The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I

By the restoration of the African province to the Roman empire and the Catholic faith Justinian won great renown. His accession had been welcomed with joy by the Catholic people. Full of great designs, he aimed at the extension of his realm, and endeavoured to advance the Christian cause by missions to countries as yet without the faith. Greatness and majesty are shown in all his creations.¹²⁹ In the year following the African reconquest Pope Agapetus wrote to him, praising his solicitude in maintaining the unity of the Church, and identifying the advance of his empire with the increase of religion.¹³⁰ The Pope adds that the emperor desired the profession of faith which he had sent to his predecessor Pope John II., and which had been confirmed by him, to be confirmed also by himself, for which "we praise you: we assent, not because we admit in laymen an authority to preach, but because, since the zeal of your faith is in accordance with the rules of our fathers, we confirm and give it force".

It is to be remembered that Pope Agapetus, elected in 535, was the subject of the Gothic king Theodatus, and as such was sent by him, under threats of death, in the winter of this year, on an embassy to Justinian. The purpose of Theodatus was to support his tottering throne by the intercession of the Pope. He had murdered at the lake of Bolsena the daughter and heiress of Theodorick, Amalasunta, who had made him king upon the untimely death of her son Athalarick in 534. He was secretly proposing to cede the Gothic kingdom of Italy to Justinian for a pension of 1200 pounds of gold. Thus Agapetus was sent to Constantinople in the winter of 535, as Pope John I. had been sent by Theodorick ten years before. He entered that city on the 20th February, 536; he died on the 22nd April following. In these two months the Pope, the subject of Theodatus, did great things. A certain Anthimus, a secret friend of the Monophysite heresy, had been brought, by the favour of the like-minded empress Theodora, from the see of Trebisond and put into that of Constantinople, having been able to impose himself upon the emperor as orthodox. Agapetus was received with the greatest honour, being only the second Pope who had visited Byzantium. He could not negotiate a peace for Theodatus; but archimandrites, priests, and monks besought him to proceed against Anthimus as an interloper and teacher of error. Agapetus refused his communion to the new patriarch, required of him a written confession of faith, and return to his bishopric, which he had deserted contrary to the canons. The emperor, believing in the orthodoxy of his patriarch, took part at first against the Pope, and strove to overcome him both with threats and with presents. But Justinian, undeceived as to the orthodoxy of Anthimus, gave him up, and Pope Agapetus pronounced judgment of deposition upon him, and on the 13th March, 536, consecrated Mennas, who had been duly elected, to be bishop of Constantinople. He first required of him a written confession "to carry to Rome, to St. Peter".¹³¹

Soon after this the Pope died suddenly. The whole population at Constantinople attended his funeral. Never, it was said, had the mourning for a bishop or an emperor drawn together such a concourse of people. His body was carried back to Rome in triumph and buried in St. Peter's.

Pope Agapetus was succeeded in 536 by Pope Silverius, chosen under the influence of the Gothic king Theodatus. He was the last Pope so chosen; and the moment of his election is coincident with events destined to change permanently the material condition both of Rome and Italy.

Justinian had accomplished, with singular ease and rapidity, the first half of his design. This was the reunion of North Africa to his empire, and the restoration in it of the Catholic faith. The second part of his design was to accomplish the same double result for Rome and for Italy. He sent Belisarius, after the victory at Carthage, into Sicily, where Syracuse and Palermo were taken; and in the summer of 536 the great commander entered Italy, captured Naples, and advanced towards Rome on the Appian Road. So the Gothic war began. Theodatus was in Rome. The Gothic army in the Pontine marshes became aware of his incompetence and his secret treating with Justinian, deposed him, and elected Vitiges to be their king in his stead, by whose orders the fugitive was slain in his flight on the Flaminian Road. But Vitiges hastened to Ravenna, where he espoused the unwilling Matasunta, daughter of Amalasuntha, granddaughter of Theodorick. Four thousand Goths alone remained to cover Rome. Belisarius appeared before it. A deputation, supported by Pope Silverius, brought him the keys of the city. The garrison was too weak to defend it, and on the 9th December, 536, Belisarius took possession of Rome, at the head of the imperial troops, who had nothing Roman in them except the name. It was sixty years since Odoacer had caused the senate to declare a western emperor needless, and Rome, as to temporal rule, had fallen, first under the Herule, then under the Goth. The Romans welcomed Belisarius as a deliverer from the double yoke of the northern intruder and the Arian heretic.

