Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition

by Eamon Duffy

  The pontificate ofVigilius had also laid bare a fundamental difference of outlook between Emperor and Pope. In the hothouse atmosphere of Constantinople, a theology of empire had evolved which raised the person of the Emperor far above any bishop. Constantine had thought of himself as the thirteenth Apostle, and had made a bridle for his horse from of one of the nails with which Christ was crucified. The emperors of Byzantium proved themselves worthy successors of Constantine. Justinian, like Gelasius, believed that there were indeed two powers set over this world, the imperial and the pontifical, but unlike Gelasius he was certain that the senior partner in that alliance was the Emperor, not the Pope. It was the responsibility of the Emperor to see that bishops performed their share of the work. To the Emperor belonged the care of all the churches, to make and unmake bishops, to decide the bounds of orthodoxy. The Emperor, not the Pope, was God’s vicar on earth, and to him belonged the title Kosmocrator, lord of the world, ruling over one empire, one law, one Church. Byzantine court ceremonial emphasised the quasi-divine character of the Emperor’s office. His servants performed an act of solemn adoration, the proskynesis, on coming into his presence, and his decrees were received with divine honours, even the parchment they were written on kissed with reverence as if it carried holy scripture.

  The bishops of the East saw no cause to challenge any of this. They accepted the Christian vocation of the Emperor as God-given, and they saw their role as that of obedient collaborators with the Lord’s anointed. To a papacy nurtured in a high sense of apostolic dignity, and based in Rome with its civic traditions and recruitment from senatorial families, such values seemed increasingly alien. Pope and Emperor might have mutual interests, and emperors, when it suited them, might pay genuine homage to the senior Bishop and the successor of St Peter. Between the imperial vision of Byzantium, however, and the theological ethos of Rome, there was a great and growing gap. The experience of the popes as they set themselves to meet the needs of Italy and the West in the years after the imperial reconquest would see that gap widen to a gulf.

  II THE AGE OF GREGORY THE GREAT

  The imperial reconquest of Africa from the Vandals was achieved by Belisarius in one short and brilliant campaign launched in 533. The campaign to recover Italy from the Goths began the following year. It was to drag on for twenty years, but there would be no joy at its ending, for it left Italy depopulated and impoverished. Up to a third of the population had perished, and to the traumas of war and its attendant famines were added natural disaster, as successive waves of plague swept through the peninsula. Politically, too, the overthrow of the Gothic kingdom proved a disaster, not a liberation. The restoration of imperial rule brought no revival of the fortunes of the Roman aristocracy. Instead, every position of importance was filled by career administrators from the East: Italy became a Greek colony. It was expected, moreover, to pay handsomely for the privilege. The burden of imperial taxation proved far more oppressive, and far more efficient, than anything the Goths had imposed – Justinian’s chief tax-collector in Italy was grimly nicknamed ‘the scissor-man’. From the 540s onwards most of the surviving ancient families of Rome in a position to do so migrated east, to Constantinople, where it had become clear that all the opportunities and the fruits of empire lay.

  Rome had a double share of the woes of Italy. Stripped of its traditional ruling class, separated by a long sea journey from the court at Constantinople, it had no real place in the new imperial order. Ravenna would remain the political centre of imperial Italy, as it had been of the Gothic kingdom. There, in the basilica of San Vitale, Justinian and Theodora set up their images behind the altar, unforgettable icons of the Byzantine convergence of regal and priestly authority. There the imperial governor of Italy, the Exarch, would rule in the Emperor’s place. Rome was left to the crows and its own devices. Repeatedly besieged and plundered, it had been captured and devastated by Totila in 546. Its population, 800,000 in AD 400, had dropped to 100,000 by AD 500, and was down to 30,000 by the year of Totila’s sack. Pope Pelagius, a man caught, as his epitaph declared, ‘in a falling world’, was reduced to begging clothing and food from bishops in Gaul for the poor – and even the former rich – of the city. The Senate was gone, and the wars had shattered the physical glory of Rome. Many of the great aqueducts which fed the city’s baths, cisterns and fountains, and which had turned the corn-mills on the Janiculum hill, had been deliberately cut by the Goths, or stripped by thieves of their lead linings. They leaked precious water from the mountains into the surrounding plain, beginning the long transformation of the Roman Campagna into the fever-ridden swamp which it would remain till the days of Mussolini.

