Agapitus

Agapetus I, also known in Latin as Agapitus, was Bishop of Rome in the mid-sixth century, holding office from 535 until his death in 536. He was a native of Rome and the son of a priest named Gordianus; the Liber Pontificalis records that his father was killed during civic violence in the city. No reliable source preserves the year of his birth, and it must not be inferred from the date of his election. He served in the Roman clergy and is attested as an archdeacon before becoming pope. Later writers sometimes linked his family with that of Pope Felix III, but the kinship is not established with certainty. On the Caelian Hill he is associated with an early Christian library: an inscription and notices connected with Cassiodorus indicate that he devoted a family property to gathering works of Christian authors, a project that reflects the scholarly concerns of the Roman church under Ostrogothic rule.

He was elected in 535 as successor to John II, while Italy remained under the Ostrogothic king Theodahad and the emperor Justinian I was preparing to recover the West. Theodahad, hoping to avert invasion, required the new pope to go to Constantinople as an envoy. Agapetus arrived in the capital in 536 and at once faced a doctrinal crisis. The see of Constantinople was occupied by Anthimus, formerly bishop of Trebizond, who was regarded as holding Monophysite views and who had been advanced with the support of the empress Theodora. Agapetus refused communion with Anthimus unless he made a clear profession of the Christology of the Council of Chalcedon. After initial tension, Justinian accepted the pope's position. Anthimus was deposed, and Agapetus consecrated Mennas, a cleric of Chalcedonian conviction, as patriarch of Constantinople.

Although these events occupied only a few months, they mattered for relations between Rome and the East. They reasserted Roman insistence on Chalcedonian orthodoxy at the imperial court and showed that the Bishop of Rome could still intervene in the capital on questions of episcopal legitimacy. During the same stay Agapetus handled other ecclesiastical business, including petitions from Eastern clergy. He did not live to return to Italy or to see the Gothic War that followed Justinian's intervention in the peninsula.

Agapetus died in Constantinople on 22 April 536, after a pontificate of less than a year. His body was later brought back to Rome and buried in St. Peter's Basilica. He is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church and in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Roman Martyrology keeps his feast on 22 April; Byzantine calendars have also commemorated him in April. The outline of his brief pontificate and of his death in the East rests on the Liber Pontificalis, correspondence of the period, and Byzantine historical notices. Those sources do not record his early years or many personal details, including whether he married or had children.