There was less difference between the position of the agricultural classes in Pope Gregory’s day and that which they occupied under the Roman Empire, or even under the Republic, than might be supposed, considering the long time that elapsed; but it was during this first time of papal influence that the population began to be divided into three classes, namely, the clergy, the nobility, and the common people; and the clergy stood between the whole country and the spasmodic government of Constantinople, to protect the one and restrain the other. It was largely because the bishops of that period were truly the shepherds of their flocks, at a time when the officers of the Empire deserved, not unjustly, to be compared to wolves, that the Church acquired that direct influence throughout the country, and won that almost passionate affection of the poor, which she preserved through so many centuries, and has not even yet wholly lost in the south, whatever may be said to the contrary. This position of the bishops is chiefly traceable to the efforts of Pope Gregory, and even Gibbon’s sarcasms have not shaken the honourable position he occupies in history. That he succeeded, as he did, in improving the condition of the governed, was in part due to the dominating position he occupied in Rome; but it must not be forgotten that he was supposed to be subject to the emperor, to whom he expressed his wishes in the form of advice in matters of government and of recommendations in affairs that were personal. In a majority of cases the emperor had no choice but to act upon these expressions of the Pope’s desires; but a very great amount of arbitrary power was conferred upon the imperial commissioner, who was superior to the governor of Sicily himself, and over whom the Pope could only exercise a moral influence, not supported by any legal force. At all events, the position was such that the Pope could only restrain him indirectly, through the emperor himself; so that in case a good understanding was not maintained, it was possible for the commissioner to do much harm, before the Pope could hinder him, by the circuitous method which consisted in appealing to Constantinople. Yet such difficulties arose rarely, if at all, during the reign of the wise Gregory, and the rich south put out new blossom and fruit under his careful hand. The clergy, the nobility, and people lived peacefully under his paternal guidance, if not under his direct and sovereign rule, and the vast wealth began to accumulate which was erelong to fill the treasury of a new conqueror. When the Arabs destroyed Syracuse in 878 they took, with other booty, more than a million pieces of gold, which is said to have been the largest sum of money ever seized by them in any one city throughout all their conquests.
Cultivation had become very extensive in Sicily, and individual estates were of enormous extent. One is mentioned which required no less than four hundred overseers, and with the Empire the custom of letting land to small tenants had arisen, as being more practical in some cases than that of cultivating a great estate for the owner’s direct benefit, under the supervision of stewards; these small free tenants were called ‘coloni,’ and the word is used in its original meaning to the present day in Italy. Of the number and condition of the slaves at the time of Pope Gregory we know little, and are not likely to learn more. The free tenants were evidently a substitute for slaves, as a means of getting the greatest possible income from the land, and this fact alone goes to show that the number of slaves had diminished, and that their value had increased, so that it no longer paid the landholder to employ them. That there were still a number of slaves in Sicily, however, we know. We know also that the introduction of the ‘Malvasia’ grape took place in this period. Malvasia is a corruption of Monembasia, and has been further corrupted in English to ‘Malmsey.’ Monembasia is a harbour in the Peloponnesus, called in ancient times Epidaurus Limera, and a very close trading connexion existed between it and Sicily in the sixth century. Its sweet white grapes were the original stock whence descended those of which the good white wines of Sicily are made in our day, and there is not a farmer in the south who does not pride himself upon having a demijohn or two of the rich Malvasia wine ripening in a corner of his ‘grotta’ for some great occasion. Its flavour is like that of Malaga, and it has as much body, and often as fine a colour; but excepting where it has been made with great skill and patience, it is usually a coarser wine. From the same grapes the Marsala is made, and the principal peculiarity of the Malvasia is that in making it a certain quite of grapes are used which have been hung in a dry place till they are half dried, and as sweet as sugar.
