Rome, the second century AD. The Christians were growing in numbers and developing their own organisation, but they still had a long way to go. Their composition, too, was changing. Their earliest communities were almost exclusively composed of Jews, but the Jewish population was now on the decline: many had emigrated from Jerusalem to Pella (in what is now the Kingdom of Jordan) in AD 66, after the execution of their leader, James. The Christian community in Rome was now overwhelmingly Gentile, and would become still more so with the passage of time.
How was it administered? Although St Irenaeus of Lyons gives us the list of the first thirteen ‘popes’, from St Peter down to his friend Eleutherius (c. 175–89), it is important to remember that until at least the ninth century the title of Pope (which derives from the Greek papas, ‘little father’) was applied generally to any senior member of the community – Rome was far from being a diocese as we understand the word today. Nor was the Roman Church, such as it was, generally accepted, or even respected. The Roman Empire, after all, had its own official religion – though nobody much believed in it – and Christians everywhere were still well advised to keep a discreetly low profile. The Neronian nightmare was over, but outbreaks of persecution still could, and did, occur. There was, for example, a disagreeable period under the Emperor Domitian (ruled AD 81–96), who himself had delusions of divinity and insisted on being addressed as dominus et deus, ‘master and god’; fortunately for the Christians, he was assassinated during a palace revolt, and they were quick to see his fate as a sign of heavenly displeasure.
The first half of the second century saw, if not a more benevolent, at least a more indifferent attitude on the part of the emperors towards their Christian subjects: Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus Pius (who together ruled from 96 to 161) were all inclined to let them be. But the Empire by now covered a vast area, and not all its provincial governors took so enlightened a view. Excuses could always be found for the occasional bloodbath; besides, the public demanded its circuses, and the animals had to be fed. The two most brilliant churchmen of their day, St Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (the first writer to use the Greek word for ‘catholic’, or ‘universal’, in its religious sense), and his friend St Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna (champion of St Paul and suspected author of several of the Pauline Epistles), both met martyrs’ deaths – the former being fed to the lions in the arena in c. 110, the latter stabbed to death some half a century later at the age of about eighty-six, after the failure of an attempt to burn him at the stake.
Ignatius and Polycarp were both Levantines, and illustrate another problem for the early Church in Rome: the fact that Christianity was essentially a Levantine religion, the greater part of which was still firmly centred in the Greek-speaking world of the eastern Mediterranean. Considered from the perspective of history, the Churches that, thanks to St Paul and his successors, were springing up in Asia Minor, Egypt, Syria and Greece were far more important than the relatively small communities in Italy. Alexandria was by now the second city of the Empire, and Antioch – where the word ‘Christian’ was first used – the third. Intellectually, too, these cities were incomparably more distinguished than Rome. Despite the fact that Greek was (even in Rome itself) the first language of Christianity it would continue to be dominant in the liturgy until the middle of the fourth century – and that the first- and second-century popes in Rome were nearly all Greeks, none of them proved to be thinkers or theologians or even administrators of any real distinction. Certainly they were not in the same intellectual league as the Bishops of Antioch and Smyrna and their friends.
But this view, not altogether surprisingly, failed to appeal to the Church of Rome. For the first two centuries of their existence, the popes had their work cut out to establish their supremacy. Rome, as they were forever pointing out, was not only the imperial capital; it was also the burial place of Peter and Paul, the two towering giants of the early Church. Oddly enough, the most vocal and persuasive champion of the Roman cause was another Levantine, St Irenaeus, who as a boy had heard Polycarp preach and is therefore thought to have been, like him, a native of Smyrna. He had settled, however, in the West, becoming Bishop of Lyons immediately after the hideous persecutions that took place there in 177 (instituted by the violently anti-Christian Marcus Aurelius, a philosopher-emperor who should have known better). For Irenaeus, the Church of Rome was ‘the great and illustrious Church, to which, by reason of its supreme status, every church, which is to say the faithful wherever they may be, must turn’.
