Pope Gregory I

Pope Gregory I (c. 540 – 12 March 604), often called Saint Gregory the Great, served as the 64th Bishop of Rome from 3 September 590 until his death. Born to a Roman senator, Gregory himself became prefect of Rome at age 30. He later lived in a monastery he founded on his family’s property, then worked as a papal ambassador before becoming pope. As pope, his administration did more to improve the welfare of Rome’s people than the emperors Maurice and Theodosius had. He restored papal authority in Spain and France and dispatched missionaries to England, among them Augustine of Canterbury and Paulinus of York. By shifting barbarian groups—Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths—away from Arian Christianity and toward Rome, he helped shape medieval Europe. He also fought the Donatist heresy, then widespread in North Africa. Gregory wrote more than any previous pope, earning the Eastern Christian title “Saint Gregory the Dialogist” for his *Dialogues*. In the Middle Ages, he was called “the Father of Christian Worship” for his thorough revision of Roman liturgy. His work on the Divine Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts, still used in the Byzantine Rite, is so significant that he is generally considered its real author. Alongside Augustine, Jerome, and Ambrose, he is honored as one of the four Great Latin Church Fathers. Right after his death, popular acclaim made him a saint. He is the second of three popes listed in the *Annuario Pontificio* with the title “the Great,” after Leo I and before Nicholas I.

Gregory was born around 540 in Rome, which the Eastern Roman Empire had recently reclaimed from the Ostrogoths. His parents named him Gregorius; the medieval writer Ælfric of Eynsham explained that this Greek name means “Watchful” in English, adding that Gregory “was very diligent in God’s Commandments.” He came from a wealthy, noble Roman family closely tied to the church. His father, Gordianus, was a patrician, senator, and former Prefect of Rome, who also held the church role of Regionarius (though little else is known about that position). His mother, Silvia, was well-born and had a married sister in Sicily. Both of Gregory’s parents and two paternal aunts, Trasilla and Emiliana, are recognized as saints by Catholic and Orthodox churches. His great-great-grandfather had been Pope Felix III. Gregory’s election to the papacy made his family the most distinguished clerical dynasty of the era.

The family lived in a suburban villa on the Clivus Scauri on the Caelian Hill (now Via di San Gregorio). This road branched from the street opposite the former imperial palaces on the Palatine Hill. To the north lay the Colosseum; to the south, the Circus Maximus. In Gregory’s time, the ancient buildings were ruined and privately owned, with villas covering the area. The family also owned working estates in Sicily and around Rome. Gregory later had frescoed portraits of his parents placed in their former Caelian home; 300 years later, John the Deacon described them: Gordianus was tall, with a long face, light eyes, and a beard; Silvia was tall, with a round face, blue eyes, and a cheerful look. Gregory had a brother whose name and fate are unknown.

Gregory was born during a turbulent period in Italy. From 542, the Plague of Justinian swept through the empire’s provinces, including Italy, causing famine, panic, and sometimes rioting. In some areas, over a third of the population died, with heavy spiritual and emotional consequences. Politically, though the Western Roman Empire had long fallen to Gothic kings, Italy was gradually retaken from the Goths by Emperor Justinian I during the 540s. Since the fighting was mainly in the north, young Gregory likely saw little of it. Rome was sacked and emptied by Totila in 546, destroying most of its population, but in 549 he invited survivors back to the ruined streets. It is thought that Gregory and his parents retired to their Sicilian estates during that interval, returning in 549. The war ended in Rome by 552, and a Frankish invasion was defeated in 554.

Like most young men of his social standing, Gregory received a thorough education in grammar, rhetoric, science, literature, and law, excelling in all. Gregory of Tours noted that “in grammar, dialectic and rhetoric … he was second to none.” He wrote correct Latin, though his claim not to know Greek seems exaggerated given his excellent education and time in Constantinople. His first language was Piedmontese. He knew Latin authors, natural science, history, mathematics, and music, and had such “fluency with imperial law” that he may have trained in it as preparation for public life. He became a government official, rising quickly to become Prefect of Rome—the city’s highest civil office—at just thirty-three. After his death, the monks of the Monastery of St. Andrew, which Gregory had founded at his ancestral home on the Caelian, made a portrait of him, described later by John the Deacon.