The work of Gregory in Rome, however, was not confined to liturgy and discipline. The tradition of parasitism at Rome was not dead, and, as there was now no _Præfectus Annonæ_ to distribute corn to the citizens, it fell to the Church to feed them; and the Romans were now augmented by destitute refugees from all parts. Gregory had to find food and clothing for masses of people, to make constant grants to their churches and to the monasteries, to meet a periodical famine, and to render what miserable aid the ignorance of the time afforded during the periodical pestilence. Occasionally he had even to control the movements of troops and the dispatch of supplies; at least, in his impatience of the apparent helplessness of the imperial government and his determination to hold Catholic towns against the Lombards, he undertook these and other secular functions.
The control of the vast Papal income and expenditure might alone have sufficed to employ a vigorous man. In Sicily, there were immense estates belonging to the Papacy, and other "patrimonies," as they were called, were scattered over Italy and the islands, or lay as far away as Gaul, Dalmatia, Africa, and the East. Clerical agents usually managed these estates, but we find Gregory talking about their mules and mares and cornfields, and the wages and grievances of their slaves and serfs, as familiarly as if he had visited each of them. It has been estimated, rather precariously, that the Papacy already owned from 1400 to 1800 square miles of land, and drew from it an annual income of from £300,000 to £400,000. Not a domestic squabble seems to have happened in this enormous field but Gregory intervened, and his rigid sense of justice and general shrewdness of decision command respect. Then, there was the equally heavy task of distributing the income, for the episcopal establishment cost little, and nothing was hoarded. In sums of ten, twenty, or fifty gold pieces, in bales of clothing and galleys of corn, in altar-vessels and the ransom of captives, the stream percolated yearly throughout the Christian world, as far as the villages of Syria. Monks and nuns were especially favoured.
Within a few years, there spread over the world so great a repute of Gregory's charity and equity that petitions rained upon Rome. Here a guild of soap-boilers asks his intervention in some dispute: there a woman who, in a fit of temper at the supposed infidelity of her husband, has rushed to a nunnery and now wants to return home, asks his indulgence, and receives it. From all sides are cries of oppression, simony, or other scandal, and Gregory is aroused. Jews appeal to him frequently against the injustice of their Christian neighbours, and they invariably get such justice as the law allows. The Zealots who have seized their synagogues (if of long standing--they were forbidden by law to build new ones) must restore them, or pay for them[84]; impatient priests who would coerce them into "believing" are rebuked. There is only one weakness--a not unamiable weakness--in his treatment of the Jews. Those who abandon their creed are to have their rents reduced: to encourage the others, he says cheerfully.[85] For the pagans, however, he has no mercy, as we shall see. He sanctions compulsion and persecution with mediæval frankness. It should be noted, too, that, while he approved the manumission of slaves, he never condemned the institution as such. Vast regiments of slaves worked the Papal estates, though the ease, if not advantage, of converting them into serfs must have been apparent. Still no slave could enter the clergy--lest, as Leo the Great had declared, his "vileness" should "pollute" the sacred order--and a special probation was imposed on slaves if they wished to enter monasteries: a wise regulation this, for many thought it an easy way to freedom. Still no slave could contract marriage with a free Christian, as Gregory expressly reaffirms.[86]