State of the civilized world at the BEGINNING OF THE SEVENTH CENTURY

That the reader maybe able to appreciate to their full extent the difficulty of the work that Gregory was called upon to take in hand, and the true nobility of his mind and character, a brief survey at least must be taken of the state of the civilized world at the time when he became Pope. Against the manifold evils which this survey will bring to our view had Gregory, it might be said almost single-handed, to struggle, that all which Christian civilized men hold dear might be preserved. Whether the student of this period of history look to the East or to the West, and whether he look at the physical aspect of their various countries, or at the moral and intellectual condition of their peoples, he will find much to sadden him. The effect of the frequent blows by which the barbarians in the fifth century smashed to pieces the Roman Empire in the West, and of their wanderings in great army-nations over its broken ruins in the sixth century in search of a resting-place, proved fatal not only to law and order, to religion and morality, to house and temple, but even to the very soil. For the barbarians, and famine and plague that lurked in their train, not only brought death to the wretched citizens of the Empire, but they so devastated whole tracts of country that they have remained barren wastes to this day. “Death” wrote Salvian (c. 485), “begot death”. “Not the Castle on the rock, not towns on lofty cliffs, not cities by the running rivers have been able to escape the craft and warlike fury of the barbarians” is the sad wail of the poet. And to come to the days at which this history begins, we have the word of Gregory himself: “Lo! throughout Europe everything is in the hands of the barbarians. Cities are destroyed, fortresses dismantled, provinces depopulated. There is no one left to till the soil. Idolaters are daily glorying in cruelly shedding the blood of the faithful”

Learning, which had for a long time been on the wane both in the East and West with the declining empire of Rome, had by the seventh century fairly disappeared in an abyss of ignorance. So that when St. Gregory ascended the Throne of the Fisherman, apart from a little learning in Rome, and a great glare but not much substance of it in Constantinople, it was only in distant Ireland that intellectual culture could be said to have had a place where on to lay its head. However, when he made England Catholic, Gregory prepared another home wherein learning found a refuge. In the countries themselves of the old civilization, in the West especially, there was small hope indeed of the revival of their ancient civilization. To the great pontiff of Rome, to that untiring Christian watchman on the Seven Hills by the Tiber, must our eyes turn as to almost the sole hope of a return in Europe to the arts and sciences of civilized life.

THE EAST

In the countries of the Eastern Empire civilization was fast disappearing, on the one hand under the inroads of the Persians and other barbarians, and on the other under the weak tyranny and maladministration of many of its rulers, who would be great at least in the number of their 'dogmatic' edicts. Their constant vain interference in matters of religion, their action in the Arian, semi-Arian, Nestorian and Monophysite heresies and in the controversy on the Three Chapters, did but serve to accentuate those differences in faith on which the minds of the Easterns were fixed to the detriment of everything else. So that when the undivided attention of emperor and people ought to have been given to the advances of the Persian, the Avar, the Slav and the Lombard, the attention of the one was largely taken up with teaching bishops the truths of religion, and of the other in disputing about abstruse theological propositions.

In the din of religious controversy they drowned the noise made by the barbarians who were thundering at their gates. They turned against one another the violent energy that should have been directed against their external foes; and they rendered their minds unfit for practical endeavors against the barbarian by being engrossed with the effort of determining the exact theological purport of the learned works of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret and Ibas! Its after history shows that the East did not belie the sad promise it gave in the days of Pope Gregory I. Its after history proved that civilization left to the care of the Eastern Empire would have perished forever. What Goth and Persian began, Saracen and Turk completed.

The Saracen commenced his work of destruction a few years after the death of Gregory, had soon torn away the fairest provinces of the empire and laid upon them that general blight under which they are still festering. The Oriental patriarchs, i.e. those of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, within the century which followed the death of Gregory, had lost practically all their liberty at the hands of the Moslem. The Patriarchs of Constantinople, who under their emperors had had but little of it, finally lost that little at the hands of the Turk. With the loss of freedom these patriarchs and their subjects of course soon lost their learning and culture. After the days of Gregory, distinguished Greek and Oriental ecclesiastics, who had once shed so much luster on the Church by their transcendent abilities, were only conspicuous by their rarity. The patriarchs of Constantinople would fain have concealed their slavery even from themselves; and while, with everincreasing power, the Roman pontiffs were taking the title of "Servant of the Servants of God", they, with decreasing influence, would have grander titles. Mere creatures of imperial masters, they would be ‘Universal Patriarchs’. In his devoted struggle for faith, morality and freedom, then, Gregory neither received a helping hand nor scarce heard an encouraging voice from the emasculated East.

