed liberality of the deceased Pope which was chosen as the point of attack by his calumniators. The stories of what happened in Rome after his death are obscure, and reach us only through authors who lived two or three centuries after the event; but there is probably in them some vague echo of the truth. Paulus Diaconus tells us that Sabinianus, Pope Gregory’s successor, refused to continue his predecessors lavish charities to the people, averring that if he did, the corn­magazines would be exhausted and they would all die of hunger. Thrice did Gregory appear to him in a vision to warn him to repent and change his course, but in vain. A fourth time he appeared, and vehemently rebuked him, and struck him on the head with his staff. Soon after (in February, 606) Sabinianus died.

According to the story told by Joannes Diaconus, Gregory’s later biographer, the Pope’s death was followed almost immediately by a famine in Rome. (This at least seems to be an undoubted fact.) Certain calumnious persons (Sabinianus' name is not expressly mentioned) stirred up the people, alleging that Gregory had been a spendthrift, and had wasted the treasures of his patriarchate. Hereupon the mob assembled with tumultuous cries, and began to talk of burning the late Pope's books. His friend the deacon Peter ran in among the crowd and earnestly sought to dissuade them, declaring that he had often seen the Holy Spirit hovering over the late Pope’s head in the form of a dove, while he was writing his books. The people shouted, “Swear to this till death, and we will not burn the books.” Hereupon Peter ascended the ‘ambo' with the Gospels in his hand, swore the required oath, and ‘breathed out his spirit amid his true confession.

The character of Pope Gregory, truly called the Great, has been sufficiently indicated by what has been here recorded of his deeds, and quoted of his words. The one great blot upon his escutcheon, his jubilation over the downfall of Maurice, and his fulsome praise of the tyrant his successor, can be palliated by no lover of truth and justice; and it is grievous to think how much more stainless his record would have been had his cruel enemy, the gout, carried him off only one year before the actual date of his death. We must admit, however, that a man of deep spiritual discernment, thoroughly imbued with the spirit of his Master, would not have written either the congratulatory epistles to Phocas, or many another letter in the great collection, which denotes impatience and an angry temper. On the whole, it seems safer to judge him as a great Roman, than as a great saint;—and thus considered, his generosity, his justice, his courage, entitle him to a high place among the noblest names of his imperial race. In estimating his character we must never forget that, during all his public life, he was almost incessantly tortured by disease. That little passage in his biography which describes how he used to train the choir in the convent which had been his father's house, seems to me emblematic of much in the life of Gregory. In the midst of a tumultuous and discordant generation, it is his to bear witness to the eternal harmony. But he is stretched upon the bed of sickness; his frame is racked by pain; he holds the rod of discipline in his hand, and ever and anon, as he starts up to chastise the offender, he feels a sharper twinge than usual of his ever-present agony; and this gives an energy to his stroke, and a bitterness to his words, of which he himself is hardly conscious. At any rate, there can be no doubt of the world- historical importance of this man, the last of the great Romans of the Empire, the true founder of the Mediaeval Papacy.

 

CHAPTER XI.

THE ISTRIAN SCHISM.

 

I have postponed to this place the description of some ecclesiastical events which took place in the North of Italy during the latter part of the sixth century, and which exercised a powerful influence over the political condition of the cities of the Northern Adriatic, especially over that of the rising Venetian Commonwealth, during the greater part of the Lombard rule.

It is necessary to remind the reluctant reader of that dreary page in ecclesiastical history known as the controversy of the Three Chapters. Most futile and most inept of all the arguments that even ecclesiastics ever wrangled over, that controversy nominally turned on the question whether three Syrian bishops of irreproachable lives, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa, were to be stigmatized, a century or more after their deaths, as suffering the punishment of everlasting fire, because the Emperor Justinian, sitting in the library of his palace at the dead of night, and ceaselessly turning over the rolls of the writings of the Fathers, had discovered in the works of these three men the germs of the Nestorian heresy. That was nominally the issue, but, as all men knew, something more than this trifling matter was really involved. The writings of these three Syrians had been received without condemnation, if not with actual applause, at the great Council of Chalcedon; and the real question was whether the Eastern Emperors should be allowed to inflict a backhanded blow on the authority of that Council by throwing out the souls of these three hapless Syrians to the Monophysite wolves of Egypt and of Asia, who were forever howling after the Imperial chariot. The Council of Chalcedon was dear to the Western, especially dear to the Roman, heart. In it a check had been inflicted on the audacious speculations of Oriental ascetics; by it the Tome of the great pontiff Leo had been accepted almost as a fresh revelation, or (it would perhaps be better to say) as the best expression of Christian common sense on the matters in dispute, and had been used as a bulwark against the ever-rising tide of irreverent speculation into which the Fullers and the Weasels and the other grotesquely-named theologians of Alexandria delighted to plunge.