The son and successor of Marcus Aurelius, Commodus, is generally considered one of the most vicious of the Roman emperors. Edward Gibbon, the first great historian to combine scholarship with a sense of humour, tells us that:
his hours were spent in a seraglio of three hundred beautiful women, and as many boys, of every rank and of every province; and, whenever the arts of seduction proved ineffectual, the brutal lover had recourse to violence. The ancient historians have expatiated on these abandoned scenes of prostitution, which scorned every restraint of nature or modesty; but it would not be easy to translate their too faithful descriptions into the decency of a modern language.1
As he grew more and more unbalanced, the Emperor identified himself with Hercules and gave regular performances in the arena, slaughtering wild animals in prodigious numbers and even entering the lists as a gladiator. In this capacity he is said to have made no fewer than 735 appearances, all of them – it need hardly be said – victorious. Assassination, sooner or later, was inevitable, but it was somehow appropriate that the man who strangled him on 31 December 192 should have been a champion wrestler.
For the Christians, however, life under Commodus was a good deal easier than it had been under his father, to the point where a eunuch named Hyacinthus became the first (and almost certainly the last) man in history to combine the duties of controller of a 300-strong harem and a presbyter of the Christian Church. It was thanks to him and to Marcia, the Emperor’s favourite concubine, that Pope Victor I (189–99) – in the intervals when he was not furiously quarrelling with all the churches outside Rome over the date of Easter – was able to infiltrate the imperial palace and so further the interests of his flock. On at least one occasion he was to do so with signal success, when he saved a company of Christians from the nightmare fate of forced labour in the Sardinian iron and copper mines.
* * *
By the beginning of the third century the popes were still working to establish their authority over the Churches of Asia, and were making steady progress. Sporadic periods of persecution varied, according to the attitude and occasionally even the mood of the reigning emperor; but the reputation of the Christians was greatly increased by the fact that the two most hostile rulers, Decius2 and Valerian, both came (as had Domitian) to unpleasant ends: the first massacred by the Goths in 249, the second captured eleven years later by the Persian King Shapur, who used him for the rest of his life as a mounting block. Fortunately Gallienus, Valerian’s son and successor, very sensibly reversed his father’s policies, allowing Christians throughout the Empire not only to worship in freedom but to proselytise. There were by this time several competing religions, including the cult of Mithras, that of Sol Invictus (the unconquered sun) and of course the old worship of the Olympian gods, which was kept going by an official priesthood more as an ancient tradition than as a living faith; but in Rome the Christians by now outnumbered them all.
There was one problem only: the fact that Rome itself was in rapid decline, becoming more and more out of touch with the new Hellenistic world. Throughout the Italian peninsula populations were dwindling; and the Empire’s principal enemy, Persia, was several weeks’, if not months’, journey away. Even when in 293 the Emperor Diocletian split his empire into four, he made his capital at Nicomedia (now Izmit, in the north-eastern corner of the Sea of Marmara) and none of his other three tetrarchs (joint rulers) dreamed of living in what was still technically the imperial capital. The whole focus of the Empire had shifted to the east. Italy had become a backwater. In the absence of the Emperor, the Pope was the most important man in Rome; but Rome itself was now a sad and distinctly seedy city, decimated by malaria and showing little trace of its former splendour.
One more burst of persecution was still to come. For the first twenty years of his reign Diocletian, who had succeeded to the imperial throne in 284, seemed willing enough to tolerate his Christian subjects – both his wife and daughter were almost certainly baptised – but then, in 303 and 304, he suddenly published four separate edicts against them. By all accounts a normally humane and merciful man, he specifically laid down that there should be no bloodshed; but his second-in-command Gallienus and his brother-officers, unwilling to be deprived of their pleasures, went ahead regardless, and for two years a monstrous wave of violence surged across the Empire. It might have lasted longer; but to its victims’ relief, the Emperor abdicated in 305 and retired to live in his palace on the Dalmatian coast and grow cabbages. And once again the pendulum swung.
It could hardly have swung faster, or further. In 306 a young general named Constantine was acclaimed by the army at York on the death of his father Constantius Chlorus, who had been reigning there as one of Diocletian’s tetrarchs. Nowadays he is known to us as Constantine the Great, and with good reason: with the exceptions of Jesus Christ, the Prophet Mohammed and the Buddha, he was to be perhaps the most influential man who ever lived. It is given to few men to take a decision that changes the course of history; Constantine took two. The first was religious: his adoption, both personally and imperially, of Christianity. He needed a few years to establish his supreme authority – Diocletian’s system of the four tetrarchs appealed to him not at all – but by 313 he and his co-regent Licinius were able to issue the Edict of Milan, which granted total freedom of religion to every imperial citizen. Two years later crucifixion was abolished, and in 321 Sunday was named a legal festival. By the time of Constantine’s death in 337 (less than thirty-five years after Diocletian’s persecutions) Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire.
