Just fifteen years after the death of Leo the Great—he was the first Bishop of Rome to be buried in St. Peter’s—the Roman Empire of the West came to its end; but the abdication, on September 4, 476, of its last emperor, the pathetic, double-diminutived child-ruler Romulus Augustulus, was hardly noticed by most of his subjects and made little difference to their lives. For almost a century the Western Empire had been in a state of near chaos, dominated by one barbarian general after another. The most recent of these, a Scyrian1 named Odoacer, had made no claim to sovereignty for himself; all he asked was the title of Patricius, in which rank he proposed to take over the governance of Italy in the name of the Emperor Zeno, then reigning in Constantinople.
Zeno, however, had a better idea. Throughout his reign he had been plagued by Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths, who were widely scattered in the lands to the north of the Black Sea. The main purpose of Theodoric’s early life was to find and secure a permanent home for his people. To this end he had spent the better part of twenty years fighting—sometimes for and sometimes against the empire—arguing, bargaining, cajoling, and threatening by turns. This constant vacillation between friendship and hostility was, in the long term, unprofitable to both parties, and sometime, probably toward the end of 487, it was agreed between Theodoric and Zeno that the former should lead his entire people into Italy, overthrow Odoacer, and rule the land as an Ostrogothic kingdom under imperial sovereignty. Early in 488 the great westward migration took place—men, women, and children, with their horses and their pack animals, their cattle and sheep, lumbering slowly across the plains of Central Europe in search of greener and more peaceful pastures.
On their arrival in Italy Odoacer put up a fierce resistance; but Theodoric steadily wore him down before agreeing to what appeared to be remarkably generous terms: that the two of them should rule jointly from Ravenna, where they would share the royal palace. It was ostensibly to seal this agreement that on March 15, 493, Theodoric invited Odoacer, with his brother, his son, and his chief officers, to a banquet in his wing of the palace. As the Scyrian took his place in the seat of honor, Theodoric stepped forward and, with one tremendous stroke of his sword, clove the body of Odoacer from collarbone to thigh. The members of Odoacer’s suite were quickly dealt with by the surrounding guards, while his brother was shot down by arrows as he fled through the palace gardens. His wife was thrown into prison, where she later died of hunger; his son was first sent off to Gaul but later executed. Then, with the Scyrian line satisfactorily wiped out, Theodoric the Ostrogoth laid aside the skins and furs that were the traditional clothing of his race, robed himself in the imperial purple, and settled down to rule.
After this unpromising beginning, his thirty-three years on the throne were prosperous and peaceful. One thing only made him unacceptable to emperor and pope alike—his uncompromising Arianism; unfortunately, the last years of his reign coincided with a campaign by the Emperor Justin I to stamp out the heresy once and for all. It was as a reaction to this that in 524 Theodoric imprisoned one of his chief advisers, the philosopher Boethius, whom he subsequently ordered to be garrotted, and that two years later he sent Pope John I at the head of a delegation to Constantinople to remonstrate. This journey, the first ever made by a pope to the Bosphorus, was a tremendous success from John’s point of view, since the emperor prostrated himself before him and accorded him a magnificent reception, at which the pope was most satisfactorily seated on a higher throne than the patriarch; from Theodoric’s, however, it was a failure, Justin having categorically refused to allow those Arians who had been forcibly converted to revert to their old heretical ways.
There can be no doubt that Theodoric was a giant, and the extraordinary mausoleum which he built—and which still stands in the northeastern suburbs of Ravenna—perfectly symbolizes, in its half-classical, half-barbaric architectural strength, the colossus who himself bestrode two civilizations. No other Germanic ruler, setting up his throne on the ruins of the Western Empire, possessed a fraction of Theodoric’s statesmanship and political vision, and when he died, on August 30, 526, Italy lost the greatest of her early medieval rulers, unequaled until the days of Charlemagne.
Just eleven months later, on August 1, 527, a ruler of similar stature ascended the throne at Constantinople. From the moment he came to power, Justinian I had been determined to bring the entire Italian Peninsula back into the imperial fold. A Roman Empire that did not include Rome was an obvious absurdity; an Ostrogothic kingdom that did—and was heretical to boot—could never be anything but an abomination in his sight. Clearly it had to be destroyed, and equally clearly the man best able to destroy it was the greatest living Byzantine general, Belisarius.
