Download PDF | The Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes (Liber Pontificalis) The Ancient Biographies of Nine Popes from AD 715 to AD 817 Translated with introduction and notes by RAYMOND DAVIS, Liverpool University Press 1992.
291 Pages
PREFACE
When the General Editors of this series approached me to undertake a continuation of The Book of Pontiffs I accepted with trepidation. The text of the lives of the popes in the Liber Pontificalis from A.D. 715 to A.D. 891 is some three times the length of that translated in the earlier volume, and the material is such that a translation would serve little purpose without a running commentary. It was a daunting prospect, and the present volume, first published in 1992, which carries the lives of the popes from 715 down to 817 (the *eighth century', roughly) represents one half of the undertaking; the third volume, covering the remaining lives of the ninth century, was published in this series in 1995.
I am conscious that this volume appears in the centenary of the completion of Duchesne's magisterial edition of the Latin text and commentary. My commentary is intended to retain in as brief a compass as possible all that Duchesne had to say which is still useful and valid; inevitably his extensive quotations of other literary sources and of inscriptions have suffered excision in the interests of space. Updating has been necessary most particularly for chapters in the text which concern the political history of the period. I doubt if the task could have been attempted by one whose historical training is in a rather earlier period had T. F. X. Noble's The Republic of St Peter not been available; to this work I willingly acknowledge my indebtedness, and to it I refer readers for fuller discussion.
The text translated is that of Duchesne entire and unaltered. Mommsen's edition of the lives after 715 was planned but never appeared. In fact the textual problems for these later lives are far less complicated than for the earlier period.
There are conflicting systems of reference to the text of the Liber Pontificalis. I have chosen the chapter numbers of Vignoli's edition as given (not always quite accurately) in Duchesne's edition; each of these is about half the length of the sections in the Bianchini edition and about a quarter of the length of Duchesne's own pages. The Bianchini sections, even though this is the edition reprinted (as *Anastasius') in the Patrologia Latina, seem now to be used by no one; and Duchesne himself expressed a preference for Vignoli (though he used Bianchini in his commentary when referring to parts of the text he had not yet reached). Duchesne's pages are simply too long to be convenient for purposes of reference or indexing.
' The paragraphing of the translation follows Duchesne as far as possible; the main modifications occur where the analysis by H. Geertman (More Veterum) of material on donations and repairs to churches requires a different arrangement. In lives 97 and 98 I have inserted chronological headings, following Geertman.
The rendering of proper names is a problem for every translator. Where familiar English forms do not exist I have generally preferred Latin for persons, Latin for those geographical features which are of uncertain location or whose modern name does not reflect the old form, and Italian for other place-names; this may be inconsistent, but I was not prepared to write of king Desiderio, to return to the older Ticinum where the text employs the later form Pavia, or to disguise Centumcellae as Civitavecchia. For the orthography of Italian names I have followed the Atlante Automobilistico of the Touring Club Italiano, and in a number of instances I have retained the antepenultimate accents used there. If Italian readers find it useful to be warned against false stresses in names like Céccano and Césena, I trust non-Italians will not object.
In the preparation of this work by far my greatest debt was to the late Dr Margaret Gibson of St Peter's College Oxford, who not merely showed enthusiasm for this work at every stage but checked the translation word by word and reviewed the introductions and commentary in detail when, as I am sure, she had much more worthwhile projects in hand. My deepest gratitude is due to her and also to Mrs Christa Mee whose cartographic skills have turned scrawl into usable maps, and to Mr Robin Bloxsidge and his colleagues at the Liverpool University Press who have worked to a tight schedule. I owe thanks also to my colleagues in the Queen's University of Belfast, many of whom I have pestered for their opinions and expertise, be it on the niceties of Latin vocabulary — particularly Dr Brian Campbell and Dr Brian Scott; or on points of Byzantine history — particularly Dr Margaret Mullett; nor can I omit to thank Miss Janis Boyd, Secretary to the School of Greek, Roman and Semitic Studies, and the late Professor Alan Astin, Director of the same School and Professor of Ancient History. Even in his last weeks he maintained interest in the progress of this work and offered me his encouragement: iustitia eius manet in saeculum saeculi.
