The Lands of St Peter: The Papal State in the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance

By Peter Partner

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

• Language: English
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• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520322585

Peter Partner

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The Lands of St Peter

by the same author

THE PAPAL STATE UNDER MARTIN V

A SHORT POLITICAL GUIDE TO THE ARAB WORLD

The Lands of St Peter

THE PAPAL STATE

IN THE MIDDLE AGES

AND

THE EARLY RENAISSANCE

PETER PARTNER

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles 1972

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

ISBN: 0-520-02181-9

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 78-182798

Copyright © 1972 by Peter Partner

Printed in Great Britain

I dedicate this book to my family,

who have so far tolerated my eccentricities

without complaint.

Von Sonn’ und Welten weiss ich nichts zu sagen, ich sehe nur, wie sich die Menschen plagen. Faust, Prolog im Himmel

Contents 1

Contents 1

Illustrations and Maps

Preface

Bibliographical Note

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

The beginnings of the Renaissance principate 419

Chapter 13

Conclusion

Table of Events

List of Popes

Frankish and German Kings and Emperors

Rulers of the Kingdom of Sicily

Index

Illustrations and Maps

Preface

The subject of this book is the Papal State, the ‘lands of St Peter’, which was a recognisable dominion or principality from the middle of the eighth century until 1870, although it did not enjoy complete political autonomy until the thirteenth century.

I would define the Papal State as the rule of the Roman bishop in Rome and in the Italian regions which were politically subject to him. I have not dealt with his rule in the Comtat Venaissain in Provence, and I have touched rather lightly on his possession of the papal enclave of Benevento. My treatment of the provinces of the Papal State has tried to do some justice to their geographical and historical diversity.¹ I have attempted to supply some guidance to the reader who is not acquainted with the Italian topography, particularly in the form of maps, and also by means of the descriptive chapter on the Papal State at the end of the Middle Ages.

The topic of the Papal State raises the whole question of the distinction between ‘spiritual’ and ‘temporal’ power. This distinction is properly the concern of canon law, and I have not felt it my business to treat it at length. I have first noticed the term ‘temporal power’ used in contemporary documents to describe papal political supremacy in 1156,² but only much later was it employed to describe papal political rule generally. I have, after some hesitation, avoided the use of the term ‘temporal power’ to describe the subject of my book, because the exercise of this power clearly had manifestations — such as the feudal relationship in which the pope stood to some European rulers outside Italy — which did not concern the Papal State.

The constitutional and legal history of the Papal State has to deal ¹ The term ‘States of the Church* is sometimes used in preference to ‘Papal State’, but it seems to me to have little to commend it. With the exceptions of Campagna and Sanabi none of the important papal provinces had a continuous existence throughout the Middle Ages.

2 Below, p. 194.

quite extensively with the relations between Frankish kings, Frankish and later emperors, and popes, especially as these relate to the ‘restitutions’ claimed by the Holy See, the ‘protection’ afforded by kings and emperors to popes, and the ‘donations’ of territory to the popes. My intention has been to deal with them so that they do not swamp the political and social history, and so that the history of the Papal State is not made to appear a transition from one set of legal definitions to another. The Papal State was a country inhabited by people whose circumstances and aims were as mutable as those of any other human society. To treat the topic in this way has meant emphasising the local political difficulties and involvements of such ‘world-historical’ figures as Gregory VII and Innocent III; I do not wish to diminish their lofty stature, but my view is that a man may be as well known by his actions in his back yard as by those in the market place.

It seems to me that a history of the papacy which dwells unduly on the peak points of papal power and prestige runs the risk of subordinating political reality to the history of ideas. The most explicit and conscious attempt to avoid this danger is that made by Haller in his famous book,1 whose title could be rendered in English: ‘The Idea and the Reality of the Papacy’. Only a continuous history can bring out the local nature of many of the political objectives of the popes, though these co-existed with others of a more lofty sort.

No doubt there are ambiguities of method in what I have tried to do. The term ‘Papal State’ is a modern one, hardly used by contemporaries to refer to the papal patrimony in the long period with which this book is concerned.2 This seems to me to be a question of terminology, and of only minor importance. Similar questions present themselves for any history which treats of the medieval antecedents of a modern state. The capital difficulty of the subject is another one: that the history of the Papal State is both that of a great religious institution and of several Italian regions. A tidy treatment of the topic is impossible.

A political history of the kind which follows is not fashionable at the moment. Historians of our day tend to find wars boring, unless they happen to be caught in one. I find boring neither wars nor the politics which produce them, and I make no apology for the way in which they dominate this book. Nor do I apologise for re-writing an oft-told tale. Though the history of the papal lands appears often enough in the general histories of the papacy, there seems to me to be little appreciation in many of these books of the continuity of the territorial factors in papal policy. Nor is there much acknowledgement of the feeling of direct personal responsibility to the saint which made the ‘land of St Peter’ into something approaching a battle-cry for Pope Gregory VII. It is hard in the twentieth century to understand how Cardinal Albornoz in the fourteenth could feel that he was fighting for ‘the Patrimony of the Crucified One’. We may not approve of these feelings, and indeed there were many medieval men who did not approve them. But to make sense of the Middle Ages we must try to comprehend them.

1 J. Haller, Das Papsttum: Idee und Wirklichkeit (Urach-Stuttgart, 1950).

2 Of. S. Z. Ehler, ‘On applying the modern term state to the Middle Ages’, Medieval Studies presented to Aubrey Gwynn, S.J. (Dublin, 1961), pp. 492-501; E. Dupr-Theseider, ‘Sur les origines de l’tat de l’glise’, L‛Europe aux IXe-XIe socles. Aux origines des Etats nationaux (Warsaw, 1968), pp. 93-103.

Bibliographical Note

The list of books written in or translated into English on the subject of the medieval Papal State is a short one. F. Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages (1900-2) and L. Duchesne, The Beginnings of the Temporal Sovereignty of the Popes (1908) are both classics of historical writing, though in very different ways. T. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders (Oxford, 1880-99) is another nineteenth-century classic. D. Waley, The Papal State in the Thirteenth Century (1961) and P. Partner, The Papal State under Martin V (1958) are more specialised monographs. G. Mollat, The Popes at Avignon 1305-78 (1963) contains a long and important section on ‘The Papacy and Italy’ which is almost entirely concerned with the Papal State. W. Ullmann, The Growth of Papal Government in the Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (1970) contains a discussion of the origins of the Papal State. P. Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages (1971) is a detailed account of the early period. J. Larner, Lords of Romagna (1965) is concerned with the social history of the later period.