THE WEST

A view of the West would scarcely give Pope Gregory more consolation than the contemplation of the East. Ireland was indeed Christian and in the enjoyment of a comparatively high state of learning and civilization, and was preparing to send forth to the continent of Europe those missionaries, who throughout the seventh century labored so successfully to spread the faith or morality of Christ in Gaul, in Belgium, in Switzerland and even in Italy. But in England the Angles and Saxons had driven in direful disorder the Britons with their civilization and Christianity into Cornwall, Wales and Brittany, and had again enveloped this island in the darkness of barbaric ignorance and paganism. Germany, that seething centre which had poured forth the hordes that overwhelmed the Western Empire, was still fiercely pagan. The various kingdoms of which France was then composed, although Catholic in name, were suffering from the countless evils which are the result of constant internecine strife, and still contained within their boundaries many professed heathens.

Spain had become the home of the Visigoths and their Arianism. And Italy, once the very centre of the world’s power and civilization, and destined to be the source to which the Western world newly civilized was to turn for its religion—what is to be said of it? Wretched indeed was its plight in the days of Gregory. In the history of Rome and Italy we see a law of the physical order exemplified in the political. To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. From Rome and Italy had gone forth century by century conquering armies that overran the world. And century by century invading hordes poured down into Italy to avenge the world’s defeats. The centuries during which Italy smiled beneath the ‘Roman peace’ were followed by centuries during which the face of the country was seared by war, famine and pestilence. Rome, which had sacked the chief cities of the world, and which Cicero had looked forward to standing ten thousand years, was, after its first capture by Alaric the Goth, in 410, taken more than once again even before the birth (540) of Gregory by different barbaric nations. As Cardinal Newman tersely put it : “First came the Goth, then the Hun, and then the Lombard. The Goth took possession, but he was of a noble nature and soon lost his barbarism. The Hun came next, he was irreclaimable but did not stay. The Lombard kept his savageness and his ground. He appropriated to himself the territory, not the civilization of Italy; fierce as the Hun and powerful as the Goth, the most tremendous scourge of Heaven”. During the sixty-two years (493-555) that the supremacy of the Ostrogoth lasted, Italy enjoyed a measure of peace and prosperity; but during the two centuries of Lombard domination there was nothing but war and wretchedness for Italy and Rome. Again was Italy one battlefield. The Lombards were ever at war either with the wretched Italians, with the Franks and the Greeks, or with themselves. Such being the social and political condition of the East and West, it will not surprise anyone to read in the letters of Gregory that in the Church simony was rife both among the Greeks and Latins, and that in the West not only were idolatrous practices widespread, but that idolaters were still to be found in Sardinia, Gaul and even Italy.

