pted 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?

Both Belisarius and Narses had enrolled a multifarious host of adventurers
under the banner which professed to deliver Rome and Italy from the Gothic
occupation. Narses especially had awakened the greed of the Lombards by the
sight of Italy's fair lands. Scarcely had he ceased to govern Rome, in
567, when the effect of this became visible. What Alaric, what Odoacer,
what Theodorick, had done, Alboin did with yet more terrible results; and
the fourth captivity which Nova Roma had prepared for her mother, become in
her mind a hated rival, was the hardest, the longest, the most destructive
of all. It is doubtful whether the retort of the eunuch Narses to the
empress Sophia, when she recalled him from his government to ply, as she
said, the spindle, that he would spin for her such a thread as in he