A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 5: The Medicis, Leo X and XI

This is the fifth installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4.

The tenth and eleventh Popes to bear the name Leo were both members of the Medici family, the ruling dynasty (at first de facto, later de jure) of Florence. Thanks to the family’s disastrous lack of concern for the Church’s laws about consanguineous marriage, Cardinal Alessandro de’ Medici was related to Leo X on both his father’s and his mother’s side, and took the name in honor of his relative. But since he died on the 27th day of his papacy, he is really more of a footnote to this series than anything else. He was born on this day in the year 1535, in the reign of another Medici, Clement VII, exactly 300 years before the birth of another Pope, St Pius X.

A portrait of Pope Leo X Medici, with his cousins Giulio de’ Medici, the future Pope Clement VII (born 1478, r. 1523-34), and Luigi de’ Rossi (1474-1519), both of whom he made cardinals; painted ca. 1518/20 by Raphael Sanzio, one of the artists who most benefitted from Leo’s generous patronage of the arts.

Lazy historians, and those who have been unknowingly misled by them, often use the name Medici as a kind of by-word for a general sense that during the Renaissance, the Church was extremely corrupt; and likewise, that the religiosity professed by members of the ruling classes was extremely hypocritical. It is far beyond my scope to untangle the many ways in which this is fair to say, and the many ways in which it is unfair. For those interested in learning more about the matter, I cannot recommend highly enough the relevant chapter (11) of a book I am currently reading, Inventing the Renaissance, by Dr Ada Palmer, who teaches history at the University of Chicago, and whose writing style is very engaging. Suffice it therefore to say that while Leo X’s early career is very astonishing by modern standards, it was not so by the standards of his own age; but the fact that they were the standards of the age goes a long way to explaining why the protestant revolt broke out during his pontificate, and why the Council of Trent needed to happen.

I also need to state that since he lived at the beginning of the 16th century, his papacy is far better documented than those of the Leos we have seen earlier in this series, and this article does not pretend to be anything more than a vary basic summary of his career.

He was born Giovanni de’ Medici in December of 1475, the seventh child of Lorenzo the Magnificent and his wife, a Roman noblewoman named Clarice Orsini. As a second son, he was destined from childhood for a career in the Church, which began at the age of seven, when he was tonsured and made an apostolic protonotary. The following year, he was made commendatory abbot of two different abbeys, one being the great Montecassino; when he was 13, Pope Innocent VIII (his sister Maddalena’s father-in-law) made him a cardinal, although he was not allowed to dress as one until he reached 16. He was then sent to study theology and canon law at the highly prestigious university of Pisa, but found literature far more to his liking. Among his tutors were the two of the greatest scholars of the era, Angelo Poliziano and Cardinal Bernardo Bibbiena.

The wooden paneled ceiling of the Roman basilica of Santa Maria in Domnica, made in the time of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who held the title of this church from 1489 until his election to the papacy in 1513, with the name Leo X. Each section represents a title of the Virgin Mary from an earlier form of the Litany of Loreto. (Photo by Mr Jacob Stein.)

The façade, photographed by our favorite Roman pilgrim Agnese during an evening station procession on the Second Sunday of Lent in 2014.   

Shortly after he was formally vested as a cardinal in 1492, he took possession of his title church in Rome, Santa Maria in Domnica, which he retained for 24 years, until his papal election. The building as it appears today is mostly the result of the major restorations he commissioned, which included the very beautiful paneled wood ceiling shown above. Within less than a month, his father died, and he returned to Florence, only to come back to Rome at the death of Pope Innocent in July, to participate in his first conclave.

The pope thus elected was Alexander VI, the second of the two Borgias, a name which eclipses that of the Medicis as a byword for corruption. Since Alexander was quite hostile to the family, Cardinal Giovanni deemed it best to return to Florence, but shortly after, Italy was invaded by France, and plunged into a period of extraordinary chaos. The Medici were driven out of their city, and the cardinal was forced to flee with several members of his family; he eventually returned to Rome, and stayed out of the Borgia palace intrigues, living quietly in the family palace (now the seat of the Italian senate) and keeping a court devoted to literary pursuits.

The Medici family palace in Rome, known as the Palazzo Madama; engraving by the Italian artist Giuseppe Vasi (1710-82).

The year 1503 saw the death of both his older brother, at which he became head of the family, and of Pope Alexander, after which he participated in two conclaves, since the cardinals’ first choice, Pius III, died after only 26 days. The new Pope, Julius II, was not as hostile to the Medicis as Alexander had been, but not especially friendly either, and for eight years, Cardinal Giovanni’s life continued much as it had under Alexander, until he was made the papal legate to Bologna, which was part of the Papal State.

Julius II is often referred to as “the warrior pope”, since his reign was taken up almost entirely with a vexingly complicated series of wars. The aforementioned book by Ada Palmer contains this absolute gem of sentence which sums things up as follows: “The War of the League of Cambrai is so incomprehensible (that) its Wikipedia page had to develop a new table format to index the betrayals.” Here I note only that in one of the crucial battles of this period, which took place at Ravenna on April 11, 1512, Card. Giovanni was taken prisoner by the French, who would have brought him as a hostage back to France, but he was able to escape and return to Ravenna.

The Liberation of St Peter from Prison, 1513-14, by Raphael Sanzio. This fresco is in the same room as the painting below; the choice of subject was certainly chosen as an allusion to Pope Leo X’s escape from capture after the battle at Ravenna.

