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

Chapter VIII. From Servitude To Sovereignty

The first land possession of the Roman See appears to have been the Cæsarean palace of the Lateran, the gift to it of the emperor Constantine, in gratitude to God for having conquered the heathen empire at the Milvian Bridge. It noted the impression on the conqueror's soul of the divine sign, in this prevail. Therein St. Silvester took up his abode, and in it was built the Cathedral Church of Rome and of the world. For a thousand years it remained the abode of the Popes – the centre of the Church's visible life, whence her spiritual jurisdiction radiated, the proper residence of one hundred and sixty Popes, from St. Silvester to B. Pope Benedict XI.

It is not a little to be noted that the original root of the Pope's temporal power was his unique spiritual power, that the gift of Constantine foreshadowed the empire of Charlemagne; that the first Christian emperor removed the Pope from the catacombs to a Cæsarean palace; that the second emperor received back from the Pope that imperial title and power which so many successors seated in Constantine's Nova Roma had used so cruelly against the successor of St. Peter, whom yet they acknowledged. And still the Lateran Basilica bears on its front in barbarous Latin the title no less true than proved,

“Dogmate Papali datur ac simul Imperiali,

Quod sim cunctarum Mater Caput Ecclesiarum”.

Nor is there any spot on the earth upon which the guiding hand of God in the fortunes of the world may be more profitably studied than before the entrance of that Church so well styled in her double character Mother and Head. If the Mother were not head her rule would be impotent; if the head were not mother it would be unbearable.

The munificence thus begun in his gratitude by Constantine was continued during centuries by great Roman families and by others also. The pastoral staff fixed itself in Roman earth, and became a great tree. In due time it flowered in a prince's sceptre. It is most interesting to mark in the gifts to the Roman See the heathen names of ancient patrician families commemorated. Under the properties administered by St. Gregory the Great we read of the Massa Papirianensis, the Massa Furiana, the Massa Varroniana, the Fundus Cornelii.

A fact which enters deep into the world's history bears remarkable witness to the rapid increase of papal wealth and its inevitable accompaniment, the political independence of St. Peter's chair. From the time the unity of the Roman realm began to be dissolved into two empires, the eastern and the western, not a single western ruler fixed his seat abidingly in Rome, although almost all lived in Italy, and although many of them could have put to good use, amid the State's increasing weakness, the help which the charm of the Roman name offered. After the death of Constantine the Great in 337, of his three sons Constantius I. received the East, Constans I. received the West in union with his younger brother Constantine II., but after his murder, alone. This Constans usually dwelt in Gaul. When he visited Italy we find him prefer Milan and Aquileia to Rome. He yielded to the insurgent Maxentius, and then Constantius became sole master of the realm, and, when in the West, lived chiefly in Milan. In his whole reign once only did he enter Rome.

The second division of the realm, which followed the emperor Jovian, gave Valentinian for ruler of the West, who selected at first Milan for residence, but was compelled by incursions of the German peoples to spend much time on the Rhine. We learn, partly from the history of St. Ambrose, partly from other documents, that the sons and successors of Valentinian I., Gratian, and Valentinian II., as well as the mother and guardian of the latter, the widowed empress Justina, when in Italy held their court chiefly at Milan and Aquileia.

The third and final partition, which severed the West for ever from the East, took place in 395 after the death of the Spaniard, Theodosius I., whom Gratian had taken for his partner. From that time not Rome, not Milan, or Aquileia, but the seaport Ravenna appears the permanent residence of those phantom-emperors who ruled for nearly a century until the full dissolution of the western empire. The political significance of the last city even remarkably survived the name of the Roman empire.

We are expressly told that Odoacer, the first German king of Italy, who deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last West Roman, had his seat in Ravenna. The same was the case with Odoacer's conqueror, the great Ostrogoth, Theodorich. During his government Ravenna received the title of the royal city, though the Ostrogoth often lived in other great cities of upper Italy, such as Pavia and Verona. Finally Ravenna, after the extinction of the Ostrogothic state and people, remained for nearly two hundred years the seat of the exarchs, Byzantine viceroys of Italy.

Why of so many princes bearing the title of Roman emperors or kings of Italy did no single one make his seat in the former capital of the world? Why did the greater number pay it only a transitory visit, some perhaps not see it at all? I think only one sufficient answer can be given to this question. They shunned a longer stay at Rome because they felt that in a city which had assumed a priestly character they would no longer play the first part so much as kings desire and must desire it. That fact is, therefore, an incontestable proof not only of the papal power, but likewise of its wealth. Without property no co-active force, not even spiritual, can in the long run maintain itself.

