Taming the Teutons

At any rate the senility of Januarius brought St. Gregory into closer touch with the Churches of Sardinia, and the many letters he had to write in connection with that island give us a glimpse of the confusion that everywhere prevailed.

Be it well understood all the West was in chaos. Whole districts were now desolate deserts, with ruined masonry to mark the site of villages and towns. Everywhere the centres of population had shifted. Roman Law gave place to feudal custom. Arian heretics held the ear of kings.

Everything was to reorganize, and the Pope had to see to everything in person. Unlike our present Holy Father, he had not at his disposal the elaborate machinery of the Roman Curia and Sacred Congregations. And the old order was giving place to new so quickly that precedents could only hamper.

The Visigoths were masters in Spain, the Franks in Gaul. Justinian's generals had won back the African Province from the Vandals.

These regions, at any rate, had their fate decided. But in Italy the war still raged. St. Gregory was a young man of twenty-eight when "the unspeakable Lombards "swarmed through the passes of the Julian Alps—wild-looking, shaggy-bearded men, with the backs of their heads carefully shaved, "savage beyond even German fierceness." There was no one competent to oppose them in 568. Belisarius was dead, Narses in disgrace, Longinus the exarch skulked behind the ramparts of Ravenna, and made no attempt to conscript the manhood of Italy in defence of hearths and shrines.

Town after town opened its gates without a blow; and Alboin, the Lombard King, gave each town, as it surrendered, to one or other of his captains with the title of Duke. Pavia alone held out for three years. Here Alboin established his capital, and here he was murdered in 574, about the time when St. Gregory became a monk.

The wretched Italians in the conquered districts were now serfs bound to the soil, compelled to work day and night to secure a scanty livelihood; for they were forced to yield up to their cruel taskmasters one-third of the produce of their labour. And no man was safe in life, or limb, or chattel, from the local despot's whim.

Lombard Italy was divided up among thirty-six dukes, each irresponsible in his own strip of territory, each eying each askance, ready to quarrel with his fellow on the smallest provocation. Had the thirty-six confederated they could easily have subdued the whole of the peninsula.

Through ten most wretched years the Lombard warriors remained on the alert, in peril from the Franks and Allemanni in the emperor's pay—hardly in peril from the Hungarians and Avars so strong were their own precautions in the Eastern Alps—in peril, lest imperial Ravenna should shake off its lethargy and the much-enduring peasantry rise in revolt.

The two southernmost of the Lombard duchies, Benevent and Spoleto, proved especially troublesome to Rome. We have already spoken of their raids on the Campagna and their attacks on the city. Furthermore, the Via Flaminia between Rome and Ravenna ran through the territory of the Duke of Spoleto; and the Duke of Benevent could at any time swoop down on the Appian Way and cut communications with the Adriatic.

It will be remembered that while St. Gregory was at Constantinople the emperor advised the Romans to hire the help of the Franks. King Childebert, nothing loth, marched his troops into Italy. It seemed that if he and the Viceroy could concert their maneuvers, the Lombards would be surrounded and driven from the land. The common danger brought the thirty-six dukes together in council, and they agreed to take their orders from Authari, the young king whose claim to fealty and to tribute they had for years ignored.

Authari decided on a policy of passive resistance. He collected provisions and shut himself up with his fighting men in Pavia. The dukes followed his example, each in his own strongest town. The peasants were left to starve in the open, and the Franks could find neither food nor provender to commandeer, no foe to meet in fair encounter. Pestilence followed in the wake of famine, and a little before Pope Pelagius died Childebert led back to Gaul the gaunt remnant of his troops.

The Lombard power was still unbroken. Never had their outlook seemed more hopeful, for a strong hand held the dukes in control. It was now the emperor's troops who kept in garrison, while the armies of King Authari raided the land. A column still marks the spot where his javelin fell when, so runs the story, he rode into the sea at the southernmost point of Italy, and hurled it with all his strength, exclaiming: "Thus far extends the limit of the Lombard rule." But the imperial fleet was still supreme at sea, the imperial garrisons secure in their strongholds along the coast.

Authari was now in the zenith of his power. At Easter, 590, that very Easter when St. Gregory massed the Romans in penitential procession, he forbade the children of the Lombards to be baptised in the Catholic Faith.

"For this crime," writes St. Gregory, "the Divine Majesty extinguished him, so that he did not see another Easter."