Since the republic established in Florence after the fall of the Medici was allied to France, Julius II, hoping to subvert it, sent troops into Tuscany to support their restoration. This led to an appalling sack of the city of Prato, after which the terrified Florentine government allowed the family to return. Cardinal Giovanni and his younger brother Giuliano entered the city in September of 1512, hoping to reconcile the various factions tearing it apart, but republican sentiment against the Medici ran high. In the midst of a plot to assassinate the brothers, the news of Pope Julius’ death (February 1513) arrived, and Cardinal Giovanni departed for Rome to participate in his fourth and final conclave.

The Meeting of Pope St Leo I and Attila the Hun, 1514, by Raphael and students (more the latter than the former), a fresco within the rooms of Pope Julius II, now part of the Vatican Museums. The cardinal at the far left is Giovanni de’ Medici. Julius died before the artist got around to painting him as Leo I, and was then succeeded by Card. de’ Medici, who chose the papal name Leo, and was therefore painted into the image a second time, as his namesake. 

After the high intensity political drama of Julius II’s papacy, the choice of a Medici to replace him was aimed very deliberately at reconciliation. (Plus ça change...) Partly at the instance of his old friend and tutor Cardinal Bibbiena, Cardinal de’ Medici was elected on the very first day of balloting. His papal name Leo was apparently chosen in remembrance of St Leo I, on whose feast day the battle of Ravenna, and his own deliverance from capture, had taken place the previous year. He was only thirty-seven at the time; after him only one other pope, his cousin Clement VII, would ever be elected at a similarly young age. He is also the last pope who was not already a priest at the time of his election.

The hopes of the cardinals that his papacy would be one of peace and reconciliation were soon realized. Late in Julius’ papacy, a group of cardinals had rebelled against him, withdrawn to Pisa, and attempted to call an ecumenical council against him; Julius’ response was to excommunicate them all, and convoke a council of his own. (In one of the most touching displays of popular devotion to the venerable person of the Holy Father, the citizens of Pisa gathered each night outside the place where these cardinals were staying to serenade them with death-threats.) Leo pardoned them all, along with the leaders of the assassination plot in Florence, and of a would-be uprising in Rome. Later on in his papacy, a group of cardinals, including one of Julius II’s nephews, Raphael Riario, would engage in a conspiracy to poison him. The plot was exposed, and the principal leader executed. Leo would have been perfectly within his rights to execute the rest as well, but he let them off with substantial fines, and confiscated Cardinal Riario’s very large palace.

The Palazzo Riario in another engraving by Vasi; originally known as the palazzo Riario, confiscated and turned into the chancery of the Roman Curia by Leo X.  

Pope Julius did not live to see even the beginning of his counter-council, which was continued by Leo, and lasted for almost five years; this is Lateran V, one of the great and ghastly failures among the ecumenical councils, a missed opportunity to enact badly needed reforms. The eruption of the so-called Reformation just after its closure was certainly one of those signs of the times that a more recent ecumenical council said the Church should look out for, and which the Church then, as more recently, completely failed to see. But this was no more the fault of Pope Leo than of thousands of other churchmen of his era, a truth that was recognized many years later by the opening speech of the Council of Trent.

However, he looms large in any history of the Reformation, in part simply because he was the Pope, and in part because he excommunicated Martin Luther. It was also he who issued the indulgence that became the flash-point for the rebellion, which was offered in exchange for monetary contributions to the rebuilding of St Peter’s basilica, a project which had been begun, but just barely, by Julius II. His nepotism, typical for the period, furthered the ecclesiastical careers of several relatives, among them his cousin Giulio, who would become Pope Clement VII after his death and the brief reign (20 months) of Adrian VI. He also expanded the territory controlled by his family, paving the way for them to eventually take absolute control of the Florentine republic and transform it into the Duchy of Tuscany.

A sketch by the Dutch artist Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), made when he visited Rome in 1532-36, showing the ruins of the old St Peter’s basilica, and the beginnings of the construction of its replacement.

In other ways, Leo was actually a very successful Pope. He negotiated a new concordat to regulate relations between the Church and the kingdom of France, which remained in effect until the French revolution. This was part of a more general pacification of relations with France, which in turn brought much needed calm to the whole Italian peninsula. But the politics of the era were such that it was often necessary to change sides, (see again the quote above from Dr Palmer), and towards the end of his reign, he took the part of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V against France, also hoping that the emperor would stem the tide of the Lutheran rebellion. This hope proved vain, but Leo did not live to see its failure, since he died, suddenly and unexpectedly, on December 1, 1521, at the age of only 46.

As stated above, for my purposes, the brief pontificate of Leo XI is really more of a footnote to that of his kinsman Leo X than anything else. He was born on this very day in 1535 to a cadet branch of the Medici family, distinguished from the main line as the Medici di Ottajano. In his youth, he was tutored by a Dominican priest (the Medici family had always had a close relationship with the order), and wished to enter the clergy, but was opposed in this by his mother, since he was the only male left in his branch of the family. It is a sign of the early success of the Counter-Reformation that she evidently did not think he could just as well have gotten ordained and fathered enough illegitimate children to continue the line, as e.g., Pope Paul III had. The former Florentine republic had now been established as a proper duchy, ruled by the main branch of the family, and she duly packed him off to the court in Florence.

