ITALY AND HER INVADERS.
CHAPTER IX.
THE PONTIFICATE OF PAUL I
We have again reached a point at which there is a clearing of the
historical stage and some new actors appear upon the scene.
It was probably while Pope Stephen was still sheltering at S. Denis that
the great champion of the Papacy, Boniface, received the crown of martyrdom.
Revisiting the scene of his early labours in Friesland in the summer of 754, he
had collected a number of recently- baptized converts on the banks of the river
Boorn, in the flat land between the Zuyder Zee and
the German Ocean, and was about to perform the ceremony of their confirmation.
A party of Frisian heathens, revengeful for his old attacks on their idols, and
coveting the ecclesiastical treasures, the vessels of silver and gold which he
and his companions (for he had a long train of attendants) had brought, came
upon them at daybreak on the 5th of June. Boniface forbade his followers to
fight, held high the sacred relics, and said to his disciples, “Fear not them
which kill the body. Anchor your souls on God, who after this short life is
over will give you the prize of eternal life in the fellowship of the citizens
on high”. The barbarians rushed on with swords drawn. Boniface lifted a copy of
the Gospels high over his head. A Frisian sword struck down the feeble defence.
He was slain, and fifty-two of his companions with him. The barbarians rifled
the tents, drank the sacramental wine, and hurled the precious manuscripts into
the sluggish river, where long after, we are told, they were found uninjured.
The very codex which the saint had used for a helmet showed the barbarian's
sword-cut through it, but had all its letters visible. So perished the great apostle
of Germany. The monks of Utrecht soon appeared upon the scene of the martyrdom,
and carried off the precious relics of the martyrs to their own cathedral. The
great prize of all, however, the body of Boniface himself, they were not
permitted to retain. It was borne away up the Rhine-stream and the Main-stream
to be laid in his own beloved monastery of Fulda.
It was only a few months after the surrender of the Exarchate and the
Pentapolis that Aistulf, king of the Lombards, vanished from the scene. The
Frankish chroniclers tell us that he was “meditating how to falsify his
promises, leave his hostages in the lurch, and violate his oaths”; but no
evidence is adduced of these fraudulent designs. All that we know with
certainty is that he fell from his horse while hunting, was thrown violently
against a tree, and died after a few days of the injuries which he had received.
The accident probably happened at the end of December, 756, for in the letter
which Pope Stephen II wrote to Pippin to inform him of the fact he says, “That
follower of the devil, Aistulf, devourer of the blood of Christians, destroyer
of the churches of God, struck by a divine blow has been swallowed up in the
infernal whirlpool. For in the very days in which he set forth to devastate
this City of Rome, after the year had come round, he was so stricken by the
divine sword that at the very same season of the year in which he had committed
so many crimes he finished his impious life”.
The Lombard people, as might be expected, had gentler words to use in
speaking of their departed king. Six years, nine years, fifteen years after his
death he was still “our lord king Aistulf of good and holy memory”.
On the death of Aistulf the Lombard state narrowly escaped the horrors
of a civil war. One of the most powerful men in the kingdom was a certain
Desiderius, a native probably of Brescia, who had been much favoured by the
late king and advanced by him to the high dignity of Duke of Tuscany. At the
head of the assembled forces of that important district he stood forth as a
claimant for the crown. Desiderius, however, was apparently a man of
undistinguished birth. There were other Lombard nobles who considered
themselves to rank much before him in the kingdom; and above all, the late
king's brother Ratchis in his cell on Monte Cassino, notwithstanding that for
seven and a half years he had worn the monkish cowl, heard with indignation
that the throne which had once been his was occupied by such an one as the
low-born Desiderius. He escaped to Pavia, and there for three months, from
December to March, ruled in the palace of the Lombards.
As to the elevation of Desiderius to the throne is thus given in the
Legend of St. Julia from a MS. Chronicle of Bishop Sieard of Cremona (who died in 1215) : I follow the translation of Abel : ‘There lived
in Brescia a nobleman, pious and God-fearing, named Desiderius. When the barons
and chief persons of the realm gathered together at Pavia to choose a king,
Desiderius said to his wife Ansa, “I will go there too”. She laughed and said,
“Go, mayhap they will choose thee for their king”. He went, and arrived on the
first day at a place called Lenum, where he lay down to rest under a tree.
While he slept, a snake stole forth and wound itself round his head like a
crown. His servant feared to wake him, lest the snake should bite him.
Meanwhile Desiderius dreamed that a royal diadem was placed upon his head. Then
he awoke, unharmed by the snake, and said, “Arise, let us go, for I have had a
dream from which I judge that I shall be king”. When they came to Pavia they
found the people standing about in the courtyard, waiting for the decision of
the electors, who had consulted together for several days without being able to
come to a decision. So the crowd said to Desiderius, “Go in to them,
Desiderius, and tell them that we are tired of waiting”. He went in and told
them what the crowd said, and when they saw Desiderius, of whom nobody had
thought before as a candidate, one of the assembly cried out, “This Desiderius
is an honourable man, and though he has not large possessions, he is valiant in
war. Let us choose him for king”. So it was done: he was arrayed in royal robes
and proclaimed king amid general rejoicing. But he forgot not the place where
the serpent had wound itself round his head, but built there a glorious abbey
in honour of Jesus Christ and St. Benedict, and enriched it with many gifts.
His wife also built at her own cost a convent for nuns in Brescia, and endowed
it with estates, meadows, mills, and springs of water, with many dependants and
slaves in all the surrounding bishoprics, and with costly ornaments, as became
a queen of the Lombards.
Happily a civil war was avoided, mainly as it would seem through the
influence of the Pope, who beheld, doubtless with genuine disapproval, this
attempt of a professed monk to return to the world and the palace which he had
quitted, and who saw an opportunity to extend his newly-won dominions by
working on the Duke of Tuscany's eagerness for the crown. An agreement was come
to between Desiderius and Stephen, which is thus described in a letter written
by the Pope to his Frankish patron : —
“Now by the providence of God, by the hands of His Prince of Apostles
St. Peter, and by thy strong arm, by the industrious precaution of that man
beloved of God, thy henchman Fulrad, our beloved son,
Desiderius, mildest of men , has been ordained king over the nation of the
Lombards. And in the presence of the same Fulrad he
has promised on his oath to restore to St. Peter the remaining cities, Faenza,
Imola, and Ferrara, with the forests and other territories thereto belonging;
also the cities Osimo, Ancona, and Umana, with their territories. And
afterwards, through Duke Garrinod and Grimwald. he
promised to restore to us the city of Bologna with its district, and he
professed that he would always remain in quiet peace with the Church of God and
our people. He declared that he was loyal towards your God-protected realm, and
he begged us to entreat your Goodness that you would confirm the treaty of
peace with him and the whole nation of the Lombards.”