The law of the year 321, allowing churches to receive landed property from any testator, had results so astonishingly great, that in 50 years Valentinian I. thought it necessary to put a limit on it. We may pass at once to the time of St. Gregory the Great, the fourteen years 590 to 604. At that time the Bishop of Rome in his Lateran Palace, had become the greatest ground landlord in Italy, and even in all the West. He was the real protector of Rome. The eastern emperor bore the name, but in every need and trial it was not at Ravenna or at Constantinople that help was sought, but at the Lateran. Royal dignity waited already upon the Vicar of Christ; a dignity with which the spontaneous offerings of three hundred years had invested him. St. Gregory lived like a monk, and gave away as a king from the inexhaustible fountain of the apostolic charity.

His letters enable us to form a fair estimate of the domains of the Roman Church at that time. In his unresting activity to minister aright the material wealth of the Church, the son of St. Benedict ripened the recognition of his political independence. His death preceded by 150 years the legal acknowledgment of sovereignty attained by his successor, Stephen II., and that intervening period was, as we have seen, a time of exceedingly severe trial. A notice of the deacon John, biographer of St. Gregory, informs us that in his pontificate the Roman Church possessed at least twenty-three patrimonies. These were respectively, that of Sicily, of Syracuse, of Palermo, of Calabria, of Apulia, the Samnite, the Neapolitan, the Campanian, the Tuscan, the Sabine, the Nursian, the Carseolan, that of Via Appia, of Ravenna, of Illyricum, the Istrian, Dalmatian, Sardinian, Corsican, Ligurian, that of the Cottian Alps, of Germanicia, and of Gaul.

The position of the Popes from the time of St. Gregory to the beginning of the State of the Church is thus described by a Jewish writer forty years ago. “The Popes were usually the helpers out of every need. They supplied the money required for the payment of the troops, and for the requisite provisionment, to keep off the ever-impending threatenings of scarcity. They also frequently redeemed captives. Now as the Protector always exercised a decisive influence on the protected, and the distant emperors distinguished themselves as much by their neglect, as the Vicars of Christ by their activity in the interest of Italy, and especially of the seven-hilled city, nothing was more natural than that the estimation of those who were so often its preservers advanced more and more. Thus they soon came in fact to stand at the head of almost all secular matters in and about Rome, with almost sovereign power. That was especially the case since the pontificate of the great Gregory I., a Pope truly venerable both for his very distinguished mental gifts, and for his far-stretching, sound, practical discernment, and his inflexible will. These were the reasons enabling him to assume a freer political position towards the Greek imperial court than his predecessors.”

It has been computed that the Popes were in all landlords of 1360 square miles, that is 870,400 acres, in the time of Leo the Isaurian, and that these lands produced to them 200,000 gold soldi in money, and 500,000 in kind. And if we add to this computation the very great secular powers which the policy of Justinian had placed throughout his empire in the hands of the bishops, we may form some notion of the secular authority wielded by the Popes before they obtained the technical rank of sovereigns, according to modern definition of that word. Constantine's gift of the Lateran palace may be considered the starting point which the continual generosity of so many succeeding generations extended, as has been recounted, until the unanimous voice of his people, delivered, as they hoped, from the Lombard burden, saluted Stephen II. on his return in 756, not only as Papa, but as Dominus Urbis.

Under the year 752, when Aistulf had attacked the exarchate and occupied the city of Ravenna, and was turning his arms against the Roman duchy and the cities depending on it, Muratori writes: “From what we have hitherto seen, although the Greek emperors had their ministers in Rome, yet the principal authority of government seems to have been seated in the Roman Pontiffs. They with the power and majesty of their rank and with the accompaniment of their virtues tranquilly governed that city and duchy, defending it moreover vigorously, when need arose, from the claws of the Lombards.”

Such was the position of the Pontiffs before that definitive rejection of the Byzantine sovereign made by Stephen II. when he was left naked to the assault of Aistulf by the cowardice or the impotence of Constantine Kopronymus. From his return in 756 he and his successors after him became kings as well as Popes of Rome. Scrupulous as the two Gregories, Zacharias and Stephen himself had been up to the time of the compact with Pipin, never after did any Pope acknowledge the Byzantine as his civil sovereign.

Never could an Italian of those ages have given to the Goth or the Lombard that heartfelt devotion which they felt for the perpetual defender of the Italian people, who was seated in the centre of Italy at once the champion of the Christian faith, and representative of Rome's old Commonwealth. The Byzantine slave-master revolted the Roman heart; the Arian politician revolted the Christian faith: but in the Roman see St. Sergius the Syrian emulated the courage of St. Martin the Roman, and St. Gregory III., also Syrian, was in no quality behind his predecessor St. Gregory II. the Roman. Is it any wonder that by the end of the seventh century when a Justinian II. tried to repeat on the person of St. Sergius the wickedness practised by his grandfather upon St. Martin, his own soldiers rose against the guardsman whom he had deputed to this atrocious work, and recognized in the Pope the defender of all which they held dear, whether in the natural or the supernatural life.

