ST. ZACHARY.

741-752.

 

Emperor. Constantine V (Copronymus), 741-775.

KINGS. Liutprand, 712-744. Hildeprand (alone), 744 Ratchis, 744-749.  Aistulf, 749-757.

ExarchS. Eutychius 727-752. (apparently the last of the exarchs).

                        

On the very day of the death of Gregory III (December 10), according to Duchesne, but, according to others, four days after the burial of Pope Gregory, viz., on Sunday, December 3,741, Zachary, a Greek, the son of Polychronius, was consecrated Bishop of Rome. It need scarcely be pointed out that, from the shortness of the vacancy of the Holy See in this case, there can have been no reference to exarch or emperor in connection with the election and consecration of Zachary. Of the new Pope we are informed, by the Book of the Popes, that he was a man of extraordinary suavity—a trait in his character which his success in dealing with his Lombard foes may well incline us to believe—a lover of the clergy and people in Rome, slow to anger, quick to forgive, and never returning evil for evil. On the contrary, returning good for evil, he even, after he became Pope, honored and enriched those who had opposed him. Although regarding this description of the character of Zachary as a stereotyped ‘official eulogium’, Gregorovius allows, “with respect, at least, to the benefits acquired for the Church, the tribute in the case of Zachary to have been well deserved”.

Doubtless one of the principal reasons why the consecra­tion of Zachary took place with such little delay was the critical state of affairs between the Romans and the Lombards. We left Liutprand, angry with both the Romans and the Lombards of Spoleto and Beneventum, preparing to subdue both; and Transamund false to his engagements to help the Romans to recover ‘the four cities’. The first thing that the new Pope did was to send an embassy to Liutprand, to beg him to restore the cities. Liutprand promised to do so; and in return the Pope sent the forces of the duchy to help the king against the faithless Transamund.

But after Transamund had been disposed of (he had been made a cleric), and his ‘kingdom given to another’, Liutprand imitated his example and would not move in the matter of restoring the cities. Accordingly Zachary resolved to interview the Lombard king in person. With a number of his clergy in his train, the Pope set out boldly for Interamna (Terni), where Liutprand was then staying. Arrived at Orte, the Pope was met by an envoy of the king, who escorted Zachary to Narni, the key of the valley of the Nera or Nar. On the great Flaminian road, eight miles from Narni, the Pope encountered Liutprand himself, who walked respectfully—in ejus obsequium—by Zachary’s side, and likewise his nobles and a large number of his troops. The king and the Pope, we are told, prayed and conversed together; and then Zachary urged peace. Liutprand agreed, and gave back ‘the said four cities with their inhabitants’ to the Pope. He also restored the Sabine patrimony, which had been lost for thirty years, and Narni, Osimo, Ancona, Humana, and the valley which is called Great, by the title of donation to Blessed Peter himself, the Prince of the Apostles, concluded a treaty for twenty years with the Roman duchy, and set free the Roman captives in his dominions. Before leaving the king, Zachary, at his request, consecrated a new bishop for Terni(?), as some maintain. On the Sunday the two dined together, and so merry was the meal, that Liutprand declared that he had never had such a glorious dinner before. The next day the Pope set out for Rome, taking possession, en route, of the four cities, which officers of Liutprand, who escorted the Pope, caused to be handed over to him. Zachary entered Rome in triumph; and to thank God for His mercies, ordered a solemn procession from the Church of Our Lady ‘ad Martyres’ (the Pantheon) to St. Peter’s (741 or the beginning of 742).

Into all this affair it is the personal element only which enters. We have on the one hand the commanding personal influence of Zachary, and on the other a Lombard king moved to acts, if not of generosity, at least of justice, by considerations of which the Pope was the sole center. Liutprand had no respect for the Iconoclast emperor at Constantinople, and the only thought he gave to that emperor’s Italian dominions was to consider how he himself might best obtain possession of them. Hence what was his by the right of the spear he gave up, not to the emperor, who with his image-breaking propensities was quite at a discount with all parties in the Italian peninsula, but to the Pope personally. Pope Zachary was practically a king by consent of Liutprand. In all these transactions there is no mention of either emperor or Roman Republic. Liutprand and Zachary are the only parties concerned. As far as the former was concerned, the rule of the Byzantine in Italy was at an end. And had it not been for Pope Zachary, there is no doubt that Liutprand the Lombard; like Theodoric the Goth, would have ruled in Rome and Ravenna.

Liutprand advances against Ravenna, 744

Zachary had not yet finished with the Lombards. In against 743 Liutprand began to make preparations for the final reduction of Ravenna. Convinced of their powerlessness to resist the old Lombard warrior, the exarch, the archbishop of Ravenna (John), and the people sent to entreat the Pope to hasten to their aid. As the embassy that Zachary at once sent off with presents to Liutprand failed in its object, the Pope himself, after entrusting the government of the city to the Duke Stephen, “like a true shepherd hurried off to save the sheep who were in danger of perishing”. Whilst on their journey to Ravenna, the Pope and his companions were, it is said, in answer, as we are assured, to their fervent prayers to St. Peter, protected every day from the heat of the sun by a cloud, which disappeared every evening. The Pope was met by the exarch at the Church of St. Christopher, at a place—not now known—called ‘ad Aquila’, about fifty miles from Ravenna. When Zachary drew near the city, all the inhabitants poured forth to welcome him, crying out with tears in their eyes, “Welcome to our Shepherd, who has left his own sheep and come to save us who are on the point of perishing”.

The first thing the Pope did on his arrival at Ravenna was to dispatch messengers to the Lombard king to announce his coming. When they reached the Lombard borders at Imola, they found that orders had been given not to allow the Pope to pass. During the night they contrived that notice of this should be sent to the Pope. So far from being daunted by this news, Zachary left Ravenna (Saturday, June 22, 743), and, soon striking the straight Aemilian Way, he reached Placentia, June 28. Here he was met by many of the Lombard nobility, who had been sent by Liutprand to receive the Pope, though he had refused to see Zachary’s messengers. Thus escorted, the Pope pushed on to Pavia, which he entered the same day, after having said Mass at three o'clock in the afternoon (as was usual on fast days) in the Church of St. Peter, outside the walls. On the Monday (June 30), after a great deal of opposition, Zachary carried his point; and Liutprand agreed to give up the parts around Ravenna that were in his hands, and two-thirds of the district of Cesena. The remaining part, and Cesena itself, he was to keep in pledge till June 1, 744, by which time his ambassadors would have returned from Constantinople, whither, as Bartolini thinks, they were sent by Liutprand to have this treaty of peace ratified.

When the Pope left Pavia, Liutprand sent a number of his nobles with him, to see that the recently conquered territory should be restored to its owners. Zachary, on his return to Rome, ‘with all the people’, sung a Mass of thanksgiving for the success of his enterprise, begging of God to save the people of Ravenna and Rome from any further oppression on the part of the persecuting intriguer Liutprand. “His prayers”, adds his biographer, “were heard by the divine clemency”, for Liutprand died in January 744. Further, “there was joy” not only among the Ravennese and Romans, but even among the Lombards themselves, when Hildeprand, Liutprand’s nephew (who had been associated with him in the kingdom in 735), who was evilly disposed to them, was expelled the kingdom, and Ratchis (Duke of Friuli) was chosen in his stead”. To the new king the Pope sent an embassy at once, and, “out of reverence for the Prince of the Apostles”, he granted a peace for twenty years—a peace which well-nigh cost Ratchis dear. It caused many of the Lombard nobles to ally themselves with Aistulf, his brother, with a view of his seizing the reins of government. It is not, therefore, matter for surprise that, with such a warlike spirit rife among the chief men in his kingdom, Ratchis was driven, willy-nilly, into breaking the peace he had made. In the year 749, doubtless in the spring, his armies both poured into the Pentapolis and invested Perugia. Without any delay, the Pope, taking with him a few of the clergy and nobility, hastened to Perugia, again determined to try the effect of his personal influence. And again was he successful. His presents and eloquent entreaties so prevailed on Ratchis that he drew off his armies. Like St. Leo I, twice had he saved Rome from the barbarian. Nor did the effect of his eloquence end there. Soon afterwards Ratchis resigned his crown, and from the Pope’s own hand received, along with his wife and daughter, the monastic habit, following the example of Carloman. As we might have expected, his fierce brother Aistulf was elected in his stead, June 749.

