Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 18
The destruction of the images proceeded with brutal violence. Leo was not content with destroying them, but likewise ruined the finest works of art. The new patriarch, Anastasius, priest and syncellus of Sancta Sophia, who had played the traitor to the man in whose place the emperor had intruded him, acted with the emperor in all his violence. Bishops were persecuted as idolaters, and above all the monks, who practised painting. The schools directed by them perished almost entirely. Leo is even said to have burnt the famous library with the twelve monks and their superior who presided over it. The imperial edict found no execution in the East only, under Saracenic domination, where the great theologian, John of Damascus, openly opposed the Iconoclasts, as the Pope had; like whom he censured the imperial despotism in religious matters. “It belongs not to kings,” said he, “to lay down laws for the Church. The Apostle said, ‘God has placed in the Church first apostles, then prophets, thirdly, pastors and teachers for the perfection of the Church’; he did not go on to say kings. And, again, ‘Obey those set over you and be subject to them, for they watch over you, as those who will give account for your souls’. And further, ‘Remember your prelates, who have spoken the word of God to you, whose faith follow, considering; the end of their conversation’. Not kings, but apostles and prophets, pastors and doctors spoke the word to you. When God had commanded David concerning building Him a house, He said afterwards to him, ‘Thou shalt not build Me a house, because thou art a man of blood’. The Apostle Paul cried out, ‘Tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour’. To kings belong prosperity of the body politic; the regimen of the Church to pastors and teachers. This, brethren, is the invasion of a robber. Saul rent the mantle of Samuel. What was the retribution? God rent the kingdom from him and gave it to David, the meekest of men. Jezabel persecuted Elias; swine and dogs licked up her blood, and harlots washed themselves in it. Herod slew John, and died eaten up of worms. And now the blessed Germanus, illustrious in life and word, has been scourged and banished with many other bishops and fathers, whose names we know not. Is not this a robber's act? ‘The Lord, when scribes and Pharisees drew near to tempt Him, that they might entangle Him in His talk, and asked Him, is it lawful to give tribute to Cæsar. He answered, bring Me the coin: when they brought it He said, whose image is this? They answered, Cæsar's. And He said, Give then to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, and to God the things of God.’ We yield to you, O emperor, in the things that are secular, tribute, custom, gifts. As to these our substance is in your hands. But in the regimen of the Church we have pastors who have spoken to us the word, and have formed ecclesiastical legislation; we remove not the ancient boundaries which our fathers have set us, but we hold to the traditions as we have received them. For, if we begin to pull about in the smallest thing the structure of the Church, the whole will come to pieces bit by bit.”
While Leo III. was thus violently proscribing and executing the defenders of the Church's rights in the East, St. Gregory II. at Rome censured his interference with the faith, but maintained his sovereignty as emperor in Italy. He had much ado to keep the peoples of Italy within imperial allegiance. When Anastasius, the intruded heretical patriarch of Constantinople, sent the letter announcing his succession to Gregory, the Pope rejected it. The personal acts of the emperor against his life did not move him from his settled purpose. The guardsman Marinus was sent as duke to Rome with orders to kill the Pope, or at least to take him prisoner. He could do nothing. A second attempt was made by the Duke Basil, in conjunction with the chartular Jordanes and the sub-deacon John. A third under the exarch Paul, who caused troops to march against Rome. Romans and Tuscans encountered them and made them retreat. Duke Basil had to save his life by taking refuge in a monastery. The Romans frustrated the further attempts of the exarch, and compelled the Pope to assume the full government of Rome, while the emperor intended to depose him and put a compliant tool in his place. Venice, Ravenna, and the five cities of the Pentapolis, under support of the Lombards, chose themselves dukes, renounced obedience to the exarch, and declared themselves for the cause of the Pope. The purpose of the Italians was to choose themselves a new emperor and advance upon Constantinople. Only the fidelity and the prudence of the Pope, who still hoped for the emperor's amendment, prevented the execution of this project.