  By the end of the sixth century, the city’s population was creeping up again, to about 90,000. Many of these, however, were refugees from a new invasion. For the imperial conquest, in destroying the Gothic occupiers, had removed the only real obstacle to a far worse scourge, the part-pagan and part-Arian Lombard tribes who descended in their tens of thousands from Austria in 568. In September 569 Milan fell to them, and their king Alboin took the title ‘Lord of Italy’. By 574 the Lombards commanded half the peninsula, and had all but cut the connections between Ravenna and Rome. They were to remain in control for the next two centuries.

  This was the inheritance of Gregory the Great (590–604). Gregory, who was born some time around the year 540, was a product of the patrician aristocracy which had suffered so much from the Gothic war. The family had a distinguished tradition of service to Church and city. Gregory was the great-grandson of Pope Felix III and a relative of Pope Agapitus I. He himself, while still in his early thirties, was to serve as prefect, the highest secular office in the city, as his brother would after him. Gregory’s father, Gordianus, was one of the Church’s regionaries, the lay officials responsible for administering the temporalities of the Roman see. In her widowhood his mother Sylvia became a nun, as did three paternal aunts. They followed a common Roman pattern of vowed life by living in retirement on their own property, where two of the aunts enjoyed visions of their papal ancestor, ‘St’ Felix, shortly before their deaths.

  The retreat of the Roman aristocracy from the world into the Church was by no means confined to the womenfolk. In part it reflected the growing dominance of the Church in the life of the West. The call of monastic life, to contemplation instead of action, was powerful in a world in which all action seemed to lead to disaster, and in which the secular order seemed to be near its end. This was certainly so for Gregory: ‘the world grows old and hoary’, he was to write, ‘and hastens to approaching death’. About 575 he resigned his city office, turned his parental home on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St Andrew, and became a monk. The family’s extensive estates in Italy and Sicily passed into the patrimony of the Roman Church, and on them too Gregory established a series of six monastic houses.

  Gregory was to look back on the next few years, given over to prayer and reflection on scripture, as the happiest of his life. He was a dedicated monk, and was to destroy his health, and his stomach lining, by excessive fasting. His Dialogues, a set of miracle-encrusted lives of the early Italian monks, in particular the father of Western monasticism, St Benedict, was to become one of the most influential books of the Middle Ages (and the only work of Gregory’s to find a Greek as well as a Latin readership). But above all, it was the contemplative dimension of monastic life he valued, and which as pope he missed:

  I remember with sorrow what I once was in the monastery, how I rose in contemplation above all changeable and decaying things and thought of nothing but the things of heaven … But now, by reason of my pastoral care, I have to bear with secular business, and, after so fair a vision or rest, am fouled with worldly dust … I sigh as one who looks back and gazes at the shore he has left behind.6

  He was not left long in his retreat. In the crisis years of the late sixth century men of his abilities and experience could not be spared. He was ordained deacon against his will by Pope Benedict I (575�
��9), and placed in charge of the city’s seventh district, with responsibility for administration and charitable relief. In August 579 the city was besieged by the Lombards, and a new pope, Pelagius II (579–90), was elected. Desperate for military help and relief for the beleaguered city, Pelagius sent Gregory as apocrisiary to Constantinople, to plead with the Emperor Tiberius. He was to remain there for seven years.

  Even as deacon of the seventh region Gregory had continued to live in his monastery, and he took a group of monks from St Andrew’s with him to Constantinople, turning the Roman embassy in Constantinople into a replica of his monastic home on the Caelian. He devoted himself to the spiritual life of this community, lecturing regularly to them on the Book of Job. But he also pursued his diplomatic duties with vigour, winning the trust of the royal family and becoming godfather to the eldest son of the new Emperor Maurice, debating theology with the Patriarch, and establishing a network of personal contacts which would stand him in good stead as pope. He remained, however, resolutely a Roman, refusing to learn Greek, suspicious of Eastern theology and liturgy, troubled by and disapproving of the Westerners in Constantinople who had gone native. As pope he would refuse to answer a letter from a woman-friend settled in Constantinople because she had written in Greek instead of her native Latin. Rome was the Eternal City, the dwelling-place of the Apostle – ‘How anyone can be seduced by Constantinople,’ he wrote, ‘and how anyone can forget Rome, I do not know.’7 The only aspect of Greek civilisation he seems to have valued was the retsina for which he formed a taste while Apocrisiary, and which he had specially shipped to Rome when he became pope.

