SABINIAN.

604-606.

 

Emperor of the East.  Phocas, 602-610.

King of the Lombards. Agilulph, 590-615.

Exarch of Ravenna. Smaragdus, 602-611.

 

We have now to notice a group of Pontiffs who, like the  ghostly kings in Macbeth, pass across the stage of life but say nothing. The life of Sabinian, however, is not without interest, as it may be used as an admirable instance to show how groundless stories to the detriment of the popes have by the potent forces of ignorance, carelessness or malice gradually been elaborated.

It is in the summer of 593 that the name of Sabinian is first met with in the correspondence of Gregory. At that time he was sent as apocrisiarius to Constantinople. Hence two letters of recommendation addressed in his behalf to John, the Faster, and to Priscus, patrician and exarch of the Orient, one of the emperor’s most distinguished generals, who in 612 retired into a monastery. The mere fact of his being chosen for such an important office by Gregory, who knew its difficulties by experience, is sufficient proof of the abilities of Sabinian.

The son of one Bonus, he was a Tuscan and a native of the town of Blera, a few miles from Viterbo. About the year 772, Desiderius, the Lombard king, “extinguished the ashes of Blera in the blood of its citizens”. Ruins and the modern village of Bieda serve to point out this ancient birthplace of one of the popes.

Sabinian’s task in Constantinople was no easy one. He had to deal with a well-meaning but rather weak emperor (Maurice), and a vain, obstinate and sanctimonious patriarch (John, the Faster). It was a work which required astuteness and courageous firmness, as the men against whom the apocrisiarius had to match himself were at once wily and tyrannical—men whom Gregory declared to be superior to the Romans both in smartness and in double dealing. And it may perhaps be correctly argued, from the spirited language adopted by Gregory in his letters to his apocrisiarius, that he was a little wanting in boldness, and was not diplomatist enough for the Faster. “I wonder”, wrote Gregory, “that he (the Faster) could so deceive you that you should permit the emperor to be persuaded to write to me to tell me that I ought to make peace with him (the Faster). Whereas, if he had wished to be just he ought to have told him to refrain from using the haughty title (ecumenical), and then there would have been peace between us at once”.

From some cause unknown to us, Sabinian returned to Rome about the middle of 597, and was succeeded in his office as apocrisiarius by the deacon Anatolius.

After a delay of some six months after the death of Gregory, a delay caused by the necessity of waiting for the emperor’s assent to his election, Sabinian was consecrated September 13, 604.

The ensuing winter was marked by an intense frost, which killed the vines in very many parts of Italy. The frost was followed by a plague of mice, and then by a spread of the rust among the corn. The crops were ruined and famine set in (605). Paul the Deacon thinks it only right and proper that the world should suffer a dearth of food and drink, seeing that by the death of Gregory men were deprived of spiritual food and drink. To these horrors were added those of war. The truce between the exarch and the Lombards expired in April.

However, by a payment of 12,000 solidi Smaragdus managed (November 605) to get the peace prolonged for one year, and then in the following year for three years longer. The famine meanwhile had been felt very severely in Rome. But the possibility of Rome having to stand a siege caused Sabinian to be very careful with the corn in the granaries of the Church, the more so that the care of the corn supply of Rome seems to have belonged to the Pope ex officio. No sooner, however, was the danger of war over than Sabinian ordered the granaries of the Church to be opened and corn to be sold to the people at the rate of 30 bushels, or rather pecks (modius), of wheat for one solidus. In the time of Theoderic, the Ostrogoth, indeed, we are told that 60 modii were sold for the solidus. But as it is a question of Rome, where Pope Gregory said that everything was dear; and, moreover, of a time of famine, the price named by Sabinian was eminently reasonable.

Anastasius further informs us that the Pope filled the Church with clergy. With this obscure phrase Duchesne compares the assertion of the biographer of Deusdedit: “He recalled the priests and clergy to their former positions”, and sees in it an assertion that Sabinian restored to the secular clergy posts which St, Gregory had entrusted to monks. If this be the true interpretation of this difficult sentence, it is clear that Gregory’s view of the advantage of the monks for different positions was not that of Sabinian. After it has been further stated, following the Liber Pontificalis, that the Pope gave certain gifts to St. Peter’s, and in one ordination consecrated twenty-six bishops for different localities, all has been told of Sabinian that is known for certain.

