Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition (15 page)

This was war, and the Emperor retaliated by attempting a rerun of the affair of Pope Martin. The Pope’s chief advisers were rounded up and deported to Constantinople, and Zacharias, captain of the imperial guard, was sent to Rome to arrest the Pope himself. It was a bad mistake, revealing the Emperor’s failure to grasp the growing resentment of his authority in Italy. Italian-born troops from the imperial forces at Ravenna and the Duchy of the Pentapolis (the five cities of Ancona, Senigallia, Fano, Pesaro and Rimini) were brought to Rome to arrest the Pope: instead, they mutinied in his defence. Zacharias was forced to take refuge in the Lateran, and ended up actually hiding under the Pope’s bed, while Sergius showed himself unharmed to the troops and the Roman crowds to calm their anger. Zacharias ignominiously fled the city, and soon afterwards Justinian was deposed in a palace coup. ‘Thus, by Christ’s favour’ commented the papal chronicler, ‘was God’s Church with its prelate preserved undisturbed.’
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The truth was that Byzantine rule in Italy was now virtually confined to Sicily and the south. The emperors were increasingly pinned down by the Islamic threat on their eastern borders, and Italy mattered to them only as a fiscal milch-cow. The popes still thought of Constantinople as the source of legitimate authority in Italy, and each new pope dutifully requested – and paid handsomely for – the imperial mandate for their consecration. In practical terms, however, they were independent rulers, thrown back on their own resources in maintaining their place within the peninsula. From the early eighth century
onwards, that place was increasingly precarious. The Lombard King Liutprand was determined to unite his realm by gaining control of the independent Lombard duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, which flanked Rome to north and south. This expansion threatened both imperial and papal interests, and the popes struggled to reconcile their loyalty to Constantinople with the brute realities of Italian politics. Resentment was focused on the growing burden of imperial taxation, for which Italy received in return no imperial protection. Pope Gregory II (715–31), as custodian of the Church’s patrimony, was the largest contributor to the imperial revenue from Italy. He put himself at the head of this economic protest, forbidding payment of the unfair tax demands. The Lombards were now Catholics, and, though often effectively at war with them, the popes were able to exert a moral influence over them which could transcend politics. In 729 Lieutprand, acting in temporary alliance with an anti-papal exarch, besieged Rome: Pope Gregory II confronted the King and ‘brought him to such remorse’ that Lieutprand left his armour and weapons as offerings at the tomb of the Apostle, and abandoned the siege. Yet, despite a virtual breakdown in relations between papacy and empire, the popes were prepared to mobilise the prestige of Peter to buy Constantinople respite from its enemies. In 729 Gregory II helped the Exarch crush the rebellion of the pretender Tiberius Petasius, and in 743 and again in 749 Pope Zacharias negotiated Lombard withdrawals from imperial territory, and thereby saved the exarchate in Ravenna.

In 726, however, the Emperor Leo III set in motion a series of events which would snap the thin thread still connecting empire and papacy. For generations the Christian consciousness of the East had been increasingly concentrated on icons, painted images of Christ and the saints. Icons were held to mediate the abiding power and protection of the holy to the Christian community, in much the way that the relics of the saints, or the sacramental elements of bread and wine, had long been held to do. In the first year of his reign, during the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717, Leo himself had ordered the greatest miracle-working icon in Constantinople, the image of the Virgin
Hodegetria
(the Virgin ‘showing the way’), to be paraded round the city walls, to comfort and reassure the people.

They needed all the comfort they could get, as the empire shrank under the Muslim advance. Theologians and preachers began to wonder aloud whether God was angry with his people, whether at
the heart of the empire there lay some great sin, for which all were being punished. In 726 this speculation was given symbolic focus by a terrifying volcanic eruption: black ash settled like an omen all over the Aegean, and the Emperor acted. God was angry, he declared, because of the sin of idolatry. The Old Testament forbade the worship of images, yet the churches were full of them. He commanded the destruction of all images of Christ and his mother, and their replacement by the unadorned symbol of the cross, the sign in which Constantine, the founder of the Christian empire, had conquered.

