Gregory the Great and the Birth of the Medieval Papacy
Gregory I became Pope on 3 September 590, elected in desperate circumstances. Rome was wracked by plague and the Lombards threatened its walls. The Byzantine emperor in Constantinople was too preoccupied with Persian wars to help. Gregory, a Roman aristocrat who had served as the city's prefect before becoming a monk and then a papal emissary in Constantinople, had no desire for the office. His fourteen-year pontificate would nonetheless shape Western Christianity more decisively than any pope between Peter and Innocent III. Gregory's first acts were entirely practical. He organized Rome's food supply through the Church's extensive Italian estates, feeding the city's population from ecclesiastical granaries. He negotiated directly with the Lombard King Agilulf for a local truce in 592, bypassing and infuriating the Byzantine Exarch of Ravenna who technically outranked him. In doing so he established a precedent with immense consequences: the Pope acting as an independent temporal ruler, negotiating with kings as a sovereign rather than as a Byzantine official. His missionary initiatives reshaped the map of Christendom. In 596 he dispatched Augustine (later of Canterbury) with monks to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons of Kent. King Aethelberht of Kent received Augustine; Aethelberht was baptized and the Church of England was born. Gregory's letters to Augustine on how to handle pagan customs, whether to destroy temples or repurpose them and how to accommodate existing festivals, reveal a pastorally flexible mind that influenced Christian missionary strategy for centuries. His Regula Pastoralis (Pastoral Care, 591), a manual on the duties of bishops, became the standard text for episcopal formation in the medieval West; Alfred the Great translated it into Old English three centuries later. His Dialogues spread the cult of Benedict of Nursia and effectively launched Benedictine monasticism as the dominant form of Western monasticism. The liturgical reforms associated with his name make Gregorian chant the bedrock of medieval worship. Gregory coined the papal title Servant of the Servants of God (servus servorum Dei), a phrase of genuine humility that every subsequent pope has used. He was the first monk to become pope, establishing a new type of ascetic, learned, pastorally engaged Christian leader. No other figure did more to ensure that the institutional Church, rather than the collapsing secular state, would be the primary vehicle of civilization in the early medieval West.
- Year: 590 CE
- Category: Religious