In 535, with an army of 7,500 men, Belisarius sailed for Sicily, which he took with scarcely a struggle. Crossing the Strait of Messina to the mainland, he captured Naples and—after a disastrous2 yearlong siege—Rome; finally, at Ravenna, the Gothic King Vitiges offered to surrender the city and deliver up his crown, on one condition: that Belisarius then proclaim himself Emperor of the West. Many an ambitious imperial general would have seized such an opportunity; but Belisarius, utterly loyal to his emperor, had no intention of doing anything of the kind. On the other hand, he saw the proposal as an ideal means of bringing the war to a quick and victorious end. He accepted; the gates of Ravenna were flung open, and the imperial army marched in.
As Vitiges, his family, and the leading Gothic nobles were led off into captivity, they must have reflected bitterly indeed on the perfidy of the general who had betrayed them. But as Belisarius took ship back to Constantinople in May 540, there is no indication that his conscience gave him any trouble. Had the Goths’ proposal not been in itself perfidious? And in any case, were the Goths not rebels against the lawful authority of the emperor? In occupying Ravenna by trickery, he had saved untold bloodshed on both sides. Besides, he had now achieved his objective. Thanks to him, all Italy was now back in imperial hands.
Not, however, for long. The Goths reestablished their monarchy and fought back, and a young Gothic king named Totila appealed to all his subjects, Goth and Italian alike, to unite and drive the Byzantines from Italian soil. In the early summer of 544 Belisarius found himself on his way back once more to Italy. But this time he was at a serious disadvantage. Justinian had always been jealous of his power and popularity—at one moment his accumulated treasure had been confiscated, though it was later returned—and on this occasion he had allowed him only a handful of inexperienced troops, little authority, and no money at all. Belisarius did his best but was unable to prevent Totila from laying siege to Rome and, in December 546, from capturing the city; and after a few more months of desultory fighting up and down the peninsula it became clear that the two sides had reached a stalemate, with neither strong enough to eliminate the other. Early in 549 Belisarius returned to Constantinople. After the glory of his first Italian campaign, his second had brought him five years of frustration and disappointment.
DURING TOTILA’S SIEGE of Rome a somewhat surprising event took place: the pope was kidnapped. Pope Vigilius was a noble Roman who, as deacon, had accompanied Pope Agapetus I to Constantinople in 536 on an unsuccessful mission to persuade Justinian to call off his Italian campaign. They were still in the capital when Agapetus died suddenly; and Vigilius, who had confidently expected to succeed him, was furious to receive news from Rome that a certain Silverius had been elected in his stead. He had already been at some pains to ingratiate himself with the passionately monophysite Empress Theodora, and he now made a secret agreement with her by which Belisarius, then in Italy, would depose Silverius and install him, Vigilius, in his stead. In return, he promised to denounce the principles laid down at Chalcedon3 and proclaim his acceptance of the monophysite creed. Belisarius did as he was bidden; Vigilius then hurried back to Rome for his coronation, forcing Silverius into an Anatolian exile.
By the autumn of 545 the army of Totila was at the gates of Rome. Belisarius, with the limited means at his disposal, was doing everything he could to avoid a siege but was receiving little or no support from his emperor. Justinian had other problems on his mind. The root of the trouble was that hoary old enigma, the identity of Christ. The orthodox view was that laid down almost a century before by the Council of Chalcedon: that the Savior possessed, in his one person, two natures divided but inseparable, the human and the divine. This view, however, had never been accepted by the monophysites, according to whom the divine nature alone existed and who consequently saw Christ as God rather than man; and these, heretics as they might be, were far too numerous and too widespread to be eliminated. Egypt, for example, was monophysite through and through; in Syria and Palestine too, the doctrine had taken a firm and potentially dangerous hold. In the West, on the other hand, such heresy as existed at all—which was to be found almost exclusively among the barbarians—championed the opposite, Arian, view that Christ was essentially human. The Roman Church, meanwhile, remained staunchly orthodox and was predictably quick to protest at any deviation from the Chalcedonian path. Justinian therefore had a difficult and delicate course to steer. If he dealt too harshly with the monophysites, he risked rebellion and possible loss to the empire of valuable provinces; Egypt was one of its chief sources of corn. If he treated them with too much consideration, he would incur the wrath of the orthodox and split his subjects more than ever. He was, of course, fully aware of his wife’s own monophysite sympathies and rather welcomed them: they enabled him on occasion to take an outwardly rigid line in the knowledge that she would secretly be able to temper its severity.
Thanks to this highly disingenuous policy, the emperor had managed to curb most of the monophysite communities—apart from those of Egypt, which he left firmly alone—but then, suddenly, there emerged a dangerously charismatic new troublemaker. Jacob Baradaeus (“the Ragged”) was a monk from Mesopotamia who, having in 543 been consecrated Bishop of Edessa by the monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria, took it upon himself to revive monophysite sentiment throughout the East, traveling constantly and at prodigious speed the length and breadth of Syria and Palestine, uncanonically consecrating some thirty bishops as he went and ordaining several thousand priests.
