Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich

at Pavia. Within five years they had captured Milan, Verona, and Florence; Byzantine rule over North Italy, won at such a cost by Justinian, Belisarius, and Narses, was ended almost as soon as it had begun. The Lombards’ line of advance was finally checked by the Exarchate of Ravenna and by Rome itself, but two spearheads pressed on to set up the great independent duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. From here they might well have gone on to conquer the rest of the South, but they never managed to unite quite firmly enough to do so. Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily remained under Byzantine control—as, surprisingly, did much of the southern coastline. The Lombards showed little interest in the sea; they never really became a Mediterranean people. That Rome itself did not succumb to the Lombard tide was a miracle hardly less extraordinary than that which had saved her from Attila in the preceding century. Once again it was wrought by a pope, one of the most formidable ever to occupy the Throne of St. Peter.
    Gregory, the son of Gordian, came from a rich and well-established Roman family, with strong connections to the Papacy. He seems to have been related to Pope Agapetus I; he was certainly a direct descendant of Felix III (483–492). The precise year of his birth is uncertain; it must have been around 540. He at first preferred a civil career to one in the Church—by 573, while still in his early thirties, he had risen to be prefect of the City of Rome—but that year his father died and Gregory’s life took a new direction. Resigning all his civic responsibilities, he turned the family palace on the Caelian Hill into a Benedictine monastery—simultaneously founding six more on his family estates in Sicily—and entered it himself as a simple brother.
    Monasticism was something new in Italy. In the East it had long been part of the religious life, but it had been introduced into the West only recently—by St. Benedict, who had founded his great monastery at Monte Cassino less than half a century before and had drawn up the monastic rule which is still observed today. Once established, it had struck an immediate response. The West at this time was deeply pessimistic. The Roman Empire was gone, the barbarians were spreading across Europe; the world, as Gregory himself put it, “was growing old and hoary, hastening to its approaching death.” In such a world, the call to a life of manual labor, contemplation, and prayer was attractive indeed. Benedict had died while Gregory was still a child, but his influence on the future pope had been deep and lasting. Long after Gregory was obliged to abandon monastic life, he was to look back on his three years in his monastery as the happiest he had ever known.
    But all too soon, Pope Benedict I nominated Gregory a regionarius , or deacon in charge of one of Rome’s seven ecclesiastical districts, responsible for local administration and the care of the poor; then, in around 580, Benedict’s successor, Pelagius II, sent him off to Constantinople as his nuncio in the vain hope of persuading the emperor to send an army against the ever-advancing Lombards. Accommodated in the same palace that had been allotted to the luckless Vigilius, Gregory does not seem to have enjoyed his seven years in the city much more than his predecessor had—largely, one suspects, because of his mistrust of everything Greek—including even the language, which he resolutely refused to learn. But his time was not entirely wasted: he earned the respect of the two successive emperors to whom he was accredited and returned in 585 with firsthand knowledge of the Byzantine court and its ways.
    ALTHOUGH HE HAD taken a number of his fellow monks with him to Constantinople—where the atmosphere in his palace must have been a good deal more monastic than diplomatic—we can imagine the relief with which, on his return to Rome, Gregory reentered his monastery. This time he had five years there instead of three; but on