This compact, as we learn from the Papal biographer (as well as from the
letter just quoted), was framed on the advice of Fulrad,
now evidently the accepted and permanent link between Pippin and Stephen, and
it was made not only in his presence but in that of Stephen’s brother Paul the
deacon, and of Christopher, who had accompanied him as regionarius into France, who was now consiliarius, and who was
thereafter to fill the higher office of primicerius and to play an important part in Roman politics. The object and motive of this
stroke of Papal policy are clear. As stated by the learned editor of the Liber Pontificalis, the conquests of Aistulf from the Empire
having been restored, it was now desired to go back a generation further and
reclaim the conquests of Liutprand. These were ‘the remaining cities' on the
west and south of the already-ceded territory, which Pope Stephen now claimed,
and some of which he actually obtained as the price of his support of
Desiderius. In view of the relations which afterwards existed between this man,
the last of the Lombard kings, and the Papal See, it is strange to find him
here spoken of as ‘mildest of men', and to remember that he was actually the
favoured Roman candidate for the Lombard throne.
On receiving the document in which the promise and oath of Desiderius
were contained, Stephen sent a letter of exhortation by the hands of the
presbyter Stephen (one day to be himself Pope) to the monk-king at Pavia. The
indefatigable Fulrad hastened with a detachment of
Frankish soldiers to the help of Desiderius, who could also reckon on a
contingent from the army of the Ducatus Romae. Ratchis saw that the scale was too heavily weighted
against him. He could not fight the Franks, the Pope, and the Lombard duke of
Tuscany all at once. He descended from his lately mounted throne, returned to
Monte Cassino, and died there, when or how we know not. All that we know is
that he, like so many other renowned sons of Benedict, lies buried on that
famous hill.
In this connection it is interesting to observe that in the just quoted
letter of Pope Stephen, the last that he wrote to his Frankish patron, there is
a plea for pardon to the monks who had accompanied Carloman in his journey to
the Frankish Court. This plea, which is preferred at the request of their abbot
Optatus, shows how heavy had been the hand of Pippin on all who were concerned
in that ill-starred intervention.
The promise so solemnly sworn to by Desiderius was not altogether made
void. Apparently before the abdication of Ratchis was complete, the urgent Pope
sent his messengers to obtain the surrender of the promised cities. They
returned bringing with them the keys of Faventia, Tiberiacum, and Cabellum (Faenza, Bagnicavallo, and Cavello), together with all the
towns in the duchy of Ferrara. This accession of territory rounded off the
Papal dominions in the north, but the important cities of Imola, Bologna, and Ancona
(with their neighbours Osimo and Umana) were still withheld by the Lombard
king.
The letter in which Pope Stephen II announced to Pippin the accession of
Desiderius described his friendly disposition towards the Roman See, and prayed
the Frankish king to look favourably upon him, was one of the latest documents
to which he set his hand. That letter seems to have been written in the month
of March or April, and on the 26th of April, 757, he died. Many of his
predecessors had been men of Greek nationality. In his five years' pontificate
this essentially Roman Pope had done much to fasten down the great western
Patriarchate to the soil of Italy. His is certainly one of the great
epoch-making names in the list of bishops of Rome. As Leo the First had turned
aside the terrible Hun and had triumphed over the Eastern theologians, as
Gregory the Great had consolidated his spiritual dominion over Western Europe
and rescued for it a great province from heathendom, so Stephen II won for
himself and his successors the sovereignty over some of the fairest regions of
Italy, gave a deadly blow to the hereditary Lombard enemy, and in fact if not
in name began that long line of Pope-kings which ended in our own day in the
person of the ninth Pius.
While Stephen was lying on his death-bed there was already hot debate
going on in Rome as to his successor. A certain portion of ‘ he people of Rome'
favoured the election of the Archdeacon Theophylact, and assembled daily in his
house to discuss measures for his elevation. This party is called by some
modern writers ‘the Lombard', by others ‘the Imperial' party. We have no
evidence in support of either conjecture.
Another, and as it proved a more powerful section of the people,
favoured the elevation of the deacon Paul, brother and chief counsellor of the
dying pontiff. He, refusing to go forth into the City and court the suffrages
of the electors, remained in the Lateran with a few faithful friends waiting
upon his brother's death-bed. His fraternal piety was rewarded. After Stephen
II had been solemnly entombed in the basilica of St. Peter, the adherents of
Paul carried his election to the vacant throne, and the supporters of
Theophylact dispersed, apparently without tumult.
We have already in the case of Silverius seen the son of a Pope chosen
for the papacy, though not in immediate succession to his father. Now brother
follows close upon brother as wearer of the Roman mitre, almost the only
instance of the kind that has occurred in the long annals of the papacy. The
choice in this instance seems to have been a good one, but it might have been a
dangerous precedent. Considering the immense power which the Popes have
wielded, it must be considered on the whole an evidence of statesmanship and
courage on the part of the electors that mere family claims have so seldom
determined the succession to the pontifical throne.
Of the new Pope’s character and personal history we know but little. A
Roman of course by birth, like his brother, and like him brought up in the
palace of the Lateran, he was probably at this time still middle life, since
his ordination as deacon dated only from the days of Zacharias (741-752). What
little we hear of his character seems to indicate a man of kindly temper,
paying nightly visits to the cottages of his sick neighbours, or with his
servants relieving the wants of the destitute : visiting the gaols also at night,
and often setting free their inmates who were lying under sentence of death.
Moreover, we are told, ‘if by the injustice of his satellites he had caused
temporary tribulation to any man, he took the earliest opportunity to bestow on
such an one the comfort of his compassion'. Even these words of praise indicate
already the characteristic defects as well as merits of a government by
priests, but they are valuable as evidence that already the Pope exercised all
the functions of a temporal sovereign in Rome, probably therefore also in the Ducatus Romae and the lately
annexed Pentapolis.
The ten years of Paul's pontificate were an interval of peace between
two political storms. He appears to have made it his chief aim to follow in all
things the policy of ‘my lord and brother of blessed memory, the most holy Pope
Stephe '; and his copious correspondence with Pippin enables us to trace the
workings of this policy in relation to the Empire, the Lombards, and the
Frankish kingdom. We will consider each subject separately.