While Justinian was discriminating between the relative demerits of a dozen heresies, and while his successors were in vain attempting to imitate what they only half understood; and while the wise and saintly Gregory was ruling the Church for the true advancement and benefit of the Empire, as well as of mankind, a man was growing up whose influence was to change the course of history and modify the lives of many millions. When Gregory was elected Pope in 590, Mohammed was twenty years of age. Two hundred years later the Mohammedan Arabs destroyed Syracuse, and made themselves masters of the south. That period of two centuries, therefore, embraces the first preachings of Mohammed, who began to propagate his doctrines about the year 610, when he gave out that the Archangel Gabriel had appeared to him, declaring those truths which he was to reveal to men. Twelve years later, after converting his family and many other persons to the belief that he was the messenger and prophet of God, he fled before persecution to Yatreb, and thence to Medina, and the date of his escape and flight was the beginning of the Mohammedan era. Seated high upon his swift camel, and wrapped in his Arab blanket, fleeing by night with a few faithful followers, the delicate, red-haired, pale-faced young man was far from dreaming that he too, like his divine predecessor, had brought not peace but a sword into the world; or that the near descendants of those whom his converts were set soon to convert should snatch an empire from the midst of a world which, in his own childhood, had been governed by such men as the Emperor Justinian and the Pontiff Gregory. It may be that the amazing progress of the Mohammedan religion was due to the wretched moral state of man in the East, that the natural force it possessed by the simplicity of the appeal it made to human passions was strengthened by the promises of unbounded satisfaction in a future which the Christian shudders to contemporary; it may be also that Christianity had not fulfilled its mission in those countries where Mohammedanism spread first and most rapidly. Between the death of Saint Gregory and the first descent of the Arabs upon Sicilian shores falls the war of the Images, than which no conflict could give a more precise notion of the condition of Christian worship in the East.
Saint Gregory, who was a practical pastor before he was an enlightened Pope, had declared that the presence in churches of pictures and statues representing not only divine beings, but persons of holy life and death, was conducive to an historical knowledge of Christianity, by affording instruction to the many who could not read. In an age when ignorance of all letters was the rule, and when an overwhelming majority of believers were therefore called upon to accept instruction both in dogma and in history of their faith by word of mouth only, such a point of view as that of the great Pope was not only wise and practical, but seemed to be the only reasonable one. The early Christians had inveighed, with a violence paralleled only by that afterwards displayed by the Arabs, against the heathen idolatry; they had animated the images of Apollo, of Aphrodite, and of Athene with the spirits of devils in order to enjoy, in the destruction of senseless matter, the imaginary delights of vanquishing the Prince of Darkness in his stronghold. The first missionary bishop in Sicily, not yet strong enough to overthrow the oracle in his temple, was believed to have silenced him by secretly fastening a letter round the neck of his image. The fury of the Christians had never been directed against the images themselves, but always against the demons that were supposed to inhabit them. Never, from the earliest times, had the Christians exhibited that horror of a graven image which was an article of faith with the Jews, and which has remained one among strict Mohammedans. From the beginning the Christian slave was impelled to express upon the stone that covered his loved on
es, the thought of that peace which is beyond all understanding; and, unlettered as he mostly was, his expression took the form of a rude image, of a symbol, of a mere sign. The simple faith which at first fulfilled its rites in caves, in subterranean quarries, and in the cellars of deserted palaces, rose to the surface and displayed itself in the upper air with a magnificence which was but the outward sign of mankind’s approbation; then the mark grew to an inscription, the symbol to a halo, the rude outline of God’s image to an exalted image of God himself. Above the dark catacomb wherein had been laid the torn bodies of martyred saints, and where the poor and the outcast had worshipped in hourly fear of death, but in the perpetual certainty of the life to come, — above those places of refuge and suffering rose the splendid cathedrals of a victorious and universal religion. And that religion, like Agag of old, lived in the illusion that the bitterness of death was past; it depicted its past sufferings and present triumphs with all the art which the times could command, it made light of future trials, and it believed that the millennium of the blessed was at hand.
Such was the condition of the Church in Sicily fifty years after Pope Gregory’s death; and it came to pass that Mohammedans sailed up to Sicily out of the southeast, and made a furious raid upon the island, and took much spoil. So strong were the adherents of the new faith become in 652, the thirtieth year of their era. But they were not yet strong enough to conquer the south, in spite of Constantinople, and when they had fought with some imperial troops under the exarch himself, they seem to have yielded to the representations of Pope Martin the First, for they sailed away again to Asia, taking their booty with them, and a number of Sicilian prisoners, who settled in Damascus.