  Gregory was eventually recalled to assist Pope Pelagius II in attempts to resolve the Istrian schism, and so was in Rome during the dreadful winter of 589, when the Tiber rose and breached the city’s war-damaged walls, flooding and demolishing churches and granaries, and decimating the winter food-supplies. In the ensuing plague Pope Pelagius was one of the first victims, and Gregory was at once elected by clergy and people to succeed him.

  Gregory was a devout man, an unselfconscious participant in the unsophisticated popular Christianity of the West in his own day. The piety revealed in his Dialogues is colourful, receptive to miracles and marvels, readily moved to awe. Yet there was nothing fanciful about him: he had all the Roman virtues – practicality, realism, a passion for order. Despite his love of contemplation, he was no abstract thinker. He distrusted learning for its own sake, and he praised St Benedict for being ‘skilfully ignorant and wisely unlearned’.8 As pope, he was to need every shred of this practicality. Most of his letters survive, and they provide a window into the overwhelming scale and range of the tasks that confronted him, and the titanic energy with which, despite wretched health, he tackled them.

  In the first place, he had to defend the city from the Lombards. Rome was now a military dukedom, with an imperial commander, based in the palace on the Capitol, nominally in charge. In practice, imperial resources were often diverted elsewhere – as Gregory complained bitterly to the Emperor Maurice, ‘Rome is abandoned, that Perugia might be held.’9 Gregory continued the policy begun by his predecessor, Pelagius II, of buying temporary truces from the Lombards ‘without any cost to the republic’ – that is, with bribes raised from the Church’s own resources. He also found himself often obliged to pay the wages of the imperial troops or to provision the Roman garrison. He negotiated treaties, ransomed refugees and provided for their relief.

  In many places, the Lombard advance drove out the Catholic clergy, and Gregory had to try to cobble together pastoral provision for the laity left behind. In imperial Italy, he used his primatial powers to try to secure decent episcopal appointments, imposing Roman clerics, when he could get away with it, in preference to unsuitable local candidates. He regulated the lives of existing monastic communities and encouraged new foundations. He tried to ensure that those in charge of the Church’s lands and properties were good employers and used the revenues for the benefit of the needy. One cluster of letters show him disciplining a slack bishop who had tried to get rid of an overzealous archdeacon by forcibly ordaining him priest. Another shows him trying to rationalise the livestock holdings on the Church’s properties in Sicily. In Rome itself he had a detailed register drawn up of every poor person in the city, where they lived, what their names and ages were, and allocated a weekly ration of corn, wine, cheese and oil to each. Food from the Pope’s own table was sent to genteel folk fallen on hard times, an exquisitely tactful way of turning a charitable dole into a mark of respect. Twelve poor people ate with the Pope each day.

  All this cost money, and one of the most remarkable features of Gregory’s activity was his reorganisation and deployment of the patrimony of the Roman Church. The Church was by now the largest single landowner in the West, its property built up from imperial bounty in the Constantinian era, and then from the donations and legacies of great families like Gregory’s own. The papacy had lands scattered in at least fifteen different regions, from Gaul to Africa, from the Balkans to Calabria. The rich Sicilian holdings were by far the most important – most of Gregory’s own family properties were there – and Sicily had been untouched by invasion. This proved the salvation of Rome, for the papacy now took on the Roman state’s traditional role of feeding the people. Gregory overhauled the whole working of these Church lands, replacing unsatisfactory ‘rectors’ – the chief officers of the patrimonies, who were often slack or corrupt local bishops or lay adminstrators – with hand-picked members of the Roman clergy and specially sworn lay assistants. He closely scrutinised their activities, and endlessly exhorted them to diligence and efficiency, scrupulous honesty, generosity to the poor, and fair dealing with tenants and employees.