I. The Empire. Already in the last letter written by Pope Stephen II to
Pippin we find a note of alarm sounded as to the hostility of the iconoclastic
‘Greek' Emperor. ‘And this,' says Stephen, ‘we earnestly pray of your Exalted
Goodness that you would order such measures to be taken with respect to the
Greeks that the holy Catholic and Apostolic faith may through you remain whole
and unshattered for ever'. This note becomes louder and more shrill throughout
the correspondence of Paul, whose religious aversion to the image-breaking
Emperor is mingled with his anxiety as a temporal ruler lest, either in
conjunction with Desiderius or by his own unaided efforts, Constantine V should
wrest from the Church its hardly-won dominions on the shore of the Adriatic.
A certain George, an Imperial secretary, had been sent from
Constantinople on a roving mission to the West, to win over Pippin if possible
to the cause of iconoclasm, to effect an alliance if possible with Desiderius,
to recover Ravenna and the Pentapolis if possible for the empire, but at any
rate and by all means to counter-work the schemes of the bishop of Rome, doubly
odious at Constantinople as the great defender of image-worship and the
rebellious subject who had by Frankish help obtained possession of the best
part of Imperial Italy and was now holding it in defiance of his lord. The
influence of this secretary George on Western statesmen was profoundly dreaded
by the pontiff. A letter, which is quoted only in abstract, contained
“lamentations and tribulations, because King Desiderius has been taking counsel
with George the Imperial envoy, who has come hither on his way to Francia to
the intent that the Emperor should send his army into Italy to wrest from us
Ravenna and the Pentapolis and the City of Rome”. Desiderius has had ‘private
and nefarious conversations' with George at Naples for the same purpose. And
lastly, in some mysterious way George has won over a certain presbyter Marinus
to his ‘unjust operations against the holy Church of God and the orthodox
faith' : that is, no doubt, to the iconoclastic crusade. A short time before,
this Marinus had been high in favour with both Pope and Frankish King. He had
been “our most dearly beloved and faithful presbyter,” to whom at Pippin’s
request Paul granted the titulus or parish church of St. Chrysogonus in the Trastevere at Rome. Now he is under the severe
displeasure of the Pope and has to undergo a singular punishment. “Tell our
brother bishop Wilchar”, writes Paul to Pippin, “to
consecrate presbyter Marinus bishop on our behalf. And order him to go and
preside over some city in your dominions, which your most wise Excellency may
decide upon, that he may there call to mind the wickedness which he has
perpetrated and repent of his unrighteous deeds lest otherwise the Devil should
lay hold of his wandering mind and raise him aloft to dash him down into utter
ruin”.
More than once we find the Pope repeating to his powerful patron the
alarming rumours which have reached him as to the designs of the most wicked
Greeks. “Some of the most sincere subjects of your spiritual mother [the Roman
Church] have intimated to us that six patricians, bringing with them three
hundred ships, together with the navy of Sicily, have started from the Royal
City [Constantinople] and are hastening to us here in Rome. What they want to
do or for what cause they are being sent hither we are utterly ignorant. This
only is told us, that they are directed to come first to us and afterwards to
your Excellency in Francia”.
This letter appears to have sounded a vain alarm. The six patricians, it
would seem, did not make their appearance in Rome, nor were their three hundred
ships descried in the offing from Ostia: but a letter from Pippin, which was
probably a reply to the foregoing, informed the Pope that he was ready for the
help and defence of the Holy Church of God ‘when the necessity for such help
should arise; a gentle hint that it would be well not to harass a king, who had
hard battles of his own to fight, with rumours of imaginary invasions.
About three years later, circa 763, (apparently) the rumour of a
Byzantine invasion was revived, the tidings again coming from some of the
faithful subjects of mother Church, probably some of the Roman party in
Pentapolis or Ravenna. Again, “The nefandissimi Graeci, enemies of God’s holy Church and
assailants of the orthodox faith, in direct opposition to God's will, are
longing to make a hostile attack on us and on the region of Ravenna.” So great
is the alarm into which the Pope is thrown by these tidings that he is willing
to accept even Lombard help for his deliverance. Pippin is besought to send an
envoy to Desiderius at Pavia, to the Lombard dukes of Tuscany, of Benevento, of
Spoleto, ordering them all to hasten to the assistance of the Pope.
This too, however, was a vain alarm. The Emperor sent ambassadors,
probably twice or thrice, to discuss the iconoclastic question with the
Frankish king, to importune him for the restoration of the Exarchate, to
wrangle with the Pope's envoys as to the wording of their master's letters, but
no armed intervention of any kind was made by Constantine Copronymus in the
affairs of Italy.
This exhibition of feebleness on the part of an Emperor of the strong
Isaurian race, perhaps the toughest and most courageous of them all, may well
surprise us till we look at the difficulties nearer home with which that
Emperor had to contend. From 753 to 775 he was almost constantly at war with
the Bulgarians, the near and still heathen neighbours of Thrace and Macedonia.
Most of his campaigns were successful, but even a successful campaign imposed a
great strain on his resources and those of his empire.
Nor did he altogether escape the fickleness of the fortune of war. In
759 he sustained a serious defeat in one of the passes of the Balkans. In 765 a
great naval armament, consisting of 2,600 transport ships, was wrecked in the
Euxine, and all the crews perished. This disaster was followed by a conspiracy,
in which some of the chief nobles of the Empire were engaged, and which even
Constantine's own iconoclastic Patriarch of Constantinople was suspected of
having favoured.
Throughout, the Emperor’s fiercest fight was with his own subjects, and
was caused by his remorseless, relentless vigour in giving effect to the
iconoclastic policy of his father. In the year 753, two years after the Lombard
conquest of Ravenna, a great synod was held at Constantinople which condemned
the worship of images. The Bulgarian wars and other embarrassments prevented
the immediate outbreak of persecution. It began however in full violence in
761, and from that time onwards Constantine, fiercely hated by a large party
among his subjects, frantically cheered by another party (which included
probably the strongest portion of his army), was pursuing, with all the energy
of his soul, the ruin of the monks and bishops who yet clave to the worship of
images. It was the monks who especially attracted the wrath of the Emperor, and
out of whose ranks came the most celebrated martyrs to the cause of
image-worship. Such an one was Andreas, who, having insulted the Emperor by
calling him “a new Julian, a new Valens,” was scourged through the Hippodrome,
strangled, and cast into the Bosphorus. Such an one was Stephanus, who after
spending thirty years in a cave in Bithynia and having afterwards become the
abbot of a monastery of refugee monks, was forcibly removed from his cell and
banished to the island of Proconnesus, then thrown
into prison, and fed for eleven months on six ounces of bread weekly, and at
last, with the connivance if not by the express orders of the Emperor, was
pulled out of prison, dragged through the streets, hacked to pieces, and cast
into the malefactors’ burying- place.
