01 — Foundations
The world Gregory was born into and the man before the papacy: the ruined Rome of the sixth century — depopulated by the Gothic wars of Justinian’s reconquest, scourged by the plague of 541–543, and pressed by the Lombard invasions from 568 — governed now as a remote frontier of the Byzantine empire under the exarch at Ravenna; and Gregory himself, scion of a wealthy senatorial family, sometime praefectus urbi, who abandoned the highest secular office for the monastic life in the house he founded on the family estate on the Caelian Hill. These files establish the devastated city and the conversion that made the monk who would become pope.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (pre-Schism; Pope of Rome; Great Hierarch)
To understand Gregory one must first see the Rome he loved and grieved over. It was not the imperial capital of legend but a battered, shrinking town on the edge of a Byzantine empire ruled from Constantinople, fought over by emperors and Goths and Lombards, emptied by war and pestilence, its aqueducts cut and its monuments crumbling. Gregory preached to its survivors that the world itself was growing old. Out of that world came a man uniquely fitted to govern it: a Roman aristocrat trained in administration who had renounced the world for the cloister, and who would be dragged from the cloister to rule the very city he had fled. This section sets the historical ground — the city after the Gothic wars and under the Lombards, and the Byzantine papacy of which Gregory was a part — and then the personal turn from prefect to monk.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Rome After the Gothic Wars | The sixth-century catastrophe: Justinian’s reconquest and the twenty-year Gothic war, the plague of 541–543, the Lombard invasion of 568, the depopulation of Rome, and the “Byzantine papacy” — Rome as a duchy of the empire under the exarch of Ravenna and the emperor at Constantinople. |
| From Prefect to Monk | Gregory’s senatorial family (his ancestor possibly Pope Felix III; his mother Silvia and aunts venerated as saints); his education and tenure as urban prefect of Rome; his conversion, the founding of St. Andrew’s monastery on the Caelian Hill, and the six Sicilian monasteries from the family estates. |
See Also
- The Papal Envoy to the East — the monk sent from St. Andrew’s to Constantinople
- Election 590 — the monk dragged back to govern Rome
- The Pre-Schism Church — the undivided Church of the sixth century
- St. Benedict of Nursia — the monastic founder of the same Italy whose Life Gregory would write
References
- Markus, R. A. Gregory the Great and His World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Moorhead, John. Gregory the Great. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 2005.
- Richards, Jeffrey. Consul of God: The Life and Times of Gregory the Great. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
- Gregory the Great. Dialogues. Trans. Odo John Zimmerman. Fathers of the Church 39. New York, 1959.