Misdated Popes: a Mistake in the Chronology of Seventh-Century Bishops of Rome

Abstract

The letter sent by Kyros of Alexandria to Sergios of Constantinople in 638 appears to contain a chronological contradiction: it implies that Sergios was aware before his death of the election of Severinus as the new bishop of Rome two months earlier. Given the travelling times in the seventh century, this is impossible. The problem originates in a mistake made by Louis Duchesne when calculating the chronology of the popes for his edition of the Liber pontificalis: for the period 619–49, all his dates are one year too late. This change of the chronological framework affects the interpretation of a number of documents.

The letter written in 638 by Kyros, patriarch of Alexandria (633–7, 641–2), to Sergios, patriarch of Constantinople (610–38), is a short and seemingly straightforward text.¹ Having thanked Sergios for his earlier message, Kyros comments on the doctrinal edict that has just been issued by the emperor Heraclius (610–41). The edict, known as the Ekthesis, was meant to avert a conflict between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome on the subject of the wills and operations of Christ. It achieved the exact opposite: it precipitated a schism between the two Churches known as the ‘monothelete controversy’, the healing of which took the rest of the seventh century. In the weeks after its publication, however, Kyros accepted Heraclius’ edict with enthusiasm and expressed the hope that God would grant the emperor victory over ‘Saracen wilfulness’, an allusion to the on-going Muslim conquest of the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. In 638, when the letter was written, Syria and Palestine had already been lost, and the fate of Egypt looked uncertain. Kyros's letter to Sergios is a rare contemporary reaction to these events. But its significance also lies elsewhere. Its references to the bishops of Rome and Constantinople cannot be reconciled with their currently accepted chronology. Either the text is corrupt or something is wrong with our chronological framework for the seventh century.

The first possibility can be discarded. It is true that documents included in such dossiers related to the monothelete controversy as the Lateran acts – which preserved the letter of Kyros to Sergios – were manipulated in various ways. Taking extracts out of context was the most common technique. But they were not, as a rule, textually altered, the entire point of their use being to confound the ‘heretics’ (such as Kyros) with their own words.²

This article argues therefore for the latter possibility, namely that the chronology of the popes of Rome is flawed by a systematic error that affects most of the first half of the seventh century. I will first establish that the chronological contradiction contained in the letter of Sergios to Kyros is inescapable. I will then retrace the procedure by which Louis Duchesne, in the later nineteenth century, calculated the dates of the bishops of Rome, and will propose a correction to his chronology. Finally, I will review the implications. On the one hand, the now rehabilitated letter of Kyros to Sergios opens up a new perspective on the career of Kyros, a key political operator in the last years of Heraclius’ reign, and in particular on the vexed question of his exile on the eve of the Arab conquest of Egypt. This, in turn, leads to a reappraisal of narrative sources on this event and, consequently, of its course. I have investigated these questions elsewhere.³ On the other hand, the proposed change in papal chronology – treated as a secure framework by historians of the British Isles, Merovingian Gaul, Italy and Byzantium – affects the interpretation of several sources pertaining to the Western Church. It also significantly simplifies the narrative of the beginnings of the monothelete controversy, the main theological and political controversy of the Christian world in the seventh century.⁴

Travelling in the seventh century

The circumstances in which Kyros wrote his letter to Sergios can be established with much precision. It was elicited by a message from Sergios accompanied by an attachment described by Kyros in the following terms:

the most glorious general Eustathios … brought to me the all-honoured words of the God-honoured beatitude of my distinguished master [Sergios], enclosing a copy, [addressed] to Isaac the most exalted patrician and exarch of Italy, of the exposition (ἐκθέσεως) of our all-venerable faith composed in a manner timely, far-sighted and pleasing to God by our most pious and God-protected master and great emperor, which now needs to be ratified by our common brother the most holy Severinus, who, with the help of God, is to be consecrated in Rome.⁵