No Roman Pope would willingly connive at anything which seemed like disrespect to the Council of Chalcedon. Vigilius had struggled, we have seen how desperately, to avoid the slight on that Council which was involved in the condemnation of the Three Chapters; but having obeyed the Imperial summons to Constantinople, he had found that he was in the power of one stronger than himself, and, after doubling backwards and forwards like a frightened hare, he had at last yielded his reluctant but final consent to the proceedings of the Fifth Council, by which the Three Chapters were condemned.

After the Holy See had once irrevocably committed itself to the propositions of Justinian, it could not be accused of lukewarmness in its newly-adopted cause. No partisans are more bitter than those who have a position which they declared they would never surrender, and who in their secret hearts envy the courage of its remaining defenders; a courage which they themselves have not dared to imitate. And thus it came to pass that for something like a century and a half the Roman Pontiffs oppressed with unusual bitterness and acrimony the men who were called the defenders of the Three Chapters, and who still struggled to maintain the position which a Pope had once fought for, and which was almost universally held in the Western Church when Justinian first started his idle controversy.

As far as we can discern, the condemnation of the Three Chapters was for a generation or more an unpopular measure in Italy generally as well as in Africa, but the peculiar geographical position and political circumstances of one province, that of Istria, caused the opposition there to be more stubborn and long-enduring, and to assume more completely the character of schism than in other parts of Italy.

The peninsula of Istria, stretching forth into the Adriatic Sea at its northern end, whose coast, during the sixth century, was still lined with fair cities which owned the sway of the Empire, formed one province with the mainland and islands to the West which bore the name of Venetia1. But this province was now so circumscribed by the conquests of the Lombards, especially in the Western portion, that its full name, ‘Venetia et Istria’, was often abbreviated, and it was called ‘Istria’ alone. The chief city of the province was Aquileia, for which, notwithstanding its awful destruction by Attila, its ecclesiastical supremacy had procured a fresh lease of life, though doubtless with greatly diminished splendour.

The Patriarch of Aquileia was still therefore an important ecclesiastical personage, perhaps the most important between Ravenna and Constantinople. Paulinus, who was Patriarch of Aquileia from about 558 to 570, raised the standard of ecclesiastical rebellion against the Fifth Council and the condemnation of the Three Chapters, and refused to communicate with Pope Pelagius, the successor of Vigilius, whom he regarded as a betrayer of the faith. The Pope retorted by urging Narses, who was then ruling Italy with an all-powerful hand, to seize both Paulinus of Aquileia and the bishop of Milan (who had consecrated Paulinus in defiance of a Papal mandate, and who probably shared his views), and to carry both these ecclesiastics to Constantinople, where they were no doubt to be subjected to the same gentle arguments which had enlightened the mind of Vigilius as to the damnation of the three Syrians. Narses, however, seems to have wisely refused to meddle in such matters; and though the schism was now formally begun, and was apparently shared by all the bishops of Istria, the dispute seems to have slumbered, till in 568 the Lombard avalanche descended upon Italy.

