Consecrated only by two bishops[7] on Easter Day, 556, he began a pontificate which was from the first disputed and even despised. The Archbishop of Milan and the patriarch of Aquileia would not communicate with him. In Gaul he was received with suspicion, and he was obliged to write to King Childebert, submitting to him a profession of his faith.[8] It is clear that the Gallican Church no more than the Lombard regarded {40} the pope as _ipso facto_ orthodox or the guardian of orthodoxy. Even this letter of Pelagius was not regarded as satisfactory. It was long before the Churches entered into communion with him; and even to the last, the northern sees of Italy refused. He ruled, unquietly enough, for four years; and died, leaving a memory free at least from simony, and honoured as a lover of the poor. Under him, as under Vigilius, the papacy had been compelled to submit to the judgment of the East. "The Church of Rome," says Mgr. Duchesne, "was humiliated." [9] The lives of these two popes cover the most important period in the ecclesiastical history of the sixth century. After the death of Pelagius I., and up to the accession of Gregory the Great in 590, the interest of Italian history is political rather than ecclesiastical. The emperors tried to rule, through their exarchs at Ravenna, from Constantinople. The papacy grew quietly in power. Then came the Lombards and a new era began. [1] So _Var._, i. 26, ed. Mommsen, p. 28. [2] ii. 29, p. 63. [3] _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. iii. p. 516. [4] _Anonymus Valesii_. [5] _Italy and her Invaders_, vol. vi. p. 528. [6] Instances are collected by M. Diehl, _Etudes sur l'administration byzantine dans l'exarchat de Ravenne_, p. 320. [7] Et dum nou essent episcopi qui cum ordinarent, inventi sunt duo episcopi, Johannes de Perusia et Bonus de Ferentino, et Andreas presbiter de Hostis, et ordinaverunt eum.--_Liber Pontificalis_, i. 303. [8] Migne, Patr. Lat., tom. lxix. p. 402. [9] _Revue des Questions Historiques_, Oct. 1884, p. 439. {41} CHAPTER IV CHRISTIANITY IN GAUL FROM THE SIXTH TO THE EIGHTH CENTURY A very special interest belongs to the history of Christianity in Gaul. There is no more striking example of what the Church did to bridge over the gulf between the old culture and the barbarians. [Sidenote: Roman Gaul.] Among early Christian martyrs few are more renowned than those who died in Southern Gaul. Paganism lived on, concealed, in many country districts, but the life and power and thought of the people became by the time of Constantine, by the fourth century, entirely Christian. As the state organised so did the Church. Gaul had seventeen provincial governments; it came to have seventeen archbishops, and under them bishops for each great city. On the Roman empire and the Christian Church the foundations were laid; and they were laid firm. [Sidenote: The barbarian invasions.]