In preparing this revised (2007) edition the opportunity has been take to correct a few errors or misprints and to clarify a good number of points in the translation and the notes.
INTRODUCTION
The individual lives have their own introductions, but it is convenient here to consider some general points.
1. The nature of the Liber Pontificalis of the Roman Church
The origins of the work in episcopal lists maintained from the third century, the development of these into biographies in the early sixth century, the production from these of a *'second edition' and the early continuations of this in the sixth and seventh centuries have been discussed in my Book of Pontiffs, and there is little to be gained by rehearsing material which has no direct bearing on the biographies contained in this volume. It is enough to recall that during most of the seventh century the LP was being updated spasmodically, and by the beginning of the eighth century on a life by life basis.
AS for the lives in this volume, which are serially numbered in the manuscripts 91 through to 99, it is clear from Bede's use of material in the life of Gregory II (see introduction to life 91) that the continuators no longer thought it necessary to wait until the pope whose reign they were chronicling had died; and the increasing length of most of the successive lives is itself a sign of compilation by contemporary writers who knew at first hand of the events they were recording.
The various continuators, all anonymous in this period, were probably clerks in the Lateran vestiarium. Politically they were all loyal to the church in whose service they worked and to the policies of the regime at Rome; as contemporaries, their comments on the defects of that regime are guarded or non-existent: one would search life 97 in vain for anything on Hadrian I's nepotistic tendencies. The authors were not members of any literary élite; their Latinity is usually, though by no means always, transparent in meaning, but their style, their grammar and their vocabulary are not such as would pass muster with the scholars of the Carolingian Renaissance. Many of the continuators were liable to fall back on register material preserved in their own office as a substitute for political history.
A single life need not have had a single author, and in the case of the lengthy pontificate of Hadrian (97) it is virtually certain that there were at least two authors. On the other hand I suspect a single author was responsible for lives 95, 96 and 97 cc. 1—44. His bible-influenced Latin style suggests that the author of life 93 was not the same as that of 92 or 94. The author of 91 is fond of military details, whereas the author of 92 shows no interest in Lombard activities. Peculiarities of vocabulary help to isolate authors: the author of 91 is fond of the words praepedire (six times) and consilium (six times in the original text, and consiliator once), whereas neither word occurs in 92. Life 93 contains words seldom or not at all used earlier in the LP: spondere (and sponsio), conspicere, advenire, conviare, redonare. Life 94 uses superlative epithets tediously (christianissimus, sanctissimus etc.), repeats royal titles every time Pepin or Aistulf are mentioned, likes to begin sentences with ad haec (four times), and favours the word imminere (seven times, in the sense 'press upon"). The lengthy life 98 never employs the verb properare (a word which unless qualified seems by this date to have lost any sense of haste), though it occurs 14 times in 96 and 20 times in 97. Other examples could be selected from these and later lives.
2. The text's importance for the history of the eighth century.
Little familiarity with the source material for eighth-century Europe is needed before it is realised that the bulk of it originates from the Frankish kingdom. Constantinople was immersed in a dark age from the historiographical point of view. Italian material is hardly plentiful. Yet these were the very years when with Frankish help the Roman church eased itself out of the orbit of the eastern empire and accepted a degree of Frankish protection. They were the years that saw the collapse of the Lombard kingdom in Italy, and in the last year of the century occurred the coronation of Charlemagne at Rome. For these events, each in its way critical in the development of Europe, the LP provides the most detailed surviving account. Among Italian sources therefore, the details preserved in these biographies are of paramount importance — if they are trustworthy.
The life of Hadrian I, with its information on Charles' donation in 774 of territories to the Roman church, and its reference back to the donation made by Pepin at Quierzy twenty years earlier, has caused the greatest controversy about the sincerity of the LP. The matter is fully discussed in the introduction to life 97, where it is argued that the account of both promised donations is reliable.
Even the register material which seems to loom so large in parts of the text has its importance. Though this was hardly the intention of the compilers, it shows the effectiveness of the papal management of the patrimonies whose revenues made the donations and restorations on such an opulent scale possible. Equally the writers show no awareness of the tensions between Rome and the east resulting from the main religious dispute of the century, that over iconoclasm; but our authors make it abundantly clear how the Roman church went overboard on providing more and more images to decorate churches while the imperial regime was pursuing the opposite line. For the art historian the material preserved by the LP is fascinating. A treatise on the nature and manufacture of the various cloths and silks recorded in the LP is invited!
