Adeodatus I

Pope Adeodatus I, also known in the sources as Deusdedit, was Bishop of Rome from 615 until his death in 618. He was a native of Rome and the son of a subdeacon named Stephen. No reliable ancient source records the year of his birth, and later dates sometimes attached to him are conjectural. According to the Liber Pontificalis he had already served as a priest of the Roman Church for some forty years when he was chosen pope. He succeeded Boniface IV and was consecrated on 19 October 615, after a sede vacante of several months. Imperial confirmation from Constantinople was still required in this period, when Rome belonged politically to the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire under the emperor Heraclius. Adeodatus was unusual among recent pontiffs in being elected from the priesthood rather than from the Roman diaconate, which had often supplied papal candidates in the sixth and early seventh centuries. He was not a monk, despite occasional later confusion with the eighth-century Pope Adeodatus II.

His short pontificate unfolded amid hardship in Italy. Rome suffered a severe earthquake and an epidemic, described in the Liber Pontificalis as a plague of scabies or a related contagious disease, which caused many deaths. Later hagiographical tradition, reflected in the Roman Martyrology, credited him with great personal charity in this crisis and related that he healed a leper by kissing him; that story belongs to medieval legend rather than to contemporary documentation. On the political side he received Eleutherius, the Byzantine exarch of Ravenna, who visited Rome and was treated with honour. Relations between the papacy and the imperial administration in Italy remained a central fact of Roman ecclesiastical life. The Italian peninsula was still unsettled after the Lombard invasions of the previous century, and the Church in Rome had to navigate both local distress and the distant authority of Constantinople.

Adeodatus is traditionally credited with being among the first popes to fasten leaden seals, known as bullae, to papal documents; a surviving example has been associated with his name in older catalogues. He also ordained fourteen priests, a comparatively large number at a time when ordinations in Rome had been infrequent because of the troubled condition of Italy. Beyond these notices the administrative record of his reign is thin, as is typical for many seventh-century pontiffs. He should not be confused with Pope Adeodatus II (reigned 672–676), with whom later writers sometimes mixed details of biography and monastic affiliation.

He died in Rome on 8 November 618, during or in the aftermath of the epidemic that had struck the city, and was buried in St. Peter’s Basilica. He was succeeded by Pope Boniface V. The Latin Church has commemorated him as a saint from an early date, by popular cultus rather than by a later formal process of canonization. His feast is kept on 8 November, the date of his death, as given in the Roman Martyrology. Apart from the outline preserved in the Liber Pontificalis, the Martyrology, and a handful of later notices, the documentary evidence for his life remains sparse.