The Pope who called himself 'the paymaster of the Lombards'

ROME, September 603 AD — In September 603 AD, Saint Gregory the Great had been Pope in Rome for thirteen years. He had spent most of them trying to make peace with the Lombards. By now he was so ill with gout that he could not leave his bed. That same month, the fighting between the Lombards and the empire stopped in a truce.

Rome was in the part of Italy that belonged to the empire. The emperor’s governor, called the exarch, was at the city of Ravenna. The war could not simply end, because the emperor could not accept the Lombards’ kingdom as lawful. And the Lombards would give the empire nothing.

The paymaster and the queen

The Church owned land, above all in Sicily. St. Gregory used the money it brought in to buy back prisoners and to pay the Lombards for truces. In July 592 AD a Lombard duke was threatening Rome. St. Gregory made his own truce with the duke, and the Church paid for it. St. Gregory called himself “the paymaster of the Lombards”.

St. Gregory could also write to the Lombard queen. King Agilulf’s wife, Theodelinda, was a Catholic, and she had helped St. Gregory win peace from her husband before. Through the queen, St. Gregory held talks with King Agilulf, and they ended in a truce in 598 AD.

That peace lasted two years. In the spring of 601 AD the exarch of that time attacked the city of Parma. The Lombards had given him no reason to. The exarch carried King Agilulf’s daughter and her husband off to Ravenna as prisoners. He wanted to force the king to accept better peace terms. King Agilulf struck back and beat the exarch’s army under the walls of Ravenna.

By then St. Gregory was running the Church from his bed. “It is long since I have been able to leave my couch,” St. Gregory 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 603 AD King Agilulf marched out of Milan. He surrounded the city of Cremona, and it fell on August 21. Three weeks later his battering rams opened gaps in the walls of Mantua. His army took that city by storm.

Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the emperor had been overthrown. A new exarch was sent to Ravenna, and he saw that he did not have enough soldiers to keep fighting. He handed back King Agilulf’s daughter, and she went home to Parma.

The new exarch agreed a truce with the king, first for thirty days. Then he agreed one for eighteen months, until April 1, 605 AD. Each side kept what it held that day, so the king kept every city he had won. In 2008 AD, Pope Benedict XVI said the peace came partly thanks to St. Gregory’s contacts with Queen Theodelinda.

A cross for the queen’s son

At Easter that year, the son of Queen Theodelinda and King Agilulf was baptised a Catholic at Monza. The queen sent St. Gregory the news. In the last months of his life, St. Gregory spoke his reply out loud for someone else to write down. He told Queen Theodelinda that his gout was so bad he could hardly get up, “not only for dictating, but even for speaking.” He had been close to death when her messengers left.

St. Gregory prayed that the boy would “grow up in His fear to be a blessing to the Lombards”. He sent the boy a cross holding wood of the Holy Cross. He also sent a passage of the Gospel in a Persian case, and three rings for the boy’s sister.

St. Gregory also asked the queen to pass on his thanks to King Agilulf for the peace. He asked her to keep 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 in Rome on March 12, 604 AD, at about sixty-three. The truce with King Agilulf still had more than a year to run.