In 1560, he visited Rome in the company of Duke Cosimo I, and became friends with his countryman St Philip Neri. Six years later when his mother died, he resumed his studies for the priesthood, and was ordained within a year. He then served as the Florentine ambassador to Rome for some years, residing in the city with his kinsman Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici. In 1573, he was appointed bishop of Pistoia, but within less a year, he was transferred to Florence, where he served as archbishop for 31 years. He was made a cardinal in 1583, and participated in a total of six conclaves. (Between September of 1590 and December of 1591, three popes in a row, Urban VII, Gregory XIV and Innocent IX, ruled for less than a year; Urban’s is the shortest papacy in history, 12 days.)

During his time as archbishop of Florence, the Carmelite nun Saint Maria-Magdalene de’ Pazzi had predicted to him that he would be elected Pope, but that his reign would be brief. This prophecy was realized in 1605; elected Pope on April 1st, he was crowned on April 10th, and died on the 27th. His papal reign is the eighth shortest in history!

The monument of Pope Leo XI in St Peter’s Basilica, by Alessandro Algardi. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Torvindus, CC BY-SA 3.0)

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 4: St Leo IX, and the Gregorian Reform

This is the fourth installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1, part 2 and part 3.

The church of Rome and the papacy have usually been late-comers to the great movements of reform and renewal in the Church, and have just as often been themselves in dire need of reform and renewal. But eventually Our Lord’s prayer that Peter, being once converted, confirm his brethren, comes again to fulfillment, the papacy at last accepts the need for a reform, and becomes its most important leader. This pattern is exemplified by the career of St Leo IX (1049-54), whose papacy is the point at which Rome, so long caught up in the general decadence of the Church in the West, definitively embraced the cause of reform. To understand this, we must back up a bit and explain some history.

Pope St Leo IX heals a man possessed by a devil, an illustration from a collection of Saints’ lives known as the Passionary of Weissenau, ca. 1170-1200. (Fondation Bodmer, Coligny, Switzerland; Cod. Bodmer 127, fol. 191r; http://www.e-codices.unifr.ch/en/list/one/cb/0127. The dark blue lines across the figure of the possessed man are stiches across a tear in the folio.)

Pope St Nicholas I, who traditionally shares the epithet “the Great” with Ss Leo I and Gregory I, and is famous inter alia for his defense of the Church’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage, died in 867 after a reign of nine years. And yet, the papacy then underwent such a rapid moral collapse that it was a distance of but thirty years and eight Popes from him to Stephen VI, whose reign of roughly sixteen months is summed up as follows in the Catholic Encyclopedia.

“Whether induced by evil passion or perhaps, more probably, compelled by the Emperor Lambert and his mother Ageltruda, he caused the body of (his predecessor) Formosus to be exhumed, and … placed before an unwilling synod of the Roman clergy. (Note: this is often referred to as ‘the Cadaver Synod’.) A deacon was appointed to answer for the deceased pontiff, who was condemned for performing the functions of a bishop when he had been deposed and for passing from the See of Porto to that of Rome. The corpse was then stripped of its sacred vestments, deprived of two fingers of its right hand, clad in the garb of a layman, and ultimately thrown into the Tiber. Fortunately it was not granted to Stephen to have time to do much else besides this atrocious deed. Before he was put to death by strangulation, he forced several of those who had been ordained by Formosus to resign their offices …”

Pope Formosus and Stephen VI - The Cadaver Synod, by Jean-Paul Laurens, 1870 (Public domain image from Wikipedia.)

After this infamous event, which has provided endless grist for the mills of anti-Catholic controversialists, the papacy remained essentially quiescent as simony, lay investiture (the de facto control of ecclesiastical appointments by lay civil rulers) and clerical incontinence became nearly omnipresent in the Church over the course of the tenth century, the first in which there is not a single canonized or beatified Pope.

Nevertheless, it is often darkest just before the dawn, and the tenth century also saw, less than 15 years after the reign of Stephen VI, the foundation of the abbey of Cluny. What made Cluny so important, especially in the 10th and 11th centuries, was the fact that the duke who founded it in 910, William of Aquitaine, renounced all control over it, in an age when monasteries were essentially the private property of the nobility, who appointed whomever they wished as abbots and officials. Given the tenor of the times, such appointments were very often made solely for the sake of providing an important connection with a salary, and with no reference to whether the man so appointed had any intention of living as a monk. Much the same applied to clerical offices of all ranks.

In the case of Cluny, however, its independence from lay control, and almost 200 years of long-lived Sainted abbots (919-1109), enabled it to become a true model of religious life, a model spread throughout Europe by innumerable daughter houses, and adopted by many older foundations.

The consecration of the third abbey church of Cluny by Pope Urban II, depicted in a manuscript of the early 12th century.

The previous article in this series covered the reigns of Leos V-VIII, all of which were fairly brief, and not much is known of them, so it gave no more than a hint of the sad state of things in Rome in their time. Suffice it to say for now that Leo V was unlawfully deposed, and Leo VIII was the successor of John XII, whose reign has traditionally been described as a “pornocracy – a reign of harlots.” And thus did things continue in Rome until the reign of another particularly unworthy successor of St Peter, Benedict IX (r. 1032-48), whom St Robert Bellarmine described as “the nadir” of the papacy, and over whose career we draw a veil, as the sons of Noah drew a veil over their father. His deposition at the hands of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II was as unlawful as that of John XII had been, and just as impossible to regret.