It was probably very soon after this event that Paulinus, fearing the barbarity of the Lombards, fled the island of Grado, taking with him all the treasures of the Church. He died soon after, about the year 570, very likely worn out with the terrors of the times and the hardships incidental to his new abode, for Grado is a poor little island at the mouth of the Isonzo, and probably offered no accommodation for a Patriarch and his retinue at all comparable to that which they had enjoyed in the neighbouring Aquileia. His successor Probinus also died, after a very short enjoyment of his dignity (about 570-571), and a man bearing the name of the prophet Elias was elected in his stead (571-586). In his days a step was taken which gave a new importance to the little island of Grado. For ten years or so the settlement in that island had been considered a mere temporary expedient. The Istrian clergy, like so many other subjects of the Emperor, looked upon the Lombard invasion as the overflow of a barbaric flood, which would soon pass away, allowing the dry land of the Roman Republic once again to appear. But by the year 579 this cherished hope had been of necessity abandoned, and on the third of November in that year a Council was held at Grado, under the presidency of Council of Elias, at which it was formally decreed that the city of Grado should receive the title of ‘the new Aquileia,' and should be declared in perpetuity the metropolis of the whole province of Venetia and Istria. The alleged proceedings of this Council are unfortunately regarded with much suspicion by scholars. If genuine, they present an interesting picture of the times. We see in them the bishops of the whole important province assembled. Padua and Verona in the Venetian plain; Concordia and Opitergium (Oderzo) in the neighbourhood of the lagunes, Trieste, Pola, and Parenzo on the Istrian coast, Aemona (Laybach) in Camiola, Celeia (Cilli) in Styria; and Avoricium, which is perhaps Avronzo, the well-known resort of travellers, under the shadow of the Dolomites: all of them sent their representatives to the Council, which assemble in the new basilica of St. Euphemia. Then, while the bishops and presbyters sat, the deacons stood round them, and a copy of the Gospels having been placed in the middle of the assembly, Elias stood forth to explain his reasons for summoning the Council. “Unspeakable,” said he, “is the mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ, who condescends to help our weakness. Amid the pangs of the Church of God, and the fierce massacres of the heathen who cease not to shake and devastate the remnants of our miserable province, I confess that it was beyond my hopes to see you all collected in this venerable assembly. For I feared lest anything should thwart the fulfilment of our common prayers; but now that by the mercy of Christ we are all met together, let me tell you wherefore I have summoned you. Long ago, by Attila, king of the Huns, our city of Aquileia was destroyed from top to bottom. Shaken afterwards by the inroads of the Goths and other barbarians, it had scarcely time to recover its breath under the rule of Narses, and now it absolutely cannot bear the daily scourge of the unutterable nation of the Lombards. Therefore with the consent of the blessed Pope Pelagius of the Apostolic See before whom I have laid our case, I ask, does it please your Holinesses to confirm this city of Gradus as our metropolis for ever, and to call it the new Aquileia?”

The presbyter Laurentius, legate of the Apostolic See, handed in the Papal ‘privilegium’, bestowing the new dignity on Grado; and when this was read by the notary Epiphanius, the bishops all shouted, ‘Hear, O Christ: grant long life to Pelagius', and unanimously ratified the proposal of Elias. Epiphanius read the Nicene Creed as contained in the acts of the Council of Chalcedon : and the members of the synod then all affixed their signatures to the record, Patriarch Elias first, the Pope's legate next, then the bishops, probably in order of age, and then the presbyters.

If we have here a genuine record of the acts of the Council of 579, it is clear that some sort of reconciliation must have taken place between the sees of Rome and Aquileia, or such a letter as the ‘privilegium’ handed in by the legate Laurentius could never have left the Roman chancery. Possibly the deaths of both the original disputants (Pelagius I having died in 560, and Paulinus in 570) may have smoothed the way of peace. No doubt also the Roman pontiffs saw the great advantage which would accrue to the cause of orthodoxy from the transference of the patriarchal see. At Aquileia the heretical defenders of the Three Chapters could shelter themselves under the wing of those deadlier heretics, the Lombards, and defy both Pope and Emperor. At Grado they were of necessity the obedient servants of the Empire, and a visit from the Imperial galleys could at any time reinforce the cause of orthodoxy. And in fact, not many years had elapsed after the meeting of the Council at Grado, before the Patriarch of New Aquileia received an earnest admonition from the Pope as to the necessity of no longer delaying his condemnation of the Three Chapters.

In this letter the Pope said that he took advantage of the interval of peace procured by the anxious labours of the Exarch Smaragdus to write to the bishop Elias, and the rest of his dear brethren the bishops of Istria, exhorting them no longer to continue in schism from the Church. He solemnly protested his unwavering faith in the decisions of the four great Councils, Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon; his veneration for the Tome of his great predecessor Leo, and his determination to uphold its authority unimpaired. He did not in this letter condescend to the details of the Three Chapters controversy, but desired the Istrians to choose out from among themselves bishops or presbyters whom they might send to Rome, and he promised to receive such messengers with love, meekly to offer them satisfaction on all the points as to which they were in doubt, and to allow them to return unhindered to their homes.

The messengers were sent; but they brought what seemed to the Pope neither submission to his will, nor an answer to his arguments, nor open minds to receive his explanations, but a short and sharp definition of the Istrian position; in fact a summons to the Pope himself to surrender, under pain of interdict from Elias and his brethren.