His death occurred at Pavia on the 5th of September, two days before the new Pope was enthroned.

Authari left no son, only a fair young widow, Theodolind, daughter of Duke Garibald of Bavaria, a Catholic princess, as good and as gracious as she was comely. The Lombards decided that she should remain their queen. The thirty-six dukes voted that the royal crown should be given to whomsoever among them she should choose to wed.

Theodolind's choice fell on Agilulf, Duke of Turin. His first care was to make an advantageous peace with the Franks, and a truce with the exarch. But the dukes of Benevent and Spoleto refused to be bound by his acts. Their troops continued to terrorize the Campagna, and St. Gregory wrote in the bitterness of his soul:

"For my sins I find myself Bishop of the Lombards whose promises stab like swords."

He warned the exarch that Benevent was tampering with the Naples garrison. He counselled that the imperial troops should not always remain on the defensive, but by a vigorous thrust on Spoleto force the Lombards in the Campagna to face rearwards in order to defend their homes. Then, seeing that his advice availed nothing, he appointed, on his own responsibility, a military governor at Nepi, and replaced the governor of Naples by an abler man. The Theodosian regiment at Rome refused to mount guard because their pay was in arrears. St. Gregory quieted their clamour with money taken from the treasury of the Church. Henceforth they were the Pope's soldiers, not the Emperor's.

The exarch Romanus, who came into office in 590, was a weakling from whom nobody had anything to fear, always excepting the unfortunate Italians whom he oppressed. So long as the war kept away from the impregnable marshes around Ravenna, he was callous to the misery it dealt elsewhere: "the towns dispeopled, strongholds dismantled, the churches burnt and the monasteries plundered, the wild beasts roaming where the multitude of men did dwell." And wherever his tax-gatherers could safely venture, he extorted money from the men whom he did nothing to defend.

"His ill-will to us," wrote St. Gregory, "is worse than the swords of the Lombards. The enemies who kill us outright are kinder than the State officials, who wear us out with their malice, their robberies and their frauds."

In 593 Romanus added perfidy to his other misdeeds. Despite the treaty he had signed with Agilulf, he took Perugia by treachery, and other towns as well. In revenge for this outrage the Lombard king marched an army upon Rome. From the battlements of his scantily garrisoned city the Pope saw with his own eyes "Romans tied by the neck like dogs "and led off to be sold as slaves to the Franks. He broke off abruptly his discourse in the Lateran basilica, where he was preaching his course of homilies on Ezekiel.

"Two things trouble me. The text is obscure, and news has reached me that King Agilulf has crossed the Po, on his way to besiege us. Judge, my brethren, how a poor soul thus weighed down with heaviness, can penetrate into such hidden mysteries! Let no man blame me if I preach no more. On all sides we are hemmed in with swords. On all sides death stands at the door. Some of our fellow-citizens have just come in to us with their hands lopped off. They bear tidings that others have been carried into slavery, and others slain. What remains for us but to thank God with tears, under the scourges which we suffer for our sins. For sometimes our Heavenly Father feeds his children with bread, sometimes he corrects them with the rod, educating them by sorrows and by joys for the inheritance to be theirs throughout eternity."

But this tense anxiety did not last long. "On the steps of the basilica of Blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles," St. Gregory faced Agilulf, as erstwhile Innocent had faced Alaric, and St. Leo the Great had faced Attila. And the King, "melted by Gregory's prayers and greatly moved by his religious commands," gave orders for the siege to cease. A truce was concluded, and the Pope guaranteed the yearly payment of five hundred gold pieces.

"The emperor has a paymaster for his troops in Ravenna," he wrote to the empress, "but he leaves me to be the paymaster of the Lombards in Rome."

The tribute was burdensome, but the peace it paid for was well worth while. The Emperor, however, blamed the Pope, and sharp letters were interchanged.

"I understand what your serene missives mean," wrote Gregory. "You find that I have acted like a fool, and you are right. If I had not acted like a fool, I should not have borne all I have borne for your sake, amid the swords of the Lombards."

It was only when a more friendly exarch had replaced Romanus at Ravenna that a treaty could be arranged between the emperor and the king—the treaty known in history as "The Pope's Peace."

St. Gregory defined his attitude during the preliminaries as "intercessor and mediator." But his name does not appear among the signatures. He refused to sign, however urgently the Lombards might plead, "for they trusted his word, and despised the oaths of the emperor's officers." He feared the bad faith of both Greeks and Lombards, and refused to degrade the Holy See by becoming a partner to their evasions.

