Patrimonium Sancti Petri - Political Position of The Papacy

Political Position of The Papacy

The pope thus became the champion of all the oppressed, the political champion of all those who were unwilling to submit to foreign domination, who were unwilling to become Lombards or yet wholly Byzantines, preferring to remain Romans.

This political aspect of the papacy became in time very prominent, as Rome, after the removal of the imperial residence to the East, was no longer the seat of any of the higher political officials. Even after the partition of the empire, the Western emperors preferred to make the better-protected Ravenna their residence. Here was the centre of Odoacer's power and of the Ostrogothic rule; here also, after the fall of the Ostrogoths, the 'viceroy' of the Byzantine emperor in Italy, the exarch, resided.

In Rome on the other hand, the pope appears with ever-increasing frequency as the advocate of the needy population; thus Pope Leo I intercedes with Attila the Hun king and Geiserich the Vandal king, and Pope Gelasius I with Theodoric the Ostrogothic king. Cassiodorus, as praefectus praetorio under the Ostrogothic supremacy, actually entrusted the care of the temporal affairs to Pope John II.

When Emperor Justinian issued the Pragmatic Sanction of 554, the pope and the Senate were entrusted with the control of weights and measures. Thenceforth for two centuries the popes were most loyal supporters of the Byzantine government against the encroachments of the Lombards, and were all the more indispensable, because after 603 the Senate disappeared.

The popes were now the only court of judicature at which the Roman city population, exposed to the extortion of the Byzantine functionaries and officers, could find protection and defence (a task more often entrusted to bishops as Defensor populi). No wonder then that at scarcely any other time was the papacy so popular in Central Italy, and there was no cause which the native population, who had again begun to organise themselves into bodies of militia, espoused with greater zeal then the freedom and independence of the Roman See. And naturally so, for they took part in the election of the pope as a separate electoral body.

When the Byzantine emperors, with cæsaro-papist tendencies, attempted to crush the papacy also, they found in the Roman militia an opposition against which they were able to accomplish nothing. The particularism of Italy awoke and concentrated itself about the pope. When Emperor Justinian II in 692 attempted to have Pope Sergius I (as formerly the unfortunate pope Martin I) forcibly conveyed to Constantinople to extract from him his assent to the canons of the Trullan Council, convoked by the emperor, the militia of Ravenna and of the Duchy of Pentapolis lying immediately to the south assembled, marched into Rome, and compelled the departure of the emperor's plenipotentiary. Such occurrences were repeated and acquired significance as indicating the popular feeling.

When Pope Constantine, the last pope to go to Constantinople (710), rejected the confession of faith of the new emperor, Bardanas, the Romans protested, and refused to acknowledge the emperor or the dux (military commander and virtual governor) sent by him. Only after the heretical emperor had been replaced by one of the true Faith was the dux allowed to assume his office, in 713.

In AD 715 the papal chair, which had last been occupied by seven eastern popes, was filled by a westerner, Pope Gregory II, who was destined to oppose Leo III the Isaurian in the Iconoclastic conflict. The time was ripening for Rome to abandon the East, turn toward the West, and enter into that alliance with the Germano-Romanic nations, on which is based our Western civilization, of which one consequence was the formation of the States of the Church. It would have been easy for the popes to throw off the Byzantine yoke in Central Italy as early as the time of Iconoclasm, but waited wisely until it was clearly establish that the Byzantines could no longer protect the pope and the Romans against the Lombards, and they found another power that could protect them, the Frankish kingdom, in the middle of the eighth century.