Byzantine Papacy

With the exception of Martin I, no pope during this period questioned the authority of the Byzantine monarch to confirm the election of the bishop of Rome before consecration could occur; however, theological conflicts were common between pope and emperor in the areas such as monothelitism and iconoclasm.

Greek speakers from Greece, Syria, and Sicily replaced members of the powerful Roman nobles in the papal chair during this period. Rome under the Greek popes constituted a "melting pot" of Western and Eastern Christian traditions, reflected in art as well as liturgy.

History

Origins (534–638)

After his invasion of Italy during the Gothic War (535–554), Emperor Justinian I forced the Goth-appointed Pope Silverius to abdicate and installed Pope Vigilius, a former apocrisiarius to Constantinople, in his place; Justinian next appointed Pope Pelagius I, holding only a "sham election" to replace Vigilius; afterwards, Justinian was content to be limited to the approval of the pope, as with Pope John III after his election. Justinian's successors would continue the practice for over a century.

Although the Byzantine troops that captured Italy called themselves Romans, many inhabitants of the city had a deep-seated mistrust of Greeks, and Hellenistic influence more generally. Before long, the citizens of Rome petitioned Justinian to recall Narses (who captured Rome in 552), declaring that they would rather still be ruled by the Goths. Anti-Byzantine sentiment could also be found throughout the Italian peninsula, and reception of Greek theology in Latin circles was more mixed.

The continuing power of appointment of the Byzantine emperor can be seen in the legend of Pope Gregory I writing to Constantinople, asking them to refuse his election. Pope Boniface III issued a decree denouncing bribery in papal elections and forbidding discussion of candidates for three days after the funeral of the previous pope; thereafter, Boniface III decreed that the clergy and the "sons of the Church" (i.e. noble laymen) should meet to elect a successor, each voting according to his conscience. This abated factionalism for the next four successions, each resulting in quick elections and imperial approval.

The prestige of Gregory I ensured a gradual incorporation of Eastern influence, which retained the distinctiveness of the Roman church; Gregory's two successors were chosen from his former apocrisiarii to Constantinople, in an effort to gain the favor of Phocas, whose disputed claim to the throne Gregory had enthusiastically endorsed. Pope Boniface III was very likely of Greek extraction, making him the "Easterner on the papal throne" in 607 (many authors incorrectly regard Pope Theodore I, who reigned from 642 to 649, as the first Eastern pope of the Byzantine papacy). Boniface III was able to obtain an imperial proclamation declaring Rome as "the head of all the churches" (reaffirming Justinian I's naming the pope "the first among all the priests"), a decree Phocas intended as much to humiliate the Patriarch of Constantinople as exalt the pope.

Phocas had a gilded statue of himself erected on a monumental column in the Roman Forum only three weeks after Boniface III's consecration, and in 609 by iussio authorized the conversion of the Pantheon into a Christian church, the first pagan Roman temple so converted. Boniface III himself attempted to outdo Phocas's efforts to Christianize the site, collecting twenty-four cartloads of martyr bones from the Catacombs of Rome to enshrine in the temple. A 610 synod ruled that monks could be full members of the clergy, a decision that would massively increase the hordes of Greek monks about to flee to Rome as the Slavs conquered much of the Balkan coast. At this time Salona in Dalmatia, Prima Justiniana in Illyricum, peninsular Greece, Peloponnesus, and Crete were under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Rome, and Constantinople was one of "the last places to which one could turn for refuge in the early seventh century".

Another wave of monastic refugees, bringing with them various Christological controversies, arrived in Rome as the Sassanid Empire ravaged the eastern Byzantine possessions. The following Muslim conquests of the seventh century in effect reversed the "avalanche of ascetics to the East" and the "brain drain of ascetic emigrations to the Holy Land" that followed the Gothic invasions of 408–410. Although the immigrating monastics were relatively small in number, their influence was immense:

"Amidst an atmosphere that warmly welcomed them, the small force of monks and clerics who came to Rome at this time would combine their zeal for Chalcedon, their intellectual acumen and higher learning, and the spiritual authority of the Roman church and the Papacy to mobilize the battle and win the war against the last of the great Christological controversies to confront the church."

