|
Home | Prev
| Next
| Contents
LECTURE XI--THE POPES AND THE LOMBARDS
'Our Lady the Mother of God, even Virgin Maria, together with us,
protests to you, adjuring you with great obligations, and admonishes
and commands you, and with her the thrones, dominations, all the
heavenly angels, the martyrs and confessors of Christ, on behalf of
the Roman city, committed to us by the Lord God, and the sheep of the
Lord dwelling in it. Defend and free it speedily from the hands of
the persecuting Lombards, lest my body which suffered torments for
Christ, and my home in which it rests by the command of God, be
contaminated by the people of the Lombards, who are guilty of such
iniquitous perjury, and are proud transgressors of the divine
scripture. So will I at the day of judgment reward you with my
patronage, and prepare for you in the kingdom of God most shining and
glorious tabernacles, promising you the reward of eternal
retribution, and the infinite joys of paradise.
'Run, by the true and living God I exhort you, run, and help; before
the living fountain, whence you were consecrated and born again,
shall dry up: before the little spark remaining of that brilliant
flame, from which you knew the light, be extinguished; before your
spiritual mother, the holy Church of God, in which you hope to
receive eternal life, shall be humiliated, invaded, violated, and
defiled by the impious.
'But if not, may your provinces in return, and your possessions, be
invaded by people whom you know not. Separate not yourselves from my
Roman people; so you will not be aliens, and separate from the
kingdom of God, and eternal life. For whatever you shall ask of me,
I will surely give you, and be your patron. Assist my Roman people,
your brothers; and strive more perfectly; for it is written, No man
receiveth the crown, unless he strive lawfully.
'I conjure you, most beloved, by the living God, leave not this my
city of Rome to be any longer torn by the Lombards, lest your bodies
and souls be torn and tormented for ever, in inextinguishable and
Tartarian fire with the devil and his pestiferous angels; and let not
the sheep of the Lord's flock, which are the Roman people, be
dispersed any more, lest the Lord disperse you, and cast you forth as
the people of Israel was dispersed.'
You will conclude, doubtless, that this curious document can be
nothing but a papal allocution. Its peculiar scriptural style
(wrongly supposed to have been invented by the Puritans, who merely
learnt it from the old Roman clergy), as well as the self-conceit,
which fancies the fate of the whole world to depend on the prosperity
of a small half-ruined city in Italy, will be to you sufficient marks
of the Roman hand. But you will be somewhat mistaken. It is hardly
an epistle from the successor of St. Peter. It professes to be an
epistle from St. Peter himself, and sent by him through the hands of
Pope Stephen III. to Pepin the king of the Franks, in the year 755.
You will have concluded also from it, that Catholic Christianity is
in its extreme agony; that the worship and name of our Lord, and the
fountains of sacramental grace are about to be extinguished for ever,
and that nothing but heresy or heathendom can follow. Then you will
be quite mistaken. These Lombards are pious Catholics. Builders of
churches and monasteries, they are taking up the relics of the Roman
martyrs, to transfer them to the churches of Milan and Pavia. They
have just given Pope Stephen the most striking proof of their awe of
his person and office. But they are quarrelling with him about the
boundaries of his estates for the patrimony of St. Peter. They
consider that he and his predecessors have grossly wronged them at
different times; and now last of all, by calling in foreign invaders;
and they are at the gates of Rome laying waste the country, and
demanding a poll-tax as ransom. That is all.
The causes which led to this quarrel must be sought far back in
history. The original documents in which you will find the facts
will be Paulus Diaconus, as far as King Luitprand's death; then the
Life and Writings of Gregory the Great; and then Baronius' Annals,
especially his quotations from Anastasius' Life of Stephen III.,
bearing in mind that, as with the Ostrogoths, we have only the Roman
Papal story; that the Lombards have never stated their case, not even
through Paulus Diaconus, who, being a clergyman, prudently holds his
tongue about the whole matter. But by far the best account is to be
found in Dean Milman's 'Latin Christianity,' Vols. I. and II. Rome,
you must understand, has become gradually the patrimony of St. Peter;
the Popes are the practical kings of Rome, possessing, in the name of
the Church, much land round Rome, and many estates scattered
throughout Italy, and even in Sicily, Gaul, Africa, and the East--
estates probably bequeathed by pious people. They have succeeded to
this jurisdiction simply by default. They rule Rome, because there
is no one else to rule it. We find St. Gregory the Great feeding the
pauper-masses of Rome, on the first day of every month, from the
fruitful corn-bearing estates in Sicily; keeping up the 'Panem;' but
substituting, thank Heaven, for the 'Circenses' at least the services
of the Church. Of course, the man who could keep the Roman people
alive must needs become, ipso facto, their monarch.
