Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 14.djvu/472

 452 LEO in a certain degree. injured the credit of the church. His aesthetic pantheism, though inspired by a real religious sentiment, fixed the reproach of paganism upon her at the precise moment when an evangelical reaction was springing up. The best possible pope for the age that was going out, he was the worst possible for the age that was coming in : hence the splendours of his administration were ephemeral, and its disasters lasting. If his reputation as a pope and a statesman is thus ambiguous, no such deduction need be made from his serener fame as a patron of letters and art. In this respect he stands almost alone, except for such rare examples as his father and the modern kings of Bavaria, as a prince who di 1 not merely strike a tacit bargain with men of genius, setting his patronage against their flattery, but one who entered into their pursuits from a genuine congeniality of taste and temperament, and uided them efficaciously not only as their patron but as their com panion. Unlike most exalted patrons of literature, he was a scholar first and a sovereign afterwards ; hence his contact with the best intellect of his age was far more direct and personal than that of an Augustus or a Louis XIV. Great as were the obligations con ferred upon individuals by his tact and discernment, it is no doubt true that the intellectual movement of his age arose and could well have subsisted without him. It is none the less true that, if not the source of that light, his court was the focus to which it con verged, and which gave it back with a lustre which still renders the era that bears his name, in its literary and artistic aspects, one of the brightest periods in the history of mankind. Tli3 life of Leo was written shortly after his death by Paolo Giovio, bishop of Nocera, who had known him intimately, lloscoe s celebrated biography, though sometimes diffuse and sometimes trite, is in the main a work of great merit, ami very agreeable from the entire sympathy between the author and the age he depicts and the subject of his biography. It has received much illustration from the notes of the Gemian and Italian translators, Henke and Bossi, but requires to be re-edited with the aid of the numerous publications from archives which have taken place since Koscoe s time. Audin s French life is a poor performance partial, mainly borrowed from Uoscoe, and disfigured by unsuccessful efforts after the picturesque. XR- G.) LEO XI. (Alcssandro de Medici) was chosen, under .Preach influence, to succeed Clement VIII. as pope on April 1, 1605, and died on April 27 of the same year. His successor was Paul V. LEO XIL (Annibale della Genga), pope from 1823 to 1829, a native of Homagna, was bora on August 22, 1760. In 1790 he first gained public recogni tion of his tilents by the success with which he accom plished the delicate task laid upon him by Pius VI. of pronouncing a funeral discourse over the emperor Joseph II. ; in 1793 he was sent as nuncio to Lucerne with the title of archbishop of Tyre ; in the following year he went, also as nuncio, to Cologne ; in 1805 he attended the diet of Piatisbon as papal plenipotentiary ; and in 1808 he shared with Caprara a difficult mission to France. Some years of retirement at the abbey of Monti celli now followed; but in 1814 he was made the bearer of the pope s con- gratulations to Louis XVIII. ; in 1816 he became cardinal priest of Sta. Maria Maggiore, receiving also the bishopric of Sinigaglia, while in 1820 he became cardinal vicarius. On September 28, 1823, he was chosen to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Pius VII. ; at the time it was believed that In had not long to live, and, in point of fact, on the 23d day of the following December his condition became so serious that the last sacraments were administered to him ; suddenly, however, he recovered. One of his first cares was for the due observance of the approaching jubilee year, and on May 27, 1824, the bull was sent forth which invited all Christendom to Rome in the following December ; but foreign Governments responded coldly to the appeals made for their co-operation in forwarding pilgrims, and even Leo s own subjects viewed the prepara tions made in their neighbourhood with indifference or aversion, and the most determined efforts of the papal government did not succeed in averting a somewhat ridiculous failure. Throughout his pontificate Leo showed himself a man of simple tastes and laborious habits ; his diplomatic relations with the European powers were on the whole characterized by firmness, tact, and moderation, and perhaps the most unfavourable criticism to be made upon his domestic policy is that it was unpractical iu its meddlesomeness and unstatesmaulike in its severity. He died on February 10, 1829, and was succeeded by Pius VIII. LEO I., FLAVIUS, surnamecl MAGNUS and THRAX, emperor of the East, was bora about 400 A.D., in the country of the Bessi, Thrace, and succeeded Marcian in February 457. At the time of his elevation he was an obscure military tribune, but had become steward to Aspar, patrician and commander of the guards, who might himself have aspired to the purple had he not been tainted with the Arian heresy. In recommending his servant to the soldiers, who proclaimed him emperor, Aspar hoped through him to be able to exercise the reality of power. The election of Leo was ratified by the senate ; his coronation by Anatolius, the patriarch of Constantinople, is said to have been the earliest instance of such an ecclesiastical ceremony. The precise nature of the military success against the barbarians which, according to the chronicles, the new emperor achieved in the first year of his reign is not accurately known. Of the more conspicuous incidents of his subsequent life, the first in chronological order is his intervention in the politico-religious troubles in Egypt, where the Eutychians had gained the upper hand, and, encouraged by the Arianizing Aspar, had made their own nominee, Timotheus Ailurus, patriarch of Alexandria. Leo made peace by deposing and banishing the new patriarch, and, when reminded by Aspar that it ill became a wearer of the purple to be guilty (as in this case he had been) of promise-breaking, retorted that it was equally unbecoming that a prince should be compelled to resign his own judgment and the public interest to the will of a subject. In 466 the Huns, invading Dacia, were defeated by Leo s generals Anthemius and Anagastus, and again by the latter in 468. In 468 Leo, in concert with Anthemius, whom in the intervening year he had caused to be made emperor of the West, equipped a naval armament against the Vandals of Africa, who, under Genseric, had long been the scourge of Italy and the Mediterranean. The large fleet of more than one thousand vessels was intrusted to the command of Leo s brother-in- law Basiliscus, who, after a prosperous passage, disembarked his troops safely at Cape Bona within 40 miles of Carthage, but weakly granted a truce of five days to the enemy ; during the interval, favoured by the wind and the darkness of the night, the fleet of Genseric, with several fireships in tow, attacked the Roman vessels, burning and sinking one half of them, and thus causing the entire failure of the expedition. A widespread belief that the Arian Aspar had somehow helped to bring about this disastrous defeat furnished Leo with a pretext for getting rid of this dangerous kingmaker, who accordingly was treacherously put to death, along w r ith one of his sons, in 471. To avenge (as they alleged) the murder, the Goths invaded Thrace, and ravaged the country almost to the walls of the capital. In October 473 Leo associated with himself his child grandson Leo II., and in the following year he died (February 3, 474) ; his successor survived him for a few months only. The somewhat misleading surname of Great borne by Leo I. is due solely to the obsequious gratitude of the orthodox party ; by the Arians he was, not without some show of justice, nicknamed Macellarius (&quot;butcher&quot;). LEO III, FLAVIUS, surnamed THE ISAURIAN, a native of Isauria, born about 680, was originally called Conon, a name which he dropped after he had risen to military dis tinction. In 713 he received from Anastasius II. the command of the eastern army ; and, when that emperor was deposed by Theodosius III. in 716, Leo, marching to Constantinople, compelled the usurper to resign, and was himself made emperor amid much popular enthusiasm, in March 718. The internal troubles of the empire had meanwhile permitted the advance of the Arabs, who in