Monothelitism conflict (638–654)

It was regarded as mandatory of a pope-elect to seek the confirmation of his appointment from Constantinople before consecration, often resulting in extremely lengthy delays (Sabinian: 6 months; Boniface III: 1 year; Boniface IV: 10 months; Boniface V: 13 months), due to the difficulty of travel, the Byzantine bureaucracy, and the whims of the emperors. Disputes were often theological; for example, Severinus was not consecrated for 20 months after his election due to his refusal to accept monothelitism, dying only months after he finally received permission to be consecrated in 640. When Greek Pope Theodore attempted to excommunicate two Patriarchs of Constantinople for supporting monothelitism, imperial troops looted the papal treasury in the Lateran Palace, arrested and exiled the papal aristocracy at the imperial court, and desecrated the altar of the papal residence in Constantinople.

Theodore was Greek-Palestinian, the son of the bishop of Jerusalem, chosen for his ability to combat various heresies originating from the East in his native tongue. As a result of Theodore's ability to debate his adversaries in their own language, "never again would the Papacy suffer the sort of embarrassment that had resulted from Honorius's linguistic carelessness". Theodore took the nearly unprecedented measure of appointing Stephen of Dor as apostolic vicar to Palestine, with the intent of deposing the Monothelite bishop successors of Sergius of Joppa. Theodore's deposition of Patriarch Pyrrhus ensured that "Rome and Constantinople were now in schism and at open war" over the Christology that would characterize the Christian empire. A Greek pope excommunicating the Patriarch no doubt proved a "distressing spectacle" for the emperors intent upon restoring religious unity. Theodore's boldness attests to:

"the strong undercurrent of Roman rancor against such heavy-handed use of imperial force emanating from Ravenna since the Maurikios incident [...] enthusiastic acceptance of imperial political authority exercised with such brutality was perceptibly waning".

Theodore's successor, Pope Martin I insisted on being consecrated immediately without waiting for imperial approval, and was (after a delay due to the revolt of Olympius, the exarch of Ravenna) abducted by imperial troops to Constantinople, found guilty of treason, and exiled to Crimea where he died in 655. Although Martin I's main crime was the promotion of the Lateran Council of 649, the council itself was a "manifestly Byzantine affair" by virtue of its participants and doctrinal influences (particularly its reliance on florilegia). The council's ecumenical status was never acknowledged, for the time solidifying the idea that the convening of ecumenical councils was an imperial prerogative. Within four years of the council's adjournment, both Martin I and Maximus the Confessor were arrested and tried in Constantinople for "transgressing the Typos".

According to Eamon Duffy, "one of the worst elements in Martin's suffering was the knowledge that while he still lived the Roman Church had bowed to imperial commands, and had elected a new pope", Pope Eugenius I. According to Ekonomou, "the Romans were as prepared to forget Pope Martin as Constans II was relieved to see him removed to the remote northern shores of the Black Sea". Thirty years later, the Sixth Ecumenical Council would vindicate the council's condemnation of Monothelitism, but not before the synod "ushered in the period of Rome's "Greek intermezzo'".

Reconciliation (654–678)

According to Ekonomou, the inhabitants of both East and West had "grown weary of the decades of religious warfare", and the arrest of Martin I did much to dissipate the "religious fever of the empire's Italian subjects". Rapprochement within the empire was viewed as critical to combating the growing Lombard and Arab threat and thus no pope "referred again to Martin I" for seventy-five years. Although the Roman uneasiness of electing a successor while Martin I lived and the Byzantine desire to punish Rome for the council caused the immediate sede vacante to last fourteen months, the next seven popes were more agreeable to Constantinople, and approved without delay, but Pope Benedict II was impelled to wait a year in 684, whereafter the Emperor consented to delegate the approval to the exarch of Ravenna. The exarch, who, invariably, was a Greek from the court of Constantinople, had the power to approve papal consecration from the time of Honorius I.