The Pope acknowledges, of course, a certain allegiance to the Emperor
at Constantinople, and therefore to his representative, the Exarch of
Ravenna: that is to say, he meets them with flattery when they are
working on his side; with wrath when they oppose him. He intrigues
with them, too, whenever he can safely do so, against the Lombards.
Thus the Pope has become, during the four centuries which followed
the destruction of the Western Empire, the sole surviving
representative of that Empire. He is the head of the 'gens togata;'
of the 'Senatus Populusque Romanus.' In him Rome has risen again out
of her grave, to awe the peoples once more by the Romani nominis
umbra; and to found a new Empire; not as before, on physical force,
and the awe of visible power; but on the deeper and more enduring
ground of spiritual force, and the awe of the invisible world.
An Empire, I say. The Popes were becoming, from the 5th to the 8th
centuries, not merely the lords of Rome, but the lords of the Western
Church. Their spiritual Empire, to do them justice, was not so much
deliberately sought by them, as thrust upon them. As the clergy
were, all over the Empire, the representatives of the down-trodden
Romans, so they naturally gravitated toward the Eternal City, their
ancient mistress. Like all disciplined and organized bodies they
felt the need of unity, of monarchy. Where could they find it, save
at Rome? Rome was still, practically and in fact, the fountain of
their doctrine, of their superior civilization; and to submit
themselves to the Pope of Rome was their only means of keeping up one
faith, one practice, and the strength which comes from union.
To seat the Pope upon the throne of the Caesars; to attribute to him
powers weightier than all which the Caesars had possest . . . It was
a magnificent idea. A politic idea, too; for it would cover the
priesthood with all the prestige of ancient Rome, and enable them to
face the barbarian in the name of that great people whose very memory
still awed him; whose baths, aqueducts, palaces, he looked on as the
work of demons; whose sages and poets were to him enchanters; whose
very gems, dug out of the ruins by night, in fear and trembling,
possest magic influence for healing, for preservation, for good
fortune in peace or war.
Politic; and in their eyes, true. Easy enough to be believed
honestly, by men who already believed honestly in their own divine
mission. They were the representatives of Christ on earth. Of that
fact there could be then, or can be now, no doubt whatsoever.
Whatsoever truth, light, righteousness, there was in the West, came
to it through them. And Christ was the King of kings. But He
delayed his coming: at moments, He seemed to have deserted the
earth, and left mankind to tear itself in pieces, with wild war and
misrule. But it could not be so. If Christ were absent, He must at
least have left an authority behind Him to occupy till He came; a
head and ruler for his opprest and distracted Church. And who could
that be, if not the Pope of Rome?
It ought to be so.--It must be so--thought they. And to men in that
mood, proofs that it was so soon came to hand, and accumulated from
generation to generation; till the Pope at last found himself
proclaiming, and what was more, believing, that God had given the
whole world to St. Peter, and through St. Peter to him; and that he
was the only source of power, law, kingship, who could set up and
pull down whom he would, as the vicegerent of God on earth.
Such pretensions, of course, grew but slowly. It was not, I believe,
till the year 875, 180 years after the time of which I am speaking,
that Pope John VIII. distinctly asserted his right, as representative
of the ancient Roman Empire, to create the Caesar; and informed the
Synod of Pavia that he had 'elected and approved Charles the Bald,
with the consent of his brothers the bishops, of the other ministers
of the Holy Roman Church, and' (significant, though empty words) 'of
the Roman senate and people.'