The Lombard king, Liutprand, thought it was just the opportunity for which he was waiting to extend his monarchy in central Italy. Exhilaratus, imperial prefect at Naples, with his son Adrian, got possession of part of Campania, and set the people against the Pope; but the Romans attacked them, and after a furious battle slew them both. They chased the duke Peter from Rome. In the territory of Ravenna it came to a fierce struggle between the Italians on the Pope's side and the imperials, in which the exarch Paul lost his life. The Lombards took many cities, especially in the Pentapolis, and well nigh put an end to the imperial dominion there. King Liutprand advanced as far as Sutri, took it, but a hundred and forty days later bestowed it upon the Apostles Peter and Paul, that is, the Roman Church. This was in the year 727. It is reckoned by some the first beginning of the State of the Church.
Then it lay in the hand of the Pope to put an end to Byzantine dominion in central Italy. The exarchate was in Liutprand's possession. Had Gregory II. come to terms with him, the Pope would have obtained a free hand over the duchy of Rome. It already refused tribute to the emperor; in arms repulsed his troops, frustrated the repeated attempts upon the freedom and life of Gregory II., and bound itself under oath to protect him. The city of Rome expelled the imperial duke, and seems to have given itself a municipal government. It was the desire of the cities on the Adriatic to substitute an orthodox for an heretical emperor. Had the Pope put himself at the head of this revolt, the emperor's power was at an end. He did it not. He maintained the purity and the freedom of the faith against imperial interference; but he urged the population to continue their allegiance to the sovereign. No stronger proof of this can be given than a letter of the Pope to Ursus, doge of Venice, in these words: “Gregory, the bishop, servant of the servants of God, to Ursus, duke of Venice. Since by sinful action the city of Ravenna, the head of all, has been captured by that unutterable race of Lombards, and our son, the noble lord the exarch, is, as we know, sojourning at Venice, your nobility should support him, and maintain his cause, as we do, that the city of Ravenna may return to the former condition of the sacred commonwealth, as belonging to the domain of our lords and sons, the high emperors Leo and Constantine. So by the help of the Lord we may be able to remain firm, by zeal and love to our holy faith, in the commonwealth and the imperial service. God preserve you in safety, beloved son.”
This conduct could not fail to endanger the Pope's position with king Liutprand. In the year 728 the strangest scene of this perplexed time took place. The Lombard king appeared with his host before Rome. Pope Gregory II. visited him in his camp, and exercised such influence over him that the king desisted from the siege, went as pilgrim to the Apostle's tomb, and left as gifts there his crown, his arms, and his mantle.
Such events as these fill up the last four years of Gregory II. The result was what we might expect. Lord of Rome the emperor was called; Pope Gregory II. became in fact a glorious beginning of the papal rule. Not reckless force, not ambitious struggle and self-seeking formed the basis of this rule, but the free voice of the population in return for real protection, for duty steadfastly fulfilled, for never-failing courage, firm belief, and holy life. Put on the one hand the struggles, the fierce enmities, the treacheries, the revolts, the scenes of blood, the shifting of parties evoked by the Iconoclast storm in Italy and Rome, threatened by the two antagonists, Greeks and Lombards; and on the other hand the great activity of Pope Gregory II. in his own spiritual domain. And then estimate the Pope who repulsed Leo III. in his attack upon the Church's indefeasible rights, but maintained him as emperor; who fostered St. Boniface, enabling him by erecting a united hierarchy to lay the foundation of a Germany, one and Christian. We may fairly place the second Gregory by the side of the first for prudence, for courage, for insight, for the sagacity of a ruler in the person of a saint. The great annalist has even said of him, “If what he wrote were extant, and what he did had been more carefully recorded, he would be thought no less than Gregory the Great”.
On the 11th February, 731, St. Gregory II. closed a pontificate as renowned in its present action, as fruitful in its results. While the clergy and laity stood beside his coffin, they chose his successor, who was consecrated thirty-five days later, when the consent of the exarch was brought from Ravenna, this being the last time it was given by a viceroy of the Greek emperor.
Concerning this Pope, Anastasius writes: – “Gregory III., a Syrian by nation, son of John. He sat ten years, two months, and twenty days. A man most meek and most wise, well instructed in the holy Scriptures, knowing both the Greek and Latin tongues. He knew all the psalms by heart, in their order, and was exceedingly skilful in their meaning by his long study of them. He was a polished speaker, an exhorter to all good works, a favourite popular preacher, a maintainer of the Catholic and Apostolic faith immutilate, who, by his fatherly warnings, ceased not to strengthen the hearts of the faithful, a fearless and zealous defender of orthodoxy: a lover of poverty, providing solicitously for those in want, not only with piety, but with careful pains. Redeemer of captives, generous supporter of orphans and widows: a lover of the religious life, so, by God's help, he reached the sacred order of the priesthood. Upon him the Romans, moved from the highest to the lowest by an inspiration from heaven, while he was absorbed in devotion beside the coffin of his predecessor, suddenly laid their hands and chose him for pontiff. It was in the times of the emperors Leo and Constantine, in the midst of that persecution which they set up, for the casting down and destruction of the sacred images of our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Mother of God, of the apostles, and all saints and confessors. The same most holy man issued writings with the vigour of the Apostolic See, like as his predecessor of holy memory had done, to move them to repentance, and to put away this error.”