It does not appear that there was much actual bloodshed in this
iconoclastic persecution, but there was an insulting flippancy in the methods
employed by Constantine V which made his tyranny harder to bear than that of
more murderous persecutors. When he found it impossible to procure the adoption
by the monks of the decrees of the Synod of 753, he turned them out of their
monasteries, many of which he converted into barracks for his soldiers. Some of
the expelled monks were compelled to walk up and down the Hippodrome, each
holding the hand of a prostitute, amidst the jeers and spittings of the mob. The Patriarch Constantine, who as has been said fell under
suspicion of being concerned in the conspiracy of the nobles and who had also
grown cold in his iconoclastic zeal, was scourged so severely that he could not
stand. He was then carried in a litter to St. Sophia, and compelled to listen
to the reading of a long paper containing the history of his misdeeds, for each
one of which he received a blow on the head from the reading secretary.
Then, after the hair of his head, beard and eyebrows had been shaven
off, he was seated on an ass with his face to its tail, and exposed in that
state to the insults of the populace in the Hippodrome. At last, after he had
been compelled by all these cruelties to recant his condemnation of the
iconoclastic synod, he was beheaded, and his truncated corpse was thrown into
the pit of the suicides. This depth of degradation, into which imperial tyranny
had hurled the second patriarchate of Christendom, is probably the best
justification that can be offered for the Roman pontiff's eagerness to obtain
the position of sovereignty, which, as he might think, could alone secure him
from a similar downfall.
For Constantine Copronymus himself, whatever may be our judgment upon
the iconoclastic controversy, it is impossible not to feel loathing and
abhorrence. Of course his cruelties have been exaggerated by the ecclesiastical
historians whose voices alone have reached posterity: but after making every
reasonable deduction on this account, it is impossible to doubt that he was
deliberately, wantonly, and insultingly cruel. And moreover, his antagonism to
the Church was not confined to the iconoclastic controversy. He seems to have
been one of the earliest instances of that free-thinking tendency which was the
result of the contact of Christianity and Islamism. He spoke lightly of some of
the names most venerated by Christians; he almost encouraged profanity in
speech; his morals were undoubtedly licentious. A free-living as well as
free-thinking ruler, bringing a round of joyous revelries into the solemn old
palace by the Bosphorus, he no doubt achieved a certain popularity both with
his soldiers and with the mob : but this very looseness of faith and of
morality must have made his religious persecution all the more exasperating.
The intolerance of a narrow bigot is hard to bear, but the intolerance of a man
who is himself devoid of faith is yet more intolerable.
This Emperor, Constantine V, and these two Popes, Stephen and Paul, mark
the final severance of political relations between Rome and Constantinople, to
be followed in the next century by the great and final rupture of
ecclesiastical relations between them. The harsh and violent character of
Constantine Copronymus had something to do with this result; the fact that
Stephen and Paul were Romans, while their two immediate predecessors, Gregory
III and Zacharias, had been Orientals (the first a Syrian, the second a Greek),
had perhaps even more to do with it: but obviously the chief determining factor
was the capture of Ravenna by Aistulf, and its surrender at the command of
Pippin to the Papacy. The sceptre had thus obviously departed from
Constantinople and been transferred to ‘Francia'. For a few years the Popes
continued as a matter of form to date their letters by the year of the Emperor
reigning at Constantinople, but after 772 even that survival from the old days
of dependence faded away. Let us consider what this renunciation of dependence
on the Eastern Augustus amounted to, for it gives a very peculiar character to
the second half of the eighth century. From the time when bishops were first
consecrated in Rome, down to—let us say—726, there could be no doubt that the
bishop of Rome was a subject; nor (with some possible reservation for the short
interval of Ostrogothic domination) that he was the subject of a Roman Emperor
reigning at Rome, at Milan, at Ravenna, or at Constantinople. From 726 to 800 the
Pope was practically ‘amasterless man’, the virtual
ruler of the Ducatus Romae,
and afterwards the acknowledged lord of the Exarchate and the Pentapolis. From
the year 800 down to the French Revolution, the Pope, however great might be
his spiritual pretensions, was, as regarded his temporal dominions, included,
theoretically or practically, in that great, mysterious, loosely-compacted
organization which was called the Holy Roman Empire. From the downfall of
Napoleon to the seizure of Rome by Victor Emmanuel, a space of fifty-five
years, the Pope-king was in theory as well as in practice an absolute monarch,
owning no political superior however shadowy, as much a sovereign as the kings
of France or Spain before the Great Revolution. Thus, from this point of view,
the half-century between Waterloo and Sedan reproduced, as no intervening
period had done, the half-century between Leo the Isaurian and Charles the
Great.
II. The Lombards. We have next to consider the relations of Paul I with
the new Lombard king, Desiderius. It need hardly be said that these relations
soon became unfriendly, but they were scarcely interrupted by actual war. We
have seen that Faenza and a little corner of territory round it were ceded to
St. Peter. Further than that concession the gratitude of Desiderius for Papal
help or his fear of the Papal anathema never went. On the contrary, he soon
bestirred himself for the restoration of the power of a Lombard king to the
fullness of its privileges in the days of Liutprand, and in doing so inevitably
came into collision with the ‘justitiae' of St. Peter, and provoked the shrill
outcry of the Pope.
In the last letter which Pope Stephen II wrote to Pippin (in March or
April of 757), the letter in which he praised the excellent disposition of ‘the
mildest of men, Desiderius', were written these words :— “Moreover the people
of the duchy of Spoleto, by the hands of St. Peter and your very strong arm,
have appointed a duke for themselves. And both the Spoletans and the Beneventans all desire to commend themselves
to your Excellency, preserved by God, and with panting breath are urgent to
entreat your goodness”.
Here was indeed an important change threatened in the political map of
Italy. True it is that the Spoletan and Beneventan duchies had often stirred uneasily and
mutinously against the rule even of a strong king like Liutprand; but if the
Pope's letter accurately described the situation, if they were ‘commending '
themselves to Pippin, that meant, in the already current language of feudalism,
that the two dukes desired to place their hands in his and to swear themselves
the men or vassals of the Frankish king. Possibly the Pope’s language is not to
be understood thus in the fullness of its technical import, but at any rate it
was plain that the two southern duchies, separated as they now were from the
northern kingdom by a continuous stretch of Papal territory, were in great danger
of being lost to the Lombard state.
