position were helpless subjects in a “servile” province, but in their religious character were successors of St. Peter. Now at the time the western emperor ceased to exist seven Popes succeeding St. Leo defended his doctrine against two emperors, Zeno and Anastasius, and foiled all the efforts of Acacius to use the eastern jealousy and the pride of the royal city, and exalt his see above the control of St. Peter’s successor, until the seventh Pope, Hormisdas, then a subject of the Arian Gothic king, Theodorich, compelled the eastern emperor, the patriarch, the bishops, and the court, to confess his supreme authority, as successor of St. Peter. Seven Popes then stood neither hesitating nor fluctuating: over against them in that time stood seven bishops of Constantinople, one originator of the whole schism, others yielding to the emperor’s will even against their own wishes. It was a contest of 44 years with an oriental despotism, waged by Popes the subjects of Arian Goths. They alone maintained the faith of the Church, as embodied in the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, and saved the East. Now, again, there has been a struggle for 44 years, in which ten Popes, subjects of the eastern emperor, and liable as such to be summoned by him to his capital, where one of them was indeed condemned to death, stood likewise as one man. They dwelt in a Rome no longer recognised as the head of the empire. Of this whole seventh century the special historian of the city says that for Rome it was “the most frightful, the most devastating of all”.(135) Civil power was not in their hands. Their election itself had to be confirmed by the exarch as representing the emperor, or by the emperor himself. The first of the ten, Pope Severinus, had to wait nineteen months for it, after which he sat two months. The last of the ten, St. Leo II., began to sit eighteen months after the death of his predecessor, St. Agatho, and then only sat ten months. During the whole of this period, from the death of Honorius in 638, to the ratification of the Sixth Council in 682, the yielding of any one of these ten Popes would have carried with it the subjection of the whole church to the Monothelite error. They saved the East, they saved the Royal City, the seat of all power, in spite of its four patriarchs condemned as heretics. That Heraclius and Constans did not destroy the faith in the seventh century is as much their work and merit as that Zeno and Anastasius did not destroy it in the fifth. Perhaps the test which by the force of circumstances was applied to the Popes from the time Rome was governed from Constantinople as a captive city in the second half of the sixth and the whole of the seventh century was even more severe than that applied to them in the fifth. Their condition was more helpless, inasmuch as the Byzantine subjection was heavier than the Arian Gothic control, while the pillaged Italy of the exarchs was wretched, and the prosperous realm of Theodoric