This situates Kyros's letter in the context of the lengthy vacancy of the see of Rome that followed the death of Pope Honorius, traditionally dated to 12 October 638. According to the Roman Liber pontificalis, the interregnum lasted for one year, seven months and seventeen days, and was the longest in the seventh century.⁶ This can only mean that the usual confirmation of the pope-elect by the emperor was for some time withheld, a supposition confirmed not only by Kyros's reference to ‘the help of God’ needed for the consecration of Severinus, but also by an independent source: the account of the negotiations of Roman legates in Constantinople, luckily preserved in an excerpt from a letter from Maximos, known as the Confessor, to Abbot Thalassios.⁷

In this short fragment, Maximos reports a ‘great and lengthy commotion’ that took place in Constantinople because of ‘the dogmas of His [i.e. God's] catholic, holy and apostolic Church’ after the arrival of the envoys of a new pope seeking the approval of his candidature.⁸ The ‘holy churchmen’ of Constantinople made their assent conditional on the acceptance by the pope-elect of ‘the dogmatic document (charta) that they have now published’.⁹ The legates refused to commit themselves but promised to ask the new pope to subscribe to it, and, after long debates, obtained the imperial iussio allowing the consecration of Severinus. Maximos, who saw a copy of the charta, reports that it banned discussions on the operations of Christ. Even if he does not refer to the matter of Christ's will, there is little doubt that this was the Ekthesis: the statement on one will came to be considered its main point only later, and Maximos may have mentioned it in the lost section of the letter (even though this is unlikely given the specific interest of the excerptor, Anastasius the Librarian, in the history of the monothelete controversy).

Kyros's reference to Severinus fits well the scenario described by Maximos. The copy of the Ekthesis that he enthusiastically accepted was, in fact, addressed not to him but to the exarch of Italy Isaac, who was in turn supposed to present it to Severinus. The dispatch of the Ekthesis to the highest imperial official in Italy was certainly meant to put additional pressure on the pope-elect to accept it, and only makes sense after the refusal of his legates to subscribe to it in his name. It follows that Kyros wrote his letter to Sergios around the time when the Roman embassy was about to leave Constantinople.

Herein lies the problem. Kyros's letter implies that many months had elapsed since the death of Pope Honorius, usually dated to 12 October 638. At the same time, it was written in response to a communication from Sergios who is thought to have died fifty-eight days later, on 9 December 638. Sergios must have been aware of the death of Honorius, because he appended to his letter a copy of the Ekthesis destined for his successor. The problem is that fifty-eight days is not enough for the news of Honorius’ death in Rome to reach Constantinople,¹⁰ not to speak of the lengthy negotiations supposedly conducted by the legates of Severinus within this time. There is a chronological contradiction here, and this is irrespective of where Kyros wrote his letter: in Alexandria or, as I argued elsewhere, in the vicinity of Constantinople.¹¹

It is certain that travel between Rome and Constantinople took more than fifty-eight days thanks to the relatively abundant information about the circulation of letters and envoys between the two cities in the seventh century. In the case of several embassies, we know the dates of both their departure and arrival. The apocrisiaries (legates) of Pope Vitalian, for example, left Rome soon after his ordination on 30 July 657, and reached Constantinople a little before 18 April 658.¹² Their journey, interrupted by the winter, took around eight months. The legates dispatched by Pope Agatho to represent him at the Sixth Ecumenical Council carried the letter of 125 bishops who met in Rome in late March 680, and arrived to Constantinople a little before or on 10 September of the same year, when Emperor Constantine iv, having consulted them, convoked the ecumenical council.¹³ Even though they used imperial ships, they needed four months to make the journey in the summer, and seven months to return, partly in the winter: they carried a document issued in Constantinople on 23 December 681, and arrived to Rome in July 682.¹⁴ Several decades later, Pope Constantine left the harbour of Rome on 5 October 710 and returned to his city on 24 October 711: his biographer does not tell us how long he spent in Constantinople and Nicomedia, where he met the Emperor Justinian ii, but it is clear that each leg of his journey took several months.¹⁵ The fastest known journey between Rome and Constantinople in the seventh century was that of another pope, Martin, who, immediately after his arrest in Rome, was put on a ship at Portus on 19 June 653 and delivered to Constantinople three months later, on 17 September; but this was a case of a high-ranking political prisoner whom the imperial government was anxious to remove from Italy as fast as possible, and who travelled, if we believe his own account, in very uncomfortable conditions (even if he was apparently accompanied by six or seven servants): he was allowed to wash only two or three times on his way.¹⁶ His journey was faster than, for instance, the spread of the news of the death of Pope Donus on 11 April 678 that had not reached Constantinople four months later, on 12 August 678, when Constantine iv still addressed a letter to him.¹⁷