"Briefly point out to our Most Serene Lord," he instructs his apocrisarius, "that if I, his servant, had chosen to mix myself up with the downfall of the Lombards, that people to day would have neither king, nor dukes nor counts. But, because I fear God, I dread being concerned in the death of any man."

Henceforward his relations were most friendly with the Court at Pavia. He writes to King Agilulf to restrain his roving bands, "chiefly those in this neighbourhood," and not to seek "occasions for unpleasantness." He writes to Queen Theodolind:

"We entreat you to thank the King, your husband and our very excellent son, for the peace that he has made, and to move his soul (as you usually do) to keep this peace in time to come. Friendship with us will be of advantage to him in many ways."

"Most excellent daughter," he writes again, "you have merited no small reward for hindering bloodshed. We pray that God in His Mercy may repay you in goods both of body and of soul, both here and hereafter. We exhort you to foster, in your own way, whatever tends to promote good feeling between the two nations. Exert yourself on every opportunity as mercy may suggest."

Theodolind gave him other cause for congratulation. She exerted herself, "in her own way," to bring her family and her people into the one true fold. When her son, Adoald, was born at Genoa in 602, his father allowed him to be baptised a Catholic. St. Gregory's death-bed was gladdened by the tidings, and he sent "the royal Adoald "a relic of the True Cross, with affectionate wishes that he might "grow up glorious in the sight of God."

Adoald was crowned, probably in his father's lifetime, with the famous Iron Crown of Lombardy, which he was the first of a long succession of princes to wear. In this golden circlet, sparkling with jewels, Theodolind had enshrined the thin strip of iron, forged from one of the sacred Nails of Calvary, which the Empress St. Helena had erstwhile fastened to the helmet of her son, Constantine the Great.

St. Gregory knew of Theodolind's devotion to holy relics. He sent her, at different times, filings from St. Peter's chains, dust from the tomb of St. Paul, and brandea, or cloths, which had touched the bodies of certain martyrs. He sent her, too, a copy of his Dialogues, that most popular of all his works, the writing whereof had served as relief and recreation amid the labours, anxieties and illnesses of his weary years as Pope.

"One day," it begins, "overweighted with the burden of worldly business, I sought a secluded spot where I might quietly indulge in grief. And there I ran over in my mind all that was unpleasant in my position. And when I had sat there a long time in sorrow and in silence, there came to me Peter, my dear son and deacon, a man whom I had loved from his youth upward, a man with whom I was wont to share my studies in Holy Scripture."

To him Gregory unbosomed his discontent because of the "dust of worldly business" which so defiled his soul as to render it unfit to muse upon things heavenly, and his dismay when he compared his own weakness and imperfection with the lives of those good men and true who were not, as he was, "storm-tossed amid the boisterous billows of worldly affairs."

"If I should, Peter, but relate to you those facts concerning the lives and miracles of holy men in Italy, whom I have known myself, or heard of from the lips of trustworthy witnesses, I should sooner lack day to talk in, than matter to talk about."

Many of the "miracles" would not pass muster nowadays at the Lourdes Bureau, or in the strict inquiries which precede canonization. But St. Gregory wrote, as Abbot Smith points out, "in an age of continued calamity; and during such periods people look for wonders, and even educated men are led to give credence to signs and portents."

The book is not meant to be an utterance ex-cathedra. The holy Pope wrote down his stories just as he heard them. He names his authorities in most cases, and warns his readers that the wording is his own, only because he found it impossible to translate verbatim from the spoken dialect into write-worthy Latin. "Some of my informants told their stories in very rustic style, so that a man of letters could not decently preserve their actual words in his record."

This collection of pious anecdotes has been compared to the Fioretti  or Little Flowers of St. Francis. Both books mirror faithfully the Italy in which they were written. But the bright and sunny Fioretti  are of Catholic Italy in the thirteenth century, while the Dialogues  deal with Italy, writhing under the heel of the Barbarians, amid the ruins of her former splendour. The Fioretti, moreover, never obtrude their moral, while St. Gregory used his stories to make the truths of religion and the virtues of a devout life more readily understood and relished by the average man.

"And above all they gave, or seemed to give, what the men of those times especially craved for, a proof of God's continual presence with His people, an assurance that even then, when evil seemed universally triumphant, the power of God was still put forth to punish and to save." (Dudden.)

