The reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals cost Justinian a few months of uninterrupted victory. The reconquest of Italy from the Goths cost twenty years of suffering to both sides, leaving, indeed, Justinian master but of a ruined Italy, master also of Rome, but after five successive captures; its senate reduced to a shadow, its patricians all but destroyed, its population shrunk, it is supposed, when Narses took possession of it in 552, to between thirty and forty thousand impoverished inhabitants. But the greatest change remains to be recorded. The Pope had indeed been delivered from Arian sovereigns, who held the country under military occupation, but exercised their civil rule with leniency and consideration, bearing, no doubt, in mind that they were, at least in theory, vice-gerents of an over-lord who ruled at Constantinople what was still the greatest empire of the world. What Pope Gelasius truly called "hostile domination" had been tempered during three-and-thirty years by the personal qualities of one who was at once powerful in arms and wise in statesmanship. Rome, in the time of Theodorick and Athalarick, had been maintained, its senate respected, the Pope treated with deference. A stranger entering Rome in 535, at the beginning of the Gothic war, would still have seen the greatest and grandest city of the world, standing in general with its buildings unimpaired. In 552, the Pope, instead of a distant over-lord, to whom he could appeal as Roman prince, had received an immediate master, who ruled Rome by a governor with a permanent garrison, and who understood his rule at Rome to be the same as his rule at Byzantium. The same as to its absolute power; but with this difference, that while Byzantium was the seat of his imperial dignity, in which every interest touched his personal credit, and its bishop was to be supported as the chief officer of his court and the chief councillor of his administration, the Rome he took from the Goths was simply a provincial town of a recovered province, once indeed illustrious, but now ruined and very troublesome. A provincial town because the seat of Byzantine power in Italy was henceforth not at Rome but at Ravenna, while the sovereign of Italy no longer held his court within Italy, at Ravenna or at Verona, as Theodorick and Athalarick, but at Constantinople. Mature reflection upon the civil condition made for the Pope by the result of the Gothic war will, I think, show that no severer test of the foundation of his spiritual authority could be applied than what this great event brought in its train. Nor must we omit to note that this test was brought about not only by the operation of political causes, but by actors who had not the intention of producing such a result. The suffering of Rome, in particular, during this war at the hands of Vitiges, Belisarius, Totila, Teia, Narses, is indescribable. It is hard to say whether defender or assailant did it most injury; but it is true to say