Signs of a breach became evident once again in the days of the tyrant Justinian II. When pope Sergius refused obedience to his behests, the emperor bade the exarch seize him and send him to Constantinople. But not only the Roman mob, but the soldiers of the imperial garrison took up arms to resist Justinian’s officials when they tried to lay hands on Sergius: the ties of military obedience had already come to be weaker than those of spiritual respect, and the Pope triumphed, for Justinian was deposed, mutilated, and sent to Cherson by his rebellious subjects, ere he had time to punish the Romans. The twenty-two years of anarchy and dissolution at Constantinople which followed the deposition of Justinian (695-717) were fraught with important consequences in Italy. The ephemeral emperors of those days were unable to assert their authority over the West, and we once more find the popes assuming secular functions, after the fashion of Gregory the Great in the preceding century. John VI. levied taxes in Rome, made treaties with the Lombard duke of Benevento, and even protected and restored the exarch Theophylactus when he had been expelled from Ravenna by a military revolt. [Sidenote: Quarrel of Gregory II. and Philippicus.] Gregory II. went so far in his independence as to refuse to acknowledge the usurping emperor Philippicus; by his advice ‘the Roman people determined that state-documents should not bear the name of a heretical Caesar, nor the money be struck with his effigy. So the portrait of Philippicus was not set up in the Church, nor his name introduced in the prayers at Mass.’ Gregory only consented to recognise Philippicus’ successor Anastasius II. when he heard that the new emperor was a man of unimpeachable orthodoxy. The independent position of the popes had now grown so marked that the next quarrel with Constantinople was destined to lead to the final rupture of relations between the papacy and the empire. It was impossible that things should remain as they were: the breach was inevitable. Its cause was to be the accession of the stern Iconoclast, Leo the Isaurian, and his attempt to enforce his own religious views on the western, no less than the eastern provinces of his empire. The protagonists in the final struggle are Leo, pope Gregory II., and the Lombard king Liutprand, whose position and power we must now proceed to explain. When king Cunibert died in the year 700, he left his throne to his young son Liutbert, a mere boy, whose realm was to be administered by a regent-guardian, count Ansprand, the wisest of the Lombards. A minority was always fatal to one of the early Teutonic kingdoms. [Sidenote: Rebellion of Reginbert of Turin.] Only eight months after Liutbert had been proclaimed king, his nearest adult kinsmen rose in arms against him, to claim the crown. These were Reginbert, duke of Turin, and his son Aribert, the child and grandchild of king Godebert, and the cousins of the boy-king’s father.