Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III
It is to be noted that Christendom and Islam coincide as to the time of their rise. A Catholic Church there had been through all the six preceding centuries. But the allegiance of different bodies politic to one Christian faith and legislation was only beginning when Mohammed arose. The various kingdoms which the Teuton races were forming in all the countries of the West drew their common spiritual life from the Pope in Rome. The eastern emperor was becoming one of many sovereigns who acknowledged the authority of Peter. If Heraclius thought himself to wield the one sovereignty displayed by Justinian, he was undeceived before his death. If his grandson kidnapped a Pope out of his Lateran Church and Palace, and then martyred him as a traitor to his absolute power, the isles of the West were looking upon him at the same time as the bestower to them of the Christian faith, and of all the blessings which that faith brought with it to their civil life. St. Wilfrid spoke to the Northumbrian king concerning the doorkeeper of the kingdom of heaven. The king listened and obeyed. Thus the roots of Christendom were sprouting in France and Spain and Britain at the moment that Omar guided the suffrages of Mohammed's companions to choose the aged Abu Bekr for his successor. From that time these powers are formed over against each other in perpetual contrast and antagonism. The union of the two powers in Islam becomes the centre of a complete despotism. The distinction of the two powers in Christendom – which Pope Gelasius had marked with so much emphasis to the encroaching emperor Anastasius a hundred and forty years before – which St. Martin exercised at the cost of his life in the time of the third chalif – was the pledge and guarantee to Christendom of authority, supreme but temperate, of spiritual rule protecting civil liberty. A long succession of Popes – at the mercy of eastern despots as to civil matters – maintain their spiritual independence and their guidance of that new assemblage of nations in a common Christendom through the terrible seventh century. At the same moment Northern Africa, and Egypt, and Syria fall passively into the hands of the chalifate, and Byzantium loses the half of its power and trembles for its own existence.
How vast in its importance for future ages the establishment of the chalifate upon the death of Mohammed was, may be seen from the following considerations. It cannot be denied that the absolutely despotic form of government in lands under the sway of Mohammed has been created by the influence of the religion. It has indeed often been maintained that the genius of Asiatic peoples specially produces this form of rule. But states which are not Mohammedan rest on quite a different basis: and their rulers are or were subject to great and essential limitations. A Hindu king who reigned under the laws of Manu could not break through the immunities of the Brahmins, or the separation of the castes. An emperor of China, though he be called the son of heaven, and his throne be approached only with forms of the deepest submission, can name no officer except according to the list of candidates provided by the learned order. Not so the Princes of the Faithful. Two elements here concur to produce the most complete form of despotism: the mixing together or more properly unification of the spiritual and the temporal power; and the military power resting on conquest. According as the theocratic or the military principle prevailed, the sovereignty would take a distinct colouring: the despotism assume a milder or a sterner aspect. When, as in the case of the Arabian chalifs, and in a certain degree of the Turkish sultans since Selim, the religious character prevailed, and the political power, in accordance with the original spirit of Islam, appeared only as an issue and endowment of the spiritual, the unconditional submission would take more of a religious and conscientious devotedness. Then the dynasty, clothed in the divinity which hedges a king, could enjoy greater stability and security: the ruler himself, reminded ever of his consecrated character, of the duties and the higher responsibility which lay upon him, would make through regard for the prescriptions of religion a more moderate use of an authority in itself unlimited. Where, on the contrary, the spirit of an arbitrary military lordship prevailed, as in most of the kingdoms formed after the overthrow of the chalifate in Central Asia, the blind obedience of the subject would rather be the result of fear and custom. An attempt to overthrow the possessor of supreme power, with the self-same violence by means of which he had raised himself to it, would appear at once as allowable and attractive. Thence would follow more frequent change of dynasty, indifference to it on the part of the population, continual suspicion, and tyrannical exercise of even the bloodiest means to put down every opposing force.