The receipt of this letter filled Pelagius with such grief that, as he told the Schismatics, he “kept silence even from good words.” In his second letter he told them that they did not understand what they were talking about. He had shown, he said, to the envoys the passages which they had quoted from the proceedings of the Councils, as they stood in the ancient documents still preserved in the Papal chancery, and had argued that when taken in their proper connection, and not read in garbled extracts in the Encyclicals of hostile bishops, they by no means sustained the contention of the defenders of the Chapters. Especially with much diplomatic skill, but hardly equal candour, he laid stress on some reservations of the great Leo, who, in assenting to the decrees of Chalcedon, had expressly stated that he only ratified that which was therein decided with reference to the faith. Doubtless Pope Leo himself, if he could have been questioned, would have replied that this exception did not refer to the alleged Nestorianism of Theodore, Ibas, and Theodoret (which was a question of faith), but did refer to the rash attempt of the Council of Chalcedon to raise the see of Constantinople to an equality with the see of Rome. Long extracts followed from Augustine and Cyprian on the necessity of keeping in unity with the visible Church, founded on the rock of St. Peter; and the letter closed with a somewhat peremptory demand that instructed persons, able to give and to receive a reason in the debate, should be sent to Rome, or (if they feared the length of the journey and the unsettlement of the times) to Ravenna, where they would be met by envoys from the Pope.

The Istrian bishops, however, were quite immovable; refused to come either to Rome or Ravenna, and sent another letter in which, as the Pope declared, they hardly condescended to argue, but announced their own authoritative decision, and seemed to command the Pontiff to accept it. That there were, however, some arguments in this letter (now lost, like almost all the documents on that side of the controversy), we may infer from the reply which Paulus Diaconus calls “a very useful Epistle, composed by the blessed Gregory while he was still deacon, and sent by Pelagius to Elias, bishop of Aquileia.”

In the interval between the second and third letters dispatched by Pelagius II, Gregory had returned from Constantinople, and even without the express statement of Paulus, we could hardly be mistaken in attributing to him the altered tone now assumed by the Pope at whose elbow he was standing.

“I have hitherto,” he says, “written to you words full of sweetness, and rather by prayer than by admonition have sought to guide you into the right way. But I now see with grieving wonder the lengths to which you dare to proceed, confiding in your own wisdom, and I have to confess to myself that my example of humility has been wasted upon you. Like Jeremiah I must say, “We would have healed Babylon, but she is not healed”. I have tried to kindle the fire of charity, and burn off your schismatic rust, but with the same prophet I must say “the bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire, the blower bloweth in vain: his ashes are not consumed.”

The Pope, or rather the deacon by his side (for in these passages we recognize all the characteristics of Gregory, his familiarity with the old prophets, and his desperate love of allegorical interpretation), proceeds to ply the recalcitrant bishops with passages from Jeremiah, Paul and Ezekiel to convince them of their error.

“Is there no resin in Gilead, is there no physician there? Why then is not the scar of the daughter of my people healed?”. What does he mean by resin, which feeds the flames, and which for the adornment of a palace cements together severed marbles? What can he mean but charity, which kindles our hearts to love, and binds together the discordant minds of men by the longing after peace, for the adornment of Holy Church? And Gilead, which is by interpretation the heap of witness—what can he mean by that but the mass of sentences piled up on high in Holy Scripture? The physician, is not he the preacher? The daughter’s scar, is not that the fault of the erring multitude laid bare before the eyes of God?”

After a few more remarks of this kind the Papal champion plunges into the thick of the controversy, and goes over all the weary battlefield, whither we need not follow him, showing that Leo had not confirmed all the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, but had expressly reserved private and personal matters; that the case of the three Syrian bishops might be considered as included in these private and personal matters : that Chalcedon must have implicitly condemned them, since it approved of Cyril and the Council of Ephesus which they opposed : that there was good patristic authority for anathematizing heretics even after their death: and that the long reluctance of Vigilius and the western bishops to accept the decrees of the Fifth Council arose from their ignorance of Greek, and gave all the more value to the sentence which they at last, after such rigorous scrutiny, consented to pronounce.

On the whole, if the course taken by the Popes in this dismal controversy had to be defended, it was probably impossible to put forth a better defence than that here made by Gregory, and he did well in sending a copy of it six years later, when he was himself Pope, to each of the schismatic bishops, inviting their candid and unprejudiced study of its contents, and predicting that they would then speedily return to the bosom of the Church.

This was not the effect, however, of the ‘useful letter’, when issued either by Pope Gregory or his of predecessor. In 5862 the Patriarch Elias died, apparently unreconciled, and was succeeded by Severus, who for twenty years ruled the Church of Aquileia. Soon after his accession, to end this troublesome business, the Exarch Smaragdus came (probably with a few Imperial ships) from Ravenna to Grado, dragged the new Patriarch forth with his own right arm from the basilica itself, and carried him off in ignominious captivity to Ravenna. Severus went not alone, for there were carried off with him three bishops, John of Parenzo, Severus of Trieste, and Vindemius of Cissa, and an aged defensor of the Church of Grado named Antonius. At Ravenna the captive ecclesiastics were detained for a year till their spirit was broken by the violence used, and the further exile threatened; and they consented, doubtless with heavy hearts, to communicate with John, bishop of Ravenna, who was on the now winning side, and condemned the Three Chapters.

