Read Online Millenium by Tom Holland - Free Book Online Page A

self-assured in a way that came naturally to a warlord anointed of God, stint in ful­filling his own side of the bargain. In 755, Lombardy was invaded, and its king briskly routed. Two years later, when the Lombards made the mistake of menacing Rome a second time, Pepin inflicted on them an even more crushing defeat. The territories that the Lombards had conquered from Byzantium were donated in perpetuity to St Peter. Arriving in Rome, Pepin personally and with a great show of sententiousness laid the keys of the cities he had conquered upon the apostle's tomb. And as caretaker of this portfolio of states, he appointed - who else? — St Peter's vicar: the Bishop of Rome.
    This was, for the papacy itself, a spectacular redemption from the jaws of catastrophe. That God in His infinite wisdom had ordained it appeared irrefutable. It was true, most regrettably, that there were a few too blinkered to recognise this, with officials from what remained of Byzantine territory in southern Italy voluble among them — but a succession of popes, confident in Pepin's backing, blithely dismissed every demand for restoration of the emperor's property. What were the arid pettifoggeries of diplomats when set against the evident will of the Almighty? The shocking manner in which the savage Lombards had presumed to menace the heir of St Peter was an outrage com­mitted not merely against the papacy itself, but against the whole of Christendom. No wonder that God had moved the heart of the Frankish king to such transcendent and gratifying effect. The surprise, it could be argued, was not that the papacy had been granted its own state to govern, but rather the very opposite - that no ruler had ever thought to grant it one before.
    Or had the Pope's archivists perhaps been overlooking something? Long centuries had passed since Constantine first established the Bishop of Rome in the Lateran — and who was to say what documents might not have been mislaid in all that time? Papal officials, keen to justify their master's claim to his new possessions, appear to have spent the decade that followed Pepin's victory over the Lombards ransack­ing the musty libraries of Rome. Certainly, it was at some point during the second half of the eighth century, even as the papacy was battling to keep hold of the grant of territories it had received from the Frankish king, that a remarkable and hitherto wholly unsuspected document was produced. [1] Its contents, from the papal point of view, could hardly have been more welcome. The foundations of the state donated to St Peter, it appeared from the document, were far more venerable than anyone in the Lateran had dared to imagine. They had been laid, not by Pepin, but by the most glorious Christian ruler who had ever lived: Constantine himself. The content of the document added sensational details to the biography of the great emperor. A sufferer, it was revealed, from 'the squalor of leprosy','' 0 he had been miraculously cured by the then Bishop of Rome, a sage of towering holiness by the name of Sylvester. Constantine, submitting humbly to the will of Christ, had then headed off to install himself in Constantinople - but not before he had first adorned Sylvester in all the splendid regalia of empire, and surrendered to him and to the heirs of St Peter for ever the rule of Rome, together with what were vaguely termed 'the regions of the West'. The implication could hardly have been more pointed: the papacy, far from depriving the emperor of his property, had merely been reclaiming its due.
    Its case was helped, admittedly, by the fact that even the most learned had only the haziest notion of who Constantine had actually been. Just as the great monuments of the emperors now stood as dis­figured ruins, obscured beneath the spread of weeds and grass, so memories of the ancient past had long since faded into myth. In the West, unlike the East, there survived no contemporary account of the life of Constantine. Nothing