  There was more to this than money. The patrimonial organisation provided Gregory with a network of patronage, persuasion and liaison with the local churches and civic administration which enormously strengthened his grip over the churches of Italy and beyond. The channels of influence which they gave the Pope were exploited to maximum effect. The rector of the Ravenna patrimony functioned as papal ambassador to the Exarch, and kept a watchful eye on the Archbishop, who chafed at his subjugation to Rome and was angling for independent patriarchal status. This network, and the revenues which sustained it, laid the foundations for the role and influence of the medieval papacy.

  Much of this activity was looked at askance in Constantinople. The Emperor resented Gregory’s independent negotiations with the Lombards, and considered that he had no business making truces with the enemies of the empire. Gregory revered the empire as the one legitimate secular authority in Christendom, and he saw himself in civic matters as its servant – ‘for the love of the empire, we have lost silver and gold, slaves and raiment’. But he in his turn resented armchair criticism levelled from the comfort and safety of Constantinople at those like himself who ‘suffer in this place among the swords of the Lombards’, and who were forced to watch ‘Romans tied by the neck like dogs, to be taken to Gaul for sale’.10

  Moreover, though he detested the ‘unspeakable Lombards’, he also thought of them not merely as the enemies of the Emperor and of Italy, to be bought or fought off, but as his pastoral responsibility, human beings with souls to be saved. The marriage of two successive Lombard kings to the Bavarian Catholic Princess Theodelinda gave the Pope a toehold in the Lombard court which he exploited to the full, showering Theodelinda with gifts, and being rewarded by the Catholic baptism of her son, Prince Adoloald. It was the first step in a process which would ultimately lead to Lombard renunciation of Arianism.

  Gregory was also perfectly prepared to do battle with imperial officials in the localities when he thought they were oppressing the poor or infringing the rights of the Church. The authority of empire was rooted in responsibility. ‘There is this difference between the kings of the barbarian nations and the Roman emperor,’ he told Maurice, ‘that the former have slaves for their subjects, the latter free men. And therefore, in all your
acts, your first object should be the maintenance of justice, your second to preserve a perfect liberty.’11 By the same token, he was ready to resist the Emperor when he encroached on matters of the spirit. In 593 Maurice issued an edict forbidding any serving soldiers to resign from the army in order to enter monastic life. In an empire at bay against armed enemies, it was not an unreasonable measure, but Gregory, who had himself abandoned public service to become a monk, would have none of it. He dutifully circulated the edict, but he wrote a blistering rebuke to Maurice, accusing him of abusing his power and locking up the way to heaven, reminding him of his humble origins and charging him with ingratitude to the God who had raised him to be emperor, before whose judgement seat, he pointed out, Maurice would soon have to stand. It is not a timid letter.12

  Gregory was generally deferential in his dealings with the Emperor, but he was insistent on the primacy of the Roman Church. He told Maurice in 595 that ‘the care of the whole Church has been committed to the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles. Behold he received the keys of the kingdom of heaven; to him was given the power of binding and loosing, to him the care and principate of the whole Church was committed.’ The issue of the primacy of Rome and its relation to Constantinople came to a head over the employment of the conventional title ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’ by Gregory’s former friend, John the Faster, Patriarch of Constantinople. Gregory’s predecessor, Pelagius II, had taken exception to the Patriarch’s use of the word ‘Ecumenical’, understanding it to mean ‘universal’ and seeing in it a challenge to the universal authority of the Pope. This was in fact a misapprehension. The title meant no more than ‘imperial’, and to begin with at least there was no larger agenda in its use. But Gregory remembered and revived Pelagius’ objections, perhaps because they had been first raised by his ancestor, Pope Felix. He denounced John’s continued use of the phrase, and tried to pressure members of the imperial family and the administration in Constantinople to put a stop to it. He also wrote to the patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch, suggesting that, as bishops of the other two ‘Petrine’ sees, they shared in the Petrine office. They too were being insulted, moreover, since ‘if one Patriarch is called Universal, the name of Patriarch in the rest is derogated’.13