The second decision was political. Constantine moved the imperial capital away from Rome, to a new eastern city built expressly for it on the shores of the Bosphorus, occupying the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium – a city that he originally intended should be named New Rome, but which from the start was always called after him, Constantinople. He inaugurated it on 11 May 330 – dedicating it, incidentally, to the Virgin – and on that day the Empire too acquired a new description, the Byzantine; but it is important to remember that neither he nor his subjects recognised any qualitative change or break in continuity. To them the Empire was what it had always been: the Roman Empire of Augustus and his successors; and they, regardless of the language they spoke – and, as time went on, Latin died out and Greek became universal – remained in their own eyes Romans through and through.
To Pope Sylvester I (314–35) and his flock in Rome, the news of the Emperor’s second decision must have done a good deal to mitigate that of his first. Christianity might now be smiled upon, persecution a thing of the past; and on Constantine’s only visit to Rome in 326 he had not only refused to take part in a pagan procession (causing considerable offence to the traditionalists), but had chosen the sites for several of the great basilicas that he intended to build – and lavishly endow – in and around the city. First among these was that which was to be dedicated to St Peter, above the saint’s shrine on the Vatican Hill. Then there was to be a second cathedral and baptistery next to the palace on the Lateran, occupying the site of the old barracks of the imperial cavalry.3 Next was the basilica of S. Croce in Gerusalemme, commemorating the finding of the True Cross by the Emperor’s mother, St Helena; and finally the great church on the Appian Way, marking the traditional spot to which the bodies of St Peter and St Paul were transferred in 258, but now dedicated (somewhat unfairly, it may be thought) to St Sebastian.
All this was excellent news; on the other hand, as Sylvester was well aware, Constantine had almost simultaneously ordered the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem,4 together with others at Trier, Aquileia, Nicomedia, Antioch, Alexandria and several other cities – to say nothing of the Great Church of St Sophia, the Holy Wisdom, in his new capital. How now was the Bishop of Rome to further his claim to supremacy over the whole Christian Church? It was not he, but his brother in Constantinople who would henceforth have the Emperor’s ear. For well over 600 years it was firmly believed that Constantine, in gratitude for his miraculous healing by Sylvester from leprosy, had sugared the pill by handing over to the Pope and his successors ‘Rome and all the provinces, districts and cities of Italy and the West as subject to the Roman Church for ever’. Alas for the papacy, he did no such thing. The so-called ‘Donation of Constantine’ is now known to have been a forgery – fabricated, probably during the eighth century, within the Roman Curia; it was however to prove of inestimable value to the territorial claims of the papacy until the fraud was finally exposed (by the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla) in 1440.
It was Pope Sylvester’s misfortune to witness, during his papacy, the appearance of the first of all the great heresies that were to split the Church in the centuries to come. This was first propagated by a certain Arius, Presbyter of Alexandria, a man of immense learning and splendid physical presence. His message was simple enough: that Jesus Christ was not coeternal and of one substance with God the Father, but had been created by him at a specific time and for a specific purpose, as his Instrument for the salvation of the world. Thus, although a perfect man, the Son must always be subordinate to the Father. Here, in the eyes of Arius’s archbishop, Athanasius, was a dangerous doctrine indeed; and he took immediate measures to stamp it out. In 320 its propagator was arraigned before nearly a hundred bishops from Egypt, Libya and Tripolitania and excommunicated as a heretic.
The damage, however, was done: the teaching spread like wildfire. Those were the days, it must be remembered, when theological arguments were of passionate interest, not just to churchmen and scholars, but to the whole Greek-speaking world. Broadsheets were distributed; rabble-rousing speeches were made in the market place; slogans were chalked on walls. Everyone had an opinion: you were either for Arius or against him. He himself, unlike most theologians, was a brilliant publicist; the better to disseminate his views, he had actually written several popular songs and jingles – for sailors, travellers, carpenters and other trades – which were sung and whistled in the streets.5 Then, a year or two later, Arius, who had hurriedly left Alexandria after his excommunication, returned in triumph. He had appeared before two further synods in Asia Minor, both of which had declared overwhelmingly in his favour, and now he demanded his old job back.