His successor, Damasus II, died on the 24th day of his reign, at which point the emperor chose a kinsman, Bruno, the bishop of the French city of Toul (about 180 miles to the east of Paris), and an active and enthusiastic reformer, to replace him. From this point on, the reform party within the Church was in the ascendant, and would go from strength to strength, with the Popes very much at its fore, promoting the Cluniac ideal of religious life for all the ranks of the clergy. As a result, the clerical vices which were universal in the mid-11th century were almost entirely gone by the end of the 12th.

A notable sign of this radical volte-face was the custom of taking a regnal name, which took hold in this period, and has held ever since with almost no exceptions. Bruno of Toul was not the first to do this, but he was the first to choose the name Leo. From 1046 to 1145, thirteen of the eighteen Popes were “second of that name”, followed by eight “thirds” out of eleven from 1145 to 1227, a clear signal that after the long period of decadence, the papacy was now returning to its glorious past.

The cathedral of St Stephen in Toul; the current building was begun in the 13th century, long after Leo IX’s time.

Bruno was born in the Alsace region, which was then part of the Holy Roman Empire, in 1002; his father was a close relation of the emperors. When he was five, he was sent to the school at Toul, and upon completion of his studies, made a canon of the cathedral. In 1026, he accompanied the emperor Conrad II on a military expedition to Italy, commanding a company furnished to the emperor by his bishop. During his absence, the bishop died, and Bruno was swiftly elected to replace him, taking possession of the see on the feast of the Ascension, 1027, at the age of only twenty-five, well below the canonical age for the episcopacy. But despite his youth, he was highly successful in reforming the clergy and monks of his diocese, following the Cluniac model.

After twenty years as a model bishop, he was chosen to become Pope in the summer of 1048 by his kinsman the emperor, now Henry II. On his way to Rome, he stopped at Cluny, and where he persuaded a Roman monk named Hildebrand, who had retired there some years earlier, to join him and help him in the great project of reform; this is the future Gregory VII, the fifth pope after Leo, whose feast day is kept tomorrow.

The relics of Pope St Gregory VII, in his chapel within the cathedral of St Matthew in Salerno. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by NicFer, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Gregory’s career as a reformer was so successful that the movement as a whole is often called “the Gregorian reform” after him. But it was so because of the momentum first given to it by Leo, who brought to the see of Peter the same energetic reforming spirit with which he had governed Toul. The revised Butler’s Lives of the Saints describes his papacy as “a kind of visitation of Western Christendom in order that he might personally enforce his regulations and arouse the conscience of those in authority.” All over Italy, France and Germany, synods were held, presided over either by the pope in person, or a legate sent by him, at which the vices which had crept in were denounced, and the pattern of a reformed clerical life established. It is astonishing to consider how effective this program was, often in the face of indifference or intense opposition from both clergy and laity; all the more so, when one considers how low the reputation of the papacy had been just a few years before. For this, Leo is often called a “peregrinus apostolicus – an apostolic pilgrim”, and in this regard, laid the pattern for the rules of many of the popes who came after him, especially in the following 80 years or so.

Of course, no reformer is wholly successful in all that he attempts, and it should not surprise us to read of failures of his pontificate as well. As ruler of the papal state, he became deeply embroiled in the political affairs of Italy, and particular the problem of the oppressive rule which the Normans had established in the south. (Conflict with the Norman monarchy of Sicily would dominate the affairs of the papacy well into the 13th century.) This brought him to take to the field in arms against them, but he was defeated and captured, which weakened the prestige and the position of his own person, and of the papacy as an institution, and earned him the harsh criticism of no less a giant of the reform than St Peter Damian.

A statue of Pope St Leo IX on a public fountain in the town where he was born, Eguisheim. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Veronique Paignier, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Likewise, his reign saw the beginning of the definitive break between Rome and Constantinople in 1054, precipitated by the violence, both literal and rhetorical, of the patriarch Michael Cerularius, and by the response of Leo’s legates to it. This matter is, of course, far too complicated to delve into in an article such as this; suffice it to note here that the mutual excommunications were issued just under two months after his death. When Leo knew that he was dying, he had his bed set up, and a coffin next to it, at the high altar of St Peter’s; he passed to eternal life on April 19, 1054. Miraculous cures began taking place at his tomb immediately, and he was formally canonized by Bd Pope Victor III in 1087.

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 3: The 10th Century (Leo V-VIII)

This is the third installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click these links to read part 1 and part 2.

Four Popes named Leo reigned within a span of about 62 years in the 10th century; their reigns are all quite brief, and their careers for the most part so obscure that the precise dates of some of them are not even known, so this will be a short article. First, however, an historical and historiographical note.

The term “dark ages” is used and over-used by bad historians to mean broadly “any period after the fall of the Roman Empire when stuff happened that I dislike.” But if there is an age to which it can justly be applied, and especially in regard to the papacy, it is the 10th century. The Carolingian Empire had fractured, and was no longer the stabilizing political force it had been under Charlemagne. Western Europe was besieged on all sides: by the Vikings from the north, the Magyars from the east, and the Saracens everywhere that touched the Mediterranean. Even if the Popes of that era had been Saints on the model of men like the first Leo, it is hard to imagine that they would have been able to achieve much that we would look back on as exemplary. But many of them were very far indeed from being Saints, and the tenth century is the first in which there is no canonized or beatified pope.