St. Boniface writes to congratulate Zachary on his election, 742

To retain, as far as consistent with clearness, the chronological order of events, and because Zachary’s dealings with Boniface are as important as any of the events of his pontificate, we may here with advantage take up the thread of the history of St. Boniface, ‘the envoy (missus) of St. Peter”, as he is called in a capitulary of Carloman. As soon as he heard of the accession of Zachary, Boniface wrote at once to express to him his great pleasure at his (Zachary’s) election, and to assure him that he hoped to be as obedient a servant of his (Zachary’s) as he had been of his predecessors, and to bring all his converts to the same obedience. He then went on to ask the Pope to confirm the three bishoprics of Wurtzburg, Buraburg and Erfurt, which he had established in Germany, to the end that “present or future generations might not presume to interfere with these dioceses or violate the commands of the Apostolic See”.

Zachary is then informed that Carlomann, duke of the Franks, wanted Boniface to hold a synod in that part of the kingdom of the Franks which was under his control, and had promised to do all in his power to reform ecclesiastical discipline, which for some sixty or seventy years had been neglected. To carry out his design, Carlomann was anxious for the sanction of the apostolic authority. “As the older men declare, it is more than eighty years ago since the Franks held a synod, had an archbishop, or made or renewed laws for any church. Most of the sees have been handed over to laymen eager for gain, or to immoral clerics to enjoy in a worldly way. If I am to carry out the duke’s wishes, I desire to have behind me the power of the Apostolic See”. Boniface next asked the Pope what steps he should take against immoral bishops, or against such as were given to drink, hunting, or fighting in battle.

In accordance with permission granted by Gregory III, as Zachary knows, inasmuch as the permission was given in his presence, Boniface had elected a successor. Now, however, he wishes to get leave to choose another, as a feud had sprung up between the one first elected and the Prince.

Boniface has to complain of various abuses which, under pretense of permission from the apostolic See, or of doing as they do in Rome, certain people wish to practice in Germany. For instance, certain stupid Bavarians and Franks think that they can practice all sorts of pagan superstitions, because in Rome, under the very eyes of the Pope, they have seen or heard, on the first of January, choruses singing pagan and sacrilegious songs through the streets, pagan feasts, women bind­ing their arms and legs in pagan fashion with amulets, and offering the same for sale, and other heathen rites. The Pope is urged to stop these customs.

Immoral bishops who have returned from Rome, saying that they have obtained permission to celebrate, Boniface has resisted, because he has never heard that the apostolic See has given decisions against the canons. To show his devotion to the Pope, he sends him, as a present, a little gold and silver and a hairy towel for the feet—an article we find that Boniface was very fond of sending to his friends.

Reply of Zachary to Boniface

To this, to us most interesting letter, Zachary returned an answer (April 1, 742?) such as might have been expected. He approves of the erection of the three sees, says he has sent ‘letters of confirmation’ to each of the three candidates, permits Boniface to be present at the synod, and, by virtue of the apostolic authority, exhorts him on no account to allow unworthy bishops to perform the functions of the episcopal office. The Pope, however, forbids Boniface to appoint his successor during his life-time, as such a proceeding is wholly against the canons; but, as a great personal favor, the Pope will ordain the one whom, on his death-bed, in the presence of all, Boniface may designate as his successor.

Zachary next assures Boniface that he has put an end to all pagan customs on the 1st of January, and that his predecessor and father had also issued a decree against them. After approving of the action of Boniface in the matter of those immoral bishops who had, of course, falsely pretended to have been granted indulgence at Rome, Zachary concludes by telling the archbishop to refer to him what difficulties he cannot settle by the canons, and assuring him that he (the Pope) has such love for him that he would be glad to have him ever by his side.

The holding of a synod was part of a scheme of reform inaugurated by Boniface for the whole Frankish kingdom, which both Carlomann and Pippin, who ruled respectively over Austrasia and Neustria, were eager to carry out. The wholesale decay of morals, which years of internal and external wars had engendered, and which the reckless confiscation of Church property and the barefaced bestowal of ecclesiastical offices on his soldiers indulged in by Charles Martel had greatly increased, called for immediate attention. Accordingly a synod, in which all the ecclesiastics in Carlomann’s realm were present, was held under the presidency of Boniface, as legate of the Pope. The place at which this synod met is not known for certain. It was held April 21, 742.

The Synod of Liftinae, 743

Carlomann, who was present at the synod along with many of his nobles, gave to its decrees the force of public law. These decrees provided for the holding of synods every year, and for the punishment of bad priests, forbade clerics to wear the dress of laymen, or fight on the field of battle, and ordered priests to obey their bishops.

In accordance with the decree of this synod of 742, relative to the annual holding of synods, there was assembled at Liftinae (often on inferior authority called Liptinae) again, in the dominion of Carlomann, a second synod, March 1, 743. From the fragments of the acts that have come down to us, we see that the first thing done was that the bishops, counts and prefects confirmed the acts of the previous synod and promised to stand by them. Various other decrees were passed to regulate the morals of clergy and laity, and to prevent the sale of Christian slaves to the heathen, or the practice of pagan rites. Illustrative of the unsettled state of the times was a decree to allow those who were holding confiscated Church lands still to retain them, on condition of paying a specified sum of money, owing to impending war. In the month of August of the same year Hartbert took to Rome letters to the Pope from Carlomann, Pippin and Boniface, in which, as may be gathered from the Pope’s reply, for the originals appear to be lost, Zachary was informed of the holding of the council, and asked to send palliums to Grimo, Abel and Hartbert, archbishops respectively of Rouen, Rheims, and Sens. In his answer to Boniface, Zachary says that he has sent the desired palliums, and also letters on the use of the pallium, to the prelates in question, and praises him for having condemned “two false prophets in the province of the Franks”, and put them in prison. The said false prophets were two heretics who claimed to be bishops. One a Frank, Adalbert by name, professed, not unlike Mahomet and Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, to have received from heaven by angelic hands letters and relics, had himself worshipped, distributed his hair and nails as relics to his infatuated followers, and taught correspondingly outrageous doctrines. Clement, the other heretical opponent of St. Boniface, went astray in the matter of morals both in theory and practice; and in dogma held that when Our Lord '’descended into hell’, he did not leave any one there (where by ‘hell’ he included the abode of the lost as well as that of the souls of the just who were waiting for the coming of Christ), denied the Catholic rule of faith, viz.. Scripture and Tradition, as interpreted by the living voice of the Church, and erred on the matter of predestination and other fundamental truths of Catholic teaching.

Boniface hints at simony in Rome, 743(?).

Before the last cited letter of the Pope reached Boniface, he had sent off another to the Pope, in which he only asked for one pallium, viz., for Grimo of Rouen, and hinted at some simoniacal practices. Unfortunately Boniface’s letter is not forthcoming. Replying to this letter on November 5, 743 or 744, Zachary expresses his astonishment at the demand for only one pallium, and adds: “In your letter we find what has greatly upset us. You speak as though we ... which God forbid, and our clergy had fallen into the heresy of Simon Magus, and had compelled those to whom we sent palliums to give us money. But we exhort you, dearest brother, never again write to us in that strain. To impute to us what we thoroughly detest, is to treat us very injuriously. The three palliums which, at your suggestion, we were asked for, as well as the letters of confirmation and instruction, we have granted without receiving anything from anybody”. In conclusion, so little was the Pope displeased at the plain speaking of our saint, that the sphere of Boniface’s action was enlarged by the Pope. Jurisdiction was given to him over all Gaul.

Through the unceasing energy of Boniface, who at once took advantage of his extended legatine powers, there were renewed in Neustria, at a synod 2 of Soissons (March 2, 744), the decrees that had already been passed in the synods in Austrasia. But corruption was more deep-seated in Neustria. There were the worldly bishops—such as Milo of Rheims, whom Abel had been elected to succeed, but who was too strong to be dislodged—whom Charles Martel had intruded into the various Sees; and the introduction of reform was stoutly resisted. Carlomann and Pippin were, however, m earnest in the matter, and by their united efforts a council was held in 745, at which bishops from both parts of the kingdom were present. With regard to this synod, we are about as much in the dark as we are with the others at which St. Boniface presided or which he summoned. Indeed, some authors identify this synod with that of Liftinae. Among the other deeds of this council seem to have been the condemnation of Adalbert and Clement, whom we have seen imprisoned by St. Boniface to await their trial at a council; the deposition of Gervilio (Gewilieb), archbishop of Mayence, for having assassinated the man who had killed his father; and the excommunication of various clerics for irregular life. To establish proper canonical jurisdiction, it was decided that Boniface should have a fixed metropolitan See; and as the See of Cologne was vacant and was thought to be suitable, for it was on the border of country still pagan, it was resolved that the Pope be asked to sanction Cologne as a metropolitan See.

