All he asked was to be left quiet in his monastery, where he was putting his whole heart into living the life of a model monk. In his ardour against himself, he carried his penances too far and fasted so rigorously that he came near to dying—an imprudence for which he paid ever after in broken health and in being debarred from fasting at all. He complains pitifully of having to “drag about such a big body with so little strength,” but this was the least of the trials that awaited him. In the year 577, when Gregory was about thirty-seven years of age, the reigning Pope, Benedict I, sent for him and insisted upon making him one of the Cardinal Deacons to whom was entrusted the jurisdiction of the seven “Regions” into which the city was divided. Gregory protested, but had to take on the charge, and from that time forward he belonged less to himself than to others. He was too necessary and valuable to be spared. The next year, Pope Benedict being dead, his successor, Pelagius II, decided to send Gregory on a very difficult and important mission to the Emperor Tiberius Constantinus at Constantinople, where trouble of all kinds seemed to be brewing. Although Gregory bewails this “thrusting out from port into the storm,” one cannot but feel how the alert fighting spirit in the man leaps to the call. The born leader may persuade himself that he is happiest in the seclusion he thinks good for his soul, but when the call to arms comes every repressed fibre of his being wakes and cries for action.