Absolute Monarchs (6 page)

5.
Diptychs were the two-leaved folders in which were inscribed the names of all Christians, living and dead, for whom special prayers were to be made in the liturgies. The striking of a name could thus be taken as a sign of excommunication.

CHAPTER IV

Gregory the Great

(590–604)

J
ustinian’s anxieties over the Three Chapters, though largely of his own making, had turned his mind away from his Italian problems. He had always tended to underestimate the Goths; it may well be, too, that the recovery of Rome by the Byzantines in April 547, only four months after its capture by Totila, had confirmed him in his belief that, given only a little more time, the Gothic opposition would crumble of its own accord.

Alas, it had done no such thing. On January 16, 550, for the second time, a few disaffected members of the imperial garrison had opened the gates to Totila’s men. But whereas in 546 the Goths had entered the city as invaders, they now showed every sign of staying. Many of them had appropriated empty houses and settled in with their families; the Senate was reopened; refugees were encouraged to return to their own homes; damaged buildings were repaired and restored. The following summer, Totila had given still more conclusive evidence of his intentions: he had staged a full-scale revival of the games in the Circus Maximus, personally presiding over them from the imperial box. Meanwhile his fleet was ravaging both Italy and Sicily, returning in 551 loaded to the gunwales with plunder. Those two insults had finally stung Justinian to action. His first choice of commander for the projected new expedition was his own first cousin Germanus, but in the autumn of 550 Germanus died of a fever. Did the emperor now turn, as he had turned twice before, to Belisarius? If so, Belisarius must have refused; for the man chosen for this last attempt to bring Italy back into the imperial fold was a eunuch named Narses, by now well into his seventies.

The choice was not as perverse as might have been thought. Although Narses had spent most of his life in the Imperial Palace he was not without military experience, having fought with Belisarius in Italy during the former’s first campaign. He was also a superb organizer, strong-willed, and determined, and despite his age and his castration he had lost none of his energy or decisiveness. He had no delusions about the magnitude of his task; by now only four cities in all Italy—Ravenna, Ancona, Otranto, and Crotone—remained under Byzantine control. But he probably knew Justinian better than any other man alive, and he easily persuaded him to make available at least 35,000 men. In the early summer of 552 he marched them into Italy, and toward the end of June, at Taginae near the modern town of Scheggia, the Roman and Gothic armies met for what was to prove the most decisive encounter of the entire war. The Gothic army, progressively outflanked and outfought, fled in panic as the sun was sinking. Totila himself, mortally wounded, took flight with the rest and died in the little village of Caprae (now Caprara) a few hours later. One more battle remained to be fought. Teias, the bravest of Totila’s generals, had determined to continue the struggle, and at the end of October there came the final encounter, just a mile or two from the long-forgotten Pompeii. It was that battle beneath Vesuvius that marked the final defeat of the Goths in Italy. Justinian’s grandest ambition was realized at last.

But not for long: the war had ushered in a dark age. Italy was a desolation; Milan in the north and Rome in the south lay in ruins. And now, within a few years of the Goths’ departure, a new Germanic horde appeared on the scene: the Lombards under their warlike King Alboin, crossing the Alps in 568, spreading relentlessly over northern Italy and the great plain that still bears their name, finally establishing their capital at Pavia. Within five years they had captured Milan, Verona, and Florence; Byzantine rule over North Italy, won at such a cost by Justinian, Belisarius, and Narses, was ended almost as soon as it had begun. The Lombards’ line of advance was finally checked by the Exarchate of Ravenna and by Rome itself, but two spearheads pressed on to set up the great independent duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. From here they might well have gone on to conquer the rest of the South, but they never managed to unite quite firmly enough to do so. Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily remained under Byzantine control—as, surprisingly, did much of the southern coastline. The Lombards showed little interest in the sea; they never really became a Mediterranean people. That Rome itself did not succumb to the Lombard tide was a miracle hardly less extraordinary than that which had saved her from Attila in the preceding century. Once again it was wrought by a pope, one of the most formidable ever to occupy the Throne of St. Peter.

Gregory, the son of Gordian, came from a rich and well-established Roman family, with strong connections to the Papacy. He seems to have been related to Pope Agapetus I; he was certainly a direct descendant of Felix III (483–492). The precise year of his birth is uncertain; it must have been around 540. He at first preferred a civil career to one in the Church—by 573, while still in his early thirties, he had risen to be prefect of the City of Rome—but that year his father died and Gregory’s life took a new direction. Resigning all his civic responsibilities, he turned the family palace on the Caelian Hill into a Benedictine monastery—simultaneously founding six more on his family estates in Sicily—and entered it himself as a simple brother.

Monasticism was something new in Italy. In the East it had long been part of the religious life, but it had been introduced into the West only recently—by St. Benedict, who had founded his great monastery at Monte Cassino less than half a century before and had drawn up the monastic rule which is still observed today. Once established, it had struck an immediate response. The West at this time was deeply pessimistic. The Roman Empire was gone, the barbarians were spreading across Europe; the world, as Gregory himself put it, “was growing old and hoary, hastening to its approaching death.” In such a world, the call to a life of manual labor, contemplation, and prayer was attractive indeed. Benedict had died while Gregory was still a child, but his influence on the future pope had been deep and lasting. Long after Gregory was obliged to abandon monastic life, he was to look back on his three years in his monastery as the happiest he had ever known.

But all too soon, Pope Benedict I nominated Gregory a
regionarius
, or deacon in charge of one of Rome’s seven ecclesiastical districts, responsible for local administration and the care of the poor; then, in around 580, Benedict’s successor, Pelagius II, sent him off to Constantinople as his nuncio in the vain hope of persuading the emperor to send an army against the ever-advancing Lombards. Accommodated in the same palace that had been allotted to the luckless Vigilius, Gregory does not seem to have enjoyed his seven years in the city much more than his predecessor had—largely, one suspects, because of his mistrust of everything Greek—including even the language, which he resolutely refused to learn. But his time was not entirely wasted: he earned the respect of the two successive emperors to whom he was accredited and returned in 585 with firsthand knowledge of the Byzantine court and its ways.