In fine, from a letter which St. Boniface about this time wrote to Cuthbert; Archbishop of Canterbury, we learn that the council subscribed to a profession of faith and proclaimed their loyalty to the See of Rome. “Our synod declared that to the end of their lives they wished to preserve Catholic faith and unity and subjection to the Roman Church, to St. Peter and his Vicar. We also decreed that metropolitans should ask for their palliums from that See, and that we would, in accordance with canon law, follow in all things the decrees of Blessed Peter, that we might be numbered among the sheep entrusted to his care”. The sequel of this letter shows that the decrees issued in preceding councils for the reformation of discipline were renewed in this general synod of the Franks.

Zachary is thankful for the holding of this Synod, 745

As soon as the Pope received word of this council, in a letter addressed to “all the bishops, priests, deacons and abbots; and to all the dukes, counts, and God-fearing men throughout the Gauls and provinces of the Franks”, Zachary thanks God that the synod he had ordered had been held, through the help of their princes, Pippin and Carlomann, and the agency of his vicar Boniface; he exhorts them to persevere in their obedience to Boniface, who is acting in his stead, and in assembling in synod every year; and finally promises them victory over their pagan foes, if they put in practice the decrees of reform which they have passed.

The next step taken by Zachary was to call a council of seven bishops of Sees in the immediate neighborhood of Rome. This synod was held in the basilica of Theodore (afterwards the oratory of St, Venantius), in the Lateran Palace, October 25, 745. With the bishops were seventeen priests of the Roman church—among whom we find three Stephens, one of whom, at least, doubtless sat on the chair of Peter. A rather more detailed account of this synod will perhaps be found interesting. When the bishops and priests were assembled, the book of the Gospels in their midst, with the deacons and inferior clergy standing round, Gregory, the regionary, notary, and nomenclator, said: “The priest Deneard, the envoy of the most holy Boniface, archbishop of the province of Germany, is without, and craves admittance. What are your wishes?”.

On this, Deneard was allowed to enter, and said: “My Lord! when in obedience to your orders my master, Bishop Boniface, had assembled a synod in the province of the Franks, and had exposed the heresies of Adalbert and Clement, they were deposed; and, acting in harmony with the princes of the Franks, he has put them in prison. However, they remain impenitent and continue to seduce the people. Hence I present you this letter of my masters, that you may make it binding in council”.

In obedience to orders, the notary and treasurer Theophanius read the said letter, in which Boniface informed the Pope that, since the council which he had held by his orders, he had had a great deal to put up with from bad priests, and especially from Adalbert and Clement, “men unlike in their errors but equal in crime”. Zachary is therefore asked himself to condemn these men, that the people may the more readily leave their errors. What those errors, as well of abstract dogma as of practical morality, were, we have already seen, so that there is no need of repeating their enumeration by further extracts from this letter. The reading of this document of the archbishop brought the first session to a close. In the next session, after the reading of Adalbert’s wild autobiography, and of the letter which, written to him by Our Lord, had dropped from heaven, the Pope remarked that only those with the minds of women or children could pay any attention to writings of that description. In the third session a prayer was read which Adalbert had written to himself, and in which angels with names, such as Uriel, Raguel, etc., were invoked. Zachary ordered these extraordinary productions to be stored in the archives of the church, and the synod declared the two heretics degraded, and, along with their followers, anathematized.

A few days after the synod was over, the Pope wrote to Boniface, bidding him not to be disheartened if the enemy had oversown with cockle the field in which he had about labored so hard, sympathizing with him on the damage which a late inroad of barbarians had wrought in his flock by reminding him that the ‘Roman state’ has often been depopulated by like causes, congratulating him on the great synod he had held, approving of the establish­ment of Cologne as his metropolitical See, replying to various questions about the rebaptising of heretics, etc., which Boniface had asked him in three different letters, and sending him a copy of the condemnation of Adalbert and Clement in the hope that those who heard it read would give up their impiety.

Adalbert and Clement, either in their own persons or through their friends, apparently put forward some plea why judgment should be stayed. For on January 5, 747, the Pope wrote to Boniface to tell him that he had sent answers to different questions on the subjects of clerics and matrimony propounded to him by Pippin; and that, at the synod that he (Boniface) must call to make the answers public, he was to summon the two sacrilegious and contumacious ex-bishops Adalbert and Clement, that their cause might be again thoroughly sifted. If, on being convicted of error, they show themselves wishful to turn to the right path, the synod and the prince of the province are to treat them as they think proper, in accordance with the canons. If, on the other hand, they continue with proud obstinacy to proclaim their innocence, they are to be sent with two or three most prudent and upright priests to the Pope, who will thoroughly investigate their cause himself and treat them as they may deserve. As to what finally became of these men history is silent. Adalbert at least, as the Pope himself observed in the synod at Rome, was certainly insane; so that it is to be hoped that some milder asylum than a prison was found for him.

In the midst of all his difficulties, Boniface had a firm friend in the Pope. In the letters that he wrote to Boniface there were always kind words of encouragement, and in the letters that he wrote to other bishops he always supported the authority of Boniface, reminding them that their archbishop was acting for him, that is, for Blessed Peter. He would not send another to hold councils and represent the Apostolic See whilst Boniface lived. In every way Zachary showed himself a hearty cooperator in the work Boniface was about.

And certainly that help was needed. Boniface was beset by ignorant or malicious opponents. One of these foes is more particularly well known from an idea that, as a man very much in advance of his age, he taught the existence of the antipodes; and that the Pope in his ignorance condemned the said teaching. The facts of the case are these. In the letter just quoted the Pope writes: “I understand from your letter that Virgilius (I forget whether he was described as a priest) has been acting maliciously against you, because you showed that he had wandered from true Catholic teaching, trying to make enmity between you and Odilo, Duke of Bavaria. Nor is it true, as he says, that he has been absolved by me so that he may obtain the diocese of the deceased bishop, who was one of the four that you consecrated in Bavaria. If it be true, moreover, that he teaches that beneath the earth there is another world and other men, call a council, excommunicate him, and (if he be a priest) deprive him of his dignity. We have, however, ourselves written to the duke about Virgil, and sent a letter to the latter summoning him to appear before us, that he may be condemned, if, after a careful examination, he be found to err in his teaching”.

The above passage contains all that is known of the teaching of Virgil relative to ‘another world’. It cannot, therefore, be stated with any degree of certainty whether, arguing from the rotundity of the world, he simply inferred the existence of antipodes, or whether he went a step further and argued, on the old pagan lines for the existence of antipodeans, who constituted an entirely different race of men, not descended from Adam. If Virgil confined himself to the first conclusion, he would not have been condemned by the Pope; but if he taught the second, he would, as that conclusion is opposed to the teaching of the Church on the redemption of all men by Our Lord. And here it may be observed in general, that, despite all the assertions of her rash critics to the contrary, the Church does not attempt to condemn the legitimate conclusions of science from its own data in its own domain. The Church only raises her protest when scientific conclusions are introduced into the realm of theology, and scientific data are made to take the place of theological data.

Boniface fixes his metropolical see at Mayence, 751

Already, in his letter of May 1, 748, the Pope speaks of Boniface as then residing not at Cologne, but at Mayence. He gives as the reason of this that the ‘Franks had not kept their promise’. Three years later, in response to the united wishes of Boniface himself and that of the ‘sons of the Franks’, Zachary issued a decree to Boniface, in which he decided that, “by the authority of Blessed Peter, the Church of Mayence be for ever the metropolitical See of you and your successors, and that it have subject to it the five cities of Tongres, Cologne, Worms, Spires and Utrecht, and all the nations of Germany, to whom, by your preaching, you have brought the light of Christ”.

In one of the last letters that Boniface sent to Zachary, he wrote : “In the midst of a vast solitude there is a woody spot, in the midst of which I have built a monastery, and placed therein monks of the order of St. Benedict, men who lead a very strict life, abstaining from flesh and wine, and working with their own hands. This place was the gift particularly of Carlomann, once Prince of the Franks. I have dedicated it to Our Saviour. Thither, with your consent, I would retire for a few days at a time to recruit the strength of my aged frame, and there would I like to lie after my death”. The monastery here spoken of is the famous monastery of Fulda, one of the greatest centers of learning in Germany in the Middle Ages.

In his reply (November 4, 751) to this letter of Boniface, the Pope says that he has granted Boniface’s request in the matter of the monastery; and there is extant the brief by which Zachary frees the monastery from subjection to any jurisdiction but that of Rome. This exemption Boniface then managed to get confirmed by Pippin, ‘King of the Franks’, for the “love of God and the veneration he bore St. Peter”. Here, once again, must we leave the narrative of St. Boniface’s connection with the See of Rome (a see with which it was his one wish always to be on the best of terms)  to conclude it under the Life of Pope Stephen (II) III.