We must turn back for a few moments to consider what events had been
occurring in these two duchies since the year 744. The fortunes of the Spoletan duchy during the years immediately following the
death of King Liutprand are very obscure. From 745 to 751 Duke Lupus, known
chiefly by his grants to the monastery of Farfa,
seems to have reigned in the Umbrian duchy. After his death Aistulf perhaps
took the duchy into his own hands, unless room has to be found for a certain
Duke Unulf, who is doubtfully reported to have reigned for a few years.
Apparently about this time the people of Spoleto took advantage of the troubles
at Pavia following the death of Aistulf to choose for themselves a new duke,
who (as we learn from a letter of Pope Paul) bore the great name of Alboin,
and, as we have seen, they sought to secure their new independence of Pavia by
placing themselves under the protection of Pippin. In Benevento, Gisulf II, who
had been installed as duke by his great-uncle Liutprand, died in 751, in the
prime of life, leaving a son, named Liutprand after his great kinsman, to
inherit his dignity. For the young duke, who was probably but a child at the
time of his father's death, his mother Scauniperga for some years acted as regent, but apparently before the year 757 Liutprand
had assumed the reins of power. There are some indications that neither Aistulf
nor Desiderius was heartily welcomed as king by the family of the great
Liutprand; and possibly some especial dissatisfaction at the exaltation of the
latter nobleman to the throne may have led the young duke and his counsellors
to venture on the treasonable course of ‘commending' themselves to the Frankish
king. However this may be—and our information as to these two Lombard duchies
is extremely meagre—it was soon clear that the new king had both the will and
the power to compel their unwilling allegiance. Desiderius assembled his army,
marched through the Pentapolis, probably not sparing its harvests and reached
Spoleto in his victorious course. Here he arrested the new duke, Alboin, with
his chief nobles, and threw them into prison. He drew near to Benevento: the
young duke did not dare to await his attack, but fled to Otranto, along with
his foster-father John. Unable to invest that sea-coast town without a fleet,
Desiderius proceeded to Naples, and there concerted measures with the Imperial
envoy George for the reduction of Otranto and—so the Pope was told—for the
recovery of Ravenna. The Sicilian navy was to undertake the blockade of
Otranto; the Lombards were to invest it on the land side; the young prince and
his governor were to be handed over to Desiderius, but the city if captured was
probably to be restored to the officers of the Emperor. How far this programme
was carried into execution and what became of young Liutprand we know not. At
this point he disappears from history, and his o, place is taken by a certain
Arichis, whom Desiderius installed in the duchy of Benevento, and to whom he
gave his daughter Adelperga to wife. The names of both husband and wife, but
that of the latter especially, will often recur in the later chapters of this
history.
As for Spoleto, Desiderius seems for a year or two to have retained it
in his own hands, but in April, 759, he invested Gisulf with the ducal dignity.
After this triumphant campaign Desiderius visited Rome. He came
apparently not as a warrior but as a guest and a pilgrim, to pay his devotions
at the tombs of the Apostles. He had, however, set his heart on obtaining the
restitution of the hostages at the Frankish court (probably those who had been
given by Aistulf at the end of the war of 756), and he hoped to accomplish this
by the Pope's mediation. The price which he offered was the addition—or as the
Pope called it the restitution—to the Papal territory of Imola, the next town
westward on the great Emilian way after the recently acquired Faenza.
The result of this interview between Pope and Lombard King was seen in
two remarkable letters dispatched by the hands of one Frankish and two Papal
emissaries to the court of Pippin.
In one letter, the Pope, after thanking God for having raised to the
pontificate one so humble as himself, and quoting the words of the Psalmist, ‘I
will take the cup of salvation and will call upon the name of the Lord',
alludes to the blessing pronounced on the peacemakers, and then continues: “Let
your most excellent Goodness know that our most excellent son, King Desiderius,
has arrived at the threshold of the Apostles, peacefully and with great
humility, and that with him we have held discourse which will be salutary to
both of us. He has promised to restore to us the city of Imola: on this
condition however, that we should send our missi to your Excellency, and that [by their mediation] he should receive back the
hostages whom as it seems you have still with you, and that you should consent
to confirm with him the peace [which was ratified with his predecessor].
Wherefore we pray you to restore those hostages to our aforesaid son
Desiderius, to confirm your treaty of peace with him, and to correspond with
him on terms of cordial friendship : so that, by the favour of God, His people
of both nations may in your joyful times dwell in peace and great safety, and
that Almighty God may grant you a long life on the throne of your kingdom”.
So ran one letter, borne by Ruodbert, George
and Stephen. The second was not like unto it. Therein the Pope details at
considerable length the ‘impious and cruel' deeds which have been perpetrated
by Desiderius in the course of the campaign just described, and the ‘nefarious
' negotiations which he has been conducting with the Emperor's ambassador at
Naples. After the conquest, or as the Pope calls it the ‘dissolution ' of the
two duchies, he has come to Rome, and there “we have besought and exhorted him
by the most holy body of St. Peter and by your God-protected Excellency to
restore to us the cities of Imola, Bologna, Osimo and Ancona, as he once
promised to do in our presence and that of your missi Ruodbert and Fulrad. But he
was not at all inclined to assent to this. He shuffled like the trickster which
he certainly is, and made several suggestions, as for instance that if he could
recover his hostages who appear to be there in Francia he would then enter into
relations of peace and concord with us. We have longed greatly to write to you,
but could not do so on account of the Lombards hemming us in on every side. In
fact we did privately, by the greatest exertion, send you two apostolic
letters, which we fear may have been intercepted by them. It is for this reason
that we now by the aforesaid missi send you
another letter, written as if in compliance with the will of King Desiderius,
desiring you to release his hostages and confirm the peace with him. But, 0
good and most excellent king, our spiritual kinsman, we so penned that letter
solely in order that our messengers might be able to get through into Francia,
since if we had not done so they would have had no chance of passing the
Lombard frontier. But when you receive that letter do not pay any heed to its
contents, and on no account consent to restore the said hostages to the Lombard
party. Rather we adjure you to order the strongest pressure to be put upon
Desiderius and the Lombard nation, so that he may restore those cities which he
promised to your honey flowing Excellency, and through you to your protector
St. Peter. For as to none of the things which he promised at the outset of his
reign have we been able to come to a firm agreement with him”.
