heart of Italy along the Via Flaminia which connected them. It cut, and effectually, the Lombard kingdom in two, and isolated the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento from the real Lombard power in Cisalpine Gaul, with its great capital at Pavia; and indestructible as it was, it absolutely insured the final success of the Catholic Faith, the Latin nationality, and the imperial power, the three necessities for the resurrection of Europe.
This achievement was in the first place due to three great personalities: to Justinian who had succeeded in establishing the imperial power with its capital at Ravenna, and whose work had such life in it that, in spite of every adverse circumstance, it was able to develop and to maintain itself during more than two hundred years and uphold the imperial idea in Italy until the pope was able to re-establish the empire in the West as a self-supporting state; to Gregory the Great in whom we see personified the hope and strength of the papacy and the Latin idea which it was to uphold and to glorify; and to Theodelinda, that passionately Catholic Lombard queen, who was able to lead her Lombards into the fold of the Roman church, and who in her son Adalwald by her second husband Agilulf, whom she had raised to the throne, presented the Lombard kingdom with its first Catholic king, and had thus done her part to secure the future.
Of these three powers those of Ravenna and Rome were, of course, by far the more important; for indeed the conversion of the Lombards was, rightly understood, but a part of the work of Gregory. Yet though both were working for the same end they did not always propose to march by the same road. In 592, for instance, the pope, seeing Naples the capital of the little isolated duchy upon his southern flank very hard pressed, proposed at all costs to relieve it; but the exarch Romanus, perhaps seeing further, was not to be moved to the assistance of the peasants of Campania from the all-important business of the defence of central Italy and the Flaminian Way, the line of communication between Ravenna and Rome. He proposed to let Naples look after itself and at all costs to hold Perugia. Gregory, however, who claimed in an indignant letter of this date (592) to be “far superior in place and dignity” to the exarch, proceeded to save Naples by making a sort of peace with the Lombard duchy of Spoleto. It is possible that this peace saw the Lombard established in Perugia, which was the Roman key, till now always in Roman hands, of the great line of communication between Rome and Ravenna. However that may be, Gregory’s peace not only aroused great anger in Constantinople, but brought Romanus quickly south with an army to re-occupy Perugia, Orte, Todi, Ameria, and various other cities of Umbria. But Romanus had been right. His movement southward alarmed Agilulf, who immediately left Pavia, and crossing the Apennines, we may suppose,[1] as Totila had done, threatened Rome itself. Then, however, he had to face something more formidable than an imperial army. Upon the steps of S. Peter’s church stood the Vicegerent of God, great S. Gregory, who alone turned him back and saved the city.
[Footnote 1: All that Paulus Diaconus, _Hist. Lang_. lib. iv. cap. 8, says is: “Hac etiam tempestate Romanus Patricius et Exarchus Ravennae Romam properavit. Qui dum Ravennam revertitur retenuit civitates, quae a Langobardis tenebantur, quarum ista sunt nomma: Sutrium, Polimartium Hortas, Tuder, Ameria, Perusia, Luceolis et alias quasdam civitates. Quod factum cum regi Agilulfo nunciatum esset statim Ticino egressus cum valido exercitu civitatem Perusium petiit …”]
The truth of all this would appear to be that Gregory was really working for peace. The Lombards were in a fair way to becoming Catholic, and as such they were no longer really dangerous to Italy. The real danger was, as the pope saw, the prolongation of a useless war. Two years later, in 595, we find Gregory writing to the “assessor” of the exarch enjoining peace. “Know then that Agilulf, king of the Lombards, is not unwilling to make a general peace, if my lord the patrician is of the same mood…. How necessary such a peace is to all of us you know well. Act therefore with your usual wisdom, that the most excellent exarch may be induced to come in to this proposal without delay, and may not prove himself to be the one obstacle to a peace so expedient for the state. If he will not consent, Agilulf again promises to make a separate peace with us; but we know that in that case several islands and other places will necessarily be lost. Let the exarch then consider these points, and hasten to make peace, that we may at least have a little interval in which we may enjoy a moderate amount of rest, and with the Lord’s help may recruit the strength of the republic for future resistance.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Gregory, _Ep_. v. 36 (34), trs. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. v. p. 382.]
It is obvious from this letter that the pope and the emperor no longer understood one another, and it is not surprising that the one thought the other a fool and told him so. Doubtless the emperor recalled the long and finally successful war against the Ostrogoths, in which Belisarius had always refused, not only terms of peace other than unconditional surrender, but even to treat. That policy had been, at least from the point of view of Constantinople, successful. From the point of view of the papacy and of Italy, it had had a more doubtful result, but the fact that the Ostrogoths were Arians had satisfied perhaps both, and certainly the papacy, that a truce could not be thought of.
From the imperial point of view things remained much the same in the Lombard war as they had been in the war with the Ostrogoths. From the papal and Italian point of view they were very different. To begin with, the Lombards were fast accepting the Catholic Faith, and then if Italy had suffered in the Ostrogothic wars, which were everywhere eagerly contested by Constantinople, what was she suffering now when the greater part of the country was open to a continual and an almost unopposed attack? “You think me a fool,” the pope wrote to the emperor. In Ravenna the papal envoy was lampooned and laughed at. Then in the end of 596 the exarch Romanus died.
Romanus was succeeded by Callinicus (Gallicinus) in whom the pope found a more congenial and perhaps a more reasonable spirit. By 598 an armistice had been officially concluded between the imperialists and the Lombards, and at length in 599, after some foolish delays in which it would appear that the pope was not without blame, a peace was concluded. Gregory, however, for all his reluctance at the last, had won his way. Henceforth it would be impossible to regard the Lombards as mere invaders after the pattern of their predecessors, Visigoths, Vandals, Huns, and Ostrogoths. They were, or would shortly be, a Catholic people; they held a very great part of Italy; they had entered into a treaty with the emperor not as _foederati_ but as equals and conquerors. Gregory the Great had permanently established the barbarians in Italy, and in his act, the act be it remembered of the apostle of the English, of the apostle of the Lombards, we seem to see the shadowy power that had been Leo’s by the Mincio suddenly appear, a new glory in the world. The new power in the West, the papacy, which thus shines forth really for the first time in the acts of Gregory, unlike the empire, whether Roman or Byzantine, will know no frontiers, but will go into all the world and compel men to come in as its divine commission ordained.
In Italy from the time of the peace with the Lombards (599) onwards what we see is the decline of the imperial power of Constantinople and the rise of the papacy. And this was brought about not only by the circumstances in which Italy and the West found themselves, but also by the character of the imperial government.
When Justin II. disappeared in 578, and made way for Tiberius II., he was already a madman, and though Tiberius was renowned for his virtues, he reigned but four years, and in 582 Maurice the Cappadocian sat upon the throne of Justinian and ruled for twenty years not unwisely, but, so far as Italy was concerned, without success. It was he who was at last brought to make peace with the Lombards and thus for the first time to acknowledge a barbarian state independent of the empire in Italy. He and his children were all murdered in 602 by Phocas, a centurion, whose shame and crimes and cruelties doubtless did much to weaken the moral power of the empire face to face with the papacy.
The peace of 599, the usurpation of Phocas in 602, and the death of Gregory the Great in 604, close a great period and stamp the seventh century in its very beginning with a new character.
That character is in a sense almost wholly disastrous. Those vague and gloomy years, of which we know so little, are almost unrelieved in their hopeless confusion. It is true that Italy had found a champion in the papacy which would one day restore the empire in the West, as Justinian himself had not been able to do; it is true that already Arianism was defeated if not stamped out. But it is in the seventh century that Mahometanism, the greater successor of the Arian heresy, first appears; and it is in the seventh century that it first becomes certain that East and West are philosophically and politically different and irreconcilable. The whole period is full of disasters, and is as we may think the darkest hour before the dawn.
As I have said, the history of those disastrous years is everywhere in the West vague and confused, and this is not least so in Italy and Ravenna.
Ravenna as always remains the citadel of the imperialists in Italy and the West, and as such we must regard her, passing in review as well as we may those miserable years in which she played so great and so difficult a part.
When the Emperor Maurice was assassinated with his family in the year 602, Callinicus was, as we have seen, exarch in Ravenna, but with the usurpation of Phocas that Smaragdus who had already been exarch and had been recalled, perhaps for his too great violence, in 589, was again appointed. He seems to have ruled from 602 to 611. In the last year of the government of Callinicus an attempt had been made by the exarch to force the Lombards to renew the two years’ peace established in 599, and on better terms, by the seizure of a daughter of Agilulf’s, then in Parma, with her husband. They were carried off to Ravenna. But the imperialists got nothing by their treachery. Agilulf at once moved against Padua and took it and rased it to the ground. In the following year Monselice also fell to his arms, and though after the murder of the emperor Maurice in 602 the exarch Callinicus, the author of the abduction, fell, and Smaragdus was appointed by Phocas, the hostages were not returned, and in July 603, Agilulf, after a campaign of less than three months, had possessed himself of Cremona, Mantua, and Vulturina, and probably of most of those places which the imperialists had re-occupied in Cisalpine Gaul in 590. Smaragdus was forced to make peace and to give up his hostages. The peace he made, which left Agilulf in possession of all the cities he had taken, was to endure for eighteen months, but it seems to have been renewed from year to year, and when in 610 Phocas was assassinated and with the accession of Heraclius (610-641) Smaragdus was again recalled and Joannes appointed to Ravenna, the same policy seems to have been followed.
Joannes Lemigius Thrax, as Rubeus, the sixteenth-century historian of Ravenna, calls him, ruled in Ravenna from 611 to 615, and in the latter year was assassinated there apparently in the midst of a popular rising, though what this really was we do not know. His successor, the eunuch Eleutherius (616-620), seems to have found the now fragmentary imperial state in Italy in utter confusion, and indeed on the verge of dissolution. Naples had been usurped by a certain Joannes of Compsa, perhaps “a wealthy Samnite landowner,” who proclaimed himself lord there, and it is obvious that even in Ravenna there was grave discontent. Eleutherius soon disposed of the usurper of Naples, but only to find himself faced by a renewal of the Lombard war, which he seems to have prevented by consenting to pay the yearly tribute which perhaps Gregory the Great had promised when he made a separate peace with the Lombard in 593, when Rome was practically in the hands of the barbarian. It was obvious that the imperial cause was failing. That the exarch thought so is obvious from the fact that in 619 he actually assumed the diadem and proclaimed himself emperor in Ravenna, and set out with an army along the Flaminian Way for Rome to get himself crowned by the pope Boniface V. But the eunuch was before his time; moreover, he was a defeated and not a victorious general. At Luceoli upon the Flaminian Way, not far from Gualdo Tadino where Narses had broken Totila, in that glorious place his own soldiers slew him and sent his head to Heraclius.
Of his immediate successor we know nothing–not even his name,[1] but in or about 625 Isaac the Armenian was appointed and he ruled, as his epitaph tells us, for eighteen years (625-644). Isaac’s rule was not fortunate for the imperialists. He is probably to be acquitted of the murder of Taso, Lombard duke of Tuscia, but it is certain that Rothari, the Lombard king in his time, “took all the cities of the Romans which are situated on the sea-coast from Luna in Tuscany to the boundary of the Franks; also he took and destroyed Opitergium, a city between Treviso and Friuli, and with the Romans of Ravenna he fought at the river of Aemilia which is called Scultenna (Panaro). In this fight 8000 fell on the Roman side, the rest fleeing away.”[2]
[Footnote 1: Mr. Hodgkin (_op. cit_. vi. 157) suggests that the predecessor of Isaac was that Euselnus who, as ambassador for Constantinople, persuaded, or is said to have persuaded, Adalwald, King of the Lombards since the death of his father, Agilulf (615), to slay all his chief men and nobles, and to hand over the Lombard kingdom to the empire; but was poisoned, it is suggested, by Isaac in Ravenna, whither he had fled when he had killed twelve among them. Ariwald succeeded him (625).]
[Footnote 2: Paulus Diaconus, cf. Hodgkin, vi. 168.]
