The eighty years of Italian history during which the Lombards were settling down in the valley of the Po, and along the Umbrian and Samnite slopes of the Apennines, have won their chief importance in the story of the world, not from the doings of Agilulf or Rothari, but from the events that were taking place in Rome. To these years we may ascribe the foundation of the temporal power of the Papacy, and the development of the œcumenical position of the bishop of Rome to an extent which had hitherto been uncontemplated. These movements owe most of their strength to a single man, Pope Gregory the Great. After the first shock of the Lombard invasion had rent Italy in twain, the Imperial governors resolved to take up their residence in Ravenna, not in Rome—in the capital of the Italy of Theodoric, not that of the Italy of Augustus. [Sidenote: Rise of the Papacy.] They chose the strong marsh-fortress close to the Lombard border, not the decayed city of the Tiber, still scarred by the traces of Baduila’s harrying. The exarch stationed himself at Ravenna, and delegated his civil and military authority in the scattered portions of Imperial Italy to minor officials, of whom the _duces_ of Rome and Naples were the chief. This removal of the seat of the viceroy from the ancient metropolis was destined to have the most far-reaching results. Its first was that the chief lay official in Rome was an individual of far less authority and prestige than the chief ecclesiastical personage there resident. The bishops of Rome had always been men of importance; their claim to a patriarchal primacy over all the Western sees of Europe had already been formulated. In the ancient civil ‘prefecture’ of Italy—that is, in the Italian peninsula, Africa, and Illyricum—it had much reality. The African and Dalmatian churches referred matters of difficulty to Rome for decision, no less than did the church of Italy. We find Gregory the Great exercising a real influence in places as distant as Salona, Larissa, and Carthage. During the existence of the kingdom of the Ostrogoths, the Popes had obtained a kind of recognition from the Teutonic kings, as the accredited representatives of the Catholic and Roman population of Italy. They were certainly the most important subjects of the realm outside the ranks of the Gothic conquerors, and were allowed to petition or plead with the king in behalf of all the Catholic Italians. The reconquest of Italy by Justinian had threatened to lower the prestige and power of the Popes, by placing them once more under a master who was both the legitimate ruler of the whole empire and an orthodox Catholic. Justinian had dealt in a very autocratic manner with the Roman bishops, as the tales of the woes of Vigilius and Silverius show. He summoned them to Constantinople, bullied, imprisoned, or tried them at his good pleasure. The continued survival of the Imperial power in Italy would have checked the growth of Papal authority in a great measure.