Whatever pomp and glory remained to the empire was centered in Constantinople. Rome and the Pope were powerless as to material strength. So St. Martin, when accused at his trial of favouring an enemy of the emperor, replied: “What was I to resist an exarch, without any force of my own?” At that time Constantinople was probably the greatest as well as the richest city in the world. When Constans II. eight years after visited Rome he swept away whatever works of art pleased him for the further adornment of his capital. In the four centuries down to Leo III. which elapsed since the consecration of the capital by its founder, every successor had made it a point of honour to improve the beauty and increase the strength of the imperial residence. Thus those twenty-four Popes from the first to the second Gregory were dwelling in a Rome which continued to exist only as the seat of their own primacy, drawing successive generations to it, and visited year by year through the pilgrims who came to it from all parts of the world, since they sought the tomb of the chief apostle when the sepulchre of the Master was enthralled by the Saracen. Beside that tomb they stood with Roman fortitude against Byzantine fluctuation. Heraclius published an Ecthesis, and Constans II. a Typus. Ten Popes condemned both, and then Constantine IV. humbly admitted that both were worthless. He further undid the heresy of four successive patriarchs by putting them under anathema. He received as the living Peter the successor of one whom his father had stolen from Rome and martyred in the Crimea; just as his son Justinian fell at the feet of Pope Constantine, after he had tried to repeat the crime of his grandfather Constans on the person of Pope Sergius. So in 680 Theodore, then patriarch of Constantinople, urged on by another patriarch who lived at Constantinople since his own Antioch was become a spoil of the Saracen, expunged from the diptychs the names of all the Popes after Honorius to his own time. Theodore was himself deposed while the Sixth Council sat, and Macarius, his adviser, was deposed by that Council, but Theodore lived to be restored and to die as patriarch with a sounder faith than he had shown at the beginning. It is remarkable that after the four Monothelite patriarchs, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, who were condemned at the Sixth Council, three patriarchs, Thomas II., 667-8, John V., 669-674, and Constantine I., 674-6,(163) “leant to orthodoxy,” and so escaped the censure of the Council, while Theodore was heretical from 678 to 680, and orthodox when restored from 683 to 686.