Two modern church histories are especially useful: H. Jedin and J. Dolan (ed.), Handbook of Church History, iii (1969) and iv (1970); A. Fliche, V. Martin (ed.) and others, Histoire de I’Eglise depuis les origines jusqu'd nos jours, vi (E. Amann, Paris, 1947), vii (Amann, 1948), viii (Fliche, 1946), ix (Fliche, R. Foreville, and J. Rousset, 1946—53), x (Fliche, C. Thouzellier and Y. Azais, 1950), xiv (E. Delaruelle, R. Labande, P. Ourliac, 1962-3).

Annual bibliographies of works on papal history emerge in Archivum Historiae Pontificiae, Revue d’histoire ecclesiastique, and Rivista della storia della chiesa in Italia. The last is especially useful for its sections on the church history of the Italian regions.

Political histories of Italy: C. G. Mor, Uetd feudale (Milan, 1952-3); L. Simeoni, Le Signorie (Milan, 1950); N. Valeri (ed.), Storia diItalia, i, 2nd ed. (Turin, 1967). The last is notably less detailed than the others, but contains valuable surveys by distinguished scholars.

NOTE ON SOURCES

To write a book of this sort is to experience sharply the contrast between the nature of the sources which are at the disposal of the historian of the early Middle Ages, and those for the latter Middle Ages and the early modern period. In the first case the historian uses a very small number of texts, almost all of which have been minutely examined by generations of historians. In the second case he confronts an immense variety of documents, tens of thousands of which are printed in full or in summary, but of which a vast number of others can be studied only in manuscript. In the case of the earlier history the historian has a reasonable chance of reading most of the more important primary sources for himself, but hardly any of reading the whole of the accretions of historical commentary. In the case of the later history he has perhaps a rather better chance, but not the smallest hope of mastering the manuscript sources. Professor Daniel Waley has remarked that in the march of Ancona alone 246 archives were recorded in a recent survey.1 If one province of the Papal State can offer such a profusion of unprinted material, the historian thinks also of the great archive deposits of Perugia and Bologna and resigns himself to the admission that his knowledge can only be patchy and small.

The sources on the origins of the Papal State present special problems of interpretation, especially the series of papal biographies in the Liber Pontificalis. The main sources were collected in a small volume by J. Haller (1907), but there is a more recent collection of the same kind edited by H. Fuhrmann, Quellen zur Entstehung des Kirchenstaates (Gottingen, 1967). The best analysis of the papal life of Stephen II is in the article of L. Levillain.2 The later papal lives are discussed by H. Lowe in the bibliographical handbook of Wattenbach-Levison.⁸

I have not succeeded in reading the whole series of the accounts of the papal provinces in the fourteenth century in the Vatican Archives in the Introitus et Exitus and the Collectoriae Camerae series.2 Much of this material was looked at or published in summary by the Austrian historian Schaefer and the Italian Antonelli, but a knowledge of the whole is desirable. For the fifteenth century I have examined the main series of papal registers in the Vatican Archives from John XXIII to the end of the pontificate of Eugenius IV.²

1 The Papal State in the Thirteenth Century, p. gon.

¹ ‘L’avnement de la dynastie carolingienne et les origines de l’tat pontifical’, BEC, xciv (1933), pp- 225-95.

* DeutscHands Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter, Vorzdt und Karolinger, IV. Heft (Weimar, 1963), PP- 455 ff-

2 Cf. K. A. Fink, Das Vatikanische Archiv (Rome, 1951), pp. 49-50. There is a valuable typescript list of the Fondo Camerale by Mons. Guidi, kept in the Vatican Archives. There are approximately 150 volumes in these series which deal with the fourteenth-century Papal State in one aspect or another. I have used Introitus et Exitus, vol. 21, and Collectoriae, vol.

203. Cf. K. H. Schaefer, Deutsche Ritter und Edelknechte in Italien (Paderborn, 1911); and the articles by M. Antonelli in ASR, xxv-xxvii (1902-4), xxx (1907), xxxi (1908), xlvi (1923), Iviii (1935) which are also based on this series of documents.

¹ There is a brief note on these sources in my Papal State under Martin V, pp. 199-200.

Acknowledgements

I have received kindnesses from many men and women of learning while I have been preparing and writing this book. I feel particular gratitude towards Professor C. R. Cheney and Dr T. S. R. Boase (formerly President of Magdalen) both for their encouragement and for their generosity in lending me rare and valuable books. I also thank the teachers who, both twenty-odd years ago and subsequently, encouraged my interest in these studies. Dr Philip Jones, Professor Lionel Butler and Professor Ernest Jacob taught and helped me at one stage or another. I owe special debts to Mr Karl Leyser, who guided my faltering steps through Stubbs’s Charters long ago, and who more recently read the earlier chapters of this book in manuscript, to Dr Anthony Luttrell, who read the later chapters, and to Professor Christopher Brooke, who read the whole manuscript. I have had friendly advice from continental scholars, especially from Dr Wolfgang Hagemann, the Deputy Director of the German Historical Institute in Rome. Dr Arnold Esch generously sent me his important book on Boniface IX as soon as it was published. The profit I have drawn from the work of Professor Waley will be evident. The responsibility for errors which remain in this book is naturally my own.

Both the British Academy and the British School at Rome gave me grants towards the carrying out of preliminary specialised studies, and the Warden and Fellows of Winchester College granted me a valuable grace term. I wish to express my gratitude for the unselfish help of those in charge of libraries and archives, especially those of the Vatican. The Library of Southampton University has kindly allowed me to use its facilities, and without the London Library, that great resource of the private scholar in this country, the book could not have been written.

