At the beginning of this pontificate, Mauritius, the officer called chartular, whose proceeding in the robbery of the Lateran treasury has been recorded above, raised a rebellion in Rome. He found people, nobility, and army embittered by the Byzantine domination, and used this feeling for his own purposes. He spread a report that Isaac was striving to be king, made party with those same turbulent Romans who had joined in the attack upon the Lateran, and induced the garrisons in all the castles of the Roman territory to refuse obedience to the exarch. When Isaac heard this, that all the army of Italy had taken the oath to Mauritius, he sent Donus as commander with an army to Rome. Thereupon the Roman army gave up Mauritius, and joined Donus. Mauritius took asylum at St. Mary of the Crib.(24) He was taken out and sent with an iron collar about his neck, as well as the others implicated in the insurrection, to the exarch at Ravenna: but, before he arrived there, was beheaded, and his head carried to Ravenna and impaled. Isaac kept the other conspirators in prison, collared in the same way, but they escaped execution by the death of Isaac himself. Isaac was buried in the beautiful church of St. Vitale, in Ravenna, and his epitaph is preserved in Greek, and being a picture not only of the man, but of his time, is worth transcribing. It runs thus:— “Here lies one, a brilliant commander, who for six years, preserved Rome and the West without injury for our serene lords, Isaac, the fellow-worker with emperors, the great ornament of all Armenia, where he was of illustrious race. Upon his death in great renown, his wife Susannah mourns over her loss like a chaste dove, the loss of a husband who gained glory by his labours both in the East and in the West, for he commanded the army of both.” Isaac may be considered as the ideal exarch, and by contemplating his deeds, we may attain to a knowledge of the race of exarchs, viceroys of Italy, and images, in common clay, of their masters in marble, towards whom, for 200 years, St. Gregory and his successors had to exercise the virtue of loyalty. Upon the accession of Constans II., in 642, the patriarch Pyrrhus, under suspicion of complicity with the empress Martina in the poisoning of the emperor Heraclius Constantinus, fled to Africa. His place was taken by Paulus, a still more zealous Monothelite. Pyrrhus, coming to the West, which was unanimous in rejecting that heresy, represented himself to have been convinced by the eloquence of the Abbot Maximus, in an African Council in 645, and came to Rome to lay the confession of his faith at the feet of the Apostle Peter. Pope Theodorus received the repentant patriarch with great ceremony in the Vatican Basilica before the assembled clergy and people, to whom he solemnly condemned his own errors. But, when he went to Ravenna, Pyrrhus fell back again. Pope Theodorus thereupon condemned him in a Roman Council.(25)