The character of the medieval history of Italy was decided in the sixth century. We can hardly overrate too highly the importance of its reconquest by Justinian, which brought it into contact again with the centre of Graeco-Roman civilization. The tender hotbed plant of Theodoric's Ostrogothic civilitas, which had never looked really promising, had perished before a bud was formed; the thing intermediate between barbarism and high civilisation was put away; and the future development of Italy was to result from the mixture of centuries between the most rude and the most refined peoples dwelling side by side.

The extirpation of the Ostrogoths was almost immediately followed by the invasion of the Lombards; the whole land was imperial for a space of but fifteen years (553-568). These two events, the imperial conquest and the Lombard conquest, possessed a high importance not merely for Italy but for the whole western world. The first secured more constant intercourse between East and West, the second promoted the rise of the papal power.

After the battle in which the allied Avars and Lombards destroyed the monarchy of the Gepids (567 AD), Alboin, the Lombard king, with an innumerable host, including many nationalities, even Saxons, advanced from Pannonia to the subjugation of Italy (568 AD). The greater part of northern Italy, Venetia, and Gallia Cisalpina, of which a large region was afterwards to be called permanently by the name of the new conquerors, had no means of defence. Milan was occupied without resistance; and in these regions the invaders were perhaps supported by a remnant of the Ostrogoths. Pavia, the ancient Ticinum, destined to be the capital of the new Teutonic kingdom, held out. The exarch Longinus, who had succeeded Narses, could do little more than make Ravenna and the Aemilia secure. The bishop of Aquileia had fled to Grado, and Honoratus, the bishop of Milan, to Genoa, but Ticinum defended itself so long and so firmly that the irritated Lombard is said to have vowed that he would massacre all the inhabitants. But when the place was taken after a siege of three years, he relented and chose it for his capital. Milan and Ticinum were the cities which Alboin was destined to possess; Ravenna, the Aemilia, and the Pentapolis stood out against the invaders, and Ravenna was probably not even attacked by them. Alboin himself did not penetrate farther south than Tuscany, but his nobles, with bands of followers, pressed forward and formed the duchies of Spoletium and Beneventum. Most of the towns in these districts were totally undefended; the walls of Beneventum had been destroyed by Totila; and thus the conquests were effected without difficulty. The name Zotto, and he is little more than a name, is well known as that of the first duke of Beneventum; he ruled for twenty years, and as his successor Arichis was appointed in 591, the foundation of the duchy of Beneventum is fixed to 571. At first small, the duchies of Spoletum and Beneventum soon expanded at the expense of their Roman neighbors, and the dukes were afterwards able to maintain a position independent of the Lombard kings, in consequence of their geographical separation from the northern duchies by the strip of Roman territory which extended from Rome to the lands of the Pentapolis.

King Alboin was slain in 573. Fate is said to have overtaken him by the hands of his second wife Rosamund, the Gepid princess, who cherished feelings of revenge towards her lord on account of the death of her father Cunimund, and a dark legend has associated itself with her name. The existence of a king was not a necessary element in a Lombard's political vision; royalty could easily be dispensed with. Accordingly, after the short reign of Clepho, Alboin's successor, the dukes did not elect a new sovereign, and for about eleven years there was no central Lombard power. But in 584 the invasions of the Franks compelled the dukedoms to form a united resistance, and necessitated the renewal of the kingly office for the purpose of this unity. Autharis, Clepho's son, was elected king. At the same time the Emperor Maurice appointed a new exarch, Smaragdus, to succeed Longinus.

For a moment it seemed possible that the Lombard power in Italy might be extinguished in the cradle. The activity of Smaragdus succeeded in forming a great coalition against the invaders (588 AD); the Franks and the Avars united with the Romans for their destruction. But the Franks were not really earnest supporters of the Roman cause; and the enterprise came to nothing. A year or two later we find the ambassadors of the Franks at Constantinople, attempting to induce Maurice to make them grants of money.

In 590 Agilulf succeeded Autharis. He conquered the eastern parts of northern Italy which were still ruled by the exarch; especially the cities of Patavium and Cremona, in the east. The Lombard conquests were not accomplished as rapidly as is sometimes represented, not as rapidly by any means as the conquest of the Vandals in Africa. It was not till the reign of Rotharis (636-652) that the coast of Liguria and the city of Genoa were won. The conqueror of Liguria is now celebrated as the compiler of the Lombard code of laws; but he also deserves to be remembered as the victorious combatant on the banks of the Scultenna (Tanaro), where the exarch and the Romans suffered a great defeat (642 ad). After this the geographical limits of the Romans and Lombards altered but little; towns were taken and retaken, but the general outline of the territories remained the same.

