[Footnote 70: In a letter which he wrote about the time (_Ep._, ciii.) to the bishops of Gaul, Leo tells them that Dioscorus has been condemned, and says that he encloses a copy of the sentence. The copy appended to the letter is spurious, for it contains an allusion to "the holy and most blessed Pope, head of the universal Church, Leo ... the foundation and rock of faith." But I do not think one can say confidently that this is the actual document sent by Leo.] [Footnote 71: _De Rebus Geticis_, xlii.] [Footnote 72: The Chronicles of Prosper and Idatius are in Migne, vol. li. Idatius adds that Attila was threatened (in his rear) by the troops of Marcian, though we cannot trace such a movement of the Eastern troops. It was enough that Attila believed it.] [Footnote 73: _Ep._, clxii.] [Footnote 74: CLXV.] [Footnote 75: CXLIX.] [Footnote 76: CLXX.] CHAPTER IV GREGORY THE GREAT, THE FIRST MEDIÆVAL POPE Seventeen Pontiffs successively ruled in the Lateran Palace during the hundred and thirty years which separate the death of Leo I. and the accession of Gregory I. The first seven were not unworthy to succeed Leo, although one of them, Anastasius (496-498), is unjustly committed to Dante's hell for his liberality.[77] During their tenure of office the Arian Ostrogoth Theodoric set up his promising kingdom in Italy, and the stricken country partly recovered. But the succeeding Popes were smaller-minded men, looking darkly on the heresy of Theodoric and longing to see him displaced by the Catholic Eastern Emperor. Their unfortunate policy was crowned by a betrayal of Rome to the troops of Justinian; and its fruit was the establishment on the throne of Peter, by the unscrupulous Theodora, of the sorriest adventurer that had yet defiled it (Pope Vigilius), the reduction of Italy to the state of a province of the corrupt and extortionate East, and a lamentable dependence of the See of Rome on the whim of the Byzantine autocrat. Seeing its increasing feebleness, a new and fiercer tribe of the barbarians, the Lombards, poured over Italy; and it was a city of ruins, a kingdom of desolation, a continent of anarchy, which Gregory I. was, in the year 590, forced to undertake to control.