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Updated: May 31, 2025
We hear that the emperor Valentinian III., according to Agnellus but we should place the bishopric of S. John Angeloptes 477-494 "was so much affected by the preaching of this holy man that he took off his imperial crown and humbly on his knees begged his blessing.... Not long after he gave him fourteen cities with their churches to be governed by him Archieratica potestate.
In the same year as Agnellus, there came to England the Trinitarian friars, called also the Maturins, from the situation of their first house in Paris, an order whose special function was the redemption of captives. In 1240 returning crusaders brought back with them the first Carmelite friars, for whom safer quarters had to be found than in their original abodes in Syria.
This was originally, as we may think, the ancient bath of which Agnellus speaks, and it was converted into a baptistery by the Arians, and later consecrated for Catholic uses under the title of S. Maria in Cosmedin and used as an oratory. It is an octagonal building whose walls support a cupola which is covered with mosaics in circles like that of the original baptistery of the city.
This bishop first received from the emperor a Pallium of white wool, just such as it is the custom for the pope to wear over the Duplum; and he and his successors have used such a vestment even to the present day." This passage of Agnellus is important, but does not seem, on examination, to have any real bearing upon the question of the dependence of the See of Ravenna upon Rome.
He had then, according to Agnellus, promised to deliver to the pope all the "gold, silver, vessels of price, hoards of money," and so forth stored up in Ravenna. Agnellus tells a long and incoherent tale of the way the pope obtained this treasure and of certain plots to murder him therefor. All that seems fairly certain is that in the first year of his reign pope Paul I. visited Ravenna.
All their work, which we would so gladly see, is gone except the little chapel of S. Peter Chrysologus, which he built and signed in one of the arches in the fifth century. Cf. Of this great man Agnellus records: "He was beautiful in appearance, lovely in aspect; before him there was no bishop like him in wisdom, nor any other after him."
He proceeded up the Adriatic and when far off he saw the great imperial city, he first, according to Agnellus, lamented its fate, "for she shall be levelled with the ground which lifted her head to the clouds;" and then having landed and been greeted with due ceremony, set his camp on the banks of the Po a few hundred yards outside the city walls.
Agnellus gives us a fairly full account of this church, which consisted of five naves divided and upheld by four rows of fifty-six columns of precious marble from the temple of Jupiter. That the church was approached by steps we learn from Agnellus in his life of S. Exuperantius, for he there tells us that Felix the patrician was killed "on the steps of the Ecclesia Ursiana."
So Gibbon, following Agnellus whose account is obscure and perhaps altogether untrustworthy. What is certain is that Liutprand was advancing against the empire in war; that he took Bologna and without difficulty made himself master of the whole of the Pentapolis. Yet the emperor took no heed. The eunuch Eutychius was appointed as exarch.
This great churchman calls S. Apollinaris martyr, and in that there is nothing strange, but he asserts that though he often spilt his blood for the Faith, yet God preserved him a long time, not less than twenty years, to his church, and that his persecution did not take away his life. Cf. Agnellus.
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