And, again, had not the seven revolutions at Byzantium – ending in the exultation of a rough soldier who was able in the field, but ignorant in doctrine – given a sufficient lesson to the Italian peoples to cast off a force which disregarded all right in the natural order, and the whole tradition of faith in the supernatural realm of revealed truth?

That is the consummation which we have been following during a whole generation, from 726 to 756.

I will here insert the judgment of another historian, upon the gift of the exarchate, made by Pipin to St. Peter, in the person of the Popes: – “To question the rightness of this donation is unreasonable and preposterous. Since the reconquest of Italy by Belisarius and Narses, Rome was regarded at Constantinople simply as a province, not as a member of the realm, or not as, what it had originally been, the seat of empire. On what could the right of Greek tyrants be founded constantly to receive back, even at second hand, conquests which they were able neither to govern nor to maintain? The assertions of some late historical writers seem to pre-suppose that all Europe, as far as the Rhine and the Danube, were placed by God for ever under the Byzantine yoke, and that the shaking off this yoke was an unpardonable injustice. Rome did under her bishops what peoples did under their kings. Rome took her opportunity to free herself from the yoke of foreign dominion and unnatural relations. No prince, no people of Europe has any other claim upon its soil to show than this and the centuries. Both tell for Rome. Before this testimony, the lesser but yet valid right disappears, that the Greek emperor had confiscated the Papal possessions situated in Lower Italy, and that nothing was more natural than that it should take the compensation which presented itself. The other question which has been also proposed, whether the office of a teacher and bishop of the Christian community can be united with a secular administration, had been long before answered. Rome owed its actual existence solely to the protection of its bishops. They had found their best right of sovereignty in the gratitude of the people, and long before the donation of Ravenna, they had been, if not in name, yet in fact, princes in Rome.”

At the beginning of the year 756, Aistulf, the most aggressive of Lombard kings, had strictly invested Rome, ravaged its campagna, and destroyed the churches therein, while he devoutly exhumed the bodies of martyrs to transport them to new shrines in Pavia. In the spring of that year he surrendered his capital to the king of the Franks, and submitted to all the conditions imposed on him by Pipin. In the autumn, by a sudden stroke of God, he died out hunting. At the beginning of the year 757, Desiderius, by the help of the Pope, Stephen II. had succeeded to the Lombard throne, itself spared by Pipin, and these great changes are recorded in an extant letter of Pope Stephen, a hymn of gratitude and praise, to Pipin, who had placed the keys of the recovered cities, forming the new created State of the Church, on the tomb of St. Peter. Great is the contrast between the letters of 756, written to Pipin, in the height of Rome's distress and danger, and this letter from the first Pope-king to his benefactor.

“Words cannot express, most excellent son, our delight at your work and your life. For we have seen miracles in our days wrought by the divine power. For the Roman Church, the holy mother and head of all the churches of God, the foundation of the Christian faith, which was groaning under the attacks of enemies, now through you, has been translated into the fulness of joy and security. Thus, by your work, and in our exultation, we rejoice to exclaim with the angels, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of goodwill’. This time last year we were wounded and afflicted on all sides: now, in our deliverance through you, we cry out. ‘This change is by the hand of the Most High,’ and, again, ‘In the evening, there shall be weeping, but in the morning joy’. What heart is there so stony that, knowing what your goodness has done, would not break into praise of God and affection to your excellency. This I am wont to say to those who come hither from all the nations of the earth: and I perpetually pray to God for your welfare, and that of the whole nation of the Franks. What can I call you but a new Moses and a glorious David, for, as they delivered the people of God from the oppression of the heathen, so have you the Church of God. May the Lord, the beauty of justice, bless you and your children, Charles and Carloman, my spiritual sons, appointed by God kings of the Franks, and patricii of the Romans.”

He then goes on to beg Pipin to execute fully all that he had promised to St. Peter by oath. He mentions specially Imola, Ferrara, Ancona, Bologna, with their complete territories; and begs him to favour the new king, Desiderius, if he restore, as he had promised, fully the justitia, which we may translate sovereignty, “to the Holy Church of God, or Commonwealth of the Romans, St. Peter, your protector”. He also prays him that the Holy Catholic and Apostolic faith may be preserved by him from “the pestilent malice of the Greeks”. He ends with the prayer: – “O victorious king, may God, in all your acts, extend His right hand over you, your queen, and mine and your dearest sons: and, as He has given you the royal power in this life, may you also hear the divine promise, 'Come, blessed of my Father, you have fought the good fight, you have finished your course, you have kept the faith; so take the crown laid up for you, and the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world'”.

