The Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity

John Moorhead

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317578260
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In the past few decades there has been an explosion of interest in the period of late antiquity. Rather than being viewed within a paradigm of the fall of the Roman Empire, these centuries have come to be seen as a time of immense creativity and significance in western history. Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity places the history of the papacy in a broader context, by comparing Rome with other major sees to show how it differed from these, evaluating developments beyond Rome which created openings for the extension of papal authority.

Closer to home, the book considers the ability of the Roman church to gain access to wealth, retain it in difficult times, and disburse it in ways that enhanced its authority. Author John Moorhead evaluates patterns in the recruitment of popes and what these suggest about the background of those who came to papal office. Structured around a narrative of the papacy's history from the accession of Leo the Great to the death of Zacharias II, the book does more than tell what happened between these years, applying new approaches in intellectual, cultural, and social history to provide a uniquely deep and holistic study of the period.

1
440–498

The Church in the World

Surrounded as they were by physical reminders of its glorious past, pride in their city came naturally to the people who lived in Rome during late antiquity. Yet such a feeling was tempered by nostalgia, for whereas it was believed in the sixth century that someone who climbed the Capitol would see the works of human skill overcome, it was clear that the city’s best days were behind it. Construction of the monumental buildings that so impress visitors to Rome to this day came to a halt. In the fourth century officials were told not to erect new buildings but to devote attention to restoring old ones, and anyone who did erect new buildings was prohibited from using materials pilfered from the old. Towards the middle of the fifth century an emperor responded to the problem of people recycling material from public buildings in words that capture the mood of the time: ‘great things are being ruined so that small things can be repaired.’ An author of the sixth century deduced from the ambit of the walls, the great bulk of the Colosseum, the size of the baths, and the large number of mills, that the population of Rome had once been much greater than it was in his time.¹ And whereas most cities in the western part of the Empire were failing to hold their own during late antiquity, the decision of the emperor Constantine to establish a new city on the Bosporus, Constantinople, as a second capital early in the fourth century, and military needs that increasingly took emperors, and the political power that accompanied them, away from Rome, meant that decline was experienced with particular intensity there. Humiliatingly, the city that had once seen itself as the head of the world was briefly occupied by hostile armies twice during the fifth century.

In 410 a force led by Goths entered the city and sacked it over three days, lighting fires that made people think of those that had engulfed Troy when it was captured by the Greeks. Among other things, the assailants helped themselves to some of the easily portable wealth that was located within the churches of the city. In the following decades attempts were made to compensate for the losses. Pope Celestine (422–432) responded to the fire that Goths had caused by presenting a church that another pope had erected a century earlier in the area of Trastevere, across the river from the main city, with items, many of them made of silver, to be used in the celebration of the Eucharist, as well as fittings to hold lamps and candles. At the request of Celestine’s successor, pope Sixtus (432–440), the emperor Valentinian replaced a silver canopy that Constantine had installed in the cathedral, the old one having been taken away by people described as barbarians; significantly, the new one contained less silver than the old. Such acts were part of a process of recovery that advanced slowly, for it took years for the government to organise the repair of walls, towers, and gates.² Damage of a more serious kind was to follow, when in 455 a force of Vandals, led by their king Geiseric, made the short crossing from Africa and occupied the city for 14 days. An eyewitness described Geiseric as having subjected it to a free and untroubled examination, after which he removed all its wealth. His troops despoiled the Palace and removed half of the roof, made of bronze overlaid with gold, which covered the vast temple that had been built nearby in honour of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Treasures of the Jews that the emperor Titus had brought to Rome after the capture of Jerusalem in the first century were taken to Carthage, where they were stored among the accumulated wealth of the kings. As they had in 410, the city’s churches again suffered losses so that the pope of the time, Leo I, was led to take a radical step. Among other gifts, the emperor Constantine had presented three of the great basilicas of the city, the cathedral and those dedicated to S Peter and S Paul, with two large silver jars weighing 100 lbs each. These Leo had melted down, so they could be turned into small chalices for the city’s various churches. Nearly 100 years later, the disaster Geiseric had visited upon the Romans was well remembered, and the city from which he set sail on his return to Africa was one in which morale had fallen dangerously low. But in the midst of all too evident signs of the city’s decline, one group within it was experiencing rapid growth.³

