Leo I of Byzantium

“ Thereupon Leo and his son Kopronymus interpreted the lesson thus given as entitling them to meet the assumption of the prophet-emperor enthroned in the Damascus which had ceased to be theirs with equal arrogance in the counter assumption to be emperor-priest. The enemy from Mecca had seized Both Powers in his claim to be prophet; the enemy at Byzantium seized both as emperor. Civil power was the appendage to Mohammed, but became the root of spiritual authority to Leo the Isaurian. ”

“ He named his palace at Pavia “the palace of Italy,” and an inscription has been found, “Aistulf, in the name of Christ, by God's will Imperator Augustus, in the fourth year of his reign”.183
No help came from Byzantium, where the emperor [pg 351] Constantine Kopronymus, after putting down a pretender to his throne, was only occupied with Iconoclast troubles. For a long time no opposition was perceived; when the last exarch fell into the Lombard king's power Rome seemed to be the sure prey of him who had won Ravenna. ”

“ A long succession of Popes—at the mercy of eastern despots as to civil matters—maintain their spiritual independence and their guidance of that new assemblage of nations in a [pg 220] common Christendom through the terrible seventh century. At the same moment Northern Africa, and Egypt, and Syria fall passively into the hands of the chalifate, and Byzantium loses the half of its power and trembles for its own existence. ”

“ And the emperors, your predecessors, struggled hard to maintain this peace. And if you bluster and threaten us, we have no need to fight you. Let the Bishop of Rome retreat twenty-four stades into Campania and go you, pursue the winds. Our predecessor, the pontiff Martin, sat for peace-sake exhorting. Thus it was that the evil Constans, erroneous in his belief as to the Holy Trinity, and throwing in his aid to the then heretical pontiffs, Sergius and Paul and Pyrrhus, sent and kidnapped him and tyrannously brought him up to Byzantium. ”

“ The pontificate of John IV., for the confirmation of which he had to wait four months, lasted only twenty-one months, and was disquieted throughout by the conflict with the Byzantine court and patriarch respecting the Ecthesis.23 There was war between the exarch and the Lombard king, Rotharis, but it did not touch Rome. All misfortunes which threatened it came from Byzantium. The struggle against the eastern heresy embittered the feeling of Constantinople to Rome. At the same time, the Byzantine court was disturbed by intestine revolutions. ”

“ This happened in the third year of the emperor Zeno the Isaurian, the ninth of Pope Simplicius, A.D. 476. The senate sent deputies to Zeno at Byzantium to declare that Rome no longer required an independent emperor; that one emperor was sufficient for East and for West; that they had chosen for the protector of Italy Odoacer, a man [Pg 23] skilled in the arts of peace as well as war, and besought Zeno to entrust him with the dignity of Patricius and the government of Italy. The deposed Nepos also sent a petition to Zeno to restore him. ”

“ A few years afterwards, when the Pope called a Council, and condemned the decrees of two emperors as heresy, and three successive bishops of Constantinople as the [pg 114] heretics who supported it, the grandson of Heraclius, Constans II., tried the Pope as guilty of high treason before the Senate of Byzantium, and crowned him with martyrdom in exile. Step from Pope Vigilius a captive guarded at Constantinople in 553, to Pope Martin sentenced there as a traitor in 655, and dying in the Crimea a martyr. ”

“ But a majority of the theologians and all the monks opposed these measures with uncompromising hostility, and in the western parts of the empire the people refused to obey the edict. A revolt which broke out in Greece, mainly on religious grounds, was crushed by the imperial fleet (727) , and two years later, by deposing the patriarch of Constantinople, Leo suppressed the overt opposition of the capital. In Italy the defiant attitude of Popes Gregory II. and III. on behalf of image-worship led to a fierce quarrel with the emperor. ”

“ Gregory II. was saying to the Iconoclast emperor Leo. In the interval Italy had been governed by the Byzantines, so far as they possessed it, during two centuries as a subject province, the captive of its spear; Rome had lived through it only in virtue of the Pope's primacy. The eastern empire having been false to the faith in its emperors and in many of its bishops, but especially in four successive patriarchs of Constantinople, had been cut in two, and one half of it given over to an anti-Christian religion to rule with unrestricted violence. ”