We are here a far cry from the travel time of 21.3 days optimistically predicted by the ORBIS model or journeys of one month recorded in the sixth-century Collectio Avellana, when both the Via Appia and the Via Egnatia were still practicable.¹⁸ None of them could be used in the seventh century, the former being blocked by the Lombards, and the latter by the Slavs and Avars. The difficulty of travelling overland is illustrated by the land journey of Justinian ii from Constantinople to Thessaloniki in 688, recorded as a feat in the chronicle of Theophanes; an army sent on the same route by Constantine iv in about 678 did not get that far.¹⁹ Travel by land from Constantinople to the second city of the empire, let alone across the Balkans, was thus impossible in the seventh century. The itineraries of the two popes who travelled to Constantinople suggest that the Gulf of Corinth was also closed for navigation: Martin journeyed via Messina, Calabria, ‘many islands’, Naxos and Abydos, whereas Constantine stopped on his way in Naples, Sicily, Reggio, Crotone, Gallipoli, Otranto (where he wintered) and Keos. The only connection between Rome and Constantinople was by the sea, around the Italian boot and the infamous Cape Malea at the tip of the Peloponnesus.²⁰

These lengthy travel times are further confirmed by notices on the interregna between successive pontificates in the Liber pontificalis. The biography of each pope records the interval between his death (or rather burial) and the ordination of his successor (see Table 1 below). This time was necessary for the election and ordination of a new pope, and, above all, for the approval of his candidature by the emperor who, however, could delegate this prerogative to the exarch of Italy.²¹ The length of the period of sede vacante thus corresponds to that of the return journey of papal legates to and from Constantinople or Ravenna. This not only gives an idea of the travel times, but also allows us to guess where a given pope was confirmed, information only exceptionally provided explicitly by the sources.

Table 1. Chronological data on the popes contained in the Liber pontificalis as established by Louis Duchesne

Notes: y = years; m = months; d = days

Data derived from LP, pp. cclv–cclvii (Duchesne's calculations) and 315–67 (edited text)

It appears that from the Justinianic conquest of Italy until the early seventh century bishops of Rome sought the assent of the emperor in Constantinople.²² The interregna between their pontificates ranged between four and twelve months, depending on whether the legates were able to return to Rome before the closure of the sea in winter.²³ Their sudden reduction to less than two months in 618 and 624 is a sign that the Persian and Avaro-Slavic invasions made travel to Constantinople too dangerous, and that the approval of the elect had been delegated to the exarch of Ravenna.²⁴ The interpretation of the later interregna is complicated by the monothelete controversy that caused the two patriarchates to break communion in c. 647–54 and c. 670–81. But in the four cases where we can be sure that Roman legates travelled to Constantinople, the vacatio sedis lasted between eleven and twenty months, implying one-way journeys of several months.²⁵ The interregna were reduced again to between forty and ninety days as soon as Constantine iv had delegated the right to approve the pope-elect to the exarch of Ravenna in 684.²⁶

Thus, in an era when land and sea communications were disrupted by the Lombards, Slavs, Persians and soon the Arabs, no known journey between Rome and Constantinople took less than three months, and this only in the summer.²⁷ Shorter journeys may have been possible, as is suggested by a late seventh-century exarch of Ravenna who reportedly observed that ‘no-one can go to Constantinople and return in three months’, implying a one-way journey of at least forty-five days.²⁸ But they are not attested; and it should be borne in mind that, firstly, sailing to Rome, as opposed to from Ravenna, involved the laborious circumnavigation of the Italian peninsula and, secondly, that the embassies discussed here were composed of senior, no doubt often elderly, clerics.

It is manifest that the legates of Severinus – who were dispatched after the death of Honorius on 12 October 638, travelled in late autumn, and must have wintered on their way – could not have arrived in Constantinople before the spring of 639. Their negotiations probably took the bulk of the warm season, so that they had to winter again on their way back to Rome, judging from the date of the ordination of Severinus, traditionally dated at 28 May 640. And yet, Kyros and Sergios appear to have discussed the outcome of their talks in Constantinople before the death of the latter on 9 December 638. The conclusion is inescapable: the date of the death of either Honorius or Sergios is wrong.