Whatever reasons had prompted the emperor Constantine to become a supporter of the Christian church early in the fourth century, his unexpected decision turned out to be the most important single event in the history of that body. A faith that had made steady, but by no means spectacular, advances since a representative of the Roman state had handed its founder over to be crucified, and had suffered spasmodic and well-remembered bouts of persecution, suddenly found itself the recipient of official backing that would accelerate across the century until, by its end, the sacrifices and worship in temples that had formed the most public parts of the Empire’s religious life in preceding centuries had been declared illegal. More of the traditional beliefs survived than our sources for the period suggest, but the adoption of Christianity by the rulers of the Empire was one of the most important events in the history of the West. Nowhere was its impact more apparent than in the ancient capital of the Empire, for although the city saw little of Constantine, he undertook there a massive campaign to erect buildings worthy of the religion he had adopted.

Chief among the churches for which Constantine was responsible was that at which the bishop of the city would normally officiate, the cathedral, which was built on a commanding site on the Caelian Hill, not far from the Aurelian walls. Appropriately enough for the city’s main church it was dedicated to Christ, although in later times it was called the Constantinian basilica after its founder, and later still the Lateran, after the family whose palace had formerly stood on the site; in the tenth century it was dedicated to S John the Baptist, from whence its modern name, S John Lateran, came. Generously proportioned, being approximately 98 m long and 56 m wide, it provided a headquarters for the bishop on a scale that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Not far away, within a complex known as the Sessorian Palace, Constantine built the church now known as Sta Croce in Gerusalemme, which he is said to have presented with a relic of the Cross sealed in a casket of gold and jewels. We only read of this gift in a source written in the sixth century, and as the cult of the cross can only be documented in Italy from late in the fourth century, we may doubt whether the story is true. However, devotion to the cross would be a lasting theme in the devotional life of the church in Rome; centuries later, the author of an account of pope Eusebius, who briefly held office during the year 308, saw the discovery of the cross as important enough to justify the inclusion of the apparently irrelevant information that it had been discovered on 3 May. Other churches were built in honour of the various martyrs who had been put to death by people acting on behalf of Constantine’s predecessors, at the places where they were believed to have met their ends outside the walls of the city. A large basilica dedicated to S Peter, 123m long and 66m wide, was erected in an area on the right bank of the Tiber known as the Vatican, in a massive operation that involved the levelling of part of a hill, and a smaller building in honour of S Paul, constructed on the Via Ostia. S Laurence was honoured by a basilica erected on the Via Tiburtina, whereas a basilica in honour of a pair of saints whose fame has not endured as well, Marcellinus and Peter, was constructed near the catacombs where their remains were thought to lie. To the buildings erected by Constantine was added a basilica that his daughter Constantia built on the Via Nomentana and paid for out of her own resources, fittingly dedicated to a female martyr, Agnes. The patronage of the state, rather than any initiative on the part of the pope of the time, Silvester, had been responsible for these works; as an inscription on the triumphal arch of S Peter’s boasted to Christ, ‘Constantine the victor founded this hall for you.’ The emperor endowed each church with property that would generate ongoing income, and equipment to be used in the liturgical ceremonies that would take place inside them. The scale of most of these buildings allowed them to accommodate throngs of worshippers, many more than would be the case today, for people then stood throughout services. The ample dimensions of the churches were put to good use when people sheltered in them during the sack of 410, in connection with which they were described as being extremely large. The sudden reconfiguration of the skyline of Rome, at a time of limited public building, must have astonished the inhabitants of the city.⁴

Modern visitors to Rome take for granted the pre-eminence of S Peter’s among the basilicas of the city, and it was certainly larger than the cathedral, but Constantine’s perspective was different. Nearly half of the income from the endowments he provided the churches with went to the Lateran and the baptistery that was adjacent to it; thereafter, in descending order, came the basilicas of S Paul, SS Marcellinus and Peter, and S Peter. By and large the popes had had little to do with S Peter’s, which was a considerable distance from the Lateran and thought of at the end of the century as being a haunt of drunken people remote from the concerns of the bishop. Donations made by pope Hilary to various churches in the second half of the fifth century suggests how their relative importance was viewed at that time: the Lateran and its baptistery were treated the most generously, and thereafter the basilicas of S Laurence, S Peter, and S Paul, in that order. The prominence of the basilica of S Laurence may answer to the growth that his cult was experiencing during that period, but Constantine had endowed the church poorly and with properties in its immediate neighbourhood, and Hilary may have seen himself as correcting an oversight. During this period the popes, like Constantine, invested S Peter’s with less importance than might have been expected.⁵