At the time of which I speak, the power was still in embryo, growing,
through many struggles: but growing surely and strongly, and
destined speedily to avenge the fall of Rome on the simple barbarians
who were tearing each other to pieces over her spoils.
It is not easy to explain the lasting and hereditary hatred of the
Popes to the Lombards. Its origin is simple enough: but not so its
continuance. Why they should be nefandissimi in the eyes of Pope
Gregory the Great one sees: but why 100 years afterwards, they
should be still nefandissimi, and 'non dicenda gens Langobardorum,'
not to be called a nation, is puzzling.
At first, of course, the Pope could only look on them as a fresh
horde of barbarous conquerors; half heathen, half Arian. Their
virtuous and loyal life within the boundaries of Alboin's conquests--
of which Paulus Diaconus says, that violence and treachery were
unknown--that no one oppressed, no one plundered--that the traveller
went where he would in perfect safety--all this would be hid from the
Pope by the plain fact, that they were continually enlarging their
frontier toward Rome; that they had founded two half-independent
Dukedoms of Beneventum and Spoleto, that Autharis had swept over
South Italy, and ridden his horse into the sea at Reggio, to strike
with his lance a column in the waves, and cry, 'Here ends the Lombard
kingdom.'
The Pope (Gregory the Great I am speaking of) could only recollect,
again, that during the lawless interregnum before Autharis'
coronation, the independent Lombard dukes had plundered churches and
monasteries, slain the clergy, and destroyed the people, who had
'grown up again like corn.'
But as years rolled on, these Arian Lombards had become good
Catholics; and that in the lifetime of Gregory the Great.
Theodelinda, the Bavarian princess, she to whom Autharis had gone in
disguise to her father's court, and only confessed himself at his
departure, by rising in his stirrups, and burying his battle-axe in a
tree stem with the cry, 'Thus smites Autharis the Lombard,'--this
Theodelinda, I say, had married after his death Agilwulf his cousin,
and made him king of the Lombards.
She was a Catholic; and through her Gregory the Great converted
Autharis, and the Lombard nation. To her he addressed those famous
dialogues of his, full alike of true piety and earnestness, and of
childish superstition. But in judging them and him we must bear in
mind, that these Lombards became at least by his means Catholics, and
that Arians would have believed in the superstitions just as much as
Catholics. And it is surely better to believe a great truth, plus
certain mistakes which do not affect it in the least, than a great
lie, plus the very same mistakes likewise. Which is best, to believe
that the road to London lies through Bishopstortford, and that there
are dog-headed men on the road: or that it lies through Edinburgh,
but that there are dog-headed men on that road too?
Theodelinda had built at Modicaea, twelve miles above Milan, a fair
basilica to John the Baptist, enriched by her and the Lombard kings
and dukes, 'crowns, crosses, golden tables adorned with emeralds,
hyacinths, amber, carbuncles and pearls, gold and silver altar-
cloths, and that admirable cup of sapphire,' all which remained till
the eighteenth century. There, too, was the famous iron crown of
Lombardy, which Austria still claims as her own; so called from a
thin ring of iron inserted in it, made from a nail of the true cross
which Gregory had sent Agilwulf; just as he sent Childebert, the
Frankish king, some filings of St. Peter's chains; which however, he
says, did not always allow their sacred selves to be filed.
In return, Agilwulf had restored the church-property which he had
plundered, had reinstated the bishops; and why did not all go well?
Why are these Lombards still the most wicked of men?
Again, in the beginning of the eighth century came the days of the
good Luitprand, 'wise and pious, a lover of peace, and mighty in war;
merciful to offenders, chaste and modest, instant in prayer,
bountiful in alms, equal to the philosophers, though he knew no
letters, a nourisher of his people, an augmenter of the laws.' He it
was, who, when he had quarrelled with Pope Gregory II., and marched
on Rome, was stopped at the Gates of the Vatican by the Pontiff's
prayers and threats. And a sacred awe fell on him; and humbly
entering St. Peter's, he worshipped there, and laid on the Apostle's
tomb his royal arms, his silver cross and crown of gold, and
withdrawing his army, went home again in peace. But why were this
great king's good deeds towards the Pope and the Catholic faith
rewarded, by what we can only call detestable intrigue and treachery?
