of Christ, flocked to the sepulchre of his Vicar the
Fisherman. And thus Rome was become the place of pilgrimage for all the
West. Saxon kings and queens laid down their crowns before St. Peter's
threshold, invested themselves with the cowl, and died, healed and happy,
under the shadow of the chief Apostle. When the three hundred years were
ended, the arm of Pepin made the Pope a sovereign in his own newly-created
Rome. During these three centuries, running from St. Leo meeting Genseric,
the pilot of St. Peter's ship has been tossed without intermission on the
waves of a heaving ocean, but he has saved his vessel and the freight which
it bears--the Christian faith. And in doing this he has made the
new-created city, which had become the place of pilgrimage, to be also the
centre of a new world.

As Leo came back from the gate leading to the harbour and re-entered his
Lateran palace, undefended Rome was taken possession of by the Vandal. Leo
for fourteen days was condemned to hear the cries of his people, and the
tale of unnumbered insults and iniquities committed in the palaces and
houses of Rome. When the stipulated days were over, the plunderer bore away
the captive empress and her daughters from the palace of the Caesars, which
he had so completely sacked that even the copper vessels were carried off.
Genseric also assaulted the yet untouched temple of Jupiter on the Capitol,
and not only carried away the still remaining statues in his fleet which
occupied the Tiber, but stripped off half the roof of the temple and its
tiles of gilded bronze. He took away also the spoils of the temple at
Jerusalem, which Vespasian had deposited in his temple of peace. Belisarius
found them at Carthage eighty years later, and sent them as prizes to
Constantinople.[5]

Many thousand Romans of every age and condition Genseric carried as slaves
to Carthage, together with Eudocia and her daughters, the eldest of whom
Genseric compelled to marry his son Hunnerich. After sixteen years of
unwilling marriage Eudocia at last escaped, and through great perils
reached Jerusalem, where she died and was buried beside her grandmother,
that other Eudocia, the beautiful Athenais whom St. Pulcheria gave to her
brother for bride, and whose romantic exaltation to the throne of the East
ended in banishment at Jerusalem. But one of the great churches at Rome is
connected with her memory: since the first Eudocia sent to the empress her
daughter at Rome hal