savage of
the Teuton family, the Saxon and the Frank. The Frank became Catholic, and
Gregory besought the rulers of the converted nation to help his
missionaries in their perilous adventure to convert the ultramarine
neighbours, still savage and pagan. He also ordered their chief bishop to
consecrate the chief missionary to be archbishop of the Angles. As there
was a Burgundian Clotilda by the side of Clovis, there was a Frankish
Bertha by the side of Ethelbert; and these two women have a glorious place
in that second great victory of the Church. The Visigoth and Ostrogoth with
their great natural gifts could not found a kingdom. Their heresy deprived
the Father of the Son, and they were themselves sterile. Those who denied a
Divine Redeemer were not likely to convert a world.

But all through Gregory's life the Byzantine spirit of encroachment was one
of his chief enemies. The claim of its bishop to be ecumenical patriarch
stopped short of the Primacy. But one after another the bishops of that see
sought by imperial laws to detach the bishops of Eastern Illyria from their
subjection to the western patriarchate. Their nearness to Constantinople,
their being subjects of the eastern emperor, helped this encroachment.

It would appear also that in Gregory's time--a hundred years after Pope
Gelasius had put the bishop of the imperial city in remembrance that he had
been a suffragan to Heraclea--the legislation of Justinian had succeeded in
inducing the Roman See to acknowledge that bishop as a patriarch. His
actual power had gone far beyond. There can be no doubt that, while the
Pope had become legally the subject of the eastern emperor, the bishop of
Constantinople had become in fact the emperor's ecclesiastical minister in
subjugating the eastern episcopate. The Nicene episcopal hierarchy
subsisted indeed in name. To the Alexandrian and Antiochene patriarchs two
had been added--one at Jerusalem, the other at Constantinople. But the last
was so predominant--as the interpreter of the emperor's will--that he stood
at the head of the bishops in all the realm ruled from Constantinople over
against the Pope as the head of the western bishops in many various lands.

The bishops were in Justinian's legislation everywhere great imperial
officers, holding a large civil jurisdiction, especially charged with an
inspection of the manner in which civil governors performed their own
proper functions; most of all, the patriarchs and the