Yet a powerful current was running that would undermine the central place of the cathedral, for the personal connection people felt with the martyrs was pulling against it. Today we unthinkingly refer to the basilica erected in honour of Peter as ‘S Peter’s’, but the terminology of our chief source for Constantine’s undertakings describes him building not S Peter’s basilica but a basilica for S Peter, and it uses similar language for churches dedicated to other saints. In the same way, it describes later rulers as making donations to S Peter. Such language conveys a sense of someone doing something on behalf of another person, perhaps one who was admired and whose goodwill was being sought. A bishop well experienced in the ways of rulers commented that kings had become suppliants and martyrs patrons, thereby inverting the customary relations between rulers and those they dealt with. So it was that, when the emperor Honorius entered Rome in triumph early in the fifth century, he was described as choosing to kneel at the memorial of the fisherman rather than the temple of the emperor, as the nearby mausoleum, now known as the Castel Sant’Angelo, that had been built for the emperor Hadrian in the second century was referred to. When Augustine enquired in a sermon as to whether an emperor visiting Rome first went to the tomb of Peter or the nearby temple of Hadrian, he did not feel it necessary to answer the question, whereas in the distant East John Chrysostom knew that emperors, consuls, and generals visited the tombs of the fisherman and the tentmaker, as he referred to Peter and Paul respectively. The practice of emperors was later imitated by kings who tried to present themselves in an imperial guise, so that when the Gothic king Theoderic visited Rome in 500, his first act was to visit S Peter’s, and the tradition was also observed by king Totila after he captured the city in 546.⁶

Not surprisingly, emperors and members of their families wanted to be buried in close proximity to the remains of the martyrs. In Constantinople, emperors wished to be buried at the church of the Holy Apostles so they would not be separated from the remains of those who were thought to be the gatekeepers of heaven and the sovereigns of Christian society. In Rome, Constantine’s mother Helena was believed to have been buried in a mausoleum adjacent to the church of SS Marcellinus and Peter, and his daughter Constantia was laid to rest near the church she had built for the virgin martyr Agnes. They, and doubtless other, less well-known members of the laity, were using the martyrs in a way that made sense to them, and we may see here signs of a distinctive lay piety that could be practised with some degree of independence from the clergy. It does not follow from this that the basilicas erected in honour of Peter and the other martyrs were separate from the liturgical life of the city, for the gifts that Constantine made to S Peter’s indicate that he expected the Eucharist to be celebrated there, and indeed late in the fourth century it was the only church in Rome where mass was celebrated on Christmas Day. Whereas popes later came to celebrate the sacrament in other churches on Christmas Day, it seems to have been taken for granted that Charlemagne would have gone to S Peter’s when he went to church on that day in 800. But lists of the priests serving in Rome that identify the church in which each one served fail to mention any as being attached to S Peter’s or the other great churches built in honour of the martyrs, which makes it likely that, for all its grandeur, the basilica lacked a clerical establishment that would have allowed the Eucharist to be celebrated regularly in it, and as we shall see special arrangements had to be made for priests to be present at the major basilicas of the martyrs to conduct baptisms.⁷

The structures that Constantine so generously bestowed on the church were oddly located. Most of them were outside the walls of the city, necessarily so, given that Roman law forbade the bringing of bodies, such as the remains of the martyrs near which they had been erected, into a city. This consideration did not apply to the cathedral, but it too had a marginal location. Perhaps the emperor wished to avoid giving offence to the non-Christians who still dominated the city, although it is possible that practical issues such as the availability of building sites and the density of population were responsible for the decision to build it in an out-of-the-way place near the walls. Whatever the reason may have been, it would take a long while for churches to penetrate into the monumental core of the city.⁸ But the distribution of the basilicas bore no relation to that of the city’s population, and this lack of fit between the ecclesiastical infrastructure and the need of the members of the church for accessible places where they could worship was largely met by a network of 25 churches that were established by wealthy citizens, although if we accept a suggestion that they were distributed in accordance with a deliberate plan the bishop may have been involved in their establishment. Called ‘titular’ churches after the title deeds that legally secured their ownership, they f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 440–498
• 2 498–555
• 3 555–604
• 4 604–655
• 5 654–701
• 6 701–751
• Bibliography
• Index