Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (16 page)

Some, like the West Saxon King Caedwalla, came to be baptised and so ‘spend their days … that they might be more easily received into heaven’, some, like Bede’s Abbot Ceolfrid, to be buried, some, like Duke Theodo of Bavaria, simply to offer prayers. Others, like Boniface, the great English missionary to Frisia, came in quest of the prestige and backing they needed for a mission which would involve confrontation with the mighty of the earth, the captains and the kings. The Englishman Benedict Biscop, who made five visits between 653 and 680, came to Rome to find patterns of apostolic life. To his monasteries at Jarrow and Wearmouth, significantly named after Peter and Paul, Biscop took back Roman paintings, Roman books, even the arch-chanter of St Peter’s to teach his monks the Roman tones for the office.

But none of these men sought a slavish replication of Roman ways, for Roman ways themselves were varied, caught in a rapid process of change. In imitation of Rome the English church quickly began to celebrate the four Eastern feasts of Mary, yet these had only recently been naturalised in Rome. The Gospel-book used at Mass in Bede’s church at Jarrow was copied from an original brought back by Benedict Biscop, but the cycle of Gospel passages for the year which it contained followed the order of the church of Naples, rather than that of Rome. Biscop could have got his gospel book from Hadrian of Africa, who had been abbot of a Neapolitan monastery, and who travelled with Biscop and Theodore of Tarsus, the Greek appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian (657–72). But he might just as easily have got it from one of the monastic houses on the Aventine, filled as they were with monks from the south. Rome was not a rigid set of prescriptions, it was a loyalty, a dynamism centred on the presence of the Apostle, and the person of the Pope who sat in the Apostle’s chair.

IV E
MPIRES OF THE
W
EST

The collapse of imperial power in Italy freed the popes from the oppressive attentions of Constantinople: it left them, however, exposed to enemies closer at hand. As Liutprand’s push to extend and consolidate his kingdom crept ever closer to Rome, it became clear that the military resources of the former duchy, now in alliance with the popes, would not be enough to hold back the Lombard advance. In 739 King Liutprand laid siege to Rome itself, as he had done ten years earlier. Then, however, the remorseful King had left his armour as a votive offering to St Peter; this time, his soldiers looted the basilica and took away its ornaments, even its lights.

Gregory III looked north for help, to Merovingian Gaul, where Charles Martel had emerged as a Christian champion. Arab armies had overrun Visigothic Spain in 711, and had then pushed on into southern Gaul. In 732 Mattel’s troops defeated a Muslim raiding party in Poitiers; in retrospect, this defeat would come to seem the crucial halting-point of the hitherto unstoppable Islamic advance into Europe. Here, then, was a champion capable of rescuing the people of St Peter: the Pope sent emissaries to Charles’ court. They took with them the keys of the shrine of St Peter, and a letter from the Pope designed to play on that northern reverence for the key-bearer which King Oswiu had exemplified so clearly at Whitby. ‘Do not despise my appeal,’ wrote the Pope, ‘that the Prince of the Apostles may not shut the kingdom of heaven against you.’
²⁴

For the time being, his appeal fell on deaf ears, but the papacy did not give up on Charles or his successors, and under Pope Zacharias (741–52) the opportunity for closer ties presented themselves. Charles and his son Pepin were not monarchs in their own right, but mayors of the Palace to the Merovingian kings. This arrangement had long been a legal fiction, for the mayors in fact ruled, and the kings were feeble ciphers. In 750 Pepin sent a chaplain to the Pope with a theological question. Should not he who held the reality of royal power also hold the title? Pope Zachary agreed that he should, and, armed with this legitimation, Pepin was duly elected king by the nobility, and anointed and crowned in 751. The ceremony was performed by Boniface, the English missionary who had taken a special vow of loyalty to the Pope at his consecration as bishop in Rome by Gregory II.

