Defender of the City

When St. Leo the Great went out to meet Attila in 452 and Genseric in 455, he acted in a role the constitution of the Roman state never assigned to him: defender of the city. This file is the reflective companion to the events themselves — it asks what it meant that a bishop, not an emperor, stood at the gate; how Leo’s theology of Rome as the apostolic city of Peter and Paul underwrote that role; and how the resulting image of Leo as protector of his people fed the veneration that made him, with only two other popes, a “Great” — while keeping the heroic icon honestly distinct from the more modest historical picture.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Latin)

A Bishop at the Gate

The single most striking fact about the embassies of 452 and 455 is not what Leo said to Attila or Genseric but who Leo was when he said it. In the classical Roman order, treating with an invading king at the head of an army was the business of emperors and their generals. Yet in 452 it was the Emperor Valentinian III, sheltering in Rome, who could do no more than send envoys; and the envoy whose presence the contemporary chronicler thought worth recording was the bishop of Rome (Prosper of Aquitaine, Epitoma Chronicon, s.a. 452). In 455, after Valentinian’s murder and amid the collapse of any effective imperial authority, it was again Leo — not the ephemeral emperor Petronius Maximus, who had already fled and been killed — who went out to Genseric (Prosper, s.a. 455; Neil, Leo the Great, 37–40). The pattern is the heart of the matter: at the two moments when Rome most needed a defender, the man at the gate wore a bishop’s vestments.

This was not, in Leo’s own mind, a usurpation of secular office; it was the natural extension of pastoral responsibility into a vacuum that the secular order had left. The detailed reconstruction of both embassies — what is attested, what historians add, and what later legend invented — belongs to the companion file on Attila and Genseric. The present file asks the prior and larger question: what did it mean for the office of the Roman bishop that he could stand there at all?

The Vacuum the Bishop Filled

Leo’s pontificate (440–461) fell in the decades when the Western imperial structure was visibly disintegrating. The emperors of the period were, for the most part, weak, short-lived, or absent from the scene of crisis: Valentinian III reigned long but governed feebly, dependent on the general Aetius and, after murdering him in 454, defenceless; his successors followed one another in a blur of coups (Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire, 375–384). Into the administrative and moral vacuum this created, the bishop of Rome was drawn by the logic of his position. He commanded the one institution in the city with continuity, organization, wealth in land, and undivided popular loyalty; he was, increasingly, the figure to whom the population of Rome looked when the state could not protect them (Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome, 1–7, 285–290).

Leo did not seek to become a temporal ruler — the medieval papacy’s territorial sovereignty lay centuries ahead — but he did, of necessity, exercise a kind of civic guardianship. His surviving sermons show a pastor addressing the whole of Rome’s population in its calamities, interpreting famine, invasion, and refugee crisis within a theological frame, summoning the city to repentance and to the fasts of the liturgical year as the proper response to disaster (Leo, Sermons 84, on the anniversary of the city’s deliverance; Neil, 40–44; Wessel, 200–210). The embassies to Attila and Genseric were the dramatic public face of a guardianship he exercised daily from the pulpit and the administrative chair. When the emperors failed, the bishop did not seize the state; he simply kept doing the one thing his office already required — caring for his flock — at a scale the failing state had abandoned.

The Theology of Rome: The Apostolic City

What made this more than improvisation was Leo’s distinctive theology of Rome itself. For Leo, Rome’s true dignity was not, in the last analysis, imperial but apostolic. In the most famous statement of this vision, preached on the feast of the apostles, he tells the Romans that Peter and Paul are the city’s real founders, who have raised it to a glory surpassing that of Romulus and Remus: the blood of the apostles has made Rome a holier city than the conquests of the legions ever made it great, so that Rome now presides over the world more widely through “the divine religion” than it ever did through “earthly dominion” (Leo, Sermon 82.1, on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul; Wessel, 287–295). Rome is the city of the two apostles before it is the city of the Caesars.

This conviction did real work in 452 and 455. If Rome was above all the city of Peter and Paul, then its bishop — Peter’s heir, as Leo understood himself, in the doctrine of the apostolic succession of the see — was its rightful protector precisely as bishop, not as a stand-in for the emperor. The defense of the city and the dignity of the apostolic see were, in Leo’s theology, a single thing. (The full development of Leo’s Petrine doctrine — Peter speaking through his successor, the plenitudo potestatis, the relation to Canon 28 of Chalcedon — belongs to its own section and is treated in The Petrine Theology; here it matters only as the theological ground of the “defender” role.) It is no accident that the later legend gave the apparition above Leo the form of Peter and Paul themselves: medieval piety intuited, and dramatized, the very identification Leo had preached — that to threaten Rome was to face its apostolic patrons, and that the bishop at the gate stood in their name (Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, “St. Leo, Pope”; Wessel, 359–360).

