Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III. Allies Thomas William
the Mesopotamian provinces. Julian perished in them. Mark Antony won no honour of Rome's eastern rival: Crassus and his host never returned. Galerius was stuffed and served as a footstool for the great king to mount on horseback. Into the heart of that eastern realm Heraclius threw himself fearlessly. He made his own army out of divers peoples, and shared their dangers. Host after host he overthrew, as only the son of Philip, the conqueror without his match, had done before him. In the end, on the very spot where a Roman emperor, the special despiser of the Nazarene, and fostering in his heart the destruction of the Church as the crowning work of his reign, to be achieved upon his return as conqueror, perished by a Persian lance, Heraclius, after driving to despair the great king, the persecutor of the Cross, its possessor by conquest, saw him dethroned, famished, and at last shot to death by his son. He received from that son, the successor of the murdered father, abundant satisfaction for the wrongs which the Roman empire had suffered from its great rival of so many hundred years.
But, moreover, during these very seven years in which Heraclius won a perpetual victory in the name of the Cross – the wood of which he brought back as a conqueror to Jerusalem, giving thanks and worship, and replaced it with the seal which guarded it unbroken in its old sanctuary – an Arabian trafficker who had gained his living by carrying goods from city to city, and lived virtuously with one wife much his elder, upon her death, when he was more than fifty years of age, was assuming the name of a prophet and the position of a conqueror. The year in which Heraclius started is the same in which this pretension was set up. His claim to be a prophet is exactly coincident with the years in which he was taking to himself wife after wife, in which, entering suddenly the tent of his adopted son, he was seduced by a casual glance on that wife's beauty to desire her, to obtain her, and to forge a permission from the Most High to take as many wives as he pleased, and the wives of others – a forgery as yet unique in all the history of imposture; for many bad men have taken the wives of others, but no one except Mohammed has pretended to have a divine sanction for an act which treads under foot all human justice, and pulls down for the lust of one man the very foundation of domestic life.
It is of this man that one who has analysed his religion and described its course opens his work with these words: —
“Since the beginning of the world has no other man – mere man – ever exerted so boundless an influence on the human race in the relations of religion, morality, and polity as Mohammed, the Arab. A man, by no means one of those rare spirits whom Providence at times evokes and endues with genius to open a path for a new world – a man rather whose mind was enclosed in narrow limits, poor in ideas for the construction of a new religion: a man such as this has for twelve hundred years cast his net of artless yet impenetrable links of doctrine round a hundred million souls – roots of teaching which have sunk into the marrow of men's minds, have taken up into themselves and mastered the whole of life, and impressed a uniform stamp on the thoughts and deeds of races as well as individuals.”
The seven years of Heraclius form part of the ten years of this Mohammed, in which the trader turns prophet and the reformer of religion endeavours to put a divine sanction on polygamy, in conjunction with a boundless concubinage of which captives were the prey.
As eighteen years of continual defeat by the Persians, from 604 to 622, had reduced the Eastern empire to a state of demoralised weakness, so the seven succeeding years, from 622 to 629, in which Heraclius wrought a full revenge on the Persian king, inflicted no passing collapse upon the empire resuscitated by the Sassanides in the third century. King Siroes did not long enjoy the fruit of his parricide. He reigned six months and then he died – some say of the plague, some of remorse. After his death the throne of Persia seemed to become a seat of murder. His young son, Ardeschir, or Artaxerxes, was killed after reigning seven months by his uncle, the general Sarbar. Sarbar kept the throne two months and was killed. Devanschir took his place. He was followed by Borane, a daughter of Chosroes. She was replaced by a certain Tschaschindeh, who was followed by Borane's sister, Azermidokt. A certain Kesra, or Chosroes, succeeded, and he gave way to a Ferokzad. Finally, Jezdedjerd, a grandson of the last Chosroes, was crowned in the year 632. Thus in the short space of four years about nine persons succeeded to the throne by murder. Jezdedjerd III. began his reign in the year Mohammed died. He is called by Theophanes, Hormisdas. He had the honour to be the last king of Persia and to end his days by the sword of the Arab in 651. His son, Peroxes, became a captain in the life-guards of the emperor of China at Singapore, and left no posterity.
