Bedridden St. Gregory works for Lombard peace through Queen Theodelinda

ROME, September 603 AD — The fighting between the Lombards and the empire stopped this month in a truce, and King Agilulf kept everything he had won. Agilulf’s army had taken two walled cities this summer. Then the exarch, the emperor’s governor at Ravenna, agreed a truce with him, first for thirty days and then for eighteen months, until April 1, 605 AD. At Rome, Saint Gregory the Great had been pope for thirteen years and had spent most of them trying to make peace with the Lombards. Now gout kept him in his bed.

Rome lay inside the empire’s share of Italy. Agilulf was taking the cities of the Po valley, and the exarch was holding Agilulf’s daughter prisoner to force better peace terms. The historian F. Homes Dudden gave the reason the war could not simply end: the emperor could not accept the Lombard kingdom as lawful, and the Lombards would give the empire nothing. St. Gregory could pay the Lombards out of the Church’s income, and he could write to the Lombard queen, Theodelinda, a Catholic who had helped him win peace from her husband before.

He had done both for years. In July 592 AD, with Ariulf, the Lombard duke of Spoleto, threatening Rome, St. Gregory made a truce with him on his own authority, and the Church paid for it. St. Gregory called himself “the paymaster of the Lombards”. Out of the income of the Church’s estates, above all in Sicily, he ransomed captives and bought truces. Talks with Agilulf, carried on through the queen, ended in a truce in 598 AD, and the peace terms were signed in 599 AD.

That peace lasted two years. In the spring of 601 AD Callinicus, who was then the exarch, attacked Parma without provocation and carried Agilulf’s daughter and her husband, Godeschalcus, off to Ravenna. Agilulf answered by making an alliance with the Avars. He destroyed Padua and beat the exarch’s army under the walls of Ravenna.

By then St. Gregory was governing the Church from his bed. “It is long since I have been able to leave my couch,” he wrote to a bishop in 601 AD. “At one time I am tormented with the pain of gout, at another time a fiery agony spreads throughout my whole body.”

In July of this year Agilulf marched out of Milan and laid siege to Cremona, which fell on August 21. Three weeks later, on September 13, he took Mantua by storm after his battering rams had opened gaps in its walls. The imperial troops panicked: the garrison of the fortress of Vulturina gave it up before a blow was struck and ran for Ravenna.

At Constantinople the Emperor Maurice had meanwhile been overthrown by Phocas, and Callinicus was recalled. Smaragdus, who had governed at Ravenna once before, was sent back as exarch. Smaragdus saw that he could not fight on against the Lombards with the troops he had. He handed over Agilulf’s daughter, who went home to Parma with her husband and children and died in childbirth almost as soon as she arrived. The truce was made uti possidetis (as you now hold): each side kept what it held that day. The historian Thomas Hodgkin judged that no change of border in the generation that followed was as large: the whole Po valley passed to the Lombards.

The truce was the exarch’s, made in the emperor’s name. St. Gregory worked for the peace through the queen. Pope Benedict XVI spoke of St. Gregory at a General Audience in 2008 AD. He called the September settlement “a more stable armistice” and said the result came “also thanks to the parallel contacts that, meanwhile, the Pope undertook with Queen Theodolinda.” The war was not over, Dudden wrote, but its worst stage was past. In Dudden’s words, “the peace which the Pope had striven so hard to obtain was destined to be frequently renewed.”

At Easter this year Theodelinda’s son by Agilulf, Adaloald, was baptised a Catholic in the church of St. John the Baptist at Monza. In the last months of his life St. Gregory dictated his reply to the queen’s news. He prayed that the boy would “grow up in His fear to be a blessing to the Lombards”. He sent Adaloald a cross holding wood of the Holy Cross and a passage of the Gospel in a Persian case, with three rings for the boy’s sister. St. Gregory told the queen that his gout was so bad he could hardly get up, “not only for dictating, but even for speaking,” and that he had been close to death when her messengers left. St. Gregory asked Theodelinda to thank Agilulf for the peace in his name and to go on turning the king’s mind towards peace, “that besides your many other good deeds, you may receive in the presence of God a reward for the innocent people who might otherwise have perished in the struggle.”

St. Gregory died at Rome on March 12, 604 AD, at about sixty-three, after thirteen years, six months and ten days as pope. The truce Smaragdus had made with Agilulf still had more than a year to run.