Finally, in 324, the Emperor intervened. There would be no more synods of local bishops; instead there would be a universal Council of the Church, to be attended by all the leading ecclesiastics from both East and West – an Ecumenical Council of such authority and distinction that both parties to the dispute would be bound to accept its rulings. It would be held in Nicaea during May and June 325, and he – Constantine – would participate himself. In the event he did rather more than that; effectively, he seems to have taken the chair, arguing, encouraging, assuaging ruffled feelings, forever urging the importance of unity and the virtues of compromise, and even on occasion switching from Latin into halting Greek in his efforts to convince his hearers.
It was Constantine, too, who proposed the insertion into the draft resolution of the key word that was to settle, at least temporarily, the fate of Arius and his doctrine. This was the word homoousios – meaning consubstantial, or ‘of one substance’, to describe the relation of the Son to the Father. Its inclusion in the draft was almost tantamount to a condemnation of Arianism, and it says much for the Emperor’s powers of persuasion – and, it must be suspected, of intimidation – that he was able to secure its acceptance. And so the Council delivered its verdict: Arius, with his remaining adherents, was formally condemned, his writings placed under anathema and ordered to be burned.
The Emperor had hoped for a large attendance from the Western churches at the Council of Nicaea; but he was disappointed. As against some 300 or more bishops from the East, the West was represented by just five – plus two priests sent, more as observers than anything else, by Pope Sylvester from Rome. It was, on the Pope’s part, an understandable decision; he probably considered that to make the journey would be demeaning both to himself and to his office. Besides, western churchmen lacked the insatiable intellectual curiosity of their eastern brethren; the Latin language, which had replaced Greek as the lingua franca of the Roman Church less than a century before, did not even possess the technical terms necessary to express the subtle shades of meaning that gave Orthodox theologians such delight. Nevertheless, he made a grave mistake. His attendance at the Council would have immensely strengthened his prestige. One claiming to be the supreme head of the universal Church should surely have been present at the drafting of the Nicene Creed, that Church’s first official statement of belief, a revised version of which is still today regularly recited at both Catholic and Anglican eucharists.
And what of Arius himself? He was exiled to Illyricum – the Roman province running along the Dalmatian coast – and forbidden to return to Alexandria; but he was soon back in Nicomedia, where over the next ten years he gave the authorities no rest. At last, in 336, Constantine was forced to summon him to Constantinople for further investigation of his beliefs. It was during this last inquiry that:
Arius, made bold by the protection of his followers, engaged in light-hearted and foolish conversation, until he was suddenly compelled by a call of nature to retire; and immediately, as it is written,6 ‘falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and gave up the ghost’.
This version of the story, admittedly, comes from the pen of Arius’s implacable enemy, Archbishop Athanasius of Alexandria; but the unattractive circumstances of his demise are too well attested by contemporary writers to be open to serious question. Inevitably they were interpreted by those who hated him as divine retribution: the Archbishop’s biblical reference is to the somewhat similar fate that befell Judas Iscariot.
The death of its initiator did not, however, put an end to Arianism. It continued to flourish in many parts of the Empire, until in 381 a fanatically anti-Arian Spaniard, the Emperor Theodosius the Great, summoned the second Ecumenical Council, which was held at Constantinople and finally worked out a satisfactory solution to the problem. Indeed, it did more. It decreed a general ban on all pagan and heretical cults. Heresy – any heresy – would henceforth be a crime against the State. In less than a century a persecuted Church had become a persecuting Church. The Jews in particular came under heavy pressure; it was they, after all, who had crucified Christ. As for Arianism, it was virtually extinguished within the Empire, although it was to remain widespread among the Germanic barbarian tribes for at least another 300 years.
Pope Damasus (366–84) sent no representatives to this council, nor even were any Western bishops present; and he was horrified later to learn of its decree that ‘the Bishop of Constantinople shall have the pre-eminence in honour after the Bishop of Rome, for Constantinople is the New Rome’. That pre-eminence, he thundered, was in no way due to Rome’s past as the capital of the Empire; it was based exclusively on its Apostolic pedigree going back to St Peter and St Paul. Nor was Constantinople even second in seniority; not even yet a patriarchate, it was outranked by both Alexandria and Antioch – the former having traditionally been founded on Peter’s orders by St Mark, the latter because St Peter had been its first bishop before he went on to Rome.
Relations between Rome and Constantinople were deteriorating fast.
