In all this we see the growing distrust and hatred of Constantinople, which the taxation had first aroused on the part of the Italian people and their champion the papacy.  These feelings were to be crystallised by the extraordinary and tactless council that the emperor convened in 691, in which the empire attempted to avenge the defeat it had sustained at the hands of the papacy in regard to the Monothelete heresy.  The council, which was mainly concerned with discipline, altogether disregarded Western custom and the See of Rome, and especially asserted that “the patriarchal throne of Constantinople should enjoy the same privileges as that of Old Rome, and in all ecclesiastical matters should be entitled to the same pre-eminence and should count as second after it.”  The pope promptly forbade the publication of the decrees of this council which he had refused to sign.  Then the emperor sent a truculent soldier, one Zacharias, to Rome with orders to seize Sergius and bring him to Constantinople as Martin had been arrested and dragged away.  It only needed this to make the whole situation clear once and for all.

For it was not only the people of Rome who rose to prevent this outrageous act.  When Zacharias landed in Ravenna, the citadel of the empire in Italy, the “army of Ravenna,” no longer perhaps Byzantine mercenaries, but Italians, mutinied and determined to march to Rome to defend the pope.  As they marched down the Flaminian Way, the soldiers of the Pentapolis joined them, a Holy War, a revolution, declared itself, and for this end:  “We will not suffer the Pontiff of the Apostolic See to be carried to Constantinople.”  This curious mob of soldiers, gathering force and recruits as it marched with songs and shouting down the Way, hurled itself against the walls of the Eternal City, battered down the gate of S. Peter which Zacharias, afraid and in tears, had ordered to be closed, and demanded to see the pope who was believed to have been spirited away in the night on board a Byzantine ship like his predecessor Martin.  Zacharias took refuge under the pope’s bed, and Sergius showed himself upon the balcony of the Lateran and was received with the wildest enthusiasm.

In that revolution was destroyed all hope of the Byzantine empire in Italy.  A new vision had suddenly appeared to those whom we may call, and rightly now, the Italian people.  The long resurrection of the West, the greatest miracle of the papacy, was upon that day secured for the future.  And henceforth the mere appearance of the exarch in Rome was regarded as an insult and a declaration of war.