Absolute Monarchs (4 page)

JUST TWENTY-THREE
years (and five popes) after Innocent’s death in 417, the Tuscan lawyer and theologian Leo I (440–461) was elected to the papal throne. He was the first Bishop of Rome to adopt the title of the pagan chief priest,
pontifex maximus
, and the first of only two in all papal history to have been known as “the Great.” In fact, he deserved the title no more than had Innocent, whose campaign to establish the supremacy of Rome he enthusiastically continued. Papal authority, he claimed, was the authority of St. Peter himself; the pope was Peter’s unworthy spokesman. This is the overriding message of his vast correspondence with bishops and churchmen all over the Western world. He and he alone was the guardian of orthodoxy, which he did his utmost to spread also throughout the East—though such a task, as he well knew, required much diplomacy and tact.

Just how much of these two virtues became clear with the storm that was soon to burst over the head of Eutyches, an elderly archimandrite of Constantinople. Already for a century and more the Church, and particularly the Eastern Church, had been deeply divided on the question of the nature—or natures—of Christ. Did he possess two separate natures, the human and the divine? Or only one? And if only one, which was it? The leading exponent of the dual nature was Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, who had been consequently deposed in 431 by the Council of Ephesus. It was possible, on the other hand, to go too far in the opposite direction; and such was the mistake of Eutyches, who held that Christ had only one nature, the human nature being absorbed in the divine. This theory, known as the monophysite, was equally unacceptable to Nestorius’s third successor, Bishop Flavian. Found guilty of heresy, condemned, and degraded, Eutyches appealed to Pope Leo, to the Emperor Theodosius, and to the monks of Constantinople and in doing so unleashed a whirlwind of almost unimaginable ferocity. For three years the Church was in an uproar, with councils summoned and discredited, bishops unseated and restored; with intrigues and conspiracies, violence and vituperation, curses and anathemas thundering between Rome and Constantinople, Ephesus and Alexandria. In the course of all this, Pope Leo sent to Flavian a copy of his celebrated
Tome
, which, he believed, established once and for all the doctrine that Christ possessed two natures coexisting. Its findings were upheld in 451 by the Council of Chalcedon, at which the papal delegates presided and which condemned monophysitism in all its forms. The doctrine of the dual nature has remained ever since an integral part of orthodox Christian dogma, though several monophysite churches—including the Copts of Egypt, the Nestorians of Syria, the Armenians, and the Georgians—broke away at Chalcedon and still continue in being.
⁸

By now, however, the whole Roman Empire of the West was crumbling. Britain, Spain, and Africa were already gone; Italy was in rapid disintegration. The new enemy was the Huns, the most savage of all the barbarian tribes, most of whom still lived and slept in the open, disdaining all agriculture and even cooked foods—though they would soften raw meat by massaging it between their thighs and the flanks of their horses as they rode. For clothing they favored tunics made, rather surprisingly, from the skins of field mice crudely stitched together; these they wore continuously, without ever removing them, until the unsavory garments dropped off of their own accord. They practically lived on their horses—eating, trading, holding their councils, even sleeping in the saddle. Their leader, Attila, was typical of his race: short, swarthy, and snub-nosed, with a thin, straggling beard and beady little eyes set in a head too big for his body. He was not a great ruler, nor even a particularly able general; but so overmastering were his ambition, his pride, and his lust for power that within the space of a few years he had made himself feared throughout the length and breadth of Europe: more feared, perhaps, than any other single man—with the possible exception of Napoleon Bonaparte—before or since.

But no sooner had Attila begun his march on Rome in 452 than he suddenly halted. Why he did so we do not know. Traditionally, the credit has always been given to Pope Leo, who traveled to meet him on the banks of the Mincio River—probably at Peschiera, where the river issues from Lake Garda—and somehow persuaded him to advance no further; but the pagan Hun would not have obeyed the pope out of mere respect for his office; what arguments or inducements did Leo offer? A substantial tribute is the likeliest answer. But there is another possibility too: Attila, like all his race, was incorrigibly superstitious, and the pope may well have reminded him of how Alaric had died almost immediately after his sack of Rome, pointing out that a similar fate was known to befall every invader who raised his hand against the Holy City. It is possible, too, that Attila’s subjects themselves were partially responsible for persuading their leader to retire; there is evidence to suggest that, after their devastation of all the surrounding countryside, they were beginning to suffer from a serious shortage of food and that disease had broken out within their ranks. A final consideration was that troops from Constantinople were beginning to arrive to swell the imperial forces. A march on Rome, it began to appear, might not prove quite so straightforward as had at first been thought.