Which of them? That of Sergios is confirmed by several independent sources. The date of 9 December 638 results from the addition of the length of his tenure given by patriarchal catalogues – twenty-eight years, seven months and twenty-one days – to the date of his ordination known from the Chronicon Paschale, 18 April 610. This date concords with that of his funeral on Sunday 13 December 638, and the mention of a second indiction (September 638–August 639) as the date of his death in a chronicle that may have been composed by his successor.²⁹ This leaves little room for doubt that Sergios did die in early December 638. No such external confirmation is forthcoming for the date of the death of Honorius, which is derived solely from the data contained in the Liber pontificalis. Is it possible that it has been miscalculated?

Abbé Duchesne and the chronology of the Liber pontificalis

The biographies of seventh-century popes in the Liber pontificalis contain, with almost no exception, three chronological indications: the length of the pontificate; that of the vacancy following the death of a pope, both given in years, months and days; and the day and month (but not the year) of his burial (depositio).³⁰ The first two belong to the original recension of the biographies and display relatively little variation between the main families of manuscripts; as for the burial dates, they are probably later interpolations in the biographies of the popes from Pelagius i to Boniface v, but are original from Honorius on.³¹

None of these indications contains any absolute year dates.³² These were calculated by Louis Duchesne in his magisterial edition of the Liber pontificalis published in 1886.³³ His general approach was to add the lengths of the pontificates and vacancies to the few exact dates of deaths of the popes that can be established from their letters and epitaphs, in the first place that of Gregory i, whose register of letters begins in September indiction 9 (590) and ends in March indiction 7 (604), very close to the date of the depositio noted in his epitaph, 12 March.³⁴ As for the epitaphs, even though the full series belonging to popes from Gregory i to Honorius had been copied before the demolition of the Old Saint Peter's in the early sixteenth century, only two contain the full date of the depositio: those of Boniface iii (12 November 607) and Boniface iv (8 May 612, but the year needs to be corrected to 615).³⁵ Finally, the exact date of the death of Pope Martin in exile in Crimea is known: 16 September 655.³⁶

On this basis and with the help of two additional assumptions – that the ordinations of the popes took place on Sundays, and that the lengths of pontificates were more significant and therefore more likely to be correctly remembered than those of the vacancies³⁷ – Duchesne was able to build a consistent, and for the most part uncontroversial, chronology of the bishops of Rome. His hesitations as to the precise day of the ordination or death of a pope rarely involved a margin of error greater than several days or weeks. But the dates of Boniface v turned out to be a hard nut to crack:

Après Deusdedit nous rencontrons une difficulté spéciale. La durée du pontificat de Boniface v, 5 ans et 10 mois, additionnée avec les deux vacances avant et après ce pape, donne juste six ans moins un jour et nous conduit au commencement de novembre 624. Or il est sûr, par les documents de la correspondance pontificale, que Boniface v siégeait encore en 625 et qu'Honorius lui succéda vers la fin de cette année. Il y a donc erreur d'un an, soit dans les chiffres de vacance entre Deusdedit et Boniface v, soit dans les chiffres de siège attribués à Boniface v. La première hypothèse est la seule admissible, en raison d'abord de la différence d'autorité des deux groupes de chiffres, ensuite parce que la vie de Boniface v place, avant son ordination, la révolte de l'exarque Eleuthère, et nous fournit ainsi l'explication d'une vacance plus longue que de coutume. Nous admettrons donc 1 an, 1 mois et 15 jours de vacance après Deusdedit. Cette correction faite, l'ordination de Boniface v est fixée au dimanche 23 décembre 619, tant par les chiffres de vacance qui tombent juste, que par les chiffres du siège, qui conduisent au mardi 25.³⁸