These two interesting but contradictory letters slumber side by side in
the pages of the Codex Carolinus, as they once
slumbered in the Frankish archives; but it is one of the tantalizing results of
this one-sided correspondence that we do not know what answer Pippin made, nor
with which of them he complied. The whole tenour of
the letters, however, shows that he was determined not to undertake another
Italian campaign, if it were possible to avoid it, having already wars and fightings enough on his hands on the other side of the
Alps. Had Desiderius indeed attempted to wrest the already surrendered cities
out of the hands of St. Peter, Pippin might have been bound in honour to
interfere, but if only the status quo could be maintained, he did not feel himself
called upon to take up arms for the further enlargement of the Church's
territory. Thus in a letter, of which it is much to be regretted that we cannot
determine the date, the Pope acknowledges that Pippin has recommended him to
live in peace and love with Desiderius, king of the Lombards, and actually
proceeds thus, “Now if that most excellent man shall be willing to remain in
that true love and fidelity which he hath promised to your Excellency and the
Holy Church of Rome, we too will remain in firm charity and stable peace with
him, observing that injunction of the Lord, ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for
they shall be called the children of God.”
These pacific counsels of the Frankish king and his obvious reluctance
to draw the sword a third time on behalf of Peter, seem to have produced the
desired effect; and Desiderius, if not harassed with entreaties to restore the
remaining cities of the Pentapolis and Aemilia, appears to have been willing to
remain at peace with Rome. There was indeed one interruption to this peace in
761, when he made an attack on Sinigaglia and sacked
a city of Campania, but this does not seem to have been a long or serious campaign.
On the whole, one would say from a perusal of the correspondence that there was
something like a gradual reconciliation between Paul and Desiderius. The
increasing bitterness of feeling between the Eastern and Western Churches
perhaps contributed to this result, the nefandissimi Graeci having now taken the place of the nefandissimi Langobardi as chief enemies of God and His Church.
In one letter the Pope says to Pippin : “You tell us that you directed
Desiderius to return to us our runaway slave Saxulus.
But I ought to tell you that Desiderius came here himself to pray at the tombs
of the Apostles, and that he brought Saxulus with him
and restored him to us. At the same time we arranged with Desiderius that he
and our missi should make a tour through the various
cities and there settle our claims. This has now been satisfactorily
accomplished for Benevento, Tuscany, and partly for Spoleto. In a postscript
you told us that you had admonished Desiderius to constrain the men of Naples
and Gaeta to restore the patrimonies of St. Peter situated at Naples, and to
allow their bishops-elect to come hither for consecration. We thank you for this”.
Everything seems to show that by the end of Paul’s pontificate a modus
vivendi had been arrived at between the Lombards and the Roman pontiffs.
III.
The Frankish Kingdom.
The relations of Pope Paul with the Frankish king, as disclosed to us by
the Codex Carolinus, consist chiefly of a lavish
outpouring of spiritual compliments, of an exhibition of that gratitude which
is “a lively sense of favours to come,” and of frequent entreaties for help
which never arrives. Not once nor twice, but in almost every letter, and often
many times in a letter, Pippin and his boyish sons (who are always coupled with
him) are reminded that St. Peter has anointed them to be kings. Pippin is the
new Moses, the new David, a man specially protected by God, who has laid up for
himself infinite treasures in the starry citadels, where neither moth nor rust
doth corrupt the treasures prepared for the righteous. “The name of your
Excellency”, says the enthusiastic pontiff, “sparkles on the book of life in
the sight of God. No tongue can express the thanks which the holy Church of God
and the Roman people owe to your Excellency for all the benefits conferred upon
them. None of this world's rewards can be an adequate remuneration. There is
but the one only God, consisting in three substances, who can fittingly reward
your Excellency with the joys of the heavenly kingdom. Pray continue steadfast
in that good work of our protection which you have begun. Right well has your
Christian Excellency perceived how great is the impious malice of the heretical
Greeks, who are eagerly plotting to humble and trample down the holy Catholic
and Apostolic Church and destroy the holy orthodox faith and the tradition of
the holy fathers. Do you manfully resist these impious heretics. Our strength
is in your arm, and we will say, ‘0 Lord! save the most Christian king Pippin,
whom Thou hast ordered to be anointed with holy oil by the hands of Thine
Apostle, and hear him in the day when he calleth upon Thee.”
The glory of the pious king is reflected upon his faithful people. In an
ecstatic psalm of thanksgiving addressed ‘To the Bishops, Presbyters, Abbots,
Monks, Dukes, Counts, and to the whole muster of the army of the Franks,
God-protected and Christ-beloved', the Pope thus salutes them: “You, dearest
ones, are a holy nation, a royal priesthood, a peculiar people, whom the Lord
God of Israel hath blessed : therefore joy and exult because your names and the
names of your kings are exalted in heaven, and great is your reward in the
sight of God and His angels. For Peter is your protector, the Prince of the
Apostles to whom our Redeemer has granted the power of binding and loosing in
heaven and on earth”.
As the missi went backwards and
forwards between Mutual Rome and the Frankish villa, they generally bore with
of Pope them some costly present, an emblem of the friendship which united Pope
and King. A table (perhaps inlaid with precious stones) had been presented by
Pippin to Stephen II, ‘and through him to St. Peter'. “This table”, says Paul,
“we brought in with hymns and spiritual songs to the hall of that chief of
Apostles, and laid it on your behalf on the shrine of that door-keeper of the
kingdom of heaven. Then we anointed it and placed upon it the sacred oblation,
which we offered up for the eternal welfare of your soul and the stability of
your kingdom, laying our apostolic censure and anathema on any one who should
dare to remove it from thence. In that same apostolic hall, therefore, it will
remain for ever, as a memorial of you, and be sure that you will receive a
fitting reward from God and St. Peter in the heavenly kingdom”.
After the baptism of Pippin's infant daughter Gisila (who was born in
757), the king sent to his venerable friend the napkin which had been used in
the ceremony. The Pope gladly accepted the offering, and considered himself to
be thereby constituted godfather of the royal child. From that time forward his
favourite epithet for Pippin, one never absent from his letters, is spiritalis compater, our spiritual co-father. “With great joy”, he says, “and accompanied by a whole
cohort of the people, we received this napkin in the chapel where rests the
holy body of the blessed Petronilla, the helper of life; which chapel is now
dedicated to keep in eternal memory the praises of your name”.