Unable to stamp out the flames of fanaticism that sprang up everywhere in the wake of Baradaeus, Justinian found himself in a quandary. The monophysites in their present mood needed more careful treatment than ever; at the same time, he was already being criticized in the West for weakness and inertia in the face of the new threat. Some kind of positive action was clearly required, and so, for want of any better solution, he decided on a public condemnation—not of the monophysites but of those who occupied the other end of the theological spectrum, professing the humanity rather than the divinity of Christ: the Nestorians. This by now half-forgotten sect had been condemned as early as 431 by the Council of Ephesus; afterward the majority had fled eastward, to Persia and beyond, and few if any now remained within the imperial frontiers. It thus mattered little to them whether they were attacked again or not, but they had the advantage of being detested by the monophysites and Orthodox alike, and an ex cathedra pronouncement of the kind the emperor had in mind would, he hoped, do something to defuse the increasing hostility between the two. Early in 544 he published an edict condemning not the heresy itself but three particular manifestations of it, soon to become notorious as the Three Chapters: the person and writings of Nestorius’s teacher, Bishop Theodore of Mopsuestia, and certain specific works of two other, still more obscure, theologians, Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Bishop Ibas of Edessa.
It was an idiotic idea, which fully deserved the response it received. Only the Orthodox clergy in the East agreed—in some cases a trifle unwillingly—to toe the imperial line. The monophysites, who had hoped for genuine concessions, were unappeased; in the West, the Roman bishops made no attempt to conceal their fury. Any attack on the Nestorians, they thundered, could only be a blow in favor of the monophysites. They refused absolutely to condemn the Three Chapters, and Stephen, the papal legate in Constantinople, made known his master’s displeasure by pronouncing the ban of the Church on the patriarch himself.
Justinian was at first surprised by these reactions and then seriously alarmed. In Italy, during the four years that had passed since the first campaign of Belisarius, the Byzantine position had grown steadily worse; now, at a moment when he needed Italian support more than ever before, he had managed to antagonize Pope Vigilius and the entire Church of Rome. The sooner the whole thing was forgotten, the better. He made no protest when the pope refused to condemn the Three Chapters but settled down quietly to mend relations.
For a year and a half he pursued this policy, and would presumably have continued to do so had circumstances allowed; but when Belisarius reported that Rome was threatened by siege, a new and alarming thought struck him: were Totila to capture the city, there was nothing to prevent his holding the pope hostage, with consequences that could only add further fuel to the flames. Justinian acted quickly. On November 22, 545, an officer of the Imperial Guard with a company of soldiers arrived in Rome, seized Vigilius just as he was leaving the Church of St. Cecilia after Mass, loaded him onto a boat waiting in the Tiber, and carried him off down the river.
The pope, who had no particular wish to remain in Rome during what threatened to be an uncomfortable and protracted siege, made no complaint when told that he was being taken to Constantinople—though he may not altogether have relished the prospect of renewing his acquaintance with Theodora; his promise to declare in favor of monophysitism remained unfulfilled, and he would obviously have a certain amount of explaining to do. As things turned out, however, his meeting with the imperial couple did not occur as soon as he had expected; he remained for a whole year as their guest at Catania in Sicily, during which time he was able to dispatch several ships, laden with grain, for the relief of Rome. Not until January 547 did he reach the Bosphorus.
AT THIS STAGE Vigilius was still firm in his refusal to condemn the Three Chapters. Though Justinian greeted him warmly on his arrival, the pope lost no time in making his authority felt, immediately placing the patriarch and all the bishops who had subscribed to the imperial edict under four months’ further sentence of excommunication. Before long, however, the constant pressure exerted by the emperor and empress—who seemed to have forgotten her previous grievances but who on this issue was every bit as zealous and determined as her husband—began to wear him down. On June 29, 547, he was formally reconciled with the patriarch, and on the same day he handed Justinian his signed condemnation of the Three Chapters, stipulating only that it be kept secret until the end of an official inquiry by a committee of Western bishops—whose findings, he hinted, were a foregone conclusion; and on April 11, 548, he published Judicatum, in which he solemnly anathematized the Three Chapters, while emphasizing that his support for the doctrines of Chalcedon remained unshaken.