For some or all of these reasons, Attila decided to turn back. A year later, during the night following his marriage to yet another of his already innumerable wives, his exertions brought on a hemorrhage; and as his lifeblood flowed away, all Europe breathed again. While the funeral feast was in progress, a specially selected group of captives encased his body in three coffins—one of gold, one of silver, and one of iron. Then, when the body had been lowered into the grave and covered over, first with rich spoils of war and then with earth until the ground was level above it, all those involved in the burial ceremonies were put to death, so that the great king’s last resting place might remain forever secret and inviolate.

The pope had saved Rome once; but when, only three years later, the Vandal King Gaiseric appeared at the walls Leo was less successful. He persuaded Gaiseric not to put the city to the torch, but he could not prevent a hideous fourteen-day sack. The
Liber Pontificalis
tells us that when the nightmare was over and Leo found that the silver chalices and patens had been plundered from all the churches in Rome, he gave orders for the melting down of the six great urns from St. Peter’s—they dated from the time of Constantine—to provide replacements.
⁹
By now, after both the Goths and the Vandals had done their worst, there can have been little of the old imperial Rome that was still worth plundering. But imperial Rome was already dead and past recall; more than a hundred years before, its spirit had passed to Constantinople. What mattered now was Christian, papal Rome—and that, as we shall see, was proof against any number of barbarian atrocities.

1.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, vol. 1, chap. 4.

2.
It was under Decius that the first head of the Church was martyred since the days of St. Peter: Pope Fabian, who died from the brutality of his treatment in prison. A few years later, under Valerian, he was followed by Pope Sixtus II, arrested in the catacombs and beheaded with his attendant deacons.

3.
It took its name from the old Roman family of the Laterani, who had originally built it.

4.
Constantine had initiated this project to celebrate the successful conclusion of the Council of Nicaea in 325, but it had been given new impetus by his mother, St. Helena. She had set off two years later at the age of seventy-two for Jerusalem, with the result described above.

5.
“We do him too much honor when we hail him as the father of religious music in the Christian Church” (
Dictionnaire de théologie catholique
, article on “Arianism”). We certainly do.

6.
Acts 1:18.

7.
Constantinople was to have no patriarch of its own until 451.

8.
It was at Chalcedon, too, that the bishoprics of Constantinople and Jerusalem were raised to the status of patriarchates, joining those of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. Constantinople was once again decreed to be second in precedence after Rome.

9.
It also reports his decree that “a nun should not receive the blessing of a veil without having been tested in her virginity for sixty years”—by which time she should certainly have deserved it.

CHAPTER III

Vigilius

(537–555)

J
ust fifteen years after the death of Leo the Great—he was the first Bishop of Rome to be buried in St. Peter’s—the Roman Empire of the West came to its end; but the abdication, on September 4, 476, of its last emperor, the pathetic, double-diminutived child-ruler Romulus Augustulus, was hardly noticed by most of his subjects and made little difference to their lives. For almost a century the Western Empire had been in a state of near chaos, dominated by one barbarian general after another. The most recent of these, a Scyrian
¹
named Odoacer, had made no claim to sovereignty for himself; all he asked was the title of
Patricius
, in which rank he proposed to take over the governance of Italy in the name of the Emperor Zeno, then reigning in Constantinople.

Zeno, however, had a better idea. Throughout his reign he had been plagued by Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, who were widely scattered in the lands to the north of the Black Sea. The main purpose of Theodoric’s early life was to find and secure a permanent home for his people. To this end he had spent the better part of twenty years fighting—sometimes for and sometimes against the empire—arguing, bargaining, cajoling, and threatening by turns. This constant vacillation between friendship and hostility was, in the long term, unprofitable to both parties, and sometime, probably toward the end of 487, it was agreed between Theodoric and Zeno that the former should lead his entire people into Italy, overthrow Odoacer, and rule the land as an Ostrogothic kingdom under imperial sovereignty. Early in 488 the great westward migration took place—men, women, and children, with their horses and their pack animals, their cattle and sheep, lumbering slowly across the plains of Central Europe in search of greener and more peaceful pastures.

On their arrival in Italy Odoacer put up a fierce resistance; but Theodoric steadily wore him down before agreeing to what appeared to be remarkably generous terms: that the two of them should rule jointly from Ravenna, where they would share the royal palace. It was ostensibly to seal this agreement that on March 15, 493, Theodoric invited Odoacer, with his brother, his son, and his chief officers, to a banquet in his wing of the palace. As the Scyrian took his place in the seat of honor, Theodoric stepped forward and, with one tremendous stroke of his sword, clove the body of Odoacer from collarbone to thigh. The members of Odoacer’s suite were quickly dealt with by the surrounding guards, while his brother was shot down by arrows as he fled through the palace gardens. His wife was thrown into prison, where she later died of hunger; his son was first sent off to Gaul but later executed. Then, with the Scyrian line satisfactorily wiped out, Theodoric the Ostrogoth laid aside the skins and furs that were the traditional clothing of his race, robed himself in the imperial purple, and settled down to rule.