A few days after this letter, that is, on the 24th April, 757, Stephen II. closed in peace his course on earth. He died in the Lateran patriarchal palace, acknowledged by all as king of Rome: and attended by his brother, Paul, who was to be his successor. He was buried with extraordinary honours in St. Peter's. In his short pontificate of five years he set the crown upon the work of his three great predecessors, Gregory II., Gregory III., and Zacharias, and is counted among the most illustrious of the Popes. He closed the seven centuries of Popes who were subjects: he opens the eleven centuries of Popes who have been kings. From the Pope who was crucified on the Roman hill to the Pope who died a king in the patriarchal Lateran palace, 93 in number, enemies have tried to deface the memory of two – but the voice of impartial history regards those rulers of the Church with unalloyed gratitude as men who, through trials and difficulties unsurpassed, kept the faith of the Church inviolate. That the city of Rome existed in their day, and exists now, is due to the pastoral staff of St. Peter, planted in its soil, which became, in the hand of Stephen II., the most gracious, the most prolific, the most honoured of sceptres.

Stephen II. was succeeded immediately by his brother Paul, who had been the chosen companion of his counsels and anxieties during the severe trials of his pontificate, ending so gloriously. It was the first instance of a brother to the Pope succeeding to his chair. He had been brought up, like his brother Stephen, in the Lateran patriarchal palace from the time of St. Gregory II., and was made a cardinal deacon by Pope Zacharias. “He was meek and very merciful, never rendering evil for evil to anyone.” He sat from 757 to 767, ten years and a month. During the whole time the closest union was maintained between the Holy See and King Pipin. A series of letters from the Pope to the king is extant, testifying the affection and the confidence which existed between them. It was by the influence of Pope Stephen II. that the new king of the Lombards, Desiderius, was accepted by that people after the untimely death of King Aistulf. He bound himself strictly to carry out the compact at Pavia between the Franks, the Lombards, and the Romans, in virtue of which, at the subjection of King Aistulf to Pipin, the Lombard monarchy continued to exist. The reign of Desiderius from 757 until he was finally overthrown and deposed by Charles in 774 shows a repetition of attempts by fraud or by violence to evade the conditions which he had bound himself to accept. Already, in 757, Pope Paul I. wrote to King Pipin: “We make known to your Excellence that we have hitherto received nothing of those things which by our legates we committed to your charge, for, according to their wont, those perfidious and malignant Lombards, persisting in great arrogance of heart, are by no means inclined to restore the justice of St. Peter”. The possession of the cities and territories of Imola, Bologna, Osimo, Ancona, and Umana were in question. In the next year, 758, Desiderius ravaged with fire and sword the Pentapolis. Then he attacked the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, which had put themselves under the protection of the Pope and the king of the Franks.

At another time the Greek emperor Kopronymus was bent upon recovering Ravenna and the Pentapolis, and upon attacking Rome itself. Desiderius met his agent and wrote to the emperor, exhorting him to send an army into Italy, and promising that he with all his Lombards would help him to recover Ravenna, and whatever else he desired.

Through the whole ten years of Paul's pontificate, this king Pipin discharged with fidelity his office of Roman Patricius, that is, the sworn defender of the Holy See. It was this protection alone which enabled the Pope to maintain his newly founded State against the perpetual wiles of the Lombard, as well as against the Greek enmity. As to Kopronymus, the Iconoclastic heresy was the furious passion of his whole life. Pope Paul wrote to King Pipin: “You know well how those most nefarious Greeks pursue us only to destroy and tread under foot the orthodox faith and the tradition of the fathers”.

When Pope Paul I. died, in 767, his pontificate of ten years had been throughout agitated by the perpetual oscillations of king Desiderius, alternating acts of devotion with acts of hostility, promises with violations of them, restitution of rights with fresh acts of plundering. Scarcely had Paul I. closed his eyes when the duke Toto, a very powerful baron of the Roman Tuscany, conspired with his three brothers, Constantine, Passivus, and Paschalis, to get possession of Rome and the papacy. Toto and his party, while preparation was being made for the solemn obsequies of Paul I. and the due election of his successor, broke into Rome, suddenly elected his brother Constantine, a layman, introduced him by violence into the Lateran palace. He seized upon George, bishop of Palestrina, and compelled him to confer minor orders upon Constantine. The next day he was made deacon by the same bishop, and on the following Sunday Toto, attended by a large body of armed men, carried the intruded Constantine to St. Peter's, where the three suburbican bishops, the said George of Palestrina, and the bishops of Albano and Porto, gave him episcopal consecration. In such fashion Constantine seated himself in the chair of Peter; he forced the people to make oath of fidelity to him. Thus the layman of a week before, thrust upon the clergy and people of Rome by the rudest violence, held possession of the Apostolic See for thirteen months. He wrote lying letters to King Pipin, who was not deceived by them. But Rome was filled with conspiracy and unrule.