Anastasius then records how the emperor had imprisoned his messenger in Sicily. “Whereupon the pontiff, with greater zeal, attended by the archbishops of Grado and Ravenna, with other bishops of the western part, to the number of ninety-three, held a Council at the sacred confession of St. Peter's most holy body, with all the clergy and the people, and passed a decree, that if henceforth there be any who, despising those who faithfully retain the ancient usage of the Apostolic Church, pull down, destroy, profane, or blaspheme the veneration of the Sacred Images, that is, of our God and Lord Jesus Christ, of His Ever-Virgin Mother, the immaculate and glorious Mary, of the blessed apostles, and of all saints, he be debarred from the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, from the unity and structure of the whole Church. This they all solemnly confirmed with their subscriptions.”
While the emperor replied to the Council's decree by imprisoning the papal bearer of it for a year in Sicily, the position of Pope Gregory III. was one of great difficulty in respect to the Lombard duchies of Benevento and Spoleto. They desired to be set free from their loose connection with King Liutprand, who, on his part, desired their complete subordination to himself. To the Pope their maintenance was of great importance. Thence arose a web of party-shiftings, treaties, and counter treaties, which encompasses the whole later history of the Lombard kingdom.
The archbishop of Ravenna had taken part in the Council at Rome, and his city was as much opposed to the emperor's godless attempts as was Rome. Leo III. resolved to be avenged upon the Pope and Italy. He put a great fleet under the command of the Duke Manes, and ordered him to sack Ravenna, to treat the cities of the Pentapolis as rebels, to march on Rome, to destroy the images there, to treat without mercy those who attempted to defend them, to seize the Pope, and bring him in fetters to Constantinople. But storms deranged these plans. A hurricane fell upon the fleet as it was in sight of Ravenna. Part of it was sunk with all the crews: part managed to reach an arm of the Po, close to the city. Manes disembarked troops from it, and went against Ravenna. The people took arms, with the bishop at their head: whilst the women and old men went in sackcloth and ashes through the streets in supplication; the young marched out against the enemy, and drew him into an ambuscade. The Greeks flew to their ships, many of which were sunk, and the 26th June, 733, was kept as a perpetual festival in Ravenna: while, for six years out of hatred to the Greeks the conquerors would eat no fish from that arm of the river.
Leo became furious at this reverse: he redoubled his cruelty on the defenders of images, and since he could hurt the Roman Church in no other way, he confiscated all the possessions of the Church in his realm. In the words of Theophanes, “That opponent of God, roused to a greater madness, and indulging further in his Arabian mind, imposed capitation taxes on the third part of Calabria and Sicily. Moreover, he ordered to be paid to the public treasury the so-named patrimonies of the holy chief apostles honoured at Rome, three golden talents and a-half, which had been paid of old to the churches, and he subjected to inspection and enrolment the male children, as Pharaoh did of old to the Hebrews: what not even his teachers, the Arabs, had done to the Christians in the East.”
But he did a great deal more and a worse thing not noted by Theophanes. By an arbitrary act of secular despotism he severed from the jurisdiction of the Roman patriarch not only Calabria and Sicily, but the ten Illyrian provinces, Epirus, Illyricum, Macedonia, Thessaly, Achaia – that is present Greece – Dacia, Mæsia, Dardania, Prævalis, and attached them to the patriarchate of Constantinople. By this act its jurisdiction became co-extensive with the eastern empire, and the patriarch ecumenical in that sense of the Greek word which considered their own empire as pre-eminently the world, the land that is inhabited by men, as contra-distinguished from the land foraged by barbarians.
The patriarch to whom this honour accrued was that Anastasius who had been put by force into the place of the deposed Germanus, and was afterwards scourged and deposed by the same force under Leo's son and successor, Kopronymus.