The exarchate of Ravenna, including the Pentapolis and the Aemilia, naturally maintained itself, as the imperial power was concentrated there. Rome, although in a state of sad decline and often hard pressed, was able to keep the Lombards at bay, chiefly through the exertions of the Popes, who possessed influence over the Lombards themselves. Naples and Amalfi also remained imperial, and the land of Bruttii, for a moment occupied by the Teutons, was soon won back by the Empire. In the north, Venice and Istria were under the immediate jurisdiction of the exarch of Ravenna.

It is apparent that the imperial possessions tended to break up into three groups. Venice, Grado, and Istria, the nucleus of the future sovereignty of Venice, formed a group by themselves in the north; the exarchate of Ravenna, with which Rome was both administratively and territorially connected, formed a group in the centre, although Rome tended to become independent of the exarch; Naples sometimes seemed to belong to this group, and at other times to fall in with the southern group, which comprised Sicily, Calabria, and Bruttii.

The distribution of the Lombards corresponds, and each group fulfills its special function. (1) The northern group includes Pavia, the royal residence, the duchies of Bergamo, Brescia, Friuli, Trent, etc., and Tuscany: this group was associated more especially with the Lombard kings, for in it they possessed a real as well as a nominal jurisdiction. Its function was to oppose the Frank invasions in the north-west and to threaten the exarchate, while on the dukes of Friuli in their march-land devolved the defence of Lombardy against the Slavs and Avars, who pressed on the frontier. (2) The Lombard territory in central Italy was the duchy of Spoletium, which endeavored to extend its limits to the north at the expense of the Pentapolis and to the west at the expense of Rome. This duchy tended to join Tuscany and include the isthmus of land which lay along the Flaminian road between Rome and the Adriatic. (3) In the south, the duchy of Beneventum included almost all the territory east of Naples and north of Consentia. But this description of the geographical demarcation of Lombard and Roman territory is not sufficient to explain the relations of the powers. There are two facts which should be emphasized, as having exercised a decisive influence on the development of Italy. The first is, that the Lombards were a military nation with no aptitude for cultivating the soil. They consequently at first left the landowners in possession of their land, exacting from them a tribute of one-third of the produce, but afterwards occupied a third of the land themselves, employing of course slave labor. The result was that no violent change was produced in the character of the population. The other fact was the wide extent of the possessions of the Church, the patrimony of St. Peter; but to understand the importance of this we must consider the development of the papal power, which the kingdom of the Lombards largely effected, and become acquainted with Pope Gregory I, the greatest figure in Europe at the end of the sixth century.

The greatness of Gregory I is due to the fact that he gathered up and presented in a new form and with new emphasis the most lively religious influences that had operated in the Latin world, namely the theological system of St Augustine and the monastic ideal of St. Benedict; and that, on the other hand, he seized and made the most of the gracious opportunities which the time offered for increasing and extending the influence of the ERoman see.

The events of his life peculiarly fitted him for achieving these results. From the diverse characters of his parents he inherited both a capacity for worldly success and a spiritual temperament; his father was a civil magistrate in Rome and his mother Silvia was a saint. He studied law with a view to a secular career, but his leisure hours were spent in reading Jerome and Augustine. The inner voice triumphed in the end, for, when he attained the high dignity of prefect of the city (574), the circumstances of state and the gilded pomp which surrounded him struck him with a sort of terror; he felt that the temptations lurking in them might assail and win; and he fled, as if from foes, to the shelter of cloister life, having broken with the world by spending the patrimony of his father on the foundation of seven monasteries. But the ascetic rigors to which he zealously submitted himself began to harm his health, and Pope Pelagius, kindly interfering, caused him to leave his cell and enter the ranks of the clergy, and sent him as an apocrisiarius, or nuncio, to Constantinople, where he remained for six years (579-585). On his return to Rome he became abbot of the monastery which he had himself founded there, and it was at this time that he observed the Anglo-Saxon slaves in the market-place and conceived the idea of a mission for the conversion of Britain. He had made all the necessary preparations to set out for that obscure island, which had already become a land of fable to the inhabitants of the Empire, but was prevented from carrying out his intention by Pope Pelagius, to whom he was far too useful to be lost. Pelagius died in 590, and Gregory was unanimously elected to succeed him, but sorely, it appears, against his own will. It is a remarkable coincidence that the contemporary Patriarch of Constantinople was also forced unwillingly to accept his chair, and that he also, like Gregory, practised the most rigorous asceticism; and yet that John Jejunator tenaciously clung to the title "Ecumenical", while Gregory won for the Roman bishop a more ecumenical position than he had ever held before. In these men there seems to have been a real union of pride in their office with personal humility.

