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subjects themselves were partially responsible for persuading their leader to retire; there is evidence to suggest that, after their devastation of all the surrounding countryside, they were beginning to suffer from a serious shortage of food and that disease had broken out within their ranks. A final consideration was that troops from Constantinople were beginning to arrive to swell the imperial forces. A march on Rome, it began to appear, might not prove quite so straightforward as had at first been thought.
    For some or all of these reasons, Attila decided to turn back. A year later, during the night following his marriage to yet another of his already innumerable wives, his exertions brought on a hemorrhage; and as his lifeblood flowed away, all Europe breathed again. While the funeral feast was in progress, a specially selected group of captives encased his body in three coffins—one of gold, one of silver, and one of iron. Then, when the body had been lowered into the grave and covered over, first with rich spoils of war and then with earth until the ground was level above it, all those involved in the burial ceremonies were put to death, so that the great king’s last resting place might remain forever secret and inviolate.
    The pope had saved Rome once; but when, only three years later, the Vandal King Gaiseric appeared at the walls Leo was less successful. He persuaded Gaiseric not to put the city to the torch, but he could not prevent a hideous fourteen-day sack. The Liber Pontificalis tells us that when the nightmare was over and Leo found that the silver chalices and patens had been plundered from all the churches in Rome, he gave orders for the melting down of the six great urns from St. Peter’s—they dated from the time of Constantine—to provide replacements. 9 By now, after both the Goths and the Vandals had done their worst, there can have been little of the old imperial Rome that was still worth plundering. But imperial Rome was already dead and past recall; more than a hundred years before, its spirit had passed to Constantinople. What mattered now was Christian, papal Rome—and that, as we shall see, was proof against any number of barbarian atrocities.
    1. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire , vol. 1, chap. 4.
    2. It was under Decius that the first head of the Church was martyred since the days of St. Peter: Pope Fabian, who died from the brutality of his treatment in prison. A few years later, under Valerian, he was followed by Pope Sixtus II, arrested in the catacombs and beheaded with his attendant deacons.
    3. It took its name from the old Roman family of the Laterani, who had originally built it.
    4. Constantine had initiated this project to celebrate the successful conclusion of the Council of Nicaea in 325, but it had been given new impetus by his mother, St. Helena. She had set off two years later at the age of seventy-two for Jerusalem, with the result described above.
    5. “We do him too much honor when we hail him as the father of religious music in the Christian Church” ( Dictionnaire de théologie catholique , article on “Arianism”). We certainly do.
    6. Acts 1:18.
    7. Constantinople was to have no patriarch of its own until 451.
    8. It was at Chalcedon, too, that the bishoprics of Constantinople and Jerusalem were raised to the status of patriarchates, joining those of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. Constantinople was once again decreed to be second in precedence after Rome.
    9. It also reports his decree that “a nun should not receive the blessing of a veil without having been tested in her virginity for sixty years”—by which time she should certainly have deserved it.

CHAPTER III

    Vigilius
    (537–555)
    J ust fifteen years after the death of Leo the Great—he was the first Bishop of Rome to be buried in St. Peter’s—the Roman Empire of the West came to its end; but the abdication, on September 4, 476, of its last emperor, the pathetic, double-diminutived