II., nominally reigned, the eastern crown was taken by
Zeno and held till 491, with the exception of twenty months in which
Basiliscus, a successful insurgent, was in possession. As Zeno had reigned
in virtue of being husband of the princess Ariadne, daughter of Leo I., so
Anastasius, in 491, in the words of the Greek chronicle, "succeeded to his
wife and the empire," and he reigned twenty-seven years, to 518.

During this whole period, from the death of the emperor Leo I. in 474 to
that of the emperor Anastasius in 518, the political state of the East and
West was most perilous to the Church. In the East, the three sovereigns,
Zeno, Basiliscus, and Anastasius, were unsound in their belief, treacherous
in their action, scandalous in their life. The Popes addressed with honour,
as the vice-gerents of divine power, men whom, as to their personal
character, they must have loathed. Their government, moreover, was
disastrous to their subjects--a tissue of insurrections, barbaric invasion,
and devastation; at home, civil corruption of every kind.

In the West, Teuton conquerors had taken possession of the Roman empire.
The Herule Odoacer had been put to death in 493 by the Ostrogoth
Theodorick, who, like Odoacer before him, reigned with cognisance and
approbation of the eastern emperor for thirty-three years. Both Odoacer and
Theodorick were Arians; so also Genseric and his son Hunnerich, who ruled
the former Roman provinces in Africa; so the Visigoths in southern France
and Spain; so the Burgundians at Lyons. One conquering race only, that of
the Franks, was not Arian, but pagan, until the conversion of Clovis, in
496, gave to the West one sovereign, Catholic and friendly to the Pope. We
have seen in what terms Pope Anastasius welcomed his baptism. The
population in the old Roman provinces which remained faithful to the
Catholic religion was a portion of the old proprietors, such as had not
been dispossessed by the successive confiscations and redistributions of
land under the victorious northern invaders, and the poor, whether dwelling
in cities or cultivating the soil. And these looked up everywhere to their
several bishops for support and encouragement under every sort of trial.
All men were sorted under two divisions in the vast regions for which
Stilicho had fought and conquered in vain: the one division was Arian and
Teuton, the other Catholic and Roman. And as the several Catholic people
looked to their bishops, so all