MY FOCUS IN this paper is two-fold: the uses of memory, and the problems of the relationship between memory and written records of memory in the early middle ages. Particular memories can also be exploited to reinforce an identity or even an ideology. We are all used to everyday journalism and spin as well as the supposed distinction between official and popular versions of history. All these raise the questions of collective and individual manifestations and uses of memory. One question to explore therefore is how helpful modern experience and categorizations may be in interpreting the distant past. I shall use case studies of historical narratives and epitaphs inscribed on stone from the early Middle Ages (ca. 500 to ca. 900) to highlight both the kind of material with which an early medieval historian works, and its implications for historical knowledge and interpretation more generally.

Flodoard of Reims and the Gate of Mars

Crucial issues about the uses of memory and the relation between memory and written, especially narrative, records of memory, can be demonstrated with two comments made by the tenth-century Frankish historian Flodoard. In his Annales, begun ca. 920, Flodoard casually mentions the Gate of Mars to make it serve as a reference point to locate the nearby church of St. Hilary where a blind man had miraculously had his sight restored. In Flodoard's History of Reims written ca. 950, however, the gate assumed greater significance. In this text Flodoard traced the history of the see of Reims from Sixtus, the first bishop of Reims, allegedly sent by St. Peter to northern Gaul. He further augmented the antiquity of the city and its secular Roman associations by discussing the city's foundation. He rejected the vulgata opinio that the city had been founded by Remus, brother of Romulus, as unlikely, and drew on his knowledge of Livy's “History of Rome” (Ab urbe condita) to support his judgement.

One thing that may have prompted the vulgata opinio was the relief sculpture of the twins Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf, the quintessential symbol of the city of Rome, on the underside of the arch.

This paper concentrates on the representation of the Constantinian Basilica in the Liber pontificalis and determines its role in the text and in the representation of the pope.The sections considered range from the foundation of the Basilica in Life 34 (Pope Silvester I) to the significance of the Basilica for Pope Stephen V in Life 112.One oddity about the Liber pontificalis is that it never refers to the Constantinian basilica as dedicated to St John. That information is supplied in liturgical books such as the Sacramentaries and Lectionaries extant in Frankish manuscripts. This prompts a reflection on the Constantinian Basilicaߣs liturgical role within Rome that casts further light on the possible implications and peculiarities of the Basilicaߣs representation in the Liber ponificalis itself.

The Liber pontificalis could simply be described as a history of Rome from the very particular perspective of the Christian church and the popes. Yet it is a far richer and less straightforward narrative than that, and it would not have been the first text to have enchanted readers with a vision of Rome. Think of the Greek geographer Strabo, writing during the reign of the Emperor Augustus: ‘If you were to pass back through the ancient forum and were to behold one forum ranged after another and the royal stoas and temples, and were to see the capitol and all the monuments on it and the Palatine and the Porticus of Livia, you might easily forget everything outside the city.’1

So far in this book I have highlighted particular themes in the Liber pontificalis presented by the authors of the sixth-century portion of the narrative and its continuations. These can be summarized as follows: the transformation of the city of Rome in imagination and text; the construction of a distinctively papal and apostolic past in early Christian Rome; and the visible display of papal power in Rome in the building and embellishment of churches in honour of the saints. All these themes combine to convey a very particular understanding of the history of the popes and of the Christian city of Rome. There is no inevitability in the development of the papacy. All the papal building projects, for example, constructed particular places for collective and regular Christian observance and devotion. They were spaces which acted as the venues where many Christians gathered, that belonged to their communities, were associated with particular saints who were part of the history of the city, and were where the institutionalized liturgical rituals of belonging took place. I have explored the way the authors exploited existing knowledge and reframed it, shaping the way subsequent readers would remember and understand the popes’ role in the city and in relation to its Christian inheritance. Indeed, I have suggested that the Liber pontificalis needs to be seen as complementing and corroborating both the contemporaneous visual and material evidence and other categories of written text. Not only that: the narrative offers a persuasive, chronologically ordered framework into which the other categories of text and material evidence could be fitted and their credentials understood. We cannot read the Liber pontificalis in isolation from these other texts and the wider physical context whose existence the Liber pontificalis implies. This is particularly the case for the liturgy, the pope’s definitive statements about Christian orthodoxy, and his interventions in canon law.

I have suggested so far that the Liber pontificalis offers a very particular portrait of the Bishop and people of Rome. Further, the text creates a mental map or virtual Rome in the minds of its readers, and invokes the imperial history of the city. The text thereby provides an essential framework for the history of the bishops and the formation of the Christian community in Rome.

The title of this book, Rome and the Invention of the Papacy, uses the word ‘invention’ in the original Latin sense of inventio (discovery), as well as the more recent one of an original creation with a function. I intend it to be a more evocative, or even provocative, word than ‘formation’ or ‘development’. Indeed, I shall not be offering a straightforward history of the early medieval papacy in this book. Instead, my theme is the power of a text, with an extended case study of a particular text that charts the history of the early medieval papacy, namely, the Liber pontificalis or ‘book of the pontiffs’.

I have argued in this book that the Liber pontificalis constructed a distinctive image of the popes and a particular representation of their history, of their role as successors to St Peter, and of the city of Rome itself as a holy city of Christian saints and martyrs. The city of Rome was transformed in the imagination as well as in the text. I have shown how the Liber pontificalis acts as a prism through which we can observe the politics and ideology of Rome’s transformation from imperial city to Christian capital, the way the Bishop of Rome is represented as establishing a visible display of power within the city, and how the text reiterates the spiritual and ministerial role of the bishop both within Rome and for the wider Christian community.

In the previous chapter, I emphasized the ways in which the sixth-century Roman history of the popes in the Liber pontificalis used the work of Peter, princeps apostolorum, and his successors to anchor the Christian faith in Rome, and how it thereby shaped the memory of the early stages of the formation of Christian Rome and the emergence of the bishop or pope as leader of the Christian community before the conversion of Constantine. I turn in this chapter to consider the implications of the means the text employs, from the narrative covering the beginning of the fourth century onwards, to enhance the pope’s power still further.