taken up with gaining souls, and all the money he could obtain he was anxious to give away and bestow upon the poor." He was a practical ruler first of all and that as a Christian bishop: afterwards he was a theologian and a statesman. This accounts for the fact that he views all political questions sub specie aeternitatis and shews no interest in any work of pure learning or scholarship even in Rome itself.
And indeed the practical needs of the time were enough to absorb the whole thoughts of any man who was set to rule. If in the East the emperors were fully occupied with wars against Persians and Avars, and were able to give little heed and no help to the stress of the city from which their sovereignty took its name, the Papacy, already partly the representative and partly the rival of the imperial power, was beset on every side by the barbarian invasion and settlement. Rome itself had become, for all practical purposes, an isolated and distant part of the Roman Empire. Imperial power in Italy had dwindled till it was only a name. But at the ancient centre of the ancient Empire sat, in the fourteen years from 590, a man of commanding genius, of ceaseless vigilance, and of incessant activity, whose letters covered almost every political, religious, and social interest of his time. His influence as a great spiritual teacher and a great ruler of men radiated over the whole Christian world.
The internal cares belonging to the "patrimony of St Peter" were not light. The estates from which the income was derived were scattered all over Italy, most largely in Sicily and round Rome, but also in east and south, beyond the peninsula in Illyricum and Gaul, in Africa, and in the isles of Corsica and Sardinia. They were ad- ministered by a multitude of officials, often with the help of the imperial administrators. Gregory liked to choose his agents from among the clergy, and employed priests and even bishops in this secular service.
All were directly under the orders of the bishop of Rome himself, and Gregory's letters of appointment contain special provision for the care of the poor, for the keeping of strict accounts to be sent to Rome, for the maintenance generally of ecclesiastical interests. This the rectores and defensores were often charged with a sort of supervision which, while it at several points encroached upon the proper province of the bishop, served to keep the distant and scattered estates in close touch with the central authority of the Roman See. Thus what was at first a mere matter of the ownership of property, through its duties and responsibilities being enjoyed by the greatest bishop of the Church, tended to become a lordship no less spiritual than material. Even bishops themselves were under the eye of the pope's representative, and that naturally came to mean that sooner or later they would fall under the jurisdiction of the pope. For this Gregory's indefatigable care was largely responsible. We find him within the first eighteen months of