Again; Leo the Iconoclast Emperor destroyed the holy images in the
East, and sent commands to the Exarch of Ravenna to destroy them in
western Italy. Pope Gregory II. replied by renouncing allegiance to
the Emperor of Constantinople; and by two famous letters which are
still preserved; in which he tells the Iconoclast Emperor, that, 'if
he went round the grammar-schools at Rome, the children would throw
their horn-books at his head . . . that he implored Christ to send
the Emperor a devil, for the destruction of his body and the
salvation of his soul . . . that if he attempted to destroy the
images in Rome, the pontiff would take refuge with the Lombards, and
then he might as well chase the wind that the Popes were the
mediators of peace between East and West, and that the eyes of the
nations were fixed on the Pope's humility, and adored as a God on
earth the apostle St. Peter. And that the pious Barbarians, kindled
into rage, thirsted to avenge the persecution of the East.' Then
Luitprand took up the cause of the Pope and his images, and of the
mob, who were furious at the loss of their idols; and marched on
Ravenna, which opened her gates to him, so that he became master of
the whole Pentapolis; and image-worship, to which some plainspoken
people give a harsher name, was saved for ever and a day in Italy.
Why did Gregory II. in return, call in Orso, the first Venetian Doge,
to expel from Ravenna the very Luitprand who had fought his battles
for him, and to restore that Exarchate of Ravenna, of which it was
confessed, that its civil quarrels, misrule, and extortions, made it
the most miserable government in Italy? And why did he enter into
secret negotiations with the Franks to come and invade Italy?
Again, when Luitprand wanted to reduce the duchies of Beneventum and
Spoleto, which he considered as rebels against him, their feudal
suzerain; why did the next Pope, Gregory III., again send over the
Alps to Charles Martel to come and invade Italy, and deliver the
Church and Christ's people from ruin?
And who were these Franks, the ancestors of that magnificent, but
profligate aristocracy whose destruction our grandfathers beheld in
1793? I have purposely abstained from describing them, till they
appear upon the stage of Italy, and take part in her fortunes--which
were then the fortunes of the world.
They appear first on the Roman frontier in A.D. 241, and from that
time are never at rest till they have conquered the north of Gaul.
They are supposed (with reason) not to have been a race or tribe at
all; but a confederation of warriors, who were simply 'Franken,'
'free;' 'free companions,' or 'free lances,' as they would have been
called a few centuries later; who recruited themselves from any and
every tribe who would join them in war and plunder. If this was the
case; if they had thrown away, as adventurers, much of the old
Teutonic respect for law, for the royal races, for family life, for
the sacred bonds of kindred, many of their peculiarities are
explained. Falsehood, brutality, lawlessness, ignorance, and cruelty
to the conquered Romans, were their special sins; while their
special, and indeed only virtue, was that indomitable daring which
they transmitted to their descendants for so many hundred years. The
buccaneers of the young world, they were insensible to all influences
save that of superstition. They had become, under Clovis, orthodox
Christians: but their conversion, to judge from the notorious facts
of history, worked little improvement on their morals. The pages of
Gregory of Tours are comparable, for dreary monotony of horrors, only
to those of Johnson's History of the Pyrates.
But, as M. Sismondi well remarks, their very ignorance and brutality
made them the more easily the tools of the Roman clergy: 'Cette
haute veneration pour l'Eglise, et leur severe orthodoxie, d'autant
plus facile a conserver que, ne faisant aucune etude, et ne disputant
jamais sur la foi, ils ne connaissaient pas meme les questions
controversees, leur donnerent dans le clerge de puissants
auxiliaires. Les Francs se montrerent disposes a hair les Ariens, a
les combattres, et les depouiller sans les entendre; les eveques, en
retour, ne se montrerent pas scrupuleux sur le reste des
enseignements moraux de la religion: ils fermerent les yeux sur les
violences, le meurtre, le dereglement des moeurs; ils autoriserent en
quelque sorte publiquement la poligamie, et ils precherent le droit
divin des rois et le devoir le l'obeissance pour les peuples {p279}.'