Emperor Constans II, the abductor of Martin I, resided himself in Rome for a period during the reign of Pope Vitalian. Vitalian's name was entered on the diptychs of the churches in Byzantium—the only name of a pope so entered since the pontificate of Honorius I (d. 638). Vitalian himself was possibly of Eastern extraction, and certainly nominated Greeks to important sees, including Theodore of Tarsus as Archbishop of Canterbury. Much has been said of Constans II's motives—perhaps to move the imperial capital to Rome or to reconquer large swathes of territory in the mold of Justinian I—but more likely he only intended to achieve limited military victories against the Slavs, Lombards, and Arabs. Vitalian heaped upon Constans II honors and ceremony (including a tour of St. Peter's tomb), even while Constans II's workmen were stripping the bronze from the monuments of the city to be melted down and taken to Constantinople with the Emperor when he departed. However, both Vitalian and Constans II would have been confident upon his departure that the political and religious relationship between Rome and Constantinople was effectively stabilized, leaving Constans II free to focus his forces against the Arabs. After Constans II was murdered in Sicily by Mezezius, Vitalian refused to support Mezezius's usurpation of the throne, gaining the favor of Constans II's son and successor, Constantine IV. Constantine IV returned the favor by refusing to support the striking of Vitalian's name from the diptychs of Byzantine churches and depriving Ravenna of autocephalous status, returning it to papal jurisdiction. Nonetheless, Vitalian's successors Adeodatus II was struck off the diptychs in the Monothelite East, a policy which did not change for the succeeding Pope Donus until after Donus' death.

Constantine IV abandoned the policy of monothelitism and summoned the Third Council of Constantinople in 680, to which Pope Agatho sent a representative. The council returned to the Chalcedonian Creed, condemning Pope Honorius and the proponents of monothelitism. Over the next ten years, reconciliation increased the power of papacy: the church of Ravenna abandoned its claim to independent status (formerly endorsed by Constans II), imperial taxation was lessened, and the right of papal confirmation was delegated from Constantinople to the Exarch of Ravenna. It was during this period that the papacy began "thinking of the Universal Church not as the sum of individual churches as the East did, but as synonymous with the Roman Church".

Greek Popes (678–752)

Pope Agatho, a Greek Sicilian, started "a nearly unbroken succession of Eastern pontiffs spanning the next three quarters of a century". The Third Council of Constantinople and the Greek Popes ushered in "a new era in relations between the eastern and western parts of the empire". During the pontificate of Pope Benedict II (684–685), Constantine IV waived the requirement of imperial approval for consecration as pope, recognizing the sea change in the demographics of the city and its clergy. Benedict II's successor Pope John V was elected "by the general population", returning to the "ancient practice". The ten Greek successors of Agatho were likely the intended result of Constantine IV's concession. The deaths of Pope John V and (even more so) Pope Conon resulted in contested elections, but following Pope Sergius I the remainder of the elections under Byzantine rule were without serious issue.

During the pontificate of John V (685–686), the Emperor substantially lessened the taxation burden on papal patrimonies in Sicily and Calabria, also eliminating the surtax on grains and other imperial taxes. Justinian II during the reign of Conon also decreased taxes on the patrimonies of Bruttium and Lucania, releasing those conscripted into the army as security on those payments. Popes of this period explicitly recognized imperial sovereignty over Rome and sometimes dated their personal correspondence in the regnal years of the Byzantine Emperor. However, this political unity did not also extend to theological and doctrinal questions.

Quinisext Council dispute

Justinian II's initial acts appeared to continue the rapprochement initiated under Constans II and Constantine IV. However, reconciliation was short-lived, and Justinian II convoked the Quinisext Council (692, unattended by Western prelates) which settled upon a variety of decrees "calculated to offend Westerners", the canons of which were sent to Pope Sergius I (in office 687–701) for his signature; Sergius refused and openly flouted the new laws. The key point of contention were the regulations of the Trullan canons, which although primarily targeted at Eastern lapses, conflicted with existing practices in the West. Sergius I would have objected to the approval of all eighty-five Apostolic Canons (rather than only the first fifty), various liberalizations of the issue of clerical celibacy, various prohibitions on blood as food, and the depiction of Christ as a lamb.