A year after this event, in July, 768 the intruder Constantine was deposed, his brother Toto killed, while a second pretended Pope, named Philip, set up for the moment, was driven away. By the exertions of Christophorus, first of the seven Palatine judges, and his son Sergius, Stephen III., a Sicilian, and at the time cardinal priest of St. Cecilia, was duly elected Pope. He sat during three years and six months, in the course of which great events took place. His first act was to send Sergius to King Pipin and his sons, beseeching him to depute a number of Frankish bishops to Rome to hold a council there with him, and to make regulations which might prevent the recurrence of violence so deplorable.

Sergius found king Pipin dying. He expired at St. Denys on the 24th September, 768. There he was buried and afterwards his monument bore the inscription, “Pipin, the king, father of Charles the Great”. He left his states, with the consent of the nobles and bishops, between his sons Charles and Carloman, who were crowned and anointed on the same day, 9th October, 768, Charles at Noyon, Carloman at Soissons. Pipin died aged fifty-five, having ruled France for twenty-seven years, ten as Mayor of the palace, seventeen as king of the Franks.

The legate Sergius proceeded at once to the kings, Charles and Carloman. They granted all which he desired. They gave him twelve Frankish bishops well instructed in the scriptures and the holy canons, the archbishop of Sens, the bishops of Mainz, Tours, Lyons, Bourges, Narbonne, Rheims, Langres, Noyon, Worms, and two others with sees of names unknown. These bishops came to Rome in April, 769, and Pope Stephen III. assembled bishops from Tuscany, Campania, and the rest of Italy, and held a council in the Lateran Basilica. Among other decrees they passed one under anathema: “that no laymen, nor any one save a cardinal, deacon or priest, ascending through the distinct degrees, be promoted to the honour of the sacred pontificate”. The Pope, all the priests, and the Roman people, prostrate on the pavement, deplored the sin they had committed in receiving Communion from the unhappy intruder, Constantine, who had been deprived of sight during the wild struggle which attended his deposition, and now in most abject guise confessed his crime before the council, and was condemned to penance.

In this terrible outburst of ambition and crime, which showed but too clearly to what sudden dangers Rome was exposed, the two great officers, Christophorus, the first of the seven Palatine judges, and his son Sergius, had done their utmost to prevent the usurpation, and in the end delivered the Holy See from the intruder Constantine. Desiderius had taken no part in the intrusion of the anti-pope. He even assisted Christophorus and Sergius in removing him. But in doing this a Lombard priest, Waldepert, sought to set up another anti-pope, and lost his life. After the due appointment of Stephen III., the master stroke of the Lombard king's policy was to sever, if he could, the two Frank kings from friendship with the Holy See, and so sooner or later to get possession of Rome. He proposed in 770 a double marriage; on one side the marriage of his daughter Desiderata or Ermengarde either with Charles or with Carloman; on the other that of their sister, the princess Gisela, with his son Adelchis. The queen mother, Bertrada, set her hand to accomplish the first. There is a most earnest letter from Pope Stephen III. to the kings Charles and Carloman, entreating them not to stain the noble Frank race, the most eminent of all, by a connection with the faithless and perfidious Lombard. “You have likewise,” he said, “by the will of God, and the command of your father, contracted lawful marriages with excellent royal ladies out of your own people, conspicuous for their nobility and beauty. It is not lawful for you to repudiate them. To take other wives would be an impiety. Heathens only can so act. Forget not, most illustrious sons, that you received holy unction from St. Peter's successor, that your father of glorious memory listened to the injunctions of our predecessor Stephen, and forebore to separate from your mother, Bertrada, and be mindful of your repeated promise to St. Peter and his successor that you would ever be friends of our friends and enemies of our enemies. Would you now bind yourselves to our enemies? For the faithless people of the Lombards, which ceases not to attack the Church of God, and make incursions on our province of Rome, is our manifest enemy.”

Nevertheless the queen mother, Bertrada, carried out her design, and the king Desiderius seemed to attain the summit of security, so far at least as this, that though his son Adelchis did not obtain the princess Gisela, Charles took his daughter Ermengarde. He also sent her back to her father the next year, and his friend and secretary, Eginhard, has left unexplained the cause of this repudiation. No historian has thrown light upon this particular in the history of Charles, either how he came to brave the anathema of Pope Stephen III. by deserting a lawful wife, or how he came to send back in a year the unhappy princess whom he had unlawfully taken, or how we find Hildegarde acknowledged as his lawful wife from 771 to her death in 786. The blot remains unerased upon the memory of him who was otherwise the greatest of the Christian emperors.

With the marriage – if it is to be so called – of his daughter with Charles, Desiderius seemed to have reached well nigh the end of his ambition. Christophorus and his son Sergius had put an end to the usurpation of Constantine, were the heads of the national Roman party, and the soul of Pope Stephen III.'s government. Desiderius in a visit to Rome managed to set the Pope against them. He had a Lombard party there, at the head of which was a certain Paul Afiarta, high in the Pope's service. Christophorus and his son Sergius both lost their lives. They had urged the king of the Lombards to restore to the Holy See the rights which he kept back. Desiderius was infuriated by their conduct and strove to destroy them. Desiderius was encamped outside of St. Peter's. A company of Lombard soldiers dragged the two victims, who had been taken out of St. Peter's, to the gate of the city, at the bridge: tore out their eyes, of which outrage Christophorus died in three days: Sergius survived in prison during two years, that is, to the death of Pope Stephen, when he was most atrociously murdered by order of Paul Afiarta.

