Download PDF | The Lives of the Ninth-Century Popes (Liber Pontificalis) THE ANCIENT BIOGRAPHIES OF TEN POPES FROM A.D. 817-891 Translated with an introduction and commentary by RAYMOND DAVIS, Liverpool University Press 1995.
353 Pages
PREFACE
This volume fulfils the promise made in the introduction to my Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes. lt contains a translation of and commentary on some three-eighths of the Liber Pontificalis of the Roman church, from A.D. 817 to the point where what Duchesne called *l'ancien livre pontifical" finally expires. The precise terminal date is given on the title page as A.D. 891, but the reader should be warned that the text of the life of Hadrian Il stops at the end of the year 870, that there is then a gap for the last two years of that pope's life, that the next three popes are omitted entirely, and that the fragment dealing with Stephen V (886-891) breaks off after perhaps no more than the first year or two of his pontificate. No lives were written for the next two centuries. Many manuscripts contain catalogues with little beyond the names and tenures of the popes in this period. These catalogues may be found in Duchesne's edition (and see Piazzoni 1989-90), but are not included here, any more than are the more extended biographies which were resumed from the time of Gregory VII and were continued by various writers down to the fifteenth century.
The format of the present volume is very closely modelled on that covering the eighth century, and the introduction to that volume explains the policies adopted with regard to the numbering of the chapters (Vignoli's system as given in Duchesne's text), the paragraphing (almost entirely Duchesne's), and the rendering of proper names. As before, the text translated is Duchesne's, though his punctuation is not held sacrosanct; attention is drawn in the commentary to a few small variations from his text, and there too will be found suggestions for some of the loci corrupti which that great scholar did not attempt to mend. Year-headings are inserted where Geertman's study (More veterum) of the building-works and donations in certain of these lives enabled him to establish the year-divisions in the archival documents incorporated in the text; they are likely to be at least approximately correct. For the lengthy life of Leo [V, not analysed by Geertman, 1 have ventured a chronology (pp. 108-110) but not risked inserting it into the translation; so too for the life of Nicholas (pp. 203-4). In the commentary I] have attempted to include whatever material in Duchesne's notes still seems valid and useful.
AS before, my debts are many. T. F. X. Noble's Republic of St Peter has remained of great benefit for the lives of the earlier part of this century; for the later lives Janet Nelson's works have been invaluable, especially her translation of the ^4nnais of St-Bertin, published (1991) in the Manchester series of Ninth-Century Histories.
] have been particularly fortunate in having had the services of Clive Cheesman, who has pondered the entire translation and made large numbers of suggestions for improvement, the great majority of which I have adopted; his influence has been much greater than it has been possible to acknowledge in the commentary. My colleagues in Belfast have also been most helpful: I single out Brian Scott who has so readily shared with me his thoughts on many 'difficult passages that 1 submitted to him, and Margaret Mullett and Dion Smyth who have been a mine of information on matters Byzantine; Fred Williams and Brian Campbell have also supplied useful advice. Errors that remain are, of course, my own responsibility. The map of Rome, reproduced from the earlier volume, results from the cartographic skills of Christa Mee. | am most grateful to the Queen's University of Belfast for a grant towards the costs of publication.
It is a great sadness to me that Margaret Gibson, to whose learning, encouragement, common sense, enthusiasm, and practical advice throughout this project l, with all contributors to this series, owe so much, has not lived to see the publication of this volume.
INTRODUCTION
In this volume are given the last ten lives from the ancient, continuous, Liber Pontificalis of the Roman Church. The lives differ markedly from each other in character: the broken fragment of life 101 (Eugene I1) composed in very simple language; the lengthy high-flown eulogy in life 102 of the ephemeral pope Valentine. Yet (except for 102) all the lives down to 107 (Nicholas) are much taken up with lists of building-works and enrichments for churches at Rome. Life 107, however, has been reworked; as is explained in the introduction to that life (p. 189), the text was taken over by a writer (possibly John Hyrmmonides the Deacon) who inserted a number of historical passages, some even at the cost of excising parts of an already-prepared text; while life 108, which contains no material on buildings and endowments and is probably the work of the interpolator of life 107, is entirely devoted to 'straight history.
