Consul of God (Routledge Revivals)

The Life and Times of Gregory the Great

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317678670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Gregory the Great, whose reign spanned the years between 590 and 604 A.D., was one of the most remarkable figures of the early medieval Papacy. Aristocrat, administrator, teacher and scholar, he ascended the throne of St Peter at a time of acute crisis for the Roman Church.

Consul of God, first published in 1980, revises the traditional picture of Pope Gregory. It examines how he organised the central administration of the Papacy and his unremitting war on heresy and schism. Gregory also pioneered a new pastoral tradition in learning, promoted monasticism, and trained the episcopate.

Jeffrey Richards demonstrates that Gregory was both a conservative and a pioneer, and just as his reign looked forward to the medieval world it also looked back to a vanishing world of imperial unity. He was thus the last representative of those Roman senators whose fortitude and energy he emulated, earning the epitaph 'Consul of God'.

Chapter One

The World of Gregory the Great

In the year of Our Lord 554 a man saw a dream fulfilled, and a nation witnessed the beginning of a nightmare. The man was the emperor Justinian I, who cherished the bright vision of restoring the lost Western provinces to the Empire’s bosom. His armies had crushed the Vandal kingdom of Africa, had annexed part of the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, and had finally extinguished the life to which the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy had clung with such unexpected and costly tenacity. In his capital city of Constantinople from his palace on the shores of the Bosporus, Justinian issued the Pragmatic Sanction, which officially re-established direct Imperial rule over Italy, ending seventy-eight years of barbarian dominion. It was a moment of supreme triumph, to be fleetingly savoured before harsh reality supplanted the rose-tinted dreams of imperial revival, for 554 was not so much a new beginning as an agonized delaying of the inevitable triumph of the barbarians in the West. Justinian was himself the last Latin-speaking ruler of a Roman Empire whose powerhouse was Constantinople, whose heartland was Asia Minor, whose culture and sensibility was Greek, and whose interests and preoccupations would shortly turn decisively eastwards. He never visited the ancient capital which had given the Empire its laws, its system of government and its very name – a magical name still, though it barely concealed the reality of a run-down, depopulated and decaying city, fever-ridden and famine-prone. The restoration of imperial rule in the West never extended to Frankish Gaul, Anglo-Saxon England or the bulk of Visigothic Spain, and, with wars in the Balkans and with Persia dominating the councils of the Empire, Italy became little more than a backwater – historic certainly, but removed from the mainstream of imperial policy and strategy.

Before many years had passed, the people of newly ‘liberated’ Italy were to find themselves living in a nightmare, as plague, famine, war and death, the veritable four horsemen of the Apocalypse, stalked that unhappy land, stilling the rejoicing and inducing the belief that the world’s end was at hand. It must all have seemed a dramatic and ironic contrast to the enlightened rule of the Arian and barbarian Ostrogothic kings, under whom the old Western Roman Empire had enjoyed something of an ‘Indian summer’. The Ostrogoths had preserved the old Roman administrative system intact, practised religious toleration, enforced law and order, encouraged peace and prosperity, stimulated a cultural revival, and worked for harmony between Goths and Romans. Despite this, there was still for many Italians an overwhelming affinity with the Roman Empire in the East, which now alone embodied their Roman heritage, their Imperial traditions, in some cases even their kith and kin. Strong religious, intellectual, cultural and family ties bound the Roman aristocracy to the East. A doctrinal schism with the East had created an illusory sense of unity between the Ostrogoths and their Roman subjects. But the ending of the schism by the emperor Justin I and his nephew and eventual successor Justinian removed even this.