The Emperor Constantine had died on Whit Sunday, 337. Though for years a self-styled bishop of the Christian Church, he had received baptism only on his deathbed, from Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea – ironically enough, an Arian. Until the end of the century he and his successors reigned supreme over the whole Empire; but Theodosius the Great, dying in 395, divided it again – giving his elder son, Arcadius, the East, and his younger, Honorius, the West. It proved a disastrous decision. Under the sway of thirteen emperors, living for the most part not in Rome but in Ravenna, each more feckless than the last and all today virtually forgotten, the Western Empire now embarked on an inexorable eighty-year decline, prey to the Germanic and other tribes that progressively tightened their grip.
But by now the Bishops of Rome had developed a quasi-monarchical position of dominance in the West. The Emperor, as always involved in the East, had exempted them from taxes and granted them jurisdiction over matters of faith and civil law, and over the years they had steadily built up their authority. Bishop Damasus had claimed an ‘apostolic’ seat, deliberately using Christ’s declaration in St Matthew to support his claims to power; he had further increased his reputation by commissioning the Vulgate – a new and vastly superior Latin translation of the Bible – from the Italian scholar St Jerome. His successor Bishop Siricius (384–99) had been the first to assume the title of ‘Pope’, giving it much of the significance that it bears today; Pope Innocent I (401–17) insisted that all important matters discussed at synods should be submitted to himself for a final decision. In the East such claims were never for a moment taken seriously; there, the Emperor alone – assisted, perhaps, by an Ecumenical Council, which only he could summon – remained the only supreme authority. Nonetheless, the Bishops of Rome could be said to have come of age: they were, at long last, effectively popes, using Latin, not Greek, for their liturgy; and it was as popes that they now found themselves with a new role: as defenders of Rome itself.
* * *
The fifth century began with a bang: in the early summer of 401 Alaric the Visigoth invaded Italy. Still no more than thirty years old, he had already spread terror from the walls of Constantinople to the southern Peloponnese. In fact, he was not fundamentally hostile to the Empire; his real objective was to establish a permanent home for his people within it. If only the Roman Senate and the dim-witted Western Emperor Honorius – whose only interest at the time seems to have been the raising of poultry – could have understood this, they might have averted the final catastrophe; by their lack of comprehension they made it inevitable. In September 408 Alaric was before the walls of Rome, and the first of his three sieges of the city began. It lasted for three months. The civic authorities were helpless, while Honorius cowered among the marshes of Ravenna; it was left to Pope Innocent I to negotiate with the conqueror and make what terms he could. Alaric demanded a huge ransom, of gold and silver and other precious materials, including 3,000 pounds of pepper; but, thanks entirely to the Pope, he respected Church property and there was no bloodbath.
The second of Alaric’s sieges had one purpose only: to overthrow Honorius. The King of the Goths made it clear to the Romans that all they had to do was depose their idiotic emperor; he would then instantly withdraw. The Roman Senate, meeting in emergency session, did not take long to concur; but Honorius refused to go. He continued to make trouble until eventually, in the early summer of 410, Alaric marched on Rome and besieged it for the third time. With food already short, the city could not hold out for long. Some time towards the end of August the Goths burst in through the northern wall, just at the foot of the Pincian Hill.
After the capture there were the traditional three days of pillage; but this early sack of Rome seems to have been a good deal less savage than the school history books would have us believe – quite restrained, in fact, compared with the havoc wrought by the Normans in 1078 or the army of Charles V in 1527. Alaric himself, devout Christian that he was, had given orders that no churches or religious buildings were to be touched, and that the right of asylum was everywhere to be respected. Yet a sack, however decorously conducted, remains just that; the Goths were far from being saints and, despite occasional exaggerations, there is probably all too much truth in the pages that Gibbon devotes to the atrocities committed: the countless magnificent buildings consumed by the flames, the multitudes of innocents slain, the matrons ravished and the virgins deflowered.
When the three days were over, Alaric moved on to the south; but he had got no further than Cosenza when he was attacked by a sudden violent fever, and within a few days he was dead. He was still only forty. His followers carried his body to the River Busento, which they dammed and temporarily deflected from its usual channel. There, in the stream’s dry bed, they buried their leader; then they broke the dam, and the waters came surging back and covered him.