THE LOMBARDS

As our estimate of the character and conduct of St. Gregory and his successors in the seventh and eighth centuries must largely depend on the view taken of the Lombards and their rule, it will not be out of place to discuss them and their doings for a brief space longer. When the Lombards first appear on the pages of history at the very beginning of our era they are set down as having their abode about the mouth of the Elbe and described as worse than the Germans in ferocity. During the course of the next few centuries they moved southwards, and when, with hordes of other barbarians, with their wives and children and such belongings as they had, they poured into Italy (568) from the north-east, its most vulnerable point of attack, and overran great part of it during the early manhood of Gregory, their fierce cruelty was still conspicuous. They were indeed possessed of a wild recklessness that passed for courage, and oft displayed a rough and ready justice that wins admiration from men who are not unfrequently wont to see justice hampered by forms of law. But Arians or pagans in religion, they persecuted the Catholics subject to them, and treated the conquered Italians with contempt. Especially did they rage against the clergy and the monasteries, and amongst the latter destroyed the famous Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino (589). The Lombards were in Italy what the Normans were afterwards in England. They behaved to the conquered Italians in the same arbitrary manner as the Normans did to the Anglo-Saxons, or as the Turks now often do to their subject Christians. They were an army of occupation, and as such were hated by the people. We can hence easily understand how the provinces that were not subject to them dreaded them. So poorly were the Lombards united among themselves that although their third ruler, Authari, is depicted, rightly or wrongly, as planting his lance on the shore of Rhegium to show that the Southern Sea alone was to be the border of his kingdom, the Lombards never succeeded in conquering all Italy. Rome never fell into their hands, nor did they ever subdue the Duchy of Naples. And it took them nearly two hundred years to overthrow the Exarchs of Ravenna. As these free states only naturally wished to retain their freedom, who would deny them the right of getting help when and where they could, and of using every fair means in their power to remain free? It will be important to bear these considerations in mind when the relations between the Popes and the Lombards come to be noticed.

When Gregory became Pope Italy was, for the most part, under the dominion of the Lombard kings, who resided at Pavia. Their power was helped or resisted, as the case might be, by thirty-six hereditary dukes. Of these, who were all more or less independent, the chief ones were the Dukes of Spoletum and Beneventum. Partially separated from the northern half of the Lombard kingdom by the line of forts along the Flaminian Way, which for a long time remained in the hands of the Empire, they were, on that account, enabled to act with less dependence on Pavia, and often showed their autocratic power by making war on their king. The districts of Italy not ruled by the Lombards were subject to a greater or less degree to the "Roman" emperor. His representative, an exarch, who had supreme civil and military authority, resided at Ravenna. In addition to a province under his own immediate jurisdiction, known, in the most restricted application of the term, as the "exarchate of Ravenna", there were subject to the exarch the Duchies of Istria, Venetia, and Rome, the Pentapolis, Calabria, Bruttium, Sicily, and a number of towns along the coast of Liguria forming the province of Maritima Italorum. A few isolated places here and there, such as Naples and Salernum, were also ‘imperial’. The exarchate comprised the modern Romagna with the marches, or valleys, of Ferrara and Commachio. A maritime Pentapolis, viz., the cities of Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia, and Ancona, along with an inland Pentapolis, viz., Jesi, Cagli, Gubbio, Fossombrone and Urbino, and the city of Osimo, constituted the Duchy of the Pentapolis. The Duchy of Rome extended from Civita Vecchia (the old Centumcellee) to Gaeta and Formia along the coast, and inland from Civita Vecchia to the course of the Tiber from Amelia and Narni, with the southern portion of the present province of Rome and the small northern part of the present Campania around Gaeta and Fondi. The Duchy of Venetia included the towns of Concordia, Oderzo (the ancient Opitergium) and Altinum with the islands of Chioggia, etc., of the lagoons. The island of Grado, of which we shall hear plenty in this volume, Trieste (the ancient Tergeste) and Pola were the principal belongings of the Duchy of Istria, The Duchy of Calabria, which included part of Apulia, seems to have been formed with Bruttium in the seventh century by the Emperor Constans “into a single administrative district, with the official name of Calabria, which, when the Empire lost most of the true Calabria, clung to the toe” of Italy as far north as the river Crathi. These great divisions of Italy had not the boundaries assigned to them above for any great length of time. They were constantly fluctuating. But on the whole, the sway of the Lombards increased, if but slowly. More or less isolated from many of his dependencies by intervening hostile Lombard territory, and often having as much as he could manage in his efforts to keep the Lombards out of Ravenna, the exarch had naturally but little control over the more distant provinces of Italy that were supposed to be subject to him. Left to themselves, they had to look after themselves. And long before the ‘Image controversy’ in the eighth century caused the people of many of the duchies to openly throw off all allegiance to the emperors at Constantinople, many of them were practically independent. Thus we shall see the Romans, abandoned by exarch and emperor, turn to the popes in their temporal as well as in their spiritual necessities. The “temporal power of the Popes”, declares even Gibbon, “insensibly rose from the calamities of the times”.