The story of the discovery of the body of Petronilla is told in the
Liber Pontificalis, from which we learn that long
before this time a marble sarcophagus had been discovered with these letters engraven upon it, AVREAE PETRONILLAE FILIAE DULCISSIMAE. It
was not doubtful (thought the scholars of that day) that these letters had been
carved by the hand of the Apostle Peter himself, to express his love for his
‘sweetest daughter'. Pope Stephen II had erected a chapel in honour of
Petronilla close to that of her uncle St. Andrew in the great basilica which
bore the name of her father. The dedication of this chapel had been in some way
connected with the name of Pippin, and its erection was regarded as a visible
monument of the league of eternal friendship between the Pope and the Frankish
King. One of the first acts of Paul I on his elevation to the papacy had been
to transport the body of Petronilla on a new wagon to the home prepared for her
by his brother, and thither, as I have said, he now in solemn procession bore
the baptismal napkin of the infant Gisila.
The Pope on his part frequently accompanied his plaintive petitions for
help with some ornament or cunningly-wrought article of apparel, which may
perhaps have been designed in the old days of splendour before the barbarians
came, and which, secure in the treasury of St. Peter, had escaped the soldiers
of Alaric and Totila, or the yet more penetrating quest of the Byzantine
logothete. “I send you”, he says, “by way of benediction, one apallarea, a sword set with jewels, with the belt belonging
thereto, a ring holding a jacinth, a quilted mantle with peacocks' feathers
embroidered upon it. Which little blessing we beg that you may receive
uninjured. To the lords Charles and Carloman, with our great apostolic
blessing, we send a ring apiece containing jacinths”.
At another time the Pope sends “to your Excellency such books [probably
on certain subjects named by the king] as we have been able to meet with; that
is to say, a book of antiphons and responses, a grammar, a copy of Aristotle, a
copy of Dionysius the Areopagite, a geometry, an orthography, and a grammar,
all written in Greek, and also a clock for use at night”
In this way the intercourse of rulers was helping forward the cause of
civilization, even when their own motives were not altogether pure or
unselfish. Constantine Copronymus, harshly dissolute Emperor as he was, may
rightly claim a high place in the musical history of Western Europe. No fewer
than six of the chronicles add to their notices of the year 757 (the year of
Paul I's accession) this naive sentence : “And the organ came into Frank-land”.
They often differ strangely from one another as to the date of wars and
councils, but this one date, that of the year when the deep voice of the organ
was first heard in a Frankish cathedral, seems to have fixed itself indelibly
in their remembrance. And from those, which may be called the state-chronicles,
we learn the fact that this wonderful organ was one of many presents sent by
the Emperor Constantine to the king of the Franks.
In the still rude and barbarously furnished villa of a Frankish prince
it was not perhaps easy to find a suitable present to submit to the critical
gaze of the courtiers of Rome or Constantinople. This was probably the cause of
a letter (unfortunately known to us only by the reply) in which the young
princes Charles and Carloman expressed to the Pope their regret that they had
not sent him any present. “By the same letter”, says the Pope in answer, “you
inform us that you are extremely ashamed that you have not been able to send us
any gifts by the hands of your messengers who brought it. But why, sweetest and
most loving sons, why, most victorious kings, should you yearn to gladden us
with your gifts? We desire no other gifts than always to learn of your safety
and prosperity, and to be able to congratulate you on your attainments, that is
our enriching: your exaltation, that is the exaltation of God's holy Church :
your defence of the orthodox faith; these are the best presents that we can
receive”.
And yet notwithstanding this lavish outpouring of sweet words, the deeds
for which they were to be the payment were never done. During all the ten years
of Paul’s pontificate no Frankish warriors again threaded the passes of Mont
Cenis in order to strike another blow for the justices of St. Peter. To
understand the causes of this negative result we must glance very briefly at
the occupations and anxieties of the Frankish king during the same period.
In 758, the year when the first note of dissatisfaction with ‘the
meekest Desiderius' was sounded by Paul, Pippin was engaged in a tough struggle
with the Saxon tribesmen on his north-eastern frontier, making a breach in the
rampart which they had cast up for the defence of their country, fighting many
battles, slaying a great multitude of their warriors (probably not without
severe loss among his own men), and at last reducing them to submission and to
the promise of an annual tribute of three hundred horses.
In 759 Pippin achieved the important result of expelling the last
Saracen invader from Gaul. The campaign was, it is true, not an arduous one.
Having marched his troops to Narbonne and formed the siege of that city, he
opened secret negotiations with the descendants of the Visigoths, who formed
doubtless the bulk of its inhabitants. When they had obtained an assurance that
if they became once more subjects of the Frankish king they should be allowed
to live by their own national law and should not be compelled to come under the
Salian or Ripuarian code, they agreed to Pippin's terms, slew the Saracen
garrison, and opened the gates of their city to the Franks. Thus was ended the
Moorish domination north of the Pyrenees. But though the campaign was not an arduous
one, it may well have left Pippin little leisure for redressing the importunate
and ever-growing claims of St. Peter.
The next year, 760, saw the commencement of a struggle which, with
little intermission, occupied Pippin's whole energies for the remaining nine
years of his life, which evidently brought him sometimes into serious danger,
and which by its toils and anxieties probably shortened his days. This was the
war with Waifar, duke of Aquitaine. That great region between the Loire, the
Atlantic, and the Pyrenees, which had once belonged to the kingdom of the
Visigoths and which became subject to the Franks in 507 (when the pious Clovis
could no longer endure that the Arian heretics should possess so large a
portion of Gaul), had probably never been so thoroughly incorporated with the
Frankish monarchy as the rest of what we now call France, and had certainly of
late yielded but an insecure and shadowy allegiance to the faineant Merovingian
kings. As we have already seen, Duke Eudo assumed an almost independent
position in his wars and treaties with Charles Martel; and now his grandson,
Duke Waifar, was probably unwilling to own himself the ‘man' or vassal of one
who had no royal blood in his veins. Doubtless if Francia was to become one
coherent state, Aquitaine must be made to own the absolute sovereignty of the Arnulfing king: and it was upon the whole the greatest
service which Pippin rendered to his country, that by severe toils, undertaken
probably in failing health and amid many distracting cares, besides the piteous
appeals of the Roman pontiff, he did succeed in accomplishing this great
result.
The pretext—it may have been more than a mere pretext—for the war, was
found in Waifar’s refusal to restore to some churches
under Pippin's special protection the property which belonged to them in
Aquitaine. War was declared, and was carried on, probably with varying success,
though the chroniclers record only Frankish victories, for the four years from
760 to763. Then came a new and a threatening development of the struggle.
