But the genius of Leo served only to defer the downfall of the Western Empire, which was doomed to disappear fifteen years after his death. His successors continued to protect Italy, so far as in them lay, against the horrors of war; and Pope Agapetus, though weighed down by years, undertook the perilous mission of going to Constantinople to make peace between the Emperor of the East and the King of the Visigoths. A few years afterwards, Pope Pelagius I. had the courage to seek an interview with Totila, and so preserve Rome from massacre and dishonour. Pelagius II., who kept within bounds the Lombards, at that time masters of Italy, was succeeded by Gregory I., surnamed Gregory the Great, one of the most illustrious of the Roman pontiffs. Gregory, whose father was a Roman senator, and whose mother was canonised, was prætor or chief magistrate of Rome, and his administration had gained for him great popularity when, by his father’s death, he inherited a large fortune. This enabled him to found seven monasteries, and, having distributed the remainder of his money amongst the poor, he became a monk in the Abbey of St. Andrew, which he had founded previous to his entering the priesthood. Chosen as pope on September 3, 590, he, in spite of his resistance to the clergy, the senators, and the people, immediately made his profession of faith in the customary manner. He converted the Lombards, who were professed Arians, and even idolaters. This was no small triumph, for it meant the peaceful subjection, or rather the alliance of a warlike people, whose close neighbourhood to Rome had been a constant cause of alarm. It was especially in his relations with the court of Constantinople that Gregory displayed all the loftiness of his character. While he bridled the ambition of the Lombards, so as to preserve for the emperors of the East their Italian possessions (Fig. 207), he defended with equal energy and tact the independence of the Church and the interests of the Italians against the unjust pretensions of the Byzantine Court. He rendered more distinct the rôle of the papacy in the Middle Ages, which was to uphold the purity of dogma as opposed to heresy against the theological pretensions of emperors, to protect also the Catholic population, vanquished and often persecuted by new masters, whether pagan or heretic; and, lastly, to convey the tidings of the Gospel to the most remote nations of the earth. [Illustration: Fig. 207.--St Michael the Archangel, Minister of God, offering to a Byzantine Emperor the globe surmounted by the cross, the symbol of the imperial power.--A leaf of an ivory dyptic or tablet of the Sixth Century, preserved in the British Museum.--From a copy by M. J. Labarte. The second leaf of this dyptic being lost, the Greek inscription, which signifies, “Receive this object, and learning the cause,” is incomplete, and its meaning enigmatical.]