But now the whole course of history was altered by a death which occurred on the 4th December. Carloman died in the flower of his youth, leaving behind him two very young children by his wife Gilberga. Charles was called by the unanimous vote of the Frank magnates to rule the whole kingdom of the Franks increased greatly as it was by the late conquests of Charles in Aquitania and Gascony. Two months later, 1st February, 772, Stephen III. closed his pontificate of three years and a half. The Pope before his death had discovered how grievously he had been deceived by king Desiderius, to whom his two chief servants and ministers had been sacrificed. Desiderius kept none of the promises which he had made on the occasion of his coming to Rome: and when the Pope reminded him of them by a special embassy, mockingly replied: “The Holy Father Stephen might have been contented that I delivered him from his two tyrants Christophorus and Sergius, and did not need to demand the rights of St. Peter. If I had not helped the Holy Father, great ruin would have fallen upon him, since Carloman, king of the Franks, the friend of both, was ready to bring an army to Rome to avenge their death, and carry away the Pope captive.”

The repudiation of his daughter, Ermengarde, and the rupture of the desired alliance between Desiderius and Charles, terminated the good fortune of the Lombard king. From that time he seemed to lose his vigour of mind, and political insight. He continued to pursue, without check, the design of Aistulf, which he had now fully made his own, to become master of Rome. But he had to deal with other adversaries. Eight days after the death of Pope Stephen III., he was succeeded by one of the greatest pontiffs who ever sat on the throne of St. Peter. Adrian, the son of Theodorus, was born in Rome of a very noble family, one of the most powerful in the city. Losing his parents early, he was brought up by a relation named Theodotus, Primicerius of the Roman See. He was distinguished from his youth by his purity of life, and his singular personal beauty. Pope Paul I. had placed him among the clergy, Pope Stephen III. created him a cardinal deacon, in which office his zeal, eloquence, learning, and management of affairs endeared him to the Roman people. On the very day of the Pope Stephen's death he was proclaimed unanimously his successor, and in eight days consecrated. He showed at once the vigour of mind and promptitude of execution which rendered his reign illustrious, and it continued nearly to twenty-four years, a period which no Pontiff reached in the seven hundred years from St. Peter before him, nor in the thousand years after him, until, at the end of the eighteenth century, it was slightly passed by that Pontiff who died a confessor, exiled, persecuted, and forlorn at Valence, in that land of the Franks, with whose greatest king Pope Adrian was bound in the closest personal friendship.

No sooner was Pope Adrian seated than he struck down that Lombard faction which the gold and intrigues of Desiderius had planted at Rome. Its head was Paul Afiarta. In the very last days of Pope Stephen, he had caused the blinded Sergius to be assassinated, and banished from Rome certain judges, both of the clergy and the army, that he might have more weight in the forthcoming election. Adrian, the moment that he was elected, recalled the judges, and delivered from prison those who had been confined for the like reason. Desiderius, who desired to keep up appearances with him, sent him a solemn embassy of the three principal persons in his kingdom, Theodicius, duke of Spoleto, Tunno, duke of Ivrea, and the Lord Treasurer Prandulus. Their office was to profess friendship and alliance to the new Pope. Adrian replied: – “It is my desire to have peace with all Christians, and even with your king, Desiderius, I will study to remain in that compact which was made between the Romans, the Franks, and the Lombards. But how can I trust your king in the matter in which my predecessor, Stephen, of holy memory, has spoken to me fully of his want of good faith: how he falsified everything which he promised on oath over the body of St. Peter, for the rights of holy Church, and only by his own hostile pleading, caused the eyes of Christophorus and Sergius to be put out, and worked out his own will upon those two chief men of the Church. Such is the faith of your king, Desiderius, and how can I trust in a treaty with him?” In reply, the ambassadors made oath that Desiderius would fulfil what he had promised to Pope Stephen, and broken. The Pope thereupon despatched messengers to see that Desiderius fulfilled the promise. When these reached Perugia, they found that Desiderius had already taken the city of Faenza, and the duchy of Ferrara, and was pressing Ravenna with siege. It was only two months after the accession of Pope Adrian, and presently messengers from Ravenna came supplicating his help, just as thirty years before, when pressed by the arms of Liutprand, they had recourse to Pope Zacharias. But now the exarchate was fully subject to the Pope, and called upon him as part of his own State for defence. When this conduct of Desiderius was reported to the Pope, he wrote in the gravest terms to the Lombard king, requiring him to restore the cities, and upbraiding him with the breach of those very promises which his own ambassadors had just made in his name. “The king,” he said, “had taken cities which his predecessors, Stephen II., Paul I., and Stephen III., had possessed.” Desiderius returned, for answer, “that he would not restore those cities, unless he first met the Pope”. At the same time, he had received the widow and young children of the deceased Carloman, and wanted to induce the Pope to crown them, and so create division in the Frank empire, and alienate Charles, the Patricius of Rome, from the Pope, and thus subjugate the city of Rome and all Italy to the Lombard kingdom. But Adrian stood firm as adamant. One of his two legates to the king, Paul Afiarta, was in league with the king, and promised to bring the Pope before him, even if it were with a rope round him. But, at this very moment, the body of the murdered Sergius was discovered at Rome. The Pope ordered an inquiry into the circumstances of his death. At the earnest entreaty of the Palatine judges, among whom Sergius had been second in rank, and of the whole Roman people, the Pope ordered the prefect of the city to try for homicide the parties inculpated. The crime was brought home to the legate, Paul Afiarta himself, at whose suggestion other highly placed officers had taken the blind Sergius out of prison, and pierced him with wounds. The Pope ordered the bodies of Christophorus and Sergius to be taken up and honourably buried in St. Peter's. He sent the Acts of the Court to the archbishop of Ravenna, instructing him to detain Paul Afiarta, when he returned from his embassy to the Lombard king. Archbishop Leo went beyond the Pope's instructions: handed over Paul Afiarta to the chief judge of Ravenna, before whom he acknowledged his guilt: and, instead of sending the criminal, as the Pope ordered, in exile to the East, had him executed by the judge.