A drawing of the third version of the church of Cluny Abbey.

Given the tremendous political and social instability of the era, it is not surprising that the papacy became essentially a tool of the local secular powers, which were themselves very corrupt, and tainted the papacy as an institution with their corruption. Rather, it is surprising, and should be encouraging, that even in the midst of such chaos, indeed, at its beginning (in the year 910), there was founded the very institution that would lead the Church out of the darkness, the abbey of Cluny.

We are not sure of the date of Leo V’s election, which took place in the second half of 903, or the length of his reign. He was from the region of Ardea, a town about 23 miles south of Rome, and at the time of his election, was a priest of a minor church outside the Roman city walls. A contemporary writer named Auxilius is cited by the Catholic Encyclopedia to the effect that he ruled for only a month, and was “a man of praiseworthy life and holiness.” Record of only one act of his papacy survives, a minor administrative matter.

For reasons unknown, he was deposed and imprisoned by one of the cardinal-priests of Rome, a man named Christopher. The report in one source that he was murdered in prison is considered suspect and unreliable, but the date and circumstances of his death are unknown. Although the deposition was both immoral and uncanonical, Christopher was accepted as the legitimate pope at the time, and is referred to as such by many subsequent documents, including some issued by sainted popes such as Leo IX.

A portrait of Pope Christopher (not based on any contemporary image of him), copied from the medallion portrait of him in the Roman basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, where he is included as a legitimate pope, despite the irregularity of the manner of his accession. (From the book Ritratti e biografie dei romani pontefici: da S. Pietro a Leone 13, by Davide Vaglimigli, 1879.)

The length of Leo VI’s reign is known, seven months and five days, but the exact date of his election within the year 928 is not. He was a Roman, the son of a city government official, and cardinal-priest of the church St Susanna at the time of his election. (The same title was previously held by Ss Sergius I (687-701) and Leo III (795-816), and much later, by Nicholas V (1447-55).) Our knowledge of his papacy is limited to some minor administrative acts.

Leo VII was a Roman, the cardinal-priest of the church of St Sixtus, elected in January of 936, and reigning for a bit longer than three and a half years, until his death in mid-July of 939. His election was brought about by Alberic II, Duke of Spoleto, who was then in conflict with another secular prince, Hugo, the king of Italy. As the latter was besieging Rome, Leo summoned St Odo, the second abbot of Cluny, to broker a peace between them, which was successfully achieved. Apart from this, most of what is known of Leo’s reign consists of administrative acts, including the granting of privileges to various monasteries, and especially Cluny. This is more important than it might seem. The word “privilegium” means literally “an exemption from the law”, and it was precisely these kinds of exemption that enabled Cluny, and the reform movement which it represented, to flourish amid so much corruption in both the Church and secular society.

Leo VIII has the rare (but not wholly unique) distinction of being regarded as both an antipope and a legitimate pope, in two different periods, a circumstance very much the product of the chaos of his era. He was a native Roman of a prominent family, and a lay protonotary at the time of his election.

His predecessor, John XII, was intruded into the papacy by the manipulations of his father, the same Alberic mentioned above. He was easily one of the most disgraceful Popes in the Church’s history, not only for his coarse behavior and personal immorality, but also for his political treachery. The famous term of rhetorical exaggeration “pornocracy”, and the equally exaggerated statement, too often taken literally, that the Lateran palace was turned into a brothel, are said especially in reference to his scandalous reign.

A reconstruction of the Lateran complex as it stood in the Middle Ages. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

In November of 963, the Emperor Otto I deposed this thoroughly unworthy man, an action which was as unlawful as the manner of John’s election had been, but, for all its illegality, difficult to regret. Leo was then put forward as his replacement, and hastily consecrated, receiving all the orders preceding that of bishop in one day, another flagrant violation of canon law. When the emperor departed from Rome the following February, Leo was deposed by a popular uprising, and John XII returned to power, but the latter died only three months later, at which another candidate, a man named Benedict, was elected to replace him.

However, Otto hastened back to Rome, and having once again seized complete control of the city, had Benedict deposed, and Leo put back into his place. A contemporary source states that Benedict acquiesced to his own deposition, allowing Leo to personally remove his pallium. For this second period, therefore, from July of 964 to about the beginning of the following March, Leo VIII is regarded as the legitimate pope, but nothing is known of the deeds of his papacy.

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 2: Saints Leo II, III and IV

This is the second installment of a series on the thirteen papal namesakes of our new Holy Father Leo XIV; click here to read part 1.

St Leo II reigned for less than 11 months, from August of 682 to June of 683. The most important deed of his pontificate was the confirmation of the acts of the Sixth Ecumenical Council, the third to be held in Constantinople, which condemned the Monothelite heresy; being fluent in Greek as well as Latin, Leo personally made the official Latin translation of the council’s acts. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, St Leo I’s letter was acclaimed with the words, “Peter has spoken through Leo,” and likewise at Third Constantinople, the intervention of Leo II’s predecessor St Agatho (through his legates) was acclaimed with the words “Peter has spoken through Agatho!” It is one of the oddities of hagiography that the latter has never been honored with a general feast day in the West, but is kept on the calendar of the Byzantine Rite. Leo II, on the other hand, was a Sicilian, and therefore born as a subject of the Byzantine Empire, but is not liturgically honored in the East.

