Paul I

Pope Paul I was a native of Rome, born in the early eighth century into a distinguished family whose father was named Constantine. He was the brother of Pope Stephen II, and both brothers were educated at the Lateran Palace, the centre of papal administration. Paul served the Roman Church as a deacon and became a close collaborator of Stephen II during a pontificate that marked a decisive shift in papal policy: the appeal to the Frankish king Pepin the Short against Lombard pressure, the beginning of the territorial Papal States through the Donation of Pepin, and a corresponding loosening of the old Byzantine political framework in central Italy. No precise year of birth is recorded in the surviving sources.

After Stephen II died in April 757, Paul was elected bishop of Rome and consecrated at the end of May. A rival faction had favoured the archdeacon Theophylact, but Paul prevailed. He immediately informed Pepin of his election and spent the following decade trying to make the Frankish alliance effective. King Desiderius of the Lombards repeatedly threatened or occupied cities that had been promised to the Roman Church, and Paul’s letters, preserved in the Codex Carolinus, repeatedly begged Pepin for military intervention and for the fulfilment of earlier territorial guarantees. At the same time the pope had to manage relations with the Byzantine Empire. Emperor Constantine V continued the iconoclastic programme of his father; Paul rejected the iconoclast council of Hieria (754), received Greek monks and clergy who fled imperial persecution, and upheld the traditional Roman defence of the veneration of images.

In Rome itself Paul I is especially associated with the care of the martyrs’ relics and with new monastic foundations. As the suburban catacombs became unsafe and neglected, he translated numerous bodies of early Christian saints into churches inside the walls. He converted family property into a monastery dedicated to Saints Stephen and Sylvester (later San Silvestro in Capite), placing there relics of Pope Sylvester I, Pope Stephen I and other martyrs, together with a relic venerated as the head of John the Baptist. He also translated the body of Saint Petronilla to a chapel at St. Peter’s, presenting her as a spiritual daughter of the Apostle Peter in a gesture that honoured the Frankish alliance, since Petronilla was regarded as a patron of the Franks. Building and restoration work at St. Peter’s and elsewhere in the city formed part of the same programme of consolidating Roman sacred topography.

Paul I died in Rome on 28 June 767 and was buried in St. Peter’s Basilica, in an oratory of the Virgin that he had himself established. His death was followed by a violent succession crisis: Toto, duke of Nepi, forcibly installed his own brother, the layman Constantine, as pope; this intrusion was later reversed and Stephen III was elected. Paul has been venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church from an early date, with his feast kept on 28 June. His pontificate stands at a turning point in the eighth century, when the bishops of Rome, still using the language of the old imperial order, were in practice becoming territorial princes allied with the Frankish monarchy and defenders of iconodule orthodoxy against Constantinople.