ALTHOUGH HE HAD
taken a number of his fellow monks with him to Constantinople—where the atmosphere in his palace must have been a good deal more monastic than diplomatic—we can imagine the relief with which, on his return to Rome, Gregory reentered his monastery. This time he had five years there instead of three; but on the death of Pelagius, stricken by the plague in 590, he was the obvious choice for pope. The first monk ever to achieve papal office, he accepted with genuine reluctance. He wrote to John IV, Patriarch of Constantinople, that he had inherited an old ship which was becoming ever more waterlogged, its rotten timbers warning of shipwreck. Italy had been devastated by floods, pestilence, and famine; the Lombards, moreover, were virtually at the gates of Rome. “How can I consider,” he wrote,

the needs of my brethren, ensuring that the city is protected from the swords of the enemy and that the people are not destroyed by a sudden attack, and yet at the same time deliver the word of exhortation fully and effectively for the salvation of souls? To speak of God we need a mind thoroughly at peace and free from care.

His own mind was certainly nothing of the sort. And indeed he was soon to discover that in those dark days the duties of pope were much the same as those that he had already performed as prefect of Rome. The city was swamped with refugees, including three thousand nuns, who had fled from the Lombards. One of his first tasks was to bring in grain from Sicily and to release considerable sums from Church funds to alleviate their misery. His difficulties were greatly increased by the attitude of Romanus, the Byzantine exarch—effectively the provincial governor—of Ravenna. This man, who should have been his ally, was insanely jealous of papal power and prestige and refused to lift a finger in support of Gregory’s efforts. “His malice toward us,” the pope complained, “is worse than the swords of the Lombards.” In consequence Gregory found himself acting as civil and military governor of virtually the whole of central Italy, organizing supplies and directing troop movements as well as paying wages (often from Church funds) and shouldering responsibility for the defense of both Rome and Naples, now simultaneously under attack from the Lombard dukes of Spoleto and Benevento as well as from Alboin’s successor, King Agilulf. On occasion this meant buying them all off, at hideous cost to the papal treasury; but the continued inertia and passive hostility of the exarch—whose officials also demanded the occasional bribe—left him little choice, and the steady drain on the exchequer continued until, in 598, an uneasy peace was concluded at last.

Where did all the money come from? The Patrimony of Peter, as it was called, consisted of a vast number of landed estates extending throughout western Europe and even in limited areas of North Africa. These had gradually accumulated over the centuries, thanks largely to pious endowments and donations but also, in more recent years, to the determination of their former owners to save them from falling into barbarian hands. The Church was by now the largest single landowner in the West. Efficient management of so heterogeneous and widely dispersed a heritage had until now scarcely even been attempted; Gregory at last took the task seriously in hand, dividing the Patrimony up into fifteen separate sections, two of them in Sicily alone, each to be administered by a rector appointed personally by the pope. Within his section each rector was all-powerful, being responsible not only for the collection of rents, the transport and sale of produce, and the rendering of exact accounts but also for all charitable institutions and the maintenance of churches and monasteries.

This reorganization necessitated a dramatic development of the papal chancery. When Gregory became pope, it was effectively in the hands of nineteen deacons, seven of whom had charge of the seven regions of the city; it was from these deacons that the popes were normally elected. (They were occasionally given the unofficial title of cardinal, but cardinals as we know them today were not to make an appearance for another hundred years.) Gregory not only increased their numbers several times over but swelled them further with newly created ranks of subdeacons, notaries, treasurers, and senior executive officers known as
defensores
, together forming a civil service unparalleled in Europe outside Constantinople itself. By means of this he also had to keep in touch with—and, when possible, in control of—his several hundred bishops, not all of whom by any means were prepared to respect papal authority.

The new chancery was also responsible for foreign relations, and above all those with by far the most important state in the Christian world, the Byzantine Empire. Since 582 its emperor had been a Cappadocian soldier named Maurice, who had a long and distinguished military record. In normal circumstances he and the pope might have got on well enough; but in 588, just two years before the start of Gregory’s pontificate, the Patriarch of Constantinople, John IV “the Faster,” took it upon himself to adopt the title of “Ecumenical”—thereby implying universal supremacy over all other prelates, including the pope himself. John was in fact not the first patriarch to make the claim; the title had been used at various times for the best part of a century and until now had passed apparently unnoticed. This time, however, there were angry expostulations from Pope Pelagius, and Gregory on his accession made his displeasure still more evident, firing off two letters to Constantinople. The first, addressed to the emperor, demanded, for the sake of the peace of the empire, that he call his recalcitrant patriarch to order; the second, to the Empress Constantina, begged her to intervene with her husband. John’s arrogance in assuming the ecumenical title was, the pope claimed, a clear indication that the age of Antichrist was at hand.

Whether Constantina ever replied we do not know; but her husband did, and he fully supported his patriarch. From that time forward, Gregory’s resentment is plain to see; when Maurice issued an edict forbidding serving soldiers to desert on the ground that they wanted to enter monasteries, Gregory, who had himself left public service for the monastic life, denounced it violently as a further blow struck against the Church. But the Byzantines were irritated, too, and it may well have been as a result of the pope’s protests that the fatal title soon became an integral part of the patriarchal style. Gregory’s successors wisely decided to ignore it, but what both sides must have understood well enough was that the incident, trivial as it might seem in retrospect, marked another stage in the steadily growing rivalry between the Eastern and Western churches.