Thus the government of the Ottoman kingdom did not take that character of brutal tyranny which marks the history of Persia. The Persian king is so absolutely lord of the life and property of his subjects, that a sentence even issued in a drunken revel without the least formality receives immediate execution. A Persian proverb truly says: To be near the shah is to be near a burning fire. The general view that a king is naturally tyrannical and unjust has passed into the very language, so that a complainant for the strongest expression of the wrong which he has suffered says: He played the king over me. Thus the learned in the law maintain that the king's commands are superior to the right of nature, they only yield to a positive divine command. The lordship of the Ottoman sultans, though resting on the same principle of unlimited power, appears on the whole milder and more moderate. Here too, as the founder of the line declared, all property belongs to the sultan; here also “the slave's neck is thinner than a hair,” and all subjects rank as the sultan's slaves, and even call themselves so: here too the sultan's mother calls her son “my lion” or “my tiger,” and Moslim name the sultan not only “the Shadow of God,” or “the Refuge of the World,” but also “the Executioner, the Slayer,” since he alone possesses the absolute right over the life of all. Turkish doctors ascribe to him also a holy character not to be effaced by any immorality. If his actions shew a scorn of all admitted conceptions of justice or prudence, yet in force of a Mohammedan fiction it is assumed that he does much or most of this in consequence of a divine suggestion, and therefore that his motives can neither be discerned nor judged by men. In the same spirit the learned in the law maintain that the sultan can put to death every day fourteen persons, without giving reason, or lying under imputation of tyranny. Whoever receives death without resistance from his hand or by his order becomes thereby a martyr, and many of his servants are said to have striven after the honour of such a death as a secure pledge of eternal happiness. A tyrannical power such as this as a rule naturally strikes those only who stand near the throne. The members of his own family, the higher officers of state, fall victims to it. The mass of the people seldom feels such direct effects of their despot. Here the principle holds, the higher the dignity, the more perfect the confidence, the greater the danger. The grand visiers, the other selves of the sultans in temporal matters have experienced this. A hundred and eighty statesmen have held this highest office of the kingdom from 1370 to 1789: most of them therefore scarcely more than two years. Many have been executed after a short time. One of the most esteemed Mohammedan princes, Soliman the Magnificent, executed during his government, one after the other, most of the men on whose shoulders he had laid the most important works and the highest offices of his kingdom. An instinct of obedience, an inclination to unconditional absolute subjection under absolute authority prevails among Mohammedans, to which the utmost cruelty appears endurable, the utmost perversity natural.
It must be added that the Sultan of Morocco unites the spiritual, and the temporal power, as sheriff, that is descendant of the prophet through Hosein and Ali. He is a despot as absolute as the king of Persia. All depends upon his will. He makes, alters, suppresses, and restores laws. He changes them according to his humour, convenience, or interests. Here there is no body of Ulema, no Mufti clothed with an authority independent of the sovereign, no divan, colleges, or ministerial departments. All follows the single command of the ruler.
The nature of the supreme authority in these three Moslem empires speaks at the present day of its origin in the person of Mohammed.
What we see is this. The misuse of Cæsarean power in applying to the Church of God, which from the beginning by divine order was independent, a supremacy in spiritual things not belonging to the civil ruler, is allowed by Divine Providence to call forth a far more terrible despotism, in the guise of a false prophet who invents a religion of which he is to be the apostle, and then claims all power, spiritual and temporal, as belonging to him in the character of apostle, and the use of force as the means of propagation. That despotism is allowed to seize for permanent occupation the richest provinces of the eastern empire, and to make its capital in fear of perpetual subjection. But it is also used to check the imperial usurpation over the Church, and to begin an era, now lasting for twelve centuries and a half, in which two religions, and two forms of government springing from these religions, stand over against each other in perpetual and irreconcilable opposition.
The structure of the Church was vehemently shaken by the earthquake which attended the pouring out of Islam upon the south-eastern and southern countries of the former Roman empire. It had to be seen whether the whole fabric would maintain itself upon its foundation of rock when such mighty portions of its structure were torn by main force away. Moslem writers say, when the locust swarm darkened vast countries, they bore on their wings these Arabic words: – “We are God's host, each of us has nine and ninety eggs; and if we had a hundred we should lay waste the world with all that is in it”.
The hundredth egg has never been granted, but if the assassin's stroke had not carried off Chalif Omar in 644, and again Chalif Osman in the year 656, and again Chalif Ali in the year 661, perhaps the desolation might have been fully accomplished; as also if the chalifate, created by election in 632, had not become within thirty years a mere hereditary kingdom, in which rival pretenders and rival families exhausted the strength of Islam by perpetual conflicts. The empire of the sword has also illustrated the divine decree: “All that take the sword shall perish with the sword”.