At that time, the emperor was that wretched Constans the Second, who sent the Exarch Olympius to Rome to murder Pope Martin, because the latter refused to accept the imperial opinion as an incontrovertible dogma. But Olympius was converted, and went with the Pope into Sicily against the Mohammedans, and died there of the plague. Then Constans accused the Pope of allying himself with the Arabs, and caused him to be brought from Rome to Messina, and thence to Constantinople, where the venerable pontiff was condemned to death, and dragged through the streets by the hangman, before he was sent to die in the Crimea.
Then Constans, having satisfied his thirst for vengeance, attempted to chastise the Mohammedans for their attack on Sicily, but was himself ignominiously beaten at sea, and retired to his own capital, which was distracted by schisms and cankered with seditions. At once restless, foolish, and unscrupulous, he conceived the idea of reëstablishing the Empire in Rome, since he could not reign peacefully in Constantinople; he would attack Benevento, crush the Lombard power in the south, conciliate the Pope, restore what had been, and make himself a reputation out of the rags of failure. He collected troops in Italy and Sicily. The Lombard Duke of Benevento had seized for himself the Lombard kingdom in the north, and reigned in Pavia, but his son defended the Duchy, some say by the miraculous help of Saint Barbatus, and put the unwarlike emperor to flight. Constans paused for breath in Naples, and then hastened on to Rome. In twelve days he had performed his devotions at the tombs of the saints and had stripped the city of its beautiful bronze statues, and of every bit of bronze and copper on which he could lay his hands.
A new scheme had formed itself in his weak brain; he would establish the empire in Sicily, and make Syracuse his residence. He returned to Naples, and proceeded thence by land to Reggio. The western side of the south was ruled by Greek dukes, loyal to the Empire, from Gaeta to Naples, Sorrento, and Amalfi, and thence to Taranto; he reached Sicily unmolested by the Lombards, who had no fleet, and he established himself in Syracuse, its last and most despicable tyrant.
Five years he reigned there and ravaged the land that remembered Verres and was soon to be a prey to the Saracens. He seized property by violence, and raised more money by the legal extortion of exorbitant taxes; and when these could not be paid, the miserable debtors were sold into slavery. To fill the measure of his greed, he took the sacred vessels from the churches and convents when there was nothing else left to take.
Then a slave killed him, in the year 668. While he was washing himself in his bath with Gallic soap, the man Andreas — insulted, we know not how, past all bearing — laid hands upon the soap box, which was the only movable thing in the bathroom, and brought it down upon the emperor’s head with all his might. Then he fled by an inner way. Either the soap box was very heavy, or the man was very strong, for the work was done, and the last tyrant of Syracuse lay dead on the marble floor. A few courtiers made a puppet-emperor of a certain Armenian, but the soldiers immediately rose and cut off his head, and sent it to Constantinople before the young Constantine the Third reached Sicily with his fleet. Having restored order he retired, and a Saracen fleet suddenly appeared before Syracuse. The Arabs once more plundered the city, carrying off to Alexandria all spoils of copper and bronze which Constans had brought from Rome. Then there was peace for a time, while Constantine reigned in his own city, and Sicily once more felt the beneficial effects of papal administration. Several Sicilians were popes within a few years; there was Agatho of Palermo, and Leo the Second, also a Sicilian, and there was the Thracian Conon, who had been brought up in Sicily, and Sergius the First, of Palermo, who refused to sign certain articles approved by a council in Constantinople. The emperor, who was then Justinian the Second, sent an officer to Rome to arrest Sergius; but the militia of Ravenna came to the rescue, and the poor Byzantine officer, in fright for his life, took refuge under the Pope’s own bed, and was allowed to escape unhurt. The Church was strong enough to defy the emperor now.