Abbreviations

The Lands of St Peter

Chapter 1

Rome, Byzantium and the Franks

I

On all the great feast days the eighth-century bishops of Rome conducted the holy liturgy in the church appointed as the ‘station’. The procession assembled at the Lateran patriarchate, the great palace which was the seat of government. Clerical officers, the acolytes and ‘guardians’, preceded the papal procession on foot, while mounted lay-constables controlled the crowd. Other officers then came on horseback — the deacons, the primicerius or chief officer of the guardians, the regionary notaries, the regionary guardians, the regionary subdeacons. The cortege was splendidly dressed, some with their horses trapped in the white silk formerly worn by the Roman civil officers. Then came the ‘apostolic one’. Then the great dignitaries and judges of the clerical administration, the major-domo, the treasurer and controller of the wardrobe, the almoner, the financial controller.¹ Petitioners would await the pope on foot; he would stop to hear them, and their cases would be presented to him by the controller or the almoner. The clergy had preceded the pope to the church, and the cardinal priests waited on his left hand, the bishops of the dioceses adjacent to Rome on his right. The Roman people waited also, the women apart from the men, the aristocrats roped off near the altar in the senatorium, the cross-bearers of the seven ecclesiastical regions of Rome in their places, the papal choristers ready to do their part. The pope dismounted, entered the sacristy, and was robed for the holy office. The liturgy which has come to serve as the model for the western Catholic world began.

'Papalism’ is something which modern men think of primarily as a system of general ideas. But like much else in Christianity, it is more the product of local history than of abstract thought. The Roman liturgy of the eighth century arises from a connection between religion

¹ M. Andrieu, Les Ordines Romani du haut Moyen Age (Louvain, 1931-56), ii, pp. 67-92. The Latin titles of these officers were vicedominus, vestararius, sacellariusi nomenclator.

and society so tight and so organic that it is hard to grasp in presentday terms. And even if we can so grasp it, it remains difficult to bridge the gap between the small, poor, politically isolated Roman community of the early Middle Ages, and the doctrines which a century after 750 had knit the Roman rite and Roman jurisdiction into the social fabric of western Europe. That this ruined and reduced provincial city should so impose itself on the western world seems at first fortuitous. But it is at least partly explained by the persistence into the barbarian, post- classical world of the social coherence and unity of what was the most fundamental in the civilisation which had preceded it, the ancient city. In ancient Rome religion had been hardly distinguishable from civic patriotism; the Christian chief priest or pontifex who followed the pagan in Rome became up to a point the focus for the same patriotic tradition.

That the Bishop of Rome should develop a doctrine of the organic unity of Christian society, and of his own divinely appointed leadership of that society, was assisted also by the way the early Church understood the social content of the gospel it preached. Christianity is the religion of the people of God, or as the fathers of the Church claimed: ‘We are the true people of Israel.’ As the fathers read the Old Testament, Israel was a human society as well as a religious ideal; when God said that he would defend his people, he was talking politics. The city of God is not of this world, but the people of God are truly and corporeally a people, a social group, and not a metaphorical expression.

Even at the worst moments of the break-up of the ancient world, the political leadership of bishops was occasional and fitful, the effect of temporary abdication by the lay power. The adoption of Christianity by the empire of Constantine in the fourth century brought no access of political power to the Church. It brought wealth, and to the huge public buildings which the empire went on constructing as long as life was left in it, were now added churches: Constantine and his mother built great Christian basilicas from Jerusalem to Trier. Immense gifts of land and valuables were made to churches which possibly were already far from poor: the list of Constantine’s largesse in the official chronicle of the popes is the first of its kind, and a very long one. The annual cost of the Church to the empire came to exceed the cost of the imperial civil service.¹

Justinian’s reconquest of Italy was launched in 536, to recover the Italian provinces from the Ostrogoth power which had ruled there since ¹ A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire (Oxford, 1964), ii, p. 934.

489. The devastation and depopulation of Italy during the wars of the Emperor Justinian were immense. The Roman people and the Roman aristocracy suffered terribly in this period; that the popes made common cause with the latter is probable from the Pragmatic Sanction on the petition of (Pope) Vigilius of 554, which was issued largely in aristocratic interests. As a great landowner and a great civil servant, the pope was bound to be one of the leaders of the Roman senatorial class. For Italy a new period began in which, though the institutions of the fifth century were to some extent restored, the political and social reality was the subjection of the peninsula to Greek interests. The papacy was not exempt from this. Though Justinian assigned them a certain function in Italian government, the Italian bishops were weak in the face of imperial power.

Justinian’s re-establishment of Roman rule in Italy lasted less than a generation. In 568 northern Italy was overrun by the Lombards, and within a few years these new Germanic invaders had conquered a large part of Italy — approximately the Lombard plain, Liguria except part of the coast, much of Emilia, most of Tuscany, and a great deal of the mountainous area stretching south down the centre of Italy, including the ‘duchies’ of Spoleto and Benevento. To the ‘Romans’ remained Venetia, Istria, the exarchate of Ravenna, Picenum or Pentapolis in the east, the duchies of Rome and (at most periods) Perugia, much of southern Italy southwards from Campania, and Sicily. The most important strategic zone in Byzantine Italy became the mountain road (the Via Flaminia) which led from the lower Tiber into the hills of Umbria to descend again into the exarchate of Ravenna, the principal province of eastern Italy and the seat of the administration. This road, which connected Rome with Ravenna, was the lifeline of Byzantine Italy, and immense effort was devoted to its defence. Another connected and equally important area was the part of north Etruria which became known as ‘Lombard Tuscany’.

Byzantium was not indifferent to the wresting away of half Italy by the Lombards. But Byzantine power was unequal to the immense strains thrown on it in this and other parts of the empire. Greek generals — many of whom were Germans — fought tenaciously against the Lombards. Important points such as Classis beside Ravenna, and Perugia in the vital communications line over the Appenines, were recaptured from the Lombards in the bitter fighting of many decades. But what was always evident was that Roman Italy was only one sector, and that not the most important, of the lines of defence of an empire whose interests went from Egypt to the Persian frontier, from the Black Sea up the Danube. When Pope Pelagius II wrote to the Emperor Tiberius II in 584 that the military needs of the empire in Italy were hardly supplied, and that Rome was practically undefended,.he was making the kind of plea which Greek Italy was to carry to Constantinople for a century and a half. Byzantium was not utterly deaf to the complaints of the Italian provincials, but it needed to husband its resources for other issues which might mean life and death for the whole empire.