Life 108 in fact breaks off two years before the death of its subject, albeit with a good finishing flourish. The introduction to that life (pp. 249-50) suggests that the author's political views and the politics of the time would have made it very difficult for him to continue without treading on thin ice. And the next three popes found (it seems) no biographers. Then life 112 (Stephen V), a mere fragment, shows that the task of compilation was again taken up after an interval of some 15 years; the author of this fragment plays safe by incorporating, uniquely, a sermon delivered by the pope against witcheraft and against talking in church. But the fragment was a mere flicker before the LP was finally extinguished.
What caused this cessation? An answer to this question may provide some insight into the very nature of the LP. Undoubtedly the troubles of the Roman church in the next few decades played a part in the failure of papal biographers to continue their task: under the short-lived successors of Formosus, violently quarrelling with each other over their attitude to Formosus, it would have been as difficult for biographers to write as it was for the author of life 108 to finish his task. Even so, had they confined themselves, as the authors of many earlier lives did, to neutral statements about the background and ordination of each pope, and then to listing endowments, the task would not have been impossible. The LP ceased mainly because it had already been taken out of the hands of authors who were prepared to write in this way, and thus the tradition of compilation in the milieu from which earlier lives had emerged had already been broken.
Who, then, were the anonymous biographers who had compiled the LP decade after decade, and why had they done so? [ remain satisfied that Duchesne was right to see in the vestiarium at the Lateran the milieu in which generations of compilers lived and worked. The view has been challenged. Caspar thought that Duchesne was right only for the lives down to the middle of the eighth century, after which stage the compilers came from the Lateran scrinium (chancery). In an important article Noble (1985) holds that the authors throughout were notaries from the chancery. He stresses the reference to the creation by pope Fabian in the mid-third century of notaries to record martyr-acts (LP 21:2, BP 8); the remark about the death of Ambrose, primicerius of the notaries (94:24); and the concentration in life 96 on the career of the primicerius Christopher. Yet the statement about Fabian is legendary, if not fiction; the death of Ambrose is an interpolation into the text; and it would hardly have been possible to deal with the pontificate of Stephen 1I without giving prominence to Christopher. [t is more significant that in life 97 (cc. 64, 67) the compiler adds epithets in commendation of Januarius, the vestiarius then in post. Nowhere else in the LP is any Lateran bureaucrat praised. The author of this late eighthcentury life was surely Januarius's subordinate; and there seems no reason why most of the lives of the ninth century should not come from the same milieu, just as lives before the seventh century had done: note, for instance, the interest shown in the sacking of the vestiarium by Maurice and Isaac before the ordination of pope Severinus in 640 (73:15, BP 65-6). There may be exceptions: perhaps the history of the fall of the Lombard kingdom which forms the first part of the life of Hadrian [ is from elsewhere. But otherwise it seems much more satisfactory to assume that the LP, devoting as it does so much space to church buildings and enrichment, comes from the hands of clerks who worked in the very office where these matters were the prime concern. Perhaps, though, it matters little whether the writers came from one Lateran office or another. lt is enough to accept that until Nicholas's time they were not among the ecclesiastical or lay nobility of Rome; they were, relatively, humble clerks.