So the Gothic kingdom fell, largely unlamented. But there was to be a rude awakening for those who had not thought through the implications of the imperial reconquest. The old days of Roman hegemony in the secular sphere were gone forever. The senatorial aristocracy collapsed, undermined by massacre, bankruptcy and migration to the East. The old administration was dismantled and a new provincial government created, based on Ravenna, staffed by Greek civil servants and headed by an Eastern military governor, soon to be called the exarch. The Arian church was suppressed and its property handed over to its Catholic counterpart. But the Roman church lost the freedom of action it had previously enjoyed, and was now expected to toe the imperial line in matters of the faith. The twenty years of war accompanying the imperial reconquest had taken a heavy toll on the life of Italy. Rome was besieged three times, and in 546 was actually captured by the Gothic king Totila, who restrained his men from wholesale slaughter but evacuated the entire Roman population for forty days to permit unimpeded plundering. Other great cities suffered similarly. Naples, taken by the imperial forces, was given over to pillage and massacre. Milan, taken by the Goths, saw its walls razed, its male population slaughtered and its female population enslaved and handed over to the Burgundians.

The country areas were no better off. The provinces of central Italy were ravaged, plundered and fought over from end to end, and in the ensuing famine some 50,000 people died in Picenum alone. The provinces were not only subject to attack by Goths and imperialists, but were also invaded and devastated by the Franks. The extensive rural estates of the Roman church were so badly ravaged that in 560–1 Pope Pelagius I reported: ‘After the continuous devastations of war which have been inflicted on the regions of Italy for twenty-five years and more and have scarcely yet ceased, it is only from the islands and the places overseas that the Roman church receives some little revenue, however insufficient, for the clergy and the poor.’¹ The population was reduced to eating acorns, and in some cases even to cannibalism.

The wretched Italians suffered as much at the hands of their Byzantine ‘liberators’ as they did at the hands of the Goths. The logothete Alexander, a man with a fearsome reputation for raising revenue for the state, was sent to Italy to screw out of the Italians all debts owed to the Gothic treasury. Imperial army commanders plundered and profiteered to enhance their own private fortunes. Indeed, one of them, Conon, disposed of so much of the Roman grain supply for his own profit, that he was murdered by his starving soldiers.²

This was the world into which Gregory the Great was born. He first saw the light of day at the height of the war. He was in his teens when the war ended, and he grew to manhood in its bitter aftermath. He was born and apparently brought up in Rome during some of its darkest hours. He never knew it in the days of its glory. As recently as 500 the African monk Fulgentius of Ruspe, visiting Rome, had declared: ‘How wonderful must be the heavenly Jerusalem, if this earthly city can shine so greatly.’ In the Ostrogothic period, under the patronage and favour of the barbarian kings, life in Rome had continued much as under the emperors. The Senate met regularly, and the great aristocratic families, like Gregory’s, maintained their handsome villas and large establishments. Games were held in the circus. Free grain was distributed to the people. Schools flourished. There was a glittering social and cultural life. The war ended all that. The three sieges of Rome had been accompanied by famine, disease and considerable suffering. Large areas of the city were destroyed by fire. Many citizens were ruined. Pope Vigilius appealed to God to preserve ‘the integrity of the faith and the security of the Roman name’, and the prayers he composed at this time paint a gloomy picture of the city, living under the constant threat of attack, fearful of treachery, oppressed by sickness and want.³ With the end of the war, a deadly melancholy settled on Rome. The aristocratic households had been largely broken up, and many of the aristocrats emigrated to Constantinople to find fortune and favour at the imperial court. The games ceased; the organized education system collapsed; the grain dole became irregular and was ultimately terminated; the Senate gradually ceased to function. Many of the most famous buildings in Rome were deserted, damaged or decaying, and the city, bearing all the scars of its years of maltreatment, became a prey to fever, flooding, famine and plague. When he became pope, Gregory observed sadly: ‘I have taken charge of an old and grievously shattered ship.’⁴ Rome had become a city of ghosts and memories, a crumbling relic of lost imperial splendour. St Benedict of Nursia prophesied its gradual and inevitable dissolution: ‘Rome will not be depopulated by the barbarians but will be worn out by tempests, lightning, storms and earthquakes.’ Gregory accepted the truth of this, writing in 593: ‘The secret meaning of his prophecy has become clearer than light to us who observe the walls broken to bits, houses overturned and churches destroyed by whirlwinds. More often all the time we see Roman buildings, wearied by old age, collapsing into ruins.’⁵ This is not mere rhetoric, for Gregory records one such occurrence in 590: ‘Two days ago by a sudden whirlwind ancient trees were uprooted, houses destroyed and churches overthrown to the foundations.’⁶