Violence, however, now, as so often before and since in affairs of the conscience, failed of its purpose. When the bishops were at length at the year's end allowed to return to Grado, neither their brother bishops nor the lay multitude would have aught to say to them: and thus the end of the schism was as far off as ever. Smaragdus, the audacious violator of the sanctity of the Church of Grado, became insane, and men saw in his mental disease the work of a demon to whom he was given over for his crime. He returned to Constantinople, and Romanus, as we have seen, was sent as his successor to Ravenna.

A Council was now held at Marano, a place on the mainland, but overlooking a broad lagune, and about twelve miles west of Aquileia. From this place, where the Lombard rather than the Byzantine was supreme, the Schismatics could venture to hurl unabated defiance both at Constantinople and at Rome. The names of the sees represented at this Council are not quite the same as those which took part in the former one. They wear a more Venetian, and less Istrian character, as might be expected from the fact that the men who bore them were now leaning on Lombard protection, and somewhat estranged from the rule of the Empire. We find the bishops of Verona, Vicenza, Treviso, Belluno, Feltre, and Zuglio from continental Venetia, to which names must be added Asolo, which I mention separately for the sake of its Cypriote queen, and its English poet. Altino and Concordia on the shores of the lagunes, Trent and Seben from the country which we now call Tyrol, all sent bishops to the Council. The Istrian peninsula was apparently represented by Pola alone. At this Council the Patriarch Severus handed in a paper in which he humbly confessed his error in having communicated with the condemners of the Three Chapters. He was hereupon received again into fellowship with his suffragans.

This Council of Marano was probably held in 589, during a pause of something like peace in Italy. Next year the great Gregory ascended the pontifical Gregory throne, and one of his earliest acts was to write a letter, short, sad, and stern, to the Patriarch of Aquileia, lamenting his wilful departure from the way of truth (of which, having once walked in it, he could no longer pretend ignorance), and summoning him, with his followers, to the threshold of St. Peter, there to be judged by a synod concerning all the matters about which doubt had arisen.

This summons purported to be issued in accordance with the commands of “the most Christian and most Serene lord of all things,” but in point of fact, since the substitution of Romanus for Smaragdus, the Pope had neither the Emperor nor the Exarch at his back.

On the receipt of this Papal summons two Councils were assembled, one of the bishops in Lombard territory, and one of those who dwelt in the Imperial cities on the coast. From these two Councils and from Severus in his individual capacity three letters were sent to the Emperor. Of these only the first has been preserved but the contents of all were probably similar. The bishops who were under the Lombard yoke expressed their unshaken loyalty to the Empire, recalled with a sigh the happy days of peace which they had once passed under its shadow, congratulated Maurice on the recent successes of his arms in Italy, and predicted the speedy arrival of the day when the ‘Gentiles’ would be suppressed, and all would be once more subject to the beneficent rule of the Holy Roman Republic. When that day should come they would gladly present themselves before a synod in the sacred city of Constantinople. Meanwhile, however, let a religious truce be proclaimed, and let them not be compelled to appear before Gregory, who was really a party to the cause, since they had renounced communion with him, and could not accept him as their judge. In all that they were now doing, they were only upholding the authority of Chalcedon, and maintaining the position which Pope Vigilius had himself ordered them to take up when he anathematized the condemners of the Three Chapters. If their enemies were allowed to persecute them, and destroy the rights of the Metropolitan Church of Aquileia, the inevitable result would be that on the death of the present occupants of the Venetian and Rhaetian sees, their successors would be appointed by a Gaulish Metropolitan, and would transfer their allegiance to him (a thing which had already happened in three churches of the Province): and where ecclesiastical obedience had gone, political obedience would probably follow. Thus even from a political point of view it was important for Maurice to uphold the rights of the struggling Church of Aquileia.

This, and the kindred petitions drew forth a letter addressed “In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” by “the Emperor Caesar Flavius Mauritius Tiberius, the faithful in Christ, the Peaceful, the Mild, the Mightiest, the Beneficent, the victor of the Alamanni;—to the very holy Gregorius, most Blessed Archbishop of the fair City of Rome, and Pope.” After referring to the three petitions, the Emperor says that he has learned from them (one imagines with some surprise) that the Pope has himself sent a tribune and a guardsman to enforce his summons on Severus and his brother bishops. He also mentions their prayer for a religious truce, and concludes, “Since therefore your Holiness is aware of the present confusion in Italian affairs, and knows that we must adapt ourselves to the times, we order your Holiness to give no further molestation to those bishops, but to allow them to live quietly until by the providence of God the regions of Italy be in all other respects restored to peace, and the other bishops of Istria and Venetia be again brought back to the old order. Then, by the help of your prayers, all measures will be better taken for the restoration of peace, and the removal of differences in doctrine.” To which the Emperor added in his own handwriting, “May God preserve you for many years, holiest and most blessed Father!”