For however Theodorick recognised, after the fury of the conflict with his brother-Teuton, the Herule Odoacer, was over, the necessity of ruling with justice over Goth and Italian, however prosperous as to the maintenance of peace and internal order the great kingdom stretching from Illyricum to Southern Gaul had been, whatever support he had given to the maintenance of Roman law, custom, and institutions, there was not a Roman, from Symmachus and Boethius in the senate to the meanest inhabitant of Trastevere, who would not loathe the occupation of Rome and Italy by the Gothic invasion. The Goths were a people of remarkable courage and extraordinary force of body. But the feeling with which Italians and, above all, Romans would regard them as masters of their country and confiscators of its soil, can only be expressed by what the English would feel if a swarm of Zulus were to take possession of England. So, when Belisarius entered Rome, the Romans looked for their being replaced under the direct and lawful government of one who should be in deed and in truth a Roman prince, as Pope Felix had called the recreant Zeno, that is, the head of law, the supreme judge, the defender of the Church. This was what they looked for. I am about to mention what they found.

The empress Theodora had tried with all her wiles to set a Monophysite prelate on the Byzantine See.¹³² Pope Agapetus had frustrated her plans by deposing Anthimus and consecrating Mennas in his place. But Theodora had not given up her intrigues, and she strove to involve in her net the Roman See itself. In the train of Agapetus at Constantinople was the ambitious deacon Vigilius. She sought to win him by promising him the Roman See. She offered him a great sum of money, and all her powerful support in attaining the papal dignity, if he would bind himself thereupon to abrogate the Council of Chalcedon, to enter into communion with Anthimus and Severus, and help them to recover the sees of Constantinople and Antioch. Vigilius agreed, and Theodora worked for the interests of her favourite by means of Antonina, wife of Belisarius. In the meantime, Silverius, as we have seen, had been chosen Pope in Rome, and Theodatus had exercised in his favour the influence which the Teuton rulers, whether styled Patricius or King, had claimed in the papal election since Odoacer. The empress invited the new Pope to come to Constantinople, or at least to restore her dear Anthimus. Silverius refused decidedly, though he was in the most dangerous position between the Greeks and the Ostrogoths, and even his personal liberty was in danger from Belisarius.

Pope Silverius continued to refuse submission to the wishes of the empress. The great commander sat in the Pincian palace in March, 537, scarcely three months after he had taken possession of Rome.¹³³ There he abased himself to carry out the commands of two shameless women, Theodora and Antonina. He caused Pope Silverius to be brought before him on a charge of writing treasonable letters to Vitiges. The Pope had taken refuge at Santa Sabina on the Aventine. When brought before Belisarius, he found him sitting at the feet of Antonina, who reclined on a couch. The attending clergy had been left behind the first and second curtains. The Pope and the deacon Vigilius entered alone. "Lord Pope Silverius," said Antonina, "what have we done to thee and the Romans that thou wouldst deliver us into the hands of the Goths?" While she was heaping reproaches upon him, John, a sub-deacon of the first region, entered, took the pallium from his shoulders, and led him into another room, where he was stript of his episcopal vestments, the dress of a monk was put upon him, and his deposition was announced to the clergy. He was then banished to Patara in Lycia. All these intrigues had been unknown to Justinian. Afterwards, the bishop¹³⁴ of Patara went to him, and invoked before the emperor the judgment of God, saying there were many kings in this world, but not one set over the Church of the whole world, as was that bishop who had been expelled from his see. Justinian, hearing this, ordered Silverius to be taken back to Rome, and a true judgment of his case to be made. But then the Pope fell entirely into the hands of his rival Vigilius, who in the meantime had, by the help of Belisarius, got possession of the pontificate. Vigilius caused him to be deported to the island of Palmaria. There it is only known that he died in great misery, but with the crown of martyrdom.