[Illustration: THE SARCOPHAGUS OF EXARCH ISAAC]
Nor was this all. It is in Isaac’s time that the growing jealousy of the empire in regard to the papacy for the first time breaks into flame. Isaac, who as exarch had the right to “approve” the election of the pope, on the accession of Severinus (638) sent Maurice his _chartularius_ to Rome as his ambassador. This Maurice it seems was eager against the papal power, and finding an opportunity in Rome suddenly seized the Lateran and its wealth at the head of “the Roman army,” and wrote to Isaac that he might come and enjoy the spoil. The exarch presently arrived in Rome, resided in the Lateran during eight days, banished the cardinals, and proceeded to steal everything he could lay his hands on in the name of the emperor, to whom he sent a part of the booty. A little later Maurice attempted to repeat his rape, but doubtless hoping to enrich himself he began by repudiating Isaac, who then dealt with him, had him brought northward, and beheaded at a place called Ficulae, twelve miles from Ravenna; but before he could decide what punishment to mete out to Maurice’s accomplices the exarch himself died, “smitten,” as it was said, “by God,” and the exarchate was filled apparently by Theodore Calliopas (644-646).
Theodore Calliopas was twice exarch. Of his first administration we know nothing at all; but in 646 he was succeeded by Plato (646-649), whose name we learn from a letter of the emperor Constans II. to his successor Olympius (649-652), who had been imperial chamberlain in Constantinople. Theodore Calliopas was then again appointed and ruled in Ravenna for eleven years (653-664).
We have seen the empire and the papacy politically at enmity and certainly bent on attaining different political ends in Italy and the West, and this is emphasised by the economic condition of Italy which the empire taxed heavily. Philosophically Constantinople had never perhaps been very eagerly Catholic–or must one say papal? But now at this dangerous moment a doctrine definitely heretical was to be officially adopted there and supported by emperor and patriarch with insistance and perhaps enthusiasm. Heraclius, the grandfather of Constans II., had asserted the Monothelete heresy which maintained that although Christ had two distinct natures yet He had but one _Will_–his human will being merged in the divine. The patriarch of Constantinople, always jealous of the popes, eagerly upheld this doctrine which the papacy continually and consistently denounced. Now Constans II. cared for none of these things. He refused to allow that either pope or patriarch was right, but as though he had been living in the sixteenth instead of the seventh century gravely announced that “the sacred Scriptures, the works of the Fathers, the Decrees of the five General Councils are enough for us;” and asked: “Why should men seek to go beyond these?” Roundly he refused to allow the question to be either supported or attacked.
Now the whole of the West was very heartily with the pope in sentiment; but save for the bishops of Italy he stood alone against the great patriarchates of the East. Nevertheless, he refused to be silent and to obey the emperor. Therefore Olympius, Constans’ chamberlain in 649, came to Italy as exarch with orders to arrest the pope and bring him to Constantinople: this it seemed to him a prudent thing to do; he was to judge for himself. Olympius decided it was not a prudent thing to do. He found the Italian bishops and the people eagerly Catholic. There is a story that he attempted instead to take the pope’s life as he said Mass, but this is probably untrue, for we find pope and exarch presently excellent friends. He went on into Sicily to meet the first invasion of the Saracens in that island, and died there of the pestilence.
Theodore Calliopas was appointed exarch for the second time as his successor in 652. He had either less sagacity or less scruple than his predecessor, for in the following year he appeared with an army in Rome. He found the pope ill and in bed before the high altar of S. John Lateran. He surrounded the church and entered it with his men, who were guilty of violence and desecration. But the pope, to save bloodshed, surrendered himself to the exarch, shouting as he emerged from the church, “Anathema to all who say that Martin has changed a jot or tittle of the Faith Anathema to all who do not remain in his orthodox Faith even to the death.” Through the tumultuous and weeping city the pope passed to the palace of the exarch upon the Palatine Hill. He entered it a prisoner and was presently smuggled away on board ship to Constantinople, where he was examined and condemned to death, insulted in the Hippodrome, and his sentence commuted to imprisonment and exile to Cherson, where he died in 655.
The controversy slumbered. Before long, surely to the amazement of the West, the emperor landed in Italy at Tarentum with the object of finally dealing with the Lombards, for Rothari was dead. It is said he asked some hermit there in the south: “Shall I vanquish and hold down the nation of the Lombards which now dwelleth in Italy?” The answer was as follows, and, rightly understood, contained at least the fundamental part of the truth: “The nation of the Lombards,” said the hermit after a night of prayer, “cannot be overcome because a pious queen coming from a foreign land has built a church in honour of S. John Baptist who therefore pleads without ceasing for that people. But a time will come when that sanctuary will be held in contempt, and then the nation shall perish.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Diaconus. v. 6; cf. Hodgkin, _op. cit_. vi. 272. Paulus adds that the prophecy was fulfilled when adulterous and vile priests were ordained in the church at Monza and the Lombards fell before Pepin.]
That prophecy contained the fundamental truth that since the Lombards were Catholic it was not possible to turn them out of Italy. But Constans heeded it not. He marched on, besieged Beneventum, was not successful, and went on to Rome, and himself spoiled the City. From Rome he returned southward to Naples and Sicily, where in 668 he died.
All that time Gregory was exarch. He had succeeded Theodore Calliopas in 664, and he ruled till 677. We know little of him save that he appears to have attempted to confirm Maurus, archbishop of Ravenna, in his “independence” of the Papal See.[1] This Maurus was undoubtedly a schismatic and Agnellus tells us that he had many troubles with the Holy See and many altercations. Indeed the position of the archbishop of Ravenna can never have been a very enviable one and especially at this time when the breach between pope and emperor, papacy and empire, was continually widening. Always the archbishop of Ravenna, as the bishop of the imperial citadel in Italy, must have been tempted to follow the emperor rather than the pope, and more especially since, personally, he might expect to gain both in power and wealth that way.
[Footnote 1: That was the “Privilegium,” whatever it was worth and whatever exactly it meant, conferred by Constans II. Constantine Pogonatus, the successor of Constans, is still to be seen in S. Apollinare in Classe the “Privilegium” in his hands in mosaic. See _infra_, p. 208.]
The exarch Gregory was succeeded apparently by a certain Theodore whose contemporary archbishop in Ravenna was also a Theodore. He ruled it seems for ten years, 677-687, and built near his palace an oratory, or a monastery, not far from the church of S. Martin (S. Apollinare Nuovo), and was, according to Agnellus, a pious man, presenting three golden chalices to the church in Ravenna and composing the differences of his namesake the archbishop and his clergy.
Theodore in his turn was succeeded by Joannes Platyn (687-701). Two years before his appointment in 685 Justinian II. (685-695) had succeeded to the imperial throne, and in that same year pope Benedict II. died. John V. succeeded him and reigned for a few months, when there followed two disputed elections, those of Conon and of Sergius. In the latter Joannes Platyn the exarch played a miserable and disastrous part. For he suddenly appeared in Rome as the partisan of Paschal, the rival of Sergius, who had obtained his support by a promise of one hundred pounds of gold if he would help him to the papal throne. On his advent in Rome, however, the exarch found that he must abandon Paschal and consent to the election of Sergius, in which all concurred. He refused, however, to abandon his bribe which he now demanded of the new pope. Sergius replied that he had never promised anything to the exarch and that he could not pay the sum demanded. And he brought forth in the sight of the people the holy vessels of S. Peter, saying these were all he had. As the pope doubtless intended, the Romans were enraged against the exarch, the money was scraped together, and the holy vessels rescued.
In all this we see the growing distrust and hatred of Constantinople, which the taxation had first aroused on the part of the Italian people and their champion the papacy. These feelings were to be crystallised by the extraordinary and tactless council that the emperor convened in 691, in which the empire attempted to avenge the defeat it had sustained at the hands of the papacy in regard to the Monothelete heresy. The council, which was mainly concerned with discipline, altogether disregarded Western custom and the See of Rome, and especially asserted that “the patriarchal throne of Constantinople should enjoy the same privileges as that of Old Rome, and in all ecclesiastical matters should be entitled to the same pre-eminence and should count as second after it.” The pope promptly forbade the publication of the decrees of this council which he had refused to sign. Then the emperor sent a truculent soldier, one Zacharias, to Rome with orders to seize Sergius and bring him to Constantinople as Martin had been arrested and dragged away. It only needed this to make the whole situation clear once and for all.
For it was not only the people of Rome who rose to prevent this outrageous act. When Zacharias landed in Ravenna, the citadel of the empire in Italy, the “army of Ravenna,” no longer perhaps Byzantine mercenaries, but Italians, mutinied and determined to march to Rome to defend the pope. As they marched down the Flaminian Way, the soldiers of the Pentapolis joined them, a Holy War, a revolution, declared itself, and for this end: “We will not suffer the Pontiff of the Apostolic See to be carried to Constantinople.” This curious mob of soldiers, gathering force and recruits as it marched with songs and shouting down the Way, hurled itself against the walls of the Eternal City, battered down the gate of S. Peter which Zacharias, afraid and in tears, had ordered to be closed, and demanded to see the pope who was believed to have been spirited away in the night on board a Byzantine ship like his predecessor Martin. Zacharias took refuge under the pope’s bed, and Sergius showed himself upon the balcony of the Lateran and was received with the wildest enthusiasm.
In that revolution was destroyed all hope of the Byzantine empire in Italy. A new vision had suddenly appeared to those whom we may call, and rightly now, the Italian people. The long resurrection of the West, the greatest miracle of the papacy, was upon that day secured for the future. And henceforth the mere appearance of the exarch in Rome was regarded as an insult and a declaration of war.
In the year 695 Justinian II. was deposed and mutilated by Leontius, but he was to appear again as emperor ten years later when Sergius was dead and John VII. sat on the throne of Peter. Pope John reigned but for three years, in which he was successfully bullied by Justinian. He was then succeeded by Sisinnius, who reigned for a few months, and then by Constantine who ruled for seven years (708-715). The archbishops of Ravenna had certainly not dared openly to side with the imperial party and the exarch during the revolution, but, with the restoration of Justinian, archbishop Felix (708-724) felt himself strong enough to oppose the pope when he categorically required of him an oath “to do nothing contrary to the unity of the Church and the safety of the empire.” He had, however, chosen a bad time to set himself against his superior, who in the minds of all was the champion of Italy.
Justinian II. had by no means forgotten the injuries he had received at the hands of the Ravennati: “_ad Ravennam_,” says Agnellus, “_corda revolvens retorsit, et per noctem plurima volvens, infra se taliter agens; heu quid agam et contra Ravennam quae exordia sumam_?” “What can I do against Ravenna?” What he did was this. Theodore the patrician, one of his generals, was despatched with a fleet to Ravenna by way of Sicily. He proceeded up the Adriatic and when far off he saw the great imperial city, he first, according to Agnellus, lamented its fate, “for she shall be levelled with the ground which lifted her head to the clouds;” and then having landed and been greeted with due ceremony, set his camp on the banks of the Po a few hundred yards outside the city walls. There he invited all the chief men of the Ravennati to a banquet in the open air. As two by two they entered his tent to be presented to their host they were bound and gagged and put aboard ship. Thus all the nobles and Felix the archbishop were taken and the soldiers of Theodore entered Ravenna and burned their houses to the ground.
Theodore took his captives to Constantinople where they were all slain save Felix, who, however, was blinded. Later he returned to Ravenna, was reconciled with the Holy See, and died archbishop in 725.
It would appear that all this happened when Theophylact (702-709) was exarch, though Theodore the patrician may have superseded him for a moment on his arrival. The exarch in 710 was Joannes Rizocopus, and in that year pope Constantine visited Constantinople with the future pope Gregory II. in his train. They met in Rome, the pope about to set sail, the exarch on his way to Ravenna, where he was apparently assassinated in a popular tumult, “the just reward of his wickedness.” The people of Ravenna then elected a certain Giorgius as their captain, and all the neighbouring cities, Cervia, Forli, Forlimpopoli, and others, placed themselves under his government and turned upon the imperial troops. We know very little of this revolution, what directly was the cause of it, or how it was suppressed; but it is clear that the exarchate, if it did not actually perish, was from this time forth for all intents and purposes dead. Three more exarchs were to reign in Ravenna, but not to govern. In 713, Scholasticus was appointed and remained till 726. He was followed by Paulus (726-727) who attempted to arrest Leo III., was prevented by the joint action of the Romans and the Lombards, and met his death at the hands of the people of Ravenna; and by Eutychius (727-752) who it seems saw the fall of Ravenna before the assault of the Lombard Aistulf. He was the last representative of the Byzantine empire to govern in Ravenna or in Italy.
