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Updated: May 1, 2025
In 718 she shook off the yoke of Byzantium by repelling the heresies of Leo the Isaurian; and when this insurrection menaced her with the domestic tyranny of the Lombard Kings, who possessed themselves of Ravenna in 728, she called the Franks to her aid against the now powerful realm. Stephen II. journeyed in 753 to Gaul, named Pippin Patrician of Rome, and invited him to the conquest of Italy.
Meletius of Antioch was in exile, and Cyril of Jerusalem and the venerated Eusebius of Samosata, while Gregory of Nazianzus had found in the Isaurian mountains a welcome refuge from his hated diocese of Sasima. If none of the living Nicenes could pretend to rival Athanasius, they at least outmatched the Arians.
But his anxiety was relieved by the bold curiosity of an Isaurian, who explored the dry channel of an aqueduct, and secretly reported, that a passage might be perforated to introduce a file of armed soldiers into the heart of the city. When the work had been silently executed, the humane general risked the discovery of his secret by a last and fruitless admonition of the impending danger.
The most frightful distress ensued at Rome. At length, after about eighteen months, certain Isaurian soldiers of the Greek garrison gave up the Porta Asinaria, and on the night of the 17th December, 546, Totila took the ill-defended city. When he entered, it was almost without inhabitants. Those whom the sword, famine, and pestilence had not yet taken were in flight or hiding.
But if they were neither more nor less Asiatics than the contemporary Russians, they were quite as much Europeans as many of the Greek emperors had been those of the Isaurian dynasty, for instance.
But the popular fury that dares to trample on superstition, is deaf to the cries of humanity; and the race of Heraclius was extinguished after a reign of one hundred years. Between the fall of the Heraclian and the rise of the Isaurian dynasty, a short interval of six years is divided into three reigns.
The liberty of Rome, which had been oppressed by the arms and arts of Augustus, was rescued, after seven hundred and fifty years of servitude, from the persecution of Leo the Isaurian.
Their nobles looked with contempt on the barbaric blood which had tainted that of the Colonnas or the Orsini, nor did any Isaurian peasant ever break the Roman line of Doges as Leo broke the line of Roman Emperors. Venice as she proudly styled herself in after time was "the legitimate daughter of Rome."
Pope Hilarus was succeeded in 468 by Simplicius, and in 474 the emperor Leo died, leaving the throne to an infant grandson of the same name, the son of his daughter Ariadne, by an Isaurian officer Zeno, who reigned at first as the guardian of his son, and a few months afterwards came by that son's death to sole power as emperor. The worst character is given to Zeno by the national historians.
In the eighth century, Leo the Isaurian ascended the throne of the East, and for a time the public or private worship of images was proscribed, but the edict was vigorously and successfully resisted by the Latins of the Western church.
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