Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/165

Rh directly concerned with this deadly feud between the two rival Western patriarchates. While they were in constant communication by that highway of commercial traffic, the Ægean Sea, the Syrian capital lay back in the East. Still, she had her old differences with Alexandria, and she was more directly associated with Constantinople, so that she more often sided with the imperial patriarchate.

In the year 550 Justinian conferred on the patriarch of Constantinople the privilege of receiving appeals from the other patriarchs. By this time, backed up by the power of the autocrat, the bishop of the chief city of the empire was threatening to become a veritable pope, in our later sense of the title. It would have needed rare prescience then to have discerned that not Constantinople, but Rome, was destined to develop the monstrous assumption of universal supremacy over the Church. It looked as though that city of ruins, neglected by the emperor, subject to the ravages of successive invaders, pillaged and impoverished, were doomed to decay, if not to extinction, with her episcopal See and all its Petrine claims. Meanwhile the brilliant metropolis on the Bosphorus, with its basilicas and palaces, its wealth, its splendour, its luxury, promised not only to take the first place politically and socially—which indeed it had already done most effectually—but also to secure ecclesiastical primacy. Nobody could then have dreamed of the proud triumphs of a Hildebrand. But the Latin Church never did dominate Constantinople except at a much later period, and then only for a brief interval and by brute force.

The rivalry between the two patriarchs came to an acute crisis before the end of the sixth century. Fortunately for the Western Church one of the greatest of all the popes was then seated in the chair of Peter. This was Gregory the Great—the missionary pope to whose zeal South England owes the light of the gospel. He was also the Italian patriot who saved Rome from the Lombards when the miserable Exarch at Ravenna had hopelessly failed to repel the rude invaders. Thus he followed in