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Biography

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Adeodatus II, also called Deusdedit II in some older Latin sources, was Bishop of Rome from 672 until his death in 676. He was a Roman by birth, the son of a man named Jovinian, and lived in a city that in the seventh century still belonged politically to the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, within the Duchy of Rome and the Exarchate of Ravenna. His year of birth is not recorded in the Liber Pontificalis or in any other surviving contemporary source, and no reliable figure can be given. Before his election he was a monk of the monastery of Saint Erasmus on the Caelian Hill, a house later associated in tradition with the Benedictine observance. The same papal biography that preserves his parentage and monastic origin describes him as a man of simple life, notable for generosity toward the poor.

He succeeded Pope Vitalian and was consecrated on 11 April 672. The documentary residue of his four-year pontificate is slight, as is typical for several seventh-century popes whose registers have not survived. What remains indicates that he gave particular attention to monastic discipline and to the confirmation of monastic privileges in Rome. He is recorded as having received monks from the abbey of Saint Martin at Tours and as having taken an interest in English monastic houses connected with the Roman mission, including the community of Saints Peter and Paul at Canterbury. In the city itself he undertook restorations of churches that had fallen into disrepair. Later notices emphasize hospitality and charity more than any large political or doctrinal initiative of his own making.

The wider setting of his reign included the continuing aftermath of the Monothelite controversy. Rome had already rejected the doctrine that Christ possessed only one will, and Adeodatus maintained the dyothelite position of his predecessors; the Sixth Ecumenical Council, which would formally define two wills in Christ, met at Constantinople only after his death, in 680–681. In the East, Emperor Constantine IV faced the prolonged Arab assault on Constantinople (c. 674–678). Adeodatus’s own acts, so far as they can be traced, remained largely pastoral and local rather than diplomatic. He was not enrolled in the Roman Martyrology as a saint, unlike his earlier namesake Adeodatus I (Deusdedit), and no securely attested medieval cult or official feast developed around him.

Adeodatus II died in Rome on 17 June 676 and was buried in the Constantinian basilica of St. Peter on the Vatican hill. He was succeeded by Pope Donus. Beyond the brief notice in the Liber Pontificalis and the standard papal catalogues, almost nothing further can be verified: no sermons, no substantial body of letters, and no detailed account of his administration survive. He belongs among the relatively obscure, pastorally described Roman pontiffs of the later seventh century, whose lives are known only in outline.

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