“ But the destruction of the armament by a storm decided the issue against him; his south Italian subjects successfully defied his religious edicts, and the province of Ravenna became detached from the empire. In spite of this partial failure Leo must be reckoned as one of the greatest of the later Roman emperors. By his resolute stand against the Saracens he delivered all eastern Europe from a great danger, and by his thorough-going reforms he not only saved the empire from collapse, but invested it with a stability which enabled it to survive all further shocks for a space of five centuries. ”

“ Since the Italian rebellion in the time of Constantine Copronymus, that allegiance had been a mere shadow, and the papacy had been in reality under Frankish influence. But it was not till 800 that the final breach took place. The Iconoclastic controversy had prepared the way for it, while the fact that a woman sat on the imperial throne served as a good excuse for the Pope's action. Leo declared that a female reign was an anomaly and an abomination, and took upon himself the onus of ending it, so far as Italy was concerned, by creating a new emperor of the West. ”

“ When Leo the Isaurian attempted, in the eighth century, to repress the worship of images, the resistance which he met at Constantinople, though violent, was speedily allayed; but the Pope, assuming a far higher position than any Byzantine ecclesiastic could attain, boldly excommunicated the emperor, and led a revolt against his authority, which resulted in the virtual independence of Italy. His position was at this time singularly grand. He represented a religious cause to which the great mass of the Christian world were passionately attached. He was venerated as the emancipator of Italy. ”

“ When he looked to the eastern emperor, now become in the eyes of the Church the legitimate sovereign of Rome, by whose commission Odoacer professed to rule, instead of a Marcian, the not unworthy husband of St. Pulcheria, instead of Leo I., who was at least orthodox, and had been succeeded by his grandson the young child Leo II., he found upon the now sole imperial throne that child's father Zeno. He was husband of the princess Ariadne, daughter of Leo I., [25] a man of whom the Byzantine historians give us a most frightful picture. ”

“ The accession of Leo the Isaurian to the throne of Constantinople suddenly opened a new era in the history of the Eastern Empire. ... When Leo III. was proclaimed emperor [A. D. 717] , it seemed as if no human power could save Constantinople from falling as Rome had fallen. The Saracens considered the sovereignty of every land, in which any remains of Roman civilization survived, as within their grasp. Leo, an Isaurian, and an Iconoclast, consequently a foreigner and a heretic, ascended the throne of Constantine and arrested the victorious career of the Mohammedans. ”

“ Then the emperor Justinian became by right of conquest immediate lord of Rome, and seized without scruple upon the appointment and confirmation of the Popes. The act of his empress Theodora, in her violent deposition of Pope Silverius, is the first specimen of Byzantine conduct when it enters by right of conquest upon Italian territory. That the Romans had every reason to wish for the extinction of foreign, which was also heretical, domination, must be clear to every one who follows [pg 381] history in its detail. ”

“ But the genius of Leo served only to defer the downfall of the Western Empire, which was doomed to disappear fifteen years after his death. His successors continued to protect Italy, so far as in them lay, against the horrors of war; and Pope Agapetus, though weighed down by years, undertook the perilous mission of going to Constantinople to make peace between the Emperor of the East and the King of the Visigoths. A few years afterwards, Pope Pelagius I. had the courage to seek an interview with Totila, and so preserve Rome from massacre and dishonour. ”

“ And when, after he had been dethroned, deprived of his nose, and exiled for ten years, he returned to triumph over his enemies, the Greek populace applauded him with Biblical quotations as he sat in the circus with his feet on his rivals’ necks.
The advent of Leo the Isaurian (716) marks an epoch in Byzantine history. Acting as head of the Church, the established function of the eastern emperors, he set himself to check idolatry, first by ordering that the pictures in the churches should be placed high enough to prevent the people from kissing them. ”

