GREGORY’S ELECTION

Epilogue “Every angel is terrifying.”

“The archangel loved heights.”

GREGORY’S ELECTION HAD come at a grim moment. In September 590, a great flood overran the banks of the Tiber and spread across much of the city. It destroyed buildings and ruined storehouses in which the church kept grain to feed its members. The plague followed in November, carrying off Pope Pelagius and leaving the deacon Gregory to protest in vain that he had no appetite for the church’s supreme office. Gregory of Tours, the contemporary Frankish historian, records a sermon that the other Gregory delivered in this moment to the people of Rome.1

For behold, the whole people is stricken with the sword of heavenly wrath, and individuals are smitten down with sudden death. . . . Each one who is struck is taken away without even a chance for repenting his sins. Think what it would be like to appear in the sight of the strict judge above with no time to weep for what you have done.

Gregory ordered a grand procession of prayer and repentance. A hundred years earlier, his predecessor Gelasius could still rant (probably to no effect) against the survival of the old festival of the Lupercal, originally a fertility ritual but by then claimed to prevent epidemics. The Lupercal rites began in ancient times by sacrificing a goat in the cave where the wolf had suckled Romulus and Remus, but that had been put aside under the empire. It was no longer the aristocrats who ran in the streets brushing women with branches to communicate fertility, but paid hands from the lower classes.

What Gregory ordered

Now, a century after Gelasius, the bishop was firmly in charge and the Lupercal was gone. What Gregory ordered was the “sevenfold litany,” dividing the population in seven parts, each assigned to one of the city’s churches, from which they would come together in prayer and procession. The clergy were to gather at the church of Cosmas and Damian (on the Via Sacra, close to the heart of the ancient city, in a building that had been the ceremonial hall of the city prefect), while abbots and monks would gather at the shrine of the martyrs Gervase and Protase. Religious women and their leaders were assigned the church of Marcellinus and Peter; children the church of John and Paul; widows the church of Saint Euphemia; married women the church of Saint Clement. The men of the city—laymen—would gather at Saint Stephen’s. From those dispersed points they would come together at the basilica of Saint Mary, which is now called Santa Maria Maggiore. Many of them gathered in the valley between the Caelian and Esquiline hills not far from the papal Lateran church of Saint John, while others huddled in shrines a few yards from Santa Maria Maggiore itself on the Esquiline.

Constantinople to Carthage

For his first decade, Heraclius stayed mainly at home, apart from one failed campaign in 613, and let his empire take its punishment. Desperation reached such a point that people said the emperor was thinking of moving his own headquarters, the capital of the remnants of empire, from Constantinople to Carthage. The thought that the Roman empire would find itself led now from the city of its ancient enemy, the city it had razed to the ground 750 years earlier, was too delicious for words. But it is reasonable to believe that Heraclius, raised in Carthage, would have been aware of the tactical possibilities of recruiting his forces from the west. He might have been smart to do so. To regain the advantage in the east, he bought his own peace in the Balkans, buying off the Avars for a time in 619. That was in the long run the real defeat, but these emperors in Constantinople were never able to discover that their long-term interests lay in the Balkans.

Predecessors and concentrated

Heraclius was wiser than most of his predecessors and concentrated his efforts in the 610s on rebuilding his army. Tradition ascribed to him the reorganization of civil government into “themes”—roughly, military recruiting districts—that after centuries would be made standard. The Byzantine empire was a stranger to irony, and none would sense it when the realm was organized into units whose functional purpose was to pro-vide soldiers in order to preserve the existing entity.

Despaired of, pressed hard, and finally becoming venturesome, Heraclius took the field in 621. For the first years of his wars, the issue remained in doubt. In the summer of 626 the Avars were at the gates of Constantinople in what could have been its last gasp, trapping the city while Heraclius and the main forces were away on the northern part of the Persian frontier, in Lazica, but the Persians’ attempts to cross the Bosporus and aid the Avars were repulsed by the Byzantine navy on August 10, and the Avars withdrew. There have been more famous battles in history, but few with greater lasting effect.

