The governor wouldn't fight, so the Pope paid for peace

ROME, September 27, 591 AD — On September 27, 591 AD, news reached Rome about Ariulf, the Lombard duke of Spoleto. He might be marching on the city, or else on Ravenna.

The man in Rome who had to answer was Saint Gregory the Great. He was a monk, and he had been Pope for a little over a year. He had become Pope after the plague killed Pope Pelagius II.

Defending Rome wasn’t the Pope’s job. It belonged to the emperor’s governor of Italy, a man named Romanus. His title was exarch, and he commanded the emperor’s army from the city of Ravenna. Romanus had the soldiers, and he had the right to make war or make peace. He would do neither. He wouldn’t fight Ariulf, and he wouldn’t let anyone else make peace with him.

Romanus had a reason: he meant to beat the Lombards by keeping them divided. He also knew that any money paid to Ariulf would hire soldiers to raid the land around Ravenna next. Ariulf wanted to loot the countryside around Rome.

St. Gregory had the Church’s money, and people respected him. But he had no legal right to give orders to a single soldier. He acted anyway. On the same day the news came, he wrote to the most senior of the emperor’s generals on the frontier. He sent the general soldiers and told him how to fight.

The plan was to raid the land around Spoleto as soon as Ariulf crossed into the emperor’s lands. Then Ariulf would have to hurry home to defend it. Ariulf put off his attack, and Rome had a quiet winter.

An army at the walls

In the summer of 592 AD the danger came back. Soon Ariulf brought his army right up to the walls of Rome. His men killed some Romans and hurt others. Ariulf wouldn’t even talk about peace until he was given money to pay his soldiers.

In July St. Gregory wrote to Archbishop John of Ravenna. The killing had made him so sad that he fell ill, he told the archbishop. The emperor’s troops had been taken out of Rome. The one regiment left behind hadn’t been paid, and it would barely agree to stand guard on the walls.

St. Gregory wrote that Romanus “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. He decided it on his own, without the governor’s permission. The Church paid for the truce. A historian, Thomas Hodgkin, judged that no law gave the bishop of Rome the power to make that truce.

Romanus ignored the truce. He marched out of Ravenna to take back Perugia and the other towns Ariulf had captured.

“Among the swords of the Lombards”

Three years later, in June 595 AD, a letter from the emperor reached St. Gregory. It accused him of betraying the emperor and of acting foolishly in the way he had dealt with the Lombards. At the emperor’s court in Constantinople, people thought well of Romanus. For some time they had been growing angry with St. Gregory.

St. Gregory wrote back to the emperor. To be called “deceived by the cunning of Ariulph”, St. Gregory wrote, was the same as being called silly. And St. Gregory agreed that he was silly. “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,” St. Gregory wrote.