The government in Italy practised the policy that the empire had practised for centuries, that the best way to combat barbarians is with other barbarians. Divide and rule was the great Byzantine maxim, as it has been that of other colonial powers. But in Italy this policy was to find only a limited application. Pope Pelagius II, besides writing to the emperor, also wrote to the Frankish Bishop of Auxerre, that ‘it is not a vain matter that your kings should share the same orthodox faith as that of the empire’. But although there was a limited Frankish intervention in Italy on behalf of the Greeks against the Lombards, it failed; after the unsuccessful expedition of 590 the Franks did not again seriously intervene. The only remaining expedient was to pit Lombard against Lombard, and the existence of semi-autonomous Lombard duchies of Benevento and Spoleto lent itself to some extent to this policy.

In 1590 the monk and apocrisarius Gregory, surnamed by later generations the Great, became Roman bishop. Almost simultaneously, Lombard pressure on the Roman duchy became more and more intense. Gregory had before entering the clergy been an important imperial official, the praefectus urbi. A man of his ability and prestige was bound to be important in the Lombard war, especially at a time when the frail line of communication between Rome and Ravenna was frequently cut by the enemy. Gregory on some occasions virtually assumed the direction of the war to secure the Via Cassia and the northern environs of Rome; he also on his own responsibility made a peace (which did not last long) with Ariulf, the Lombard Duke of Spoleto. The peace was made ‘without cost to the empire’, and so probably was made at the price of ‘protection’ money paid to Ariulf by the pope himself. Already the economic power of the Roman Church was of political importance. The provisioning of Rome; the re-settlement of refugees from areas invaded by Lombard forces; the defence of Naples: all these were matters which under the stress of war fell into Gregory’s competence.

Nothing in Gregory’s career declares him, nevertheless, as anything but the loyal subordinate of the empire.¹ His policies were often overruled both by the imperial officials in Italy and by the emperor in Byzantium; Gregory’s peace with Ariulf was broken by the Byzantine exarch, who launched a vigorous counter-attack down the whole line of the Via Flaminia. Gregory had his own Lombard policy. Partly because of his hopes of a Lombard conversion to Catholicism through Queen Theodelinda, and partly because of his interest in peace as the greatest of the Roman landowners, this policy was more appeasing than official Byzantine policy; it is doubtful whether Gregory (or the other Romans) wanted to endorse the policy of total war in order to expel the Lombards from Italy. They knew that in practice this meant the withdrawal of troops from the defence of Rome, and their employment in offensive operations which brought the Romans no relief. But in practice the issues on which Gregory is known to have resisted imperial policy were not temporal but spiritual; he defended his peace with Ariulf to the emperor, but the most vigorous protest he made to Byzantium was against the imperial decree forbidding civil servants to enter the Church.

Gregory should certainly not be seen as a war leader. His thoughts on war are best shown in his sombre homilies on the prophet Ezekiel: ‘Cities, castles, farms are destroyed; the land is laid waste. No peasants remain in the fields; the cities are almost empty; those who remain are pitilessly stricken; imprisoned, mutilated, slain. And Rome, the onetime mistress of the world, to what do we see her reduced? Assailed by every misfortune, her citizens ruined, assaulted by enemies, her buildings in collapse; we see revealed in her what was prophesied by the Prophet Ezekiel of Samaria. …’ Gregory’s work of pastor and mentor, and intercessor and negotiator with the barbarians, is best summed up in the formula in the papal Liber Diurnus which probably refers to him: ‘Only the power of God and of the prince of the apostles, transmitted through the medium of his vicar the Roman pontiff, modifies and tempers the ferocity of the neighbouring enemies … those whom armed force fails to make humble, bend before pontifical prayer and persuasion.’²

Gregory’s genius was practical: his pontificate makes no mark on the history of the papal ideology. His attitude to the emperors — even to the murderous Phocas, whose usurpation he recognised immediately — was ¹ Cf. E. H. Fischer, ‘Gregor der Grosse und Byzanz’, ZSSRG, Ixvii, Kan, Abt, xxxvi (1950), pp. 15-144, especially at pp. 67-8, 77-97, 129-44.

¹ Th. von Sickel (ed.), Liber diurnus Romanorum Pontificum (Vienna, 1889), p. 53. In the edition of H. Foerster (Berne, 1958), pp. 116, 214, 323-4. Cf. O. Bertolini, T papi e le relazioni politiche di Roma con i ducati longobardi’, etc., RSCI9 vi (1952), p. 45.

never less than deferential. His status in the universal Church was not negligible, but it is unlikely that an emperor would have offered him, particularly when referring to matters outside Italy, the famous tribute paid in 445 to Pope Leo the Great by the Emperor Valentinian III: ‘That [papal] verdict would have been valid throughout Gaul even without imperial enforcement. For what limits can there be to the authority in the Church of a bishop as great as he?’ By contrast with his predecessor Leo, Gregory had to deal not only with a physically present empire, but with an empire inspired by a coherent theory of state control of the Church, and a long tradition of its practical application. With this Byzantine ‘servitude’ the popes had to contend for another century, but there is no evidence that they thought it such. The only alternative which seemed to present itself to Gregory was to become ‘a Lombard bishop’ and to exchange the rule of Byzantium for that of barbarians and heretics.

II

The huge landed estates of the Roman Church were among the largest concentrations of landed property in Byzantine Italy. The Roman bishop administered both the lands of the mother Church itself, and the lands of the Roman basilicas which were classified as tituli.¹ The piety of the early Middle Ages, which preserved the Registers of Gregory the Great, has enabled us to know where the great landed estates of the Roman See were, and how they were exploited. They had existed before Gregory’s day, and probably more plentifully than when the peninsula had for over half a century been devastated by war. There is evidence in the official papal chronicle, the Liber Pontificalis, which was prepared in the Lateran offices from which the papal patrimony was administered. Pope Gelasius, for example, was rich enough to supply Rome in time of famine — an example to be followed by very many of his successors, including Gregory. Gelasius also had a list of the possessions of the Roman Church drawn up, which remained as the standard reference book in the papal financial offices.