From this sketch it will be seen that Gregory had three different experiences. He had the experience of civil affairs, he had the experience of monastic life, he had the experience of ecclesiastical diplomacy. Thus he was peculiarly fitted to carry on the various forms of activity which the papal dignity and the difficult circumstances of Italy rendered possible; and his strong nature, of somewhat coarse fibre, was well adapted to contend with and take advantage of the troubled times. We may consider, in order, his relation to the Lombards, his position in western Christendom, his relation to the Emperor, his theological and literary work.

The hands of the Roman Emperors, Justin, Tiberius, and Maurice, were so full with the wearisome Persian and Avaric wars that they had no money or men to send to the relief of Italy. The exarch could do little, for though he was invested with military as well as civil authority, his attention was chiefly confined to the collection of taxes. While the Pope was naturally concerned for the defence of Rome in the first place, his concern extended also to the rest of Italy, especially to the southern provinces. It was Pelagius, and not the exarch of Ravenna, who sent entreaties for assistance to the Emperors. One of the missions assigned to Gregory when he was apocrisiarius was to obtain aid against the Lombards; but Tiberius was unable to send succor, and advised the Pope either to buy off the enemy, or by a bribe to persuade the Franks to invade Cisalpine Gaul. Shortly after this the Franks were induced to undertake three successive invasions; but these came to nothing, as no intelligent co-operation was carried out between the invaders and the military forces of the exarchate.

In the year in which Gregory became Pope, Autharis died, and his widow, the Bavarian Theudelinda, married Agilulf, who became the new king. Agilulf was an Arian, but Theudelinda was a Catholic, and Gregory possessed so much influence over her that her husband allowed their son to be baptized into the Catholic faith and ceased to place the Catholics in his realm under any disabilities. Thus in Gregory's time the see of Rome and the Lombard court were generally on very good terms, although on one occasion (593) Agilulf threatened Rome, and it was necessary to buy him off. The Pope was the mediator of a peace between Pavia and Ravenna in 599.

Thus it was not the king of Lombardy who was a thorn in the side of the Pope, but the dukes of Beneventum and Spoletium. The former pressed on the Roman territory in the south, the latter pressed on it in the east. Now, while it was of course necessary to defend Rome and other important cities against Lombard aggressions, it was also extremely desirable for the Popes to be at peace with the Lombard rulers, as the lands of the Church were scattered through their dominions. Thus the Pope had a far greater interest in maintaining peace than the exarchs, who had no pledges in the hands of the enemy. This circumstance was apparent when, in 592, Gregory concluded a peace with the duke of Spoleto, who was threatening Rome; and the Emperor Maurice called him "fatuous" for so doing.

Gregory practically managed all the political and military affairs in the south of Italy, though this was strictly the duty of the exarch. He appointed the commanders of garrisons and provided for the defence of cities; and in this activity not only were his early secular training, and his experience in public affairs, of service, but the fact that he had been a civil functionary in Rome must have secured for him considerably greater power and influence with the people than he could otherwise have possessed. The Pope's practical experience aided him in administering "the patrimony of Peter", to which I have already referred. This was an important matter, as the large possessions of the Church were one of the chief means of supporting and extending the papal power. Nor were these possessions confined to Italy; the Church owned property in north Africa, in Gaul, and in Dalmatia. The income from these lands enabled Gregory to take measures for the defence of Rome, to give the monthly distributions of bread and money to the poor, to ransom captives taken in war. He was therefore extremely careful in watching over economy of the Patrimony, which was placed in the hands of ordained clergy called rectores or defensores; and he used to inquire into the minutest details.