Many of the tales reappear in the Homilies. But as the collection grew, the needs of the Lombards became evidently uppermost in St. Gregory's mind. For the fourth book deals entirely with the nature of the soul and its life after death, questions which sorely perplexed the Teutons of that period, and about which their mythology was most vague. We have all heard Bede's account of the Northumbrian noble who compared the life of man here below to the swift flight of a sparrow on a dark, snowy night, in at one door and out at the other of a well-lit, well-warmed room.

"While he is within he is safe from the storm. But after a short space of fair weather, he vanishes out of our sight into the dark winter from which he came."

Although Bede does not mention it, St. Paulinus had doubtless with him a copy of the Dialogues  from which to satisfy the honest heathen.

There were Arians as well as pagans among the Lombards, but these heretics seem to have given little trouble from a theological point of view. For Arianism was essentially a State religion; and the conversion of the people followed that of the prince, as a matter of course. In Africa Arianism vanished with the Vandals, about the time our saint was born. In the year before his pontificate began the heresy died out in Spain with the conversion of King Reccared.

Leovigild, the last Arian ruler of the Visigoths, began his busy reign in 568, the year the Lombards invaded Italy. At this date the imperial troops still held Cordova, and the native Spaniards looked to Constantinople for support when the arrogance of their Arian masters became intolerable. The Swabians in the North, too, were now Catholics. They had long ago fraternized with the Basques, and were on friendly terms with the Franks on the other side of the Pyrenees.

But the ruling race in Spain, the Visigoths, were bitter Arians, and St. Gregory of Tours tells us that their nobles had "the detestable habit of killing their king whenever he displeased them." But Leovigild cured them of this bad habit, for he left not a male alive among the nobles, and took steps to start a dynasty.

To keep the kingly office in his family he had his son, Hermengild, crowned, and gave him rule over Seville and the districts around. A series of raids broke the power of the Greek garrisons. Leovigild took from the Swabians their treasure and their land. Matrimonial alliances put him on a friendly footing with the Frankish kings. His own second wife, Galswinth, was by a previous marriage mother of Brunehaut, Queen of Austrasia, and of Galswinth, wife and victim of King Chilperic of Neustria. Brunehaut's daughter, Ingonde, became the bride of King Hermengild; and this child of thirteen resisted all attempts to undermine her faith, and bore bravely the harsh treatment meted out to her by her grandmother, Queen Galswinth. Ingonde's constancy so impressed her bridegroom that he abjured Arianism, and received Confirmation at the hands of his uncle, St. Leander, Bishop of Seville.

Leovigild ordered his son to give up his faith or his crown. Civil war ensued; and St. Leander, driven from his see, went to Constantinople to appeal to the emperor for military support. Such was the state of Spain when St. Gregory heard the story from his lips.

Both saints were back at their duties in the West when Hermengild, in prison, had his head cloven with an axe by his father's orders, because he refused to receive his Easter Communion at the hands of an Arian bishop.

"One Visigoth died that many might live," is St. Gregory's comment. "One grain was sown in faith, and a great crop of faithful people sprang therefrom."

For in 589 Leovigild died, full of remorse; and Reccared, his second son, succeeded him on the throne. Of this young king, St. Gregory writes: "Walking in the footsteps of his brother the martyr, he utterly renounced Arianism, and laboured so earnestly to restore religion that he brought the whole nation of the Visigoths to the Faith of Christ, and would not suffer anyone that was a heretic among his subjects to bear arms and serve in his wars."

St. Gregory further expresses his joy in a letter to St. Leander:

"But since you know the wiles of the old enemy, and that he wages a fiercer war against those who have once been victorious, I trust that Your Holiness will now watch over the King, so that he may finish what he has well begun. Do not suffer him to take pride in his good works. Help him to preserve, by the excellency of his life, the faith which he has now embraced. Make it clear to him that he must prove himself by his works a citizen of the Heavenly Kingdom. And so, after many years, may he pass happily from crown to crown."

Some years later he writes to Reccared himself: "I cannot express in words, most excellent son, how pleased I am with your work and conduct. I often speak to my children here of your achievements, and we wonder at them with delight. And often are my feelings roused against myself, sluggish and useless and torpid in listless ease, while kings are toiling to gather in souls for the heavenly Kingdom. Still I have this comfort, good man, that when I rejoice and exult in your good deeds, what is yours by labour becomes mine by charity."