A painful picture of the alliance: but, I fear, too true.
The history of these Franks you must read for yourselves. You will
find it well told in the pages of Sismondi, and in Mr. Perry's
excellent book, 'The Franks.' It suffices now to say, that in the
days of Luitprand these Franks, after centuries of confusion and
bloodshed, have been united into one great nation, stretching from
the Rhine to the Loire and the sea, and encroaching continually to
the southward and eastward. The government has long passed out of
the hands of their faineant Meerwing kings into that of the semi-
hereditary Majores Domus, or Mayors of the Palace; and Charles
Martel, perhaps the greatest of that race of great men, has just made
himself mayor of Austrasia (the real Teutonic centre of Frank life
and power), Neustria and Burgundy. He has crushed Eudo, the duke of
Romanized Aquitaine, and has finally delivered France and Christendom
from the invading Saracens. On his Franks, and on the Lombards of
Italy, rest, for the moment, the destinies of Europe.
For meanwhile another portent has appeared, this time out of the far
East. Another swarm of destroyers has swept over the earth. The
wild Arabs of the desert, awakening into sudden life and civilization
under the influence of a new creed, have overwhelmed the whole East,
the whole north of Africa, destroying the last relics of Roman and
Greek civilization, and with them the effete and semi-idolatrous
Christianity of the Empire. All the work of Narses and Belisarius is
undone. Arab Emirs rule in the old kingdom of the Vandals. The new
human deluge has crossed the Straits into Europe. The Visigoths,
enervated by the luxurious climate of Spain, have recoiled before the
Mussulman invaders. Roderick, the last king of the Goths, is
wandering as an unknown penitent in expiation of his sin against the
fair Cava, which brought down (so legends and ballads tell) the
scourge of God upon the hapless land; and the remnants of the old
Visigoths and Sueves are crushed together into the mountain
fastnesses of Asturias and Gallicia, thence to reissue, after long
centuries, as the noble Spanish nation, wrought in the forges of
adversity into the likeness of tempered steel; and destined to
reconquer, foot by foot, their native land from the Moslem invader.
But at present the Crescent was master of the Cross; and beyond the
Pyrenees all was slavery and 'miscreance.' The Arabs, invading
France in 732, in countless thousands, had been driven back at the
great fight of Tours, with a slaughter so great, that the excited
imagination of Paulus Diaconus sees 375,000 miscreants dead upon the
field, while only 1500 Franks had perished. But home troubles had
prevented 'the Hammer of the Moors' from following up his victory.
The Saracens had returned in force in 737, and again in 739. They
still held Narbonne. The danger was imminent. There was no reason
why they should not attempt a third invasion. Why should they not
spread along the shores of the Mediterranean, establishing themselves
there, as they were already doing in Sicily, and menacing Rome from
north as well as south? To unite, therefore, the two great Catholic
Teutonic powers, the Frank and the Lombard, for the defence of
Christendom, should have been the policy of him who called himself
the Chief Pontiff in Christendom. Yet the Pope preferred, in the
face of that great danger, to set the Teutonic nations on destroying
each other, rather than to unite them against the Moslem.
The bribe offered to the Frank was significant--the title of Roman
Consul; beside which he was to have filings of St. Peter's chains,
and the key of his tomb, to preserve him body and soul from all evil.
Charles would not come. Frank though he was, he was too honourable
to march at a priest's bidding against Luitprand, his old brother in
arms, to whom he had sent the boy Pepin, his son, that Luitprand
might take him on his knee, and cut his long royal hair, and become
his father-in-arms, after the good old Teuton fashion; Luitprand, who
with his Lombards had helped him to save Christendom a second time
from the Mussulman in 737. The Pope, one would think, should have
remembered that good deed of the good Lombard's whereof his epitaph
sings,
'Deinceps tremuere feroces
Usque Saraceni, quos dispulit impiger, ipsos
Cum premerent Gallos, Karolo poscente juvari.'