Chapter V. Old Rome And New Rome
The seizure of Pope St. Martin in his Lateran Church by the exarch of Ravenna, Kalliopas, under order from the Emperor Constans II., his secret deportation to Constantinople, his trial before the Senate as guilty of high treason, his condemnation to death, and subsequent death in the Crimea from hardship or starvation, with the election of Pope Eugenius during his lifetime by the Roman clergy through dread of a Monothelite being forced upon them by the Byzantine; all this marks probably the lowest point of civil depression and helplessness to which the Papacy was ever reduced in those momentous three centuries which run from Genseric to Aistulf, from 455 to 755. The emperor who committed acts so mean, perfidious, and cruel was reigning over an empire already cut in two by the sword of Mohammed's chalif. How little he had heeded the chastisement we learn from an incident in the trial of the great eastern confessor, St. Maximus, which I have already recorded, but to which I recur that I may exhibit the full insolence of the eastern despot, as well as his blindness. Theodosius, the consul, coming straight out from the emperor's cabinet, with the condemnation of Maximus in his hand, addressed him in these words: “Learn, Sir Abbot, that when we get a little relief from this rout of heathens (that is, of the Saracens who had stripped Constans of Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and North Africa as far as Kairowan), by the Holy Trinity we will bring you to terms, and your Pope, who is now lifted up, and all the talkers there, and the rest of your disciples; and we will cook you all, each in his own place, as Martin has been cooked”.
These words were spoken on the 14th December, 656. The Pope Eugenius was the Pope alluded to in them, and it is inferred from them that he rejected those terms of union which the emperor was seeking to impose and which the nuntios were willing to accept. The martyrdom of St. Martin had taken place on the 16th September of the preceding year, 655.
It was the providence of God that the chalif himself never allowed the sworn protector of the Church who sat on the eastern throne to execute this threat. Rather he was all through this century in dread lest the Mohammedan, having fixed his throne at Damascus, should advance it to Constantinople. It was again the providence of God that Constantinople itself should not fall during this time of its utmost weakness, and so open the whole of northern Europe to Mohammedan domination. The city of Constantine was then the material rampart which stopped the impetuous current of Saracen invasion to the north. The chalif Muawiah, who reigned over the immense Saracen empire from 661 to 680, was strong enough continually to beat the Emperor, to ravage his Asiatic territory, to advance towards his capital, but he was never able to take it. The advance of the seat of the Saracenic empire from the remote Medina to the near and beautiful Damascus, the paradise of eastern cities, dwelling in its perpetual garden among ever-flowing waters of Abana and Pharpar, was itself a sign how the empire had fallen. A religion founded on the denial of the Christian faith, of which it was, moreover, the special rival, had full possession of the once Roman and Christian East. Muawiah became chalif on the death of Ali in 661. He had conducted the civil war against Ali, which distracted for five years the Saracen power, with the forces of Syria, as its governor; and when he became supreme made it the capital of his empire.
Constans II., having crowned with martyrdom the greatest confessor of the West, Pope Martin, and the greatest confessor of the East, St. Maximus, resolved in the year 662, to visit the West. The tyranny of Constans in regard to the Pope was not completed even by his treatment of St Martin. When he had condemned this Pope, but before he had caused his death he is supposed to have compelled the Roman clergy to elect another Pope. This was Eugenius, who was recognised in the year 654 for Pope, while St. Martin was yet alive. Whether the urgency and threats of the imperial ministers overcame at length the constancy of the clergy, or whether, as is more probable, they feared to see some heretic sent by the emperor to occupy the throne of St. Peter, they elected Eugenius, by birth a Roman, a person of great goodness and holy life, who held the See two years and eight months. The synodical letter of Peter, the fourth Monothelite patriarch of Constantinople in succession was sent to him, but being obscure in its expressions about our Lord, was sent back with indignity. It would seem that the exceeding danger of the time caused the election and consecration of Pope Eugenius in the lifetime of St. Martin, to pass for legitimate. Eugenius died in 657, and was succeeded by Pope Vitalian, after a vacancy of a month and 29 days.
Pope Eugenius had not acknowledged either of the patriarchs Paulus or Peter by writing to them, but Vitalian sent his nuntios to Constans to announce his accession to the papacy by his synodical letter. Constans received them graciously, acknowledged the privileges of the Roman Church, and sent by them to St. Peter at Rome a copy of the gospels bound in golden covers and studded with diamonds. Vitalian, says Anastasius, preserved in all respects the ecclesiastical rule and vigour.