The great papal accumulation of landed property which is revealed by Gregory’s Registers must have been yet larger in the earlier period. The list of lost or partly lost papal estates under Gregory includes those in Africa, which appear at this time to have been in the hands of the

¹ Cf. S. Kuttner, ‘Cardinalis: the history of a canonical concept’, Traditio, iii (1945), pp. 129-214, at pp. 152 f.

imperial exarch, in Gaul, and in Dalmatia, which was ravaged by Slavs and Avars. Other patrimonies in Liguria had been seized by the Lombards. In Corsica and Sardinia — where Popes Pontian and Callistus had once been condemned to hard labour in the mines —the see still held lands, though they were difficult to exploit. The great mass of the profitable estates of the Roman See was in southern Italy, especially in Sicily, but also in Calabria, and Apulia. Around Rome there was also a most valuable patrimony, extending south down the Via Appia, northeast into Sabina, north into southern Etruria. Other estates were in the south of Pentapolis (the area stretching down the Adriatic from Rimini to Ancona) and in the region of Ravenna, besides hundreds of smaller farms in other places.

The popes had an elaborate organisation of land management,

modelled more or less on that for the imperial domain. ‘Rectors of the patrimony’ were appointed for each major territory, drawn from a larger group of subordinate Roman officials — subdeacons or notaries and ‘guardians’ (defensores) many of whom were laymen. Papal supervision of the rectors was close; their relations with the government and tax collectors were supervised, their seizure of property in anticipation of legal process reprimanded, the abuses of extraordinary weights and measures and reckonings of money by which they squeezed the peasants, the coloni, rectified. The ‘rectors’ and ‘defenders’ were important men, quite likely to be employed as ambassadors or papal envoys. Between the rector and the masses of free and unfree peasants was a class of conductores, themselves either coloni or slaves, whose status was something between that of a reeve and of a small farmer.

These huge clerical estates had formed in a world where the great estate, the latifundium, was the ruling social as well as the ruling economic phenomenon. At the same time that the great senatorial families became once more Italian, instead of Byzantine and cosmopolitan, their control of the Italian countryside became yet closer from the Italianisation of the army, which they dominated. Endless war meant the decay of the civil authority outside the towns, the conscription of peasants and their permanent subjection to local military service and to burdens of carriage and service in kind for the army. When this occurred to papal settlements like Gallipoli or Squillace (both in Apulia), the Church seemed to be controlling military posts for the State and exercising public powers, but this is not so. The church lands remained in the sphere of private law.¹

To what purpose were these huge church incomes directed? The most important was the provisioning of the city of Rome. At this period the Bishop of Rome undertook the responsibility, which his successors preserved until 1870, for feeding the Roman proletariat. Not only the born Romans, but the hordes of refugees from the Lombard war, were entered on Gregory’s charity lists. On these, the names of three thousand nuns alone were to be found. The pope possessed something between an immense soup kitchen and a public ministry of supply. Huge quantities of com (including those due to the State for taxes in kind) were shipped from the southern estates of the Church and stocked in her Roman granaries — not only com but all manner of food. It is true that the population of Rome was immensely reduced. Even in Gregory’s day, agriculture was going on within the walls of Rome, and a century later when the Tiber flooded, ‘the fields, vineyards and olives were laid waste, and most of the Romans were unable to sow their land’.² But the papal responsibility was a heavy one. The diaconates of Rome were developed in this period in order to store and distribute the grain of the Church and to act as centres of social welfare.⁸

The Roman Church was on the way to replacing important parts of the public power, though it did not seek to do so. Not only were great quantities of imperial com stored in the papal granaries, but because of the complete breakdown of the Roman banks (the last seems to have disappeared during Gregory’s pontificate) the papacy was compelled to act as banker for the imperial army. This led to the confiscation of the

¹ Cf. E. Caspar, Geschichte des Papsttums (Tubingen, 1933), ii, p. 333. For the patrimonies, ibid. pp. 323-30.

² L. Duchesne (ed.), Liber Pontificdlis (Paris, 1886), i, p. 399.

³ O. Bertolini, Ter la storia delle diaconie Romane nell'Alto Medio Evo sino alia fine del secolo VIII’, ASR, ixx (3rd ser., i, 1947), pp. 1-145. Also in O. Bertolini, Serini Scelti di Storia Medioevaley ed. O. Banti (Livorno, 1968), pp. 309-456.

B treasure of the Roman Church by Isaac the Patrician and Maurice the Cartulary in 640, on the pretext that it was due to the army for arrears of pay.

The decay of the imperial administration in Rome itself placed more on the shoulders of the bishop. The prefect of the city — the very office which Gregory once occupied — ceased to exist; so also did the cur a palatii, and the great imperial Roman palaces began their long decline into medieval ruin. As for the senate, Gregory himself lamented that it was no more. As the seventh century progressed, other state services became a papal responsibility. The aqueducts and walls of Rome, both vital to the security of the city, became maintained by the popes. The exarch, the head of the Byzantine administration in Italy, had his headquarters in Ravenna and not in Rome, and the ‘dukes’ [duces) and tribuni to be found in and near Rome at the head of defence, were military and not civil officials. On the other hand, the popes themselves stood at the head of an efficient and highly organised bureaucracy. The papal notaries and defensores, the arcarius and sacellarius, the head and second-in-command of the financial offices, the nomenclator who assisted in dealing with petitions — all these constituted a civil service which by the late seventh century was probably the most effective administration in Western Europe. On the other hand Pope Agatho (678-81) was so hard pressed for good officials that he had to do the work of the arcarius himself, and sign his own receipts.

Ill

For the whole of the seventh and into the eighth century Byzantine Italy remained in a state of intermittent emergency and war, stretched to hold open the fragile line of communication across Lombard territory from Ravenna to Rome, and fighting not on a single front but over a vast area. Once the Arab invasions had begun in the fourth decade of the seventh century, the empire was firmly engaged in a struggle for life with the Muslims which would never allow it to consider Italy as more than a side-show.

A great peace between the empire and the Lombards was signed between 678 and 681. The frontiers established by this peace are unknown, but the agreement is of great importance as marking the recognition by Byzantium, a century after they took place, of the Lombard usurpations of imperial territory in Italy. The boundaries of the 681 peace possibly re-appeared in the eighth century as the territorial limits of the claims made by the popes to the Franks.

