Paschal I

Paschal I (Latin: Paschalis), whose personal name before election is not preserved in the surviving sources, was a native of Rome and the son of a man named Bonosus. The year of his birth is unknown and should not be inferred from the date of his pontificate. Before becoming pope he served as a priest of the Roman Church. He was elected in January 817 as successor to Pope Stephen IV (sometimes numbered Stephen V) and was consecrated without waiting for prior confirmation from the Carolingian court, a step that asserted Roman initiative in the choice of a bishop of Rome. He then notified the Emperor Louis the Pious. The ensuing settlement, often called the Pactum Ludovicianum, confirmed the territorial holdings of the Roman Church and recognized that papal elections should proceed without imperial interference, while providing that the emperor be informed of the result.

Carolingian relations remained central to the pontificate. In 823 Paschal crowned Louis’s son Lothair I as co-emperor in Rome. After Lothair’s departure a violent crisis followed: two senior Lateran officials associated with Frankish interests, the primicerius Theodore and the nomenclator Leo, were seized, blinded, and killed. Frankish missi investigated the murders. Paschal denied complicity and cleared himself by oath, but the episode damaged trust between the Lateran and the imperial court and helped prepare a stronger Frankish hand in the election of his successor. The affair is one of the best-documented political controversies of early ninth-century Rome and shows how contested the city’s government had become.

Paschal is equally remembered as a builder and as a defender of the veneration of images during the second Byzantine iconoclastic period. He received Greek monks and clergy who fled persecution under Leo V and his successors, and he stood with the doctrine of the Second Council of Nicaea. He rebuilt and richly decorated several Roman churches, above all Santa Prassede on the Esquiline, Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, and Santa Maria in Domnica. The mosaics of this campaign, including the chapel of Saint Zeno at Santa Prassede, are among the principal surviving monuments of early ninth-century Roman art and display marked Byzantine influence. In connection with these restorations he translated large numbers of relics from the catacombs into intramural churches, including, according to the Liber Pontificalis, the body of Saint Cecilia and many other martyrs, concentrating their cult inside the city walls.

Paschal died in Rome on 11 February 824 and was buried in Santa Prassede, the church he had restored and adorned. He was succeeded by Eugene II, whose election took place under more open Frankish influence. He has been venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church; his feast is kept on 11 February and his name remains in the Roman Martyrology, though it was removed from the General Roman Calendar in the twentieth century. No contemporary source records a wife or children; he belonged to the Roman clergy in an era when the Latin Church required celibacy of priests and bishops. Beyond his Roman building work and his role in Carolingian–papal politics, the documentary record of his life remains limited, as is typical for popes of the early ninth century.