In complete accord with the above narrative is the epitaph of the Pope, which will be quoted in full at the end of this sketch of his life. For it tells of his gradual rise to the supreme pontificate, of his generosity which in death left him with nothing to leave, and of the peace which endured (for Rome at least) during his reign.

The above is the only sound material that we have for forming a judgment on the character of Sabinian. But, of course, with the good wheat there is often chaff, and with the pure metal, dross. And so Platina, Bower and Milman, simply repeating one another, or relying on false readings in the Liber Pontificalis, on the accretions to Paul the Deacon’s life, and on the unsupported testimony of John the Deacon, or still later writers, and then mixing up the worthless chaff thus laboriously got together, give us a picture of Sabinian that has not the slightest foundation in genuine history. On the authority of one of the additions to the life of Paul the Deacon, it is related that after the Pope had shut up the monasteries, deaconries, etc., whence the alms of Gregory were wont to be distributed, he opened the granaries of the Church and sold wheat at thirty solidi a peck. The poor, thus deprived of their great resource, came clamoring to the Pope and asked him if he was going to allow those to starve whom his great predecessor had fed. Sabinian replied that if Gregory, for his own glory, had taken care of everybody, he could not. As a consequence of this oft-repeated answer, Gregory appeared to Sabinian three times in visions and bade him do differently. Sabinian took no notice of this portent. Gregory, therefore, appeared to him a fourth time, and after giving him a terrible scolding, struck him on the head. Of this blow Sabinian soon afterwards died. In John the Deacon’s account no mention is made of Sabinian at all. It is Gregory himself that is assailed, because, on account of his extravagant liberality, there was an empty treasury. And as his accusers could not lay their hands on Gregory or anything that belonged to his person, they wished to burn his books. Peter, the Deacon, however, the great friend of Gregory, pointed out to them what a sacrilege it would be to destroy books which he himself had seen the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, inspiring into the mind of the Pope. He then prayed that he might die on the spot to prove his words. This happened, and the books were saved! In Paul’s account, Peter is not made to die, and only tells the story about the dove because some people had maintained that Gregory had written his works from an inflated idea of his own powers. This is the farrago, written down some hundreds of years after the events they are supposed to describe, that some writers set down as history. Milman, copying Platina, who wrote in the fifteenth century, and who has added to the tales cited above, is really remarkable in his treatment of the material he has thus acquired. He has discovered “two hostile factions, one adoring, the other hating Gregory”, and “an old Roman attachment to majestic edifices and gods yielding to the most credulous Christian superstition”. Mr. Seeley, narrating an interview he had with that distinguished German scholar, Ewald, says : “I was not surprised that he listened with a kind of superb indifference when I spoke of our Milman”. No one who was acquainted with the dean’s wholesale inaccuracies could have been surprised.

If Milman had either looked at the original life of Sabinian in the Liber Pontificalis, or given any thought to the selling price of corn, he could never have written that he sold corn at thirty solidi a modius. Though he wrote before the accurate editions of Duchesne or Mommsen were issued, the older edition of the L. P., e.g., that of Fabrotti in 1649, showed that the correct reading was “thirty modii for one solidus”. Later mediaeval writers who quote the Liber also show which was the proper reading. Besides, one solidus a bushel was a very high price; and even in famines caused by sieges we do not read that one modius fetched thirty solidi.

If there is any truth underlying these legends, it will probably be that men, unstrung by famine, blamed everything and everybody for what was the fault of nobody. And so the foolish, helped by the wicked who had been punished by Gregory, may not unlikely have attributed their starving condition to his liberality, or have assigned to parsimony Sabinian’s inability to help them to a greater extent than he did.

Sabinian died in February 606. He was buried in St Peter’s, February 22. His body was taken out of the city proper, for St. Peter’s on the Vatican hill was not in the city then, by St. John’s gate and across the Tiber over the Ponte Molle.

 

BONIFACE III