Rome After the Gothic Wars

The Rome into which Gregory was born around 540 was a city in catastrophe. Justinian’s reconquest of Italy from the Ostrogoths turned the peninsula into a twenty-year battlefield; Rome itself was besieged and changed hands repeatedly, its population collapsing and its aqueducts severed. The bubonic plague of 541–543 swept the Mediterranean, and from 568 the Lombards poured into Italy, leaving the empire only a fragmented strip of territory ruled from Ravenna by an exarch. Gregory governed not the capital of the world but a depopulated frontier town of the Byzantine empire, and he believed he was watching the world itself grow old and die.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)

The Gothic War and the Ruin of Italy

For most of the fifth century Italy had been ruled, after the deposition of the last Western emperor in 476, by Germanic kings — first Odoacer, then the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great (r. 493–526), whose reign from Ravenna was remembered as a period of relative order and prosperity. That settlement was shattered by the Emperor Justinian I (r. 527–565), who from Constantinople resolved to recover the lost Western provinces for the Roman empire. His general Belisarius landed in Italy in 535, and the war that followed — the Gothic War of 535–554 — devastated the peninsula for a generation (Markus 1997, 1–15; Richards 1980, 1–32).

Rome itself was the prize and the victim. The city was taken by Belisarius in 536, besieged by the Goths under Witigis in 537–538, and over the next decade and a half passed back and forth between imperial and Gothic hands. The Gothic king Totila captured Rome in 546 and again in 549–550; according to the contemporary historian Procopius, after one capture the city was for a time left so empty that “no living soul” remained within its walls (Procopius, Wars 7; cf. Richards 1980, 9–11). The siege warfare cut the great aqueducts that had supplied the city’s fountains and baths and irrigated the suburban estates; the Roman Senate, already a shadow, effectively ceased to function as a body during these years. By the time Gregory was a child the population of Rome had fallen catastrophically from its imperial peak of perhaps a million to a small fraction of that — modern estimates for the late sixth century range broadly, but all agree on a drastic collapse [Disputed: estimates of Rome's population in Gregory's day vary widely among scholars — some put it at perhaps 90,000 or fewer, others lower still at around 30,000; the ancient figures are impressionistic and no census survives (Richards 1980, 9; Markus 1997, 9)].

The Plague

Into this war came pestilence. The great pandemic now called the Plague of Justinian reached the Mediterranean in 541 and struck with full force in 542–543, and it returned in waves across the following decades. Procopius, who witnessed it at Constantinople, described it in terms consciously modelled on Thucydides; the disease — most scholars identify it with bubonic plague (Yersinia pestis) — killed an enormous, though unquantifiable, share of the population of the empire (Procopius, Wars 2.22–23; Markus 1997, 5–9). Italy, already wrecked by war, suffered its visitations along with the rest. Plague would shadow Gregory’s whole life and would frame the very moment of his accession: it was an outbreak of plague at Rome in 590, which carried off his predecessor Pope Pelagius II, that opened the see to him (see Election 590).

The sense of living amid death and the imminent end of all things runs through Gregory’s preaching. In his Homilies on the Gospels, delivered to the Roman people, he tells them plainly that they are witnessing the dissolution of the age: “everywhere we see mourning, everywhere we hear groaning. Cities are destroyed, fortresses overthrown, fields laid waste, the land reduced to a desert” (Gregory, Homilies on the Gospels 1.1, on the signs of the end; trans. NPNF II/12, with the parallel in the Dialogues preface). This is not rhetorical flourish but the lived experience of a man who had seen Rome’s hinterland ravaged.

The Lombards

The empire’s hold on Italy, so dearly bought, was almost immediately undone. In 568, only fourteen years after the Gothic War ended, the Lombards (Langobards) under their king Alboin crossed the Alps and invaded Italy. Unlike the Ostrogoths, the Lombards had no settled accommodation with the empire; they overran the north (giving their name to Lombardy), pressed down the peninsula, and established duchies — notably at Spoleto and Benevento — that hemmed in the imperial territories. By Gregory’s pontificate the Lombards repeatedly threatened Rome itself; in 593 their king Agilulf advanced on the city, and Gregory records breaking off his preaching on Ezekiel because of the danger (Gregory, Homilies on Ezekiel 2.10; Markus 1997, 97–107; Moorhead 2005, 30–46).

What remained to the empire in Italy was a broken patchwork: Ravenna and the northeast, a corridor across the centre, Rome and its duchy, the south, and the islands. This was administered by an imperial governor with combined military and civil authority, the exarch, resident at Ravenna. Rome was, in constitutional terms, a duchy of the Byzantine empire, its garrison and its formal allegiance owed to the emperor at Constantinople through the exarch — a fact that shaped every move of Gregory’s pontificate, for the pope was at once the empire’s loyal subject and, in practice, the chief civil authority left standing in a city the distant emperor could no longer defend (Markus 1997, 83–96; Richards 1980, 51–66).

The “Byzantine Papacy”

Historians call the period from Justinian’s reconquest to the eighth century the era of the Byzantine papacy: the popes were subjects of the Christian Roman emperor, their elections required imperial confirmation, and they operated within an empire whose centre of gravity was Constantinople and whose official culture was increasingly Greek. Several popes of these centuries were themselves Greek or Syrian by origin. Gregory belonged wholly to this world: he had served as the papal envoy at the imperial court (see The Papal Envoy to the East), he addressed the emperor with the deference of a subject, and he never questioned that Rome and Constantinople were two sees of one empire and one Church (Markus 1997, 83–96; on the undivided Church of this age, see The Pre-Schism Church).

This is essential context for the Orthodox reading of Gregory. The later medieval papacy, with its claims to a universal jurisdiction independent of and above the empire, lay centuries in the future. The pope Gregory was was a Roman bishop and an imperial subject, governing a ruined city on the empire’s frontier, and the Church he served was the one undivided Church of East and West. The distance between that pope and the later papal monarchy is itself one of the themes an Orthodox reader must hold in view (see Veneration as a Great Hierarch).

A City to Be Fed and Buried

The practical consequence of all this was that the bishop of Rome had become, by default, the city’s protector and administrator. The imperial structures had withered; the bishop had the one institution — the Church and its vast landed patrimony — capable of feeding the survivors, ransoming captives from the Lombards, paying the soldiers, and burying the dead. When Gregory became pope he inherited not a throne but a relief operation. His Register shows him distributing grain, managing estates in Sicily and across Italy, negotiating with Lombard dukes, and shouldering the material survival of a population the empire had abandoned (Gregory, Register, passim; Markus 1997, 112–124; Richards 1980, 88–98). The devastated Rome of the sixth century did not merely form the backdrop to Gregory’s papacy; it defined its work (see Servus Servorum Dei).

References

Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. (The Gothic War, the plague, the Lombards, the Byzantine papacy, and population collapse.)
Richards, Jeffrey. Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. (The ruin of Rome, the exarchate, and the administrative role of the bishop.)
Moorhead, John. Gregory the Great. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2005. (The Lombard threat and Gregory’s world.)
Procopius. History of the Wars, Books 2 (the plague) and 5–8 (the Gothic War). Trans. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library. (Contemporary narrative of the war and pestilence.)
Gregory the Great. Homilies on the Gospels and Homilies on Ezekiel. (Gregory’s own testimony to the devastation; the breaking-off of the Ezekiel homilies under Lombard threat.)