by Eamon Duffy
Gregory did what he could to prevent this feeling escalating into revolution, urging loyalty to the imperial ideal, but the Iconoclastic crisis deepened under his successor Gregory III (731–41). The Emperor refused all papal offers of reconciliation, and so Gregory organised a synod in Rome in 731 which denounced Iconoclasm and excommunicated anyone perpetrating it. Significantly, the Archbishop of Ravenna took part in the Synod, a mark of the extent to which the Emperor’s Iconoclasm had alienated even his supporters in Italy. Nevertheless, the Pope did the empire sterling service in 733 by negotiating the return of the exarchate of Ravenna from the Lombards. In gratitude, the Exarch donated six twisted columns of onyx to the shrine of St Peter. The gift was perhaps intended as an olive branch, but if so it did not disarm papal hostility to imperial religious policy. Pointedly, Gregory used the Exarchs columns to support a series of elaborate new images of Christ and the saints.
Gregory III’s intervention to rescue the exarchate was all the more remarkable in that it coincided with a devastating imperial attack on the papacy. Realising that he had little chance of bringing Rome to heel behind his Iconoclast policies, Leo struck at both its spiritual jurisdiction and its material base. Some time in 732 or 733 he confiscated all the papal patrimonies in southern Italy and in Sicily, the main source of the Pope’s income. He went on to remove from papal jurisdiction the bishoprics ofThessalonica, Corinth, Syracuse, Reggio, Nicopolis, Athens and Patras, in other words all the Greek-speaking provinces of Illyrica, Sicily and southern Italy From now on, these would all be subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople. To hold the remains of the empire together, Constantinople was strengthening its grip on everything south of Naples, and ditching the rest. The exarchate at Ravenna would stagger on till its final destruction by the Lombards in 751, and the popes continued for a time to hanker after the old links with Constantinople. But Leo’s actions had deeply embittered papal Rome. No pope had ever addressed an emperor in tones as defiant as those used by Gregory II during the height of the Iconoclastic disputes, and no pope had ever shown so clear a sense of the real source of the papacy’s strength:
The whole West has its eyes on us, unworthy though we are. It relies on us and on St Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, whose image you wish to destroy, but whom the kingdoms of the West honour as if he were God himself on earth … We are going to the most distant parts of the West to seek those who desire baptism. Although we have sent bishops and clergy of our holy church to them, their princes have not yet received baptism, for they wish to receive it from ourselves alone …
You have no right to issue dogmatic constitutions, you have not the right mind for dogmas; your mind is too coarse and martial.23
Pope Gregory’s contrast between the faithful West and the heretic East was laden with significance for the future of the papacy, and its final turn from East to West. It was to be less a matter of choice, however, than a recognition of realities: with Leo’s confiscation of Sicily and the south, the papacy to all intents and purposes had been cast out of the empire.
It is one of the ironies of history that this long slow divorce between the Greek empire and the papacy should have taken place largely under Greek-speaking popes. Of the thirteen popes elected between 687 and 752, only two,Benedict II (684–5) Gregory II, were native Romans, or even Latins. All the rest were Greek-speakers, from Greece, Syria or Byzantine Sicily. This extraordinary development, which could be said to have begun with the election of Pope Theodore in 642, reflected a profound transformation of the Roman clergy. Gregory the Great and Pope Honorius were the last representatives of a once-common papal type, of which Pope Vigilius was a less salubrious example – aristocratic bishops drawn from the Roman senatorial families. The calamities of the Gothic war and the imperial reconquest had put an end to that type, as the great families faded out or emigrated east. At the same time, Rome began to fill up with Greek-speaking clergy. Some came as a direct consequence of the restoration of imperial rule, in the wake of the Byzantine garrisons in Rome. Round the imperial quarter on the Palatine there sprang up a ring of churches staffed by Eastern clergy and dedicated to Eastern saints, most of them with military associations – Sts Cosmas and Damian, Sts Sergius and Bacchus, St Hadrian, Sts Quiricius and Giulitta, Sts Cyrus and John. To these camp-followers of empire were added wave after wave of the victims of empire, refugees from the monophysite, monothelite and eventually the Iconoclastic persecutions. And, thirdly, there came the refugees from Islam, as the ancient heartlands of Christianity – and of monasticism – went down before the Arab tide.
At precisely the moment when the supply of educated Latin clergy from which the popes were traditionally recruited was drying up, therefore, a flood of Greek clergy and monks arrived in Rome. By the end of the seventh century these Greek-speakers dominated the clerical culture of Rome, providing its theological brains, its administrative talent, and much of its visual, musical and liturgical culture. Greek monks were brought into the burgeoning relief work of the Roman Church, as small monastic communities were placed in charge of the ancient diaconia, distribution-points along the Tiber for corn and other doles to the poor. These centres were part of an emerging Byzantine quarter of the city, and the Greek churches of San Giorgio in Vellabro and Santa Maria in Cosmedin, at the foot of the Aventine, were formed out of such relief centres.
The impact of all this on papal Rome was far-reaching, sometimes daunting. In the reign of Pope John VI (701–5) the English Bishop Wilfrid arrived in Rome. He came to appeal against the reorganisation of the church in England recently introduced by Theodore, the gifted and energetic Greek Archbishop of Canterbury. Wilfrid’s party were honourably received, but were disconcerted to find the whole papal entourage laughing and whispering among themselves, in Greek. The entire papal delegation to the Sixth General Council in 680 was made up of Greeks. Even the native traditions of Roman religious art were now transformed by Eastern influence, the monumental realism of the Roman style, represented in the apse of Sts Cosmas and Damian, being replaced by the delicate formalism of the paintings in Santa Maria Antiqua, or the Byzantine-style icon of the Virgin now in the church of Santa Francesca Romana. The worship of the Roman Church itself was being transformed by Eastern influence. Round the person of the Pope there was growing up an increasingly formal ceremonial, modelled on Byzantine court ritual, which served to emphasise the sacredness of the person of the successor of St Peter. The austere, businesslike ceremonial of the Roman rite was enriched and elaborated by feast-days, music and ritual observances borrowed from Syria, Jerusalem and Constantinople.
None of this implied any watering down of the distinctive identity of the Roman Church. Pope Sergius I played a key role in introducing oriental observances into the Roman liturgy, like the Syrian custom of singing the ‘Agnus Dei’, or the elaborate processions, with Greek chant, which he introduced for the four major Eastern feasts of the Virgin. Yet Sergius passionately resisted the Canons of the Quinisext Council, which would have imposed alien Eastern customs on the Roman Church, and it was he who solemnly transferred the relics of St Leo the Great, the great patron and formulator of the papacy’s Petrine and Roman claims, into a conspicuous new shrine in St Peter’s. Indeed, the Eastern popes, with their more learned and sophisticated theological interests, brought a new, doctrinal edge to the Petrine claims of the papacy, an emphasis which their confrontations with heretical emperors had sharpened and fixed.
Rome under the Greek popes, therefore, was a melting-pot. In it many of the traditions of East and West were flowing together, to create a vibrant and solemn religious culture which fascinated and dazzled the newly Christianised peoples of Europe. A party of Irish monks in Rome to discuss the Easter question met in their hostel fellow pilgrims from Egypt, Palestine, the Greek East and southern Russia. Kings, bishops, monks and the ordinary faithful travelled to Rome to beg the grace of the Apostle, to be near the relics with which Rome was full and which the Greek popes had gorgeously enshrined for their devotion.
Whole quarters of the city were given over to them, like the Saxon Borgo near St Peter’s, where the English in Rome were based.
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 EMPIRES OF THE WEST
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 ex
traordinary 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.