Calabria and Sicily returned to the jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch when the eastern emperor lost his dominion in them. The other provinces remained under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, the gift of an heretical emperor to a patriarch raised by him as his instrument to the ecumenical throne and at last deposed by his son as an instrument of little value.
In this act we see the completion of the aggression begun in the year 381, which attempted to give to the see of Constantinople the second rank in the Church. The sees of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem have sunk under it, but they have fallen into Saracen domination, and are little more than names; the diminished empire has in its capital the only real patriarch, and seeks to indemnify him for eastern losses by severing ten provinces from the patriarchal jurisdiction of Rome, under which they had been from the beginning of the Christian hierarchy. And Nova Roma, halved it is true in its secular extension, and trembling at the perpetual aggression of the Mohammedan chalif, beholds at length its patriarch standing over against the elder Rome as the chief instrument of imperial despotism in spiritual things.
Leo III. consciously completes the structure which Theodosius unwittingly began. The exaltation of the see of the capital is from beginning to end the work of imperial power, and this special character bears out to the full the denunciation of it by St. Gregory the Great in his own time, when he called the bishop's assumed title “a name of blasphemy and diabolical pride, and a forerunner of anti-Christ”.
Further, the acts of Leo III. in 733 are unanimously viewed by historians as having a large effect in the deliverance of Italy from the eastern sovereignty, and his arrogation of the power to sever from the Pope, patriarch, a large extent of provinces is viewed no less as a prelude to the great schism between the East and West. The remaining years of Gregory III. are filled up with his embarrassing position between the Lombard duchies of Benevento and Spoleto and Liutprand aiming at uniting Italy in a Lombard monarchy, whereby the Pope should become his subject as before he had been a subject of the Goths. From the moment when king Liutprand resumed more decidedly his plan against the Greek possessions and therefore against the duchy of Rome, he was bound to endeavour to end the independence of the two outlying Lombard duchies. But at the same time the alliance between these duchies and the papacy became a political necessity.
In the year 738 Liutprand took the field. He began with incursions into the territory of Ravenna, and invited the dukes of Spoleto and Benevento to attack the duchy of Rome. They refused, since, as Pope Gregory III. in one of his letters informs us, they had declared that they would not take the field against God's holy Church and her people, with whom they had entered into covenant. Thereupon the king made war against his disobedient liegemen. While he laid waste the possessions of the Church in the territory of Ravenna, he sat down before Spoleto in the spring of 739 with a considerable force. Duke Thrasimund could not resist and fled to Rome. In June the king entered Spoleto. He compelled Benevento to receive his nephew Gregory for duke. At the same time he drew the exarch to his interest, to whom the Pope's independence had long been odious. The confused accounts of annalists and historians make it difficult, if not impossible, to establish particular events in chronological accuracy. And the greatest uncertainty lies upon one of these events which is of particular importance, since it would secure for us an adequate reason for the Pope's conduct. Liutprand is said immediately after the taking of Spoleto to have appeared before Rome, demanding that the fugitive duke should be delivered up to him. Encamped in the meadows of Nero, beside the Vatican, he plundered St. Peter's, laid waste the neighbourhood, and made many Romans prisoners. It is certain that he took four cities in the Tuscan part of the Roman duchy, Amelia, Ortes, Bomarzo, and Bleda, as hostages for Duke Thrasimund.
The Pope was in the utmost danger of being speedily swallowed up by the encircling Lombard monarchy. Another siege of Rome, perhaps its capture, was to be immediately expected. The Lombard duchies were unable to repulse the Lombard king: for defence the emperor was impotent. He could send a fleet to ravage the imperial metropolis of Italy; he could not defend the ancient mistress and maker of his empire: from whom he still took a title, which seemed a mockery. The Lombard threatened to dethrone Leo and make the Pope his subject. The dread of sacrificing the Church's independence drove St. Gregory III. to the last and sole remaining refuge.
