After a hundred years and a succession of fourteen Popes, St. Martin held a great Council at Rome in 649, in which he passed anathema upon the heresy of two eastern emperors, grandfather and grandson. In requital for this the grandson had him seized in his Lateran Church itself, carried secretly to Constantinople, judged by the senate there for high treason, condemned to death, and finally suffered him to die of starvation in the Crimea. As Pope John I. gained his crown of martyrdom by the first visit of a Pope to Constantinople, so Pope Martin gained the like crown by the fourth. About thirty years after this a General Council was held in which the heresy which St. Martin had placed under ban was condemned afresh; and it was called by the wish and command of the then reigning emperor, son of the very man who had persecuted St. Martin to death, and in it the largest acknowledgments of St. Peter’s succession at Rome were made to St. Martin’s successors. Yet, ten years afterwards, this man’s son, then emperor, tried to repeat upon Pope Sergius the crime of the grandfather committed on Pope St. Martin. That his attempt was baffled, the life of his messenger saved by Pope Sergius, and the messenger dismissed in most ignominious flight, was owing to the Italian troops of the emperor rising in defence of the Pope. They would not allow him to be taken to the capital on the Bosphorus. In another ten years the usurper Apsimar had despatched another exarch, Theophylact, to carry Pope John VI. to Constantinople that he might be induced to give the consent which Pope Sergius had refused to the canons of the Trullan Council. This attempt also was frustrated by the flocking of Italian troops to Rome in defence of the Pope. Last is the visit of Pope Constantine, in which two things are remarkable. The very emperor who had attempted to kidnap Pope Sergius in 693, being on the eve of the extinction which was to fall on the line of Heraclius, in 710 invited Pope Constantine to visit him, ordered him everywhere to be received with royal honours; when they met, fell, though crowned, at his feet to kiss them, and sent him back in highest honour. And presently the patriarch of Constantinople, begging of him to be condoned for a grievous fault, drew a picture of his supremacy the functions of which he compared to those which the Creator in His wisdom has given to the head in the human body. I will venture to say that no western mind has expressed with greater force or tenderness the office which belongs to him who sits in the see of the chief apostle than was done by the tenant for the time of that see of New Rome, which for more than three centuries had been striving to rival and depress the elder Rome.