In Spain, in Gaul, and in Africa the influence of Rome was considerably increased under Gregory, while the conversion of Britain extended the limits of western Christendom. Leander, the bishop of Seville, who was a warm supporter of Gregory, induced Reccared, the Visigothic king, whom he had converted from Arianism to Catholicism, to send to the bishop of Rome an announcement of his conversion, accompanied by the guerdon of a gold cup, as an offering to St. Peter. In Gaul Gregory exercised considerable indirect influence, and the bishop of Arles acted as a sort of vicar or unofficial representative. The exertions of the Pope were successful in suppressing or lessening many abuses, such as simony and persecution of the Jews; and he maintained a correspondence with the celebrated Queen-mother Brunhilda. Brunhilda's acts are supposed to have secured her an honorable place among the Jezebels of history, but Pope Gregory felt great joy over her "Christian spirit." It is certainly futile to assume, with Gregory's defenders, that he was ignorant of the contemporary history of the courts of Paris and Soissons, because very small connection subsisted then between Italy and France; nor, on the other hand, can the correspondence be regarded as either surprising or damning. Brunhilda was liberal in endowing churches and religious institutions; she was sympathetic and helpful in Gregory's missionary enterprises; she was Roman in her ideas. If her political conduct was not irreproachable, she had thrown much in the counter scale; if she was a fiend, she was certainly a fiend angelical. When we take into account the ideas of that age, in which heresy was looked on as the deadliest sin and religious zeal as efficient to cancel many crimes, it is hardly to be wondered that Gregory treated Brunhilda with respect.

In Africa Gregory had far greater authority than in Gaul, where he had no official position. Not only were the bishops of Carthage and Numidia his ardent supporters and useful instruments, but the exarch Gennadius, who had earned a fair fame by delivering his provinces from the Moorish hordes who vexed it, favored and encouraged the increase of the Pope's influence. A regular, system was introduced of appealing to the see of Rome as the supreme ecclesiastical court.

The relations of Gregory to the Emperor Maurice, whose subject he was, were not untroubled by discord, and in the extension of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction the Pope sometimes came into collision with the Emperor. In Dalmatia, for example, a certain Maximus was elected bishop of Salona. Gregory forbade his consecration, and Maximus appealed to Maurice, who espoused his cause. Then Gregory forbade him to perform the episcopal offices, but Maurice continued to support Maximus in his contempt of the papal commands. As Gregory had no means of enforcing his will, he consulted his dignity by transferring the matter to Maximian, the bishop of Ravenna, and Maximus, as directed, betook himself thither. He was there convinced of his fault and confessed that he had "sinned against God and against Pope Gregory."

Gregory's quarrel with the Patriarch of Constantinople has been already referred to, and in this affair too the Pope came into collision with the Emperor. It has also been mentioned that there was discord between them on the matter of Gregory's relations to the Lombards. A law of Maurice which prevented soldiers from shirking service by entering monasteries was yet another cause of dispute.

The consequence was that the relations between Gregory and Maurice were strained; Gregory was inclined to attribute all the evils which beset the Empire to the iniquity of the Emperor, and he was so unspeakably relieved by the death of Maurice that he could not restrain the voice of jubilation. He looked upon Phocas, whose name became in the eastern part of the Empire a "common nayword and recreation" for all that is abominable, as a public deliverer to whom the thanksgiving of the world was due; and his congratulatory letter to Phocas, wherein he says that "in heaven choirs of angels would sing a gloria to the Creator," may still be read.

This is a page in Gregory's correspondence which, like his letters to Brunhilda, has been made a subject for sectarian controversy. Protestants seize hold of it as a glaring blot in the Pope's character, while Catholics are at pains to defend him on the plea that he knew nothing either of Phocas personally or of the circumstances under which he had assumed the crown. It has been especially urged that there was no apocrisiarius at Constantinople at the time to inform him of the details, and that he had merely heard the bare fact that Phocas had succeeded Maurice. Here again we have no proof of the extent of the Pope's information; but it seems gratuitous to assume that he knew nothing of the details. Such an assumption would not be made in the case of any one but a saint; the ground for the exception being that the character of a saint is inconsistent with the authorship of a letter in which the perpetrator of such acts as those of Phocas is not merely acknowledged but eulogised. But we must remember the ideas which were prevalent at the time; when we are at a house of entertainment in the sixth or seventh century we must be particularly careful not to reckon without our host. Maurice was, in the eyes of Gregory, a pestilence to the Empire and a foe to the Church; his death was a consummation eminently to be desired; and he who should achieve such a consummation was a person devoutly to be blessed. There seems therefore no reason to suppose that Gregory was not aware that the feet of Phocas, as he ascended the throne, were stained with innocent blood; he looked upon the acts as a political necessity, for which it would have been hardly fair to condemn the new Emperor. On the other hand, we need not suppose that Gregory was influenced by any ulterior motive to speak insincerely in his letter, or that he aimed at flattering Phocas into commanding the Patriarch of Constantinople to discard the obnoxious ecumenical title. This ensued; but we need not assume that it was compassed by insincerity on the part of the Pope.