But the fall of the imperial power in Italy was not the work of the Romans or of the Lombards. It fell because it had ceased to be Catholic.
We have seen the invasions of the Visigoths and the Huns fade away into nothing; we have seen the greater attempt of the Ostrogoths to found a kingdom in Italy brought to nought. One and all they failed for this fundamental reason, that they were not Catholic. The future belonged to Catholicism, and since it is only what is in the mind and the soul that is of any profound and lasting effect, to be Arian, to be heretic, was to fail. The great attempt, the noble attempt of Justinian to refound the empire in the West, to gather Italy especially once more into a universal government, succeeded, in so far as it did succeed, because the circumstances of the time in Italy forced it to be a pre-eminently Catholic movement. When that movement ceased to be Catholic it failed.
Let us be sure of this, for our whole understanding of the Dark Age depends upon it. Justinian’s success in Italy was a Catholic success. What had always differentiated the imperialists from the barbarians since the fall of the old empire was their Catholicism. Justinian, a great Catholic emperor, perhaps the greatest, faced and outfaced the Arian Goths. He succeeded because his cause was the Catholic cause. But when his successors had to meet the Lombards they soon found that, for all they could do, they had no success. The Lombards, never very eagerly Arian, were open to conversion, slowly they became Catholic, and from the day they became Catholic there was no longer any hope of turning them out of Italy. It is only what is in the mind that is of any fundamental account. Face to face with such a thing as religion, race is as a tale that is told. But though all hope of turning the Lombards out of Italy ceased with their conversion, and the plan of Justinian, with nothing as it were to kick against, was thus rendered a thousand times more difficult, it did not become utterly hopeless and impossible till the empire, the East, that is, Constantinople, fell into heresy and ceased itself to be Catholic. It was the gradual failure of Constantinople in Catholicism that disclosed the pope to the Italians as their champion. It was this failure that raised up even in the imperial citadel, even in Ravenna, men and armies passionately antagonistic to the emperor, passionately papal too. During a hundred years this movement grew till, in the eight century, the _coup de grace_, as we might say, was given to the Justinian plan by the Iconoclastic heresy.
The Iconoclastic decrees of the emperor Leo are said to have appeared in Italy in the year 726. Leo was an adventurer from the mountains of Isauria. He was, so Gibbon tells us, “ignorant of sacred and profane letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his intercourse with the Jews and the Arabs, had inspired the martial peasant with an hatred of images.” It was his design to pronounce the condemnation of images as an article of faith by the authority of a general council. This, however, he was not able to do, for he was at once met and his iconoclasm pronounced heretical by the greatest of all opponents, the pope–Gregory II.
Gregory had been elected to the papacy in 715 upon the death of Constantine. He was a man of great strength of purpose and nobility of character. Upon the Lombard throne sat Liutprand whose boast it was that “his nation was Catholic and beloved of God,” and who acknowledged the pope as “the head of all the churches and priests of God through the world.” These three men were the great protagonists who decided the fate of the empire in Italy.
The Lombards though they were thus Catholic had certainly not ceased to make war upon the empire. In this ceaseless quarrel, for instance, they had, perhaps about 720, possessed themselves of Classis, the seaport of Ravenna, and not long after of the fortress of Narni upon the Flaminian Way, and a little later, about 752, Liutprand himself laid siege to Ravenna, apparently without much result, though Classis seems to have suffered pillage. But if Ravenna did not then fall it was because the emperor’s Iconoclastic decrees had not then reached Italy. They appear to have arrived in the following year and immediately the whole peninsula was aflame. “No image of any saint, martyr, or angel shall be retained in the churches,” said Leo, “for all such things are accursed.” The pope was told to acquiesce or to prepare to endure degradation and exile. Then, says Gibbon, surely here an unbiassed authority, “without depending on prayers or miracles, Gregory II. boldly armed against the public enemy and his pastoral letters admonished the Italians of their danger and their duty. At this signal Ravenna, Venice, and the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis adhered to the cause of religion; their military force by sea and land consisted for the most part of the natives; and the spirit of patriotism and zeal was transfused into the mercenary strangers. The Italians swore to live and die in the defence of the pope and the holy images; the Roman people were devoted to their Father and even the Lombards were ambitious to share the merit and advantage of this holy war. The most treasonable act, but the most obvious revenge, was the destruction of the statues of Leo himself; the most effectual and most pleasing measure of rebellion was the withholding of the tribute of Italy and depriving him of a power which he had recently abused by the imposition of a new duty.”
The life of the pope was attempted by the imperial officials and the exarch appears to have been privy to the plot. The Romans rose and prevented the murder by slaying two of the conspirators, and when the exarch attempted to arrest the pope the very Lombards “flocked from all quarters” to defend him. In Ravenna itself there was revolution; Paulus the exarch was slain it seems in 727, and Ravenna apparently swore allegiance to the Holy See. Leo sent a fleet and an army to chastise her; “after suffering,” says Gibbon, “from the wind and wave much loss and delay, the Greeks made their descent in the neighbourhood of Ravenna; they threatened to depopulate the guilty capital and to imitate, perhaps to surpass, the example of Justinian II. who had chastised a former rebellion by the choice and execution of fifty of the principal inhabitants. The women and clergy in sackcloth and ashes lay prostrate in prayer; the men were in arms for the defence of their country; the common danger had united the factions, and the event of a battle was preferred to the slow miseries of a siege. In a hard-fought day, as the two armies alternately yielded and advanced, a phantom was seen, a voice was heard, and Ravenna was victorious by the assurance of victory. The strangers retreated to their ships, but the populous sea-coast poured forth a multitude of boats; the waters of the Po were so deeply infected with blood that during six years the public prejudice abstained from the fish of the river; and the institution of an annual feast perpetuated the worship of images and the abhorrence of the Greek tyrant.”
So Gibbon, following Agnellus whose account is obscure and perhaps altogether untrustworthy. What is certain is that Liutprand was advancing against the empire in war; that he took Bologna and without difficulty made himself master of the whole of the Pentapolis.
Yet the emperor took no heed. The eunuch Eutychius was appointed as exarch. He appeared in Naples and sent orders to Rome to have the pope murdered; but again the Roman people saved their champion and swore to him a new allegiance. Then Eutychius turned to the Lombards.
He attempted to bribe both Liutprand and the dukes. At first he was unsuccessful, but presently they began to listen to him. Liutprand certainly hoped to make himself king of Italy, and it may be that it was this which Eutychius offered him under the emperor. Moreover, he was jealous, and not without cause, of the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento, who had rallied to the pope, and was anxious to have them under his feet. This, too, he may have hoped to attain as King of Italy and the emperor’s representative in Italy.
When the pope saw Liutprand march southward with the exarch he must have known that the whole of the future depended upon the outcome of this act. Liutprand presently encamped with his army in the plain of Nero between the Vatican and Monte Mario. There the pope met him and, even as Leo the Great had done upon the banks of the Mincio, and as Gregory the Great had done upon the steps of S. Peter’s, overawed the barbarian. Liutprand laid his crown and his sword at the pope’s feet and begged, not only for his own forgiveness, but for that of the exarch his ally. The moment of enormous danger passed, the pope received both his enemies; but from that moment it was evident that the Lombards were not to be trusted and must one day feel the weight of the papal arm.
Gregory died in February 731, and was succeeded by Gregory III. who continued his predecessor’s Italian policy. The great and terrible danger which had suddenly threatened the whole of papal policy when Liutprand and the exarch approached one another seems to have haunted the third Gregory. His obvious defence was to support the dukes against Liutprand, and this he did. Liutprand marched down against him and seized several towns in the duchy of Rome. It is now that the future begins to declare itself. The pope in his peril, a peril that would presently increase, made an appeal to the great Christian champion, Charles Martel; he appealed to the Franks; in the event, as we know, it was the Franks who saved the situation. In 740, however, Charles Martel refused to interfere; he was the kinsman of Liutprand and his son was a guest at the court of Pavia; that son was to be king Pepin the Deliverer–the father of Charlemagne, the first emperor of the restored West.
That appeal for help was in all probability not made only on account of the threat of Liutprand against Rome. It was obvious and more and more obvious that the imperial power in Italy was about to dissolve. What was to take its place? The papacy? Yes, but the state of Italy, the hostility of Liutprand, the whole attitude and condition of the Lombards, forced upon the papacy the necessity of finding a champion, a soldier and an army. That champion Gregory hoped to find in Charles Martel; his successors found him in Charles’s son Pepin and in Charlemagne.
I say the appeal of the pope for help was not made only on account of the Lombard threat against Rome. It was the sudden dissolution of the imperial power that called it forth. In or about 737, the city of Ravenna, as we may believe, was besieged and taken by Liutprand and for some three years remained in his hands, till at the united prayers of exarch and pope the Venetians fitted out a fleet and recaptured it for the empire as we may think in 740.[1]
[Footnote 1: I follow Hodgkin, vi. p. 482 _et seq_., and Appendix F. Cf. also for discussion as to the date, Pinton in _Archivio Veneto_ (1889), pp. 368-384, and Monticolo in _Archivio della R. S. Romana di St. Pat_. (1892), pp. 321-365.]
We know nothing of that siege and capture and practically nothing of the splendid victory of the Venetians. But the tremendous significance of the fall of Ravenna, which had been the impregnable seat of the empire in Italy since Belisarius entered it in 540, must not escape us. Rightly understood it made necessary all that followed.
At this dramatic moment the Emperor Leo died, to be followed in 741 by Pope Gregory and Charles Martel. Gregory was succeeded by Pope Zacharias, who in the year of his election met Liutprand at Narni and obtained from him the restoration of the four frontier towns he had taken two years before. But though Rome was thus secured Ravenna was in worse danger than ever, for Liutprand now renewed his attack upon it and it was only the intervention of the pope in person at Pavia that saved the city. Zacharias set forth along the Flaminian Way; at Aquila perhaps near Rimini the exarch met him, and he entered Ravenna in triumph, the whole city coming out to meet him. In spite of the opposition of Liutprand he made his way to Pavia, and was successful in persuading him to give up his attempt to take the once impregnable city and to restore much he had captured. Liutprand was an old man; perhaps he was not hard to persuade, for he was on the eve of his death, which came to him in 744. His successor Hildeprand reigned for six months and was deposed. Ratchis became king, a pious man who made truce with the pope, and in 749 abdicated and entered a monastery. Aistulf was chosen king, and at once turned his thoughts to Ravenna. The crisis so long foreseen, so often prevented by the papacy, came at last with great suddenness. In 751 Ravenna fell and the Byzantine empire in Italy thereby came to an end.
We know nothing of this tremendous affair; we do not know whether the great imperial city, full of all the strange wonder of Byzantium, and heavy with the destiny of Europe, was taken suddenly by assault or after a long siege. We know only that it fell, and that Aistulf was master there in the year of our Lord 751.
A sort of silence followed that fall. In 752 Pope Zacharias died. His successor was never consecrated, but died within three days of his election and made way for Pope Stephen. In the confusion of all things it is said that a party in Rome urged Aistulf to usurp the empire. This was enough; it might have been, and perhaps was, expected. The pope had his answer ready. The heir of the empire in Italy was not the Lombard but the Holy See. Aistulf threatened to invade Roman territory, and, indeed, occupied Ceccano in the duchy of Rome. Again the pope had his answer. That answer was the appeal to Pepin and his Franks. The papacy had found a champion.
X
THE PAPAL STATE
PEPIN AND CHARLEMANGE
The appeal of Stephen, which was to have for its result the resurrection of the empire in the West and the establishment of the papacy as a temporal power and sovereignty, was made in a letter now lost to us, which a pilgrim on his way back to France from Rome carried to Pepin the king of the Franks. In reply to it, the abbot of Jumieges appeared in Rome as Pepin’s ambassador to invite the pope himself to cross the Alps.
