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.

What, during these 200 years, an imperial exarch at Ravenna was like
Gregory tells us in a letter to his friend Sebastian, bishop of Sirmium:
"Words cannot express what I suffer from your friend, the lord Romanus. I
may say that his malice against us is worse than the swords of the
Lombards. The enemies who slay us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of
the commonwealth, who wear our hearts out with their malignity, their
plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to superintend
bishops and clergy, monasteries also and the people, carefully to watch
against insidious attacks of our enemies, and be perpetually on guard
against the treachery and ill-treatment of our rulers, you, my brother, can
the better judge what labour and sorrow is here in proportion to the purity
of your affection for me who suffer it."[185]

This glimpse will be enough of the generation which preceded the accession
of St. Gregory to the Chair of Peter. The whole fifty years