Free Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich

being in Latin, is, alas, spurious. Still according to Bede, Gregory followed up this first pun with two more even worse ones, which the reader will be spared.
    3. Statues of Ethelbert and Bertha were unveiled on Lady Wootton’s Green in Canterbury in 2006.
    4. One pilgrim during the Dark Ages, a draper from Douai, was informed that the aqueducts “were formerly used to bring oil, wine, and water from Naples.”

CHAPTER V

    Leo III and Charlemagne
    (795–861)
    E arly in the seventh century, a new people and a new faith appeared on the world stage. Until the third decade of that century, the land of Arabia was terra incognita to the Christian world. But in September 622 the Prophet Mohammed had fled from the hostile city of Mecca to friendly Medina: this was the hegira , the event which marked the beginning of the Muslim era. Just eleven years later, his followers burst out of Arabia. The following year, an Arab army defeated the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius on the banks of the Yarmuk River; two years later still, they took Damascus; after five, Jerusalem; after eight, they controlled all Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Within twenty years, the whole Persian Empire as far as the Oxus River had fallen to the Arab sword; within thirty, Afghanistan and most of the Punjab. Then the Muslims turned their attention to the West. Their progress across North Africa was somewhat slower, but by the end of the century they had reached the Atlantic, and by 732—still less than a century after their eruption from their desert homeland—they had (according to tradition) made their way over the Pyrenees as far as Tours. There, only 150 miles from Paris, they were stopped at last by the Frankish leader Charles Martel.
    For Christendom, the effect was cataclysmic. Three of the five historic patriarchates—Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—engulfed in the Muslim tide, now existed in little more than name; all the great churches of North Africa disappeared, save only the Copts of Egypt, who managed to retain a tenuous foothold. The lands which had seen the origins of Christianity were all lost, never to be properly recovered. The Eastern Empire was hideously maimed. The political focus of necessity now shifted north and west. Perhaps, as the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne suggested, it was Mohammed who made Charlemagne possible.
    IN ITALY, ALL through the second half of the seventh century and the first half of the eighth, we see two opposing tendencies: on the one hand, a steady weakening of political and religious links with the Byzantine Empire; on the other, an equally steady increase in the power of the Lombards. In 653 Pope Martin I, though old and ill, was arrested on trumped-up charges and taken to Constantinople, where he was publicly stripped of his vestments, dragged in chains through the city, flogged, and deported to the Crimea, dying there soon afterward; and matters came to a head in 726, when the Emperor (not the Pope) Leo III published his fateful edict imposing iconoclasm—a doctrine which, calling as it did for the wholesale destruction of all holy images, was received with horror in the West and caused revolts throughout Byzantine Italy. In retaliation, the emperor confiscated the annual incomes of the churches of Sicily and Calabria, transferring their bishoprics, together with a considerable number of others in the Balkan Peninsula, from the see of Rome to that of Constantinople. It was the continuation of the long, slow process of estrangement which would end, three hundred years later, in schism.
    The Lombards, meanwhile, were steadily strengthening their hold. Under the greatest of their kings, Liutprand, they twice—successfully—laid siege to Rome. On the first occasion, in 729, Pope Gregory II—at last a Roman-born pope after a long succession of Greeks—confronted Liutprand, who abandoned the siege, feeling guilty enough to leave his arms and armor in St. Peter’s as a votive offering; but on the