It is not necessary to engage with the detail of this calculation, which is based on more assumptions and emendations than it may at first appear. The length of the tenure of Boniface v, ‘5 years’ in the best manuscripts of the Liber pontificalis, was reasonably corrected by Duchesne to ‘5 years 10 months’ on the basis of other catalogues of popes.³⁹ It is indeed likely that the number of months and days fell out at an early stage of transmission. Duchesne then added the length of the pontificate of Boniface v (plus the preceding and following vacancies) to the date of the death of his predecessor Deusdedit (8 November 618) that he had calculated, in turn, from the date of the depositio of the previous pope, Boniface iv (known from his epitaph), and the length of the tenure of Deusdedit (given by the Liber pontificalis).⁴⁰ But the resulting date of the ordination of Honorius, November 624, is, according to Duchesne, impossible because there exist letters of Boniface v demonstrating that he was still in office in 625. There must be somewhere an error of a year, either in the length of the vacancy preceding Boniface v or in that of his pontificate. Without hesitation, Duchesne chose the first possibility: not only per his assumption that lengths of tenures are more likely to be correct than those of the vacancies, but also because political turmoil in Italy in 618 might explain why the vacancy lasted for over a year. He concluded that a year should be added to the vacancy between Deusdedit and Boniface v, and that the ordination of the latter should be fixed to 23 December 619, not 618.⁴¹

This is a complex and coherent argument. But its complexity disguises several arbitrary corrections, the questionable choice of the date of the death of Deusdedit, the brevity of the revolt of the exarch Eleutherius⁴² and, above all, the insertion of a full year between popes Deusdedit and Boniface v – which was necessitated, according to Duchesne, by the existence of letters of Boniface v dated to the year 625.

Duchesne did not reference them, but he certainly had in mind three letters of Boniface v included by Bede in his Ecclesiastical history of the English people, and addressed to Justus archbishop of Canterbury, Edwin king of Northumbria, and his wife Æthelburh of Kent.⁴³ Bede did not copy their dates, but he situated them quite precisely within his chronology of English bishops: he inserted the letter to Justus right after the notice of the death of his predecessor Mellitus on 24 April 624, and those to Edwin and Æthelburh after the account of the journey of Paulinus, who had been ordained bishop by Justus on 21 July 625, to Northumbria in the train of Æthelburh, betrothed to the still pagan Edwin. More precisely, in his narrative Æthelburh and Edwin receive the letters soon after the birth of their daughter Eanfled on Easter of the following year (20 April 626).⁴⁴ According to this chronology, Boniface v must have written to them in late 625, and therefore could not have died a year earlier.

It is tempting to accept Bede's chronology as it stands: it is coherent and requires no conversion into our system given that he was one of the first chroniclers to count years ab incarnatione Domini. But Bede encountered the same problems as any historian when trying to reconcile dates from various sources. He placed, for instance, the death of Pope Gregory i in 605, one year too late, which suggests that his date of the beginning of the pontificate of Boniface v should also be moved one year earlier, from 619 to 618 (which, incidentally, contradicts Duchesne's intercalary year).⁴⁵ His dates of the death of Mellitus and the ordination of Paulinus are expressed in years from the incarnation, indicating that they resulted from his calculations, the logic of which cannot be recovered. They ‘cannot be wildly inaccurate’, but it would be rash to consider them indisputable.⁴⁶ There are also other difficulties: the news of the ordination of Paulinus must have reached Boniface v within only three months (before 25 October 625, Duchesne's date of his death), whereas Edwin and Æthelburh, if we follow Bede in placing their marriage after the ordination of Paulinus, must have taken immediate action for their daughter to be born less than nine months later. The former is impossible, and the latter unlikely.⁴⁷

It rather appears that all three letters of Boniface v must have been written at the same time.⁴⁸ They may have reached Bede by different channels, but they all refer to the same immediate context, that of the recent conversion of an Anglo-Saxon king, ‘Aduluald’ or ‘Audubald’, that opened up prospects for further missionary success.⁴⁹ The letter to Justus alludes to his plans to Christianise the neighbours of the converted king, a probable reference to his projects in Northumbria, which are, in turn, the subject of the pope's letters to the Northumbrian couple.⁵⁰ The latter do not mention Paulinus and make it clear that Edwin and Æthelburh are already married, contrary to what Bede's sequence of events implies.⁵¹ As a result, it is not necessary to place them after the ordination of Paulinus.⁵² Given the rarity of written communications between Rome and England, it is more than likely that all the three letters travelled together and were written around the year 624.