It was a fateful moment, for in the same year the exarchate of Ravenna finally fell, and, having disposed of the Italian headquarters of the empire, the Lombards set about a mopping-up operation of other Byzantine towns in northern and central Italy. Within a year King Aistulf had laid siege to Rome, asserted his sovereignty over the duchy, and imposed an annual tribute on the people. Pope Zachary died before Aistulf’s siege. He was the last of the Greek popes, and the last with any real loyalty to Constantinople. Over and above his political loyalty to Constantinople his real desire to keep open contacts between East and West is symbolised by the fact that he translated Gregory the Great’s Dialogues into Greek. In his place the people elected a Roman aristocrat, Stephen II (752–7), an indication that what the times demanded was an expert local politician: for the next century, all but two of the popes would share this same aristocratic social background.

Stephen was immediately plunged into Rome’s crisis, leading penitential processions through the city in which he shouldered a miraculous icon of the Virgin. As that action suggests, Rome remained very much at odds with the iconoclast emperors, but emperor Constantine V clearly felt the papacy remained a card in the imperial hand, and ordered the Pope to help secure the return of the exarchate. Stephen, remarkably, did travel to Pavia to see the King, but Aistulf forbade him to make any representations on behalf of the empire, and Stephen in any case had more pressing concerns than trying to salvage something for Constantinople from the wreckage of Italy. Instead of returning to Rome, he pressed on into Gaul, to seek the help of Pepin. On 6 January 754, the Feast of the Epiphany, Pope and King met at Ponthion.

It was the first of a series of symbolic encounters which went on into the summer of 754. These meetings helped shape the future of the papacy, and of Europe itself. Stephen’s first objective was straightforward, to secure the help of the most powerful neighbour of the Lombards in restraining Aistulf’s threat to the patrimony of Peter, and the populations under papal protection in central Italy. Pepin accepted the role of defender now offered him. In what would come to be called the ‘Donation of Pepin’, made at Quierzy, he undertook to recover and return to St Peter the duchy of Rome, the exarchate of Ravenna and the other cities and lands captured by the Lombards. In addition to this promise, which was what Stephen had crossed the
Alps to get, Pope and King outdid each other in a series of gestures which would prove almost as important for the future as the territorial guarantees. At their first meeting Pepin performed an act of ostentatious humility by walking alongside the mounted Pope, leading Stephen’s horse like a groom. For his part, the Pope endorsed the legitimacy of Pepin’s line by solemnly anointing the King, the Queen and Pepin’s sons, giving the King and princes the title ‘patrician of the Romans’, and binding the Franks by a solemn vow never to recognise any other royal family.

Pepin rapidly fulfilled his undertaking, marching into Italy and defeating the Lombard armies in 754 and again, more decisively, in 756. The exarchate of Ravenna, the province of Emilia and the duchies of the Pentapolis and of Rome, feed of Lombard domination, were handed over to the Pope. The Emperor at Constantinople protested at once, demanding the return of these lands to him, since they properly belonged to the empire. Pepin replied that he had intervened in Italy not for the sake of the empire but for love of St Peter and for the forgiveness of his sins: the lands he had captured would belong to Peter. As a token, the keys of the cities and a document recording Pepin’s donation were deposited on the grave of St Peter. A papal state had been created: it would endure, in much the form that Pepin gave it, for more than a thousand years.

This unprecedented situation was full of unresolved questions, the main one being that already raised by the protests from Constantinople: by what right, other than brute force, had Pepin given the recovered Italian territories to the Pope? It was perhaps to answer that question that there emerged at about this time an extraordinary forgery, known as the
Donation of Constantine. This
document purported to be a solemn legal enactment by the first Christian Emperor. In it, Constantine recounts the legend (accepted as historical fact in the eighth century) of his healing from leprosy during his baptism by Pope Sylvester I. In gratitude for this miracle, and in recognition of Sylvester’s inheritance of the power of Peter to bind and loose, Constantine sets the Pope and his successors for ever above all other bishops and churches throughout the world. He gives him also ‘all the prerogatives of our supreme imperial position and the glory of our authority’. Constantine tells how he had himself handed Sylvester his imperial crown, ‘which we have transferred from our own head’, but the Pope, in respect for his priestly tonsure, chose not to wear it.
Instead Constantine gave him a cap of honour, the
camalaucum
, and ‘holding the bridle of his horse … performed the office of groom for him’. Finally, ‘to correspond to our own empire and so that the supreme pontifical authority may not be dishonoured’, Constantine gave to the Pope and his successors not only the city of Rome, but ‘all the provinces, districts and cities of Italy and the Western regions’.
²⁵

