Complete Works of F Marion Crawford

by F. Marion Crawford

  And here ends the invaluable chronicle of the soldier historian, without whose book it would have been quite impossible to understand the nature of the struggle for Rome, and the transition from the fall of the Western Empire to the temporary supremacy of Pope Gregory the Great, and thence to the story of the Saracen domination. There can be no doubt but that Narses stemmed the stream of history in the battle of the Apennines and turned it at Monte Lettere, and he deserves to be numbered among the world’s great generals. The chronicler, Agathias, has given us the best brief description of his character. “He was, above all, a man of sound mind, keen and clever in adapting himself to the times; and though he was not versed in literature nor practised in oratory, he made up for these deficiencies by the fertility of his wit, and did not lack words with which to express his opinions, which was an extraordinary thing for a eunuch brought up among the follies of the royal palace. In stature he was small and of a lean habit, but stronger and more high-spirited than would have been believed.” Such was the general who, in his old age, reduced the story of the Gothic kingdom to the limits of a page in the history of mankind, and against whom such heroes of arms as Totila and Teias fought and gave up their lives in vain. Again the difference between warlike spirit and military genius presents itself, and while distinguishing between the two, and according our admiration to the great general, we need not withhold our sympathy from the fair-haired warriors who fought so bravely and died so manfully under the southern sky.

  So far as the south is concerned, the story of the Gothic domination divides itself into two periods, of which the first comprises Theodoric’s long reign, a time of peace and plenty and agricultural activity, while the second includes about two years of robbery and violence, that left the land a wilderness and reduced the cities to desolation. The Goths avenged themselves, and Narses took vengeance upon them in turn; but after him, in the changing fortunes of the miserable Empire, there came Franks and Lombards, and all Northern Italy was laid waste with fire and sword. One of their kings, Autharis the Lombard, rode southward far, and reached the straits. For the Deacon Paul says that he went down by Spoleto to Benevento, and took it, and that he went through the country to Reggio, the Italian city nearest to Sicily, and it is said that there a column stood out alone, washed by the waves of the sea. Then Autharis spurred his horse through the salt foam, and he smote the pillar with the point of his spear, saying, ‘Here shall be the boundary of the Lombards.’ Which column, says the good deacon, is said to be standing to‑day, and is called the Pillar of Autharis. But a little further on he tells us that this Autharis died of poison at Ticinum, which is Pavia, in the north; and he died in 590, in which same year a greater man than he arose, who was Pope Gregory the Great. But by that time the Lombards had taken all that part of Italy from the empire, and they held it, and made a kingdom.

  As for the rest of Italy, the great struggle had meant only that the East was trying to get possession of the heritage of the West, in spite of the barbarians who wanted it for themselves, since it no longer had any emperor. The result of it was that the East got all Italy, then lost a part of it and kept the rest, that is, the centre, the south, and Sicily, governing the provinces by an exarch residing in Ravenna, leaving Rome to a prefect much under the influence of the Pope, when the latter was a strong man, and appointing a praetor and a quaestor, according to the ancient Roman custom, to govern Sicily, to keep the peace, and levy war taxes, while the regular revenues of the country were under the management of officials controlled by the so‑called ‘Count of the Patrimony of Italy.’

  At this time our notice is first attracted by the existence of vast estates, in Sicily, Italy, Corsica, Africa, and elsewhere, which were the property of the Catholic Church, and constituted what were called the Patrimonies; that is, as we should say, the Patrimony of Saint Peter. It appears that these lands had been left by will to the Church of Rome, before the final disappearance of the Western Empire, it was even then customary for individuals to leave property in that way, and also to the churches of other cities. These estates were controlled by the Pope, who appointed a rector to manage them, paid taxes and titles in kind to the imperial government, and enjoyed the income or decided what use should be made of it.

  The lands thus held by the Church of Rome in Sicily were so extensive as to enable the popes to supply Rome with Sicilian corn, and it is not surprising to find Sicily again the granary of the Italian capital. It was the possession of these lands that laid a first foundation for the temporal power of the popes, which became a fact when actual possession of a territory on the mainland was necessary, in order to compensate for the financial disaster suffered by the Church through the loss of Sicily to the Empire. Pope Gregory was a man whose intellectual superiority would in any case have led him to distinction, and whose charitable disposition could hardly fail to procure him a well-deserved popularity; but the real power which he wielded with such wholesome energy was based upon the Church’s already vast possessions in the south, and was perhaps supplemented by the great private wealth he is generally believed to have inherited from his mother. This fortune likewise came to him in the shape of Sicilian lands, on which he was able to found rich monasteries before he became Pope; and though Gibbon observes with some sarcasm that his devotion pursued the path which would have been chosen by a crafty and ambitious statesman, it is the general opinion of mankind that he deserved the title of Saint and the veneration of Christians, at least as truly as any man since the Apostles and the early martyrs.

