statement. With this the Pope condescended to comply; he sent his confession of faith to the King, with an admonition to the orthodox sovereign to exercise vigilance over all heretics within his dominions. Still some obstinate dioceses, chiefly of Venetia and Istria, refused communion with all who adhered to the Synod of Constantinople. Pelagius had recourse to the all-powerful Narses to enforce submission; the most refractory, the Bishop of Aquileia, and the Bishop of Milan, who had uncanonically consecrated that prelate, were sent prisoners to Constantinople.

On the death of Pelagius, Rome waited in obsequious. submission the permission of the Emperor to in- July 14, 560. augurate her new Pope, John III. The period between the accession of John III. and that of Gregory the Great is among the most barren and obscure in the annals of the papacy. One act of misjudging authority, and one of intercession, are recorded during the pontificate of John. He received, according to the permission of the Frankish King, Gunthram, the appeal of two bishops, Salonius of Embrun and Sagittarius of Gap," who had been deposed for crimes most unbefitting their order by a synod at Lyons. These were the first Christian bishops who had appeared in arms, the prototypes of the warlike and robber-prelates of later times. The Pope urged their restoration, the King assented: but the reinstated prelates returned to their lawless and unepiscopal courses, and were again degraded by the common indignation.

The act of intercession was more worthy of the head of Western Christendom. The Eunuch Narses had A.D. 552-567. ruled Italy and Rome as Exarch for fifteen years since the conquest, with vigour and justice. Justinian and Theodora had gone to their account; the throne of the East was occupied by Justin the younger. But the province groaned under the rapacity of Narses. Petitions were sent to Constantinople with the significant words, that the yoke of the barbarian Gauls was lighter than this Roman tyranny. Narses was superseded by the Exarch Longinus, insult was added to his degradation. "Let him to Pelagius died 560. 8 Ebrodonum. Vapincum.

his distaff," is the speech ascribed to the imperious wife of the Emperor Justin the younger. "I will weave her such a web as she will find it hard to unravel," rejoined the indignant Eunuch. He returned to Naples, from whence he entered into negotiations with the terrible Lombards, who had once already invaded Italy. Revolt, with Narses at its head, threatened the peace of Italy. The Pope undertook an embassy to Naples, appeased the wrathful Eunuch, who returned to Rome, and closed his days as a peaceful subject of the empire.

The few years of the pontificate of Benedict I. were Benedict I. occupied with the miseries of the Lombard invaJune 3, 574. sion. His successor Pelagius II. in those disastrous times was consecrated without awaiting the sanction of the Emperor. Pelagius in vain endeavoured to reduce the bishops of the north of Italy to accept the fifth Council of Nov. 27, 578. Constantinople. Some who were now under the Lombard dominion paid no regard to his expostulations; a synod at Grado rejected his mandates, and the bishops defied the power of the Exarch, through whom Pelagius sought to awe them to submission. Yet Pelagius, in one respect, maintained all the haughtiness of his See. The Bishop of Constantinople had again assumed the title of Ecumenic Patriarch, it was confirmed by a Council at Constantinople. Pelagius protested against this execrable, sacrilegious, diabolic usurpation: but in Constantinople his invectives made no impression. Pelagius was succeeded by Gregory the Great.

A.D. 588.

A.D. 590.

Since the conquest of Italy the popes had been the humble subjects of the Eastern Emperor. They were appointed, if not directly by his mandate, under his influence. They dared not assume their throne without his permission. The Roman Ordinal of that time declares the election incomplete and invalid till it had received the imperial sanction. Months elapsed, in the case of Benedict ten months, before the clergy ventured to proceed to the consecration.

Pelagius II. was chosen when Rome was invested by

b Sine jussione Principis, Vit. Pelag. ii.

Compare Schroeck., xvii. p. 236.

the Lombards; for this ignominious reason he had been consecrated without the consent of the Emperor.