Pope Innocent had done all he could, but had been unable to save his flock from the third and last siege. Arguably he was the first really great Pope. A man of vast ability, high resolution and impeccable morality, he stands out like a beacon after the scores of mediocrities who preceded him. Papal supremacy, he was determined, should be absolute; all major causes of dispute must be submitted to the judgement of the Holy See. He was surely gratified when, in 404, he received a respectful appeal from the Bishop of Constantinople, St John Chrysostom, that saintly but insufferable prelate whose scorching castigations of the Empress Eudoxia – who had by this time deserted her husband Arcadius in favour of an apparently interminable string of lovers – had resulted in his deposition by the Patriarch of Alexandria7 and subsequent exile. John now demanded a formal trial at which he could confront his accusers – unmistakably implying that he recognised the Bishop of Rome as his superior. Innocent naturally leaped to his defence, summoning a synod of Latin bishops which duly called on Arcadius to restore Chrysostom at once to his see; then, when this was seen to have no effect, he despatched a delegation to Constantinople. Including as it did no fewer than four senior bishops, it could hardly be ignored; but Arcadius was unimpressed. The envoys were not even permitted to enter the city. Their letters of credence were snatched from them; they were then thrown into a Thracian castle, where they were subjected to what was almost certainly a painful interrogation. Only then, insulted and humiliated, were they allowed to return to Italy.
And so when in 407 St John Chrysostom died in a remote region of Pontus on the Black Sea – probably as a result of ill-treatment by his guards – he left the Church profoundly split; and Pope Innocent, who only three years before had good reason to believe that his supremacy was generally acknowledged in Constantinople, was now faced with all-too-convincing proof of his misapprehension. He remained in power, however, for another decade, making important contributions in the fields of the liturgy and theology, and governing Rome with a firm hand. Whether or not he altogether deserved the sainthood that was subsequently bestowed on him is perhaps open to discussion; but he gave the papacy an international prestige of a kind that it had never before known, and he marks the first milestone on its road to greatness.
Just twenty-three years (and five popes) after Innocent’s death in 417, the Tuscan lawyer and theologian Leo I (440–61) was elected to the papal throne. He was the first Bishop of Rome to adopt the title of the pagan chief priest, pontifex maximus, and the first of only two in all papal history to have been known as ‘the Great’. In fact, he deserved the title no more than had Innocent, whose campaign to establish the supremacy of Rome he enthusiastically continued. Papal authority, he claimed, was the authority of St Peter himself; the Pope was Peter’s unworthy spokesman. This is the overriding message of his vast correspondence with bishops and churchmen all over the Western world. He, and he alone, was the guardian of orthodoxy, which he did his utmost to spread also throughout the East – though such a task, as he well knew, required much diplomacy and tact.
Just how much became clear with the storm that was soon to burst over the head of Eutyches, an elderly archimandrite (head of a large monastery) of Constantinople. Already for a century and more the Church, and particularly the Eastern Church, had been deeply divided on the question of the nature – or natures – of Christ. Did he possess two separate natures, the human and the divine? Or only one? And if only one, which was it? The leading exponent of the dual nature was Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, who had been consequently deposed in 431 by the Council of Ephesus. It was possible, on the other hand, to go too far in the opposite direction; such was the mistake of Eutyches, who held that Christ had only one nature, the human nature being absorbed in the divine. This theory, known as the monophysite, was equally unacceptable to Nestorius’s third successor, Bishop Flavian. Found guilty of heresy, condemned and degraded, Eutyches appealed to Pope Leo, to the Emperor Theodosius and to the monks of Constantinople, and in so doing unleashed a whirlwind of almost unimaginable ferocity. For three years the Church was in uproar, with councils summoned and discredited, bishops unseated and restored; with intrigues and conspiracies, violence and vituperation, curses and anathemas thundering between Rome and Constantinople, Ephesus and Alexandria. In the course of all this, Pope Leo sent to Flavian a copy of his celebrated Tome, which, he believed, established once and for all the doctrine that Christ possessed two natures coexisting. Its findings were upheld in 451 by the Council of Chalcedon, at which the papal delegates presided and which condemned monophysitism in all its forms. The doctrine of the dual nature has remained ever since an integral part of orthodox Christian dogma, though several monophysite Churches – including the Copts of Egypt, the Nestorians in Syria, the Armenians and the Georgians – broke away at Chalcedon and still continue in existence.8
By now, however, the whole Roman Empire of the West was crumbling. Britain, Spain and Africa were already gone; Italy was in rapid disintegration. The new enemy were the Huns, the most savage of all the barbarian tribes, most of whom still lived and slept in the open, disdaining all agriculture and even cooked foods – though they would soften raw meat by massaging it between their thighs and the flanks of their horses as they rode. For clothing they favoured tunics made, rather surprisingly, from the skins of field-mice crudely stitched together; these they wore continuously, without ever removing them, until they dropped off of their own accord. They practically lived on their horses: eating, trading, holding their councils, even sleeping in the saddle. Their leader Attila was typical of his race: short, swarthy and snub-nosed, with a thin, straggling beard and beady little eyes set in a head too big for his body. He was not a great ruler, or even a particularly able general; but so overmastering were his ambition, his pride and his lust for power that within the space of a few years he had made himself feared throughout the length and breadth of Europe: more feared, perhaps, than any other single man – with the possible exception of Napoleon – before or since.