Saint Brigid

By 6OO, Ireland was able to export its version of Christianity, which had become slightly eccentric by now, from time spent growing in a hothouse far from its original home and without regular contact with the continent. A religious-minded prince from the family that came to call itself O’Donnell fled local quarrels for the Hebrides and settled on Iona. His name was Columba, Latin for “dove.” Later stories would have it that he was sent away in penance for his part in a war, to a place he could never set eyes on Ireland again, and Iona was closest. The contemporary accounts of Saint Brigid make most sense if we keep in mind that her home, Kildare, had been the center of worship of the ancient goddess Brigit long before anyone heard of Christianity. The “voyage of Saint Brendan” with his followers in a tiny boat into the north Atlantic need not have happened in just the way the medieval legend tells it, but it captures the omnidirectional zeal of an island society gone mad for monkery.

That Irish church would flourish in its often daffy way until the twentieth century, though now it is in retreat. The Irish stressed some aspects of continental Christianity—particularly a long tradition of intense, learned biblical exegesis. But the conversion of ancient Ireland’s druidic class happened too quickly and easily to be entirely transformative. Ireland remained a center of missionary activity, monastic zeal, and frequently idiosyncratic practice, intermittently subject to military invasion from the east (Britain) or northeast (Scandinavia), rarely exporting anything. On a later page we will meet a few more Irishmen wrestling with angels in the middle of the sea.

Theoderic’s family

The Irish share with the citizens of Iberia, southern Gaul, and Italy— the last of these all ruled by distant offshoots of Theoderic’s family and relations—the pleasure of being the last Christianities to thrive in the west before the rise of imperial Christianity radiating from the Frankish and Byzantine courts.6 The rulers of these ancient Christian societies generally cared about Christianity enough to practice it in some form, to support it, and even to discourage its enemies, but they had no vision of a society wholly Christian that they could insistently impose on their followers. Augustine of Hippo himself, writing The City of God in Africa in the early fifth century, provided the makings of such a vision, without being able to imagine a world in which Christianity was unopposed and sovereign, unpersecuted and persecuting. The reality was emerging before his very eyes, but it had not yet established itself. Much of the most intolerant Christian language and practice arose among people who assumed that intolerance was necessary for a battle always fought but never won.

Patrick’s story is of the mid-fifth century. The story of Augustine of Canterbury, whom we mentioned above, is of the late sixth century, when Pope Gregory in Rome sent out a mission to convert the heathen Angles to Christianity. A small band of monks made their way from Rome north, crossing Gaul and making visits to the chief churchmen along their route personal tours bulgaria.

They found it easy enough to cross to Britain and had the serene confidence to introduce their faith to the people they found there as though they had come from another world with a great gift. In fact, they had little sense of what they would encounter when they arrived. In a society already sprinkled with pockets of Christianity, they quickly found themselves involved in local politics, winning kinglets here and there for their cause, only to find that other kings and other peoples were already affiliated with their creed through their other dissonant parts.

Christians argued

The various communities of British Christians argued not about doctrine but about practice. In one year the royal household of King Oswin, or Oswy, of Northumbria found itself divided at Eastertime by a disagreement over the calendar. Finding the date of Easter is not a straightforward calculation, inasmuch as the four gospel texts in the canonical scriptures differ among themselves about the precise timing of the crucifixion and resurrection, and so it took a very long time for all communities to approach agreement on this matter. In this case, Queen Eanfleda, daughter of King Edwin of Kent in the south, had brought her own chaplain, a priest named Romanus, and he insisted that she follow the Roman calendar.

It scheduled Easter a week later than the clerics of the king’s end of the palace, who observed the date calculated by the Irish tradition of the time.7 The pre-Easter period was a time of austerity and self-control, especially the last week, and so there was some tension, not least sexual, in the household when the menfolk in the king’s retinue came to the end of their austerity and were prepared to celebrate in many ways, but the womenfolk around Eanfleda were just entering the week of their greatest renunciation. Differences of practice were visible every day, as when the island’s monks observed the ritual haircut—the tonsure—in a different style from the continent.