Bede's chronology of the letters of Boniface v is not then sufficiently firm to justify the muscled emendation of the Liber pontificalis proposed by Duchesne. There is no reason to tamper with the length of the vacancy between Deusdedit and Boniface v as transmitted by its manuscripts, and to move the ordination of Boniface v from December 618 to December 619. His pontificate has been dated by Duchesne one year too late.

Consequently, the dates of Deusdedit's successors are also affected. But of how many of them? Ideally Duchesne should have encountered another chronological difficulty as he progressed with his reconstruction of the chronology of seventh-century popes. And indeed, only several paragraphs further he found himself faced with a superfluous year:

Entre le 14 mai 649, jour où mourut Théodore, et le 10 août 654, jour où fut ordonné Eugène, il n'y a pas place pour la durée que le Liber pontificalis assigne au pontificat de Martin, 6 ans 1 mois et 26 jours. Il n'en est pas de même si on descend jusqu'au 17 septembre 655, date que le biographe indique comme celle de la mort du pape. En remontant à partir de cette date, les chiffres de siège conduisent au mercredi 22 juillet 649.⁵³

Duchesne thus accepted the length of the pontificate of Pope Martin given by the Liber pontificalis, but struggled to find enough room for it. He first tried the most obvious solution, namely subtracting it from the day of the ordination of his successor Eugenius. The resulting date of the beginning of Martin's tenure, 15 June 648, contradicted that of the death of Martin's predecessor Theodore, placed by him on 14 May 649. But Pope Martin, the only pope forcibly deposed in the seventh century, is a special case. The end of his pontificate can in theory be placed on three different dates: his arrest on 17 June 653, the ordination of Eugenius on 10 August 654, or his death in exile in Crimea on 16 September 655.⁵⁴ Duchesne decided on this last date and calculated that Martin was ordained on 22 July 649, suitably close to his date of Theodore's death and to the length of interregnum indicated by the Liber pontificalis (fifty-two days, extended to sixty-nine days).

Duchesne's solution is again ingenious and unnecessary. If Martin's biographer in the Liber pontificalis had really counted the period between the ordination of Martin's successor and the death of Martin as part of his pontificate, this would imply that he considered Eugenius to be illegitimate. There is, however, not a shadow of doubt as to the canonical status of Eugenius as the bishop of Rome in the Liber pontificalis; he was even acknowledged as such (even if somewhat grudgingly) by Martin himself in a letter from his exile in Crimea.⁵⁵ Duchesne's initial instinct was, in fact, correct: the slightly more than six years of Martin's pontificate ought to be counted back from the ordination of Eugenius, as indicated also by the exceptional omission of the length of the vacancy between these two popes in the biography of Martin. It results in the conclusion that Martin was ordained bishop of Rome in June or July 648.⁵⁶

The consequence of this double mistake – the insertion of a year between the pontificates of Deusdedit and Boniface v in 618–19, and the removal of the first year of Martin in 648–9 – is that all the dates of the popes between 619 and 649 have been advanced by one year, and should consequently be moved one year back (see Table 2 below).⁵⁷

Table 2. Proposed chronology of seventh-century popes

Documents from the first and last years of the pontificates

Is it possible to bring the surviving documents issued by the six concerned popes, or addressed to them, in line with the proposed correction of their dates? Despite the significant number of documents from the years 619 to 649 included in the regesta of the popes, very few kept their original dates, and not a single one of them comes from the last year of any of the six popes. But several documents known indirectly from references in other sources have been attributed to the years that have now changed pope.⁵⁸ In what follows, I will try to show that they can all be assigned to a different pope or date.