Thus, when the empress died eleven weeks later, it might have been thought that she and her husband had triumphed and had succeeded at last in restoring unity to the Church. In fact, the split was soon revealed to be deeper than ever. Theodora had always been more feared than her husband; while she lived, many distinguished churchmen had preferred to keep a low profile rather than incur her displeasure. After her death, they came out publicly in opposition to the imperial edict, and gradually others across Europe followed suit. Whatever Vigilius might have said to the contrary, it was generally accepted that his anathemas had dangerously undermined the authority of Chalcedon; and the pope was now generally reviled throughout Western Christendom as a turncoat and apostate. In Carthage, indeed, the bishops went further still and excommunicated him. Vigilius saw that he had gone too far. He had never wanted to condemn the Three Chapters in the first place and had done so only as a result of the intolerable pressure put upon him by Justinian and Theodora. There was nothing for it but to retract, which—with what little dignity he could muster—he did.
For Justinian, this was the last straw. He now ordered his religious adviser, Theodore Ascidas, Archbishop of Caesarea, to draft a second edict which went considerably further than its predecessor, and he summoned a General Council of the Church to endorse it. Supported, no doubt, by many of the Western churchmen in Constantinople, Vigilius protested that this document flew in the face of the principles of Chalcedon and called upon the emperor to withdraw it immediately. Justinian predictably refused, whereupon the pope summoned a meeting of all the bishops from both East and West who were present in the city. This assembly pronounced unanimously against the edict, solemnly forbidding any cleric to say Mass in any church in which it was exhibited. When, a few days later, two prelates ignored the decree, they were excommunicated on the spot—as was (for the third time) the patriarch himself.
On hearing the news, Justinian flew into one of the terrible rages for which he was famous, and the pope, fearing that he was no longer safe from arrest, sought refuge in the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, which the emperor had recently built on the Marmara just to the south of St. Sophia. Scarcely had he reached it, however, when there arrived a company of the Imperial Guard. According to a number of Italian churchmen who were eyewitnesses of what took place and who subsequently described it in detail to the Frankish ambassadors,4 they burst into the church with swords drawn and bows ready strung and advanced threateningly on the pope, who made a dash for the high altar. Meanwhile, the various priests and deacons surrounding him remonstrated with the guards, and a scuffle ensued during which several of them were injured, though none seriously. The soldiers then seized hold of the pope himself, who was by this time clinging tightly to the columns supporting the altar, and tried to drag him—some by the legs, some by the hair, others by the beard—forcibly away. But the more they pulled, the tighter he clung, until at last the columns came loose and the whole altar crashed to the ground, narrowly missing his head.
By this time a considerable crowd, attracted by the commotion, had begun to protest vehemently against such treatment being accorded to the Vicar of Christ; and the soldiers, manifestly unhappy, wisely decided to withdraw, leaving a triumphant though badly shaken Vigilius to survey the damage. The next day there arrived a high-powered delegation led by Belisarius himself, to express the emperor’s regret for what had occurred and to give the pope a formal assurance that he could return to the palace that had been put at his disposal without fear of apprehension.
Vigilius returned, but soon found that he was being kept under so close a surveillance as to amount to something approaching house arrest. He realized, too, that if he was to break the present deadlock and maintain the prestige that he had striven so hard to recover among the Western churches, he must once again take decisive action. Two nights before Christmas, in the late evening of December 23, 551, he squeezed his considerable bulk through a small window of the palace and took a boat across the Bosphorus to Chalcedon, where he made straight for the Church of St. Euphemia. It was a clever move, and also a symbolic one in that he was deliberately associating himself with the scene of the Great Council of 451, thus distancing himself from the emperor, who was questioning its authority, and taking refuge from him in the very building in which its sessions had been held exactly a century before. Once again a delegation under Belisarius came to plead with him, but this time he stood firm, and when a detachment of soldiers called a few days later they were content to arrest some of his priests but made no attempt to lay hands on the pope himself. Vigilius, meanwhile, composed a long letter to Justinian known as Encyclica, in which he answered accusations made by the emperor by giving his own account of the controversy as he saw it and once again proposing negotiations. In a less conciliatory mood, he also repeated his sentences of excommunication on the patriarch and the two bishops who had incurred his wrath the previous August.
Negotiations were resumed in the spring, and in June Justinian decided on a major tactical concession: the patriarch and the other excommunicated bishops were dispatched to St. Euphemia to apologize and humble themselves before Vigilius, after which the pope returned to his palace. It was also agreed to annul all recent statements on both sides covering the Three Chapters, including the emperor’s edict. To the papal supporters it must have seemed like victory, but Justinian was not yet beaten. He now summoned a new Ecumenical Council and invited Vigilius to preside.