Meantime two events occurred, which cannot but have hardened the resolve of the pope to find a champion. These events were the occupation of Ceccano in the duchy of Rome by Aistulf and the appeal of the emperor to the pope that he should go to Pavia and attempt to persuade the Lombard king to give up Ravenna and the cities he had lately taken. The appeal of the emperor must have assured the pope, if indeed he had any doubt about it, that the emperor, so far as Italy was concerned, was helpless; while the occupation of Ceccano made it doubly obvious that the Lombard intended, now that the empire was helpless, to be absolute master throughout the peninsula.
[Illustration: Colour Plate S. GlOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
Stephen considered what course he should pursue, received two other Prankish envoys in Rome, consented to go to Pavia on behalf of the emperor, and determined at the same time to visit Pepin in the north. He set out for Pavia upon October 13, 753, leaving Rome with a vast concourse of people, which accompanied him some distance along the Way, out of the Flaminian Gate. His mission on behalf of the empire was naturally entirely fruitless, and early in November the pope left Pavia with the hardly won consent of Aistulf to cross the Alps by the Great S. Bernard–a difficult and dangerous business at that time of year–and to meet the Frankish king at S. Maurice in the valley of the Rhone. In the latter he was disappointed. Pepin had been called away to deal with an incursion of the Saxons, and now awaited his amazing visitor at Ponthion in Champagne, but he sent his son Charles, destined to be the first emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, a hundred miles down the long roads to meet the pope, and it was in the company of this youthful hero that upon the Feast of the Epiphany 754 Stephen entered Ponthion at last, and was greeted by Pepin, who cast himself upon the ground before him and walked as his lackey beside him as he rode.
The result of their interview is given in the _Liber Pontificalis_: “The most blessed pope tearfully besought the said most Christian king that by means of a treaty of peace (? with him the pope) he would dispose of the cause of the blessed Peter and the republic of the Romans, who by an oath there and then (de praesenti) satisfied the most blessed pope that he would obey all his commands and admonitions with all his strength and that it pleased him to restore by every means the exarchate of Ravenna and the rights and territories of the republic.”[1]
[Footnote 1: As this is very important I give the original Latin “Ibidem beatissmus Papa praefatum Christianissimum regem lacrimabiliter deprecatus est ut per pacis foedera causam beati Petri et reipublicarae Romanorum disponeret. Qui de praesenti jurejurando eundem beatissimum Papam satisfecit omnibus ejus mandatis et ammonitionibus sese totis nisibus obedire, et ut illi placitum fuerit Exarchatum Ravennae et reipublicae jura seu loca reddere modis omnibus.”]
That winter the pope spent at S. Denis, where he solemnly crowned Pepin and his queen, and Charles and Carloman their children, pronouncing an anathema upon all or any who should ever attempt to elect a king not of their house. Upon Pepin too he conferred the title of patrician. Can it be that by this he intended the king of the Franks to be his executor in the exarchate as the exarch had been the executor of the emperor?[1] We do not know; but a little later a document was drawn up in which Pepin declared and enumerated the territories he was ready to secure for the pope. This document, the Donation of Pepin, would seem to have confirmed in detail and in writing the oath he had sworn to the pope at Ponthion. Unhappily the document has disappeared, and we can only judge of its contents by what actually happened.
[Footnote 1: The title patrician was not exclusively borne by the exarch, the Dux Romae, for instance, bore that title in 743.]
The adventure into Italy to which the pope had persuaded Pepin was not universally popular with the Frankish nobles. We find Pepin attempting to gain his end by negotiation with Aistulf, but all to no purpose, and probably in March 755 the Franks set out with the pope at their head to march into Italy to curb and chastise the Lombard.
The great army of Pepin crossed the Alps by the Mont Cenis, and in what was little more than a skirmish upon the northern side of the pass defeated the Lombard army and proceeded to invest Pavia and ravish the country round about. Aistulf, who was rather an impetuous than a great soldier, had soon had enough and was ready to entertain proposals for peace. A treaty was made in which he agreed “to restore” Ravenna and divers other cities, and to attempt nothing in the future against Rome and the Holy See. This having been decided, the pope took leave of Pepin, who returned to France, and went on his way to Rome.
The pope had won and had really established the Holy See as the heir of the empire; but Aistulf was by no means done with. He forgot alike his treaty and his promises. “Ever since the day when we parted,” the pope writes to Pepin and the young kings, his sons Charles and Carloman, “he has striven to put upon us such afflictions and on the Holy Church of God such insults as the tongue of man cannot declare…. You have made peace too easily, you have taken no sufficient security for the fulfilment of the promises you have made to S. Peter, which you yourselves guaranteed by writing under your hand and seal….”
But the Franks were deaf. An expedition to crush the Lombards was a laborious and an expensive business, and Pepin had much to occupy him at home.
In January 756, however, Aistulf, mad from the start, laid siege to Rome, and for three months laid waste the farms of the Campagna, S. Peter’s patrimony. Narni was taken and indeed all seemed as hopeless as ever. Then the pope took up his pen and as the successor of the Prince of the Apostles wrote a letter as from S. Peter himself and sent it to the three kings, Pepin, Charles, and Carloman, to the bishops, abbots, priests and monks, the dukes, counts, armies, and people of Francia. Gibbon thus summarises this extraordinary and dramatic epistle: “The apostle assures his adoptive sons the king, the clergy, and the nobles of France that dead in the flesh, he is still alive in the spirit; that they now hear and must obey the voice of the founder and guardian of the Roman Church; that the Virgin, the angels, the saints, and the martyrs, and all the host of heaven unanimously urge the request, and will confess the obligation; that riches, victory, and paradise will crown their pious enterprise; and that eternal damnation will be the penalty of their neglect, if they suffer his tomb, his temple, and his people to fall into the hands of the perfidious Lombards.”
Pepin could not be deaf to such an appeal. He again crossed the Mont Cenis, and again the Lombards were as chaff before him. On his march to Pavia he was met by two envoys from Constantinople who had ill-treated, detained, and outstripped the papal ambassador. They besought Pepin to restore Ravenna and the exarchate to the empire, but he denied them and declared roundly that “on no account whatsoever should those cities be alienated from the power of the blessed Peter and the jurisdiction of the Roman Church and the Apostolic See, affirming too with an oath that for no man’s favour had he given himself once again to this conflict, but only for love of S. Peter and for the pardon of his sins; asserting, also, that no abundance of treasure would bribe him to take away what he had once offered for S. Peter’s acceptance.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Cf. Hodgkin, _op, cit_. vii. p. 217.]
Pepin marched on; Pavia was besieged, Aistulf was beaten to the dust. A treaty was drawn up in which the Lombard gave to “S. Peter, the Holy Roman Church, and all the popes of the Apostolic See forever” the Exarchate, the Pentapolis, and Comacchio. An officer was commissioned to receive the submission of every city, and their keys and the deed of Pepin’s donation were placed upon the tomb of S. Peter in Rome. The papal state was founded; where the empire had ruled so long there appeared the heir of the empire, the papacy “sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”
The cities that with their _contadi_ and dependencies thus formed the temporal dominion of the pope were, according to the papal biographer, twenty-three in number; Ravenna first and foremost, then Rimini, Pesaro, Fano, Sinigaglia (but not Ancona) that had formed the old Pentapolis. To them was added La Cattolica. The whole of the inland Pentapolis–though Fossombrone is not mentioned–Urbino, Jesi, Cagli, Gubbio–passed to the pope as well as the following places: Cesena and the Mons Lucatium, Forlimpopoli, Forli, Castro, Caro, S. Leo, Arcevia, Serra dei Conti, the Republic of S. Marino, Sarsina, and Cantiano together with Comacchio and Narni. A few months after all this was accomplished, in December 756, Aistulf, “that follower of the devil,” as the pope called him, died.
Every state that is nearing dissolution is the prey of civil discord. So it was with the Lombards. Ratchis, who had more than seven years before become a monk, claimed the throne; so did Desiderius, “mildest of men.” Pope Stephen supported the latter on condition that Ancona, that last city of the Pentapolis, Osimo which dominated it, and Umana, together with Faenza, Imola, and Ferrara, were “restored” to the papacy. Desiderius agreed and became king, but failed, as the Lombards always failed, to keep his promise, for though he handed over Faenza, Bagnacavallo, and Gavello, he withheld Imola, Bologna, Ancona, Osimo, and Umana; this was in 757, the year of Stephen’s death.
In the same year Pope Paul I. seems to have visited the chief city of his new state, Ravenna, mainly perhaps on ecclesiastical business, for the archbishop Sergius was by no means a loyal subject and had only been brought to heel when nothing but submission was left open to him. He had then, according to Agnellus, promised to deliver to the pope all the “gold, silver, vessels of price, hoards of money,” and so forth stored up in Ravenna. Agnellus tells a long and incoherent tale of the way the pope obtained this treasure and of certain plots to murder him therefor. All that seems fairly certain is that in the first year of his reign pope Paul I. visited Ravenna. Indeed the chief difficulty of the papacy at this time must have been the occupation of the state it had won so consummately. How were the popes to make good their somewhat shadowy hold upon Ravenna, and the Pentapolis, and those other strongholds in central Italy and Aemilia?
That they were not to hold them easily was soon evident. The empire was plotting to win Pepin to its side, and when that failed again, rumours of an imperial invasion reached Rome. Politically all relations ceased between Constantinople and Rome about this time; for though the pope in reality had long ceased to be a subject of the emperor, when he had possessed himself of the exarchate even theory had to give way to fact. Nor was the papacy more fortunate in its relations with Desiderius. The pope’s object was doubtless to keep the Lombard kingdom weak, if not to destroy it. The first step to that end was obviously to encourage the achievement of a real independence by the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, which, again, bordering as they did upon the duchy of Rome, would be easier to deal with if they stood alone. There can be little doubt that the pope fostered the sleepless disaffection of the dukes, but when their revolt matured Desiderius was able to crush it, laying waste the Pentapolis on his way. He was then wise enough to visit Rome and to arrange a peace which was only once broken during pope Paul’s pontificate: in 761 when Desiderius attacked Sinigaglia.
It was easier, however, for the pope to arrange successfully a foreign policy than to administer his new state. No machinery existed for the secular government by the Holy See of a country so considerable; nor was this easy to invent. The pope was forced to fall back upon his representative in Ravenna, namely, the archbishop. Now the archbishops of Ravenna had always been lacking in loyalty. Ravenna and the exarchate were governed in the name of the pope by the archbishop, assisted by three tribunes who were elected by the people. This government was never very successful, for at every opportunity, and especially after the resurrection of the empire in the West, the archbishops were eager to consider themselves as feudatories of the empire. This was natural and it may be worth while briefly to inquire why.
Because Ravenna had for so long, ever since the year 404, been the seat of the empire in Italy, the bishops of that city had acquired extraordinary privileges and even a unique position among the bishops of the West. As early as the time of Galla Placidia, the bishop of Ravenna had obtained from the Augusta the title and rights of metropolitan of the fourteen cities of Aemilia and Flaminia. It is true that the bishop continued to be confirmed and consecrated by the pope–S. Peter Chrysologus was so confirmed and consecrated–but the presence of the imperial court and later of the exarch encouraged in the minds of the bishops a sense of their unique importance and a certain spirit of independence in regard to Rome. Of course the Holy See was not prepared to cede any of its rights; but the spirit of disloyalty remained, and presently the bishop of Ravenna at the time of his consecration was forced to sign a declaration of loyalty, in which was set forth his chief duties and a definition of his rights.
After the Byzantine conquest the church of Ravenna, which the empire regarded as a bulwark against the papal claims, received important privileges and its importance in the ecclesiastical hierarchy was greatly increased. Like the bishop of Rome, the bishop of Ravenna had a special envoy at Constantinople and was represented, again like Rome, in a special manner in the councils of the Orient. In religions ceremonies the bishops of Ravenna took a place immediately behind the pope, and in ecclesiastical assemblies they sat at the right hand of the pontiff. There can be little doubt indeed of the Erastianism of Justinian nor of his encouragement of the bishop of Ravenna.
The declaration that the bishops were forced to sign upon their consecration by the pope by no means settled matters. In 648 this declaration itself was in dispute as to its interpretation, for Constans II. had conferred upon the See of Ravenna the privilege of autonomy, and at this time the bishop did not go to Rome for consecration. The Iconoclastic heresy of Constantinople, however, indirectly brought about peace between the pope and his suffragan, for Ravenna was in this whole heartedly Roman.