In seeking for the causes of the wonderful success achieved by our great countryman “among the races of Germany to whom he was sent”, there is no doubt that, apart from his burning zeal and his capacity for work, which for so many years he strained to its utmost tension, one of the chief ones was the amiability of his character. This it was before which opposition melted away, this made all wishful to work with him, this attached all men to him. Not only was he beloved by the popes, who, as we have seen, would have had him always with them, but he was dear to the whole Roman Church. Its deacons and its archdeacons were constantly writing to him the kindest of letters, and sending him presents. He had the greatest influence with the ‘Princes of the Franks’, who ever showed themselves ready to do all he wanted; and the people of his country, whether men or women, were always most devoted to him. Every letter that is addressed to him is full of affectionate language. Hence, not unnaturally, is one loath to leave the delightful collection of his letters and those of his friends.

In the early part of the year 742 Zachary sent legates to Constantine V with letters, as well for the emperor as for the Church of Constantinople. The emperor was exhorted to restore the holy images, and the Church of Constantinople was put in receipt of the Pope’s synodical letter or profession of faith. On their arrival in Constantinople, the legates found that Constantine V was no longer in power there. Taking advantage of his absence on a campaign against the Saracens, his brother-in-law, the orthodox Artavasdus, took possession of the imperial city, and had himself crowned towards the close of the year 741. The papal ambassadors were prudent enough not to recognize the usurper, but in retirement awaited the issue of events. It was not long before Constantine appeared with an army before his capital, and by November 743 Byzantium was in his hands and the cause of Artavasdus was lost. Pleased at the action of the Pope’s legates, Constantine had them sought out, and for once showed himself well disposed to the Church of Rome. For in accordance with the expressed wish of the Pope, the emperor, in writing, granted to Zachary and the Roman Church for ever the two estates known by the names of Nympha and Normia (now Norma), which had till then remained in the hands of the emperor. These two estates were of very considerable value; and it has been suggested that Constantine wished to make some compensation for the confiscation of the Calabrian and Sicilian patrimonies.

But Zachary had not much communication with the East, at least as far as our knowledge goes. Such as he had was confined to writing to the emperor from time to time, to beg him to give up his persecution of ‘image worship’ and its adherents. Whilst Zachary was Pope, Constantine V was so much occupied, first with the rebellion of Artavasdus and then with the ravages of a great plague, that he had not much leisure to attend to the image controversy, or the relations between them might have been more frequent than pleasant. For the persecution against those who dared to oppose the imperial will in the matter of the ‘images’ still went on; and unless he has been very much maligned by Theophanes, Constantine’s character seems to have been on a par with his nickname, Copronymus.

Synod at Rome, 743

Whilst pushing on reform in the Frankish kingdom through his legate Boniface, the Pope did not neglect to attend to needed reforms at home. In the autumn of 743 he presided over a synod of some forty bishops, twenty-two priests and six deacons, in which fifteen decrees were promulgated. These decrees regulated various points of discipline in connection with bishops, priests and nuns; forbade marriages within certain degrees of kindred; anathematized those who kept the 1st of January and the 25th of December (the feast of Bacchus) after the pagan fashion, as well as those who sold Christian slaves to the Jews; and ordered disputes between clerics to be settled by the bishops or by the Pope, and that all bishops who are subject to the Pope (as patriarch of the West) come ‘ad limina apostolorum’ (viz., to Rome, to the Pope), if near at hand, every year on the 15th of May, but if they reside at a distance, in accordance with their ‘indult’.

One of the events that made the greatest stir in Zachary’s reign, not only in Rome, but over a large part of Europe, was the arrival (747) in the Eternal City of the great and successful Prince of the Franks, Carlomann, to become a monk. His departure for Rome and his becoming a monk is noted in chronicle after chronicle. The influence of St. Boniface upon him had been very great, and under it he strove to advance in virtue day by day. But as he felt that he could not make that progress towards perfection which he wished whilst still ‘in the world’, he chose, continues the biographer of St. Boniface, “the best part, which shall not be taken away from him” (St. Luke X. 42). That is to say, he determined to embrace the religious life. According to one chronicle, his desire to leave the world was quickened by the reflection of the thousands of men who had fallen in the wars he had had to undertake. However that may be, he entrusted his kingdom and his son to the charge of his brother Pippin, and, with a numerous train of followers, bearing considerable presents for the Pope from both Pippin and himself, betook him to Rome, and at the hands of Pope Zachary received the clerical tonsure and the habit of a monk. At first he withdrew to Mount Soracte, some twenty-eight miles from Rome, to a monastery which he had himself built, and which may still be seen.

“He there enjoyed for several years the repose he sought for, in company with the brothers of the order (Benedictine) who had gone with him. He was, however, obliged to change his place of residence, because many of the Frankish nobility, when making pilgrimages to Rome to fulfill their vows, broke, by their frequent visits to him, that quiet which he most of all desired, since they were unwilling to pass by unnoticed one who had formerly been their king. As constant interruptions of this sort hindered the object of his retirement, he betook himself (by the advice of the Pope) to the monastery of St. Benedict on Mount Cassino, in the province of Samnium, and there passed the remainder of his life in religious exercises”. The last remark of Charlemagne’s famous biographer is, as we shall see later, not quite accurate. At the bidding of his abbot Gratianus, he left his monastery in the year 753, and went to France to try to ward off from the said monastery the destruction with which the Lombard king Aistulfus threatened it. He died at a monastery in Vienne in 755.

In the same year in which he bestowed the monastic habit on Carlomann, Zachary was working for an improvement in morals in England. Informed of the decay in discipline that began to set in after the death of the great archbishop Theodore, the Pope ordered a council to be held, and those who should oppose its decrees to be anathematized. The letters of the Pope conveying these orders are lost, but of their former existence and purport the opening words of the council itself assure us. The synod was opened with the reading of two letters received from the Pope, “who was held in reverence by the whole world”. These letters were read “as the Pope had himself ordered, with the greatest care, first in Latin and then in an English translation. In these writings he admonished the people of this island, lovingly exhorted them, and finally threatened to cut off from the communion of the Church, all who should despise his warning and obstinately persist in their wickedness”. There assembled (September 747) at the council, held at Cloveshoe, which some think to have been a town near Rochester, and others Abingdon, then known as Sheovsham, some dozen Bishops and a considerable number of ecclesiastics, Ethelbald, King of Mercia, and thirty-three of his chief nobility. Over thirty canons were drawn up for the reform of the clergy and monastic bodies, for the better rendering of the divine service, and for the general advancement of piety. Hence every effort was ordered to be made to foster a love of study and the Holy Scriptures; and in whatever regarded the Mass and the sacred chant, all were commanded to follow the customs and teachings ‘of the Roman Church’. Altogether the decrees of Cloveshoe were of a most useful and practical order. Well worthy are they of being read and studied at any time. They cannot fail to have been productive of good in the eighth century.

Zachary consecrates the new basilica of Monte Cassino, 748

The year 748 is a most important one in the history of monasticism. In that year was completed the restoration of Monte Cassino, the chief seat of the greatest religious order that has ever graced and strengthened the Church—the Benedictine. The work, begun by the abbot Petronax under the auspices of Gregory II, was continued by the same zealous monk with the aid of Gregory III, and completed with such munificent assistance from Pope Zachary, that the credit of the entire restoration was assigned to him. Attended by thirteen archbishops and sixty-eight bishops, Zachary performed the dedication ceremony, venerated the bodies of St. Benedict and his sister St. Scholastica, confirmed the various donations and possessions of the monastery, exempted the abbot from any episcopal jurisdiction, except from that of Rome, granted him certain of the honors that are usually confined to bishops, and himself gave various presents to the monastery. Besides a copy of the Holy Scriptures—his copy of the Gospels is said to be still preserved there—he presented the abbey with the copy of his rule, which St. Benedict had written out with his own hand, and his weight for the bread and his measure for the wine which the saint allowed his monks. These precious memorials of their founder the monks had saved from the first destruction of their monastery under Zoto and his Lombards. Presented by them (the monks) to Pope Gregory II, as an act of gratitude for the kindness they had received at the hands of the popes during their sojourn in Rome, these interesting mementos were thus restored to them by Zachary. The bull of Zachary, dated February 18, from Aquino, on the strength of which some of the above statements with regard to Monte Cassino and the Pope rest, has been rejected by Muratori, Jaffé and others as spurious. It has been received here as, to say the least of it, many of the arguments against its genuineness have been disproved by Troya.

