the cause of it, or how it was suppressed; but it is clear that the exarchate, if it did not actually perish, was from this time forth for all intents and purposes dead.  Three more exarchs were to reign in Ravenna, but not to govern.  In 713, Scholasticus was appointed and remained till 726.  He was followed by Paulus (726-727) who attempted to arrest Leo III., was prevented by the joint action of the Romans and the Lombards, and met his death at the hands of the people of Ravenna; and by Eutychius (727-752) who it seems saw the fall of Ravenna before the assault of the Lombard Aistulf.  He was the last representative of the Byzantine empire to govern in Ravenna or in Italy.

But the fall of the imperial power in Italy was not the work of the Romans or of the Lombards.  It fell because it had ceased to be Catholic.

We have seen the invasions of the Visigoths and the Huns fade away into nothing; we have seen the greater attempt of the Ostrogoths to found a kingdom in Italy brought to nought.  One and all they failed for this fundamental reason, that they were not Catholic.  The future belonged to Catholicism, and since it is only what is in the mind and the soul that is of any profound and lasting effect, to be Arian, to be heretic, was to fail.  The great attempt, the noble attempt of Justinian to refound the empire in the West, to gather Italy especially once more into a universal government, succeeded, in so far as it did succeed, because the circumstances of the time in Italy forced it to be a pre-eminently Catholic movement.  When that movement ceased to be Catholic it failed.

Let us be sure of this, for our whole understanding of the Dark Age depends upon it.  Justinian’s success in Italy was a Catholic success.  What had always differentiated the imperialists from the barbarians since the fall of the old empire was their Catholicism.  Justinian, a great Catholic emperor, perhaps the greatest, faced and outfaced the Arian Goths.  He succeeded because his cause was the Catholic cause.  But when his successors had to meet the Lombards they soon found that, for all they could do, they had no success.  The Lombards, never very eagerly Arian, were open to conversion, slowly they became Catholic, and from the day they became Catholic there was no longer any hope of turning them out of Italy.  It is only what is in the mind that is of any fundamental account.  Face to face with such a thing as religion, race is as a tale that is told.  But though all hope of turning the Lombards out of Italy ceased with their conversion, and the plan of Justinian, with nothing as it were to kick against, was thus rendered a thousand times more difficult, it did not become utterly hopeless and impossible till the empire, the East, that is, Constantinople, fell into heresy and ceased itself to be Catholic.  It was the gradual failure of Constantinople in Catholicism that disclosed the pope to the Italians as their champion.  It was this failure that raised up even in the imperial citadel, even in Ravenna, men and armies passionately antagonistic to the emperor, passionately papal too.  During a hundred years this movement grew till, in the eight century, the coup de grace, as we might say, was given to the Justinian plan by the Iconoclastic heresy.