Thus Gregory with consummate dexterity took advantage of all the means that presented themselves to put the papal power on an independent footing, and win for it universal recognition in the West. But it is especially important to observe how the double rule in Italy contributed to the realization of the Pope's ambition. If there had been no Lombard invasion, if Italy had been the secure possession of the Roman Empire, Gregory would have been at the mercy of the Augustus of Byzantium and would have had no power to act independently. On the other hand, the presence of the imperial power was equally important; it would have been still more disastrous to become the subject of the Lombard king. Thus the independence of the Popes was struck like a spark between the rival temporal powers that divided Italy.

If we turn to his more specially religious work, we find that Gregory exerted a far-reaching influence over the future life of the Church. He had himself been deeply moved by the monastic ideal of St. Benedict, of whom he wrote a biography; and he assiduously endeavored to make salutary reforms in cloister life. He firmly suppressed those vagrant monks, whom the sanctity of a religious dress could not always shield from the obnoxious name of beggars. He forbade youths under eighteen years to take the vows, nor would he permit a married man to enter a monastery without his wife's express consent. He relieved monks of all mundane cares by instituting laymen to look after the secular interests of the religious establishments.

The clergy (clerus), whom he was careful to dissociate completely from the monastic profession, were the object of still more solicitous attention. His Regula pastoralis, or manual of duties for a bishop, became and remained for centuries an authority in the Church and an indispensable guide for bishops. The celibacy of the clergy was his favorite and most important reform, and even in Gaul he was able to exert influence in that direction. The reforms in the liturgy which have been attributed to him are doubtful; but the introduction of the solemn Gregorian chant instead of the older less uniform Ambrosian music has rendered his name more popularly known than any of his other achievements.

In doctrine he followed the respectable authority of the founder of Latin theology, St. Augustine. But theology was the Pope's weak point; here the coarse fibres of his nature are apparent, his want of philosophy, his want of taste. Take, for example, his theory of the redemption. Influenced by familiarity with the ideas of Roman law, men were prone to look on the redemption as a sort of legal transaction between God and the devil, in which the devil is overreached. Gregory, true to the piscatorial associations of the first bishop of Rome, presents this idea in a new, definite, and original form. It is easy to identify leviathan in Job with the Evil One; and once this identification is made, it is obvious that the redemption must have been a halieutic transaction, in which God is evidently the fisherman. On his hook he places the humanity of Jesus as a bait, and when the devil swallows it the hook pierces his jaws.

Consistent with the coarseness displayed in this grotesque conception, which is put forward earnestly, not as a mere play of imagination, was his unenlightened attitude to literature and classical learning, in which he went so far as to despise grammar; and this trait of his character is brought out in the twelfth-century legends, which ascribe to him the destruction of the Palatine library and other acts of vandalism. The superstitious love of miracles and legends, exhibited in every page of his works, may be added to complete a superficial sketch.

The great historical importance of the pontificate of Gregory I consists in the fact that he placed the Roman see in a new position and advanced it to a far higher dignity than it had previously enjoyed. The germ of the papal power, which so many circumstances combined to foster and increase, lay in the position of the Pope as a defender of the people against temporal injustice and misery. This idea is expressly recognised by Cassiodorus, the secretary of Theodoric.It was on the same principle that the bishops influenced the election of the defensores civitatis and co-operated with them. Justinian in 554 sent standards of coins, measures, and weights to the Pope and the senate, thus recognising that the activity of the bishop of Rome was not limited to affairs of religion and morals. But Gregory the Great was the first pontiff who made temporal power an object of aspiration, and took full advantage of the opportunities which were offered. Pope Pelagius (555-560) had called in the assistance of military officers against bishops who resisted his authority, but Gregory appointed civil and military officers himself. He nominated Constantius tribune of Naples when that city was hard pressed by the Lombards, and entrusted the administration of Nepi, in southern Tuscany, to Leontius, a vir clarissimus. He made peace on his own account with the Lombards when they were at war with the imperial representative, and asserted that his own station was higher than that of the exarch. At the same time he would not tolerate interference in temporal affairs on the part of any subordinate dignitary of the Church, whether bishop or priest, and, like Pelagius, he used the arm of lay authority to suppress recalcitrant clergy.

During the seventh century, for it is convenient to anticipate here the only remarks that have to be made on the subject, no great Pope arose, no Pope of the same power as Gregory I; yet his example was not forgotten. Honorius (625-638), the dux plebis as he is called in an inscription, consigned the government of Naples to the notary Gaudiosus and the master of soldiers Anatolius, and instructed them in what manner they were to govern. We shall see that during the disputes with the monotheletic Emperors of Constantinople the soldiers at "ome always espoused the cause of the Popes against the exarchs.