It was then, by means of an instrument still very uncertain, that the papacy was forced to govern its new state, and in these circumstances, friendly relationship with Constantinople daily becoming more impossible, it is not surprising that we see the pope making an attempt to come to some sort of permanent reconciliation with Desiderius; and indeed when pope Paul died in 767 undoubtedly a peace had been arranged.
All might have been well if pope Paul’s successor had been regularly chosen; but a layman Constantine was elected by a rabble at the instigation of his brother Toto of Nepi. Christopher and his son Sergius, who held two of the greatest offices in the papal chancery, decided to call in the aid of the duke of Spoleto to attack Constantine, Rome was entered, and in the appalling confusion the Lombards elected a certain priest named Philip to be pope. Christopher appeared, Philip was turned out, and Stephen III., a Sicilian, was regularly chosen. That was in 768, and in the same year king Pepin died and was succeeded by his two sons, Charles to whom apparently fell Austrasia and Neustria, and Carloman who took Burgundy, Provence, and Swabia.
The death of Pepin left the papacy without a champion. Nor was this all, as soon appeared. Charles and Carloman began to quarrel and to effect their reconciliation, or to avert its consequences, Bertrada, their mother, counselled and succeeded in forcing upon them a friendship and an alliance with the Lombards which meant the complete abandonment of Italy upon the part of the Franks. This alliance was to be secured by a double marriage. Charles was to marry Desiderata, the daughter of the Lombard king, while Gisila, Bertrada’s daughter, was to marry Desiderius’ heir. It is obvious that S. Peter was in peril, nor was pope Stephen slow to denounce the whole arrangement. His remonstrance, however, was ineffectual and there remained to him but one thing to do: to arrange himself with the now uncurbed Lombard king. This was exceedingly difficult, because his own election had been achieved only by the humiliation of the Lombards. However, he managed it at the price of civil war. Desiderius and his army entered Rome at the behest of the pope, who celebrated Mass before the king in S. Peter’s. The Franks were checkmated.
It was not long before Charles saw that he had been outwitted. An immediate change of his policy was necessary. In 771 it came with the repudiation of Desiderata, who was sent back to her father’s court at Pavia. Henceforth Charles and Desiderius were implacable enemies. And now everything went in favour of the papal policy, just as before everything had seemed to cross it. Carloman, who had not quarrelled with Desiderius, and might have opposed Charles and changed all the future, suddenly died in December of the year of the quarrel. Charles became thus sole king of the Frankish nation. When pope Stephen came to die in February 772 he must have laid him down with a quiet mind.
In Stephen’s stead there was elected as pope a pure Roman, born in the Via Lata of the nobility of the City; he took the famous name of Hadrian I. Desiderius, who had watched with a growing anxiety the amazing policy of Stephen, now turned to his successor, and both demanded and begged a renewal of friendship. Hadrian answered his ambassador at last with the mere truth. “How can I trust your king when I recall what my predecessor Lord Stephen of pious memory told me in confidence of his perfidy? He told me that he had lied to him in everything as to the rights of Holy Church, though he swore upon the body of the Blessed Peter…. Look you, such is the honour of king Desiderius and the measure of the confidence I may repose in him.”
Desiderius’ answer was not to the point. He seized the cities of Faenza, Ferrara, and Comacchio and ravaged the territory about Ravenna, burned the farms and carried off the cattle. Then he fell upon the Pentapolis, seized Sinigaglia, Jesi, Urbino, Gubbio, S. Leo, and other “Roman” cities, and indeed possessed himself of everything save only Ravenna and Rimini, and proceeded upon a raid into the duchy of Rome.
The answer of the pope was mild but firm: mild, for the hour was not yet come; firm, for it would strike ere long. “Tell your king,” said he, “that I swear in the presence of God that if he choose to restore those cities which in my time he has taken from S. Peter, I will hasten into his presence wherever he may appoint a meeting place, at Pavia, Ravenna, Perugia, or here in Rome, that we may confer together…. But if he does not restore what he has taken away he shall never see my face.”
The hour was not come. Charles was busy with the Saxon hordes upon the north and east of his kingdom. It was not till the beginning of January 773 that the pope sent his messenger Peter to summon him to his aid. Meanwhile, Desiderius marched on Rome. But even without Charles the pope was not defenceless. The Vicegerent of God who had without a soldier turned back Attila on the Mincio and had thrust back Liutprand from Rome was not to be at the mercy of such a king as Desiderius. At Viterbo his messengers, the three bishops of Albano, Palestrina, and Tivoli, met the Lombard king and gave him the pope’s last word: “Anathema.” Desiderius shrank back. In that moment as it seems the ambassadors of Charles arrived in Rome, satisfied themselves of the justice of the papal summons, and carried back to the great Frank the prayer of the pope that he would “redeem the Church of God.” In the late summer of that year the Frankish host was assembled at Geneva and was already beginning to cross the mountains in two mighty commands by the Great S. Bernard and the Mont Cenis; in October the siege of Pavia was begun.
That siege endured for more than eight months. Meanwhile Charles had made himself master of Verona and of many of the cities of the plain. The men of Spoleto hastened to “commend” themselves to the pope and the citizens of Fermo, Osimo, and Ancona, and of Citta di Castello, we read, followed their example, and for the feast of Easter 774, Charles appeared in Rome, and was greeted and embraced by the pope at S. Peter’s. On Easter Day Charles heard Mass in S. Maria Maggiore, on Easter Monday in S. Peter’s, on Easter Tuesday in S. Paul’s. On the Wednesday in that Easter week, according to Hadrian’s biographer, he made that great Donation to the papacy which confirmed and extended and secured the gift of Pepin his father. The duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, and much else, were added to the exarchate “as it was of old” and given to the pope. Then in June Pavia, the Lombard capital, fell and Desiderius and his wife were sent by Charles as prisoners to a convent in Picardy where it is said they ended their lives.
[Illustration: GUARDHOUSE OF THE PALACE OF THEODORIC]
The Donation of Pepin, confirmed, renewed, and enlarged by Charles, may, of course, be understood in various ways; at any rate it has been so understood; but it is certain that the pope saw in it both the fulfilment of his hopes and the final establishment of the papal monarchy. Yet while he utterly refused, and rightly, to admit the claim of Charles–not yet emperor–to interfere in the election of the archbishop of Ravenna, the head of his new dominion, he graciously permitted the king to take away certain mosaics from the old imperial city to adorn his palace at Aix; and that in the following letter, which Dr. Hodgkin translates: “We have received your bright and honeysweet letters brought us by Duke Arwin. In these you expressed your desire that we should grant you the mosaics and marbles of the palace in the city of Ravenna, as well as other specimens to be found both in the pavement and on the walls. We willingly grant your request because by your royal struggles the Church of your patron S. Peter daily enjoys many benefits, for which great will be your reward in heaven….” On no theory yet put forward can the pope be considered as the subject of the king of the Franks. That he had been and was to be the subject of the emperor can be defended, but when has S. Peter been the creature of a king?
It was not Hadrian as we know but Leo who was destined to crown what pope Stephen had begun, and to re-establish the empire in the West, and as he thought to create for S. Peter not an occasional but a permanent champion.
Twenty-five years after that great Easter in Rome, pope Leo, who succeeded Hadrian, whose long pontificate lasted for twenty-three years, was attacked in the streets of Rome and thrown to the ground in the Corso by two nephews of Hadrian’s. Exactly what was the nature of their quarrel with Leo we do not know, but they managed to imprison the pope, who presently escaped and, assisted by Winichis, duke of Spoleto, made his way to the court of Charles. During the summer of 799 the pope remained in France, and probably in October returned to Rome with a Frankish guard of honour. In the following autumn Charles set out on his fourth journey to Rome. It was now that he visited Ravenna, as he had already done in 787, and remained for seven days. On the 24th November he arrived in Rome. A month later upon Christmas Day the great king, attended by his nobles, amid a vast multitude, went to S. Peter’s to hear Mass. It was there in the midst of that great basilica, before the tomb of the Prince of the Apostles, that upon the birthday of Christ the empire re-arose; the pope placed upon the head of Charlemagne the golden diadem and the Roman people cried aloud, “_Carolo Piissimo Augusta Deo, Coronato Magno a Pacifico Imperatori Vita et Victoria_,” Three times that great acclamation echoed over the tomb of the Fisherman. Once more there was an emperor in the West, a champion of the Faith and defender of the Holy See.
It has been asserted, and is still I believe maintained, that that coronation was a surprise to Charles. But such things do not come unforeseen, nor was Charlemagne the man to permit or to tolerate so amazing an astonishment. All Rome knew what was about to be accomplished and had gathered in the ancient basilica to await it and complete it.
Such a question, however, concerns us but little. For us it remains to note that with the re-creation of the empire, and the appearance of the Holy See as a great temporal sovereignty in Italy, the historical importance of Ravenna comes to an end. We have seen that in the autumn of the most famous year save that of the birth of Our Lord, Charlemagne had visited Ravenna and had spent seven days in the city. Once more he was to visit it, and that upon his return journey northward in May 801. From this time Ravenna ceases to be of any significance in the history of Europe. The pass it held was no longer of importance, for the barbarian invasions were at an end, and a new road into Italy over the Apennines was coming into use, the Via Francigena, the way of the Franks. As the port upon the sea which was the fault between East and West it, too, ceased to exist; for East and West were no longer of any real importance the one to the other, and already the alteration of the coast line, which was one day to leave the old seaport some miles from the shore, had begun.
The history of Ravenna, her importance in the history of Europe and Italy, thus comes to an end with the appearance of Charlemagne and the resurrection of the West. The ancient and beautiful city which had played so great a part in the fortunes of the empire, which had, as it were, twice been its birthplace and twice its tomb, herself passes into oblivion when that empire, Holy now and Roman still, rises again and in the West with the crowning of Charlemagne in S. Peter’s Church upon Christmas Day in the year of Our Lord 800. With her subsequent story, interesting to us mainly in two of its episodes–the apparition of Dante and the incident of 1512–I shall deal when I come to consider the Mediaeval and Renaissance city.
But in fact we always think of Ravenna as a city of the Dark Age, and in that we are right. She is a tomb, the tomb of the old empire, and like the sepulchre outside the gates of Jerusalem, that was Arimathean Joseph’s, she held during an appalling interval of terror and doubt the most precious thing in the world, to be herself utterly forgotten in the morning of the resurrection. And surely to one who had approached her in the dawn, while it was yet dark, of the ninth century, of mediaeval Europe that is, her words would have been those of the angels so long ago: _Non est hic; sed surrexit_. While to us to-day she would say: _Venite et videte locum ubi positus erat Dominus_.
XI
THE CATHOLIC CHURCHES OF THE FIFTH CENTURY
THE CATHEDRAL, BAPTISTERY, ARCIVESCOVADO, S. AGATA, S. PIETRO MAGGIORE, S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA, S. GIOVANNI BATTISTA, AND THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA
Ravenna, as we see her to-day, is like no other city in Italy. As in her geography and in her history, so in her aspect, she is a place apart, a place very distinctive and special, and with a physiognomy and appearance all her own. What we see in her is still really the city of Honorius, of Galla Placidia, of Theodoric, of Belisarius and Narses, of the exarchate, in a word, of the mighty revolution in which Europe, all we mean by Europe, so nearly foundered, and which here alone is still splendidly visible to us in the great Roman and Byzantine works of that time.
For the age, the Dark Age, of her glory is illumined by no other city in Italy or indeed in the world. She was the splendour of that age, a lonely splendour. And because, when that age came to an end, she was practically abandoned–abandoned, that is, by the great world–just as about the same time she was abandoned by the sea, much of her ancient beauty has remained to her through all the centuries since, even down to our own day, when, lovelier than ever in her lonely marsh, she is a place so lugubrious, so infinitely still and sad, full of the autumn wind and the rumours of silence of the tomb, of the most reverent of all tombs–the tomb of the empire.