Justinian II first sent a magistrate to arrest John of Portus and another papal counselor as a warning, and then dispatched his infamous protospatharios Zacharias to arrest the pope himself. Justinian II attempted to apprehend Sergius I as his predecessor had done with Martin I, underestimating the resentment against imperial authority among those in power in Italy, and the Italian-born troops from Ravenna and the Duchy of the Pentapolis mutinied in favor of Sergius I upon their arrival in Rome. Not long after, Justinian II was deposed in a coup (695). However, the thirteen revolts in Italy and Sicily that preceded the fall of the exarchate in 751 were uniformly "imperial in character" in that they still harbored "allegiance to the ideal of the Christian Roman Empire" and harbored no sovereign political ambitions for the Italian peninsula. Indeed, rather than capitalize on any anti-Byzantine sentiments in Italy, Sergius I himself attempted to quell the entire controversy.

In 705 the restored Justinian II sought to compromise with Pope John VII (in office 705–707) asking him to enumerate the specific canons of the Council he found problematic and to confirm the rest; however, John VII took no action. In 710 Justinian II ordered Pope Constantine (in office 708–715) to appear in Constantinople by imperial mandate. Pope Constantine, a Syrian, left for Constantinople in 710 with thirteen clerics, eleven of them fellow Easterners. Crossing paths with Constantine in Naples was exarch John III Rizocopo, who was on his way to Rome where he would execute four high-ranking papal officials who had refused to accompany the pope. While Rome's rejection of the Trullan canons remained, the visit largely healed the rift between pope and emperor.

Greek was the language of choice during this period as countless Easterners rose through the ranks of the clergy. According to Ekonomou, between 701 and 750, "Greeks outnumbered Latins by nearly three and a half to one". Any power vacuum was swiftly filled from Rome: for example, Pope Gregory II came to the aid of the exarchate of Ravenna in 729 by helping to crush the rebellion of Tiberius Petasius, and Pope Zacharias in 743 and 749 negotiated the withdrawal of the Lombards from imperial territory.

Iconoclasm dispute

Popes of the first half of the eighth century perceived Constantinople as a source of legitimating authority and in practice "paid handsomely" to continue to receive imperial confirmation, but Byzantine authority all but vanished in Italy (except for Sicily) as the emperors became increasingly pressed by the Muslim conquests. According to Ekonomou:

"Like every Roman pontiff who had come before him, Zacharias considered himself a loyal servant of the imperium Romanum Christianum and a dutiful subject of the emperor who occupied the throne in Constantinople. The empire was, after all, the terrestrial image of the kingdom of heaven. It was a sacred realm of which Rome and the papacy were integral components. It represented culture and civilization. It was the irrefragable chain that connected the present to the classical past and gave his beloved Rome the aura of eternity. Most of all, it was the empire that guarded and protected the holy catholic and apostolic church. The emperor was God's elected representative on Earth. He held the empire in the name of Christ whose instrument he was and from whom he derived his power and authority. To criticize the emperor was sacrilege; to fail to obey and pray for him, whether he was good or bad, unthinkable impiety."

Although antagonism about the expense of Byzantine domination had long persisted within Italy, the political rupture was set in motion in earnest in 726 by the iconoclasm of Emperor Leo III the Isaurian. The exarch was lynched while trying to enforce the iconoclastic edict and Pope Gregory II saw iconoclasm as the latest in a series of imperial heresies. In 731, his successor, Pope Gregory III organized a synod in Rome (attended by the Archbishop of Ravenna), which declared iconoclasm punishable by excommunication. When the exarch donated six columns of onyx to the shrine of St. Peter in thanks for the pope's assistance in his release from the Lombards, Gregory III defiantly had the material crafted into icons.

Final break

Emperor Leo III responded in 732/33 by confiscating all papal patrimonies in south Italy and Sicily, together constituting most papal income at the time. He further removed the bishoprics of Thessalonica, Corinth, Syracuse, Reggio, Nicopolis, Athens, and Patras from papal jurisdiction, instead subjecting them to the Patriarch of Constantinople. This was in effect an act of triage: it strengthened the imperial grip on the southern empire, but all but guaranteed the eventual destruction of the exarchate of Ravenna, which finally occurred at Lombard hands in 751. In effect, the papacy had been "cast out of the empire". Pope Zachary, in 741, was the last pope to announce his election to a Byzantine ruler or seek their approval.