So Charles Martel took the title of Patrician from the Pope, but sent
him no armies; and the quarrel went on; while Charles filled up the
measure of his iniquity by meddling with that church-property in Gaul
which his sword had saved from the hordes of the Saracens; and is
now, as St. Eucherius (or Bishop Hincmar) saw in a vision, writhing
therefore in the lowest abyss of hell.
So one generation more passes by; and then Pepin le Bref, grown to
manhood, is less scrupulous than his father. He is bound to the Pope
by gratitude. The Pope has confirmed him as king, allowing him to
depose the royal house of the Merovingians, and so assumed the right
of making kings.--A right which future popes will not forget.
Meanwhile the Pope has persuaded the Lombard king Rachis to go into a
monastery. Astulf seizes the crown, and attacks Ravenna. The Pope
succeeding, Stephen III., opposes him; and he marches on Rome,
threatening to assault it, unless the citizens redeem their lives by
a poll-tax.
Stephen determines to go himself to Pepin to ask for help: and so
awful has the name and person of a Pope become, that he is allowed to
do it; allowed to pass safely and unarmed through the very land upon
which he is going to let loose all the horrors of invading warfare.
It is a strange, and instructive figure, that. The dread of the
unseen, the fear of spiritual power, has fallen on the wild Teutons;
on Frank and on Lombard alike. The Pope and his clergy are to them
magicians, against whom neither sword nor lance avails; who can heal
the sick and blast the sound; who can call to their aid out of the
clouds that pantheon of demi-gods, with which, under the name of
saints, they have peopled heaven; who can let loose on them the
legions of fiends who dwell in every cave, every forest, every ruin,
every cloud; who can, by the sentence of excommunication, destroy
both body and soul in hell. They were very loth to fear God, these
wild Teutons; therefore they had instead, as all men have who will
not fear God, to fear the devil.
So Pope Stephen goes to Pepin, the eldest son of the Church. He
promises to come with all his Franks. Stephen's conscience seems to
have been touched: he tries to have no fighting, only negotiation:
but it is too late now. Astolf will hear of no terms; Pepin sweeps
over the Alps, and at the gates of Pavia dictates his own terms to
the Lombards. The old Lombard spirit seems to have past away.
Pepin goes back again, and Astolf refuses to fulfil his promises.
The Pope sends Pepin that letter from St. Peter himself with which
this lecture commenced.
Astolf has marched down, as we heard, to the walls of Rome, laying
the land waste; cutting down the vines, carrying off consecrated
vessels, insulting the sacrament of the altar. The Lombards have
violated nuns; and tried to kill them, the Pope says; though, if they
had really tried, one cannot see why they should not have succeeded.
In fact, Pope Stephen's hysterical orations to Pepin must be received
with extreme caution. No Catholic historian of that age cares to
examine the truth of a fact which makes for him; nothing is too bad
to say of an enemy: and really the man who would forge a letter from
St. Peter might dare to tell a few lesser falsehoods into the
bargain. Pepin cannot but obey so august a summons; and again he is
in Italy, and the Lombards dare not resist him. He seizes not only
all that Astolf had taken from the Pope, but the Pentapolis and
Exarchate, the property, if of any one, of the Greek Emperors, and
bestows them on Stephen, the Pope, and 'the holy Roman Republic.'
The pope's commissioners received the keys of the towns, which were
placed upon the altar of St. Peter; and this, the Dotation of Pepin,
the Dotation of the Exarchate, was the first legal temporal
sovereignty of the Popes: --born in sin, and conceived in iniquity,
as you may see.
The Lombard rule now broke up rapidly. The Lombards of Spoleto
yielded to the double pressure of Franks and Romans, asked to be
'taken into the service of St. Peter,' and clipt their long German
locks after the Roman fashion.
Charlemagne, in his final invasion, had little left to do. He
confirmed Pepin's gift, and even, though he hardly kept his promise,
enlarged it to include the whole of Italy, from Lombardy to the
frontier of Naples, while he himself became king of Lombardy, and won
the iron crown.
And so by French armies--not for the last time--was the Pope propt up
on his ill-gotten throne.
