Liutprand

730.

vassals. He then moved toward Rome, which the exarch was already besieging. But he had no wish that pacifies Italy, the imperial power should be strengthened by the recovery of Rome, and, encamping his army in the Field of Nero, outside the city, proceeded to claim to act as arbitrator between Gregory and Eutychius. They were too weak to resist him, and the Pope at least gladly acquiesced in the pacification of Italy which Liutprand proposed. The exarch was to return to Ravenna, leaving Rome unmolested, and to be content with the possession of Ravenna only, all his other lost dominions in the Pentapolis and Æmilia remaining in the hands of the Lombards. Gregory, in consideration of being left unmolested in Rome, professed to return to his allegiance, but in reality remained in an independent position. He did not withdraw his opposition to Iconoclasm, and took advantage of the peace to call together a great council of Italian bishops, ninety-three in number, who solemnly anathematised all who refused to reverence images, though they did not curse the emperor by name (730).

Two months later pope Gregory 11. died, and was succeeded by Gregory III., as great an enemy of Iconoclasm as his namesake. He had no sooner displayed his views, than the emperor, discontented with the peace which the exarch had concluded, and much irritated by the anathema of the Council of Rome, revenged himself on the papacy by issuing an edict which removed from the jurisdiction of the Pope, as Patriarch of the West, the Illyrian and south Italian dioceses which had hitherto paid spiritual obedience to Rome. For the future, not only Epirus and Sicily, but even Apulia and Calabria, were to look to the Patriarch of Constantinople as their head and chief (731).

In 732 Leo took a more practical step for reducing the Pope to obedience. He fitted out a great armament in the ports of Asia Minor, which was to sail to Italy, to recover by force of arms the lost regions of the Exarchate, and to arrest Gregory III. and send him in chains to Constantinople. But

the fates were against the restoration of imperial authority in the West: the fleet was completely wrecked by a storm in the Adriatic, and the fragments of it which reached Ravenna effected nothing. This was the last serious attempt of the empire to recover central Italy. Henceforth the Last effort Popes went their own way, while the exarch, penned up in the single fortress of Ravenna, awaited with trembling the outbreak of the next Lombard war—a war which would certainly sweep away him and his shrunken Exarchate.

of Leo to re

conquer Italy,

732.

But for eight years after the treaty of 730, king Liutprand maintained peace over all Italy. He was a pious prince, and a respecter of the papacy, to which he had even made a grant of territory, ceding the town of Sutri in Tuscany, which he had captured from the exarch in the war of 728-30. His reign was a time of prosperity for Lombardy: the southern dukes were compelled to obey orders from Pavia the Slav and Avar were kept back from the northern marches, Liutprand also kept up his friendly relations with Charles Martel, the great Mayor of the Palace in Gaul. When Charles was looking about for a neighbour sovereign who should, according to old Teutonic custom, gird with arms and clip the hair of his son Pippin on his arrival at manhood, he chose Liutprand to discharge this friendly office. On the invasion of Provence by the Saracens in 736-7, Charles asked the Lombard for the aid of his host, and Liutprand crossed the Alps and joined in expelling the infidels from Aix and Arles.

The peace of Italy was not broken till 738 when Transimund duke of Spoleto rebelled, not for the first time, against Liutprand. The king crushed the revolt with his accustomed vigour, and the duke was compelled to fly: he took refuge at Rome with pope Gregory III. Liutprand Liutprand promptly demanded his surrender: Gregory re- attacks Rome, fused, and the Lombard army at once marched 738.

into the duchy of Rome. The king captured Orte, Bomazo, and two other towns in south Tuscany, and menaced Rome

Gregory III. asks aid from

the Franks.