  The fall of the Gothic kingdom was followed within a few years by the rise of the Papacy. The Eastern Empire was never able to hold and govern Italy directly, owing, perhaps, to that radical defect in all Eastern governments to which I have already alluded. On the other hand, the emperors could not and would not relinquish such a possession, and where the authority of their exarchs and their praetors was insufficient, they supplemented it by increasing that of the popes, which was sure to be exercised in a more or less conservative spirit. A right understanding of these simple facts is all that is necessary in order to trace the evolution of the Papacy, with its organized temporal power, from the chaos that followed the extinction of the Western Empire. In other words, and to recapitulate briefly, chaos was followed by a tremendous effort on the part of the barbarians to get possession of Italy; this having failed, and Justinian having reoccupied the country, he found himself unable to govern it without the support of the popes, who gradually turned their assistance into a domination. The connexion of all this with the story of the south lies in the fact that the popes relied upon their possessions in Sicily for the greater part of their worldly wealth and power, before the union and consolidation of these produced their temporal sovereignty.

  The Synod of Constantinople, held in the year 381, had acknowledged the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome by giving him precedence over all others, and this action was confirmed by the Synod of Chalcedon in 451. Justinian had further acknowledged this precedence of the popes by the manner in which he had received Pope John when the latter came to Constantinople as Theodoric’s ambassador, and it was not unnatural, therefore, that the emperor should suffer the popes to exercise such very great influence upon Italian affairs; and since Sicily is spoken of at that time as the ‘Asylum and Paradise of the Church,’ it is quite certain that the papal influence must have been especially strong in the island, and may have amounted to a positive domination under such a Pope as Gregory the Great.

  This extraordinary man was born in Rome about the year 540, and was therefore thirteen years old at the time when the Goths were finally overcome. He was the son of a Roman senator, Gordianus, and of his wife Sylvia, who is believed to have been a Sicilian lady of great wealth. Gordianus himself afterwards entered the Church, and died one of the seven cardinal deacons who administered the seven ecclesiastical districts of Rome. Gregory received an education befitting his birth and fortune, and it is a sign of the decay of Greek influence in Central Italy that
he never learned the Greek language. At the age of thirty-four, as most writers think, he was appointed Prefect of Rome by Justin the Second, which means that he presided in the Senate, was the chief magistrate of the city, and was largely responsible for providing it with food. How long he remained in this high office is not known, but it was probably not more than a year, and on the death of his father he inherited a palace on the Coelian. His mother, who was still alive, appears to have abandoned to him her Sicilian possessions, for he founded there six monasteries on lands of his own, and he converted the Coelian palace to monastic uses in 575, and dedicated it to Saint Andrew. It probably occupied the site of the hospital which now stands opposite the Lateran basilica, and within which there is still a church of Saint Andrew. He had always loved the society of monks and ecclesiastics; he now gave himself up entirely to devotion, and injured his health by the severity of his fasting. After this, having seen certain fair Anglian children exposed for sale as slaves, he desired to convert Britain, saying that it was ‘a lamentable consideration that the prince of darkness should be master of so much beauty and have such comely persons in his possession; and that so fine an outside should have nothing of God’s grace to furnish it within’; and he played also upon the words ‘Anglians’ and ‘Angels,’ for playing upon words in this manner was a sort of weakness with him, and many of his jests are recorded. At first the Pope permitted him to undertake the conversion of those heathen; but when he had journeyed three days towards Britain, the Pope sent a messenger after him, because his fame was already so great that the people murmured and cried out, saying that without Gregory Rome was lost. So he returned, and soon afterwards he was made a cardinal deacon, and was then sent as nuncio, or ambassador, to Constantinople, where the Emperor Tiberius the second was reigning, to whose grandson Gregory stood godfather; and there he remained long enough to write his work of Morals upon Job, ‘in such a manner as to reduce into one body the most excellent principles of morality.’ In the year 584 he was recalled, and resumed his tranquil monastic life, of which many anecdotes are told. The Pope died in 590, in the great pestilence, and the clergy, the Senate, and the Roman people chose Gregory to be his successor; but in those days it was the custom to consult the emperor about the election of a Pope, and Gregory wrote many letters to Constantinople, imploring that his own election might not be approved. The prefect of Rome intercepted them all, and wrote very strongly requesting the imperial approval. During the pestilence Gregory publicly prayed with the people, walking in procession and singing a solemn Kyrie, and while he walked through the streets four score of those who went with him fell dead of the plague. When he learned that his letters had not been delivered, he tried to escape from Rome, lest he should be made Pope, and in order to elude the guards at the gates he had himself carried out in a wicker basket, and lay three days hidden in the woods. But he was found and brought back with great joy and acclamation, and he was consecrated, and made profession of faith at the tomb of Saint Peter, which is called the Confession to this day.