The collection of papal biographies known as the Liber Pontificalis is practically the only source of information about him, and gives few other details of real interest. He was highly skilled in rhetoric and music, and noted for his love and care for the poor. He built a church in the area of Rome now known as the Velabro, dedicated to St Sebastian, and later also to St George, whence its common title “San Giorgio in Velabro.” (Because George is the patron of England, Leo XIII gave it to St John Henry Newman as his cardinalitial title.)

San Giorgio in Velabro (seen though the nearby Arch of Janus), 1820, by the Dutch painter Antonie Sminck Pitloo (1790-1837).

On the Saturday before the feast of Ss Peter and Paul, June 27, 683, he celebrated the ordination of nine priests, three deacons, and twenty-three bishops, and then died the next day. The Liber Pontificalis does not say that it was the ordination ceremony that killed him, but the heat of Rome in June and the inevitable length of such a ceremony make this seem likely more than coincidence. June 28th is his traditional feast day, but he was moved in 1921 to July 3rd to make room for St Irenaeus of Lyon, and then suppressed altogether in 1960.

St Leo III (795-816), a native of Rome, possibly of either Greek or Arab descent, was appointed as the cardinal priest of the church of St Susanna by St Adrian I, who reigned for 23 years and almost 11 months, and held the title of longest-reigning Pope (after St Peter) for over a millennium. Adrian died on Christmas of 795; the very next day, after his funeral and burial, Leo was elected by a unanimous vote to succeed him, and would reign for nearly 20 years and a half, the 12th-longest papal reign.

In 799, there occurred a very shocking incident which, although it was resolved for the good, was nevertheless a harbinger of the terrible state to which Rome and the papacy would devolve in the 10th century, the first in which there is no canonized or blessed Pope. A group of nobles disaffected with Leo’s reign, led by some of Adrian’s family, attacked the Pope during the Great Rogation procession, and attempted to render him incapable of performing the duties of his office by blinding him and cutting out his tongue. The attempt failed, and although Leo was injured, he recovered very quickly, but very naturally decided to flee to the court of Charlemagne, who as king of the Franks, had long been the protector of the papacy.

The Oath of Pope St Leo III, 1516-17; fresco by the workshop of Raphael within the apartments of Pope Julius II, known as the Stanze of Raphael, now part of the Vatican Museums.  

The following year, Leo returned to Rome, escorted by Charlemagne’s troops, and a commission was appointed to investigate the attack. The Pope’s enemies retaliated by bringing charges of such gravity against him, involving perjury and adultery, that the matter was referred back to Charlemagne, who soon came to Rome in person. A synod was called together in St Peter’s basilica, with the king himself being present. The Pope’s accusers did not dare to appear, and the assembled bishops declared that they had no right to sit in judgment of him; nevertheless, Leo solemnly swore to his innocence before the synod on December 23rd.

Two days later, on Christmas Day, Leo crowned Charlemagne as emperor of the Romans in St Peter’s, the event traditionally recognized as the beginning of the Holy Roman Empire. This alliance of Church and State brought many benefits to both, and it would be foolishly cynical to represent it, as has often been done, as no more than Leo’s attempt to strengthen his own position by strengthening that of his protector. But it also revealed a growing problem, that the position of the papacy was dependent on that of the empire, and as the latter grew progressively weaker after Charlemagne’s death, so did the former; whence also the unedifying spectacle of Rome in the 10th century, which includes the reigns of Leos V-VIII.

The Coronation of Charlemagne, 1514-15, also by the workshop of Raphael; this fresco is on the wall next to the one shown above.

As a final matter of note, pertaining to the Filioque controversy, Leo accepted what had by his time become the common understanding in the West, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. But he advised against adding the word “Filioque” to the Nicene Creed, which had become the custom in various places, including Charlemagne’s court, and did not allow it to be said in Rome itself.

St Leo IV, also a native of Rome, was raised in one of the monasteries attached to St Peter’s basilica, and made cardinal-priest of the title of the Four Crowned Martyrs on the Caelian Hill by Pope Sergius II, whom he succeeded in April of 847.

In his time, Saracen pirates were wreaking havoc throughout the western Mediterranean; the year before his election, they had sailed up the Tiber and sacked the basilica of St Paul Outside-the-Walls, destroying at least a large portion of the Apostle’s relics. His papacy began with the construction of major works to defend Rome, including a new set of walls around the Vatican, which are still called the Leonine walls to this day, and the complex as a whole was known as the Leonine city. (This used to be the name of the bus stop in front of Cardinal Ratzinger’s old apartment building, ‘Città Leonina’ in Italian.)

In the year of his election, he put out a fire which had broken out in the Borgo, the neighborhood in front of the Vatican, by giving his blessing from the balcony of St Peter’s. Two years later, he formed a league with the maritime states of Naples, Gaeta and Amalfi; at the battle of Ostia, their combined naval forces destroyed a massive Saracen invasion force which had set out from Sardinia. Both of these events are depicted in one of the rooms now within the Vatican Museums known as the Stanze of Raphael, but these specific paintings are really the works of his students.

