‘Do you think,’ she asked as I left, ‘that Maximin will be made a saint?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The miracles will undoubtedly be attested.’
I looked back at her from the doorway of the library. Still seated, she looked back at me. She had the sad eyes of the very lonely. She had lost and lost and lost.
With a flourish, I dumped the bag down in front of Lucius. He was seated in his library. With his own hands, he was cleaning off a phallus he’d once drawn on a page of the Gospels. A slave stood beside him with a battered relic box.
‘We may expect a visit later today from the dispensator’s men,’ he explained, looking concerned. He turned to the slave. ‘Remind me – who was that procurator of Judaea who put the Galilean carpenter to death?’
‘It was Pontius Pilate, sir,’ the slave replied, looking rather pleased with himself. As Lucius turned back to me, I saw the slave actually smile and kiss the relic box.
Lucius waved him out of the room. ‘Well, this bag has a fine, letterly feel to it,’ he said with sudden ebullience. ‘Let’s have a look inside.’
I broke the seal on my bag with my sword. I drew out the three letters to which I’d given so little attention, when the shortest glance could have saved four lives. Their seals had been broken and then resealed – again with the mark of the English mission. There could be no doubt now that Maximin had read the letters, and that he’d thought them just as important as we’d guessed.
One was a mass of elaborate squiggles that looked as impressive as it was meaningless. Another was in Greek. So far as I could understand the complex style, this was a translation of the first out of Persian. The third was in Latin. Lucius and I pressed close together over the table to read the tiny writing that covered the skin side of the parchment.
It was a letter from the pope to the Lombard king. It had all the right seals, and was drawn in exactly the same form as the copy letters I’d seen in Canterbury written to Ethelbert and his queen. I won’t try to duplicate the windy recitation of titles with which these things begin, or the pompous language in which they are written. As it was, I had to read it twice to get the full meaning. I will instead summarise in a few words what was there expressed in a mass of words.
The pope was proposing a deal to the Lombards. Phocas was increasingly beleaguered in Constantinople. All the Eastern Churches were on the edge of heresy or at least schism. Smaragdus, the exarch in Ravenna, was both mad and incapable of defending the True Church against its internal and external enemies. Bearing in mind the whole drift of the East, whoever replaced both emperor and exarch would be still less satisfactory as the civil power in Italy.
The pope therefore proposed that King Agilulf should lay close siege to Ravenna. This was impregnable from the land side, so long as it had unbroken access from the sea. But it could be cut off from all communication with northern and central Italy. This done, he should march on Rome. Outside the walls, he should convert before his whole army out of the Arian heresy into the True Faith of Rome. The pope would then allow him into the city, where he would be crowned emperor of the West.
The pope had this right of election, he claimed, on account of some grant of power by Constantine, which gave him supremacy throughout the West.
Standing together in the Lateran, the pope and new emperor should declare a twenty-year toleration of Arianism, during which time all peaceful means should be employed to convert the Lombards to the True Faith. In return for this election to the purple, the pope should get written confirmation that the Church was the supreme spiritual power in the West, and all military assistance possible to assert this status over any refractory Churches in France and Spain.
The cities of Italy, excluding Rome, should be ruled by joint councils of the Church and the Lombards, the surplus of any revenues to be shared equally. There was to be a common citizenship of the new Western Empire for all inhabitants of Italy, and a common obligation of service in both administration and army. All were to swear allegiance to pope and emperor jointly, and utterly to renounce allegiance to Constantinople, whether civil or military or religious. Rome was to be ruled jointly by pope and emperor, both of whom were to live there. It was to be the capital of the new Italy, with a revived Senate of Roman and Lombard nobles, who should be urged to intermarry and become a single order, and from which would be drawn all the highest officials of Church and State.
The pope had been in contact with Great King Chosroes of Persia, and with the Eastern barbarians. These were prepared, on acceptance of the terms proposed by Agilulf, to mount a coordinated attack on Constantinople. If successful, this would entirely destroy the Empire in the East. The imperial forces there, as directed by Phocas, would be outnumbered and outclassed. And there would now be no hope of reinforcements from Italy. In any event, the combined assault in the East would prevent reinforcements from being sent to Italy. There was also a strong possibility that the Ethiopians could be brought to invade Upper Egypt, thereby tying down still more of the imperial forces.
In token of his good faith, the pope signed his own name to the letter. In addition, he sent with it a sealed letter from the great king himself, together with one of the most holy relics of the Church and thirty pounds of gold. This would pay the first expenses of the march on Ravenna. A further three thousand pounds would be handed over once Agilulf had sealed his declaration of papal supremacy.
The letter was dated a few days before that encounter with the bandits on the road between Populonium and Telamon. The combined attack on the Empire was proposed for the early autumn.
The letter in Persian I couldn’t read. But what I could follow of the Greek translation said enough. Great King Chosroes had written to Agilulf, confirming the proposed deal from the pope. He swore he would so far as possible tie up all imperial forces in the East, and would open full diplomatic relations with any emperor of the West on the same basis of equality as had long existed with Constantinople. Within a mass of Oriental flattery, he hailed Agilulf as his ‘dearest brother’ and ‘Joint Eye of the World’.
43
We looked and looked at those letters.
I looked up first. It all made perfect sense to me. The emperor was clearly unable to protect Italy from the Lombards. But he was able to keep the Lombards from the peaceful enjoyment of what they had conquered. An alliance of pope and Lombard king would give Italy its first chance of peace in forty years. Indeed, with the Greeks sent off to fuck themselves, it would return Italy to the good old days of King Theodoric – only this time without the problem of heresy that had brought his experiment in coexistence to an early end. Who in Italy could object to this?
Lucius, I could see, objected. He was furious. I’d never seen him show the slightest concern for the common good. Now, he banged his fist on the table and was shaking with anger. ‘Those shitty clerics!’ he shouted. ‘I should have guessed they were up to something like this. They’d make a pact with the Jews – no, they’d make a pact with their devil – if they thought it would advance the interests of their Church.
‘You know something? When Alaric – the first Alaric, that is – was outside Rome, the pope of the day was told the city could be saved from sack by propitiating the Old Gods. Did he turn the advice down? Did he fuck! He said the ancient sacrifices could go ahead, but only if they were held in private to save his face. Because of that, Rome had its first foreign conqueror in a thousand years. Of course, there was a private deal before he was let in, and Alaric spared the churches.
‘These people don’t believe in anything but power! You know how they fuss on about heresy. Well, here they are, coolly offering to tolerate what they’ve always denounced as the most damnable heresy of all. So long as they get their hands on the full machinery of state, they’re perfectly happy to share it with a bunch of Arians.’ He paused and looked down again at the papal letter.
‘But Lucius,’ I protested, ‘this would mean no more Phocas.’
He turned savagely to me. ‘For all we know, sitting here, Phocas is already out of power. Whatever the case, he’ll be out soon enough. If it isn’t the exarch of Africa or his relatives, it’ll be someone else. It’ll be another of my noble relatives. He’ll then set affairs right again.