  Then, says the best of his biographers, he became the common father of the poor, relieving their necessities with such gentleness as to spare them the shame of receiving alms. He made them sit at his own table, and he made exact lists of them. As each month began he made distribution to all of corn, wine, lentils, cheese, fish, meat, and oil, and he appointed officers over districts and streets, whose duty it was to see that poor sick persons were fed and cared for. He redeemed captives taken by the Lombards, and for this purpose he even ordered the Bishop of Messina to break up and sell certain sacred vessels. He ordered the Bishop of Terracina to restore to the Jews their synagogue, which had been taken from them, saying that if they were to be converted, it should be done by meekness and charity.

  He issued the same orders for the Jews of Sicily, as well as of Sardinia, and in his letters to his stewards he constantly inculcates the duty of dealing liberally with the farmers, and even of advancing money to them in bad times, to be repaid in small sums. Yet he was a man of undaunted courage, who could be hot in anger, and he said of himself that he tolerated long, but that when he had once determined to bear no longer, he would face any danger with delight.

  With regard to Sicily and its administration, we find that Syracuse was still regarded as the natural and traditional capital of the island, and Gregory’s vicar, the Subdeacon Peter, was established there. The first of the Pope’s letters which has been preserved enjoins upon the Sicilian bishops to meet the vicar once a year, either in Syracuse or in Catania, for the discussion of important matters. The monasteries founded by him are believed to have been the following: Saint Herma, now San Giovanni degli Eremiti, in Palermo; San Martino, at the head of a valley not very far from the same city; Saint Maxim and Saint Agatha, called ‘Mons Lucusianum’; Saint Theodore; Saint Hadrian; and the Praetorianum or Praecoritanum. With the exception of the first two, their sites are not positively known, and it will probably never be possible to determine them. The influence of these religious institutions, founded as they were by Gregory himself, may have been considerable, and they were most probably not subject to the papal vicar, but were under the control of the superior of the order, who resided in Rome, and occasionally conferred with the Pope himself.

  As for the Vicar Peter, he began by being Gregory’s most trusted friend and servant in Sicily, but he was guilty of all manner of neglect, he tried his master’s patience beyond the limit of endurance, and was ultimately removed from office. As a specimen of the Pope’s manner of rebuke, it would be impossible to give anything better than the fragments which Mr. Hodgkin has selected and translated from the vast mass of Saint Gregory’s letters; and when we remember that it was this Pope who first signed himself in all his letters, ‘Servus servorum Dei,’ the Servant of the servants of God, thereby inaugurating a custom which still survives, we cannot but be edified and interested by his manner of admonishing those in service under him, both with sarcasm and with earnest exhortations. He addresses his vicar politely as ‘Your Experience,’ when Peter had shown his signal lack of that quality, and as ‘Your Anxiety,’ when the slothful vicar had exhibited the most culpable indifference.

  Professor Grisar, cited as a high authority by Mr. Hodgkin, has estimated that the whole Patrimony of the Church in Saint Gregory’s time amounted to •eighteen hundred square miles of land, and Mr. Hodgkin speaks of these possessions as, ‘wide domains,’ the revenue of which is calculated by Professor Grisar at three hundred thousand pounds sterling. I do not know how the estimate and the calculation were made, not being able to obtain a copy of the article from which Mr. Hodgkin quotes them; but there is a manifest discrepancy between the extent of the land and the large income supposed to be derived from it. As I have before said, the modern Brontë estate in Sicily is eighty miles in circumference. If the figure were a square, •twenty miles on each side, the area would be four hundred square miles; if a circle, it would be considerably more than five hundred. Four or five such estates would therefore equal the ‘vast domains’ that composed the Patrimony of Saint Peter, and which were situated in Rome and its environs, in the country of the Sabines, in Picenum, in the neighbourhood of Ravenna, in Campania, Apulia, and Bruttii, in Gaul and Illyricum, in the islands of Sardinia and Corsica — and principally in Sicily. A little further calculation shows that an even distribution would give only one hundred and fifty square miles to each of the regions named, or an estate in each equal to about one-third of the Brontë property. Moreover, the revenue calculated would amount to one hundred and sixty-six pounds sterling per average square mile, or five shillings per acre, roughly, which, at three and a half per cent, a very high estimate, would make the land worth over eight pounds an acre in the year 600; which is impossible, especially as much of the property lay in half-civilized regions. If, on the other hand, we suppose that Professor Grisar, cited by Mr. Hodgkin, meant •eighteen hundred miles square, instead of eighteen hundred square miles, we should have an area much larger than
the whole of Europe. There is, therefore, some radical mistake in the estimate or in the calculation, or in both, which renders them quite useless as a basis of argument. Of the figures given, that of the income actually enjoyed by the Pope is by far the most probable, from whatever sources the revenue may have been derived; and the conclusions drawn by Mr. Hodgkin are just, namely, that the care of such a property must have been a heavy burden on the shoulders of an ascetic Pope, and that the expenditure, as well as the receipt, of the large income derived from the Papal Patrimony imposed severe labour on so conscientious a steward of his wealth as Pope Gregory.