For a long time the issue of papal sovereignty has bedevilled studies of the history of this period. In what sense, and precisely when, did the papal state come into existence as a separate political entity from the eastern Roman empire? To what extent and with what effect was the new state constitutionally subject to or dependent on the Frankish kingdom and, later, empire, rather than Constantinople? The narrative of events given in the LP is crucial and must be taken into account in any view on these questions; but the compilers were not constitutional theorists.
If an ancient historian may interject a view in such controversial ground, it is that the issue should not be approached in terms of territorial sovereignty: such a concept is not one that men whose outlook was based on the ancient world and in no way on medieval or modern political systems could readily have understood. The fact that christian theology had provided a new ultimate source of authority does not affect the matter. Sovereignty, if the word must be used, is to be seen in personal terms, for individuals or for groups.
In some sense the Roman people, even in the eighth century, had imperium and were conscious that they had it, and the pope was their representative (vicarius), the man they had elected much as their ancestors had elected other holders of imperium. But he was more than that; he was the Vicar of St Peter. And they, as christian Romans, were more than just the Roman people; their outlook, and that of the popes, consciously or otherwise, is that of Leo the Great: Rome is a christian city founded by Peter and Paul, replacing the pagan city founded by Romulus and Remus, but not thereby losing any of the imperial prerogatives of the Roman people, rather gaining added spiritual ones. For imperium is not equivalent to *'empire' in the territorial sense the word now bears. It is a personal right to expect one's instructions to be fulfilled. There were, of course, still Roman emperors who held imperium, even if they resided on the Bosphorus, and even if, after Constans II in 667, none of them visited Rome. But had one of them done so in the eighth or the ninth century, he would still have been recognized as the personal holder of an imperium somehow conferred on him by the Roman people; and no doubt he would have resided, as Constans II had done, in the imperial palace on the Palatine, probably still intact at this date. From the Roman point of view — and there is nothing new about this in the eighth century — the imperium he held, while real, was not coextensive or identical with that of the Roman and christian people; but neither for him nor for them was the distinction territorial.
When Pepin promised to give 'back' to St Peter former Roman territory recently occupied by the Lombards, neither Pepin nor even the eastern Roman emperor saw matters as they would be seen in the modern world: it was not a matter of reducing the size of the Roman empire. The inherited conceptual framework was one of the auctoritas, sometimes of the potestas or potentia, of individuals, not of territorial sovereignty. To be sure, one can consider the constitutional position of the popes and of the Frankish and Lombard kings vis-à-vis the Basileus at Constantinople. But if the issue is reduced to territorial terms the results are meaningless or contradictory.
The concept of imperium was not merely metaphysical: it needed a provincia for its exercise; but even a provincia in older thought was not primarily territorial. The word survives in eighth-century usage at Rome: thus in the LP, apart from less specific uses, Italy is described as a province at 92:4, 93:2, 94:9, 15, 96:17, 97:41, the province of the Ravennates occurs at 93:12, 15, that of the Romans at 92:14 (in an insertion dating from the 750s, 'the province under Roman control', more literally *subject to the dicio of the Romans"), 94:15—16 (where it is apparently synonymous with Italy), that of the Romans and the exarchate of Ravenna at 96:22, that of France at 94:30, and those of Venetiae and Istria at 97:42; while at 94:6, the provincia is what is coveted by Aistulf. But most telling of all is the expression in 94:13, where Stephen II institutes a litany for 'the safety of the province and of all Christians': these are not alternatives, they are the same thing. In ninth-century lives, *province' is used under Nicholas I (107:29,55) for the spheres of jurisdiction of bishops, in practice their territorial dioceses as we would say; but as late as the life of Hadrian 1I (108:30) we are told, in a speech directed against Photius, how comprovinciales go up to Constantinople as to a regia civitas. Thus it is that in the period with which we are dealing, as in the days when the Roman empire was intact, provincia is the sphere in which power is exercised. The insistence by the popes that the authority of the emperor did not extend to spiritual matters — that church and state had separate provinciae — served to restrain the word province from coming to be seen in purely territorial terms; and as long as that was the case the concept of imperium, as that which was exercised within a province, could not be Seen as merely geographical.