Desiderius found himself bereft of his counsellor, Paul Afiarta: he refused to listen to the Pope's request to restore his cities. He committed further outrages and assaults. He rejected repeated letters and messengers of the Pope. His reply was that, instead of restoring cities, he would march with his whole army to Rome, and force it to surrender. The Pope had several of the gates of Rome built up and others carefully closed, and sent by sea messengers to Charles, begging him to help the Roman Church as his father had done, and force Desiderius to restore what he had taken from St. Peter.

Desiderius saw that his attempt to move the Pope to crown the sons of Carloman was vain; then, with the widowed Gilberga, these sons and the duke, Autchar, he advanced his troops from Pavia, on the way to Rome, and informed the Pope of it. Adrian replied, “If the king does not give up the cities, as he has promised, and fully satisfy us, it is useless for him to take the trouble to come to us. He shall not see my face.”

Adrian, while awaiting the succour which he had asked from king Charles, had taken all measures necessary for the defence of Rome. He collected all the men of war whom he could from the Roman Tuscany, from Campania, from the duchy of Perugia, from such cities of the Pentapolis as the Lombards had not yet taken, who, with the Roman soldiers, might suffice to defend the vast circle of the walls and towers, and sustain a siege at least for a time. The two basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul, being outside the walls, were defenceless. The Pope caused them to be stripped of all precious objects, which were brought for protection within the city. He had all the doors closed and barred up within: so that, if the Lombard king attempted an entrance, it would be as a burglar.

These were his acts as a sovereign prince – as pontiff, learning that the king was approaching the Roman frontiers, he sent to him the bishops of Albano, Palestrina, and Tibur, with an intimation in his own hand, adjuring him by all the divine mysteries, and under threat of excommunication, that neither he, nor any Lombard, nor the Frank Autchar should set foot on the Roman territory without his leave.

Desiderius had reached Viterbo, the last city of the Lombard Tuscany. He was, at the head of his army, about to pass the frontier. On receiving the Pope's injunction he was struck with confusion and retired back with his army to his own city, Pavia. As the Hun had listened to St. Leo, the Lombard also listened to Adrian, and Rome was once more saved by her pontiff.

When Peter, the legate of Adrian, reached France in the first months of 773, he found Charles wintering at Thionville, after his first expedition against the Saxons. He had destroyed the famous idol Irminoul. It was the beginning of his longest and fiercest war. Now, Pope Adrian called upon him, as Patricius of the Romans, to defend Rome and the State of St. Peter against Desiderius, from whom neither peace nor justice could any longer be hoped. At the same time a Lombard embassy reached him, professing that Desiderius had already restored every thing to the Pope. Charles sent three messengers of his own to Rome to ascertain the facts. They reached Rome just after its deliverance from the fear of a siege by the retreat of Desiderius from Viterbo. The Pope related to them in order all the late events: and sent with them other messengers of his own, conjuring Charles afresh to carry into effect the promises which he had formerly made with his father to St. Peter, and to fulfil the redemption of the holy Church of God by compelling the perfidious king of the Lombards to restore without contest to St. Peter, both the cities and the other rights which he had taken away. On their way to France the joint-messengers appeared at the court of Pavia, and, by instruction of Charles, urged Desiderius peacefully to restore the cities and rights. He gave an absolute refusal, which they carried to Charles.