Constans had a brother named Theodosius, whom he forced to become a deacon, and he had repeatedly received from his hands the chalice of the Lord's Blood. Afterwards he caused him to be murdered. He was said to have often dreamt of his victim, offering him a chalice full of blood, with the words: “Brother, drink”. The stings of conscience and the hatred of the people for his cruelty and his protection of heresy, were supposed to drive him from his capital.
The book of the Popes under its notice of the life of Vitalian says: “In his time the emperor came from the royal city by coast to Athens, thence to Tarentum, Beneventum, and Naples. At Rome he arrived on the 5th July. The Apostolical went out with his clergy to the sixth milestone from the city to receive him. The same day the emperor went to pray at St. Peter's, and offered his gift. On Saturday he went to St. Mary's and also offered his gift. On Sunday he went in procession with his army to St. Peter's. All went out with wax candles to meet him, and he offered on the altar a golden woven pall, and Mass was celebrated. Again on Saturday the emperor came to the Lateran, took a bath, and dined in the Julian basilica. On Sunday there was a station at St. Peter's, and after celebration of Mass the emperor and the pontiff took leave of each other. Twelve days he remained in the Roman city. Every bronze statue which ornamented the city he took down, nay, and he unroofed of its brazen tiles the Church of Blessed Mary at the Martyrs, and sent all things which he had taken to the royal city. Then on Monday he left Rome and returned to Naples. Then he went by land to Rhegium and entered Sicily. He lived in the city of Syracuse, and caused much affliction to the people, the inhabitants or proprietors of Calabria, Sicily, Africa, and Sardinia, by his exactions during many years such as had never been. He separated even wives from their husbands, and sons from their fathers, and they suffered many other unheard of things, so that a man had not hope of life. They took even the sacred vessels and ornaments of God's holy churches, and left nothing.”
The visit of Constans to Rome casts a strong light upon the condition of things in a century concerning which we are singularly destitute of detailed information.
When Constans landed with a certain force at Tarentum, he found the Lombards in possession of the duchy of Beneventum. A legend said that their king Autharis after a bold march through the Peninsula to the Straits of Messina, had spurred his horse into the sea and exclaimed, “This shall be the Lombard boundary”. But his successors had never made good the words of Autharis. Naples and Amalfi, Sorrentum, Gaeta, and Tarentum had imperial governors. Alboin however made a duchy of Beneventum which then included the ancient Samnium and Apulia, and portions of Campania and Lucania. It was a stronghold of Lombard robbers in southern Italy. Constans tried to expel the young duke Romuald. But he failed, and hearing that King Grimoald was approaching to aid his son, he went to Naples, left at Formiæ, the present Mola di Gaeta, 20,000 men, and marched on Rome by the Appian Way.
Pope Vitalian went out to meet him as legitimate Roman emperor. It was true that ten years before he had seized Pope St. Martin in his church, and carried him off by stealth to trial, suffering, and ultimate martyrdom in the Crimea. It was true likewise that while holding St. Martin in prison, he had repeated the evil deed committed by Justinian's empress Theodora, a hundred and sixteen years before, and compelled the Roman clergy under threat of worse things to elect a new Pope while the Pope was living, though in this case the elected was himself blameless and excellent. It is true, also, that later still he had treated the great confessor Maximus with equal cruelty. But these crimes did not prevent his being the actual emperor to whom loyal submission was due from the great throne of justice in the earth. It would seem also by the mode in which Constans had received the nuntios who bore Pope Vitalian's synodical letter, announcing his accession, and by the superb present which he sent back in acknowledgement, that somehow a better spirit prevailed at the moment towards the Pope. We are met indeed by the fact that the Monothelite patriarch Peter held the see of Constantinople for twelve years from the death of the re-established Pyrrhus in 654, to his own death in 666, being the fourth heretic in succession from Sergius in the see of the royal city. Constans approached Rome at the head of an army. He made his offerings as emperor to the three great churches of Rome, the Lateran, St. Peter's and St. Mary Major. The Pope was completely at his mercy. He lodged in the imperial palace on the Palatine, which, however great its desolation, was able at least to receive him. In his twelve days sojourn he laid his hands upon every bronze statue which he thought worth plundering: and he stripped of its costly roof the church which his predecessor sixty years before had given to the Pope, dedicated to the Mother of God and all Martyrs.