By another bull bearing the same date as the previous one, Zachary confirmed the rule of St. Benedict, ordered the feasts of SS. Benedict, Scholastica and Maurus to be kept by the community as doubles of the first class, i.e., with the same solemnity as Christmas Day.

Over the authenticity especially of the first of these bulls there has been a fierce controversy—a controversy in which not a few among the best of modern historians have been engaged. We allude, of course, to the famous dispute as to whether the body of St. Benedict was or was not in the seventh century (672 or 673) removed by some Gallic monks from Monte Cassino to Fleury by the Loire. Discussion on this topic has been going on for the greater part of a thousand years; and when last summer (1901) we visited what still remains of the once glorious abbey of Fleury (viz., a fine romanesque church), we were assured that the French monks had at length settled the discussion, and that it was now acknowledged at Monte Cassino that the relics of St. Benedict which we were shown in the crypt were really the body of the great patriarch of Monasticism in the West! To those who are disposed to sneer at such lengthy and ardent discussion on such subjects, and to brand them as sterile, we would point out that this and similar disputes have at least done a very great deal to sift the sources of history, and have even led to historical discoveries. Into the arena of this controversy we have no thought of entering, either to take sides or even to arbitrate. The monks of St. Benedict are doughty literary champions, and we will leave them to settle their literary difficulties themselves. We will simply observe that if the bull of Pope Zachary, Omnipotenti Deo, can be urged as proving that the body of St. Benedict was at Monte Cassino on the date of its publication (748), there is a letter of the same Pope, written in 750-1, and seemingly more likely to be genuine than the aforesaid bull, in which he exhorts the clergy of France to cause the body of St. Benedict to be restored whence it had been taken. Of the rest of this letter, which treats of Pippin and Grifo, something will be said when Zachary’s connections with the Franks come to be treated of.

Now that a beginning has been made of treating of the work of Church restoration by Zachary, it will be convenient to mention here the rest of his labors in that direction. For though in his days the people entrusted to him by God lived in peace and happiness, there was so much to be done, in the way of keeping existing monuments in repair, that even an energetic Pope, such as Zachary, had no time to think of adding new ones. His first care was the Lateran Palace, which he practically rebuilt. From the days of John VII, who built the new palace beneath the Palatine—the finding of the ruins of which has already been described—evidently no great attention had been paid to the old Lateran palace The work of Zachary, no doubt, saved it from going to complete decay. It contained the archives of the Church and the Treasure Chamber, and was the dwelling, at the same time, of the popes and their households. Enlarged by degrees, it included, besides the great basilica, several smaller churches, many oratories, triclinia or dining halls, and several chapels, among them the celebrated private chapel of the popes, called St. Lorenzo, or, later, Sancta Sanctorum. In addition to the ordinary decorations, such as mosaics, paintings and images, with which the Pope adorned the Lateran, he had painted a large fresco map of the world, which doubtless furnished Giovanni da Udine with the idea for those similar maps that now adorn one of the loggias of the Vatican.

Among the gifts presented by Zachary to the basilica of St. Peter were his own copies of the Psalter, the antiphonary of St. Gregory and the lives of the saints which are recited at Matins. One of these is still preserved in the Vatican Library.

 

Discovery of the head of St George

Of special interest to us in this country was the finding of the head of St. George. Probably whilst some repairs were in progress at the Lateran palace, a box was discovered in which was found a skull, which, from an attached label in Greek characters, was shown to be the head of St. George. With great joy both pastor and people assembled at the Lateran. With hymns and canticles the sacred relic was transported by the Pope’s orders to the deaconry of St. George (in the second region of the city), known as ‘ad Velum aureum’ (Velabro). The mention of St. George in Velabro belonging to the second region of the city shows us that at least part of the tenth imperial region—(the Palatine Region)—was included in the second ecclesiastical region. The church of the deaconry was completely restored by the Pope, and placed in charge of some Greek monks of the order of St. Basil, who had fled to Rome to escape the persecution of the Iconoclast Copronymus. These monks were very naturally chosen by Zachary, as St. George was one of the chief patron saints of the Greeks. Various inscriptions, still to be seen in this old basilica of St. George, recall the memory of the Greek Egumeni (abbots), who in the eighth and ninth centuries had charge of the church.

To go further into Zachary’s work in the direction of Church restoration and decoration would be to trench on the office of the archaeologist and the antiquarian. Referring, therefore, our readers to the Book of the Popes, and the learned comments of Bartolini, it will be worthwhile to add a word or two on his efforts as a landlord to improve the cultivation of the Roman Campagna.

The Campagna, a low-lying plain round Rome, some ninety miles in length and some thirty, from the sea to the Sabine and Alban hills, in breadth, was never at the best of times a very healthy district. But at the period of which we are now writing, what with the devastations of the Huns and other barbarians, who broke up the Roman empire and sacked its capital, what with the wars of Belisarius and Narses for the recovery of Italy from the barbarian Goth, and the various attacks on Rome by the Lombards, the state of the Campagna was rapidly approaching that desolate and disease-producing condition in which we see it today. Zachary, however, profiting by a year or two of peace, turned his attention to promote measures that might effect something in the way of retarding the destruction of the fertility of the Campagna, which he saw was but too rapidly going on. He accordingly established agricultural colonies—known as ‘domus cultae’—at suitable places. Dwellings and oratories or small churches were provided; and every effort was made by the Pope to induce men to settle there, and to procure by purchase sufficient land in their neighborhood to give the colonists plenty of employment. The Liber Pontificalis gives us the names of five such colonies. One that went by the name of St. Cecily was situated five miles from Rome on the Tiburtine road, and was incorporated with the Tiburtine ‘patrimony’, which included all the country between the Via Praenestina and the Tiber. A second was founded some fourteen miles from Rome in the Etruscan patrimony that stretched along the right bank of the Tiber. This ‘colony’ lay between the Claudian and Cornelian roads. Laurentum, now Capocotta, was the third; and Antius and Formia, in the old Volscian territory, constituted the fourth and fifth. When the work of founding these agricultural colonies was accomplished, Zachary summoned a synod of the clergy of the Roman Church, declared before it that he had added the said colonies to the patrimonies and dominion of St. Peter, and forbade their alienation by any of his successors or by any other person whatsoever.

Of the regular intercourse which Zachary maintained with the Franks, very little has come down to us. The Caroline Code has preserved only one of his letters, addressed to “the most excellent and most Christian Pippin, Major Domus, to all our most beloved bishops and religious abbots, and to all the God-fearing princes of the Franks”. This document furnishes a series of replies to questions on various points of the canon and moral laws, sent to him for solution by Pippin, acting on the advice of Frankish bishops. The Pope gives his answers in accordance with the tradition of the Fathers, the authority of the canons, and his own decrees, which he has issued by his apostolical power. Further, the letters of St. Boniface reveal the fact that Zachary vigorously cooperated with that great apostle of the Germans by securing for him the active support of the Franks. And lastly, a letter already alluded to, a letter of which the authenticity has been questioned on seemingly insufficient grounds, shows him in that role of peace­maker which he knew so well how to play. The brothers Pippin and Carlomann lived on the best of terms after the death of their father Charles Martel. But this was not the case with their half-brother Grifo, the son, whether legitimate or otherwise is not known, of Charles Martel and the Bavarian princess Swanahild. Whether Grifo was dissatisfied with the share of power left to him by his father, or whether the two brothers were jealous of what had been done for Grifo, certain it is that war ere long broke out between the latter and his half-brothers. Grifo was soon subdued and imprisoned (741). When Carlomann renounced the world, Pippin released Grifo (747). It was kindness thrown away. Grifo was soon in arms again. And once more did the sword fail him. It was at this juncture that the Pope intervened (750-1). He implored the clergy to add their efforts for peace to those which were being made by the monks whom Optatus, the abbot of Monte Cassino, and his princely subject, Carlomann, had sent to the court of the Major Domus, Pippin. It is, to say the least, likely enough that this mediation saved Grifo. Yet once more was he forgiven by the generous Pippin. But Grifo was impervious to kindness, and it was while scheming with Pippin’s foes, Tassilo of Bavaria, and Aistulf, the king of the Lombards, that he was slain by some of Pippin’s followers (753).

