Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  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.

  This rivalry was also responsible for the most indelible stain on the pope’s reputation. In November 602 the reign of the Emperor Maurice came to an abrupt and premature end. His army, deployed against the barbarian Avars and Slavs in the Balkans and looking forward to returning for the winter to Constantinople, was suddenly ordered to sit it out in the inhospitable lands beyond the Danube. Rather than endure the intense cold and discomfort under canvas, living as best they could off the local populations and in constant danger from marauding barbarian clans, the soldiers mutinied, raising as their leader one of their own centurions, a brutal and bloodthirsty monster named Phocas. Maurice and his five sons, the eldest of whom was the pope’s godson, were all murdered; Constantina and their three daughters were dispatched to a nunnery; and Phocas was crowned emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. Such an atrocity should have led to the most violent condemnation of which Gregory was capable; almost unbelievably—and bowing, presumably, to the inevitable—he sent the new emperor a message of fulsome congratulation and supported him for the remaining two years of his life. Had he lived to witness the reign of terror that would follow for another six, the executions and the judicial murders, the blindings and the mutilations, the tortures and the burnings alive, until in 610 Phocas himself was seized and torn to pieces, one can only hope that he would have changed his mind.

  IN NORTHERN AND far western Europe the prospects for extending Christendom seemed a good deal more promising than in the south. Some of the former Roman provinces, now ruled by barbarian kings mostly of Frankish origin, were already nominally Christian, though probably of the Arian persuasion; others were still pagan. All were in need of guidance if they were to be brought into the Catholic fold. At the beginning of Gregory’s pontificate the principal regions to be taken in hand seemed to be Visigothic Spain, Frankish Gaul, and Anglo-Saxon Britain.

  The challenge of Visigothic Spain solved itself. Around the turn of the century its Arian King Recared, encouraged by the pope’s friend Leander, Bishop of Seville, announced his conversion to Catholicism. The bulk of the population—being by origin Roman provincials—were Catholic already; now the remaining Arian nobles and bishops followed their monarch’s lead. As a sign of his pleasure (and perhaps relief) at the news, Gregory made the king a present of two relics of extreme holiness: a key made from the chains of St. Peter and a crucifix containing within it a fragment of the True Cross together with a few hairs from the severed head of St. John the Baptist.

  The Kingdom—or, more accurately, the kingdoms—of the Franks extended over modern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, northwest Germany, and Switzerland. They were a Germanic people, theoretically Christian, their King Clovis I having been baptized in 499; but with them the challenge was not Arianism: it was chaos, with a dozen petty states and kingdoms all warring and intriguing against one another, the Church hierarchy, most of whose members had bought their highly profitable offices, far gone in depravity. (When King Childebert I, who ruled from 511 to 558, having murdered his nephews to acquire their lands, visited Soissons, the bishop was so drunk that he was denied admission to his own city.)

  In Gregory’s attempts to restore a degree of order, he had but one ally, though not perhaps an entirely satisfactory one: Queen Brunhilde of Austrasia, daughter of King Athanagild of Visigothic Spain, who had converted from Arianism on her marriage to Sigebert I.1 In 575 Sigebert himself was assassinated, and Brunhilde was briefly imprisoned at Rouen; on her release she joined her young son Childebert II in his capital at Metz and for the next thirty years struggled to establish a united Catholic kingdom, maintaining a long and lively correspondence with the pope, who gave her all the support he could. Alas, they failed. Her objectives may have been praiseworthy, but her methods—which Gregory did his best to overlook—were no less violent than those of the rest of her family, and in 613, unable to bear her a moment longer, the Austrasian nobles seized her, tortured her for three days, tied her onto the back of a camel, paraded her for the mockery of the army, and finally dragged her to death at a horse’s tail.

  In Britain, the problem was somewhat different. The first missionaries had probably arrived during the third century—British bishops had been present at the Council of Arles as early as 314—but with the coming of the largely pagan Anglo-Saxons the Christians had been driven to the farthest west and the religion had suffered a temporary eclipse. Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Scotland had done something to reverse the trend, but their churches had always plowed their own furrow. Celtic monasticism in particular, tending toward the Orthodox model, had little in common with that of the West; the Celts also had their own system of calculating the date of Easter, which they celebrated on a different day. It remained a fact that no previous pope had given serious thought to missionary work beyond the imperial frontier, and Gregory himself had countless problems nearer home. What is interesting is the importance he attached to that remote island—which he himself regularly described as lying at the end of the universe—and his determination not only that the Christian word should be spread but that the Christians already existing there should be brought under papal control and properly aligned with the ideas and practices of Rome.

  All British children are—or used to be—brought up on the story, told by the Venerable Bede, of one of history’s first (and worst) puns: of how, some years before, Gregory had been wandering through the Roman market and, noticing some beautiful blond boys being offered for sale as slaves, asked from which country they had come. He was told that they came from the island of Britain and were called Angles. “Right,” said he, “for they have an angelic face, and it is meet that such should be co-heirs with the Angels in heaven.”2 In 595 we find him writing to his rector in Gaul with instructions to recruit young English slave boys to be trained as monks, whom he may well have seen as potential interpreters; and in the year following he dispatched a mission of about forty monks to England under the leadership of Augustine, the prior of St. Andrew’s Monastery in Rome,
the same house in which he himself had been a brother. Warned, on his arrival in southern Gaul, of the dire perils that awaited him among the barbarian English, Augustine turned back to Rome with the suggestion that the mission be abandoned, but Gregory put new heart into him, gave him letters of recommendation, and set him back on the road.

  Still, presumably, in a state of some trepidation, Augustine and his monks finally landed on the Kentish coast in the spring of 597. They were politely received by King Ethelbert of Kent, at that time the chief ruler in the south of England; he is said by Bede to have extended his power to all England south of the Humber. His wife, Bertha, daughter of the Frankish King Charibert I and niece of Queen Brunhilde, was already a Christian and naturally gave Augustine her full support. Her husband at first remained cautious. “I see,” he said to Augustine,