“ Germanus was a staunch supporter of image worship, and in the case of this bold bishop we have a rare instance of independence on the part of the head ecclesiastic of the Greek Church at Constantinople in opposition to the emperor, which is in marked contrast to the too common subservience of the Constantinople patriarchs. But that fact makes it all the more remarkable that Leo should have so acted as to stir up a hornets' nest just when he was consolidating his power for the security of the empire. ”

“ The Roman alphabet was discarded and Roman law was written in Greek characters and explained by Greek judges. The Emperor became an Asiatic despot, worshipped as the god-like kings of Thebes had been worshipped in the valley of the Nile, three thousand years before. When missionaries of the Byzantine church looked for fresh fields of activity, they went eastward and carried the civilisation of Byzantium into the vast wilderness of Russia.
As for the west, it was left to the mercies of the Barbarians. For twelve generations, murder, war, arson, plundering were the order of the day. ”

“ The pope was driven to revive the western empire in order to secure the gift of the exarchy, to eradicate the claims of the Greeks, and to restore the majesty of Rome from the debasement of a provincial town. The emperors of the West would receive their crown from the successor of St. Peter, and the Roman Church would require a zealous and respectable advocate.
Inspired by these motives, Pope Leo, who had nearly fallen a victim to a conspiracy (788) , and had been saved and reinstated by Charlemagne, took the opportunity presented by the French king's visit to Rome to crown him emperor. ”

“ Leo died in 740, leaving the throne to his son, [pg 196] Constantine V., whom he had brought up to follow in his own footsteps. The new emperor was a good soldier and a capable man of business, but his main interest in life centred in the struggle against image-worship. Where Leo had chastised the adherents of superstition with whips Constantine chastised them with scorpions. He was a true persecutor, and executed not only rioters and traitors, as his father had done, but all prominent opponents of his policy who provoked his wrath. ”

“ He must quiet the disagreeable wranglings of the German humanists. Other problems connected with his family interests served to complicate the situation and eventually to prevent the successful consummation of many of his plans. At the very time of Leo’s accession Louis XII. of France, in alliance with Venice, was making a determined effort to regain the duchy of Milan, and the pope, after fruitless endeavours to maintain peace, joined the league of Mechlin on the 5th of April 1513 with the emperor Maximilian I., Ferdinand I. of Spain and Henry VIII. of England. ”

“ Such a visit accompanied by such acts give a lively picture of the regard entertained by a Byzantine emperor for the city which gave him his title. It sums up the hundred and ten years of abject servitude into which all Italy had fallen since the capture of the city by Narses under Justinian. We have the contemptuous despot, the long-suffering Pope, the half-ruined powerless city. ”

“ LOGGIE OF RAPHAEL IN THE VATICAN
But this is not all. It is unfortunately true that there is another and much better reason why Leo the Thirteenth cannot show himself in the streets of Rome. It is quite certain that his life would not be safe. The enthusiastic friends of Italy who read glowing [Pg 262] accounts of the development of the new kingdom and write eloquent articles in the same strain will be utterly horrified at this statement, and will, moreover, laugh to scorn the idea that the modern civilized Italian could conspire to take the life of a harmless and unoffending old man. ”

“ In not a few places among the barbarians the bishops became the acknowledged heads of the Roman element of the communities. In meeting the threatened invasion of Italy by Attila, Leo was the representative of the Roman people, the head of the embassy sent to induce the Hun to recross the Danube. Under such circumstances the see of Rome constantly gained in importance politically and ecclesiastically. As a centre of unity it was far more powerful than a feeble emperor at Ravenna or puppets set up by barbarians. ”

“ For ten years prior to his election, Leo was perhaps the most prominent man in Rome and noted for his learning and piety. While absent on a civil mission in Gaul, he was chosen Pope. At that time the Empire was in a very weak condition. Women, surrounded by their court of eunuchs and parasites, ruled at Constantinople and Ravenna. Barbarians were pressing in from all sides. Heresies rent the East and ignorance was fast covering the West. Western Christendom must be consolidated and disciplined so that it could meet the crudeness and heresy of the powerful invaders and overcome both. ”