The inability of the Byzantine Empire to defend its Italian subjects did not mean that its rule was tolerant or kind. The seventh century was, indeed, one of the most painful times of trial in papal history. The plundering of the treasure of the Roman Church in 640, after the death of the rich but doctrinally suspect Pope Honorius, preceded a period of theological differences between the eastern emperors and the Roman bishops. Like the earlier differences between Constantinople and Egypt in Justinian’s time, the religious quarrels masked regionalist disputes between the capital and the provinces.

Pope Martin’s consecration in 649 took place without seeking imperial confirmation of his election, and he also called a synod at Rome against the imperial definition in the Monothelite controversy. The Exarch Olympius, who then came to Rome to arrest Martin and proclaim the imperial definition, was unable to do so because of the unreliability of his own troops and the opposition of at least a part of the Roman army.1 He therefore changed sides, made peace with the pope and, subsidised by papal funds, went to the south of Italy where he died fighting against the Muslims. It was on a charge of complicity in this ‘rebellion’ of Olympius that Pope Martin was arrested, taken to Constantinople, tried and condemned to death. The sentence was commuted to exile in the Crimea, where the broken man died after a few months. His martyrdom is primarily part of the history of Rome’s claims to define the faith. But one cannot overlook the element of Italian regionalism which enters this story — when Martin’s Greek adherent Maximus the Confessor was examined at Constantinople he was asked: ‘Why do you love the Romans and hate the Greeks?’

In 680 Constantine IV summoned the Roman envoys to the Sixth Oecumenical Council at Constantinople and accepted the Roman theological definitions, abandoning those which his predecessors had vainly tried to impose. But conflict between Rome and Constantinople again broke out under Pope Sergius, who was elected in 687 in spite of an attempt by the exarch to exert illegal pressure on the electors. Sergius refused to accept the disciplinary canons of the Eastern Church after their issue by the ‘Quinisext’ Council² in 692 which the Emperor Justinian II ordered to be kept in the West. When the imperial official Zacharias came to arrest the pope and despatch him to Constantinople for a fate like that of Popes Martin and Vigilius, Italian regionalism again intervened, and this time more effectively. To oppose the arrest of the pope the army of Ravenna marched on Rome against the government forces. It met with no opposition, but probably got the support of the Roman militia, and with trumpets blowing entered Rome. The terrified Zacharias took refuge under the pope’s bed in the Lateran patriarchate: the imperial attempt on the pope had miserably failed. That the Italian soldiery should come to the pope’s help against the government suggests that there was no longer an imperial army of peninsular Italy; what went under this name was an Italian militia of uncertain loyalty. The Arabs continued to press hard in the western Mediterranean: Byzantine Africa fell in 697 and Sicily was threatened. By the beginning of the eighth century the hold of Byzantium on Italy was extremely weak, and in a military sense scarcely existed.

It is tempting, knowing the outcome, to imagine the popes as plotting and planning their future escape from what has been called their ‘almost self-imposed thraldom’2 to Constantinople. But the existence of such a plan is the conjecture of modern historians; and it may be questioned whether we do well to attribute such a programme to men whose main concerns were to preserve the faith and to survive. Greek sovereignty was not ‘self-imposed’ but accepted because there was no political alternative. Menacing, semi-barbarous, and full of hate for Rome, the Lombards could not be accepted as masters. The mere facts of political geography made the unity and independence of the Byzantine provinces in Italy impossible. Immediately present to the minds of the popes must have been the immense dangers of a complete break with the empire. Even apart from the Lombard threat, such a break would mean their material ruin. Nearly all the most valuable properties of the Roman See were in southern Italy, which was unlikely to fall out of imperial control. Equally, a break with the empire might mean the loss of the spiritual allegiance of the bishops of south Italy, or Ravenna (which was to some extent the spiritual rival of Rome), or of Venetia and Istria. All this explains how extremely cautious and even reluctant the popes were in cutting their ties with Byzantium. But the continued bankruptcy of Byzantine military power meant that the ties were bound to weaken, even if the Italian provincials were anxious to preserve them.

IV

In 710 the first move towards the breakaway of the Italian provinces occurred. The leaders and the militia of Ravenna were angered by a particularly savage proscription by the restored Emperor Justinian II against the archbishop and curia of the city. They elected their own leader in one George, the son of a proscribed official, and ruled Ravenna and northern Pentapolis in defiance of the empire. In this Pope Constantine had no part; his views may be deduced from the comment of the official papal biography on the blinding of the Archbishop of Ravenna, which it describes as a fitting punishment for his disobedience to the apostolic see. Pope Constantine in the same year was summoned to Constantinople, not ignominiously but with honour, to confer with the emperor. What agreement he made is unknown, as Justinian II was overpowered and murdered shortly after the pope’s return to Rome in 711.

The Byzantine Empire was now moving towards the worst period of the Arab wars, the year-long siege of Constantinople in 717-18. All over the Byzantine world, the ‘Roman’ way of life faced its supreme crisis. The empire accepted as leader the great Leo ‘the Isaurian’, who shortly afterwards chose to rally the people by the religious programme of the destruction of the holy images. Whatever the true nature and motives of the iconoclast movement, nothing could have emphasised more brutally the cultural and religious split between the eastern and western parts of the empire. Even in Naples and southern Italy, hitherto and later the stronghold of Byzantine loyalism, the iconoclast decrees were rejected. The natural leader of western resistance to iconoclasm was, of course, the Roman See.

The clash between Leo the Isaurian and the papacy began not over the iconoclast decrees (although the iconoclast policy was probably already launched in the east when it occurred) but over the spoiling of church property. Pope Gregory II, a Roman, was one of three important popes in the eighth century to have been brought up from childhood by the papal bureaucracy in the Lateran patriarchate, where he made his career, and became sacellarius (financial controller) and librarian. His biography, a carefully written propagandist work, part of which was published in Europe (and read by Bede in Northumbria) while he was still alive, calls him ‘a determined defender of the goods of the Church’, a description which his career fully bears out. The first stage of the struggle with which the biography acquaints us, probably in 725 or 726, shows him already under sentence of arrest by the emperor on a capital charge. The attempt to arrest him (the biography says, murder him) was frustrated by the Romans, who killed one of the imperial officials responsible. A second attempt to seize him and replace him by another bishop was then made by Paul the exarch, the newly arrived head of the Byzantine government in Italy. This time the charges are given, that he ‘hindered the collection of taxes in Italy, and the despoiling of the churches which had been carried out elsewhere’. The sense is that Leo’s reforms had included the collection of a tax in Byzantine Italy and the mulcting of church property throughout the empire, including Italy. The arrest was again frustrated by the Romans, who on this occasion induced the Lombards of the duchy of Spoleto to close the passes across the Apennines to the exarch’s troops.