From Defender to Saint: The Making of an Image

The image of Leo as the bishop who saved Rome was potent precisely because it fused the two things his contemporaries most needed reconciled: spiritual authority and visible deliverance. That image fed directly into his veneration. Leo is one of only three popes in the entire tradition to carry the epithet “the Great” — alongside Gregory I and, in Roman reckoning, no others until much later usage — and while his theological achievement (the Tome, Chalcedon) is the deeper ground of the title, the dramatic public courage of the embassies gave the epithet its popular, memorable face (Neil, 1–5, 130–134; Wessel, 1–4). The bishop who walked out to meet Attila became, in the collective memory of the Latin West, the type of the pope as protector of the people — an image rehearsed in liturgy, sermon, and finally in the monumental art of the Renaissance, above all Raphael’s Vatican fresco of 1513–1514, which made the Attila meeting one of the defining visual statements of papal Rome.

The image grew by the ordinary process of hagiographical magnification (cf. Methodology §3.5): the spare contemporary notice in Prosper became, over centuries, the wonder of the apostles with drawn swords (first a single figure in Paul the Deacon, late eighth century; then Peter and Paul in Jacobus de Voragine, c. 1260) and at last the canonical icon in Raphael. Each stage made Leo more clearly the defender and less merely the envoy. The trajectory tells us less about 452 than about the Church’s need for an image of the shepherd who does not flee the wolf.

The Icon and the History

A serious account must finally hold the heroic icon and the historical picture together without collapsing either. The icon — Leo facing down Attila by sheer holiness, the apostles flashing their swords overhead, the Eternal City delivered by its bishop — is a true expression of a real theological conviction and of Leo’s genuine courage, but it is not, as such, history; its miraculous content is medieval, not fifth-century (per Methodology §3.5).

The history, soberly read in the contemporary sources, is more modest and in some ways more admirable. Leo’s intervention with Attila coincided with material pressures — famine, plague, the Eastern emperor Marcian’s offensive against the Hunnic homeland — that gave the king his own reasons to withdraw, so that the embassy was a real but partial cause of a withdrawal that had several (Heather, 339–342; Kelly, Attila the Hun, 188–193). His intervention with Genseric did not prevent the fourteen-day sack of 455 but, on the favorable reading of Prosper, mitigated it — sparing lives and the great basilicas while the city was systematically plundered (Prosper, s.a. 455; Wessel, 360–361). The truthful portrait is therefore not of a thaumaturge who turned armies by a word, but of a bishop who twice did not stay behind his walls — who walked out, in the absence of any emperor willing or able to do so, to bear the risk of negotiation on behalf of a city that had become, in fact as well as in his theology, the bishop’s charge.

That is the durable meaning of “defender of the city”: not that Leo worked miracles at the gate, but that the gate was his to stand at, because the empire had vacated it and the apostolic see, in his understanding, was made for exactly such an hour. The veneration that followed — and the epithet “Great” — fastened, rightly, less on a legend of swords than on the plain and attested fact that when Rome had no defender, its bishop became one (Neil, 40–44, 130–134; Wessel, 358–362).

References

Leo the Great, Sermon 82 (on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul), Sermon 84 (on the deliverance of the city); ed. Antoine Chavasse, CCSL 138–138A; trans. Jane Patricia Freeland and Agnes Josephine Conway, St. Leo the Great: Sermons, Fathers of the Church 93 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
Prosper of Aquitaine, Epitoma Chronicon, s.a. 452, 455; ed. Theodor Mommsen, MGH AA 9 (Berlin, 1892).
Paul the Deacon, Historia Romana 14 (late 8th c.); ed. Hans Droysen, MGH AA 2 (Berlin, 1879).
Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea, c. 1260), “St. Leo, Pope”; trans. William Granger Ryan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Susan Wessel, Leo the Great and the Spiritual Rebuilding of a Universal Rome (Leiden: Brill, 2008).
Bronwen Neil, Leo the Great, The Early Church Fathers (London: Routledge, 2009).
Peter Heather, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
Christopher Kelly, Attila the Hun: Barbarian Terror and the Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Bodley Head, 2008).