Why did they write at all? As explained in my Book of Pontiffs (ivv), the origins of the LP are to be found in the propaganda battles of the schism at the very beginning of the sixth century when Symmachus and Laurentius fought for possession of the Roman see. Once written and consolidated by interested contemporaries down to 530 and then 538, the work was left aside. The quality of the rest of the sixth-century lives does not suggest a contemporary compiler. But from some point in the first half of the seventh century (perhaps under Honorius) the lives become ongoing compilations by contemporary writers; and [ can see no reason to suppose that this ever ceased to be so, even in the ninth century (note especially the curious case, already mentioned, of the life of pope Valentine), though naturally one cannot exclude touching up after the death of the subject of each biography. Why, then, from the early seventh century to the late ninth did contemporary clerks compile these biographies? Never to be underestimated is the 'lethargy-factor': a job was to be done because it had 'always' (as compilers would have imagined) been done, much as ceremonies continue to be performed long after their purpose has been forgotten. Nor, in so far as there were more positive purposes, should we conclude that these were necessarily the same in each generation; or that the motives of compilers can necessarily be deduced from the uses to which the finished product was put.
Noble (1985) suggests three motives: the LP was an official version of papal history for the training of young clerics; but, since much of the material was too advanced for use at this level, it was also to be a ready-reference work for veterans; and it was to act as an inventory of archives (presumably, though, the archives of the vestiarium rather than those of the chancery). That the LP may have been used at Lucca for the education of clerics (though to what purpose is baffling) tells nothing about the education of clerics at Rome; and I cannot help feeling that if the LP was used as a textbook someone would at some point have done something about the Latin style and syntax. Some Roman clergy may have learnt from it; but 1 cannot believe it was written to be part of a regular curriculum. The second motive suggested supposes that the record of relations, political or ecclesiastical, with Byzantines, Lombards and Franks is complete enough to be useful. 1t is not; for the Franks it is sufficient to note the hiatus in the account of Charlemagne's dealings with Hadrian 1 and Leo 1l from 774 to 799 and after 800, or the inadequate account given in the life of Gregory IV, which manages not to mention that pope's personal intervention north of the Alps. The third suggested motive depends on what, to us, is selfevident: a record office is useless without an inventory or catalogue of some kind. Yet if the LP was written to provide an archival inventory, it ís difficult to see how a researcher would actually be helped by it to find anything. We should not assume that any ancient archive was easy to consult, or that the order of documents was ever more than chronological (if that). Archives were kept as often as not, [ suspect, because it seemed wrong to throw documents away, rather than in any expectation that the preserved material would be consulted, or with any plan to make life easy for researchers. The 'lethargy-factor' worked here as well. The archive material which is incorporated in the LP (in a very summary fashion and with no obvious principle of selection) is there because it recorded what was, in the rather narrow outlook of the compilers, the chief way in which each pope had glorified God, St Peter, and the Roman church - the institution with which the authors" loyalty lay. It is this loyalty, not their deliberate purpose, that they reveal. As Noble (1985:356) rightly stresses, by compiling an institutional history of an unprecedented kind the writers succeeded in depicting the *ceaseless march through time of a seemingly timeless institution'. But I doubt whether that was the conscious motive of any of the successive biographers.
Under Nicholas the compilation was taken over by one or more writers from a higher status in society, whose purpose was closer to what we understand as historiographical, but who soon found that the task of writing both fully and honestly was one that they could not sustain. Compilation ceased because the tradition was cut; except for its brief flicker under Stephen V the candle was snuffed out. Even the last lives that had been compiled seem not to have become widely known, even at Rome. When in the late 930s Flodoard of Rheims visited Rome to find material for the verses he was composing on ali the popes back to Peter, he was well received by pope Leo Vii, and the finished product shows that he had access to a copy of the LP. But his copy, it is clear, did not extend beyond life 107 (Nicholas); for the next 22 popes, but never earlier, his verses depend on the verse epitaphs on the papal graves at St Peter's, many of which still survive and can be compared with his efforts (his only other source for this period seems to have been the letters exchanged between the popes and the archbishops of Rheims). Even life 108 (Hadrian Il) was unavailable to him, let alone the fragment on Stephen V or any other lives if such existed. It is hardly likely that he was denied access to an up-dated LP, or that having made the effort to come to Rome he was too unconcerned to seek it out (Duchesne II. IX-XT).
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