In that island he appointed the primate of Canterbury, and designed the primate of York. Through St. Leander and St. Isidore, and the martyr St. Hermenegild, he recovered Spain from the Arian blight; through the queen Theodelinda he made some impression upon Lombard cruelty and misbelief; through the Frankish monarchy he won back France from dissolution and heresy. As he saw the palaces around him deserted, and the broken aqueducts mourn over their intercepted streams in a wasted Campagna, and the glory of Trajan's forum become paler day by day, he thought that the end of the world was coming--and so thinking and so saying, he founded Christendom. In Rome itself, the almsgivers whom he had organised traversed the streets daily, carrying food to the hungry, medicine and medical aid to the sick. Every month he allotted portions of corn, wine, oil, cheese, fish, vegetables. The Church seemed to be the general provider. Every day he fed at his table twelve poor pilgrims, and served them himself. The nuns who took refuge in Rome, from the destruction of their monasteries by the Lombards, amounted to three thousand, whom Gregory supported, especially during the severe winter of 597. He wrote to the sister of the emperor Mauritius: "To their prayers and tears and fasts Rome owes its delivery from the sword of the Lombards".[184] Other cities also he saved, and so he distributed the vast patrimony of the Roman Church in Southern Italy, Sicily, Africa, France, Illyricum, with such wisdom and so beneficent a mercy, that historians trace to him the beginning of that temporal sovereignty which two hundred years after him the Popes were to take in change for the cruel abandonment, paired with incessant exaction, of Byzantine despotism; and the most loyal of subjects were called to be the most beneficent of sovereigns; and the people who had found them fathers from age to age rejoiced to see the fathership united with kingship. What had happened to the Italy recovered by the arms of Belisarius and Narses, to the unity of the Roman empire, which caused the calamitous state described by Gregory?