Thomas Allies - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I

Had such a vision been vouchsafed to either of these great saints, with what words of thankfulness would he have described it. This is the subject which this narrative opens; and we, the long-descended offspring of these hordes, have seen this sight and witnessed this exertion of power carried on through centuries; and degenerate and ungrateful children as we are, we are living still upon the deeds which God wrought in that conversion of the nations by the pastoral staff of St. Peter, leading them into a land flowing with oil and wine.

When St. Leo refused his assent to the Canons in favour of the see of Constantinople, which, at the end of the Council of Chalcedon, the Court, the clergy, and above all Anatolius, the bishop of the imperial city, desired to be passed, and with that intent overbore the resistance of the Papal legates, the race of Theodosius was still reigning both at Old and at New Rome. The eastern sovereigns, Marcian and Pulcheria, by becoming whose husband Marcian had ascended the throne, had acted with conspicuous loyalty towards the Pope. The mistakes of Theodosius II. were repaired, and the cabals of his courtiers ceased to affect the stronger minds and faithful hearts of his successors. In the West, Galla Placidia, during all the reign, since the death, in 423, of her brother Honorius, with which her nephew Theodosius II. had invested her, was also faithful to St. Peter's See; the same spirit directed her son Valentinian, and his empress-cousin, the daughter of the eastern emperor. The letters of all exist, in which they strove to set right their father, or nephew, Theodosius II., in the matter of Eutyches. All had supported St. Leo in the annulling that unhappy Council which compromised the faith of the Church so long as it was allowed to count as a Council. But not for any merit on the part of Pulcheria and Marcian would St. Leo allow the mere grandeur of a royal city, because it was the seat of empire, to dethrone from their original rank, held since the beginning of the Christian hierarchy, the two other Sees of St. Peter – the one of his disciple St. Mark, sent from his side at Rome; the other, in which he had first sat himself. St. Leo could not the least foresee that the course of things in less than a generation would justify by the plainest evidence of facts his maintenance of tradition and his prescience of future dangers. He had charged Anatolius with seeking unduly to exalt himself at the expense of his brethren. The exaltation consisted in making himself the second bishop of the Church. His see, a hundred and twenty years before, had, if it existed at all – for it is all but lost in insignificance – been merely a suffragan of the archbishop of Heraclea. Leo saw that Anatolius, under cover of the emperor's permanent residence in Nova Roma, sought to make its bishop the lever by which the whole episcopate of the East should be moved. We are now to witness the attempt to carry into effect all which St. Leo feared by a bishop who was next successor but one to Anatolius in his see.

The changes, indeed, wrought in a few years were immense. St. Leo himself outlived both Pulcheria and Marcian; and on the death of the latter saw the imperial succession, which had been in some sense hereditary since the election of Valentinian I., in 364, pass to a new man. As this is the first occasion on which the succession to the Byzantine throne comes into our review, it may be well to consider what sort of thing it was. I suppose the Cæsarean succession even from the first is a hard thing to bring under any definition. Since Claudius was discovered quaking for fear behind a curtain, and dragged out to sit upon the throne which his nephew Caius had hastily vacated, after having been welcomed to it four years before with universal acclamation, it would be difficult to say what made a man emperor of the Romans. So much I seem to see in that terrible line, that the descent from father to son was hardly ever blessed, and that those who were adopted by an emperor no way related to them succeeded the best. The children of the very greatest emperors – of a Marcus Aurelius, a Constantine, a Theodosius – have only brought shame on their parents and ruin on their empire. Again, if the youth of a Nero or a Caracalla ended in utter ignominy, the youth of an Alexander Severus produced the fairest of reigns, while it ended in his murder by an usurper. But strange and anomalous as the Cæsarean succession appears, that of the Byzantine sovereigns, from the disappearance of the Theodosian race to the last Constantine who dies on the ramparts of the city made by the first, shows a great deterioration. 29 29 See Philips, Kirchenrecht , vol. iii., sec. 119. There was no acknowledged principle of succession. Arbitrary force determined it. One robber followed another upon the throne; so that the eastern despot seemed to imitate that ghastly rule, in the wood by Nemi, "of the priest who slew the slayer and shall himself be slain". If the army named one man to the throne, the fleet named another. If intrigue and shameless deceit gained it in one case, murder succeeded in another. Relationship or connection by marriage with the last possessor helped but rarely. This frequent and irregular change, and the personal badness of most sovereigns, caused endless confusion to the realm. This is the staple of the thousand years in which the election of the emperor Leo I., in 457, stands at the head. On the death of Marcian, following that of Pulcheria, in whose person a woman first became empress regnant, Leo was a Thracian officer, a colonel of the service, and director of the general Aspar's household. Aspar was an Arian Goth, commander of the troops, who had influence enough to make another man emperor, but not to cancel the double blot of barbarian and heretic in his own person. He made Leo, with the intention to be his master. And Leo ruled for seventeen years with some credit; and presently put Aspar and his son to death, in a treacherous manner, but not without reason. He bore a good personal character, was Catholic in his faith, and St. Leo lived on good terms with him during the four years following his election. St. Leo, dying in 461, was succeeded by Pope Hilarus, the deacon and legate who brought back a faithful report to Rome of the violent Council at Ephesus, in 449, from which he had escaped. Pope Hilarus was succeeded in 468 by Simplicius, and in 474 the emperor Leo died, leaving the throne to an infant grandson of the same name, the son of his daughter Ariadne, by an Isaurian officer Zeno, who reigned at first as the guardian of his son, and a few months afterwards came by that son's death to sole power as emperor. The worst character is given to Zeno by the national historians. His conduct was so vile, and his government so discredited by irruptions of the Huns on the Danube, and of Saracens in Mesopotamia, that his wife's stepmother Verina, the widow of Leo I., conspired against him, and was able to set her brother Basiliscus on the throne. Zeno took flight; Basiliscus was proclaimed emperor. He declared himself openly against the Catholic faith in favour of the Eutycheans. But Basiliscus was, if possible, viler than Zeno, and after twenty months Zeno was brought back. The usurper's short rule lasted from October, 475, to June, 477; exactly, therefore, at the time when Odoacer put an end to the western empire. It was upon Zeno's recovery of the throne that he received back from the Roman senate the sovereign insignia, and conferred the title of Roman Patricius on Odoacer. In the following years Zeno had much to do with Theodorich. He gave up to him part of Dacia and Mœsia, and finally he made, in 484, the king of the Ostrogoths Roman consul, as a reward for the services to the Roman emperor. But, afterwards, Theodorich ravaged Zeno's empire up to the walls of Constantinople, and was bought off by a commission to march into Italy and to dethrone Odoacer. Zeno continued an inglorious and unhappy reign, full of murders, deceits, and crimes of every sort, for fourteen years after his restoration, and died in 491.