Leo’s edict was the product of profound social panic, several generations of theological reflection by bishops and theologians, and the cumulative impact of controversy about the person and natures of Christ. Whatever its causes however, the Emperor’s attack on images, and the resulting wave of image-breaking or ‘iconoclasm’, fell like a thunderbolt in the West. The Exarch, who tried to enforce it in Ravenna, was lynched by an angry mob, and Pope Gregory II saw in it yet another example of the empire espousing heresy. Indignantly, he rejected Leo’s decree, and warned him that as a layman he had no right to interfere in theological matters. The Emperor ordered the new Exarch to depose the Pope, provoking a series of uprisings which expressed Italian resentment of imperial rule: as the
Liber Pontificalis
commented, ‘Romans and Lombards bound themselves together in the tie of faith, all of them willing to undergo a glorious death in the pontiff’s defence.’
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Gregory did what he could to prevent this feeling escalating into revolution, urging loyalty to the imperial ideal, but the Iconoclastic crisis deepened under his successor Gregory III (731–41). The Emperor refused all papal offers of reconciliation, and so Gregory organised a synod in Rome in 731 which denounced Iconoclasm and excommunicated anyone perpetrating it. Significantly, the Archbishop of Ravenna took part in the Synod, a mark of the extent to which the Emperor’s Iconoclasm had alienated even his supporters in Italy. Nevertheless, the Pope did the empire sterling service in 733 by negotiating the return of the exarchate of Ravenna from the Lombards. In gratitude, the Exarch donated six twisted columns of onyx to the shrine of St Peter. The gift was perhaps intended as an olive branch, but if so it did not disarm papal hostility to imperial religious policy. Pointedly, Gregory used the Exarchs columns to support a series of elaborate new images of Christ and the saints.

Gregory III’s intervention to rescue the exarchate was all the more remarkable in that it coincided with a devastating imperial attack on the papacy. Realising that he had little chance of bringing Rome to heel behind his Iconoclast policies, Leo struck at both its spiritual jurisdiction and its material base. Some time in 732 or 733 he confiscated all the papal patrimonies in southern Italy and in Sicily, the main source of the Pope’s income. He went on to remove from papal jurisdiction the bishoprics ofThessalonica, Corinth, Syracuse, Reggio, Nicopolis, Athens and Patras, in other words all the Greek-speaking provinces of Illyrica, Sicily and southern Italy From now on, these would all be subject to the Patriarch of Constantinople. To hold the remains of the empire together, Constantinople was strengthening its grip on everything south of Naples, and ditching the rest. The exarchate at Ravenna would stagger on till its final destruction by the Lombards in 751, and the popes continued for a time to hanker after the old links with Constantinople. But Leo’s actions had deeply embittered papal Rome. No pope had ever addressed an emperor in tones as defiant as those used by Gregory II during the height of the Iconoclastic disputes, and no pope had ever shown so clear a sense of the real source of the papacy’s strength:

Pope Gregory’s contrast between the faithful West and the heretic East was laden with significance for the future of the papacy, and its final turn from East to West. It was to be less a matter of choice, however, than a recognition of realities: with Leo’s confiscation of Sicily and the south, the papacy to all intents and purposes had been cast out of the empire.

It is one of the ironies of history that this long slow divorce between the Greek empire and the papacy should have taken place largely
under Greek-speaking popes. Of the thirteen popes elected between 687 and 752, only two,Benedict II (684–5) Gregory II, were native Romans, or even Latins. All the rest were Greek-speakers, from Greece, Syria or Byzantine Sicily. This extraordinary development, which could be said to have begun with the election of Pope Theodore in 642, reflected a profound transformation of the Roman clergy. Gregory the Great and Pope Honorius were the last representatives of a once-common papal type, of which Pope Vigilius was a less salubrious example – aristocratic bishops drawn from the Roman senatorial families. The calamities of the Gothic war and the imperial reconquest had put an end to that type, as the great families faded out or emigrated east. At the same time, Rome began to fill up with Greek-speaking clergy. Some came as a direct consequence of the restoration of imperial rule, in the wake of the Byzantine garrisons in Rome. Round the imperial quarter on the Palatine there sprang up a ring of churches staffed by Eastern clergy and dedicated to Eastern saints, most of them with military associations – Sts Cosmas and Damian, Sts Sergius and Bacchus, St Hadrian, Sts Quiricius and Giulitta, Sts Cyrus and John. To these camp-followers of empire were added wave after wave of the victims of empire, refugees from the monophysite, monothelite and eventually the Iconoclastic persecutions. And, thirdly, there came the refugees from Islam, as the ancient heartlands of Christianity – and of monasticism – went down before the Arab tide.