With this letter he sends a relic of the True Cross to Reccared, and a small key which had touched the relics of St. Peter. "In this key I have inserted some filings from his chains, so that what bound his neck in martyrdom may deliver you from your sins." He exhorts him to persevere in humility of heart and cleanness of body, and bids him not to do quickly even that which is lawful, "lest power corrupt the mind and anger creep in. For deeds of cruelty will be condoned as just, if anger once get a footing in the mind, not following behind reason, as a handmaid ready at reason's call to step forward and chastise a criminal."

Reccared begged St. Gregory to obtain from the emperor a copy of a treaty with Justinian which defined the position of the Gothic kings. The Pope discreetly declined to interfere. "You ought to search your own archives," he hints, "for the documents which are unfavourable to you, and not ask me to produce them."

He advised the young king to treat all his subjects on an equal footing, so that merit and not race should decide a man's fitness for office, as was the custom when Spain was under Roman rule. Well had it been for his dynasty had Reccared followed this advice. But the Visigoths alone had full citizenship, and when the Moors won at Xeres in 711, the Spaniards acquiesced with apathy in the change of masters. And so in a land admirably fitted for guerilla warfare, the Mohammedans conquered with such ease and rapidity that in 732 they crossed the Pyrenees to receive their first setback at Poitiers, when they hurled themselves against a nation in arms with all the fighting qualities to be expected from an army of Gauls and Franks.

Evils of another nature afflicted Gaul. There victors and vanquished had the same religion, the same civic rights. Since the conversion of Clovis the clergy held an honoured place in feudalism; but simony and lay investiture, with their hideous outcome of immorality and independence of the Holy See, sapped the energy of the Churches among the Franks. Black indeed is the record of unworthy ecclesiastics which confront us in the pages of such writers as St. Gregory of Tours.

In his letters to King Childebert of Austrasia and to his own apostolic delegate, Virgilius, Bishop of Arles, our holy Pope denounces these abuses in strong terms. "Reports have reached me," he writes, "that in parts of Gaul and Germany no one receives Holy Orders without paying money. If this be so, I condemn it with grief; for, when the priesthood is corrupt within, it cannot resist assaults from without. I am informed, too, of another detestable practice. When bishops die, mere laymen are sometimes tonsured, from desire of temporal glory. They suddenly become priests, and at one step mount to the rank of bishops. And thus one who has never been a pupil himself becomes a master. How can he teach what he has not learnt? How can he atone for the sins of others when he has not bewailed his own? He may be called a shepherd, but he does not feed his flock, he leads it astray." In the royal armies, he reminds the king, only tried men are made generals. "It is shameful, and we blush to say it, priests assume command of souls who have not seen even the beginnings of religious warfare."

Politically all was chaos. When Childebert died in 596 his kingdom was divided between his infant sons, Theodebert in Burgundy and Theodoric in Austrasia, under the regency of their grandmother Brunehaut. Neustria, the land North of the Loire and West of the Meuse, was ruled by the brilliantly clever and atrociously vile Queen Fredegonde, in the name of her son, Clotaire.

With Fredegonde, St. Gregory had little or nothing to do. He did not even write to secure her goodwill for the travellers, when he sent St. Augustine and his forty monks to Kent. But many letters passed between the Pope and Brunehaut.

At her request he sent the pallium to Syagrius, Bishop of Autun. The case is unique in this pontificate, for the pallium gave indeed prestige to Syagrius, and thereby increased his usefulness to the Church, but did not burden him with extra responsibilities.

Brunehaut loved Autun, and we find St. Gregory issuing charters to the convent, the church and the hospital which she founded in that city. "We rejoice in your Christianity," he told her in a covering letter, "since you strive to increase the honour of those whom you know to be servants of God."

"How many good gifts has God bestowed upon you," he writes on another occasion. And how clearly do your many meritorious deeds make manifest to men that the goodness of heavenly grace has filled your heart, and that you add to regal power the ornament of wisdom. I have, therefore, great confidence that you will correct abuses. Do God's work, and He will do yours. Order a synod to meet in order to put down simony in your kingdom. Believe me, money sinfully acquired is never profitably spent. Years of experience have taught me this. If you do not wish to be deprived of anything unjustly, see to it that you acquire nothing unjustly. If you wish to conquer your enemies by the help of God, observe with reverential awe the Commandments of God."