with a siege. Gregory III. could hope for neither help nor sympathy from his master the emperor Leo, whom he had so grievously insulted. Accordingly he determined to seek aid from the one other power which might be able to succour him, the great Mayor of the Franks. He sent to Charles Martel the golden keys of the tomb of Saint Peter, and besought him to defend the holy city against the impious Lombard. He conferred on the Mayor the high-sounding title of Roman Patrician, which was not legally his to give, for only the emperor could confer it. He even offered to transfer to the ruler of the Franks the shadowy allegiance which Rome still paid to the emperor. Thus did Gregory III., first of all the Roman pontiffs, endeavour to bring down upon Italy the curse of foreign invasion. He had drawn upon himself the wrath of Liutprand by his secular policy: the war arose purely from the fact that he had favoured the rebellion of the duke of Spoleto, and sheltered him when he fled. Yet he made the Lombard invasion a matter of sacrilege, complaining to Charles that Liutprand's attack was an impious invasion of the rights of the Church, and a deliberate insult to the majesty of St. Peter. Considering that the king had saved him from destruction eight years before, Gregory must be accused of gross ingratitude, as well as of deliberate misrepresentation and hypocrisy. But the Pope had imbibed a bitter and quite irrational hatred for the Lombard race: the danger that he might lose his secular power, by Rome being annexed to the realm of Liutprand, caused Gregory to view the pious, peaceable, and orthodox king of the Lombards with as much dislike as he felt for the heretical Iconoclast at Constantinople. Considering the amiable character of Liutprand, and the respectable national record of the Lombards when they are compared with their contemporaries beyond the Alps, it is astonishing to read of the terms in which Gregory and his successors spoke of them. No epithet applied to the heathen in the Scriptures was too severe to heap upon the 'fetid, perjured, impious, plundering,

murderous race of the Lombards.' And all this indignation and abuse was produced by the rational desire of Liutprand to punish the Pope for harbouring his rebels! It is impossible not to wish that the great king had succeeded in taking Rome, and unifying Italy, a contingency which would have spared the peninsula the curses of the Frankish invasion, of its long and unnatural connection with the Western Empire, and of that still greater disaster, the permanent establishment of the temporal power of the papacy.

Charles Martel did not accept Gregory's offers, or carry out the Pope's plans: he would not quarrel with his old friend Liutprand on such inadequate grounds as the Pope alleged. He chose instead to endeavour to mediate between Gregory and the Lombard king. He accepted the title of Patrician, and received the Roman ambassadors with great pomp and honour, sending them home with many rich presents. But his own delegates who accompanied them were charged to reconcile the Pope and the king, not to promise aid to the one against the other. Both Charles and Gregory, as it happened, were at this moment on the edge of the grave: both died in the next year (741), and it was some time before the first active interference of the Franks in behalf of the papacy was destined to take place.

to the Pope,

How uncalled for was the action of pope Gregory is shown by the fact that in the next year Liutprand came to terms with the Roman See. On the accession of pope Zachariah, who promised to give no more aid to the rebel duke Liutprand of Spoleto, Liutprand restored the cities he had grants peace taken from the Roman duchy, and granted a 742. peace for twenty years. He even presented great offerings. to the Roman Churches and made a present of some valuable estates to Zachariah. Yet the anger of the popes was in no way appeased in their hearts they hated the Lombards as if they were still Arians or heathen, and only awaited another opportunity for conspiring against them.

Meanwhile Liutprand died in peace in 743, after a reign

of thirty-one years, in which he had added the greater part of the Exarchate to his kingdom, had extended the boundaries of Italy to north and east against the Bavarian and Slav, and had reduced the Beneventan and Spoletan dukes to an unwonted state of subservience. No one, save his enemies the popes, ever laid a charge of any sort against his character, and he appears to have been the best-loved and best-served king of his day. We read with pleasure that he died in peace, ere the terrible invasion of the Franks began to afflict the land he had guarded so well. It would have been better perhaps for Italy if he had been a less virtuous and pious sovereign: a less temperate ruler would have finished his career of conquest by taking Rome, and so would have staved off the countless ills that Rome was about to bring on the whole Italian peninsula.