We shall not find in Ravenna anything at all, any building, that is, or work of art, of classical antiquity; all she was, all she did, all she possessed in the great years of the empire has perished. Nor shall we find much that may have been hers in the smaller life that came to her in the beginning of the Middle Age, or that was hers in the time of the Renaissance; the memory and the dust of Dante, a few churches, a few frescoes, a few pictures, a few palaces; nothing beside. For all these we must go to Pompeii and to Rome, or to Florence, Siena, Assisi, and Venice; in Ravenna we shall find something more rare, but not these. She remains a city of the Dark Age, of the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, and she is full of the churches, the tombs, and the art of that time, early Christian and Byzantine things that we shall not find elsewhere, or, at any rate, not in the same abundance, perfection, and beauty.
And yet though so much remains, her story since the time of Charlemagne might seem to be little else but a long catalogue of pillage and destruction. Charlemagne himself began this cruel work when he carried off the mosaics and the marbles, the ornaments of the imperial palace, to adorn Aix-la-Chapelle, and since his day not a century has passed without adding to this vandalism; the worst offenders being the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, which by rebuilding, by frank pillage, by mere destruction, by earthquakes, by contempt, and worst of all by restoration have utterly destroyed much that should have remained for ever, and have altogether spoilt and transformed most of that which, almost by chance it might seem, remains.
And so it comes to pass that the oldest buildings remaining to us to-day in Ravenna are to be found in the baptistery, the cathedral, the arcivescovado, and the mausoleum of Galla Placidia, the oldest complete building being the last. Let us then first consider these.
The first bishop, the “Apostle” of Ravenna, according to Agnellus, was S. Apollinaris, a Syrian of Antioch, the friend and disciple of S. Peter, who, as we know, had been bishop of Antioch for seven years before he went to Rome. Apollinaris followed S. Peter to the Eternal City and was appointed by him bishop of Ravenna, whither he came to establish the church. There might seem to be some doubt as to his martyrdom; but, according to Agnellus, he was succeeded by his disciple S. Aderitus, and he in his turn by S. Eleucadius, a theologian, who is said to have written commentaries upon the books of the Old and New Testaments, and to have been followed as bishop by S. Martianus, a noble whom S. Apollinaris had ordained deacon. There follows in the _Liber Pontificalis_ of Agnellus a list of twelve bishops, S. Calocerus, S. Proculus, S. Probus, S. Datus, S. Liberius, S. Agapetus, S. Marcellinus, S. Severus (c. 344), S. Liberius II., S. Probus II., S. Florentius, and S. Liberius III., who occupy the see before we come to S. Ursus, who “first began to build a Temple to God, so that the Christians previously scattered about in huts should be collected into one sheepfold.”[1] S. Ursus, according to Dr. Holder-Egger, ruled in Ravenna from 370 to 396, and his church was dedicated in 385; but a later authority[2] would seem to place his pontificate later, and to argue that it immediately preceded that of S. Peter Chrysologus, who, the same authority asserts, was elected in 429. All agree that S. Ursus reigned for twenty-six years, and therefore, if he immediately preceded S. Peter Chrysologus, he was elected not in 370, but in 403; that is to say, in or about the same time as Honorius took up his residence in Ravenna.
[Footnote 1: “Iste piimus hic initiavit Templum construere Dei, ut plebes Christianorum quae in singulis tuguriis vagabant in unum ovile piissimus collegeret Pastor … Igitur aedificavit iste Beatissimus Praesul infra hanc Civitatem Ravennam Sanctam Ecclesiam Catholicam, quo omnes assidue concurremus, quam de suo nomine Ursianam nominavit … “]
[Footnote 2: A Testi Rasponi, _Note Marginali al Liber Pontificalis di Agnello Ravennate_ in _Atti e Memorie della R. Dep. di St. Pat. per la Romagna_, iii. 27 (Bologna, 1909-10).]
However that may be, we must attribute the foundation of a new cathedral church in Ravenna to S. Ursus, for till this day it bears his name, Ecclesia Ursiana, though it appears to have been dedicated in honour of the Resurrection (Anastasis.)
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL (_Basilica Ursiana_)]
Agnellus gives us a fairly full account of this church, which consisted of five naves divided and upheld by four rows of fifty-six[1] columns of precious marble from the temple of Jupiter. That the church was approached by steps we learn from Agnellus in his life of S. Exuperantius, for he there tells us that Felix the patrician was killed “on the steps of the Ecclesia Ursiana.” Both the vault and the walls were adorned with mosaics,[2] which Agnellus describes and which would seem to have covered then or later the whole of the interior; the wall on the women’s side of the church being decorated with a figure of S. Anastasia, while over all was a dome “adorned with various coloured tiles representing different figures.” When Agnellus wrote (ninth century) this great church was of course standing, but doubtless it had been added to and adorned from century to century, and it is impossible to learn from his description, or indeed any other that we have, what was due therein to S. Ursus and what to his successors. One of the most splendid ornaments the church possessed would seem to have been a ciborium of silver, borne by columns which stood over the high altar also of silver. This is said by Agnellus to have been placed there by the bishop S. Victor, who seems to have ruled in Ravenna from about 537 to 544. It is said to have cost, with the consent of Justinian, the whole revenue of Italy for a year and to have weighed some one hundred and twenty pounds. The whole stood in the midst of a circular choir of marble, itself covered with silver it might seem, if we may believe a chronicler of Vicenza of the fifteenth century, quoted by Zirardini,[3] who says: “In the great church of Ravenna all the choir, the altar, and the great tabernacle over the altar are of silver.” Before the altar was the _Schola Caniorum_.
[Footnote 1: Fabri, however, in his _Sacre Memorie_, says there were forty-nine columns.]
[Footnote 2: Agnellus gives the names of the mosaicists Euserius or Cuserius, Paulus, Agatho, Satius, and Stephanus.]
[Footnote 3: Zirardini, _De Antiquis Sacris Ravennae Aedificiis_.]
Agnellus tells us further in his life of S. Felix (_c_. 693) that that bishop built a _Salutatorium_ (? Sacristy), “whence the bishop and his assistants proceeded at the Introit of the Mass into the presence of the people.” But the Epigram which Agnellus quotes from this building would seem to suggest that the _salutatorium_ was rather then rebuilt than added for the first time to the church.
The magnificent basilica, one of the most splendid in Italy, was sacked by the French in April 1512, but, as Dr. Corrado Ricci says, it was not they who destroyed the church itself, but the _accademici_ of the eighteenth century, who, instead of conserving the glorious building, then some thirteen hundred years old, began in 1733 to pull it down, to break up the beautiful capitals and columns of precious marbles, and to make out of the fragments the pavement of the new church we still see, begun in 1734 by Gian Francesco Buonamici da Rimini. Only the apse with its beautiful great mosaic remained for a few years till at last it too was destroyed.
Thus the church we have in place of the old Basilica Ursiana is a building of the eighteenth century, and all that we care for in it is the fragments that are to be found there of its glorious predecessor.
These are few in number and of little account. Supporting the central arch of the portico are two marble columns which belonged to the old basilica, and by the main door are two others of granite which came perhaps from the old nave.
Entering the church we find ourselves in a cruciform building consisting of three naves, divided by twenty-four columns of marble, transept, and apse, with a dome over the crossing. In the second chapel on the right is an ancient marble sarcophagus said to be that of S. Exuperantius, bishop of Ravenna about 470. The magnificent tomb carved in high relief did not, however, belong to the old cathedral, but was brought here when the church of S. Agnese was destroyed. In the south transept is the chapel of the Madonna del Sudore, where on either side are two other sarcophagi of marble adorned with figures and symbols. That on the right is said to be the tomb of S. Barbatianus, confessor of Galla Placidia, and was originally in the church of S. Lorenzo in Caesarea, whence it was brought to the cathedral in the thirteenth century by the archbishop Bonifazio de’ Fieschi, whom Dante found in Purgatory among the gluttons:
“Bonifazio
che pasturo col rocco molte genti…”
He brought the sarcophagus to the cathedral for his own tomb and there I suppose he was buried. The sarcophagus upon the left was likewise used in 1321 as a tomb for himself by the archbishop, Rainaldo Concoreggio. This, too, is sculptured with a bas-relief of Christ, a nimbus round His head, a book in His hand, seated on a throne set on a rock, out of which four rivers flow. With outstretched hand He gives a crown to S. Paul, while S. Peter bearing a cross holds a crown, just received, in his hand. The sculpture on the sarcophagus of S. Barbatianus is ruder.
The high altar is of course modern, but within it is an ancient marble sarcophagus of the sixth century, in which it is said the dust of nine bishops of about that time lies.
But one noble thing remains here among all the modern trash to remind us of all we have lost: the glorious processional cross of silver called of S. Agnello. Yet even this, noble as it is, does not come to us from Roman or Byzantine times it seems, but is rather a work of the eleventh century.
In the midst of this great cross, upon one side, is the Blessed Virgin praying, and upon the other Christ rising from the tomb. Upon the arms of the cross, and the uprights, are forty medallions of saints, of which three would seem to be archbishops. I say this beautiful and precious thing comes to us from the eleventh century; but it has been very much restored at various times and is now largely a work of the sixteenth century. Dr. Ricci tells us that on the side where we see the Madonna only the five medallions on the lower upright and the two last of the upper are original; while upon that of the Risen Christ, only the five medallions on the lower upright are untouched, all the rest is restoration.
Beneath the eighteenth-century apse of the cathedral is the ancient crypt, no longer to be seen; it does not, according to Dr. Ricci, date earlier than the ninth century nor do any of the other crypts in the city.
In the left aisle a few fragments from the old church remain recognisable. They are the marble slabs of an _ambo_ erected by S. Agnellus, archbishop of Ravenna in the middle of the sixth century. There we read: _Servus Christi Agnellus Episcopus hunc pyrgum fecit_. Among these are some earlier panels of the fifth century. In the treasury, again, we find two other panels from the _ambo_ of S. Agnellus, and a strange calendar carved upon a slab of marble to enable one to find the feast of Easter in any year from 532 to 626; this is certainly of the sixth century.
A certain number of Mediaeval and Renaissance things are also to be seen in the church. Here in the treasury we have a cross of silver gilt, with reliefs of the Crucifixion, God the Father, the Blessed Virgin, S. John Baptist, and S. Mary Magdalen, dating from the middle of the fourteenth century (1366). Over the entrance to the sacristy is a fresco by Guido Reni of Elijah the prophet fed by an angel. Within, is a good picture by Marco Palmezzano: a Pieta with S. John Baptist; while the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament is decorated by him and his pupils.
It is obvious, then, that very little remains to us of the original Basilica Ursiana; nor can we reckon among that little the beautiful round and isolated campanile. This is not older than the ninth century, and has been much tampered with, especially in the sixteenth century, after an earthquake, and in the seventeenth century after both earthquake and fire. Indeed, the upper storey dates entirely from 1658.
As it is with the cathedral, so it is with the _Arcivescovado_. Of the old palace of the Bishops of Ravenna only a few walls, a tower, and a wonderful little chapel remain. What we see now is work of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries after a restoration at the end of the nineteenth. The old vast palace which has been destroyed was the work of many archbishops, achieved during many centuries. It consisted of a series of buildings grouped about the palace which the archbishop S. Peter Chrysologus built in the fifth century, and its most magnificent part was due to S. Maximian, archbishop of Ravenna in the time of Justinian. All their work, which we would so gladly see, is gone except the little chapel of S. Peter Chrysologus, which he built and signed in one of the arches in the fifth century.[1]
[Footnote 1: According to Rasponi the chapel was dedicated originally to S. Andrea and is to be identified with the Monasterium di S. Andrea, which was not built by S. Peter Chrysologus (429-_c_. 449), but by Peter II. (494-_c_. 519). Cf. Rasponi, _Note Marginali al Liber Pontificalis di Agnello Ravennate_ (Atti e Memorie della R. Dep. di Stor. Pat. per la Romagna, iii. 27), Bologna, 1909-1910.]