Though the authority is anything but contemporary, the Annals of Metz (not written till towards the close of the tenth century) are probably but relating a fact when they tell of a rebellion of Otilo (the predecessor of Tassila III), against Pippin. The Bavarian dukes were ever chafing against the yoke of the Franks, and consequently they were frequently in arms against them. They were invariably worsted. And so on the banks of the Lech, Otilo was defeated by Pippin and Carlomann in 743. In the fight there was captured on the side of Otilo the priest Sergius, the missus of Pope Zachary. The same authority says that on the day before the battle he had been sent by Otilo to the Franks, and, pretending to speak in the name of the Pope, had forbidden the battle and ordered the Franks to depart from Bavaria. When Sergius fell into the hands of Pippin and his brother, they took good care to impress upon him that he could not have been speaking in St. Peter’s name, because it was by the intercession of Blessed Peter and the just judgment of God that they had been victorious, and that “Bavaria and the Bavarians were to belong to the empire of the Franks”. We may conclude that the Annals had no authority for much more than the fact of the Pope’s attempted mediation between the combatants.

Zachary authorizes the deposition of Childeric III, 752

But the most important of Pope Zachary’s relations with the Franks,—indeed, one of the most memorable events in the history of the popes of the Middle Ages up to this date—was his decision with regard to the election of Pippin to the throne of the Frankish empire in place of Childeric. No action of the mediaeval popes up to this period has been more discussed or more variously viewed. While some writers would condemn the conduct of the Pope, others would approve of it; and there are those who would minimize and those who would perhaps magnify its importance. Before entering upon the details of the matter, there are one or two points which unquestionably stand out from the historical documents of the period. The number of writers who speak of it—both at the time and in the years more immediately following the event—shows unmistakably that the affair was then regarded as one of no mean importance; and the way in which it is spoken of by these writers shows that the appeal to the Pope and his judgment on the matter were looked on at the time as most natural. This is a very important point to bear in mind, first because many are apt to judge of the doings of men in the past by the different laws and the different recognized criteria of judgment of the present day; and again because we have not such a deep knowledge of the facts of the case as to warrant us in forming a different judgment on it to that formed by the historians and men of the time.

What are the facts of the case as they have come down to us, it will be our task now to set forth with but as little admixture of comment of our own as need be. The later descendants of the kings of the Merovingian race were men practically without vigor of mind or body. All real power slipped or was plucked from their feeble grasp. While they were once a year saluted as kings, throughout all the year the so-called mayors of the palace were looked up to as kings, and had in reality all the power of kings.

Originally only ‘masters of the household’, they were, at the time of which we are now speaking, the chief ministers of the kingdom, and had control over the chief departments of the State. Such an important place did they occupy that even before the declaration of Pope Zachary we sometimes find them spoken of simply as kings. And so Desiderius, Bishop of Cahors, addresses Grimoald, the son of Pippin ‘of Landen’, and mayor of the palace in the kingdom of Austrasia, as “the ruler not only of the royal court but of the kingdom”.

The nominal king of the Franks in the year 752 was Childeric III, one of the weakest of the weak. He is described as a man of “not the slightest account, of no sense, as useless and good for nothing”. It does not require any deep political insight to see that such a condition of things was to the last degree dangerous to a State. And the danger was intensified at this period by the rebellions of Grifo, Pippin’s half-brother. Among the Franks, as among the Anglo-Saxons, the monarchy was at least so far elective that it lay with the nobles to choose their kings from amongst the various members of the royal family. And the records of both peoples show that the eldest sons did not always succeed to their fathers’ thrones. Matters had now come to such a pass with the Merovingian race, from a continued succession of mere boys, that there does not appear to have been at the time of Childeric III any member of that family worthy of holding the kingly power, at any rate in comparison with such ‘mayors of the palace’ as Charles Martel and Pippin the Short. Consequently the chief men of the Franks, both cleric and lay, felt that the interests of their country imperatively demanded a change. There can be no difficulty in believing that Pippin helped on their deliberations, and named himself as the most fitting man both to be and to be called king. But it is equally clear, from the quiet way in which the resolution that actually made him king was accomplished, that his pretensions were regarded as just by the nobles at large. However, though themselves convinced that it was within their power and right for sufficient reason to depose one sovereign and replace him by another, they were men of sense, and understood well enough that their contemplated action might form a dangerous precedent. And so, knowing that no one is a judge in his own case, and that they might be deceived in supposing they had reason enough to dethrone Childeric, they resolved to get the opinion and decision of another on the merits of their proposed conduct. To whom, then, could they turn more naturally on this, which was as much a question of morals as of politics, than to the Pope, to whom they looked up not only as the author of their Christianity, but as the representative of Our Lord on earth, and so the chief pastor of all Christians?

Arguing from the fact that one of those sent by Pippin to consult Zachary on his wishes was Burchard, Bishop of Wurtzburg, one of St. Boniface’s friends, that according to many ancient authors, Boniface anointed Pippin as king, and that in 751 Boniface sent Lull to Rome to discuss some secret matters with the Pope, not a few authors think it by no means improbable that St. Boniface was the chief of Pippin’s supporters and advisers in the contemplated revolution. However that may be, it is certain that there went to Rome (probably at the close of the year 751) two ambassadors from Pippin, and the whole nobility of the Franks, viz., Burchard, Bishop of Wurtzburg, and Fulrad, Pippin’s chaplain, charged to ask the Pope whether it was a desirable state of things that there should be in France men who with the name of king had no regal power. To this Zachary gave an authoritative reply that it was better, under the circumstances, that he should be and should be called king who had the power of a king rather than the one who had the name without the substance of a king. Accordingly, “that the good order of the Christian world might not be disturbed”, he “ordered by his apostolic authority that Pippin should be made king”, and “that Archbishop Boniface should anoint him”. The decision of the Pope was followed by the public election of Pippin; and, raised on a shield amidst the applause of his cheering comrades, he was by them hailed as king, after in a most solemn manner he had been anointed king at Soissons by Boniface and other assistant bishops (752). As will be noticed in its proper place. Pippin was again anointed (754) by Pope Stephen (II) III. Childeric was tonsured and shut up in the monastery of St. Bertin in Sithiu, founded by St. Omer (or Audomar). His wife and son were also enclosed in convents.

As the history of this appeal is so important, our readers might perchance care to know a little more about the authorities on which it rests than can be gathered from the preceding notes. Besides the testimony of the so-called Annales minores of Lauresheim, which chronicle the events between the years 741 and 788, there are those of the Annals of Lauresheim, and those, so-called, of Eginhard. Concerning these two latter, the illustrious Pertz gives it as his opinion that the annals of Lauresheim were composed in the monastery of Nazarius, and only reached down to the year 788; that they afterwards came into the hands of Eginhard, the biographer of Charlemagne, who continued them to the year 829; and that finally, after the earlier part, the work of the monks, had received some emendations from him, the whole chronicle (741-829), with a few slight changes in his continuation, was edited as the Annals of Eginhard.

The evidence of these contemporary chronicles is supported by a host of others, and is if possible excelled by one or two other documents now to be adduced. In an old MS. codex, containing the works of St. Gregory of Tours, De vitis patrum and De gloria confessorum, found in the abbey of St. Denis, near Paris, there was discovered, in the same characters, and written with the same ink, as the rest of the MS., the following interesting note by the scribe who wrote the MS :—“If, reader, you would care to know when this work in praise of the holy martyrs was written, it was in the year of Our Lord 767, during the sixteenth year of the reign of the most happy, peaceful, and Catholic Pippin, king of the Franks, and patrician of the Romans, in the fifth indiction ... The aforesaid most flourishing Lord Pippin, Pious King, was raised to the regal throne by the authority and command (imperium) of the Lord Pope Zachary of holy memory, by the anointing with the sacred chrism at the hands of the holy bishops of Gaul and by the election of all the Franks three years before”. As Bartolini takes notice, the epithets, ‘most flourishing, etc,’ give us internal evidence that the scribe was contemporary with Pippin, as does also the title ‘Lord’ applied to Zachary, for it shows that that Pope must have been but comparatively recently dead. Another contemporary writer, cited by the above-named distinguished author from an inedited Vatican MS., speaks quite to the same effect when he says, that with the advice and consent of all the Franks an embassy was sent to Rome; and that on the receipt of the apostolic mandate Pippin was raised to the throne according to the ancient rite, by the election of the Franks, the consecration of the bishops, and the homage of the nobles.

From the contemporary authorities, which the reader now has before him, he can have no difficulty in concluding that the Pope intervened actively in Pippin’s elevation, and that, as results showed, his intervention was most salutary. An important revolution of the greatest benefit for Church and State was thus brought about without the slightest disorder. A strong government was established, under which civilization, which, if true, means improvement in the welfare of the people from all points of view, made considerable progress in Western Europe. Only sticklers for “the right divine of kings to govern wrong” (which right, we believe, in the eyes of sound thinking men, does not exist) could object to Zachary’s decision, a decision the lawfulness of which was not called in question by any of his contemporaries. Well would it be for modern Europe if its rulers would refer their differences or their difficulties to the popes once again. Their disagreements would lead to much less fatal results.

