officer was reduced to cowering under the pope’s bed. Clearly Constantinople’s
influence and authority over Rome had become tenuous. Sheer distance as well as
diminishing imperial power in Italy meant that the popes had in effect become the
leaders of non-Lombard Italy.
The gap between Byzantium and the papacy widened in the early eighth century,
when Emperor Leo III tried to increase the taxes on papal property to pay for his
wars against the Arabs. Gregory II, the pope who later commissioned Saint
Boniface’s evangelical work (see above, p. 66), responded by leading a general tax
revolt. Meanwhile, Leo’s fierce policy of iconoclasm collided with the pope’s
tolerance of images. For Gregory, as for Saint John of Damascus, holy images could
and should be venerated, though not worshiped. Increasing friction with Byzantium
meant that when the pope felt threatened by the Lombard kings, as he did in the mid-
eighth century, he looked elsewhere for support. Pope Stephen II (752–757)
appealed to the Franks – not to the Merovingians, who had just lost the throne, but to
Pippin III, the king who had taken the royal crown. Pippin listened to the pope’s
entreaties and marched into Italy with an army to fight the Lombards. The new
Frankish/papal alliance would change the map of Europe in the coming decades.
*****
The “fall” of the Roman Empire meant the rise of its heirs. In the East the
Muslims swept out of Arabia—and promptly set up a Roman-style government
where they conquered. The bit in the east that they did not take—the part ruled from
Constantinople—still considered itself the Roman Empire. In the West, impoverished
kingdoms looked to the city of Rome for religion, culture, and inspiration. However
much East and West, Christian and Muslim, would come to deviate from and hate
one another, they could not change the fact of shared parentage.
Chapter Two Key Events
c.570–632 Life of Muhammad
587 Reccared, Visigothic king, converts to Catholic Christianity
590 Saint Columbanus arrives on the Continent
590–604 Pope Gregory the Great
597 Augustine arrives at the court of King Ethelbert
607–630 Sasanid–Byzantine wars