Merchant on the Danube

In the mix of languages and peoples at this court, most readers have focused on one man, whom Priscus himself reports as an anomaly: a Greek happily living among the Huns. After years as a merchant on the Danube he fell in among the Huns and decided to stay, with a perfectly coherent rationale:

After war, the Scythians live in idleness, enjoying their plunder and left almost entirely to themselves. The Romans, on the other hand, are first of all likely to die in war, since they depend for their safety on soldiers and their tyrants do not allow them to bear arms in their own defense. . . . But Roman subjects in peacetime suffer worse than the evils of war, for the tax collectors are brutal and unforgiving and un-principled men who inflict injuries on others, because the laws are not fairly applied to all classes. An offender who belongs to the wealthy classes is not punished for his crime, while a poor man, who does not understand how business is done, suffers the full force of the law— that is, if he does not die before trial—for lawsuits are drawn out forever and cost the parties immense amounts of money.

We recognize in this voice the spirit of an American living among revolutionaries in central Asia or religious enthusiasts in Jerusalem: an irresistible story and part of the natural diversity of fates in a civilized world. This story says not that Hunnic splendor was somehow superior to Roman splendor, but that it offered enough civilities to provide an alternative world for malcontents.

Priscus caps his tale with an account of a banquet in the great hall of Attila’s palace. The meal was served on silver plates, but Attila had the wit to confine himself to a wooden trencher, to drink from a wooden cup, and to keep to Scythian (that is, barbarian) clothes and shoes. Priscus gives us the barbarian chieftain’s manners as a piece of performance art, letting himself be entertained by native singers when a Moorish dwarf, Aetius’s gift to Attila, comes in gabbling in Latin, Hunnic, and Gothic. Everyone except Attila laughed to exhaustion, but Attila showed himself calmly above such silliness, smiling only at the arrival of a son on whom he doted. Attila played his part of humble nomad achieving great dignity with aplomb.

Domains blurred and sometimes separated in the Balkans

The luck that Aetius and Attila depended on for their partnership was about to run out. Attila had till now navigated adroitly the fault line between the eastern and western empires. The effective spheres of interest of the two domains blurred and sometimes separated in the Balkans. Constantinople cared a lot about the lower Danube; Rome and Ravenna cared about the upper Danube through the Hungarian plain and down to about Belgrade. Each had an interest in the lands between those two zones, roughly from Belgrade to Sofia, but neither a compelling presence there, for the country was more remote, the profits were fewer, and the threat to one or another capital was less direct balkan tours 2023. After the death of Theodosius II in 450 in Constantinople, emperors began to pay more attention to their northwestern frontier. Theodosius was succeeded first by one of his generals, Marcian, who took the late emperor’s sister Pulcheria in marriage after agreeing to respect her religious devotion by allowing her to remain a virgin. He supported the religious politics of Pulcheria and her circle, which would culminate in the next year in the grand church council of Chalcedon, of which we will hear much more later. On the Balkan frontier, Marcian favored a hard line with the Huns and began by canceling payments of tribute that had flowed north with regularity.

Next came a question for Attila and Aetius. Pressed from the east, Attila began to move west, looking for an easy mark—but where to go? How daring could he be? He must have known there would come a point at which Aetius would need to oppose him, and he must have thought he would prevail. Drifting north, Attila reached and crossed the Rhine. We will never know with what enterprise, treachery, and anxiety Aetius began massing forces to meet him. The Visigoths now chose to ally themselves with their old oppressor Aetius; but after the battle was over, some of At- tila’s allies claimed to be the Visigoths’ long-lost cousins and called themselves Ostrogoths. They were under the leadership of Theoderic’s father. (Theoderic himself was born about two years later.)