The relations of the Franks to Rome had been various since the emperor Maximian had received the Salian Franks into the number of Rome's allies. After the victory over Syagrius, near Soissons, Clovis had raised up the Gallic-Frankish kingdom upon the ruins of Roman and Visigoth dominion. When baptised by St. Remigius, Clovis had become the first Catholic king in the midst of northern peoples attached to Arianism. This had brought him into manifold connection with the Holy See. In the time of Pope Gregory II., the conversion to the faith of Germany, from the Rhine as far as Saxony and Thuringia, not only relied for support, but had its root in the Frankish kingdom, and bound it still closer with the Papacy. There were also connections of another sort. As far back as the year 577, the emperor Justin II., conscious of his own impotence, had given to the messenger from Rome, soliciting help against Lombard aggression, for answer, either to seek to gain one of the Lombard dukes, or, if that failed, to draw the Franks to make a diversion by an expedition into Italy. The emperor Mauritius had himself made use of these means. From the year 584, king Childebert had been induced, by Byzantine invitation and gold, to undertake four campaigns against the Lombards. But it was reserved to a stronger family than his to co-operate in producing a great change south of the Alps. At the head of a people formed by the conjunction of various races amalgamated out of Germans, Gauls, and Romans, there grew up, in spite of sundry partial divisions, the mass of a mighty monarchy, north of the Alps. The weakness of the larger number of the kings who succeeded Clovis caused the chief officers of the crown to increase in strength. The lower the Merovingians sank, the higher rose the sons of Pipin, from the banks of the Meuse, until they equalled and outgrew the effete race. By the end of the first quarter of the eighth century, Charles Martell, Major Domus, first of the Austrasian, and then of the Neustrian-Frankish realm, had all power in his hands. In October, 732, he had won a greater merit from all the West than, perhaps, even Aetius and the Visigoth kings had gained. They had repulsed the vast Mongol mass at Chalons: he, by Tours, in a bloody battle, had set bounds for ever to the advance of the Arabians, overflooding Gaul after the conquest of Spain. He threw them back upon the uttermost south of Gaul, from which, after many a battle, they were forced to recross the Pyrenees.
To Charles Martell, shining in the lustre of that great victory which saved the West from Mohammed, as Leo III. prevented his entrance into Constantinople, the beleagured Pope turned from the cruel yet impotent tyranny of Leo, and the pretension of the encroaching Lombard. And his own words, at the moment of trial, will better express his situation than any others which can be put in his mouth: —
“We have thought it necessary to write again to your Excellency for the excessive grief which is in our heart, and for our tears, confiding that you are a loving son of St. Peter, prince of the apostles, and ours also, and that from reverence to him you will listen to our charge for the defence of God's Church, and his own peculiar people: we, who can no longer endure the persecution and oppression of the Lombard race. They have taken from us all the lights in St. Peter's Church, which were given by your relations or yourself. Next to God, we take refuge in you: for this the Lombards oppress and make a mock of us. St. Peter's Church is stripped, and reduced to utter desolation. But we have rather confided the details of our sorrows to your liegeman, the bearer of this, which he may present by word of mouth. O my son, may the Prince of the Apostles deal with thee now and in the future life before our Almighty God, as thou disposest and contendest with all speed for his Church and our defence, that all nations may know your fidelity, your pure intention, the love which you bear to the Prince of the Apostles, to us, and to his peculiar people, by your zeal and your defence of us. And by it you will also gain eternal life.”
Either with this letter, or before it, the Pope had sent to Charles Martell the keys of St. Peter's Confession, together with rich presents. His messengers were received with great honour, but no actual help in soldiers came. It is supposed that Charles Martell was then engaged, together with Eudo, Duke of Aquitania, in expelling the Saracens from Southern France.
The acts of Leo III., as an open enemy of the Pope's spiritual power, by his completion of the Byzantine patriarch's usurped jurisdiction in the year 733, as above described, thus precede, by about five years, the appeal made to Charles Martell, by Gregory III., in the face of the advancing Lombard king, Liutprand, on the one hand, and the absence of any protection by the emperor on the other.
Such was the uncertain position of things when, in the year 741, the three great actors were withdrawn from this life, Leo III., on the 18th June, Charles Martell, on the 24th October, Gregory III., on the 27th November.
