The Roman Church in the Age of Gregory the Great

The Rome Gregory was born into around 540 had been besieged, taken, retaken and emptied within living memory. The Gothic wars and Justinian's reconquest had wrecked the city and the countryside that fed it, and from 568 the Lombards held most of the peninsula. The imperial government sat at Ravenna and had little left to spend on Rome. Gregory was city prefect, gave it up, turned the family house on the Caelian into a monastery, and was sent to Constantinople as the pope's representative. He was elected bishop in 590, during a plague, and spent fourteen years doing a job that had quietly become something else. The letters show what it was. He ran the papal estates in Sicily as the city's food supply and audited the men who managed them. He paid soldiers and negotiated with Lombard dukes when the exarch would not. He ransomed prisoners. He told bishops in Gaul, Spain, Africa and Illyricum what he thought they were doing wrong, at length. He refused the title of universal bishop when Constantinople's patriarch used it, and called himself servant of the servants of God instead. And in 596 he sent a party of his own monks to Kent, and then wrote to them again and again about what to do with pagan temples and how far to insist on Roman custom. The Pastoral Rule, written at the beginning of it, is the book underneath all the rest: an argument that the government of souls is the art of arts, that different people must be told the same truth differently, and that wanting the office is itself a disqualification for it.