Nobody knows exactly when, where or why this document was assembled, though it is clearly closely related to Pope Stephen’s dealings with Pepin. To some historians it seems likely that the
Donation
was cobbled together by someone in the Pope’s entourage in preparation for his appeal to the King in 754, and that it represents a deliberate blueprint for the creation of a papal state to replace imperial authority in the West. Other historians believe the document is a later creation, composed piecemeal as much as two generations after Pepin’s reign by clergy on the payroll of the Frankish royal family, and designed to justify the exercise of overlordship in Italy by Pepin and his successor Charlemagne, against the attacks of the Emperor in Constantinople.

On balance it seems more likely that the
Donation of Constantine
is the product of subsequent reflection on the events of Pope Stephen’s momentous visit to the court of Pepin, than that the Pope or his advisers already had a clearly worked out papal claim to the sovereignty of Italy. Whatever its origin, however, it shows quite clearly that from 756 onwards the papacy believed that its safety in future lay not in token allegiance to the now powerless Byzantine empire, but in the creation of a territorial state within which the Pope ruled on behalf of St Peter, under the protection of Pepin’s dynasty Within this
sancti Dei Ecclesiae Respublica
– ‘the republic [that is, state] of God’s Holy Church’ – Stephen seems to have dreamed of including all of imperial Italy and much of the Lombard kingdom. In the end he and his successors had to settle for much less – the duchy of Rome and part of southern Tuscany, and the territory of the old Ravenna exarchate, where the exercise of the Pope’s sovereignty was often sabotaged by the ambitious archbishops of Ravenna.

Constantinople did not easily accept the new situation, and even formed an alliance with the Lombard King Desiderius to expel the Franks from Italy and to recapture the exarchate. The generation after Pepin’s
Donation
was one of extreme anxiety for the popes. It was also a time of radical instability in Rome itself, for as soon as the papal state came into existence the ruling families of Rome plunged
into murderous rivalry for control over it. Allying themselves to the Lombards, the Franks or the old empire, they jostled to have their candidates elected pope. The pontificates of Paul I (757–67) and Stephen III (768–72) saw challenges by the antipopes Constantine and Philip, and the papacy was sucked into a sordid whirlpool of internecine violence and betrayal, punctuated by blindings, torture and judicial murder.

The situation was changed dramatically by the emergence of Pepin’s son Charlemagne (Charles the Great) as sole king of the Franks in December 771, and the election to the papacy in February 772 of Hadrian I (772–95). Charlemagne was to prove a colossus, whose imposition of political unity (of a sort) on much of western Europe captured the admiration and imitation of the kings and leaders of his own day, and has continued to haunt the European political imagination ever since. Hadrian was a tough-minded and devout aristocrat, renowned as a preacher and with a highly successful career in the papal administration behind him. These two strong men, at first wary but eventually admiring allies, gave substance to the association between Frankish crown and papacy which Pepin and Stephen had established. Charlemagne was a sincere son of St Peter, but he was also a man fascinated by the glamour of imperial Rome, which he was determined to recreate in his own realms. He took his role as patrician of the Romans seriously, and he was also intent on extending and strengthening Frankish influence in Italy. When the Lombard King besieged Rome in 773 and Hadrian turned to the Patrician of the Romans for help, Charlemagne decided to deal decisively with this thorn in his and Pope’s flesh. He marched his army into Italy, captured the Lombard capital of Pavia, abolished the Lombard kingdom and added ‘King of the Lombards’ to his other titles.

He then decided to spend Easter 774 in Rome, a move which took the Pope by surprise, but which proved to be a huge success. Hadrian had Charlemagne greeted with all the honours formerly given to the Exarch: Charlemagne for his part showed a gratifying deference to the Apostle and his successor. Going to St Peter’s to meet Hadrian (who had not himself come out of the city to greet him), he honoured the Apostle by kissing each of the steps up to the basilica, at the entrance to which the Pope was waiting. King and Pope took to each other, and five days into the visit Hadrian asked Charlemagne to reconfirm the Donation of Pepin. Charlemagne
solemnly made over to him territories amounting to two-thirds of the peninsula, and deposited the document with his own hands on the tomb of Peter.