This was the first act of that dominion, lasting more than two hundred years, in which the Byzantine sovereigns were lords of Rome, as part of a reconquered province, and claimed to confirm the Papal elections, a claim set up by the Herule Odoacer, continued by Theodorick, inherited by Justinian.

When Belisarius occupied Rome he had only 5000 soldiers at his command. Vitiges, the new Gothic king, had gone to Ravenna, and made peace with the Franks by surrendering to them the southern provinces of France, held by Theodorick. He then levied the whole fighting force of the Goths, and, in March, 537, advanced from Umbria upon Rome at the head of 150,000 men. Belisarius, in the three months, had done his best to repair the walls, the towers, and the gates of the city. He had also laid up provisions. He dug trenches round the least defended spots, and had constructed great machines which shot bolts strong enough to nail an armoured man to a tree. Vitiges approached from the Anio, and made a desperate attempt to storm the city at once. Having failed in this, through the great courage and skill of Belisarius, and being unable, even with his vast host, to surround the city, he set up six fortified camps from the Flaminian Gate to that of Prœneste, and a seventh in the Neronian fields on the other side of the river, the plain which stretches from the Vatican to the Milvian bridge. The Goth cut off the fourteen aqueducts which supplied Rome with water. Those greatest monuments of imperial magnificence from that time have stretched their broken arches across the Campagna, the admiration and sorrow of every beholder in so many generations. What five hundred years of empire had done, the Goth, in his fury to recover the land which he had usurped, was able to ruin. The besiegers went on wasting the Campagna, and preventing the entrance of provisions into the city. Amid the increasing want, and the fear of worse, Vitiges in vain tried to seduce the Romans to revolt. Finding that Belisarius would not capitulate, he constructed great wooden towers, loftier than the walls, upon wheels, from which fifty men to each should direct battering-rams. Belisarius opposed him with like weapons. On the nineteenth day, the Goths poured out from their seven camps for a general storm. In a tremendous conflict, Belisarius beat back the invaders by counter sallies at the gates assailed. But at one point they all but succeeded. The Mausoleum of Hadrian formed part of the defence. Procopius, the eye-witness of this famous siege, and its narrator, says of it: "The tomb of the Roman emperor Hadrian lies outside the Aurelian Gate, a stone's-throw from the walls – a work of marvellous splendour. For it consists of huge blocks of Parian marble, fastened to each other without jointing from inside. It has four equal sides, each of them in length a stone's-cast. Its height exceeds that of the city walls. Upon it stand wonderful statues of men and horses." This is all that Procopius says. Up to this moment, full four centuries after the death of Hadrian, all the glories of Grecian art, which that imperial traveller over the world, from Newcastle to the cataracts of the Nile, could collect, had shone through the Roman sky on the monument, splendid as a palace and strong as a castle. On this fatal day of Rome's direst need they were hurled down upon the advancing Goth, whom the narrow streets had enabled to approach with scaling ladders. Statues of emperors, gods, and heroes hailed upon the northern giants; the works of Polycletus and Praxiteles were used for common stones upon invaders who despised art as well as letters; and a thousand years afterwards, when the building was finally formed into a castle, in digging the trenches the fragments of the Sleeping Faun were found, which had crushed some inglorious barbarian and saved Rome from capture.

But the storming, repulsed at every gate, cost Vitiges the flower of his host. Thirty thousand are said to have fallen, that being the number which Procopius records as derived from Gothic officers themselves; and greater, he says, was the number of wounded, when the deadly bolts from the machines of Belisarius mowed down their encumbered masses in flight.