Tassilo, sister's son to Pippin, now a young man of twenty-one years of age,
who had for fifteen of those years held the dignity of duke of Bavaria, who had
followed his uncle to the Italian war in 756, and had in the following year at
Compiegne sworn tremendous oaths of fidelity on the holiest relics of the
saints, now in the fourth year of the Aquitanic campaign flatly refused any longer to follow the Frankish standard, and falsely
feigning sickness returned to his own country, from whence he sent a message
that he would see his uncle’s face no more. Thus did the young duke
definitively renounce his allegiance to his Frankish overlord, and, what was a
more outrageous offence in Teutonic eyes, by the time and manner of his
defection he committed the unpardonable crime of harisliz,
or desertion of his lord in the presence of an enemy. This act changed all the
after-life of Tassilo, darkened its close, and exercised an important if
indirect influence on the fortunes even of the Lombard people.
It is probable that Tassilo’s defection caused the failure of the
campaign of 763, and it is possible that Pippin himself may have been thereby
brought into a situation of peril. If so, we may safely refer to this period
two letters from Pope Paul, in the first of which he expresses his anxiety for
the king's safety, seeing that so long a time has elapsed since he heard news
of him, and that gloomy tidings concerning him are arriving ‘from your and our
enemies'—who are probably the Greek iconoclasts.
In the second letter the Pope announces that he has heard from various
pilgrims to the thresholds of the Apostles that the king has returned in safety
to his home, tidings which fill his soul with joy and call forth his fervent
thankfulness to God.
In a letter written some years later the Pope informs Pippin of some
faint overtures towards reconciliation which Tassilo desires him to communicate
to his offended overlord; but nothing seems to have resulted from this
mediation.
For two years Pippin remained in his own land pondering the situation,
distracted by the double war which seemed opening out before him, and
collecting his forces for either event. At length he decided, no doubt wisely,
that the Aquitanic enterprise alone must be proceeded
with, and that the chastisement of his rebellious nephew must for the present
be postponed. The three years from 766 to 768 were devoted to the prosecution
of the war, evidently with ever-increasing success. At length in the midsummer
of 768 Waifar, who had been for many months wandering up and down in Perigord,
a hunted fugitive, was slain, apparently by one of his own followers; and the
war of Aquitaine was at an end.
Theological discussions occupied some of Pippin's leisure in the
interval between these triumphant campaigns. In January, 767, the Byzantine
ambassadors appeared before a synod of Frankish bishops which was convened at
Gentilly near Paris. As described by the chroniclers, it was assembled to
decide ‘questions concerning the Holy Trinity and the worship of images'. The
purely theological question was the everlasting argument between Easterns and Westerns as to ‘the procession of the Holy
Spirit' and the words ‘Filioque' surreptitiously (said the Easterns)
added to the Nicene confession of faith. It is suggested that this old
grievance was brought up by the Byzantine envoys in order to counterbalance the
iconoclastic innovations objected against them by the Latins. The synod,
however, appears to have dispersed without arriving at any harmonious
conclusion—the predecessor of many equally fruitless discussions of a similar
kind between the Eastern and Western Churches.
We read in the Codex Carolinus some letters in
which apparently the Pope, in expectation of the holding of this synod, speaks
confidently of the result, and praises the unshaken firmness of Pippin in all
his dealings with the shifty and heretical Greeks, but we have none expressing
the satisfaction which he must certainly have felt if he heard the result. The
chronicler informs us that after his victorious campaign of 767 Pippin sent his
army into winter quarters and spent his own Christmas at Bourges, where he
heard the tidings of the death of the Roman Pope. The news must have travelled
slowly, for the death of Paul the First actually took place on the 28th of
June, 767. On account of the summer heats he had retired to the church of his
namesake, S. Paolo Fuori le Mura. He was seized with
sickness, and his death followed in a few days. His body, at first buried in
that basilica, was after an interval of three months transported by a multitude
of Romans and foreigners, with psalms and hymns, to the regular resting-place
of the Popes at St. Peter's.
‘And the bishopric of Rome lapsed for one year, one month [and ten
days]'. So writes the Papal biographer. That lapse of the episcopate is the
Church's way of describing the wild scenes of faction and disorder which will
form the subject of the next chapter.
NOTE.
On the Offices of the Papal Household.
These officers, who formed practically the ministry of the Pontifical
State, are thus enumerated by a MS. of the twelfth century found in the Lateran
and published by Mabillon.
“In the Roman Empire and in the Roman Church of today there are seven
Palatine Judges, who are called Ordinarii, who ordain the Emperor, and with the
Roman clergy elect the Pope. Their names are as follows :—
I. Primicerius, and II. Secundicerius, who
receive their names from their offices themselves. These two, walling in the
Emperor on the right hand and the left, seem in a certain way to reign with him
: without them no decision of importance is taken by the Emperor. Moreover, in
the Roman Church in all processions they lead the Pope's palfrey, taking
precedence of the bishops and other magnates.
II. The third is the Arcarius, who presides
over the tribute.
IV. The fourth is
the Sacellarius, who hands forth to the soldiers
their pay, gives alms to the sick on the Sabbath day, and bestows upon the
Roman bishops and clergy and persons in orders their presbyteria [stipends],
V. The fifth is
the Protoseriniarius, who presides over the scriniarii whom we call tabelliones [scriveners].
VI. The sixth is
the Primus Defensor, who presides over the defensores,
whom we call advocates.
VII. The seventh is the Adminiculator,
whose duty it is to intercede for orphans and widows, for the afflicted, and
for captives.
In criminal cases these men do not judge, nor do they pronounce a
capital sentence on any man, and at Rome they are clerics who are never
promoted to any other rank. But the other magistrates, who are called Consuls,
conduct trials and punish those who are amenable to the laws, and pass sentence
on the guilty according to the magnitude of their crimes.''
In the four centuries which elapsed between Paul I and Alexander III
many changes may have taken place, but there seems reason to suppose that the
officials here enumerated were to be found in Rome in the eighth century. I
would suggest, however, a doubt whether they were necessarily all ecclesiastics
at the period with which we are now dealing. Christopher and his son Sergius
seem to me more like laymen than clerics.
As Hegel points out, the full title of the Primicerius and Secundicerius should include the addition notariorum; and they may be considered as the President and
the Vice-President of the Papal Chancery.
The statement that they with the Roman clergy elected the Pope would of
course not be true for the eighth century, in which there was still a semblance
of popular election. Savigny, however, suggests that these seven Judices
Palatini directing the election of the Pope may have furnished the type for the
seven cardinal-bishops of a later day, and may even have had some influence on
the selection of seven as the number of the Electors in the Holy Roman Empire.
