St. Gregory the Great buys Rome a truce the emperor's governor forbade

ROME, September 27, 591 AD — Word reached Rome this week, on September 27, 591 AD, that Ariulf, the Lombard duke of Spoleto, was believed to be marching on Ravenna or on Rome. Saint Gregory the Great, pope for a little over a year, wrote the same day to Velox, the senior imperial general on the frontier. He sent Velox soldiers and told him how to fight. For the next ten months St. Gregory ran the defence of Rome, while the emperor’s governor of Italy stayed at Ravenna and did not fight. The ten months ended in a truce St. Gregory bought from Ariulf with the Church’s money, against the governor’s will.

St. Gregory, a monk, was consecrated on September 3, 590 AD, after the plague had killed Pope Pelagius II. The defence of Rome belonged to the exarch, the emperor’s governor of Italy, who commanded the imperial army from Ravenna. The exarch was Romanus.

Ariulf wanted the plunder of the Roman countryside. Romanus held the soldiers and the right to make war and peace, but he would neither fight nor let anyone else make peace. St. Gregory had the Church’s money and the respect he inspired, but no legal right to give orders to a single soldier. Romanus meant to beat the Lombards by keeping them divided, and he knew that money paid to Ariulf would hire soldiers to raid the country around Ravenna next.

Earlier in 591 AD, St. Gregory had written: “For my sins I find myself bishop, not of the Romans, but of the Lombards, whose promises stab like swords, and whose kindness is bitter punishment”.

Four imperial generals, each with a small force, were watching Ariulf from posts along the Roman frontier. St. Gregory told Velox to confer with two of them, the generals Maurice and Vitalian, and to act together with them. “Should you learn that the unspeakable Ariulf is moving in this direction, or to the parts about Ravenna, do you get to work in his rear as becomes brave men,” St. Gregory wrote to Velox. The plan was to ravage the country around Spoleto the moment Ariulf crossed into imperial territory and force him home to defend it.

Ariulf put off his campaign, and Rome had a quiet winter. Nepi, a small town thirty miles north of Rome, had no governor, so St. Gregory appointed one. He told its clergy, council and people: “whosoever resists his lawful commands will be deemed a rebel against us, and whoever obeys him will be obeying us”. Only the exarch had the right to write to a town in those terms, and no one at Ravenna or Constantinople objected.

In the summer of 592 AD the danger returned. St. Gregory wrote to Maurice and Vitalian that he feared an immediate invasion, and that he trusted in “the power of Almighty God and of the blessed Peter, on whose festival they wish to shed blood”. Soon after, a threatening letter arrived from Ariulf, saying that the frontier town of Suana had promised to surrender to him. St. Gregory left the decision on Suana to the two generals.

Almost at once Ariulf brought his army up to the walls of Rome. His men killed some Romans and mutilated others. Ariulf would not even discuss terms until he was given the money to pay his soldiers.

In July St. Gregory wrote to Archbishop John of Ravenna. The killing had made him ill, St. Gregory told the archbishop: “I was so affected with sorrow that I became ill with a disease of the bowels”. The imperial troops had been taken out of the city, he wrote, and the regiment left behind was unpaid and would barely agree to stand guard on the walls. Romanus, St. Gregory wrote, “is not inclined to fight against our enemies, and yet forbids us to make peace”. Then he asked the archbishop: “Unless, therefore, we have peace, how can this city, abandoned as it is by all men, continue to exist?”

About the end of July 592 AD, St. Gregory made a truce with Ariulf on his own responsibility, without the exarch’s consent. The Church paid for it. The historian Thomas Hodgkin judged the truce “entirely beyond any legal competency yet possessed by the bishop of Rome”. Romanus ignored it and marched out of Ravenna to take back Perugia and the other towns Ariulf had seized.

At Constantinople, where the exarch was in favour, resentment of St. Gregory had been growing for some time. In June 595 AD a letter from the emperor reached St. Gregory, accusing him of treachery and folly in his dealings with the Lombards. St. Gregory wrote back to the emperor that to be called “deceived by the cunning of Ariulph” was to be called silly, “which I also myself acknowledge to be the case. For, though your Piety were silent, the facts cry out. For, if I had not been silly, I should by no means have come to endure what I suffer in this place among the swords of the Lombards”.