The Pope who bought peace called himself the Lombards' paymaster

ROME, September 603 AD — In a letter, Pope St. Gregory called himself “the paymaster of the Lombards.” The money came from the lands the Church owns, above all in Sicily. He has used it to buy grain and hand it out, and to keep poor priests and nuns. He has used it to get back citizens the Lombards had carried off. The same money has bought truces.

The Lombards have a king, Agilulf, and they have been at war with the empire in Italy for years. Agilulf wants everyone to agree that his kingdom in Italy is really his, and the emperor at Constantinople will not agree it. The empire wants its cities back, and the Lombards will not give up anything they hold. That is why there are truces and never a peace.

The one man who could make an agreement with the Lombards was the exarch, the emperor’s governor at Ravenna. He commands the emperor’s soldiers in Italy, and he alone has the legal right to deal with the enemy. In July 592 AD Pope St. Gregory made a truce with the Lombard duke of Spoleto anyway, against the exarch’s wishes, and the Church paid for it.

The exarch Romanus worked to stop a peace being made at all. He thought money paid to the Lombards would only hire more Lombard soldiers to come and trouble Ravenna. In May 595 AD the Pope wrote to a friend at Ravenna that he would make peace with Agilulf without the exarch’s say-so if he had to. Word of that got to Constantinople, and in June the emperor Maurice wrote back accusing him of treachery and folly.

The talking took four more years after that, and the articles were signed in 599 AD, to the Pope’s great joy. The fighting stopped until 601 AD.

The summer the cities fell

In the spring of 601 AD the exarch Callinicus attacked the city of Parma for no reason. He carried Agilulf’s own daughter and her husband off to Ravenna as prisoners, working out that the king would buy them back by agreeing better terms. Agilulf made an alliance with the Avars instead. He took Padua and destroyed it, and then he beat Callinicus in a battle under the walls of Ravenna.

This July Agilulf marched out of Milan and sat down in front of Cremona. The city fell to him on August 21. On September 13 he opened holes in the walls of Mantua with battering rams and took the city by storm. The emperor’s soldiers in the fortress of Vulturina did not wait for him. They gave the place up before a blow was struck and ran for Ravenna.

By then the exarch who had restarted the war was gone, and so was the emperor who had told the Pope off for seeking peace. The emperor Maurice had been murdered in November and Phocas had taken the throne. Callinicus had been recalled. Smaragdus, a soldier who had governed at Ravenna once before, was sent back in his place.

Smaragdus soon saw that he could not cope with the Lombards with the forces he had. He gave the king’s daughter up at once. Then he agreed a truce: thirty days first, and then eighteen months, to run until April 1, 605 AD.

It was struck not at Rome but at Ravenna. Pope St. Gregory has spent his thirteen years in office trying to reach exactly this, and he was not at the table. He has not been able to get up from his couch in years. “It is long since I have been able to leave my couch,” he told 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.”