Only then, with the Roman duchy in open rebellion, were the imperial decrees forbidding the images published in Italy (probably in 727). The effect of the decrees was to release all that hatred for the Greeks which had accumulated in Byzantine Italy north of the Neapolitan campagna. The Italians elected local leaders (duces) and wanted to elect an emperor, but the pope dissuaded them, ‘hoping for a change of heart in the emperor’. This did not prevent him from leading the Italians in a bitter civil war, in the course of which it is evident that the local territorial aristocracy, and particularly the Roman aristocracy, were the backers of the popes. Eutychius, the next exarch, when he sent agents from Naples to Rome to accomplish what the Exarch Paul had failed to do, ordered that the pope be arrested ‘together with the magnates of Rome’. The arrest was again frustrated, and the ‘great and lesser men’ of Rome took an oath to defend the pontiff. In Ravenna at least an imperialist faction appeared, and fought the revolutionaries. The Lombards, and particularly King Liutprand eagerly took the chances now offered to them. Sutri, thirty miles north of Rome, was seized for a short time by Liutprand in 727-8, but ransomed by the pope. Liutprand also marched on Rome against the pope on behalf of the Exarch Eutychius, but (doubtless again for a substantial bribe) was reconciled to Gregory. In spite of these hostilities the pope dissuaded the Italians from supporting a pretender to the empire who was put forward by troops in Byzantine Italy, and he caused the Roman army to arrest him and to send his head to Constantinople — telling the Italians ‘not to waver in their loyalty to the Roman Empire’.

The papal exhortation just quoted, and the lack of reference to further fighting, suggest that even before Gregory II’s death in 731 the civil war had petered out, perhaps leaving imperial officials in nominal control of provinces which were in fact independent. Certainly the government was not strong enough to try to punish the rebels, and the resistance of Italy to the iconoclast decrees continued. But in spite of the leadership by the popes of this resistance, as of the Italian revolution, they still clung to imperial sovereignty. The consummate insolence of Gregory II’s letters to the emperor (if these texts are genuine, which is uncertain) did not prevent his appealing to that sovereignty as if it was in full force. The same recognition of imperial control appears to have been continued in the earlier part of his pontificate at least, by his successor Gregory II, who by paying a large sum to the Duke of Spoleto induced him to make peace and to restore the village of Gallese ‘within the structure of the holy Empire and of the Roman army dear to the body of Christ’.¹ But the ‘Roman army’, which is the complement of the empire, shows how Byzantine sovereignty had been reduced by the political realities to a mere name. Political power seems to be shared between the ‘Roman army’, the militia which had reappeared in history only a century earlier, and the Bishop of Rome. The early Christian idea of the people of a city as the people of God, a social body which is also part of the body of Christ, was being grafted into the medieval alliance of the popes with the Roman landed aristocracy. 3 come about, a new and yet more revolutionary situation was needed.

The transitional stage in which the Italian provinces of the empire now found themselves must have seemed to most contemporaries a transition from Greek to Lombard rule-at the very best the prelude to something akin to the restoration of the Romano-German kingdom of Theodoric the Ostrogoth. Against this possibility the popes struggled desperately, though relying on diminished assets. In 733 all the patrimonies of the Church in south Italy, the financial backbone of the papacy, were confiscated by the emperor. Given the uses to which the income of the patrimony was put, it was a confiscation carried out as much against Rome as against its bishop. Ravenna itself had fallen to Liutprand for a period, probably 732-3. When he resumed his pressure against Rome in 739 there was so much the less money to buy him off. In this period, the darkest in the history of the Italian provinces, the alliance between the Roman duchy and the Lombards of Spoleto broke down, after Transamund of Spoleto had been heavily defeated by the Lombard king. The Roman frontier towns on the borders of Lombard Tuscany fell, (Amelia, Orte, Bomarzo, Bieda), and although Liutprand’s main effort was not yet directed against Rome itself, his appearance before the city in 739 seemed to announce the final Lombard victory in central Italy and the end of independent Rome. In despair Pope Gregory sent an embassy to Charles Martel, the Frankish mayor of the palace, whom he addressed as ‘sub-king’, and to whom he referred as ‘patrician’. The embassy, the first of its kind the Frankish kingdom had ever known, was honourably received, but failed in its purpose. Liutprand had helped Charles against the Arabs only two years earlier, and had ‘adopted’ his son Pippin. The pope’s case was also weakened by the fact that Liutprand had acted primarily against the rebellious Transamund, and not against Rome. The time for Frankish intervention was not yet.

Much as the popes feared him, there is no indication that Liutprand had the intention of annexing Rome, at all events as an immediate political aim. What had troubled him had been the Roman alliance with Spoleto. In 741 the Syrian Pope Gregory III was succeeded by the Greek, Zacharias, who immediately and successfully launched a policy of conciliating Liutprand. In 742 the pope met Liutprand at Temi, and the Lombard king agreed to restore ‘to blessed Peter prince of the Apostles’ the four border villages taken two years earlier, together with the papal estates in central Italy seized by the Lombards in the course of the preceding wars. The pope returned to Rome, the biographer says, ‘with the palm of victory’.

Liutprand doubtless intended the Romans to leave Ravenna to its fate, but when he attacked the latter in the following year, Zacharias scored a yet more notable success. ‘Leaving Rome under the control of the patrician and duke’ (a wording which seems intended to imply that the pope was now the effective ruler of the city) Zacharias travelled through the district of Ravenna to the Lombard kingdom. At Pavia he induced Liutprand to restore ‘to the empire’ the district around Ravenna, and two-thirds of the territory of Cesena. Either because he was grateful for this papal mediation, or in hope of bribing Zacharias, the Emperor Constantine V, at the pope’s request, made him a gift of the large estates of Ninfa and Norma, at the foot of the Monti Lepini, presumably in partial compensation for the confiscated southern patrimonies. A stage seemed to have been reached at which the emperor tacitly and for the moment recognised the strong position now occupied by the pope in Byzantine Italy. Italy itself enjoyed a brief respite of peace, the first for twenty years.