After this unpromising beginning, his thirty-three years on the throne were prosperous and peaceful. One thing only made him unacceptable to emperor and pope alike—his uncompromising Arianism; unfortunately, the last years of his reign coincided with a campaign by the Emperor Justin I to stamp out the heresy once and for all. It was as a reaction to this that in 524 Theodoric imprisoned one of his chief advisers, the philosopher Boethius, whom he subsequently ordered to be garrotted, and that two years later he sent Pope John I at the head of a delegation to Constantinople to remonstrate. This journey, the first ever made by a pope to the Bosphorus, was a tremendous success from John’s point of view, since the emperor prostrated himself before him and accorded him a magnificent reception, at which the pope was most satisfactorily seated on a higher throne than the patriarch; from Theodoric’s, however, it was a failure, Justin having categorically refused to allow those Arians who had been forcibly converted to revert to their old heretical ways.

There can be no doubt that Theodoric was a giant, and the extraordinary mausoleum which he built—and which still stands in the northeastern suburbs of Ravenna—perfectly symbolizes, in its half-classical, half-barbaric architectural strength, the colossus who himself bestrode two civilizations. No other Germanic ruler, setting up his throne on the ruins of the Western Empire, possessed a fraction of Theodoric’s statesmanship and political vision, and when he died, on August 30, 526, Italy lost the greatest of her early medieval rulers, unequaled until the days of Charlemagne.

Just eleven months later, on August 1, 527, a ruler of similar stature ascended the throne at Constantinople. From the moment he came to power, Justinian I had been determined to bring the entire Italian Peninsula back into the imperial fold. A Roman Empire that did not include Rome was an obvious absurdity; an Ostrogothic kingdom that did—and was heretical to boot—could never be anything but an abomination in his sight. Clearly it had to be destroyed, and equally clearly the man best able to destroy it was the greatest living Byzantine general, Belisarius.

In 535, with an army of 7,500 men, Belisarius sailed for Sicily, which he took with scarcely a struggle. Crossing the Strait of Messina to the mainland, he captured Naples and—after a disastrous
²
yearlong siege—Rome; finally, at Ravenna, the Gothic King Vitiges offered to surrender the city and deliver up his crown, on one condition: that Belisarius then proclaim himself Emperor of the West. Many an ambitious imperial general would have seized such an opportunity; but Belisarius, utterly loyal to his emperor, had no intention of doing anything of the kind. On the other hand, he saw the proposal as an ideal means of bringing the war to a quick and victorious end. He accepted; the gates of Ravenna were flung open, and the imperial army marched in.

As Vitiges, his family, and the leading Gothic nobles were led off into captivity, they must have reflected bitterly indeed on the perfidy of the general who had betrayed them. But as Belisarius took ship back to Constantinople in May 540, there is no indication that his conscience gave him any trouble. Had the Goths’ proposal not been in itself perfidious? And in any case, were the Goths not rebels against the lawful authority of the emperor? In occupying Ravenna by trickery, he had saved untold bloodshed on both sides. Besides, he had now achieved his objective. Thanks to him, all Italy was now back in imperial hands.

Not, however, for long. The Goths reestablished their monarchy and fought back, and a young Gothic king named Totila appealed to all his subjects, Goth and Italian alike, to unite and drive the Byzantines from Italian soil. In the early summer of 544 Belisarius found himself on his way back once more to Italy. But this time he was at a serious disadvantage. Justinian had always been jealous of his power and popularity—at one moment his accumulated treasure had been confiscated, though it was later returned—and on this occasion he had allowed him only a handful of inexperienced troops, little authority, and no money at all. Belisarius did his best but was unable to prevent Totila from laying siege to Rome and, in December 546, from capturing the city; and after a few more months of desultory fighting up and down the peninsula it became clear that the two sides had reached a stalemate, with neither strong enough to eliminate the other. Early in 549 Belisarius returned to Constantinople. After the glory of his first Italian campaign, his second had brought him five years of frustration and disappointment.

DURING TOTILA’S SIEGE
of Rome a somewhat surprising event took place: the pope was kidnapped. Pope Vigilius was a noble Roman who, as deacon, had accompanied Pope Agapetus I to Constantinople in 536 on an unsuccessful mission to persuade Justinian to call off his Italian campaign. They were still in the capital when Agapetus died suddenly; and Vigilius, who had confidently expected to succeed him, was furious to receive news from Rome that a certain Silverius had been elected in his stead. He had already been at some pains to ingratiate himself with the passionately monophysite Empress Theodora, and he now made a secret agreement with her by which Belisarius, then in Italy, would depose Silverius and install him, Vigilius, in his stead. In return, he promised to denounce the principles laid down at Chalcedon
³
and proclaim his acceptance of the monophysite creed. Belisarius did as he was bidden; Vigilius then hurried back to Rome for his coronation, forcing Silverius into an Anatolian exile.