The Fire in the Borgo, by the workshop of Raphael, 1514-17. The three male figures on the left are a nod to the story of Aeneas escaping from the burning of Troy; their exaggerated musculature, and that of the man next to them hanging from the wall, reflects the exaggerated influence of the recently discovered statue of Laocoön, which also greatly influenced the work of Michelangelo. This painting was much admired for the cleverly designed figure on the far right, the woman with a water-jar on her head, who has just turned the corner, and opens her mouth in astonishment at the scene. ~ A few years prior to the commissioning of this painting, Pope Julius II and his architect Donatello Bramante had begun the process of replacing the ancient basilica of St Peter, then almost on the point of collapse. This image is an important historical record of what its façade looked like at the time.

The Battle of Ostia, also by the workshop of Raphael, 1514-15. Pope St Leo IV presides over the battle from the far left in cope and papal tiara, as one does; his face is that of the contemporary Pope, Leo X Medici.

The Liber Pontificalis contains an enormous list of his works in and benefactions to Roman churches, and he translated the relics of many Saints from the catacombs outside the city to churches within it. He is also traditionally, but erroneously, credited with the invention of the Asperges rite, and the sermon on the duties of priests which the Pontificale appoints to be read by the bishop at their ordination. He died on July 17, 855.

In the southwest corner of St Peter’s basilica, immediately to the left of the altar of Pope St Leo I, stands the altar of the Madonna of the Column, a votive image painted on one of the columns of the Constantinian Basilica of St Peter. In the process of tearing down the ancient church and rebuilding, the section of the column with the fresco of the Virgin and Child was saved, and later mounted within this reredos; the relics of Popes Leo II, III and IV are in the altar, which is also dedicated to them.

A History of the Popes Named Leo, Part 1: Introduction, and St Leo I

The ancient Romans had a saying, “Nomen est omen – a name is a sign”, i.e., a presage about the person who bears it. Of course, this is not always or in all ways true; during my very sleepy teenage years, my mother used to joke that Gregory, which derives from the Greek word for “watchful”, was about as inappropriate a name as they come. But it is a tradition solidly grounded in the Sacred Scriptures, where there are many significant names, the greatest of all being, of course, the Holy Name of Jesus, which means “salvation”; and likewise, significant name changes, most notably that of St Peter.

Christ Consigning the Keys to St Peter, 1481/82, by Pietro Perugino, a fresco on the right wall of the Sistine Chapel.

It occurred to me, therefore, that it might be interesting to take a look at the histories of the Popes named Leo, especially since the new Pope himself has said that he chose his new name in reference to Leo XIII, who “in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” (If His Holiness declares a crusade against so-called “artificial intelligence”, he shall find no more enthusiastic supporter than myself; and if he decides to expropriate the term “Butlerian jihad” for it, I shall cheer for him all the more loudly.)

First, some statistics. As of last week’s election, Leo is tied with Clement as the fourth most common papal name, behind John, Gregory and Benedict. Five of these, the first through fourth and the ninth, are Saints. Leos V-VIII reigned within a span of about 62 years in the 10th century, the first century in which there is not a single canonized Pope, but three of them for less than a year. The first eight lived before it was the custom for popes to take a new name upon their election, so Leo was their baptismal name.

Since that custom took root in the mid-11th century, there have been at various points some clear trends in the choices of name. From 1046 to 1145, thirteen of the eighteen Popes were “second of his name”, followed by eight “thirds” out of eleven from 1145 to 1227. From 1644-1774, there were 14 popes, all of whom were called either Innocent, Alexander, Clement, or Benedict. (Three of those names have not been used again since that period.) Seven of the twelve Piuses reigned within the 183-year span from 1775 to 1958, occupying almost 128 of those years.

Leo, however, has never been a fashionable name in that sense. The reign of St Leo IX was a watershed in the history of the papacy, and very much for the good, despite its relative brevity (five years and two months), but his name was not taken again for over four and a half centuries. XI called himself Leo in honor of X, who was related to him, and it then went into abeyance again for almost 220 years.

Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903)

Almost every series I have ever planned for NLM has been revised along the way, but for now, the plan is to cover just Leo I, a titanically important figure, in this article, followed by the next three Sainted Leos, then the four who reigned in the 10th century, Leo IX, the two Medicis (X and XI), and the two in the 19th century, XII and XIII.

St Leo I was Pope from September of 440 to November of 461, the tenth longest reign in the Church’s history. He is one of three popes traditionally known as “the Great”, along with Ss Gregory I (590-604) and Nicholas I (858-67), and with the former, one of only two recognized as Doctors of the Church, although this honor was not accorded to him until 1754. He is the first pope of whose theological writings we possess a really substantial corpus, in the form of nearly 100 sermons and over 140 letters.

He was born in Rome ca. 400, and is said to have been of a Tuscan family, but we know nothing of his early life. As a deacon of the Roman church under the sainted Popes Celestine I (422-32) and Sixtus III (432-40), he was already a very prominent figure, and received letters from St Cyril, the patriarch of Alexandria, and the great monastic writer John Cassian. It has been speculated that he was the theological mind behind the mosaic program of the basilica of St Mary Major, built in the wake of the Council of Ephesus (431) as Pope Sixtus III’s response to the Nestorian heresy. He was elected to the papacy from the diaconate, a common event in those days, while on a mission as a peace envoy in Gaul.