But as the imperial standards were being firmly planted in the city he loved, Gregory can have had no inkling of the calamities that were about to burst upon her. Almost simultaneously Italy was subjected to the twin horrors of barbarian invasion and the return of the plague.

Barely fifteen years after the official reinstatement of imperial rule in Italy, as the province still counted the cost of the decades of exhausting and destructive warfare, the Lombards struck. They were a ferocious barbarian race of Germanic origin, living in Pannonia, organized in clans, ruled by an elected king, and for the most part adherents of Arian Christianity. Paul the Deacon gave the following description of them, as they were depicted in a late-sixth-century mural in the royal palace at Modicia:⁷

They shaved the neck and left it bare up to the back of the head, having their hair parted from the forehead and hanging down from the face as far as the mouth. Their garments were loose and mostly linen, such as the Anglo-Saxons are accustomed to wear, decorated with broad borders woven in various colours. Their boots were open almost to the tip of the big toe and were kept together by crossed laces. But later they began to wear trousers, over which they put waterproof woollen leggings when they rode.

Legend had it that the unpopular Byzantine governor-general, Narses, faced with disgrace and dismissal, had called on the Lombards to leave their inhospitable Pannonian homeland and take over the rich and fecund land of Italy, backing up his suggestion with samples of fruit and other alluring Italian produce. This seems inherently unlikely; it is not recorded until at least twenty years later and is not mentioned at all by the most reliable contemporary authorities (Marius of Aventicum and Gregory of Tours).⁸ But it rapidly gained currency and entered the mythology. The likelihood is that it was shifts in the balance of power in the Balkans, and in particular the arrival of the Avars, constituting a new and dangerous threat to the Lombards, which prompted them to seek safer, softer and richer pastures.

Their shrewd, ruthless war-leader, King Alboin, led the Lombards into Italy in 568, and they carried all before them, sweeping through the largely undefended north unopposed. In September 569 the old imperial capital of Milan opened its gates to them and Alboin assumed the title ‘Lord of Italy’. By 571, they had completed the conquest of the Po Valley and were sweeping southwards into Umbria and Tuscany. Then suddenly in 572, at the height of his triumphal career and soon after he had taken the surrender of Pavia, which had held out for three years, Alboin was murdered by his wife, Rosamunda, who, having failed to secure the throne for her nominee, fled with the royal treasures to the imperialists at Ravenna. Alboin’s successor, King Cleph, was himself murdered within two years and the Lombard chieftains decided against electing a new king. Instead the Lombard horde divided itself up into thirty-six separate duchies, based on the already conquered cities. Of this period Gregory of Tours, a contemporary, writes: ‘Once they had occupied the country, they wandered all over it for seven years, robbing the churches, killing the bishops and subjecting everything to their dominion.’⁹ Their advent was certainly marked by atrocities. Gregory the Great records several in his Dialogues: 400 captives slaughtered in one massacre, 40 peasants in another and a group of Valerian monks in a third.¹⁰ Paul the Deacon says: ‘In these days many of the noble Romans were killed from love of gain, and the remainder were divided among their “guests” and made tributaries, paying a third part of their produce to the Lombards.’¹¹ In fact, comparatively little is known of the condition of the Roman population in Lombard Italy. But the most likely conclusion is that the great landowners either fled, were killed or were reduced to economic subjection, the peasants carrying on much as before, tilling the soil and serving new masters. For the principal interests of the Lombards were hunting and warfare, and they retained their clan organization, geared for war and supplied with food and labour by the native population.¹²