Of this great man Agnellus records: “He was beautiful in appearance, lovely in aspect; before him there was no bishop like him in wisdom, nor any other after him.” He was a native of Imola, then called Forum Cornelii, and was ordained deacon by the bishop of that city, one Cornelius, of whom he always speaks with affection and gratitude. When the bishop of Ravenna died, it is said the clergy of the cathedral, then just built or building, with the people, chose a successor, and besought the bishop of Imola to go to Rome to obtain the confirmation of the pope. Cornelius took with him his deacon Peter, and the pope, who had been commanded so to do by the Prince of the Apostles in a dream, refused to ratify the election already made, but proposed Peter the deacon as the bishop chosen by S. Peter himself. Peter was there and then consecrated bishop, was conducted to Ravenna, and received with acclamation. He is said to have found a certain amount of paganism still remaining in his diocese, and to have completely extirpated it. He often preached before the Augusta Galla Placidia and her son Valentinian III., and he was perhaps the first archbishop of the see, Ravenna till his time having been suffragan to Milan. He seems to have died about 450 in Imola. Among his many buildings, which included the monastery of S. Andrea at Classis, is the little chapel now dedicated in his honour in the _Arcivescovado_ of Ravenna. It is perhaps the only one of his works which remains. The little square chamber, out of which the sanctuary opens, is upheld by four arches, which are covered, as is the vaulting, with most precious mosaics, still of the fifth century, though they have been and are still being much restored. On the angles of the vaulting, on a gold ground, we see four glorious white angels holding aloft in their upraised hands the symbol of Our Lord. Between them are the mighty signs of the Four Evangelists, the angel, the lion, the ox, and the eagle. In the key, as it were, of the arches east and west is a medallion of Our Lord, and three by three under the arch on either side the eleven Apostles and S. Paul, who takes the place of Judas instead of Matthias. In the key of the arches north and south is a medallion of the symbol of Christ, and three by three under the arch on either side six saints, the men to the right SS. Damian, Fabian, Sebastian, Chrysanthus, Chrysologus, and Cassianus; the women to the left SS. Cecilia, Eugenia, Eufemia, Felicitas, Perpetua, and Daria. Here the SS. Fabian, Sebastian, and Damian, Dr. Ricci tells us, are altogether restorations. For the rest, these mosaics have suffered much, both from restoration, properly so called, and from painting.
The pavement is old and beautiful, as I think are the walls, but the frescoes, once by Luca Longhi, are most unworthy and out of place. The recess which now contains the altar might seem not to have made a part of the original chapel or oratory; it appears it was only in the eighteenth century that the two were thrown into one. At that time the mosaics of the Blessed Virgin and of S. Apollinaris and S. Vitalis were brought here from the old cathedral.
Just outside this wonderful little chapel in the _Arcivescovado_ there is an apartment devoted to Roman and other remains found from time to time in Ravenna: a torso of a statue, a work of Roman antiquity, should be noted, as should certain fragments of a frieze, also an antique Roman work. Here, too, is preserved the splendid cope of S. Giovanni Angeloptes who was archbishop from 477 to 494[1] when he died.
[Footnote 1: Cf. A. Testi Rasponi, _op. cit. supra_.]
In another apartment of the _Arcivescovado_ is preserved a relic of another great archbishop of Ravenna: the ivory throne of S. Maximianus. This is a magnificent work of the early part of the sixth century, and is one of the most splendid works known to us of its kind. It was made for the cathedral of Ravenna, but in or about the year 1001 it was carried off by the Venetians and given by doge Pietro Orseolo II. to the emperor Otto III., who left it to the church of Ravenna on his death. It is entirely formed of ivory leaves, most of them carved sumptuously in relief. In front we see the monogram of _Maximianus Episcopus_ and under it are carvings of S. John Baptist between the Four Evangelists; all these between elaborately carved decorative panels. About the throne to right and left is the story of Joseph in ten panels, and upon the back in the seven panels that remain[2] the miracles of Our Lord. Altogether it is a work of the most lovely kind, and certainly Byzantine.
[Footnote 2: Four of those missing, Dr. Ricci tells us, have of late years been discovered, one in the Naples Museum (1893), one in the collection of Count Stroganoff (1903), one at Pesaro (1894), and another in the Archaeological Museum at Milan (1905).]
We shall come upon S. Maximianus again in S. Vitale, where something must be said of him. He lies, as has already been noted, in one of the great sarcophagi in the second chapel on the right in the cathedral.
From the _Arcivescovado_ we pass to what is now the most remarkable building of the group–the Baptistery.
Dr. Ricci tells us that it was originally one of the halls of the baths that were near the present cathedral. But it was converted into a baptistery and ornamented with mosaics by the archbishop Neon of Ravenna (_c_. 449-459) as its inscriptions tell us and is signed with his monogram. The original floor is three metres below that we see, and a second floor about a metre and a half above the original floor has been discovered; this it would seem is that made by Neon, while a third remains about half a metre under the pavement we use, and upon this are set the eight columns, with their capitals, two of them Byzantine and the rest Roman, which uphold the arches of the upper arcade upon which is set the great drum of the dome. The plan is a simple octagon, bare brick without, covered with a “tent” roof of amphorae under the tiles; but within, everywhere encrusted with glorious marbles and mosaics.
It is to the mosaic of the cupola that we instinctively turn first, for it is, perhaps, the finest left to us in Ravenna. It is divided into three parts. In the midst is the Baptism of Our Lord on a gold ground. Christ stands up to His waist in the clear waters of the Jordan, the god of which river waits upon Him. S. John high up on the bank, his staff, topped with a cross, in his hand, pours the water from a shell upon Our Lord’s head while the Dove, an almost heraldic figure, is seen above About this circular mosaic is set a greater circle in which we see, upon a blue ground, the twelve Apostles in procession, each bearing his crown. Nothing left to us of that age is finer or more gravely splendid than these mosaics, they seem to be the highest expression of a great art which has known how to reject the brutal realism of an earlier time and to seize perfectly the secret of decoration. Nothing of the kind more masterly remains to us in Europe.
Beneath these two circles another is set in which are eight panels, each of three parts, where are represented eight temples, four of them with thrones signed with the Cross, and four of them with altars upon which the book of the Gospel is open.
[Illustration: THE BAPTISTERY AND CAMPANILE OF THE CATHEDRAL]
The whole cupola is borne by the upper arcade, where we see sixteen figures of the Prophets in stucco. The upper arcade is in its turn borne by the lower, which is everywhere encrusted with mosaics, restorations of our own time. The walls are panelled with various marbles. In the midst of the building is a huge octagonal font with its _ambo_, and in one of the wall niches is an ancient altar, and in another a vase of marble.
The effect of all this splendour is even to-day very lovely and glorious; what it might have been if it had been properly cared for instead of “restored” we can only guess. Unhappily the “restoration” has been very radical. Even in the central Baptism, the head and shoulders and right arm of the figure of the Saviour, the head and shoulders and right arm, the right leg and foot of the Baptist and the cross in his his left hand have been destroyed and the whole dimmed and even spoiled. Such as it is, however, where shall we find its equal or anything to compare with it?
From the cathedral group we now turn to the other churches which were built in the time of the old empire in Ravenna for the most part, in the days, that is, of Galla Placidia and her son Valentinian III.
Among these is the church of S. Agata (entrance Via Mazzini 46), which though entirely rebuilt, with its campanile, in the later part of the fifteenth century is since the “restoration” of 1893 interesting, if at all, because the church dates originally from the fifth century. It would seem indeed that it was founded in the time of the Augusta, and to this the walls of part of the nave bear witness, but it was continued later perhaps by the archbishop Exuperantius (_c_. 470) whose monogram appears upon the second column to the left in the nave, and finally completed or in part rebuilt in the sixth century. In the fifteenth century (1476-94), the church was largely rebuilt again, but its tribune with its great mosaic remained till 1688 when it fell. In the sixth century it would seem to have had an atrium or narthex. Its main interest for us to-day lies in the beauty of its columns of bigio antico, cipollino, porphyry, granite, and other marbles belonging to the original church, with their Roman and Byzantine capitals. Also to the right of the nave we see a curious _ambone_ hollowed out of a fragment of a gigantic column of Greek marble. The altar, too, is formed from an ancient sarcophagus which is said to hold the dust of the two archbishops, Sergius, with whom the pope had so much trouble, and Agnellus. According to Agnellus the chronicler there was a portrait of the archbishop S. John Angeloptes in the apse, but this like the great mosaic of the tribune is gone. It was here, however, that S. John got that strange surname of his–Angeloptes. He and his predecessor S. Peter Chrysologus with S. Maximian and Sergius were the great archbishops of this great see. We hear that the emperor Valentinian III., according to Agnellus–but we should place the bishopric of S. John Angeloptes 477-494–“was so much affected by the preaching of this holy man that he took off his imperial crown and humbly on his knees begged his blessing…. Not long after he gave him fourteen cities with their churches to be governed by him _Archieratica potestate_. And even to this day (ninth century), these fourteen cities with their bishops are subject to the church of Ravenna.[1] This bishop first received from the emperor a _Pallium_ of white wool, just such as it is the custom for the pope to wear over the _Duplum_; and he and his successors have used such a vestment even to the present day.”
[Footnote 1: The Archbishop of Ravenna at the present day has seven suffragans, Bertinoro, Cervia, Cesena, Comacchio, Forli, Rimini, Sarsina. It is hard to decide whether this man or Peter Chrysologus was the first archbishop of Ravenna.]
This passage of Agnellus is important, but does not seem, on examination, to have any real bearing upon the question of the dependence of the See of Ravenna upon Rome. The Pallium was originally an imperial gift to the popes, probably in the fourth century. And the fact that it is the emperor and not the pope who bestowes it upon the archbishop of Ravenna in the fifth century, if it be true, can have no meaning at all in the question of papal supremacy.
Agnellus, whom I have quoted, goes on to tell us of that miracle which gave S. John, archbishop of Ravenna, his surname of Angeloptes or Angel-seer. “When the said John,” he tells us, “was singing Mass in the Basilica of S. Agata and had accomplished all things according to the pontifical rite, after the reading of the Gospel, after the Protestation (? the Credo), the catechumens to whom it was given to see saw marvellous things. For when that most blessed man began the Canon, and made the sign of the Cross over the sacrifice, suddenly an angel from heaven came and stood on the other side of the altar in sight of the bishop. And when after finishing the consecration he had received the Body of the Lord, the assisting deacon who wished to fulfil his ministry could not see the chalice which he had to hand to him. Suddenly he was moved aside by the angel who offered the holy chalice to the bishop in his place. Then all the priests and people began to shake and to tremble beholding the holy chalice self-moved, inclined to the bishop’s mouth, and again lifted into the air, and laid upon the holy altar. A strange thrill passed through the waiting multitude. Some said: ‘The deacon is unworthy;’ others affirmed, ‘Not so, but it is a heavenly visitation.’ And so long did the angel stand by the holy man until all the solemnities of the Mass were ended.”
Soon after this strange miracle S. John Angeloptes died and was buried in the basilica of S. Agata behind the altar in the place where he saw the angel standing.
Nothing seems to remain of his tomb or his grave; but the church is full of curious fragments, broken pillars, bits of mosaic, ancient marble panels, beautifully carved, and more than one old sarcophagus. Somewhere there no doubt the dust of S. John Angeloptes awaits the resurrection.
From S. Agata we pass to S. Francesco. This church was founded by S. Peter Chrysologus (429-_c_. 449) and was completed by S. Peter Chrysologus’ successor, the archbishop S. Neon (_c_. 459). Its first title would seem to have been that of S. Peter Major; we hear, too, that it was called SS. Peter and Paul, and Agnellus in his life of S. Neon calls the church Basilica Apostolorum. The region of the city in which it stands would seem to have borne also the name _Regio Aposto lorum_, though whether it got the name from the church or the church from it is impossible to decide.[1]
[Footnote 1: The Franciscans conventuals would seem to have possessed the church from 1261 to 1810.]
Unhappily the church has been entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century, and our interest in it is confined for the most part to the tower, the crypt, the twenty-two columns of Greek marble which uphold the nave, two of which are signed ‘P. E.’ and four others ‘E. V. G.,’ and the tombs. The tall square tower dates, perhaps, from the tenth century, the crypt from the ninth, but the columns are of the fifth century. Perhaps the oldest thing in the church is the sarcophagus on the right of the main door which has on its front Pagan sculptures and on its sides Christian. Close to the holy water stoup is a very lovely sarcophagus of the fourth century with reliefs of Our Lord and eight Apostles. The ribs of the cover have as finials the heads of lions; altogether this is a very splendid and noble tomb. In the last chapel upon the right we find the great sarcophagus, still used as an altar, of S. Liberius, bishop of Ravenna (_c_. 375), “a great man, a never-failing fountain of charity; who brought much honour to the church,” according to Agnellus. The sarcophagus dates from the end of the fourth century and is sculptured in high relief.