Such a visit accompanied by such acts give a lively picture of the regard entertained by a Byzantine emperor for the city which gave him his title. It sums up the hundred and ten years of abject servitude into which all Italy had fallen since the capture of the city by Narses under Justinian. We have the contemptuous despot, the long-suffering Pope, the half-ruined powerless city. Three hundred and six years had passed since the degenerate son of Constantine, when he came to Rome in 357, was amazed at the beauty of its great buildings, the forum of Trajan, the theatre of Pompey, the unequalled Flavian amphitheatre. But in Constans the memories of Rome were dead: he robbed the last relic of its grandeur, Agrippa's pantheon, nor was he ready to reverence the protection of the Blessed Virgin over the Church dedicated to her by the Pope on receiving it as the gift of a preceding emperor. These last spoils he had embarked for his royal city, but they were detained at Syracuse, and on its capture shortly afterwards by the Saracens fell into their hands.
But before this event the life and misdeeds of the emperor Constans II. had come to a sudden end. He was living in Ortygia, the sole remaining quarter of that once princely city, wherein Achradyna, Tyche, Neapolis, and Epipolæ lay desolate. He had entered his bath one day, and received in it a blow on his head by his attendant, whether a slave, or a conspirator. His courtiers when they at length came in found him dead. The Greek chronologist Theophanes alleges as a reason for this event that after his murder of his brother he became greatly hated at Constantinople, both for his persecution of Pope Martin and Maximus, “that most wise confessor, whose tongue he cut out, and whose hands he cut off, and condemned many of the orthodox with tortures, banishments, and confiscations, because they would not submit to his heresy”. In his dread he had wished to transfer his residence to the West, but this his counsellors prevented. His treatment of the Sicilians was so bad that some in despair went to settle at Damascus, though it had become the capital of the chalif.
So lived and so died the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., “Roman emperor and Christian prince” from 642 to 668, in the times when the chalifs of Mohammed, Omar, Osman, Ali, and Muawiah carved the Saracen realm out of the empire which Heraclius had possessed, and out of the kingdom of the “Great King,” whom Heraclius, when bearing the standard of the cross had brought low. If Heraclius treated Syria and Egypt as Constans treated Rome and Italy, is not the wonder diminished that in the ten years of Omar the structure of Roman power which had lasted seven centuries was overthrown, and those provinces had received a Mohammedan instead of a Byzantine master? Muawiah at Damascus cherished the Syria which at Antioch the lord on the Bosphorus had ground down with taxes. The Rome also which Constans, when he had been welcomed as its emperor, left stripped of its last ornaments was regarded with veneration by the farthest isle of the West, which it was winning at once to civilised and to Christian life. An English authority tells us that five years after the visit of Constans, Pope Vitalian, in the twelfth year of his pontificate, on the 26th March, 668, consecrated a monk of Tarsus, then living at Rome, learned both in secular and divine literature, speaking both Greek and Latin, of holy life, and venerable in age, being sixty-six years old. Thus Theodore was sent to be Archbishop of Canterbury. He was received in his passage through France by the Archbishop of Arles, and the bishop of Paris. He reached his see in the following year, 669, and sat in it full twenty-one years. St. Bede's account of him says that he went over the whole island, wheresoever there were English, was received by all most cordially, and obeyed, when he gave them a right order of life, and the canonical celebration of Easter, which he spread abroad. St. Bede adds that he was the first among the archbishops whom the whole Church of the English consented to obey. His friend Adrian, who had recommended him to the Pope, and accompanied him from Rome, attended him in England: they had a large number of disciples, whom they instructed not only in theology, but in music, astronomy, and arithmetic. St. Bede wrote forty years after the death of Theodore, and says, “Even at this day there survive persons taught by them, who know the Greek and Latin languages as well as their own. Nor from the time the English came to Britain were there ever happier times, since, possessing kings most valiant and at the same time Christian, they were a terror to all barbarous nations; and the vows of all men tended to the joys of the heavenly kingdom but newly revealed to them; and all who wished to be instructed in the sacred lessons had masters ready to teach them.”