Not much remains to be told of the doings of this great Greek pontiff. In reply to a letter of Theodore, Bishop of Pavia, he forbids a son to marry a girl to whom his father has stood as godparent, a decision that was inserted among the decretals on the subjects of spiritual relationship, and was consequently the law of the Church for a long time. By the Council of Trent, however, spiritual relationship was limited to the first degree—to the godparents themselves and to their godchildren and their godchildren’s natural parents, as well as to the baptizer, the baptized, and the parents of the baptized.

Zealous for the preservation of order, we find Zachary in the last year of his life condemning Ausfred, Bishop of Siena, for presuming to consecrate an altar in the Church of St. Ampsanus against the wishes of the Bishop of Arezzo, under whose jurisdiction the said church was. The bishops of Siena, however, as the Church was within the limits of their diocese, thought that sufficient attention had not been paid to their side of the question. The case reappeared again at intervals even till the beginning of the eleventh century (1029).

The Pope’s charity

In the midst of all the weighty matters of Church and State in which Zachary was ever immersed, to the great profit of both, he found time, like his great model the first Gregory, for deeds of charity and for literary pursuits. Not only did he cause food from his own table to be taken by the masters of his household to the poor and pilgrims who dwelt in the hospitals in the neighborhood of St. Peter’s, but looked after the poor and sick of the whole city. And like a true bishop he showed in a most substantial way that he had a genuine love of his clergy; was, indeed, their father. Justly regarding it as an important point that the clergy should be in such a position as to appear respectable in the eyes of everyone, he more than doubled the donative which the popes were wont to bestow on the Roman clergy once a year, in addition to the regular revenues they derived from the property belonging to the Church to which they were attached. This was called ‘one donative’, because, as Bartolini observes, it was granted once a year. His biographer might well say of Zachary that he would not suffer anyone to be in distress.

In the department of literature we know that he translated the Dialogues of St. Gregory I into Greek, and we have the authority of the heresiarch Photius that, to the general gain, he translated many other of his works in addition.

Zachary, the great and good, went the way of all flesh, March 14 or 22, 752, and was buried in St, Peter’s the following day. His name is to be found inscribed among the saints in the earliest martyrologies that are extant, written after his death, such as those of Ado and Usuard. In the Roman martyrology he is commemorated on March 15.

To serve as a natural introduction to a few words on the temporal power of the popes at this period, mention of one act of Zachary has been hitherto delayed. The act referred to is the fact of his having issued money bearing his own name.

Zachary coins money

After the Romans threw off their allegiance to the emperor Leo in the reign of Pope Gregory II, it is only natural to conclude that the need for new coins would have to be met, as of course the supply from the mints of Constantinople would cease. The need for coins of small value would probably be the first felt. The smaller coins would be the ones in the most constant use—for the Rome of this age especially must have been a city of poor—and consequently from this cause, and from the very fact of their small value, would be soonest lost. Though there is extant a silver coin that bears no name, and which may belong to an issue of St. Gregory II, small square bronze coins of Gregory III are, as far as we know, the first that were struck by order of a Pope. The coins that we have of Pope Zachary are also small, square and bronze; for a silver coin that is shown bearing the name of Zachary is acknowledged on all hands to be spurious. On the obverse of the coins of Zachary, enclosed in a circlet of raised dots, and with an initial cross, we have the letters ZACCHARIAE, and on the reverse, with the same circlet and cross, the letters PAPAE. These coins, both of Gregory III and Zachary, are in the Kircherian Museum at Rome. According to Cinagli, the coin of Zachary there preserved weighs 27’51 Roman grammes, or 1’35 French.

Since writing the above, a visit to Rome has furnished facts which render necessary a modification of the preceding paragraph. There are no longer any papal coins in the Kircherian Museum. When the Italian government seized the Gregorian University buildings, in which was the Museum founded by the Jesuit, Father Kircher—an act of robbery with violence which is glossed over by saying that the buildings were made national property— the papal coins which used to be there were transferred to the Museo delle Terme. But the coins of Gregory III, etc., are not forthcoming. It may be that after the confusion caused by transportation has been remedied they will be found. As it is, however, the obliging director of the Museum, Cavaliere Pasqui, informed us that at present the national collection of papal coins does not go further back than Gregory IV.

Specimens of the said coins were, however, seen by us in the Vatican collection of papal coins, which, through the great kindness of Signor Serafini, who is the director as well of the Vatican collection of coins as of the Municipal, we were able to examine. Through the recent purchase of the collection of Cardinal Randi, the Vatican has now the finest collection of papal coins in the world. It is composed of over 30,000 specimens, of which 16,000 are different. Whatever may be thought of the coins of the popes before Hadrian I, the series of papal coins un­questionably begins with him and goes down till towards the middle of the twelfth century. Coins of Pascal II (1099-1118) exist in the Vatican and elsewhere. Then, for about a century and a half, money in Rome was struck by the Senate. During that period, though at the height of their power abroad, the popes had not much of it at home. From Blessed Benedict XI, (1303-5) to our own times (Pius IX) there is an unbroken series of papal money. The Senate (1252) were the first to strike money in gold. They also coined in silver, copper and in some alloy. The papal coins, however, from Hadrian I to Pascal II are all in silver; and so, as the coins of Gregory III and Zachary are of copper, and for the most part square, Promis and Serafini, whose opinion is entitled to very great respect, believe that they are only tesserce, and were used for the same purposes as our soup-tickets. Still, the appearance of such pieces of stamped metal for the first time, just when political considerations would lead one to expect to find traces of a papal coinage, is so striking that we cannot but subscribe to the view of Pizzamiglio, and maintain that they are the first essays of the popes in the direction of coining money. Even if they are regarded as tesserce, they must be considered as having the relation to money that bank notes have.

Now if there is one thing that history makes clear, it is that whoso coins the money in a State holds, practically at least, the supreme power in that State. A prince always justly considered himself as practically independent of any central government if he issued his own money; and, on the other hand, it has ever been the aim of such as have wished to extend their sway to reserve to themselves the sole right of coining money throughout the territories they wished to claim as theirs. The fact, then, that Gregory III and Zachary issued a coinage of their own, shows us that at this point in the eighth century the civil rulers of the city of Rome were the popes and not the emperors; for it has never been contended that any special permit to coin money was given them by the rulers at Constantinople.

So much passion and prejudice is generally brought to bear on this subject of the temporal power of the popes, that it behoves us to approach it with the greatest circumspection. Some half century ago the non-Catholic writers of the Cabinet Cyclopedia of History did not hesitate to declare that “modern writers especially, speaking of the Papacy, had almost always aimed at perverting the truth of history, and that in no country under heaven has this abominable dishonesty been so prevalent as in England”. Though, with the rapid publication of original documents that has of late years gone on in the more advanced nations of Europe, and with much greater and deeper attention on the part of the ‘many’ to historical studies, this damning charge stands in need of some modification, there is still much truth in it. And even yet many writers cannot bring themselves to speak on the popes, and especially on their temporal power, in accordance with a fair temperate deduction from historical facts

In considering this question of the temporal power of the popes, it may be well first again to emphasize the facts of the case and then to enquire into their causes. As a matter of fact, then, there can be no doubt that from the days of Gregory II Rome was to all intents and purposes independent of the emperors and subject to the popes. On this point of fact there is abundance of non-Catholic testimony. Though the supremacy of the Eastern Empire was still recognized, says Finlay, “from this time, AD 733, the city of Rome enjoyed political independence under the guidance and protection of the popes”.

There is by no means so much agreement as to the cause or causes that brought about this temporal sway of the popes over the Roman duchy. Many non-Catholic writers ascribe it to the bad ambition of the popes themselves in this age. At this conclusion they can but arrive by imputing evil motives (knowledge of which they can only draw from their imaginations) to acts which, simply considered as history presents them, are quite innocent. But anyone who may have taken the trouble to read the preceding pages will, we imagine, have seen for himself that practically independent temporal power did not come to the popes all at once in the eighth century, but that civil authority gradually accumulated in their hands from the days of Pope Gregory I; and, as will be shown presently, long before his time. It will, doubtless, have been observed how, from the unwillingness or incapability of others, it naturally fell to the popes to take measures for the defence of the Roman duchy, and how in time, equally naturally, the people of Rome at last came to recognize only those as their rulers who had proved themselves their sole preservers. We say it fell naturally to the popes, inasmuch as they were the most distinguished men in Rome, as well from the material resources at their command, as, of course, still more from the regard had by the people to their spiritual power. On the other hand, if the power of the Eastern emperors had been greater, had they honestly done their best for their Italian provinces, instead of endeavoring to use them merely as a means to raise money, or as an area through which their dogmatic edicts had to be propagated, there would, humanly speaking, have been no independent temporal power in the hands of the popes. For certainly the popes never tried to throw off the yoke of the Eastern Empire.