Then came the conflict about the use of images, of which the result was to establish the supremacy of the popes in Rome. I have already said enough to explain the view held regarding images in Italy. In the year 717 the Emperor Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of Constantinople. Animated by a spirit of reform, but unable to understand that the Church’s real danger lay in the theological dissensions which continually distracted Constantinople and the East, he decreed that all images and pictures should be removed from churches throughout the Empire. A more unwise measure could hardly have been adopted, or one more certain to rouse a storm of opposition in the Eastern and in the West. Had Christianity begun its career, like Mohammedanism, by prohibiting the representation of animate living things, there is no reason to suppose that its followers could ever have fallen into an abuse of symbolism or an excess of images. The Persian Mohammedans have departed from the law of the Prophet in regard to at least two points; they drink wine, and in their arts they depict both human beings and animals; yet they are not a nation of drunkards, and the images they paint and carve have little or no connexion with their faith. With Christians it was otherwise; their history was bound up with countless memories of individuals, and while it cannot rightly be said that the sum of their devotion was divided among many objects, yet, in their worship of those they supremely revered, their doctrine taught them of the constant presence of those who before themselves had died for the faith, of the nameless millions who waited for them on the threshold of heaven, worshipping with them and praying for them in the Communion of Saints, and most of all of those whom they themselves had known on earth and who were gone before to the place of refreshment, light, and peace. The Latin mind was never imaginative; the Greek intelligence had ceased to be; and to unimaginative minds some representation of the thing believed is all but necessary to belief. Half a lifetime spent among the people of the south has convinced me that, in spite of all that northern writers have said to the contrary, the Italian peasant never really confounds the image with the holy person, divine or human, whom it represents. He may call the image miraculous, and to those who do not understand his mode of expressing himself, it may indeed seem that he is attributing supernatural powers to the wood and stone; but a few questions asked in his own language and in terms comprehensible to him, will suffice to convince any fair inquirer that he
looks upon the matter very differently. The souls of the departed blessed, he says, are in paradise; they may be moved by prayer to intercede for man, and, as if retaining some of their earthly attributes, they may prefer that men should address them, when possible, in places which their lives and deaths, or their especial choice, may have more particularly indicated. The peasant who makes a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady at Pompeii, or of Saint Michael on Monte Gargano, speaks as if he were going to see the Mother of God, or the Archangel, in their bodily reality; but in real truth he goes to places which he believes they have especially chosen, with the hope of awakening his sluggish imagination by the sight of revered images and objects in the company of many of his fellows. To destroy those images, even when the places wherein they are preserved are not consecrated, would be to attack his right of stimulating his imagination in the manner most natural to him. If such an edict as that issued by Leo the Isaurian were proclaimed in the south to‑day, it would produce results that might surprise the world. It is no wonder that in the beginning of the eighth century it should have led to a revolution which established the independence of the temporal power of Rome for many centuries to come. Leo indeed published his edict, but Pope Gregory the Second solemnly declared in a papal bull that the emperor was not concerned in such matters and had no right to decide what belief should be held by the Church; and by way of enforcing theory by practice, he forbade his people in Rome and in Italy to pay taxes to the emperor. The latter retorted boldly by deposing the Pope, so far as a mere written declaration could accomplish such a momentous undertaking. Leo wrote his decree, but the whole militia of Naples and of Venice assembled without delay to protect the Pope. The emperor attempted to enforce his will with a fleet and an army, but the Italians stood by the Pope to a man, and the Lombards of the north took up arms in his defence. The emperor’s troops were everywhere repulsed, and their leaders were put to death; the ancient factions and feuds of the Italian cities were forgotten, and the people united to fight side by side for the holy images. At Ravenna, which was the seat of the imperial exarchate, the fighting was long and fierce; the army of Leo was beaten on land and sought a fancied safety in the ships of the imperial fleet; but the people pursued them in small craft and fishing-boats and skiffs, and in a single day the river Po was dyed so deeply red with Byzantine blood that for six years the people would not taste of its fish. Failing in arms, the emperor made more than one attempt to assassinate his stout opponent; but the Pope was secure in the protection of his fellow-countrymen and thundered a general and major excommunication against his defeated adversaries. Gregory the Second could have assumed the reins of independent government had he chosen to do so; or perhaps Liutprand, the Lombard king, might have taken Rome for himself and reëstablished an Italian kingdom. But the skilful diplomacy of Gregory the Second turned his strong ally from the path of conquest on the one hand, and on the other, he did not choose to inflict useless humiliation upon his imperial adversary. The emperor’s exarch was suffered to live unmolested in Ravenna, and to enjoy some outward semblance of a departed power. Having been beaten by sea and land, driven to an ignominious flight, and tacitly included under the ban of excommunication, Leo was nevertheless afterwards designated as Piissimus, the Most Pious, and Rome, liberated from imperial oppression, allowed herself to be ruled in the name of the emperors. And so the administration continued to be exercised until another pope crowned Charles the Great as first emperor of a new Western line.
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1432