The weight of imperial pressure upon Rome had been considerably affected by the Lombard occupation of the northern provinces of Italy, beginning in 568. The capture of Italy as a province, won for Justinian by the conquest of Narses, was only completed in 555. In thirteen years the Lombards entered upon the country which the Goths had well nigh reduced to ruin. Lombard aggression ran well nigh side by side with Byzantine oppression for two centuries. Right in the midst of both the Apostolic See was placed. In 596, the great St. Gregory complained that he had been keeping watch and ward against these new northern robbers for twenty-eight years, which is the second arm of Byzantine oppression. The exarch, in the judgment of the despotic Justinian and his successors, was a viceroy of all Italy, planted in the fortress of Ravenna, one side of which was guarded by the sea, the other by marshes. Thence Theodorich ruled: there he was buried: and the Byzantine only felt secure in the Gothic stronghold. Defenceless Rome was stretched out beneath his feet in central Italy, or, if it had a defence, it was that the deathless spirit of the Apostolic See lived within the walls of Aurelian, and animated by its guardianship the often broken and rudely repaired towers of the world’s ancient mistress. The exarch was the choice instrument of the emperor’s despotism. St. Gregory, in his fourteen years’ struggle with all the elements of civil dissolution, accounts the exarch Romanus as his worst enemy. He was always ready to combine with the Lombard, then in the depths of savagery and ignorance, against his own lord’s liege vassals in Rome. Thus St. Gregory unbosoms himself to Sebastian, bishop of Sirmium:—“Words cannot express what we suffer from your friend, the lord Romanus. I would say, in a word, that his malice towards us surpasses the swords of the Lombards. The enemies who destroy us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of the Commonwealth, who wear out our thoughts by their ill-will, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to have the care of bishops and clergy, of monasteries and people, to watch carefully against enemies in ambuscade, to be exposed even to suspicion by the deceit and ill-will of rulers—the labour and the sorrow of this your brotherhood can the better weigh by the purity of your affection for me who suffer it.”(206) These words may fitly introduce us to the Byzantine exarchate as a government. In the thirty years succeeding St. Gregory, the exarch appears as the great manager of Papal elections: from which his least hostile act would be to extort a fee as great, at least, as that laid down in the last Gothic time as 3000 gold coins. Now and then, as opportunity offered, he would enjoy the greater luxury of plundering the Lateran treasury of the Church at his leisure: as done by the exarch Isaac in 638, who was immortalised for the deed in the inscription of his tomb