After this glimpse at the action of the Byzantine and Persian empires on each other during the thirty years which follow immediately on the death of St. Gregory, we turn to consider the conduct of the temporal liege-lord of the Pope towards him whom he recognised as successor of St. Peter.
The emperor Phocas, following in this his predecessor Justinian, had expressly enjoined on the patriarch of Constantinople to recognise the Primacy of Rome. What the chroniclers remark is important, that Boniface III., the next to succeed St. Gregory, received a decree from Phocas, in which he solemnly declared that the See of the Roman Church was to be considered the head of Christendom. It may be remarked here that Phocas did not say a word more than his predecessor, Marcian, said to St. Leo a hundred and fifty years before. Phocas may be named a tyrant, but Marcian has left an unspotted reputation as a Christian king and Roman prince, who received the empire with the hand of Pulcheria, heiress of the great Theodosius, and the only descendant worthy of his greatness, whose name stands also on the diptychs of the Catholic Church as a virgin saint.
Upon the history of the City of Rome during the first half of the seventh century the greatest obscurity rests. It was indeed the most frightful and destructive century for the former queen-city of the world. The Book of the Popes by Anastasius trickles in a slender thread amid war, famine, and pestilence, and inundations of the Tiber; but it is all we have to look at.
With the death of the great Pontiff, who guarded and fed his city while the calamities which he saw all round the sphere of his vision over the whole Church led him to look for the end of the world, the See of Peter remained half a year unfilled until his successor, Sabinianus of Volterra, formerly Papal Nuncio at the Byzantine court, received the confirmation of his election from the exarch or the emperor. The confirmation of each pope's election was, as a rule, obtained either from the exarch or direct from the emperor. It was a business both costly and protracted. It also made the spiritual head of Rome dependent for his recognition on the imperial court. I find that in the period of 111 years, running from the death of St. Gregory in 604 to the death of Pope Constantine in 715, twenty-four popes succeeded. Of these the first, Sabinian, in 604, had to wait six months. Phocas confirmed the election of Boniface III., the next pope, after a year. He died in November, 607, and Boniface IV. following took his seat in August, 608. When he died, Pope Deusdedit waited five months. At his death Boniface V. succeeded after a year, in 619. Pope Honorius followed Boniface in five days and sat during thirteen years, but at his death the confirmation of his successor, Pope Severinus, was delayed by Greek intrigue, and for a purpose hereafter to be mentioned, during nineteen months and sixteen days, so that he only sat from the 28th May to the 1st August, 640. St. Martin in 649 did not wait for the imperial confirmation; he was first banished and then martyred by the emperor Constans II., who put in by threats his successor, Eugenius, during his lifetime. St. Leo II. waited eighteen months in 682, after the death of Pope Agatho, and the next Pope, Benedict II., a year in 684.
This privation of its original freedom, according to which the Pope's consecration followed at once upon his complete and legitimate election by clergy and people, the Roman Church owed to the Arian Herule Odoacer, during his occupation of Italy. It was eagerly grasped, after Theodorich and Theodatus had exercised it, by Justinian, when he became, by conquest, lord of Rome. I have already recorded the infamous violence exerted by Belisarius as soon as he had entered Rome, at the bidding of the Empress Theodora, upon St. Silverius. Now we have the eastern emperors, through the seventh century, exerting, sometimes directly, sometimes by delegation to their exarch, this stolen privilege. It was taken by Odoacer ostensibly for the preservation of order in the election, and the prevention of violence. I suppose it is the furthest reach of disloyalty to exercise a power which has been entrusted for protection to the injury of the party protected. This disloyalty was perpetually shown by the eastern emperors to the Popes, whose Primacy over the Church they acknowledged, until they finally lost the opportunity by the new-creation of the Western empire, and the