at Ravenna, as the most faithful servant of his most serene masters at Constantinople. The exarch Olympius, in 648, received from his master, Constans II., the higher commission to murder St. Martin, as he was giving holy Communion. But the attempt was frustrated, as was believed at the time, by a divine intervention. However, the exarch Theodore Kalliopa, sent for the special purpose, succeeded in carrying off Pope St. Martin, as he lay ill before the altar of the Lateran, five years later in 653, and placing him in the hands of Constans II., to be condemned for high treason, in that he had not waited for the confirmation of his election by Constans, but, instead, had condemned his heresy in the great Council which he summoned at Rome. In the interval of twenty-five years, from the death of St. Martin to the opening of the Sixth Council, the exarchs were faithful to the imperial tradition until Constantine the Bearded renounced the heresy of which his father, Constans, and his grandfather, Heraclius, had been the chief supporters, while they were nursed in it by a succession of Byzantine patriarchs. But when Justinian II. had followed, the exarch John Platina, in 687, hurried from Ravenna to Rome to hinder the election of the great pontiff, Sergius. Finding it accomplished, he was obliged to content himself with fining the new Pope to the extent of a hundred pounds’ weight of gold, that being the bribe which the unsuccessful candidate had promised him if he would come to Rome to secure his election. Four years afterwards, Justinian II., unable to induce Pope Sergius to accept the decrees of his Council in Trullo, or to accept the place for his signature of them which the emperor had provided in a line between his own signature and that of his patriarch, sent Zacharias not an exarch, but a guardsman, to repeat, if possible, in the person of Pope Sergius, what had been done forty years before in the person of Pope St. Martin. But, instead, the emperor’s own troops caused the guardsman to tremble for his life. His only place of refuge was under the bed in the Pope’s own chamber: the Pope’s intercession alone saved the imperial emissary from a fatal outburst of Italian wrath. Yet ten years later, under the upstart emperor Apsimar, in his short reign, another exarch, Theophylact, was again repulsed from his execution of an intended attack on the Pope by Italian soldiers. Once more, when Pope Constantine, obeying an imperial letter of the restored Justinian II., had left Rome for Constantinople, several chief Papal officers were summarily executed at Rome. Thus the five attempts on the life of the Pope Gregory II. made by exarchs or guardsmen, at the bidding of the emperor Leo III., in his Iconoclastic fury, were but the consistent continuation of the spirit shown by the exarchs, and fostered and supported by the emperors, from the time of St. Gregory’s adversary, the Lord Romanus.