By the autumn of 545 the army of Totila was at the gates of Rome. Belisarius, with the limited means at his disposal, was doing everything he could to avoid a siege but was receiving little or no support from his emperor. Justinian had other problems on his mind. The root of the trouble was that hoary old enigma, the identity of Christ. The orthodox view was that laid down almost a century before by the Council of Chalcedon: that the Savior possessed, in his one person, two natures divided but inseparable, the human and the divine. This view, however, had never been accepted by the monophysites, according to whom the divine nature alone existed and who consequently saw Christ as God rather than man; and these, heretics as they might be, were far too numerous and too widespread to be eliminated. Egypt, for example, was monophysite through and through; in Syria and Palestine too, the doctrine had taken a firm and potentially dangerous hold. In the West, on the other hand, such heresy as existed at all—which was to be found almost exclusively among the barbarians—championed the opposite, Arian, view that Christ was essentially human. The Roman Church, meanwhile, remained staunchly orthodox and was predictably quick to protest at any deviation from the Chalcedonian path. Justinian therefore had a difficult and delicate course to steer. If he dealt too harshly with the monophysites, he risked rebellion and possible loss to the empire of valuable provinces; Egypt was one of its chief sources of corn. If he treated them with too much consideration, he would incur the wrath of the orthodox and split his subjects more than ever. He was, of course, fully aware of his wife’s own monophysite sympathies and rather welcomed them: they enabled him on occasion to take an outwardly rigid line in the knowledge that she would secretly be able to temper its severity.

Thanks to this highly disingenuous policy, the emperor had managed to curb most of the monophysite communities—apart from those of Egypt, which he left firmly alone—but then, suddenly, there emerged a dangerously charismatic new troublemaker. Jacob Baradaeus (“the Ragged”) was a monk from Mesopotamia who, having in 543 been consecrated Bishop of Edessa by the monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria, took it upon himself to revive monophysite sentiment throughout the East, traveling constantly and at prodigious speed the length and breadth of Syria and Palestine, uncanonically consecrating some thirty bishops as he went and ordaining several thousand priests.

Unable to stamp out the flames of fanaticism that sprang up everywhere in the wake of Baradaeus, Justinian found himself in a quandary. The monophysites in their present mood needed more careful treatment than ever; at the same time, he was already being criticized in the West for weakness and inertia in the face of the new threat. Some kind of positive action was clearly required, and so, for want of any better solution, he decided on a public condemnation—not of the monophysites but of those who occupied the other end of the theological spectrum, professing the humanity rather than the divinity of Christ: the Nestorians. This by now half-forgotten sect had been condemned as early as 431 by the Council of Ephesus; afterward the majority had fled eastward, to Persia and beyond, and few if any now remained within the imperial frontiers. It thus mattered little to them whether they were attacked again or not, but they had the advantage of being detested by the monophysites and Orthodox alike, and an
ex cathedra
pronouncement of the kind the emperor had in mind would, he hoped, do something to defuse the increasing hostility between the two. Early in 544 he published an edict condemning not the heresy itself but three particular manifestations of it, soon to become notorious as the Three Chapters: the person and writings of Nestorius’s teacher, Bishop Theodore of Mopsuestia, and certain specific works of two other, still more obscure, theologians, Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Bishop Ibas of Edessa.

It was an idiotic idea, which fully deserved the response it received. Only the Orthodox clergy in the East agreed—in some cases a trifle unwillingly—to toe the imperial line. The monophysites, who had hoped for genuine concessions, were unappeased; in the West, the Roman bishops made no attempt to conceal their fury. Any attack on the Nestorians, they thundered, could only be a blow in favor of the monophysites. They refused absolutely to condemn the Three Chapters, and Stephen, the papal legate in Constantinople, made known his master’s displeasure by pronouncing the ban of the Church on the patriarch himself.

Justinian was at first surprised by these reactions and then seriously alarmed. In Italy, during the four years that had passed since the first campaign of Belisarius, the Byzantine position had grown steadily worse; now, at a moment when he needed Italian support more than ever before, he had managed to antagonize Pope Vigilius and the entire Church of Rome. The sooner the whole thing was forgotten, the better. He made no protest when the pope refused to condemn the Three Chapters but settled down quietly to mend relations.