The result of this great conflict was to weaken the Goths, to encourage the Romans, to make Belisarius confident of success. The siege lasted after this nearly a year. The extremity of hunger and misery was endured in the city. The supply of water was reduced to the cisterns and springs and the river. Vitiges at length occupied Porto, and cut off Rome from the sea. But the Goths also suffered terribly both from famine and from summer heat. The end of all was that, after a siege of a year and nine days, in which the Goths had fought 69 battles, Vitiges, in March, 538, drew off his diminished troops. One morning, Belisarius, from his Pincian palace, saw one-half of the remaining Goths on the other side of the Milvian bridge, and he forthwith ordered a sally upon their rear-guard. Vitiges left perhaps the half of his great host mouldering in the wasted, pestilent, deserted Campagna. He left also a city impoverished in numbers, full of sickness and misery. He had destroyed all the villas and dwellings of the Campagna; the churches of the Martyrs lay in heaps of ruins: from the Porta Salara to the Porta Nomentana hardly one stone upon another seems to have remained. Also Vitiges had ordered the senators whom he had left at Ravenna to be put to death. Only, during this siege, the basilicas of Rome's patron saints, which lay outside the walls, received no damage and were respected by the Goths.¹³⁵

After this the storm of war drew off to the North. It continued with changing fortune in the provinces of Tuscany, Æmilia, the plain of the Po, the coasts of the Hadriatic. On the one side Franks and Burgundians took part; on the other side the soldiers of Belisarius were made up of all races from the East: not without skill in fight, but without discipline, under rival and quarrelling commanders. They pressed grievously on the land which they were sent to deliver. But the Goths grew weaker: they never recovered their losses before Rome. At last Belisarius got hold of Ravenna – not by capture, but after long negotiations, on both sides deceptive. Belisarius made the Goths believe that he would set himself at their head, and construct a new western empire. Vitiges, whether he trusted him or not, came to terms with him. Belisarius proclaimed Justinian emperor. The German realm seemed broken to pieces: only Verona, Pavia, and a portion of Liguria held out. A small part only of the army still carried the national banner. Then the conqueror, in 539, was recalled to Byzantium, to conduct the war against Persia. He left Italy almost subdued, and carried with him the captive king of the Goths, Vitiges, as in former years he had carried Gelimer, the captive king of the Vandals. This was in 539, thirteen years after Theodorick's death.

The first act of that fearful drama, the Gothic war, was over. But as soon as Belisarius disappeared, the Goths began to recover themselves. The generals of Justinian lived on plunder. In Totila arose a new Gothic leader, the bravest of the brave. At the end of the year 541 he marched out of Verona with only five thousand men, defeated the incapable and disunited Grecian captains, took city after city, passed the Apennines, passed near Rome, without assailing it. In this career of victory the Gothic king once approached that Campanian hill on which the great benefactor of the West, St. Benedict, was laying the foundations of the cœnobitic life. In the first instance, Totila tried to deceive the Saint. He dressed up a high officer as king, and sent him, with three of his chief counts in attendance, to personate himself. When Benedict saw the Gothic train approaching he was seated, and as soon as they were within earshot, he cried out to the warrior pretending to be king: "Son, lay aside that dress which is not thine". The Goth fell to the ground in dismay, and returned to report his discomfiture to Totila, who then came himself. But when he saw Benedict seated at a distance he prostrated himself, and though Benedict thrice bade him arise, he continued prostrate. The Saint then came to him, raised him up, upbraided him with the acts which he had committed, and revealed to him the future concerning himself: "Many evils thou doest; many hast thou done. Put a curb at length on thine iniquity. Rome, indeed, thou shalt enter; the sea thou shalt pass. Nine years thou shalt reign; in the tenth thou shalt die."¹³⁶ The king was awe-struck. The savage in him was quelled by the speaker's sanctity. From this time forth he altered his conduct, and became more humane. In the capture of Naples shortly afterwards he showed by his merciful treatment the effect which the presence of St. Benedict had produced on him, as well as in the following years of his life. This interview took place in the year 542.