I shall return to S. Francesco when I consider Mediaeval Ravenna.[2] At present I would direct the reader’s attention to S. Giovanni Evangelista.
[Footnote 2: See _infra_, p. 245 _et seq_.]
This church was originally founded by Galla Placidia herself, in fulfilment of a vow made by her to S. John Evangelist, when, on her way from Constantinople to Ravenna, she was in danger of shipwreck.[3] Agnellus tells us that of old the church bore an inscription to this effect, and he gives it to us: _Sancto ac Beatissimo Apostolo Johanni Evangelistae Galla Placidia Augusta cum filio suo Placidio Valentiniano Augusta et filia sua Justa Grata Honoria Augusta, Liberationis penculum marts votum solmentes_. The mosaic of the apse of old represented the incident. Unhappily the church was almost entirely rebuilt in 1747, only the tower of the eleventh century and the portico of the fourteenth being left as they had been. The beautiful fourteenth-century door, however, bears above it a relief of that time in which we see Our Lord, S. John Evangelist, Valentinian III., Galla Placidia with her soldiers and her confessor, S. Barbatian, with priests. Below this on either side of the arch of the doorway is a representation of the Annunciation and within the arch itself a relief which recounts the miracle which attended the consecration of the church. For the church of S. Giovanni Evangelista was not only founded in recompense for a miracle, but a miracle attended its consecration. It seems that when the church was to be consecrated no relic of S. John Evangelist was to be had. Therefore the Augusta and her confessor gave themselves a whole night to prayer, and suddenly there appeared to them S. John himself, vested like a bishop with a thurible in his hand, with which he incensed the church. Then when he came to the altar to incense it, and they would have venerated him, he suddenly vanished, only leaving in the hand of the Augusta one of his shoes. This legend, which is represented in relief in the fourteenth-century doorway of S. Giovanni Evangelista, is also the subject of a picture by Rondinelli of Ravenna in the Brera at Milan.
[Footnote 3: See _supra_, p. 41.]
The church has, as I have said, been ruined by the rebuilding of 1747; but there still remain the twenty-four columns of bigio antico with their Roman capitals, which upheld the old basilica, and in the crypt is the ancient high altar of the fifth century. Something, too, of the old church would seem to remain in the much repaired walls of the apse without.
[Illustration: THE CAMPANILE OF S. GIOVANNI EVANGELISTA]
The frescoes by Giotto, sadly repainted, in the fourth chapel on the left, must be noted. They represent the four Evangelists with their symbols over them, and the four Latin fathers of the Church, S. Jerome, S. Ambrose, S. Austin, and S. Gregory. Certain fragments of a thirteenth-century mosaic pavement are to be seen in the chapel of S. Bartholomew, which is itself perhaps the oldest part of the church.
We turn now to the church of S. Giovanni Battista which was founded by a certain Baduarius, according to Agnellus, and consecrated by S. Peter Chrysologus. It is possible that Baduarius was the mere builder, and that he built by order of Galla Placidia. Nothing, however, is left of the old church, which was entirely rebuilt in 1683, except the apse as it is seen from the outside, the round campanile in its first story and the beautiful columns sixteen in number, four of bigio antico, two of pavonazzetto, one of cipollino, and the rest of greco venato, according to Dr. Ricci.
* * * * *
There remains to be considered what is, when all is said, I suppose the noblest monument of the fifth century left to us in Italy or in Europe–the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.
Agnellus tells us that the Augusta built close to her palace a great church in the shape of a Latin cross. This she dedicated in honour of the Holy Cross which it will be remembered her predecessor S. Helena had discovered in Jerusalem. Of this church, though it has long since disappeared–the “western” part of it having been destroyed in 1602 and what remained restored out of all recognition in 1716–we know a good deal. According to Agnellus it was covered with most precious stones (? marbles) and apparently with mosaics and was full of splendid ornaments. It had, too, a great narthex, and at the end of this Galla Placidia presently built a cruciform oratory for her own mausoleum, where she was to lie between her brother Honorius and her son Valentinian.
[Illustration: Colour Plate THE MAUSOLEUM OF GALLA PLACIDIA]
The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia is the oldest complete building left to us in Ravenna, for it dates from well within the first half of the fifth century, whereas the baptistery, altered and transformed as it was by S. Neon, is as we see it a work of the first years of the second half of that century. Simple as it is, without, a cruciform building of plain brick, within it is so sumptuously and splendidly adorned that not an inch anywhere remains that is not encrusted with mosaic or precious marbles. These mosaics were, before their radical “restoration,” perhaps finer and more classical than those of the baptistery. It might seem, indeed, that they were perhaps the finest and subtlest work done in the Roman realistic tradition, nor was there perhaps anywhere to be found so noble a representation of the Good Shepherd as that which adorned this great monument. It is, however, impossible to speak with any confidence of what we see there now, for all has been restored again and again, and is now little better than a _rifacimento_ of our own time, a copy, faithful perhaps, but still a copy, of the work of the fifth century.
Nevertheless, the impression of the whole is very splendid and solemn. The roofs and dome are covered with mosaics of a wonderful and indescribable night blue, powdered with stars. In the cupola is a cross and at the four angles are set the symbols of the four Evangelists, glorious heraldic figures.
Above the door we see Christ the Good Shepherd, youthful, classic in form and repose, very noble and Roman, seated on a rock in a broken hilly landscape, a cross in His left hand, caressing His sheep with His right. This figure even after “restoration” gives us more than a glimpse of what it once was. Nowhere had Christian art produced so majestic a representation of its Lord; nor had the subject of the Good Shepherd been anywhere more splendidly treated than here.
Over the great sarcophagus, opposite the entrance, we see a very different scene. Here is no longer a youthful Christ, with the hair and the noble aspect of Apollo, but a bearded and majestic figure in the fullness of manhood, His eyes full of anger, His draperies flying about Him, moving swiftly, the cross on His shoulders, in His left hand an heretical, probably Arian, book which he is about to cast into the furnace in the midst. Upon the extreme left is a case or cupboard in which we see the books of the four Gospels. In the other lunettes we see very gorgeous decorative work of arabesques and stags at a fountain and two doves drinking from a vase. Above in the spandrils of the arches are figures of apostles or saints. Nothing in the world is more solemnly gorgeous in effect than this beautiful rich interior. The pavement is composed of fragments of the same precious marbles as those which line the lower parts of the walls.
Under the mosaic of the burning of the heretical books we see the mighty sarcophagus of plain Greek marble which once held the body of the Augusta. This, of old, was richly adorned with carved marbles and perhaps with silver or mosaic; and we know that in the fourteenth century certainly it was possible to see within the figure of a woman richly dressed seated in a chair of cedar and this was believed to be the mummy of the Augusta Galla Placidia. However, we hear nothing of it before the fourteenth century, and Dr. Ricci suggests that it may have been an imposture of about that time. It is possible, but perhaps unlikely, for the Augusta was not a saint, and what reason could men have in the thirteenth century, when the very meaning of the empire was about to be forgotten, for such an imposture? However this may be, the figure remained there seated in its chair during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and the greater part of the sixteenth centuries. And indeed, it might have been there still but that in 1577 some children, curious about it and anxious to see a thing so wonderful, thrust a lighted taper into the tomb through one of the holes in the marble, when mummy, vestments, chair and all were consumed, and in a moment nothing remained but a handful of dust.
The sarcophagi under the arches on either side, according to various authorities, hold the dust of the emperor Honorius, the brother of the Augusta, and of Constantius her husband, or of the emperor Valentinian III. her son. It is impossible to decide at this late day exactly who does and who does not lie in these great Christian tombs.
The Mausoleum of the Augusta was long known, though not from its origin, as the sanctuary of SS. Nazaro e Celso. When it was so dedicated I am ignorant, but it was not in the time of the Augusta. Then, in the fifteenth century, when so much was remembered and so much more was forgotten, it bore the title of SS. Gervasio e Protasio, and this name remained to it till the seventeenth century, when the old title was revived. To-day although it retains its name of SS. Nazaro and Celso, it is more rightly and universally known as the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia.
XII
THE ARIAN CHURCHES OF THE SIXTH CENTURY
THE PALACE OF THEODORIC, S. APOLLINARE NUOVO, S. SPIRITO, S. MARIA IN COSMEDIN, THE MAUSOLEUM OF THEODORIC
It was, as we have seen, upon March 5, 493, that Theodoric, king of the Ostrogoths, entered Ravenna as the representative of the emperor at Constantinople. One of his first acts seems to have been the erection of a palace designed for his habitation and that of his successors. Why this should have been so we do not know. It might seem more reasonable to find the Gothic king taking possession of the imperial palace, close to which the Augusta Galla Placidia had erected the church of S. Croce and her tomb. Perhaps this had been destroyed in the revolution or series of revolutions in which the empire in the West had fallen, perhaps it had been ruined in the Gothic siege which endured for some three years. Whatever had befallen it, it was not occupied, restored, or rebuilt by Theodoric. He chose a situation upon the other side of the city and there he built a new palace and beside it a great Arian church, for both he and his Goths were of that sect. We call the church to-day S. Apollinare Nuovo.
The palace, of which nothing actually remains to us, though certain additions made to it during the exarchate are still standing, was, according to the various chroniclers whose works remain to us, surrounded by porticoes, such as Theodoric built in many places, and was carved with precious marbles and mosaics. It was of considerable size, set in the midst of a park or gardens. Something of what it was we may gather from the mosaics of S. Apollinare Nuovo in which it is conventionally represented. It came to owe much to Amalasuntha who lived there during her brief reign, and more to the exarchs who made it their official residence.
In 751 when Ravenna fell into the hands of the Lombards Aistulf established himself there, but it might seem that the place had suffered grievously in the wars, and it was probably little more than a mighty ruin when, in 784, Charlemagne obtained permission from the pope to strip it of its marbles and its ornaments and to carry them off to Aix-la-Chapelle. Among these was an equestrian statue in gilded bronze, according to Agnellus a portrait of the great Gothic king, but as Dr Ricci suggests a statue of the Emperor Zeno. This too in the time of Leo III. Charlemagne carried away. According to the same authority the back of the palace was not then very far from the sea, and this was so even in 1098. Nothing I think can give us a better idea of the change that has come over the _contado_ of Ravenna than an examination of its situation to-day, more than four miles from the sea coast.
The only memorial we have left to us _in situ_ of that palace of the Gothic king is a half-ruined building, really a mere facade with round-arched blind arcades and a central niche in the upper story, a colonnade in two stories, and the bases of two round towers with a vast debris of ruined foundations, walls, and brickwork, scarcely anything of which, in so far as it may be said to be still standing, would seem to have been a part of the palace Theodoric built. Indeed the ruined facade would seem to belong to a guard house built in the time of the exarchs in the seventh or eighth century. If we seek then for some memory of Theodoric in this place we shall be disappointed.
Far otherwise is it with the great church, the noblest in Ravenna, of S. Apollinare Nuovo. This was built about the same time as the palace, in the first twenty years of the sixth century, as the Arian cathedral by the Gothic king. It was the chief temple in Ravenna of that heresy, and it remained in Arian hands till with the re-establishment of the imperial power in Italy it was consecrated, in 560, for Catholic use by the archbishop S. Agnellus. It consists of a basilica divided into three naves by twenty-four columns of Greek marble with Romano-Byzantine capitals. Of old it had an atrium, but this was removed in the sixteenth century, as was the ancient apse in the eighteenth. The original apse, however, was ruined in an earthquake, as Agnellus tells in his life of S. Agnellus, in the sixth century, and of the atrium only a single column remains _in situ_ before the church. The campanile, a noble great round tower, dates from the ninth century for the most part, its base is, however, new. The portico before the church is a work of the sixteenth century, as is the facade, which nevertheless contains certain ancient marbles, among which are two inscribed stones, one of the fourth century and the other of the eleventh.
When Theodoric built this great and glorious church he dedicated it to Jesus Christ. It seems to have been dedicated in honour of S. Martin in 560 by the archbishop S. Agnellus who consecrated it for Catholic worship, and finally in the middle of the ninth century to have been