Natalis

Natalis (Latin Natalis, Italian Natale) was Archbishop of Milan in the middle of the eighth century. Virtually nothing is known of his family, place of birth, or career before he occupied the Ambrosian see. He is known principally from the traditional catalogues of the bishops of Milan, which place him after Theodore II and before Arifred. Scholarly reconstructions of the episcopal chronology, which for this century rest on later and not wholly consistent lists, generally assign him an episcopate running from about 740 or 746 until his death in 751. No contemporary vita, inscription, or charter issued in his name has survived, and he is not mentioned in the major narrative histories of the Lombard kingdom.

Milan in Natalis’s lifetime belonged to the Kingdom of the Lombards. The long reign of King Liutprand ended in 744; Ratchis and then Aistulf followed. The popes of the period, Gregory III (died 741) and Zachary (741–752), were engaged in a difficult diplomacy with the Lombard rulers while seeking to preserve the independence of Rome and the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Italy. A later, unsubstantiated tradition claimed that Natalis was a Roman appointed to Milan by Pope Gregory III; historians regard this story as legendary and without foundation in eighth-century evidence. The general paucity of documents from the Milanese church in these decades means that even the most basic facts of Natalis’s administration—his relations with the Lombard court, his liturgical or disciplinary activity, any participation in synods—remain unknown.

According to the received chronology he died in 751. A late tradition, again unsupported by early testimony, asserted that he was buried in the church of San Dionigi in Milan, a church that was demolished in 1783. He was succeeded by Arifred according to the episcopal lists. Despite the silence of the sources, Natalis was honoured as a saint in the local tradition of the Archdiocese of Milan. His feast day is kept on 13 May. His cult appears to have been confined to the Ambrosian calendar and did not achieve a prominent place in the general Roman Martyrology. No specific patronages are recorded for him.

The case of Natalis is typical of a number of eighth-century Italian bishops whose names were preserved in diocesan catalogues and who later received liturgical commemoration, yet whose lives cannot be reconstructed in any detail. Later medieval and early-modern compilers of Milanese sacred history included him among the holy predecessors of Saint Ambrose’s chair, thereby guaranteeing his place in the local sanctoral cycle. Modern historical scholarship, while accepting his place in the succession, emphasizes the extreme thinness of the evidence and treats all anecdotal elaborations as subsequent legend. Thus Natalis remains an attested but almost entirely obscure figure of the Lombard-era church of Milan.