But Totila¹³⁷ so advanced in power that, in spite of Byzantine intrigue and jealousy, Belisarius, having happily concluded the Persian war, was sent back to the supreme command in Italy. He landed in Ravenna, but without army, war-material, or money. In the summer of 545, Totila, having subdued the land all about Rome, laid siege to Rome itself. Belisarius occupied Porto, and Totila set up his camp eight miles from Rome, commanding the Tiber, and turning the siege into the closest blockade. In vain Belisarius attempted to burst the Gothic bar of the river and introduce provisions to Rome. In vain embassies were sent to Constantinople for help. The most frightful distress ensued at Rome. At length, after about eighteen months, certain Isaurian soldiers of the Greek garrison gave up the Porta Asinaria, and on the night of the 17th December, 546, Totila took the ill-defended city. When he entered, it was almost without inhabitants. Those whom the sword, famine, and pestilence had not yet taken were in flight or hiding. Patricians crept about in the garb of slaves. The number of victims at this capture was small. The desolation and misery seem to have worked not only on Totila, but also on his army. The plunder, which a captured city could not escape, was generally bloodless; but many houses were burnt in the Trasteverine quarter. As Theodorick had offered his prayers at the tomb of the Apostles, so Totila went from the Lateran to St. Peter's. What a change had the forty-six years brought about. To the miserable remnant of the senate Totila upbraided the ingratitude which had been shown for Gothic benefits under Theodorick. He accepted, however, the intercession of the deacon Pelagius, and protected not only the female sex in general, but especially the noble Rusticiana, widow of Boethius and daughter of Symmachus. Amalasunta had restored their property to her sons, the younger Boethius and Symmachus; but the war seems to have consumed everything. She was now a beggar, and the wild host of Totila wished to put her to death for having, as she was charged, maimed statues of Theodorick. But the king rescued her from their fury.

In the first impulse of wrath Totila had threatened to level Rome with the ground. Belisarius, lying sick at Porto, had addressed to him a letter, entreating him to spare the greatest and noblest of cities. He did, however, throw down a considerable part of the walls, and when he marched to Lucania against the Greeks, took with him the chief citizens, and made the rest of the inhabitants migrate to Campania. He left a desert behind him. If we could trust the exaggerated reports of Greek historians, Rome remained forty days without inhabitants, tenanted only by beasts.

So ended the second act of the Gothic tragedy.

But as Vitiges had quitted Rome, so Totila deserted it, and in the spring of 547 it was entered again by Belisarius. In less than a month he restored as well as he could the part of the walls demolished, called back the inhabitants lingering in the neighbourhood, and prepared for a new attack. It was not long in coming. Scarcely had the gaps in the walls been filled up by stones piled in disorder and the trenches cleared, when the Gothic king reappeared. Thrice was his assault repulsed; then he gave up the attempt, broke down the bridges over the Anio behind him, and went to Tibur, which he took by treachery of the inhabitants, who were at strife with the Isaurian garrison. Totila massacred the citizens, the bishop, and the clergy; got possession of the upper course of the Tiber, and cut off the Romans from Tuscany. But then Belisarius was enabled to give greater care to repairing the city's defences. The state in which several gates remain to this day still show his hand. He restored Trajan's aqueduct, which fed the mills on the right bank. But in the winter of 547 the great captain was drawn away from Rome to carry on a miserable petty war with insufficient force in the south of Italy, and was finally recalled to Constantinople. So ended the third act of Rome's fall.

But Totila hastened from place to place, from victory to victory. After scouring the South and then Umbria at the beginning of 549, he stood the third time before Rome. A strong Byzantine garrison in the city had provided magazines, and the wide spaces within the walls had been sown with wheat. His first attack failed; but treachery opened to him the Ostian gate, and its famished defenders soon surrendered the mausoleum of Hadrian. The conqueror, in this fourth capture of the city, acted mildly. He called back the yet absent inhabitants, amongst them many of the senators who had been sent into Campania. How had the nobles of Rome melted away! Vitiges had ordered those kept in Ravenna as hostages to be slain. Some had then escaped to Liguria. The distrust of the Greeks as well as of the Goths threatened them. Cethegus, chief of the senate, had been compelled to leave before the first siege of Totila. Now Totila did not succeed in coming to terms with Justinian. The Greek army received a new commander in the eunuch Narses, who had served before under Belisarius. In him skill, energy, court favour, and the command of considerable forces were united. Before the end of 549, Totila left Rome. Almost all Italy save Ravenna was in his hands. He dealt generously with the people, whilst the Byzantine officials, exhausting the land with their exactions, added to the sufferings of war.