It has just been said that temporal power began to be exercised by the popes even long before the days of Gregory the Great. From the earliest times, the popes had that at least indirect temporal power which the possession and free use of wealth give to its owners in every civilized land. Of the early wealth of the popes, Eusebius has preserved evidence enough. The letter of St, Dionysius of Corinth to Pope Soter (175-182) tells of the previous generosity of the Roman Church being outdone by Soter, who “furnished great supplies to all the saints”; and Eusebius adds that the liberality of the Church of Rome was continued to his time (fourth century). The wealth of the Roman Church, which enabled its bishops to be so liberal, was largely increased by Constantine and others after Christianity had overthrown paganism in the Roman world. So that by the time of Gregory the Great, the bishop of Rome had landed property (known as the patrimonies of St, Peter) in every province of the empire. And long before his time, the wealth of the bishop of Rome had furnished the pagan with subject matter for pleasant raillery or bitter sneer, as the case might be.

After the conversion of Constantine, the popes had not only that influence in temporal matters that follows wealth and station, they had the direct power in civil affairs that was given to all Christian bishops by the laws of the empire. Constantine bestowed on all bishops considerable judicial power. “He permitted”, says Sozomen, a lawyer of Constantinople who wrote about the middle of the fifth century, “all who had law-suits to decline the jurisdiction of the civil magistrates and to appeal to the judgment of the bishops; he even ordered that the sentence of the ecclesiastical tribunal should be more binding than that of secular judges, that they should have the same authority as those given by the emperor himself; finally, that the governors of provinces and their officers should be obliged to enforce their execution”. Though part of these powers was somewhat restricted by some of the successors of Constantine, still, in what may be called the final expression of Roman law, the Code of Justinian, the powers given to bishops in civil affairs are both numerous and important. A glance at the first book of the Code will convince anyone that there is no exaggeration in this statement. The bishops had not only to watch over the interests of youths, women, slaves, orphans, prisoners and poor, and to aid the magistrates to suppress gambling, but to take their share in seeing to the defence and other interests of the cities—such as the safe custody of the standard weights and measures —and, with the chief men in the different provinces, to select suitable persons for the purposes of local govern­ment. It is only to be expected, then, that if bishops in general had such powers, those of the great patriarchs of both East and West would be more extensive. To confine ourselves to the Western patriarchs, i.e., to the Roman pontiffs, we have evidence of their great authority in temporals in the words of Socrates, a lawyer of Constantinople, like Sozomen in the fifth century, who, if not a Novatian himself, was certainly a great admirer of that heresy and its votaries. Because the popes had taken measures to suppress the Novatians, Socrates seizes the occasion to rail at them for “going beyond the limits of their ecclesiastical jurisdiction”, and for what he is pleased to call “degenerating into their present state of secular domination”.

This ‘secular domination’, which roused the wrath of Socrates, because he found it adverse to his pet sect, went on increasing, and was very largely exercised, as we have seen, by St. Gregory the Great; so much so that Dr. Hodgkin notes that “the distance from the seat of empire, the interruption of communication with Ravenna, the lordship of the vast patrimony of St. Peter, were all tending to turn the Pope, with his will or against his will, into a temporal sovereign”. As time went on one act of jurisdiction after another was performed by Honorius, by Sisinnius, by Zachary; and, on the other hand, one act of rebellion after another against the emperors on the part of the Romans themselves under Constantine, and under Gregory II, forced the hands of the popes ever more and more. So that before the end of the first half of the eighth century the popes were independent rulers of the duchy of Rome. The stamping of his own name on the coins of the duchy by Zachary was but a legitimate consequence of the people of Rome refusing in the time of Pope Constantine to receive coins stamped with the name of the emperor Philippicus. This full independent civil power which accrued to the popes in the eighth century was a natural result of temporal authority wielded well and wisely for several centuries previously. It is but a physical law that everything that is well used grows. And notoriously, of all things, power increases as it moves forward. And, on the other hand, it is equally in accordance with nature that what is ill used should cease to grow, nay, should shrink. Nature and not ambition, then, is the key to the temporal power of the popes.

Men who are not Christians will, it may be presumed, accept the temporal power of the popes on what must be to them the sufficient ground that it was well gotten. But there are among those who profess that name, men who hold that, as Our Lord declared that “His kingdom was not of this world”, it is not right for those who claim to be His vicars to hold the power of kings. Apart from the truth that Our Lord’s kingdom, if not ‘of’, i.e., ‘sprung from’ this world, is certainly ‘in’ this world, we have it on the word of Our Lord that the children of the bridegroom were to do in His absence what they were not to do in His presence. And so, though the ‘temporal power’ cannot be said to be necessary in itself, for it was not much in evidence during the centuries of persecution, and is at present in abeyance, still ‘temporal power’ may be said to have become necessary with the rise of the Christian nations. It would not have been so, of course, with ideal Christian peoples. With human nature such as it is and always was, however, temporal power both was and is necessary to the popes if they are to be the common Fathers of all nations alike. A glance at the treatment meted out to them by the Byzantine emperors or other tyrants will show the absolute need the popes have of an independent temporal power to enable them fearlessly to proclaim the faith of Christ, as various non-Catholic writers have admitted. Passing over the persecutions of Liberius, St. John I, Silverius, and Vigilius, as their names do not occur in this part of the history of the Papacy on which we are now engaged, we have seen St. Martin I dragged off to exile and death, and Sergius, John VI, and Gregory II, only escaping a similar fate by the devotion of the people. And it may be added that the history of the popes of the tenth century, of those of Avignon and of Pius VII in the hands of Napoleon, clearly points to the same moral. The Pope must be an independent ruler over some State that he may be truly free to administer the affairs of the Church in the best way. It is, then, obviously the duty of everyone who has at heart the true interests of the Church to do all that lies in his power that the ruffianly brigandage perpetrated in 1870, when in the name of ‘Italian patriotism’ Rome and the adjoining territory were wrested from their rightful owners the popes, may be undone. Italy lawfully belonging to Rome is the evidence of ancient history, but never has history shown us Rome lawfully belonging to the Italians. Mediaeval and modern Rome have been made and preserved by the genius of the popes with the aid of the wealth of the Christian world. Rome, then, belongs to the popes; after them to the Christian world, particu­larly, perhaps, to the countries of Western Europe. Certainly not to the Italians alone, unless, forsooth, right and justice are to be gauged by geographical position. The sooner, then, Rome is restored to its proper owners the sooner will another great wrong be set right.

To sum up what we have said. The foundation of the temporal power of the popes was their paramount spiritual authority. For there can be no doubt that, at least in the very earliest records that we have, in which the relative position of the great rulers in the Church is touched upon, the bishop of Rome is always set forth as the Head of the Church Catholic—whatever may have been the difference of opinion as to how far that headship extended. This, their spiritual position, naturally brought them wealth and station even during the era of the persecutions. With the triumph of the Church under Constantine, they shared in a pre-eminent degree the powers he gave to all bishops. With the transference of the seat of empire from Rome to Constantinople, with the coming of the barbarians, the hold of the emperors on Italy and the West kept lessening, whereas the influence of the popes in Rome kept increasing—the more that they were frequently its saviors. And with the decay of the municipal system in the fourth century, the most important position in the great cities of the West was in the fifth century occupied by the bishops: Mr. Dill, while telling us that “the municipal system, once the great glory of Roman organizing power, had in the fourth century fallen almost to ruin”, assures us that “the real leader of the municipal community in the fifth century, alike in temporal and in spiritual things, was often the great Churchman”.

In Rome and in Italy in the sixth century, even under the Ostrogoth, Arian though he generally was, considerable power was left in the hands of the Catholic bishops and the popes. And when in the same century the Ostrogoth was crushed out of existence, and the ‘Roman’ empire once more asserted itself in Italy, the Pragmatic Sanction of Justinian did but put the popes on a higher pedestal of temporal power than ever. In 568 came the Lombards into Italy. From that the cause of the Roman empire in Italy was lost. Sauve qui peut was the only possibility. Preserving Rome from the ferocious Lombard, all power in it was forced into the hands of the popes. They had to take charge of its water and corn supply, to raise and pay troops, to repair its walls. And when, in return for saving Rome to the Empire, their persons were maltreated, and their faith outraged, the Roman people would endure the cupidity and weak tyranny of their emperors no longer. They threw off the yoke of the Greek, which oppressed them, and chose that of the Popes which was easy.