During the whole pontificate of St. Gregory he was defending himself against the deceit and despotism of the man whom he acknowledged as his lawful sovereign, the Byzantine emperor. The despotism usually veiled itself in deceit, while the deceit rested upon the despotism rooted in the heart of the eastern that he was lord of the world.(3) Worse than the Lombards, who pursued to the very gates of Rome the people nourished by Gregory on the Church’s patrimonium, who spoiled, maimed, and tortured those whom they could catch, were the intrigues of the imperial lieutenants, the exarchs of Ravenna, plotting with the Lombards, enemies of the emperor, against his subjects, the Pope and his Romans. With this state of things the seventh century begins, and so it continues to the end. We have to consider the great events which took place in this century, and especially to point out their connection with this fact of the Byzantine temporal despotism as it was turned upon the spiritual power. Again, during his whole pontificate, St. Gregory was resisting the attempts of the bishops of Constantinople to extend their power. In his own time it would seem to have been an effect of Justinian’s legislation that the Roman See accepted them as patriarchs, which Pope Gelasius denied them to be. Not only so but in every step of their advancement they were backed by the emperors to go on yet further by pushing their See under the title of Ecumenical to a position over the eastern empire parallel to that of the Pope over the West, while it was subordinate at the same time to the emperor himself. The four-and-twenty immediate successors of St. Gregory, from Pope Sabinian, elected in 604, to Pope Constantine, who died in 715, were exposed to the full force of this attempt. The bearing of it upon the rise of the Mohammedan empire will appear more and more as we proceed in the history of this terrible century.