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temporal and spiritual lords of the steadily growing kingdom of the Franks had noted very clearly the justice and injustice, the strength and weakness, of the vassals of the East enthroned in the city of Peter. Circumstances there now pointed more and more toward a separation from Byzantium. The government of Justinian, hollowed out by wars, the cost of luxurious splendour and confiscatory taxes, was unable to help Rome and its Popes during the time of tribulation at the hands of the barbarians, plagues, and inner conflicts. The situation became utterly hopeless when the Lombards, the last migrant Germanic tribe, invaded Italy, They did not conquer the whole of the country but they broke it asunder politically and were the causes of its long- enduring impotence. The Greek Empire retained Rome and the ad- joining territory, Ravenna and the Pentapolis. To the south it re- tained the region of Naples, Calabria, and Sicily. If the Church was to be the fundamental society, it must now imperatively find leaders able to preserve its social and spiritual authority. And the men it needed appeared.
"I, unworthy and feeble man, took over an old ship which the waves had battered severely. The waters poured in from all sides, and the rotten planks whipped daily by storms foreshadowed imminent ship- wreck." So wrote Gregory the Great (590604) shortly after he had been elected Pope. Comparable for strength of will and active energy to Leo I, he nevertheless bore a good-natured smile on his paternal features. He was a monk by disposition; but despite the fact that he was tired of this world, he sowed the seeds of the future on a vast field. The last "Roman" looked from the height of a ruined building at the fierce melee of peoples roundabout and placed his hope when he dared hope in gathering and unifying all peoples, even the bar- barians of the north, inside the educational institutions founded by Christ. Throughout all the subsequent history of the Church, this man and his achievement have remained the great exemplars of what a successor of Peter can be and can accomplish.
Gregory was the son of a rich Roman patrician family, and during his early manhood had become a prefect of the city. He was a born lawyer, an administrator and a lover of brilliant display, who managed the police, the judges, the tax officials and others subordinate to his office in a manner pleasing to the Romans. When his father died
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