690

Monotheletism and the Papacy

[c. 630-715 rolled back the tide of conquest, restored the frontiers of the Empire, recovered the Holy Cross, and humiliated Persia. Is it to be wondered at, therefore, that the victorious Emperor should have made another attempt to reunite the Christians, and have listened to those who suggested that, if it could be acknowledged that in our Lord were two natures the human and the divine- and but one working energy (évépyela Spaστiký), Monophysites would unite with the supporters of Chalcedon? To this Honorius (pope 625–638) was disposed to assent, and in his correspondence he used the term "one will" (una voluntas) as applying to the Saviour. Hence the controversy is known as the Monothelete. But the action of Honorius was profoundly unpopular in Rome; and the successes of the Muslims and the loss of Egypt and Syria were regarded as a just punishment of the heresy of Heraclius as expressed in his Ekthesis.

The Monothelete controversy was fraught with humiliation for the See of Rome. Constans II (641-668), the brutal grandson of Heraclius, issued his Type in favour of Monothelete views; and, because he was opposed by Pope Martin V, he ordered the exarch Theodore Calliopas to seize the recalcitrant pontiff and bring him to Constantinople. There the Roman bishop, after enduring insult and imprisonment, which were unable to break his spirit, was deposed and banished by imperial decree to the Crimea, where he died deserted by his friends, a martyr for the faith as defined by his great predecessor Leo. During the reign of Constantine Pogonatus, in the pontificate of Agatho (678-682), the Roman See obtained some reparation for the insults heaped on Martin. At the Sixth General Council, which met in Constantinople 7 Nov. 680, the Monothelete doctrine was condemned, and with it its supporters, Cyrus, bishop of Alexandria, and two patriarchs of Constantinople, Sergius and Pyrrhus. In addition to these, a unique circumstance in ecclesiastical history, the General Council pronounced Pope Honorius to be anathema non quidem ut haereticus sed ut haereticorum fautor. Thus the Roman See had to accept the deep humiliation of having one of its occupants pronounced unsound in a matter of faith.

A further insult was still in store for the Papacy. In 692 another council was summoned to Constantinople for the purpose of completing the work of the Sixth Council by drawing up canons of discipline. This Synod, generally known as the Council in Trullo, passed its canons and sent them for ratification to Pope Sergius, and on his refusal to acknowledge the work of the Council the Protospatharius was sent to arrest him and he was threatened with the fate of St Martin. The Romans however stood by their bishop and rescued him from the imperial officer.

The last pope to be summoned to Constantinople was Constantine (708-715), who came at the invitation of Justinian II (Rhinotmetus). He was, however, treated with honour by that formidable emperor and returned in safety in 711 to Rome.

715-731]

Iconoclasm

691

We have now reached the period of the last struggle between Constantinople and Rome, due, like the Three Chapters in the days of Justinian I and the Monothelete controversy in the following century, to another amazing display of the strength inherent in the Empire. In the famous "Isaurian" dynasty the Graeco-Roman power, which had been threatened at its very source by the triumphant Caliphs, once more shewed itself the strongest force in the world. Again orthodoxy made overtures of peace to Monophysitism, but in a very different form from those of the sixth and seventh centuries. The schismatic or heretical churches, whether Nestorian or Monophysite, shewed a conservatism greater than that exhibited by the Catholics in maintaining a simplicity in church ornamentation which orthodoxy had long abandoned. The images or pictures, originally introduced, to use the words of John of Damascus, as "books for the unlearned," had not found a place in the Monophysite or Nestorian churches; but among the orthodox had become objects of superstitious reverence. To remove this scandal and to save the Church from the reproach of Jews and Muslims as well as to conciliate the Christians outside its pale, Leo the Isaurian in 726 issued his celebrated edict against the images and inaugurated the Iconoclastic controversy. Since the Monophysites opposed the attempt to represent the human appearance of our Lord as contrary to their doctrine of the loss of his manhood in the infinity of his Godhead, the edict was sure to find favour in their eyes.1

It is not easy to determine the precise effect of the Iconoclastic decree on the Roman Church. Certainly Leo the Isaurian's reign saw the beginning of the complete abandonment of the exarchate of Ravenna and its dependencies by the Greeks. Letters survive, professedly by Pope Gregory II (715-731) to Leo, denouncing him with the utmost violence and defending the image-worship with as grotesque an ignorance of the Old Testament as of the rules of common courtesy. It is now generally supposed, however, that these two letters are spurious, alien as they are to what we know of the wise and prudent man which Gregory II shewed himself in his other dealings. Nor does there seem to have been any formal breach between the Papacy and Constantinople. Down to the end of the eighth century the popes acknowledged the Emperor.