Of what this most noble Pope did for Rome, Anastasius gives a long account. If the Romans loved and admired him as a cardinal priest, they loved and admired him no less as Pontiff to the end. While fully acknowledging still the sovereignty of the eastern emperor, a man as unworthy of the loyalty which bound the Pope to him, as a sovereign could be, the Pope neither by his heresy nor by his tyranny was induced to renounce him. He did, indeed, one great and momentous act. He sent to Charles Martell the keys of St. Peter's Confession, conjuring him in the name and person of the Apostle, to save his city from the Lombard robber: the city which its sovereign was neither able nor willing to save: the city on which the robber was descending with the utmost force. It is supposed that Charles Martell was engaged in battle with the Saracens in Southern France at the time. The Pope sent a second time, to the great leader, the Hammer of the infidel, the Liberator of the Christian. What took place is not exactly known: but the Lombard king, Liutprand, retired in the month of August, 739, from the siege of Rome with his army to Pavia, and helped Charles Martell against the Saracens, who had again invaded Provence. Then also Rome was saved by her pontiff from becoming a Lombard prey.
Once more towards the end of 741, Liutprand was preparing a new expedition against Rome and its duchy, when Rome lost, on the 27th November, St. Gregory III., its pontiff, prince, and champion. At Constantinople, Leo III. had been succeeded by his son, Kopronymus, whom the Greek Zonaras calls, “a cub more cruel than his sire”. Rome seemed covered by a terrible tempest: France had been deprived not a month before of Charles Martell. All minds were in fearful expectation, when a star of peace appeared on the horizon. There rose up one who, by the force of his mind and the unsparing risk of his own person, was to preserve Italy during ten years from the destruction which seemed impending.
Upon the death of Pope Gregory III., the Roman chair was filled in four days. The usual three days having been devoted to the solemn funeral of that Pope, the electors, on the fourth day, which was Sunday, the 2nd December, met in the Lateran palace, and immediately united their votes on the person of Zacharias, and he was consecrated the same day. Two things combined to bring about this rapid election and ordination, one the extraordinary merit of the elected, the other the extreme urgency of the public need, as Rome, with its provinces, was threatened by King Liutprand. The confirmation by the exarch, that token of imperial oppression, was not waited for. Zacharias was the last of those illustrious orientals of whom a series at this time occupied the Roman Chair. Though born in Italy, being a native of the Calabrian city, St. Severina, he was Greek by lineage. Of him and of his predecessor, Photius himself, the leader of the Greek schism, has left written, “How could I pass over in silence the two Roman prelates, Gregory and Zacharias, who were eminent for their virtue, who contributed to increase the flock of Christ by their teaching full of divine wisdom, who were even conspicuous by the divine gift of miracles?” Of Zacharias, the character given by Anastasius is, “a man most meek and gentle, adorned with every goodness, a lover of the clergy and all the Roman people, slow to anger and quick to mercy, rendering to no man evil for evil, nor punishing according to desert, but from the time of his ordination made kind and tender to all: so that he returned good for evil to his former persecutors, both promoting and enriching them”. During ten years, Zacharias, by his wisdom and personal influence, kept at bay the three Lombard kings, Liutprand, Rachis, and Aistulf, who seemed on the point of completing the long-fostered ambition of their people by the absorption of Rome into a barbarian kingdom. The whole time is a contest of mind against matter, of right against encroachment. We learn, by the very words of these Popes, that even in the eighth century the radical opposition between Romans and Lombards continued still as in the time of the first invasion under Alboin. The end of the Lombards was to make themselves lords of all Italy: that of the Romans, to prevent themselves passing under a barbarian yoke. True peace there could never be between them. A truce, liable at any time to be broken, was all that could subsist.
Three times at least in the ten years of his pontificate, Zacharias repeated, with Lombard kings, the action of his great predecessor, Leo, with Attila. Liutprand, after thirty years of reign, was consolidating his kingdom by the reduction of the two Lombard dukedoms, Spoleto and Benevento. Bent upon gaining Rome, when he had subdued Spoleto, free from the check of Charles Martell, secure of the East by the contested succession to Leo of his son, Kopronymus, Liutprand was at Terni. Thither Pope Zacharias resolved to go in person, accompanied by a train of clergy. Liutprand received the Pope with great honour, and the result of a long interview was that he agreed to restore to the Pope four cities of the Roman duchy which he had taken. He likewise gave back the patrimony of Sabina, which he had seized thirty years before, and made peace with the Roman duchy for twenty years. The Pope returned as it were in triumph to Rome, was received with exultation, and ordered a procession of thanksgiving from the Church of St. Mary of the Martyrs, that is, the Pantheon, to St. Peter's. This was in his first year, 742.
