Zacharias

Pope Saint Zacharias, known in English also as Zachary, was bishop of Rome from 741 until his death in 752 and is counted among the popes of Greek origin who held the Roman see in the early Middle Ages. The Liber Pontificalis describes him as a Greek, the son of Polychronius. Later tradition places his birth in Calabria in southern Italy, a region then under Byzantine influence and still Greek-speaking in many communities. No contemporary source records the year of his birth, and round figures sometimes found in modern compilations are conjectural rather than documented. He served as a deacon of the Roman Church before his election, which followed the death of Gregory III. He was the last pope of Eastern family background for a very long period, and his bilingual culture shaped both his diplomacy toward Constantinople and his literary work.

The central political problem of his pontificate was the Lombard kingdom’s pressure on the duchy of Rome and on the imperial exarchate of Ravenna. Unlike some of his predecessors, Zacharias relied heavily on personal negotiation. He traveled to meet King Liutprand and, at a meeting often located at Interamna (Terni), obtained the restoration of several towns that had been taken from Roman territory, together with a truce. He later intervened again when Lombard arms threatened Ravenna, acting at the request of imperial authorities who could no longer defend the exarchate themselves. After Liutprand’s death he dealt with King Ratchis. These dealings did not create a lasting settlement of the Italian question, but they bought time and recovered property for the Roman church.

North of the Alps, Zacharias was the pope with whom Saint Boniface corresponded as he organized the church in the German lands and attempted to reform Frankish ecclesiastical life. The pope confirmed Boniface’s metropolitan arrangements, answered canonical questions, and supported synodal action against irregular clergy and against figures accused of heresy or false sanctity. In the last phase of his pontificate he was consulted by the Franks on the legitimacy of replacing the powerless Merovingian Childeric III with Pepin, mayor of the palace. Zacharias’s reply, that royal title should belong to him who actually exercised royal power, was understood in Francia as papal sanction for the change of dynasty. The later anointing of Pepin by Zacharias’s successor Stephen II sealed an alliance that would transform the papacy’s political position in Italy, but the decisive moral authorization is associated with Zacharias.

In Rome he is remembered as a restorer of churches and a careful administrator of the papal patrimony. He is credited with translating the Dialogues of Gregory the Great into Greek, a work that circulated in the East. Sources also attribute to him efforts to check the sale of Christians into slavery. He died in Rome in March 752 and was buried at Saint Peter’s. His name entered the martyrologies, and the Roman Church keeps his feast on 15 March. He belongs to the era before the centralized papal canonization process of the later Middle Ages; his cult rests on ancient liturgical commemoration and on the reputation preserved by the Liber Pontificalis and by the Boniface correspondence rather than on a formal decree of canonization by a later pope.