But the mere support of French armies was not enough to seat the Pope
securely upon the throne of the western Caesars. Documentary
evidence was required to prove that they possessed Rome, not as the
vassals of the Frankish Kaisers, or of any barbarian Teutons
whatsoever; but in their own right, as hereditary sovereigns of Rome.
And the documents, when needed, were forthcoming. Under the name of
St. Isidore, some ready scribe produced the too-famous 'Decretals,'
and the 'Donation of Constantine,' and Pope Adrian I. saw no reason
against publishing them to Charlemagne and to the world.
It was discovered suddenly, by means of these remarkable documents,
that Constantine the Great had been healed of leprosy, and afterwards
baptized, by Pope Sylvester; that he had, in gratitude for his cure,
resigned to the Popes his western throne, and the patrimony of St.
Peter, and the sovereignty of Italy and the West; and that this was
the true reason of his having founded Constantinople, as a new seat
of government for the remnant of his empire.
This astounding falsehood was, of course, accepted humbly by the
unlettered Teutons; and did its work well, for centuries to come. It
is said--I trust not truly--to be still enrolled among the decrees of
the Canon law, though reprobated by all enlightened Roman Catholics.
Be that as it may, on the strength of this document the Popes began
to assume an all but despotic sovereignty over the western world,
and--the Teutonic peoples, and Rome's conquest of her conquerors was
at last complete.
What then were the causes of the Papal hatred of a race who were good
and devout Catholics for the last 200 years of their rule?
There were deep political reasons (in the strictest, and I am afraid
lowest sense of the word); but over and above them there were
evidently moral reasons, which lay even deeper still.
A free, plain-spoken, practical race like these Lombards; living by
their own laws; disbelieving in witchcraft; and seemingly doing
little for monasticism, were not likely to find favour in the eyes of
popes. They were not the material which the Papacy could mould into
the Neapolitan ideal of 'Little saints,--and little asses.' These
Lombards were not a superstitious race; they did not, like the Franks
and Anglo-Saxons, crowd into monasteries. I can only find four
instances of Lombard sovereigns founding monasteries in all Paulus'
history. One of them, strangely enough, is that of the very Astulf
against whom the Pope fulminated so loudly the letter from St. Peter
which I read you.
Moreover, it must be said in all fairness--the Lombards despised the
Romans exceedingly. So did all the Teutons. 'We Lombards,' says
Bishop Luitprand, 'Saxons, Franks, Lorrainers, Bavarians, Sueves,
Burgunds, consider it a sufficient insult to call our enemy a Roman;
comprehending in that one name of Roman, whatever is ignoble,
cowardly, avaricious, luxurious, false, in a word, every vice.' If
this was--as it very probably was--the feeling of the whole Teutonic
race; and if it was repaid--as it certainly was--on the part of the
Roman, by contempt for the 'barbarism' and 'ignorance' of the Teuton;
what must have been the feeling between Roman and Lombard? Contact
must have embittered mutual contempt into an utter and internecine
hatred, in which the Pope, as representative of the Roman people,
could not but share.
As for the political reasons, they are clear enough. It is absurd to
say that they wished to free Italy from Lombard tyrants. What did
they do but hand her over to Frankish tyrants instead? No. The true
reason was this. Gradually there had arisen in the mind of all
Popes, from Gregory the Great onward, the idea of a spiritual
supremacy, independent of all kings of the earth. It was a great
idea, as the event proved: it was a beneficent one for Europe; but a
ruinous one for Italy. For the Popes were not content with spiritual
power. They could not conceive of it as separated from temporal
power, and temporal power meant land. How early they set their
hearts on the Exarchate of Ravenna, we shall never know: the fact is
patent, that it was a Naboth's vineyard to them; and that to obtain
it they called in the Franks.
