Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/279

602] of the poor had been redressed — "We will rejoice that your benignity and piety are come to the imperial throne." Later letters to Phocas and his wife Leontia breathe the same spirit: of congratulations on the political change: of hope that it will mean relief and liberty for the Empire: of solicitude that the aid which Maurice had long denied might now be given to Italy, trodden down by the barbarian and the heretic. We are shocked as we read Gregory’s cordial letters to the brutal murderer of Maurice; but we must remember that the pope had no representative at Constantinople to tell him what had really happened: all that he may have known was that popular indignation had swept a tyrant from the throne and avenged its injuries on him and his innocent family, and that a soldier had been set up, with all due forms of law, as ruler in his stead. From a bed of suffering he indited these letters to those from whom he might have new hopes of the salvation of Italy. But he wrote as an official of the Church to an official of the State, and he mingled with his formal words of congratulation and the Church's Gloria in excelsis no words of personal adulation. Whatever may be the true judgment on Gregory's attitude at this moment, it is obvious that in the change of dynasty he hoped for a better prospect for Italy and knew that more power would come to Rome itself and the Roman bishop.

It is as a Roman and a Roman bishop that Gregory fills the great place he holds in the history of the Middle Age. He was a Roman of the Romans, nurtured on traditions of Rome's imperial greatness, cherishing the memories of pacification and justice, of control and protection. And these, which belonged to "The Republic," he was eager to transfer to the Church. Vague were the claims which the Roman bishops had already put forth in regard to the universal Church. But what all bishops held as inherent in their office, the right of giving advice and administration, was held by the Roman pontiffs to belong especially to the see which was founded in the imperial city. There was a prerogative of the Roman bishop as of the Roman Emperor, and already the one was believed to run parallel to the other. The pope directly superintended a large part of the Christian world: everywhere he could reprove and exhort with authority, though the authority was often contested. And Gregory's exercise of this power was one of the great moments in the world's history. To the practical assertions of his predecessors he gave a new moral weight, and it was that which carried the claims to victory. Well has it been said by Dean Church that "he so administered the vast undefined powers supposed to be inherent in his see, that they appeared to be indispensable to the order, the good government, and the hopes, not of the Church only, but of society." And this success was due not so much to the extent of her claims or the weakness of his competitors, but to the moral force which flowed from his life of intellectual, moral, and spiritual power.