Gregory had certainly some reason to complain of such a mandate as this. The question of the Three Chapters was none of Rome's raising. It was an Emperor at Constantinople who had dug up the bones of Theodore, Theodoret and Ibas, and set the whole Christian world at variance over the question of their damnation. The Popes had been merely the instruments, at first the most unwilling instruments, of the State in enforcing conformity with the decrees of the Fifth Council on their suffragans, and now, when the unity of the Western Church was endangered, and Rome was threatened with the uprising of a new and insolent rival at Aquileia, Constantinople intervened, and would not allow the use of one tribune and one life-guardsman in order to put pressure on the Schismatics. Doubtless the remembrance of that letter about the Istrian bishops was one of the things which rankled in the breast of Gregory, when, eleven years after, he sang his lamentable hosannas over the murder of Maurice and his sons. However, for the present the Pope bowed his head to the hard necessity of the times, and, as far as we can see, during the whole Exarchate of Romanus (that is till 597) made no attempt to invoke the powers of the State in order to end the Istrian schism.

It was during this interval that, as has been said, he reissued the ‘useful letter’ which he had himself composed for his predecessor Pelagius, and sent a copy to each of the schismatic bishops, informing them that if, after reading that document, they still remained unconvinced, their error could only be imputed to sheer obstinacy. He also pointed out to them that they were entirely in error in saying that they were ‘persecuted'. Persecution, martyrdom and words of that kind can only be rightly used of those who hold the truth. Men who are in error have no right to claim them. This reasoning would have been cheerfully adopted by Diocletian or Galerius.

Towards the end of this period (July 595), two bishops, Peter of Altinum, and Providentius of an unknown see, made overtures for reconciliation to the Pope, and were invited to visit him at Rome. We are not informed, however, of the result of the negotiations. A little later on (June 596), we find one solitary monk, Joannes by name, returning from the schismatic fold. He takes refuge in Sicily, and Gregory makes him a small annual allowance from the Church patrimony; but his conversion cannot be considered a signal triumph for the cause of orthodoxy.

With the appointment of Callinicus to the office of Exarch a slight change comes over the scene. The Imperial veto on compulsory conversion remains in force, but it is evidently felt that the man in power at Ravenna is now more friendly to the Roman See, and that the Istrians may have a harder struggle to maintain their position of independence. A certain Magister Militum with the barbaric name of Gulfaris receives the warm thanks of Gregory for his watchful care over the souls of those under his rule, and his desire to bring them back from schism into the bosom of the Church.

But our attention is especially attracted by the case of the Insula Capritana, which appears to be the island in the lagunes at the mouth of the Piave, upon which was soon to arise the city of Heraclea, the precursor of Venice. The story is somewhat obscurely told us in Gregory's letters, but seems to have been something like this. A certain man named John, coming from Pannonia, had been appointed bishop of the Venetian ‘Newcastle', (Castellum ad Novas), and had violently annexed to his diocese the adjoining island of Caprea, expelling its bishop. He had then temporarily abjured his schismatic profession, and had, together with the laity on the island, sought through the Exarch Callinicus reconciliation with the Roman Church. Before long, however, the bishop relapsed into schism, while the congregation, or at least a considerable portion of them, still desired to re-enter the Catholic fold. The expelled bishop also, who had made his way to Sicily, that chosen home of all the Roman ‘emigration', showed some signs of willingness to condemn the Three Chapters. A deputation from his late flock having arrived in Rome, Gregory invited the bishop to come himself to the ‘threshold of the Apostles' in order to be confirmed in his new faith. Whether he accepted the invitation or not, a meeting was to be arranged between the Istrians and their bishop, and the new converts were sped upon their homeward way (the journey being apparently accomplished by water, and therefore taking them round by Sicily), and were supplied with letters of amplest commendation to the Exarch, to the bishop of Ravenna, and to all their fellow countrymen of the island of Caprea. The result of this affair, as of so many others which have been opened to us by the Papal correspondence, does not seem to be anywhere disclosed. But there is an interesting passage in the first of Gregory's letters to the Exarch about these poor returning Capritans. Two pieces of news have just been communicated by the Exarch which have equally gladdened the Pope's heart. One is a series of victories over the Sclavonians, and the other this return of the inhabitants of Caprea to their ecclesiastical obedience. The Pope assures him that his victory over the enemies of the State is the reward of his exertions to bring back the enemies of God under the yoke of their true Lord. But Callinicus had some doubts whether he was not transgressing the Emperor’s commands in going even as far as he had gone to meet the returning heretics. To this Gregory answers that the Imperial prohibition, itself obtained under false pretences, only restrained the Exarch “during this time of uncertainty,” from forcibly compelling the unwilling, and by no means ordered him to repel those who were willing to return to the unity of the Church; “wherefore it is necessary that you should hasten to make this suggestion to our most pious Emperors, so that they may understand that under their reign, by the help of Almighty God, and of your labours, the Schismatics are of their own accord returning to the Church.”

