Glycerius

Saint Glycerius (Italian: Glicerio) was Archbishop of Milan in the mid-fifth century. He is known to have served previously as a deacon of the Milanese church and was chosen as bishop after the death of Saint Martinianus, taking office around 436. His episcopate was brief, lasting only about two years until his death in 438. Almost nothing survives concerning his family, place of birth, or formation, which is typical of many Western bishops of late antiquity whose names are preserved mainly in episcopal catalogues and liturgical calendars rather than in contemporary narrative biographies.

The Church of Milan in his lifetime still stood in the shadow of Saint Ambrose, who had died in 397, and continued to follow the distinctive Ambrosian liturgical and disciplinary tradition. Glycerius’s short tenure fell during the last decades of the Western Roman Empire, when northern Italy faced political instability and the growing presence of Germanic peoples. No synods, doctrinal controversies, or major public acts are firmly attached to his name in the surviving record. The principal early witness to his place in the succession is the Catalogus archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium, the traditional list of Milanese bishops.

According to that catalogue he was buried in the Basilica of the Holy Apostles, the church later known as San Nazaro in Brolo (Saint Nazarius), which Ambrose had founded to house apostolic relics and which became a burial place for several of Ambrose’s successors. Glycerius has been venerated as a saint from ancient times. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 20 September. Later medieval legend did not develop an elaborate vita or cycle of miracles around him, so his cult remained essentially local and liturgical.

He is a different person from the Glycerius who reigned briefly as Western Roman emperor in 473–474 and was afterward made bishop of Salona. The Milanese bishop belongs to an earlier generation and is known solely as a cleric of the Ambrosian church. Beyond the dates of his episcopate, his burial, and his place in the martyrology, the historical sources are silent, and no further biographical details can be verified.