Their dread was, evidently, lest the Lombards should become masters
of the whole of Italy. A united Italy suited their views then, no
more than it does now. Not only did they conceive of Rome as still
the centre of the western world, but more, their stock in trade was
at Rome. The chains of St. Peter, the sepulchres of St. Peter and
St. Paul, the catacombs filled with the bones of innumerable
martyrs;--these were their stock in trade. By giving these, selling
these, working miracles with these, calling pilgrims from all parts
of Christendom to visit these in situ, they kept up their power and
their wealth. I do not accuse them of misusing that power and that
wealth in those days. They used them, on the contrary, better than
power and wealth had been ever used in the world before. But they
were dependent on the sanctity attached to a particular spot; and any
power, which, like the Lombard, tended to give Italy another centre
than Rome, they dreaded and disliked. That Lombard basilica, near
Milan, with all its treasures, must have been in their eyes, a
formidable rival. Still more frightful must it have been to them to
see Astulf, when he encamped before the walls of Rome, searching for
martyrs' relics, and carrying them off to Milan. That, as a fact,
seems to have been the exciting cause of Stephen's journey to Pepin.
This Astulf was a good Catholic. He founded a nunnery, and put his
own daughters in it. What could a man do more meritorious in the
eyes of the Pope? But he took away the lands of the Church, and
worse, the relics, the reserved capital by which the Church purchased
lands. This was indeed a crime only to be expiated by the horrors of
a Frank invasion.
On the same principle the Popes supported the Exarchs of Ravenna, and
the independent duchies of Spoleto and Beneventum. Well or ill
ruled, Iconoclast or not, they were necessary to keep Italy divided
and weak. And having obtained what they wanted from Pepin and
Charlemagne, it was still their interest to pursue the same policy;
to compound for their own independence, as they did with Charlemagne
and his successors, by defending the pretences of foreign kings to
the sovereignty of the rest of Italy. This has been their policy for
centuries. It is their policy still; and that policy has been the
curse of Italy. This fatal gift of the patrimony of St. Peter--as
Dante saw--as Machiavelli saw,--as all clear-sighted Italians have
seen,--as we are seeing it now in these very days--has kept her
divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign
invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions
into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable, as the hierophant of a
priestly caste, to unite his people in the bonds of national life;
unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for
himself; and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in
the balance of power; the Pope has been forced, again and again, to
keep himself on his throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and
calling in foreign arms; and the bane of Italy, from the time of
Stephen III. to that of Pius IX., has been the temporal power of the
Pope.
But on the popes, also, the Nemesis came. In building their power on
the Roman relics, on the fable that Rome was the patrimony of Peter,
they had built on a lie; and that lie avenged itself.
Had they been independent of the locality of Rome; had they been
really spiritual emperors, by becoming cosmopolitan, journeying, it
may be, from nation to nation in regular progresses, then their power
might have been as boundless as they ever desired it should be.
Having committed themselves to the false position of being petty
kings of a petty kingdom, they had to endure continual treachery and
tyranny from their foreign allies; to see not merely Italy, but Rome
itself insulted, and even sacked, by faithful Catholics; and to
become more and more, as the centuries rolled on, the tools of those
very kings whom they had wished to make their tools.
True, they defended themselves long, and with astonishing skill and
courage. Their sources of power were two, the moral, and the
thaumaturgic; and they used them both: but when the former failed,
the latter became useless. As long as their moral power was real; as
long as they and their clergy were on the whole, in spite of enormous
faults, the best men in Europe; so long the people believed in them,
and in their thaumaturgic relics likewise. But they became by no
means the best men in Europe. Then they began to think that after
all it was more easy to work the material than the moral power--
easier to work the bones than to work righteousness. They were
deceived. Behold! when the righteousness was gone, the bones refused
to work. People began to question the virtues of the bones, and to
ask, We can believe that the bones may have worked miracles for good
men, but for bad men? We will examine whether they work any miracles
at all. And then, behold, it came out that the bones did not work
miracles, and that possibly they were not saints' bones at all; and
then the storm came: and the lie, as all lies do, punished itself.
The salt had lost its savour. The Teutonic intellect appealed from
its old masters to God, and to God's universe of facts, and
emancipated itself once and for all. They who had been the light of
Europe, became its darkness; they who had been first, became last; a
warning to mankind until the end of time, that on Truth and Virtue
depends the only abiding strength.
Prev
| Next
| Contents
|