ed with
reluctance the painful task of supporting his own reputation and
retrieving the faults of his successors. He was too late to save Rome
from the Goths, by whom it was taken in December 546; but he recovered
it in the following February. After his recall by his envious sovereign
in September 548, Rome was once more taken by the Goths. The successful
repulse of the Franks and Alemanni finally restored the kingdom to the
rule of the emperor. Belisarius died on March 13, 565.

The emperor survived his death only eight months, and passed away, in
the eighty-third year of his life and the thirty-eighth of his reign, on
November 14, 565. The most lasting memorial of his reign is to be found
neither in his victories nor his monuments, but in the immortal works of
the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes, in which the civil
jurisprudence of the Romans was digested, and by means of which the
public reason of the Romans has been silently or studiously transfused
into the domestic institutions of the whole of Europe.

_IV.--Gregory the Great_

Justinian was succeeded by his nephew, Justin II., who lived to see the
conquest of the greater part of Italy by Alboin, king of the Lombards
(568-570), the disaffection of the exarch, Narses, and the ruin of the
revived glories of the Roman world.

During a period of 200 years Italy was unequally divided between the
king of the Lombards and the exarchate of Ravenna. Rome relapsed into a
state of misery. The Campania was reduced to the state of a dreary
wilderness. The stagnation of a deluge caused by the torrential swelling
of the Tiber produced a pestilential disease, and a stranger visiting
Rome might contemplate with horror the solitude of the city. Gregory the
Great, whose pontificate lasted from 590 to 604, reconciled the Arians
of Italy and Spain to the Catholic Church, conquered Britain in the name
of the Cross, and established his right to interfere in the management
of the episcopal provinces of Greece, Spain, and Gaul. The merits of
Gregory were treated by the Byzantine court with reproach and insult,
but in the attachment of a grateful people he found the purest reward of
a citizen and the best right of a sovereign.

The short and virtuous reign of Tiberius (578-582), which succeeded that
of Justin, made way for that of Maurice. For twenty years Maurice ruled
with honesty and honour. But the parsimony of the emperor, and his
attempt to cure the inveterate evil of