We have scarcely any record of the indescribable sorrows which the Lombard in his aggressive policy, and the Byzantine in his continuous resistance, made up of treachery and bribery added to insufficient military power, inflicted on the cities and the people of Italy: nor of what the Popes endured in their loyal acknowledgment of their duty as subjects, and their unbroken tenacity in maintaining the faith and government of the Church against the succession of adventurers who mounted the Byzantine throne. These culminated in the seven revolutions terminated by that of Leo III. Then the strong man, armed, rode his charger right into the Church of God and strove to add the Popes of Rome to the number of patriarchs whom he raised, deposed, blinded, and executed as he pleased. He made them ecumenical and trod upon them when so made, with the heel of the imperial buskin. And now we come from the first oppression in confirming the Pope, and the second in reducing him to a captive vassal, to the third of subjecting him as the chief teacher of the Church to the lay power of the emperor. As we look back we see the whole mind of Justinian photographed in his imperial legislation. When he had to speak to the bishop of his capital his language ran: “To the most holy and blessed Archbishop of this Imperial City, and Ecumenical Patriarch”—the core of the title was “Bishop of this Imperial City,” its corollary “Ecumenical Patriarch”. To him the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were to submit any appeal from the provinces subject to them. Rome was not to be deposed from the prior rank acknowledged once for all by the eastern monarch and episcopate at the termination of the Acacian schism, in which act Justinian himself, as the ruling nephew, had taken notable part: but there was to be at Constantinople a similar patriarch, whom the whole eastern world should obey. From him the eastern bishops were to learn the mind of the emperor, just as, when they attended the court, he introduced them to the imperial presence. The emperor would honour him by using him as his chief ecclesiastical minister, who held the portfolio of doctrine. The laws which all the world was to receive bore this exaltation of the imperial bishop in their bosom. And it must be confessed that in St. Gregory’s time the patriarchal title which Pope Gelasius had utterly refused to the Byzantine bishop a century before, had been conceded to him in St. Gregory’s practice: the patriarchal title, but not the ecumenical. Of the patriarchs, when speaking of a fault to be condoned, he wrote, “if any of the four patriarchs had done this we could not pass it over,” and Constantinople must be added to Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to make up this number of four: but of the assumed title of ecumenical, he wrote that it was diabolical, and the forerunner of anti-Christ.