But the chain was really broken. The Lombards took Ravenna, occupied the Pentapolis and began to threaten the ducatus Romae, already a virtually independent state with an army commanded by its Duke, and with the Pope almost acknowledged as the representative of the Emperor. When Ravenna was taken is unknown: the whole history of the period is obscure; all that can be said with certainty is that by 1 The origin of the Iconoclastic controversy will be related elsewhere. It may have been partly due to the antagonism between the Asiatic (from which the army was mainly recruited) and the Hellenic elements of the Empire. So Brehier, La Querelle des Images (Paris, 1904).

692

Precarious position of the Papacy

[c. 739-754

7 July 751 the exarchate had come to an end and the Greeks were no longer a power in Italy. The Pope had also lost his Sicilian estates which afforded his principal revenue. The experience the Papacy had gained by its connexion with Constantinople was not forgotten, and moulded its subsequent policy. It became evident that to work out its destiny it needed alike freedom and protection-freedom to assert its claims to rule over the conscience of mankind, and protection from the enemies who encompassed the defenceless city.

Neither of these could the Byzantine government afford. The Lombards were pressing closer on Rome, and no prospect of aid from the Emperor was at hand; and in any case it would be too great a price to yield to his demands in matters theological. /The aims of the Empire and the East were distinct from those of Rome and the West. In the latter there was practically no great religious difference, and the priests, secure in their monopoly of learning, were unlikely to disturb men's minds by explaining the traditional faith or adapting it to the conditions of the hour. In the more educated East questions of the utmost moment caused serious divisions among clergy and laity alike; nor is it without significance that Pope Agatho had to explain to the Sixth General Council that his delegates were rude and unlettered men who had to live by the labour of their hands. So far then were the rough and ignorant clergy even of Rome removed from their brethren of the East./But, though ignorant of the arts of life, the Roman clergy had one distinct advantage over the more cultured ecclesiastics of Constantinople. They had fought a long and stubborn battle with the barbarian invaders of Italy with no one to come to their aid, and in the struggle they had developed political instincts denied to the servants of a political and spiritual despotism. Thus the popes of the eighth century learned the statecraft with which their successors were to raise the papal power to its highest pitch. From the birth of Christ there is approximately as long an interval backwards to Romulus as forwards to the political severance of Rome from the Empire, and at the latter period the foundations of a world-governing power were as surely laid as when the first king built the walls of Rome.

(2) The Lombard invaders of Italy after a long struggle had succeeded in dispossessing the Empire of all pretence to exercise sovereignty in Italy. They had made their appearance in the year 568 under Alboin, and though Paul the Deacon testifies to the comparative mildness of their rule at first, on the death of Alboin it became intolerable. Two facts are worth bearing in mind, namely that the Lombards are the first invaders of Italy who settled with no sort of imperial sanction — Alaric, Odovacar, and Theodoric having all had recognition from the Roman government; and further that under their occupation the theory of a united Italy was abandoned, never to be realised till the nineteenth century. There was further a sort of

573-675]

Lombard and Roman territory

693

undeveloped feudalism in the Lombard settlement by which the kingdom was divided into more or less independent dukedoms, some — like those of Spoleto and Benevento - eventually detaching themselves completely from the king's authority. After the death of Alboin in 573 there were no less than thirty-six dukes each exercising unrestrained the power of a petty tyrant. But anarchical as was the condition of affairs among the Lombards at the close of the sixth century, it was becoming evident that the Byzantine government was powerless to expel them from Italy and even that its abandonment of the peninsula was only a matter of time.