Of course the reality of territorial control is a different matter. Since the fifth century areas of what had been the (geographical) Roman empire had come under the control of barbarian kings, and in the eighth century the Lombards controlled parts of Italy. Liutprand, Aistulf and Desiderius are kings (of the Lombards rather than of territories), just as Pepin and his sons are kings (of the Franks rather than of France). They are not emperors, though they have little truck with the emperor; but equally their own Lombard dukes in practice come to control territories such as Benevento and Spoleto with little reservation of real power to the Lombard king. For the pope in eighth-century Rome this means that as Vicar of St Peter he was like the Vicar of a Praetorian Prefect (who had once in a given territory, called a diocese, exercised certain aspects of power on behalf of his senior who had a sphere of authority throughout the empire). St Peter's Vicar held certain aspects of authority among the christian people (more particularly those of Rome, but the Roman people saw itself as the christian people), just as the Basileus, the kings and the dukes had other aspects of authority. There was no simple hierarchy in this: it was more a matter of wheels within wheels. But above all it was personal, not territorial. Respublica comes in the eighth century to be used of what we call the papal state; and *State' has been used to render the word throughout this volume, rather than *Republic', in the belief both that the word has marginally less of a territorial connotation and that it does not imply a contrast with *empire' or *kingdom'.
I will not pursue this matter further, but leave it to experts in the field. Suffice it to say that I believe that much talk of the creation at some precise moment in the eighth century of a territorially-bounded politically independent papal state is a reflection of modern concepts of nationhood. It is probably no coincidence that the modern discussion began at much the same time as the struggle was occurring to turn Germany and Italy into nationstates and when, in the latter case, the survival of the States of the Church (which could all too easily be seen as originating in the eighth century) was viewed as an obstacle to national unity and independence. In the *Roman Question' as it existed down to 1929 it suited both sides to perceive the origins and development of the Papal States in modern terms.
3. The manuscript tradition and variant recensions.
The later the life, the fewer the manuscripts. This results from the fact that our surviving MSS are all copies of on-going texts which left Rome at different dates and therefore ended at different points. The earlier the text left Rome, the longer the opportunities for its diffusion. By life 98 (that of Leo IIT) we are dealing with only six manuscripts of the full text, and the situation deteriorates even further in the ninth century. Lives 109 to 111 are missing entirely (if they were ever written), while the last paragraph of life 112, the last in the series, is known from only one manuscript, itself incomplete.
Apart from normal textual variants, the manuscripts bear witness to different recensions; the text did not have the sacrosanctity of a literary work, and the very fact of its anonymity may even have encouraged interpolations in and modifications to the existing text. In some cases later manuscripts show a strong tendency to regularize spelling and grammar to accord with classical norms. But for lives 91 to 99, the most serious textual variants are in 91, which exists both in its original form and in a much revised version, produced perhaps 20 years later.
Until the 1 1th century editorial activity only occasionally took the form of deliberate excision of material: an exception here is life 94 which exists also in what is known as the Lombard recension, designed to remove opprobrious comments about the Lombards to suit the taste of Lombard readers; this change was presumably made before the fall of the Lombard kingdom in 774. But from the 11th century on, new recensions were produced which treated the ancient text in a much more cavalier fashion. For example, the earliest of these, that of Adhémar of Chabannes, has a text down to life 105 showing many alterations to the text and heavily abbreviating longer lives like that of Leo III by excising most of the register-type material on donations and repairs to churches as no longer of interest.
The same can be said of other medieval recensions. In the twelfth century Cardinal Pandulf produced what is called the 'third edition' of the LP (known from the Codex Dertusensis and from Petrus Gulielmus' manuscript, Vaticanus 3762, see Pferovsky's edition), designed as a preliminary to newly composed lives beginning with Gregory VII. Medieval recensions are not much help for the text of the earlier lives; at the most they reflect the readings of one manuscript of the standard text which was used to produce a new edition. The recensions provide, in Duchesne's view, no help in any of the difficult passages.
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