And now we reach the fifth act of the drama in which Rome was humbled to the very dust. Totila, for more than two years and a half, carried on an unceasing struggle over land and sea – Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, which he subdued, and beyond the Hadriatic, to the opposite coasts. Though generally victorious, he was more like the leader in an old Gothic raid than a king who ruled and defended a great realm. At last, in the spring of 552, Narses advanced from Ravenna with a great force to a decisive battle for Rome. Totila advanced from Rome into Tuscany to meet him. At Taginas, on the longest day, the conflict which decided the fate of the Gothic kingdom took place. All that summer day the battle lasted. The Gothic king, a true knight in royal armour, on a splendid steed, marshalled and led his host. When night had come his cavalry was overthrown, his footmen broken. The spear of a Gepid had wounded him mortally. He was taken from the field, died in the night, was hastily buried. But his grave was disclosed to the Greeks. They left him where he lay; only his blood-stained mantle and diadem set with precious stones were carried to Constantinople. Six thousand of his bravest warriors lay on the field of battle. Yet when the remains of the host collected themselves in Upper Italy they elected Teia in Pavia for head of the yet unconquered race.

But Narses, having captured the strong places in Middle Italy, advanced upon Rome. The Gothic garrison was too weak to defend the wide circuits of the walls. Parts were soon taken. Presently Hadrian's tomb, which Totila had surrounded with fresh walls, alone held out. But it soon fell, and hapless Rome was captured for the fifth time in the reign of Justinian. It was a day of doom for the still remaining noble families. Goths and Greeks alike turned against them. In Campania and in Sicily many distinguished Romans had waited for better times. Now not only the flying Goths cut down all who fell into their hands, but the barbarian troops in the army of Narses, at their entrance into Rome, followed the example. Then, again, three hundred youths of the noblest families, who had been kept as hostages at Pavia, were all executed by Teia. The western consulate ended in 534, Flavius Theodorus Paulinus being the last. It continued seven years longer in the East, where to Flavius Basilius, consul in 541, no successor was given. When Justinian abolished this dignity it had lasted 1050 years, with few interruptions. Though for more than half this time it had been a mere title of honour, yet the consuls gave their name to the year, and served still, it may be, to mark to the world the unity of the Roman empire.

From Rome the conqueror Narses turned his steps southwards to Cumæ, that he might seize the treasure of the Goths, which was guarded by the new king Teia's brother Aligern. This brought Teia himself by a rapid march down the Hadriatic coast, and crossing Italy obliquely, he appeared at the foot of Vesuvius. There, in the spring of 553, Teia fought a last and desperate battle over the grave of sunken cities, in view of the Gulf of Naples. At the head of a small host, he fought from early morn to noon. It was like a battle of Homeric warriors. Then he could no longer support the weight of twelve lances in his shield, and, calling to his armour-bearer for a fresh shield, he fell transfixed by a lance. The next day the remnant of the army, save a thousand who fought their way through and reached Pavia, accepted terms from Narses, to leave Italy and fight no more against the emperor.

