Absolute Monarchs by John Julius Norwich Read Free Book Online

he could return to the palace that had been put at his disposal without fear of apprehension.
    Vigilius returned, but soon found that he was being kept under so close a surveillance as to amount to something approaching house arrest. He realized, too, that if he was to break the present deadlock and maintain the prestige that he had striven so hard to recover among the Western churches, he must once again take decisive action. Two nights before Christmas, in the late evening of December 23, 551, he squeezed his considerable bulk through a small window of the palace and took a boat across the Bosphorus to Chalcedon, where he made straight for the Church of St. Euphemia. It was a clever move, and also a symbolic one in that he was deliberately associating himself with the scene of the Great Council of 451, thus distancing himself from the emperor, who was questioning its authority, and taking refuge from him in the very building in which its sessions had been held exactly a century before. Once again a delegation under Belisarius came to plead with him, but this time he stood firm, and when a detachment of soldiers called a few days later they were content to arrest some of his priests but made no attempt to lay hands on the pope himself. Vigilius, meanwhile, composed a long letter to Justinian known as Encyclica , in which he answered accusations made by the emperor by giving his own account of the controversy as he saw it and once again proposing negotiations. In a less conciliatory mood, he also repeated his sentences of excommunication on the patriarch and the two bishops who had incurred his wrath the previous August.
    Negotiations were resumed in the spring, and in June Justinian decided on a major tactical concession: the patriarch and the other excommunicated bishops were dispatched to St. Euphemia to apologize and humble themselves before Vigilius, after which the pope returned to his palace. It was also agreed to annul all recent statements on both sides covering the Three Chapters, including the emperor’s edict. To the papal supporters it must have seemed like victory, but Justinian was not yet beaten. He now summoned a new Ecumenical Council and invited Vigilius to preside.
    In theory an Ecumenical Council of the Church was a convocation of bishops from all over Christendom. When all were gathered together, it was believed that the Holy Spirit would descend on them, giving a sort of infallibility to their pronouncements. Their judgment was supreme, their decisions final. In practice, however, attendance was inevitably selective. If, therefore, the Church was split on any given issue, the outcome of the Council’s deliberations would depend less on divine intervention than on the number of bishops from each side able to attend, and both emperor and pope knew full well that bishops were considerably thicker on the ground in the East than they were in the West, so that—particularly if the meetings were held in Constantinople—the Easterners would always command a substantial majority. Vigilius accordingly suggested that the question should be put to a small committee composed of an equal number of representatives from both East and West, but Justinian refused; and after various other possibilities had been put forward and similarly rejected, the pope decided that his only chance lay in boycotting the assembly altogether. In consequence, when the Fifth Ecumenical Council eventually met in St. Sophia on May 5, 553, of the 168 bishops present only 11 were from the West, and 9 of those were from North Africa. Justinian, too, had elected to stay away since, he explained, he did not wish to influence the assembly; but his letter to the delegates, read aloud at the opening session, reminded them that they had already anathematized the Three Chapters. None of those present could have had any doubt as to what was expected of them.
    For over a week the deliberations continued; then, on May 14, after repeated invitations to