Little as we know of him (although his portrait was found in S. Maria Antiqua), Zacharias was perhaps the most subtle and able of all the Roman pontiffs, in this dark corridor in which the Roman See hovered just inside the doors of the Byzantine world. This skilful diplomat, who secured benefits from the severe Constantine V, fended off Liutprand and his successor Ratchis, and ‘amassed a great treasure’ in Rome, was the last Greek Bishop of Rome.

The most eventful of all his political decisions was taken in 749, when Pippin the Short had for four years ruled the kingdom of the Franks after the re-establishment of the faineant Merovingian king, Childeric. The political bankruptcy of the Meroving house which had ruled Francia for two and a half centuries was known to all, but the legal attributes of kingship had until then remained with the old dynasty. In that year Pippin sent an embassy to Pope Zacharias to know ‘whether it was good or not’ that the legitimate king of the Franks (the infant Childeric, on whose behalf he purported to rule) did not exercise royal power. Zacharias replied, that it was better that he should be king, who had royal power, than he who had not. By that reply he decided the fate of the papacy and, if indirectly, the fate of Europe. If he did not himself legitimise the new Frankish dynasty, he pointed the way to it. He could scarcely know that the new dynasty he thus approved would, by the end of the century, conquer the Western world from the Pyrenees Ba to the Elbe, nor that it would be secured by firm bonds to the papacy when Charlemagne carried it to world power. Within a short time of Zacharias’s answer, the Frankish magnates and bishops assembled at Soissons, hailed Pippin as king, and saw him anointed (probably by the Anglo-Saxon Bishop Boniface) to the kingship. The first Arnulfing king of the Franks had come to rule with the consent of the pope, and the sacramental oil was applied by a bishop who was also a papal agent.

Whether Zacharias was executing a long-meditated papal plan, or whether he merely tried to play off Franks against Lombards as a shortterm expedient, we do not know. When Zacharias died in 752 he was succeeded by Stephen II, a Roman orphan who like Gregory III had been bred from early childhood in the Lateran patriarchate. Aistulf, who succeeded Ratchis as king of the Lombards, abandoned the hesitations of his predecessors and decided that the time was near to absorb Rome and the Roman duchy. In 752 he demanded a Lombard protectorate over Rome: the Romans were asked to pay annual tribute of one gold solidus a head, and were to acknowledge him as overlord. This time the desperate attempts of Pope Stephen to fend off the Lombards by negotiation and bribery failed. Neither he nor the Byzantine emissary who appeared on the scene at this point could wring concessions from Aistulf. Barefoot, and carrying a holy image on his own shoulders, the pope led his clergy to S. Maria Maggiore and placed ashes on the heads of the wailing people, while he nailed to the crucifix the treaty which Aistulf had broken. Having thus invoked God, Pope Stephen wrote to Pippin, and appealed for Frankish aid.

The envoy from Byzantium, John the Silentiary, made one more appearance in Italy, and ordered the pope to make a further personal approach to Aistulf, in the emperor’s name. The pope obeyed, and asked for a safe conduct from the Lombards. But at the same time Pippin responded to Stephen’s appeal, telling him to count on the Franks for support, and then agreeing that the pope should in person travel to Francia, escorted there by the Frankish envoys.

On 14 October 753 the pope left St Peter’s for Pavia, accompanied by the two Frankish envoys and the imperial agent, John the Silentiary: the Roman magnates escorted him only as far as the Lombard border. In Pavia Aistulf still felt himself strong enough to refuse concessions; that the Franks would actually send an army against their Lombard allies was not at all certain, and he knew that the Greeks were powerless in Italy. When the pope asked him to restore Ravenna and the exarchate and the other territories of the empire4 which he and his predecessors had taken, he refused, as he refused John the Silentiary. When Aistulf was told of the pope’s wish to travel to Francia he ‘ground his teeth like a lion’, but dared not obstruct him. So on 15 November 753 Pope Stephen, together with the chief officers of the papal court, left Pavia for Francia. Having arrived at Pavia in company with the imperial agent he left it alone, in order to act independently. The papacy had made a decisive step. Perhaps it took it not because it had a ‘plain’ to free itself from Byzantine rule, but because the Bishop of Rome identified himself with the cause of the ‘Italian Province’, and read in Isaiah and the gospel his duty to protect ‘God’s flock’, the ‘peculiar people of God’. And even while Stephen negotiated in Pavia, his relation to the Byzantine emperor suffered a further change. Preparations were being made in Constantinople for the great iconoclast council which was to open on 10 February 754. Constantine V had not yet, in the papal view, absolutely committed himself to an anti-Roman policy: he was now to do so irrevocably.

Pippin met the papal cortege on 6 January 754, not on the border but at Ponthion in Champagne, where there was a royal estate. If the papal chronicle is truthful, the dismounted king met the pope at the approaches to the settlement, and Pippin acted as groom, leading the papal horse and its rider among the chanting clergy to the palace. The pope on his side (an action not reported in the papal chronicle) then fell before the king in sackcloth, with ashes on his head, with tears asking him ‘that in accordance with the peace treaties (between Romans and Lombards) he would support the suit of St Peter and of the republic of the Romans’. The king replied by swearing to hold himself at the behest of the pope, and ‘to restore the exarchate of Ravenna and the rights and territories of the republic’. It is unlikely that he intended the Byzantine Empire to be in any way the beneficiary of this promise. The nature of the engagements entered into by either side cannot be known except by a process of learned inference. That either side took a holdoath to the other (as has been suggested) seems unlikely. But certainly Pippin assumed a duty of protection towards the Roman bishop.5

Frankish diplomacy was thus put to work for the papal cause, and the first of three missions was despatched to Aistulf to ask him to honour the Roman-Lombard treaties as the pope demanded, but without effect. What now was to come to the proof, was whether or