In theory an Ecumenical Council of the Church was a convocation of bishops from all over Christendom. When all were gathered together, it was believed that the Holy Spirit would descend on them, giving a sort of infallibility to their pronouncements. Their judgment was supreme, their decisions final. In practice, however, attendance was inevitably selective. If, therefore, the Church was split on any given issue, the outcome of the Council’s deliberations would depend less on divine intervention than on the number of bishops from each side able to attend, and both emperor and pope knew full well that bishops were considerably thicker on the ground in the East than they were in the West, so that—particularly if the meetings were held in Constantinople—the Easterners would always command a substantial majority. Vigilius accordingly suggested that the question should be put to a small committee composed of an equal number of representatives from both East and West, but Justinian refused; and after various other possibilities had been put forward and similarly rejected, the pope decided that his only chance lay in boycotting the assembly altogether. In consequence, when the Fifth Ecumenical Council eventually met in St. Sophia on May 5, 553, of the 168 bishops present only 11 were from the West, and 9 of those were from North Africa. Justinian, too, had elected to stay away since, he explained, he did not wish to influence the assembly; but his letter to the delegates, read aloud at the opening session, reminded them that they had already anathematized the Three Chapters. None of those present could have had any doubt as to what was expected of them.
For over a week the deliberations continued; then, on May 14, after repeated invitations to attend, the pope produced what he described as a Constitutum, signed by himself and nineteen other Western churchmen. It was to some degree a compromise, in that it allowed that there were indeed certain grave errors in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia; but, it pointed out, the other two writers accused had not been pronounced “orthodox fathers” at Chalcedon. In any case, it was not proper to anathematize the dead. The present agitation over the Three Chapters was therefore unfounded and unnecessary and itself to be condemned. Vigilius concluded by forbidding—“by the authority of the Apostolic See, over which by the Grace of God we preside”—any ecclesiastic to venture any further opinion on the matter.
It was not till May 25 that the pope formally sent a copy of his paper to the Imperial Palace. He cannot have expected it to be well received; neither, however, had he reckoned with the changed situation in Italy. Totila was dead, the Goths defeated; no longer was it necessary to woo the Roman citizens in Italy for their support. The emperor had had more than enough of Vigilius, and now at last he could afford to treat him as he deserved. He made no reply to the Constitutum; instead, he sent one of his secretaries to the Council with the text of the pope’s secret declaration of June 547 anathematizing the Three Chapters, together with a decree that Vigilius’s name be struck from the diptychs5—though Justinian stressed that in repudiating Vigilius personally he was not severing communion with Rome. At its seventh session, on May 26, the Council formally endorsed the emperor’s decree and condemned the pope “until he should repent his errors.”
For Vigilius, it was the end of the road. Disgraced and banished to an island in the Marmara, he was told that until he accepted the findings of the Council he would never be permitted to return to Rome. Not for another six months—by which time he was suffering agonies from gallstones—did he capitulate, but when at last he did so, his surrender was absolute. In a letter to the patriarch of December 8 he admitted all his previous errors, and early in 554—almost certainly at Justinian’s insistence—he addressed to the Western churches a second Constitutum in which he formally condemned the Three Chapters and all who dared uphold them; as for himself, “whatever is brought forward or anywhere discovered in my name in their defense is hereby nullified.” He could not say more. By now too ill to travel, he remained another year in Constantinople and only then, in a brief respite from pain, started for home. But the effort was too great. On the way, his condition suddenly worsened. He was obliged to interrupt his journey at Syracuse, and there, broken alike in body and spirit, he died. For him there was to be no tomb in St. Peter’s.
The story of Vigilius did untold harm to the Papacy; and when his successor, Pelagius I, on his accession instantly added his voice to the condemnation, papal prestige lay in tatters. Several sees, including those of Milan and Aquileia, broke off communion with Rome; it was to be half a century before relations were restored with Milan, one and a half before Aquileia and Istria returned to the fold. Meanwhile, in 555 Justinian had decreed that in future the emperor’s personal fiat (“let it be done”) must be obtained for any election of a Bishop of Rome. But less than thirty years after the death of Pelagius in 561 there was to be consecrated a new pontiff who, though failing to heal those particular breaches, would utterly transform his office, giving it new energy and direction: he was to be known as Gregory the Great.
1. The Scyrians were one of the many minor Germanic tribes, of minimal importance in this story.
2. Disastrous because in the first weeks the Goths cut all the eleven aqueducts that brought water to Rome, leaving the city half-paralyzed.
4. Their letter will be found in Jacques-Paul Migne, Patrologia Latina, vol. 69, cols. 113–19.
5. Diptychs were the two-leaved folders in which were inscribed the names of all Christians, living and dead, for whom special prayers were to be made in the liturgies. The striking of a name could thus be taken as a sign of excommunication.