f of the chains which had bound St. Peter at his
imprisonment by Agrippa. When Pope Leo held the relics, which had come from
Jerusalem, to those other relics belonging to the Apostle's captivity at
Rome on his martyrdom, they grew together and became one chain of
thirty-eight links. Upon this the empress in the days of her happiness
built the Church of St. Peter ad Vincula to receive so touching a memorial
of the Apostle who escaped martyrdom at Jerusalem to find it at Rome. Upon
his delivery by the angel "from all the expectation of the people of the
Jews," he "went to another place". There, to use the words of his own
personal friend and second successor at Antioch, he founded "the church
presiding over charity in the place of the country of the Romans,"[6] and
there he was to find his own resting-place. The church was built to guard
the emblems of the two captivities. The heathen festival of Augustus, which
used to be kept on the 1st August at the spot where the church was founded,
became for all Christendom the feast of St. Peter's Chains.[7]

In the life of St. Leo by Anastasius, we read that after the Vandal ruin he
supplied the parish churches of Rome with silver plate from the six silver
vessels, weighing each a hundred pounds, which Constantine had given to the
basilicas of the Lateran, of St. Peter, and of St. Paul, two to each. These
churches were spared the plundering to which every other building was
subjected. But the buildings of Rome were not burnt, though even senatorian
families were reduced to beggary, and the population was diminished through
misery and flight, besides those who were carried off to slavery.

At this point of time the grandeur of Trajan's city[8] began to pass into
the silence and desolation which St. Gregory in after years mourned over in
the words of Jeremias on ruined Jerusalem.

Let us go back with Leo to his patriarchal palace, and realise if we can
the condition of things in which he dwelt at home, as well as the condition
throughout all the West of the Church which his courage had saved from
heresy.

The male line of Theodosius had ended with the murder of Valentinian in the
Campus Martius, March 16, 455. Maximus seized his throne and his widow, and
was murdered in the streets of Rome in June, 455, at the end of
seventy-seven days. When Genseric had carried off his spoil, the throne of
the western empire, no longer claimed by anyone of the imperial race,
became a prey to ambi