The central section of the mosaic arch above the altar in the basilica of St Mary Major, ca. 432 AD, with the throne of Christ, (the motif known as an etimasia), Ss Peter and Paul, and the symbolic animals which represent the four evangelists. Below them, the inscription reads “Xystus (the original form of ‘Sixtus’) the bishop for the people of God.” The Apostles are dressed as Roman senators; paired with “the people of God” in the inscription, this makes for a Christian version of the formal name of the Roman state, “the Senate and the Roman people”, a declaration that the Christian polity will outlast the collapsing Roman polity. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by RightLeft Medieval Art, CC BY-SA 4.0.)

Much of St Leo’s preaching and letter-writing was occupied with combatting the various heresies afflicting the Church in his time: not just the on-going Christological controversies, but also Pelagianism, and the Gnostic sects of the Priscillianists, who were growing in Spain, and the Manichaeans. (On discovering the existence of a group of the latter in Rome itself, he made the reception of the chalice at Mass mandatory as a way of chivying them out, since the Manichaeans abominated the consumption of wine.) Unsurprisingly, the authority of the chief of the Apostles, and of his successor, the bishop of Rome, is a frequent theme in his works, and the Roman Rite has traditionally read his sermons in the Divine Office on the various feasts of St Peter.

The Christological controversies entered a new phase during his pontificate with the invention of yet another new heresy in Constantinople. This was the creation of an abbot called Eutyches, which later came to be known as Monophysitism, the denial of the two natures, divine and human, in the one person of Christ. A second council was called together at Ephesus in 449, the infamous “latrocinium – robber-synod”, as Leo called it, in which Flavian, the orthodox patriarch of Constantinople, was subjected to such violence by the heretics that he died of his injuries not long afterwards. (He is venerated by the Church as a martyr.) Leo’s legates (one of whom, his archdeacon Hilarius, would succeed him as Pope) were forcibly prevented from reading his letter to the council, and barely escaped with their lives.

Leo himself immediately declared the council to be null and void, and wrote a letter to the emperor Theodosius II, demanding that he cease interfering with matters that fall under the authority of the Church and its bishops. Two years later, with the coming of a new emperor to the throne, and with the support of his wife, the Empress St Pulcheria, the orthodox faith was vindicated at the fourth ecumenical council, that of Chalcedon, at which Leo’s letter, known as the “Tome to Flavian”, was acclaimed with the words, “Peter has spoken through Leo.”

Contemplating the serene beauty of St Mary Major, it is difficult to imagine that when it was built, the Western Roman Empire was dangerously unstable, and close to its end. Rome had already been sacked by the Visigoths in 410, the first time it had been attacked by a foreign enemy in 800 years. In 452, just one year after the Council of Chalcedon, the Huns under Attila entered Italy, and after successfully plundering Aquileia, Milan and Pavia, turned their sights towards the capital. The military was powerless to oppose them, and it was the Pope to whom the emperor and senate turned to intervene. Leo headed north and encountered Attila near Mantua; the exact words of their meeting have not been recorded, but he was somehow able to persuade the Hun to leave Italy in exchange for a tribute. (A later tradition, repeated in the breviary, and often represented in art, but completely unhistorical, has it that the Apostles Peter and Paul appeared over Leo with swords in their hands as a way of warning Attila off.)

The Meeting of Pope St Leo I and Attila the Hun, 1514, by Raphael and students (more the latter than the former), a fresco within the rooms of Pope Julius II, now part of the Vatican Museums.

When the Vandals arrived at the gates of Rome three years later, Leo was unable to persuade them to leave off as he had Attila, but he did at least get them to refrain from massacring civilians and from burning the city. The remaining six years of his reign were much occupied with repairing the ensuing damage, especially to the churches, and to recovering the captives whom the Vandals had taken with them back to Africa. The Liber Pontificalis records that he donated new silver vessels to the churches of Rome after the sack, and renovated the “Constantinian basilica”, i.e., the cathedral of Rome, not yet called St John Lateran, as well as the basilicas of Ss Peter and Paul, establishing a monastery at the former.

The addition of the words “sanctum sacrificium, immaculatam hostiam” to the Canon is traditionally ascribed to him, but it must be said that the liturgical notices given in the Liber Pontificalis are quite unreliable. The oldest collection of Roman liturgical texts, a manuscript preserved in the capitular library of the cathedral of Verona, contains several prayers which are unmistakably based on his sermons. For this reason, its discoverer, a canon of Verona named Giuseppe Bianchini (1704-64), called it the “Leonine” sacramentary, but it is not a sacramentary, and was certainly compiled rather later than Leo’s time.

Pope St Leo I, by Francisco Herrera the Younger (1627-85)

Despite his importance, devotion to Pope Leo as a saint, both as formally expressed in the liturgy and on a popular level, has never been very prominent, especially in comparison with St Gregory. His feast day is missing from many of the earliest liturgical books of the Roman Rite, he is represented far less often in art, and, as noted above, he was not declared a Doctor of the Church until the mid-18th century. He is, however, one of the few Roman popes celebrated in the Byzantine Rite, on February 18th. In the West, the traditional day of his feast is April 11th, which is believed to be the date of one of the translations of his relics, although there is some uncertainty on this point. In the post-Conciliar Rite, his feast is kept on November 10th, the anniversary of his death. His relics are in an altar in the southwest corner of St Peter’s basilica; those of Ss Leo II, III and IV, who will be the subjects of the next article in this series, are together in the altar right next to it on the left.

The altar of Pope St Leo I in St Peter’s basilica.