By the time the kingship was suspended in 574, the initial impetus of the Lombards had spent itself. But they had effectively gained control of half of Italy. They ruled most of the old northern province Italia Annonaria, with the exception of the coastal areas of Liguria (centred on Genoa), Istria-Venetia (centred on Grado), and Aemilia (centred on Ravenna and the Pentapolis). In Suburbicaria, they established control over the central spine via two powerful and important duchies based on Spoleto and Benevento from which they effectively dominated the Italian interior. Imperial rule was maintained in the duchy of Rome and in the coastal areas around Naples, Rhegium, Hortona, Sipontum and Tarentum. In effect the imperial province of Italy had been reduced to a series of coastal enclaves, linked by sea. The islands of Sicily, Sardinia and Corsica remained untouched, but they were organized separately and not part of the exarchate of Ravenna.

How could this happen? There are perhaps three reasons. First and most important, the imperial government was wholly unprepared for the invasion. Italy seems to have been very weakly garrisoned, and the governor, unwilling or unable to act, simply dug himself in at Ravenna and sat tight. Decisive countermeasures were not immediately forthcoming. Justinian had died, and the throne was now occupied by his eccentric and unstable nephew Justin II, who finally went mad in 574. Only then, with the emergence as regent of the capable general Tiberius Constantine, did the government act. An army of mercenaries led by Justin’s son-in-law, Count Baduarius, was dispatched to Italy in 575, only to be annihilated by the Lombards. This disaster effectively prevented the government from taking any further direct military action in the West and allowed the Lombards to secure their acquisitions.

The second reason for the speed of the province’s collapse was the plague. Having already devastated the East, the plague arrived in Italy in 543, returning in the mid-560s and the early 570s. It was accompanied by severe famine, and the Liber Pontificalis recorded that many cities surrendered to the invaders because of starvation.¹³ Famine, plague and war had undermined the Italians’ strength to resist. Their will to resist was perhaps further reduced by the ill feeling resulting, particularly in the north, from the condemnation of the ‘Three Chapters’. The emperor Justinian, in a bid to conciliate the Monophysite heretics, had arranged for the condemnation of certain writers and writings, which were collectively known as the ‘Three Chapters’. Many Catholics felt that this condemnation impugned the validity of the Council of Chalcedon, which had defined the basic tenets of the faith. The West was solidly opposed to condemnation, and yet Justinian persuaded successive popes, Vigilius and Pelagius I, to endorse the condemnation. The archbishops of Milan and Aquileia, the two senior churchmen of the north, had gone into immediate schism from Rome, and Pelagius I, arriving in Rome from Constantinople, had been hard put to it to find anyone willing to consecrate him. Eventually, with the aid of the imperial authorities in Italy, the pope had persuaded the centre and the south of Italy of the condemnation’s validity. The north, however, remained unreconciled. This purely theological controversy was overtaken by the political catastrophe of the Lombard invasion. For many Catholics in the north the rule of an Arian ruler may have seemed preferable to that of a heretical pope and emperor. Certainly many bishops hastened to come to an accommodation with the Lombards, with the result that regular episcopal succession and continuity was maintained in many north Ita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orginal Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The World of Gregory the Great
• 2 Gregory’s Early Life
• 3 Character and Outlook
• 4 Gregory’s World-View
• 5 The Gregorian Court Circle
• 6 Central Administration: (1) War, Finance and Supply
• 7 Central Administration: (2) Law, Discipline and Liturgy
• 8 Patrimonial Administration
• 9 Gregory and the Episcopate: (1) Sicily
• 10 Gregory and the Episcopate: (2) Italy
• 11 Gregory and the Lombards
• 12 Gregory and the West
• 13 Gregory and the East
• 14 Gregory’s Missionary Activities
• 15 Gregory and Monasticism
• 16 The Legacy of Gregory
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index