But no sooner had Attila begun his march on Rome in 452 than he suddenly halted. Why he did so we do not know. Traditionally the credit has always been given to Pope Leo, who travelled to meet him on the banks of the Mincio river – probably at Peschiera, where the river issues from Lake Garda – and somehow persuaded him to advance no further; but the pagan Hun would not have obeyed the Pope out of mere respect for his office; so what arguments or inducements did Leo offer? A substantial tribute is the likeliest answer. But there is another possibility too: Attila, like all his race, was incorrigibly superstitious, and the Pope may well have reminded him of how Alaric had died almost immediately after his sack of Rome, pointing out that a similar fate was known to befall every invader who raised his hand against the Holy City. It is possible, too, that his subjects themselves were partially responsible for persuading their leader to retire; there is evidence to suggest that, after their devastation of all the surrounding countryside, they were beginning to suffer from a serious shortage of food, and that disease had broken out within their ranks. A final consideration was that troops from Constantinople were beginning to arrive to swell the imperial forces. A march on Rome, it began to appear, might not prove quite as straightforward as had at first been thought.
For some or all of these reasons, Attila decided to turn back. A year later, during the night following his marriage to yet another of his already innumerable wives, his exertions brought on a haemorrhage; and as his life-blood flowed away, all Europe breathed again. While the funeral feast was in progress, a specially selected group of captives encased his body in three coffins: one of gold, one of silver and one of iron. Then, when the body had been lowered into the grave and covered over, first with rich spoils of war and then with earth until the ground was level above it, all those involved in the burial ceremonies were put to death, so that the great king’s last resting place might for ever remain secret and inviolate.
Pope Leo had saved Rome once; but when, only three years later, the Vandal King Gaiseric appeared at the walls, he was less successful. He persuaded Gaiseric not to put the city to the torch; but he could not prevent a hideous fourteen-day sack. The Liber Pontificalis tells us that when the nightmare was over and Leo found that the silver chalices and patens had been plundered from all the churches in Rome, he gave orders for the melting-down of the six great urns from St Peter’s – dating from the time of Constantine – to provide replacements9. By now, after both the Goths and the Vandals had done their worst, there can have been little of the old Rome that was still worth plundering. Imperial Rome was already dead, and past recall; more than a hundred years before, its spirit had passed to Constantinople. What mattered now was Christian, papal Rome – and that, fortunately, was proof against any number of barbarian atrocities.
1 E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. IV.
2 It was under Decius that the first head of the Church was martyred since St Peter: Pope Fabian (236–50), who died from the brutality of his treatment in prison. A few years later, under Valerian, he was followed by Pope Sixtus II (257–8), arrested in the catacombs and beheaded with his attendant deacons.
3 It took its name from the old Roman family of the Laterani, who had originally built it.
4 Constantine had initiated this project to celebrate the successful conclusion of the Council of Nicaea in 325, but it had been given new impetus by his mother St Helena, who had set off two years later at the age of seventy-two for Jerusalem, with the result described above.
5 ‘We do him too much honour when we hail him as the father of religious music in the Christian Church’ (Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, article on ‘Arianism’). We certainly do.
6 Acts I, 18.
7 Constantinople was to have no patriarch of its own until 451.
8 It was at Chalcedon, too, that the bishoprics of Constantinople and Jerusalem were raised to the status of patriarchates, joining those of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch. Constantinople was once again decreed to be second in precedence after Rome.
9 It also reports his decree that ‘a nun should not receive the blessing of a veil without having been tested in her virginity for sixty years’ – by which time she should certainly have deserved it.