“Know, however, that it caused me no little sorrow that your Intendant [Major Domus], who had received the petition of a bishop desirous to return, professes to have lost it, and that it afterwards fell by accident into the hands of the adversaries of the Church. I think this was done, not through negligence, but for a bribe: wherefore I wonder that your Excellency should have so slightly punished such a fault. But after saying “I wonder”, I at once corrected myself, for where my lord Justin is allowed to give advice, a man who is himself out of the peace of the Catholic Church, one cannot expect that heretics will be punished.” Dark hints these as to cabals in the Exarch’s cabinet, to which we have no further clue.

In May 602, as we find from another letter of Pope Gregory, Firminus, bishop of Tergeste (Trieste), returned to his obedience to the Roman See. He suffered, we are told, many things at the hands of his schismatic Metropolitan Severus, who even endeavoured to stir up an insurrection against him in his own city. The conversion of the bishop of so important a city was doubtless a great triumph for the condemners of the Three Chapters, and we are not surprised to find Pope Gregory earnestly entreating the Exarch Smaragdus to protect the new convert.

It was not only on the shores of the Northern Adriatic that this miserable controversy about the Three Chapters disturbed the peace of the Church. Constantius, bishop of Milan, the firm friend and adherent of Gregory, was beset by entreaties, both from above and below, that he would separate himself from the see of Rome in this matter. The bishop and citizens of Brescia called upon him to write them a letter, in which he was to assert upon oath that he had never condemned the Three Chapters. Pope Gregory forbade him to give them any assurances of the sort. Three of his suffragan bishops solemnly informed him that they renounced his communion because he had condemned the Chapters, and had given a bond for his perpetual adhesion to the Fifth Council. And not only so, but the pious Theudelinda herself, ‘seduced by the words of evil men', consented to the course pursued by the three bishops, and withdrew for a time from communion with Constantius. Here was indeed a blow for the Catholic cause, if the royal influence so hardly won, after the long contest with Arianism, was to be lost again over the souls of the three Syrians. Gregory wrote to the queen expressing his regret that she should endanger the result of all her good works and all her pious tears by listening to the talk of ‘unskilled and foolish men, who not only were ignorant of what they were talking about, but could scarce understand what they heard,' and at their persuasion separating herself from the communion of the Catholic Church. He assured her that whatever had been done “in the times of the pious Emperor Justinian, had been so done as in no degree to impair the authority of the great council of Chalcedon.” This letter was sent to Constantius for delivery, but was prudently suppressed by him, for he knew that an allusion to the Fifth Council, however faint and indirect, would ruin all chance of its reception by Theudelinda. Thus warned, the Pope wrote another letter, in which he dwelt with earnest emphasis on his adhesion to the four councils (the number of which, like that of the four gospels, the four living creatures in the Apocalypse, the four rivers of Eden, had a charm for devout minds), and, in slightly different words, renewed his entreaties that she would submit herself to the judgment of the priests of God.

The entreaties of the Pope probably availed to induce Theudelinda to resume her communion with Constantius, and her relations with Pope Gregory seem thenceforward to have been those of unbroken friendship. He sent her a copy of his marvellous ‘Dialogues' with the deacon Peter, and in 599 he wrote to her that letter of congratulation, which has been already quoted, on the great peace obtained through her mediation.

One last letter, as we have seen, Pope Gregory wrote to the Lombard queen in December 603, only three months before his death. In it, while congratulating her on the birth and Catholic baptism of her son Adalwald, he excused himself on the plea of sickness from writing an elaborate answer to the paper sent him by “his dearest son the abbot Secundus.” We have here an interesting glimpse of the Tridentine Ecclesiastic, to whom we are indirectly indebted for so much of the early history of the Lombards. It is evident that Secundus was on the side of the vindicators of the Three Chapters, and we are thus enabled to understand why the allusions to the controversy in the pages of his copyist Paulus are written with so obvious a bias towards the schismatic side. We may conjecture also that Secundus, who, according to Paulus, lived on till the year 612, exerted his influence till the close of his life on behalf of the defenders of the Three Chapters. Theudelinda would seem, at any rate after the year 594, to have occupied a middle position, heartily cooperating with the Pope in all good works, but not renouncing the communion of the Istrian schismatics, perhaps at heart well inclined to their cause.