But Italy was far yet from tranquillity. Teia had incited the Alemans and the Franks to break into Italy. The two brothers, Leuthar and Bucelin, led a raid of 70,000 men, who ravaged Central and Southern Italy down to the Straits of Sicily. One of these barbarians carried back his spoil-laden troops to the Po, where pestilence consumed him and his horde. The host of the other brother, Bucelin, when it had reached Capua, was overthrown on the Vulturnus by Narses, with a slaughter as utter as that which Marius inflicted on the Cimbri. Scarcely five are said to have escaped. So, in the spring of 555, after twenty years of destruction, ended the Gothic war.¹³⁸

The reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals cost Justinian a few months of uninterrupted victory. The reconquest of Italy from the Goths cost twenty years of suffering to both sides, leaving, indeed, Justinian master but of a ruined Italy, master also of Rome, but after five successive captures; its senate reduced to a shadow, its patricians all but destroyed, its population shrunk, it is supposed, when Narses took possession of it in 552, to between thirty and forty thousand impoverished inhabitants. But the greatest change remains to be recorded. The Pope had indeed been delivered from Arian sovereigns, who held the country under military occupation, but exercised their civil rule with leniency and consideration, bearing, no doubt, in mind that they were, at least in theory, vice-gerents of an over-lord who ruled at Constantinople what was still the greatest empire of the world. What Pope Gelasius truly called "hostile domination" had been tempered during three-and-thirty years by the personal qualities of one who was at once powerful in arms and wise in statesmanship. Rome, in the time of Theodorick and Athalarick, had been maintained, its senate respected, the Pope treated with deference. A stranger entering Rome in 535, at the beginning of the Gothic war, would still have seen the greatest and grandest city of the world, standing in general with its buildings unimpaired. In 552, the Pope, instead of a distant over-lord, to whom he could appeal as Roman prince, had received an immediate master, who ruled Rome by a governor with a permanent garrison, and who understood his rule at Rome to be the same as his rule at Byzantium. The same as to its absolute power; but with this difference, that while Byzantium was the seat of his imperial dignity, in which every interest touched his personal credit, and its bishop was to be supported as the chief officer of his court and the chief councillor of his administration, the Rome he took from the Goths was simply a provincial town of a recovered province, once indeed illustrious, but now ruined and very troublesome. A provincial town because the seat of Byzantine power in Italy was henceforth not at Rome but at Ravenna, while the sovereign of Italy no longer held his court within Italy, at Ravenna or at Verona, as Theodorick and Athalarick, but at Constantinople. Mature reflection upon the civil condition made for the Pope by the result of the Gothic war will, I think, show that no severer test of the foundation of his spiritual authority could be applied than what this great event brought in its train. Nor must we omit to note that this test was brought about not only by the operation of political causes, but by actors who had not the intention of producing such a result. The suffering of Rome, in particular, during this war at the hands of Vitiges, Belisarius, Totila, Teia, Narses, is indescribable. It is hard to say whether defender or assailant did it most injury; but it is true to say that the one and the other were equally merciless in their purpose to retain it as a prey or to recover it as a conquest. Vitiges, besides pressing the people cooped up in its walls with a terrible famine during his siege of a year, broke down its aqueducts and ruined every building on that part of the Campagna which he scoured. Totila, in like manner, after famishing the inhabitants, when he took Rome, broke down a good part of its walls, and at his second capture, in 546, the city is described as having been absolutely deserted. In the last struggle, Teia slew without pity the three hundred hostages of Rome's noblest blood who had been sent to Pavia, thereby almost destroying its patricians. These were the parting tokens of Gothic affection for Italy. Then Belisarius, attempting to relieve Rome with inadequate forces, which was all that the penury of Justinian allowed him, was the means of prolonging the famine, while he did not save the city from capture. Lastly, Narses, sent to finish the war, enrolled in Dalmatia an army of adventurers. Huns, Lombards, Herules, Gepids, Greeks, and even Persians, in figure, language, arms, and customs utterly dissimilar, fought for him under the imperial standard, greedy for the treasures of Italy. Narses took Rome in 552, and governed it as imperial prefect for fifteen years at the head of a Greek garrison, until he was recalled in 567. That occupation of Narses in 552 is the date of Rome's extinction as the old secular imperial city. The year after his recal came the worst plague of all, and the most enduring. The Lombards did but repeat for the subjection of Italy to a fresh northern invasion what Narses had done to deliver it from Theodorick's older one in the preceding century.