Rome was then so severely pressed that the See of Peter remained more than a year unfilled; for the Lombards were encamped before Rome, and hindered communication with Byzantium, whence Benedict I., the newly-elected Pope, had to wait for the imperial confirmation. The _Book of the Popes_ recites that during his four years' government the Lombards overran all Italy, and that pestilence and hunger consumed her people. Rome, also, was visited by both. The emperor Tiberius tried to succour it by sending corn from Egypt to the harbour Porto. Alboin had been murdered, and Kleph had succeeded him, on whose death, in 575, the Lombards fell into anarchy, and were divided into thirty-six dukes, and Faroald, the first duke of Spoleto, held Rome besieged when Benedict I. died, in 578; and so his successor, Pelagius II., a Roman of Gothic descent, was consecrated without the emperor's confirmation. The beleaguered Pope sent a cry of distress by an embassy to the eastern emperor, together with a gift of 3000 pounds' weight of gold from the impoverished city. But the emperor, engaged in a Persian war, could only send insufficient troops to Ravenna, more precious to him than Rome, declined the Roman gold, and advised to corrupt with it the Lombard commanders. Zoto, the Lombard duke of Beneventum, returning from Rome, which had ransomed itself, destroyed St. Benedict's monastery of Monte Cassino, in 580. The monks escaped to Rome, carrying with them the Saint's autograph of his Rule. Pope Pelagius II. received them in the Lateran basilica. There they founded the first Benedictine monastery in Rome. They named it after St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist, and so Constantine's basilica, or the Church of the Saviour, became in after-times St. John Lateran. Monte Cassino lay in ruins 140 years, during which time the great Order had its chief seat in Rome. Thus did Rome and Italy learn what they had gained by reunion with the eastern empire under Justinian. The pitiless financial exaction of that empire was exerted wherever it had power. War and pestilence ravaged town and country. It cost the Church a labour of 200 years to turn the Lombards from Arians and savages into Catholics who should one day be capable of resisting a Barbarossa and generating a Dante.