Along with the letter just referred to, Gregory sent a copy of the Acts of the Fifth Council, which the royal infant was, at some future time, to read and thereby convince himself that all that was alleged against the Apostolic See was utterly false, and that the Popes had deviated in nothing from the Tome of the sainted Leo. There is evidently here some change in the relations of the two parties from the time when the Pope did not venture even to mention the name of the Fifth Council to Theudelinda.

At the time of Gregory’s death the Schism was not closed, but had assumed a geographical character. All becomes round the coast of Istria, at Grado itself, and probably among the lagunes of Venetia—in fact, wherever the galleys of Constantinople could penetrate—churchmen were desirous to return into unity with the Emperor and the Pope, and were willing to admit that Theodoret, Theodore and Ibas were suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. On the mainland, at Aquileia itself, in the great old desolate Venetian cities, Padua, Vicenza, and the like, in the little towns under the shadow of the Dolomites, wherever the swords of the Lombards flashed, men took a more hopeful view of the spiritual prospects of the three Syrians. At the death of Severus, in 606, the divergence became manifest. The abbot John was chosen by one set of ecclesiastics, assembled at old Aquileia, as their Patriarch, and the champion of the Three Chapters, while the bishop Marcianus, and, after him, Candidianus, both in full communion with the Pope, were chosen Patriarchs of Grado by the bishops and clergy of the coast.

“And from henceforth”, as Paulus relates, “there were two patriarchs.” The detailed history of the schism after this point does not greatly interest us, nor indeed are there many materials from which it could be written. Its effect, however, in throwing the defenders of the Three Chapters into the arms of the Lombard invaders is vividly shown by a letter from the Aquileian Patriarch John to King Agilulf. In it the Patriarch complains bitterly of the severities practised by the ‘Greeks’ and asks what sort of unity is that which is obtained at the point of the sword, by imprisonment, by the blows of the cudgel, by long and dreary banishment. The old grievance of the forcible abduction of the bishops to Ravenna by Exarch Smaragdus is again brought up, and the king is informed that in more recent times three Istrian bishops have been dragged away by the soldiers of the Empire from their churches, and forced to communicate with Candidianus at Grado. Now, however, at the hour of writing, that worthless prelate has departed this life and gone to the place of eternal torment, and Agilulf is entreated to interpose on behalf of the Catholic faith and prevent another unjust ordination of a Patriarch from taking place in the village of Grado. However, the election was held, and the schism continued. Some years later, a certain Fortunatus, though a secret champion of the Three Chapters, was chosen Patriarch of orthodox Grado. He soon found his position untenable, and fled, with all the Church's treasure, to the mainland, where the Lombard duke of Friuli obtained for him the Patriarchate of Aquileia. In vain was application made to the Lombards by his successor Primogenius (a faithful adherent of the Pope) for the surrender of the fugitive Patriarch, or at least of the stolen treasure. Both were steadfastly refused, and, on the ‘lamentable petition' of Primogenius to the Emperor Heraclius, setting forth the sad condition of the Church of Grado, bereft of all her wonted ornaments, a large sum was transmitted from the Imperial treasury to enable the Patriarch to make good the deficiency.

So the Schism smouldered on till near the very end of the seventh century, when the reigning Lombard king Cunincpert summoned a council at Pavia, which was attended by a full representation from the lately schismatic Patriarchate of Aquileia. With shouts of triumph they entered the church, declaring that they renounced the heresy of Theodore and his companions, and wished to be restored to the unity of the Church. Tears and sobs expressed the overpowering emotion with which the spectators, Catholics and Schismatics alike, witnessed this ending of so long a struggle. Legates were sent to bear the joyful news to Pope Sergius, who returned for answer to King Cunincpert, ‘He which converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save his soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins.’ At the same time he gave orders that all the MSS. setting forth the doctrines of the now defeated sect should be burned, lest their errors should ever again infect the souls of the new converts.

So ended the heresy of the Three Chapters; a heresy which at one time had all that was best and wisest in the Western Church, including the Pope's own authority, on its side. But not even thus was peace restored to the Church, nor were occasions of strife between Rome and Constantinople done away. The Monotheletic word-war had already tormented Christendom for half a century, and the dispute about the worship of images was shortly to ascend above the horizon.