The condition of Byzantine Italy was not altogether dissimilar from that of the Lombard territory. As at Pavia, the capital of the king, so at the exarch's seat at Ravenna, the central authority was at times deplorably weak; and in both cases the "dukes" were practically independent princes. The duke of Naples for example was as little amenable to the exarch as the Lombard dukes of Benevento were to their sovereign. The difficulty was principally one of communication. The Lombards held the country and the Byzantines the coast, and unless the road between Rome and Ravenna could be kept open it was impossible for the exarch to govern, succour, or advise the Pope; and in one case a pope's enthronement had to be deferred for more than a year owing to the difficulty in obtaining confirmation of his election. Hence it was of the utmost importance to keep open the Flaminian way leading from Rome to Ravenna and the coast, and the possession of such places as Perugia was vital to the Romans.

The territory occupied in Italy by the Lombards and the exarchate in Italy respectively, say during the pontificate of Gregory I (590–604), was approximately as follows. The Byzantines on the east coast held Istria on the Adriatic, the islands along the coast already known as Venetia, the marshes around Comacchio and Ferrara, the mouth of the Po where Ravenna is situated, and inland as far as Bologna. Practically from Venetia to Ancona the frontiers of the Empire were the Apennines and the sea. Then came a very debatable territory giving access by way of Perugia to the Roman duchy. Proceeding southward, Calabria remained imperial till 675, when Brindisi and Tarento fell into the hands of Romuald, duke of Benevento, and Bruttium and Sicily were held by the Greeks. On the western coast were two duchies, Naples and Rome. The Roman duchy was constantly shrinking owing to the encroachments of the Lombard dukes of Benevento and Spoleto, the latter having pushed his frontier almost to the N.E. wall of the city, his boundary being the old Sabine one formed by the Tiber and the Anio. The rest of Italy was held by the Lombards, the valley of the Po being more directly under the authority of the king, whose capital was Pavia, whilst the three great almost independent duchies were Friuli (Forum Julii), north of Venetia, Spoleto, extending

694

The Conflict unavoidable

[593-741 from the Pentapolis to the Roman duchy, and Benevento in the south, This partition of Italy was practically recognised by the treaty made. mainly by Pope Gregory I, in 593, but throughout the seventh century the power of the Lombards increased whilst that of the exarchate diminished. It is not necessary for our purpose to trace the progress of the Lombard power till we reach the eighth century when the popes came into sharper conflict with it than they had done since the days of Gregory I.

In the century which intervened between the death of Gregory I and the accession of Gregory II the Lombards had been transformed from Arian heretics into devout Catholics, so that the religious difficulty which parted Roman from Lombard had disappeared. The hostility of the popes to the Lombards was therefore political rather than religious. The cause of it was a feeling, inherent in the Papacy, that any supreme secular power in Italy would be detrimental to its interests. This was natural and not wholly unjustifiable, as the sequel of events tends to shew. The whole spirit of the Roman Church in Italy being anti-national, the predominance of one people was felt to be inconsistent with its ideal of universality. We have seen how sorely tried the patience of the clergy had been by the policy of the Byzantine Caesars; but these, at least in theory, were the rulers of the world. The Lombard kings on the contrary were merely local princes, representative of the two things most detested by the Papacy - nationality and barbarism. An even worse evil was in store should (as was far from unlikely) the Lombard territories become a number of independent dukedoms, for in that case the Pope would be at the mercy not even of a king but of a petty prince like the duke of Spoleto; and Rome itself would be the carcass over which the Lombard chieftains would be constantly quarrelling. The breach between the Lombards and the popes was therefore inevitable directly it was understood that the end of the Byzantine rule in Italy was a mere question of time. Let the monarch and his dukes be never so conciliatory and the Pope never so gracious, their interests were radically dissimilar, and either the Lombard dominion must perish or the Papacy must abandon the very motive of its existence. In one respect the pontiffs had a distinct advantage; they were perfectly indifferent to the fate of the Lombards; whilst these, as Catholics, held the priestly office of the bishops of Rome in the highest honour. The period therefore we are about to survey from Gregory II (715) to the accession of Hadrian I (772) is fraught with the most important consequences, as what happened then gives the clue to the whole secular policy of the Papacy for eleven centuries, from Charles the Great to Napoleon III — a policy which, despite all adverse circumstances, is not yet abandoned.

The somewhat complicated relations of six popes, Gregory II and III, Zacharias, Stephen III, Paul, and Stephen IV, with three Lombard kings, Liutprand, Aistulf, and Desiderius, must now occupy the attention of the reader. Liutprand, the Lombard king, reigned 712-744 and this