At precisely the moment when the supply of educated Latin clergy from which the popes were traditionally recruited was drying up, therefore, a flood of Greek clergy and monks arrived in Rome. By the end of the seventh century these Greek-speakers dominated the clerical culture of Rome, providing its theological brains, its administrative talent, and much of its visual, musical and liturgical culture. Greek monks were brought into the burgeoning relief work of the Roman Church, as small monastic communities were placed in charge of the ancient
diaconia
, distribution-points along the Tiber for corn and other doles to the poor. These centres were part of an emerging Byzantine quarter of the city, and the Greek churches of San Giorgio in Vellabro and Santa Maria in Cosmedin, at the foot of the Aventine, were formed out of such relief centres.

The impact of all this on papal Rome was far-reaching, sometimes daunting. In the reign of Pope John VI (701–5) the English Bishop
Wilfrid arrived in Rome. He came to appeal against the reorganisation of the church in England recently introduced by Theodore, the gifted and energetic Greek Archbishop of Canterbury. Wilfrid’s party were honourably received, but were disconcerted to find the whole papal entourage laughing and whispering among themselves, in Greek. The entire papal delegation to the Sixth General Council in 680 was made up of Greeks. Even the native traditions of Roman religious art were now transformed by Eastern influence, the monumental realism of the Roman style, represented in the apse of Sts Cosmas and Damian, being replaced by the delicate formalism of the paintings in Santa Maria Antiqua, or the Byzantine-style icon of the Virgin now in the church of Santa Francesca Romana. The worship of the Roman Church itself was being transformed by Eastern influence. Round the person of the Pope there was growing up an increasingly formal ceremonial, modelled on Byzantine court ritual, which served to emphasise the sacredness of the person of the successor of St Peter. The austere, businesslike ceremonial of the Roman rite was enriched and elaborated by feast-days, music and ritual observances borrowed from Syria, Jerusalem and Constantinople.

None of this implied any watering down of the distinctive identity of the Roman Church. Pope Sergius I played a key role in introducing oriental observances into the Roman liturgy, like the Syrian custom of singing the ‘Agnus Dei’, or the elaborate processions, with Greek chant, which he introduced for the four major Eastern feasts of the Virgin. Yet Sergius passionately resisted the Canons of the Quinisext Council, which would have imposed alien Eastern customs on the Roman Church, and it was he who solemnly transferred the relics of St Leo the Great, the great patron and formulator of the papacy’s Petrine and Roman claims, into a conspicuous new shrine in St Peter’s. Indeed, the Eastern popes, with their more learned and sophisticated theological interests, brought a new, doctrinal edge to the Petrine claims of the papacy, an emphasis which their confrontations with heretical emperors had sharpened and fixed.

Rome under the Greek popes, therefore, was a melting-pot. In it many of the traditions of East and West were flowing together, to create a vibrant and solemn religious culture which fascinated and dazzled the newly Christianised peoples of Europe. A party of Irish monks in Rome to discuss the Easter question met in their hostel fellow pilgrims from Egypt, Palestine, the Greek East and southern
Russia. Kings, bishops, monks and the ordinary faithful travelled to Rome to beg the grace of the Apostle, to be near the relics with which Rome was full and which the Greek popes had gorgeously enshrined for their devotion. Whole quarters of the city were given over to them, like the Saxon Borgo near St Peter’s, where the English in Rome were based.