Charles sent fresh messengers to Desiderius, and offered him 14,000 gold solidi, if he would make restitution. All was of no avail. When the messengers returned to Charles, he brought the whole matter before his dukes and chiefs, probably at the May diet, and an expedition into Italy was resolved upon for the autumn. The Frank army was summoned to meet at Geneva. One part of it Charles sent by the Mons Jovis, the St. Bernard; the other he conducted himself by the passes of Mont Cenis, the same route which Pipin had held in 754 and 756. When Charles reached the pass above Susa, he found it strongly fortified and valiantly defended by Desiderius in person, and his son, Adelchis. Here it is said the Franks were so long detained, being unable to break through the Lombard defence, that they were on the point of retiring, when a secret road was discovered to Charles, and their flank was turned. The result was a precipitate retreat of Desiderius to his fortified capital, Pavia, and of his son, Adelchis, to Verona. From that moment the chief struggle was concentred about these two cities. Other cities of Upper Italy, such as Turin, Ivrea, Vercelli, Novara, Piacenza, Milan, Parma, Tortona, and the maritime cities, with their castles, fell speedily into the hands of the Franks. Charles sat down before Pavia at the end of September or beginning of October, 773. That royal city of the Lombards, in the eighth century, was first among all the cities of Upper Italy, not only for its riches and magnificence, but for its military strength. Near the confluence of the Ticino and the Po, it was esteemed almost impregnable. It had resisted Odoacer, and Alboin required more than three years to take it, which he accomplished rather by famine than by force. Charles encamped with his army round it, and completely enclosed it with lines and trenches. He sent for the queen Hildegarde and her children. He made an attempt to take Verona, but found it too strong for anything short of a regular siege, defended, as it was, by the most valiant Adelchis. However, the widowed queen Gilberga, with her children, who were therein, surrendered themselves to him. They disappear henceforward from history, and are supposed to have been confined in Frank monasteries. Charles spent the feast of Christmas in the camp at Pavia. All we know of these months is the two words of Eginhard, that he spent them, “much employed”. We may conclude that not only the siege of Pavia, but the settlement of the numerous cities in North Italy, which yielded to him, well occupied his time.

But Charles had hitherto never seen Rome, and the feast of Easter, which fell in that year, 774, on the 3rd April, drew him with a great attraction to visit the tombs of the apostles, and he resolved to be present for the Paschal rites. He left therefore his army under the command of his chief officers and with a great train of bishops, abbots, judges, dukes, and counts, and a large escort of warriors, took the road of Tuscany, which probably had been in a great part subdued, and advanced so quickly that he reached the gates of Rome on the morning of Holy Saturday.

Great was the joy of Pope Adrian to hear of this unexpected visit of Charles, and his rapid approach. He made the utmost preparation to receive so great a king, who had likewise the special dignity of Rome's Patricius, that is, her sworn defender. He sent out all the judges of Rome to a spot thirty miles away near the lake of Bracciano, where they awaited him with banners displayed. At a mile from Rome, near Monte Mario, by order of the Pope the soldiers under their respective leaders, and the children who were learning letters, were drawn up to meet him, and bearing in their hands branches of palm and olive sang welcome to him. The standards of crosses were carried, as in the reception of an exarch or a Patricius. When the king of the Franks, Patricius of the Romans, met these crosses, he descended from horseback with his officers, and walked the rest of the way on foot to St. Peter's. There, Pope Adrian, rising early with all the clergy and people of Rome waited, to receive the king of the Franks at the top of the steps leading into the court of the Basilica.

At that time there were thirty-five steps in five series of seven each. When Charles reached these steps, he threw himself on his knees, and so ascended, kissing separately each one of the thirty-five in the fashion of a pilgrim. At the top he found Pope Adrian; they embraced each other, and the king holding the Pope's right hand they entered the church together, all the clergy and the monks singing, “Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord”. When the king with the bishops, abbots, judges, and all the Franks of his train, came to the Confession, they prostrated themselves to our almighty God, and rendered their vows to the Prince of the Apostles, glorifying the divine power in him, who had given them by his intercession such a victory.

After their prayer the king turned to the Pope and earnestly requested of him permission to enter Rome, in order to venerate the other churches of the city, and therein pay his vows. Whereupon the Pope and the king, together with Roman and Frank judges, descending to the body of St. Peter, bound themselves by oath to mutual protection. This permission to enter Rome was granted in after times by the Popes to Roman emperors themselves, as often as they approached the gates of Rome with armed force. After this permission received Charles and the Pope rode in solemn pomp from St. Peter's to the Lateran, through the whole of Rome. And Charles, in the Lateran church, witnessed the Pope's celebration of the baptismal rite to the catechumens as usual on that day.