The conquest of Italy by the Greeks was, to a great extent at least, the work of the Catholic clergy. Their impatience under a foreign and an Arian yoke is by no means surprising; nor could they anticipate that the return to Roman dominion would be the worst evil yet endured by Italy. Rome suffered more under the alternate sieges and alternate capture by the Byzantines and the Goths than it had from Alaric or even Genseric, as much perhaps as in its later sieges by Robert Guiscard, and by the Constable Bourbon. The feeble but tyrannical Exarchs soon made Italy regret the just, if oppressive and ungenial rule of the Goths. The overthrow of the Gothic kingdom was to Italy an unmitigated evil. A monarch like Witiges or Totila would soon have repaired the mischiefs caused by the degenerate descendants of Theodoric, Athalaric and Theodotus. In their overthrow

began the fatal policy of the Roman See, fatal at least to Italy (however, by the aggrandisement of the Roman See, it may have been, up to a certain time, beneficial to northern Christendom), which never would permit a powerful native kingdom to unite Italy, or a very large part of it, under one dominion. Whatever it Whatever it may have been to Christendom, the Papacy has been the eternal, implacable foe of Italian independence and Italian unity, and so (as far as independence and unity might have given dignity, political weight, and prosperity) to the welfare of Italy. On every occasion the Goths, the Lombards, as later the Normans and the House of Arragon, found their deadliest enemies in the popes. As now from the East, so then from beyond the Alps, they summoned some more remote potentate, Charlemagne, the Othos, Charles VIII., Charles of Anjou, almost always worse. tyrants than those whom they overthrew. From that time servitude, servitude to the stranger, was the doom of Italy. To Rome herself, the foreign sovereign (the tyranny of the Eastern Emperor and his Exarchs was an admonition of what the transalpine emperors might hereafter prove) was hardly less dangerous than a native and indi

genous sovereign would have been. And if the papacy had been more confined to its religious power, less tempted or less compelled to assume temporal as well as ecclesiastical supremacy, that power had been immeasurably greater, as less involved in political strife, less exposed to that kind of personal collision with the temporal monarchy, in which a sovereignty which rests on the awe and reverence of men must suffer; it might have maintained its ecclesiastical supremacy over obedient and tributary Christendom, even held as vast possessions on the tenure not of a temporal princedom, but of an ecclesiastical endowment; and thus more entirely ruled the minds of men by confining its authority to that nobler and, for a time at least, more unassailable province.

Rome, jealous of all temporal sovereignty but her own, for centuries yielded up, or rather made Italy a battle-field to the Transalpine and the stranger; and at the same time so secularised her own spiritual supremacy as to confound altogether the priest and the politician, to degrade absolutely and almost irrevocably the kingdom of Christ into a kingdom of this world.

CHAPTER V.

CHRISTIAN JURISPRUDENCE."

CHRISTIANITY had been now for more than two centuries the established religion of the Roman Empire; it was the religion of all those independent kingdoms which were forming themselves within the dissevered provinces of Rome. Between the religion and the laws of all nations must subsist an intimate and indissoluble connexion. During all that period the vast and august jurisprudence of Rome had been constantly enlarged by new imperial edicts or authoritative decrees, supplementary to, or corrective and interpretative of, the ancient statutes.

I. The jurisprudence of the old Roman Empire at first admitted, but only in a limited degree, this modifying power of Christianity. The laws which were purely Christian were hardly more than accessory and supplementary to the vast code which had accumulated from the days of the republic, through the great lawyers of the empire, down to Theodosius and Justinian. But the complete moral, social, and in some sense political revolution, through Christianity, could not be without influence, both as creating a necessity for new laws adapted to the present order of things, or as controlling, through the mind of the legislator, the general temper and spirit of the legislation. A Christian First effects of Emperor could not exclude this influence from Christianity. his mind, either as affecting his moral appreciation of certain obligations and transgressions, or as ascertaining and defining the social position, the rights and duties, of new classes and divisions of his subjects. Under Christianity a new order of men of a peculiar character, with special

Let me not be suspected of the vain ambition of emulating Gibbon's splendid chapter on Roman Law, which has become the text-book in universities (see my edition of Gibbon). My object is

more narrow and limited; and appeared necessary to the history even of Latin Christianity; the interworking of Christianity into the Roman jurisprudence.