We have already seen the case of the letters of Boniface v to Edwin and Æthelburh of Northumbria. As for his successor Honorius, the most recent edition of papal regesta places three documents in his last year (637/8): a letter to Spanish bishops, their irritated answer dated 9 January 638, and a letter from Sophronios of Jerusalem.⁵⁹ The first is only known from a mention in the second: there is no difficulty in placing it before Honorius’ death on 12 October 637, and in assuming that the Spaniards had signed their response before the news of his death reached them.⁶⁰ As for the letter from Sophronios, all we know is that shortly before his death he sent to Rome an envoy, Stephen of Dor.⁶¹ The identity of the pope whom Stephen met is not specified and the episode is difficult to date, given the uncertainty as to the precise date of Sophronios's death, variously placed between 638 and 640.⁶² No document issued by, or addressed to, the next pope, Severinus, can be independently dated, but his exchanges with Constantinople strongly support the chronology proposed in this article. Finally, a letter sent by the pope-elect John iv and other Roman clerics during the vacancy preceding his ordination to bishops and clerics from Ireland, known from Bede's Ecclesiastical history and traditionally dated to August–December 640, belongs more logically to the previous year. If it answers, as has been proposed, an Irish enquiry about the correct date of Easter in 641, it would make more sense to provide such information well in advance of the beginning of Lent in early February 641, rather than risk throwing the liturgical calendar into confusion. Such an answer should therefore have been dispatched from Rome in autumn 639 for it safely to reach Ireland in time.⁶³

More interesting is the privilege that a pope John issued at the request of a king Chlodwig for a Merovingian monastery, perhaps Luxeuil. Such a combination of names is only possible for Pope John iv and Clovis (Chlodwig) ii, king of Neustria since January 639 (until 657). The original is lost, but was ‘recycled’ in five spurious privileges for Frankish monasteries.⁶⁴ The complex relations between these documents need not occupy us here; what is relevant is that one of the charters, for the monastery of St Cross in Meaux, contains a dating formula of such complexity that, as observed by Eugen Ewig, it must derive from an authentic letter of John iv:

Datum R. Id. Maii impp. DD.NN. piissimis sed Constantino anno xxvi P.C. eius anno viii et Heraclio anno viii DD. et Martino CC sed DD. quidem anno secundo et Martino anno primo indictione xii.⁶⁵

Ewig proposed to date it to the reign of Constantine iii and Heraklonas, the sons of Heraclius, and read it as follows:

Datum R(omae) Id. Maii imperantibus dominis nostris piissimis [Constantino et Heraclio] sed Constantino anno xxvi et Heraclio anno viii [post consulatum eius (eorum?)] anno viii, David et Martina c(aesaribus?) sed David quidem anno secundo Martina anno primo indictione xii.⁶⁶

Ewig correctly recognised David, the son of Heraclius who became Caesar on 4 July 638, in the abbreviation DD, but incorrectly interpreted the name of his brother Martin as that of his mother and the second wife of Heraclius, Martina (who never appears in the imperial dating formulae). He observed, also correctly, that ‘sed’ after ‘dominis nostris piissimis' and ‘Constantino’ in the first line was explicative but his addition cannot be retained, as he did not realise that all the chronological indications point towards the period before the death of Heraclius. It is his years of reign and post-consulate that one needs to supply in the lacuna:

Datum R(omae) Id. Maii imperantibus dominis nostris piissimis sed [Heraclio anno xxx post consulatum eius xxix,⁶⁷ et] Constantino anno xxvi post consulatum eius anno viii, et Heraclio anno viii, David et Martino caesaribus sed David quidem anno secundo et Martino anno primo, indictione xii.

Such formulae are well known from papyri dating from the very last years of the Roman rule in Egypt and have been recently much discussed.⁶⁸ The difficulty, in this case, is that its elements are not consistent:

the 26th year of Constantine iii corresponds to 22 January 638–21 January 639,

his 8th post-consulate to 1 January–31 December 639,

the 8th year of Heraklonas also to 1 January–31 December 639,

the second year of David as Caesar to 4 July 639–3 July 640,

the exact date of the elevation of Martin as Caesar is not known, but it took place between January and November 639,⁶⁹

and the 12th indiction to 1 September 638–31 August 639.

Despite its incoherence, the formula has all the hallmarks of authenticity: beyond its complexity, it includes the names of the two little-known Caesars, and counts the regnal years of Heraklonas from his appointment as Caesar on 1 January 632, not from his coronation as Augustus on 4 July 638, while correctly classifying him as a full emperor.⁷⁰ In conjunction with the day given at the beginning of the formula, the indiction suggests the date of 15 May 639. But a date one year later, 15 May 640, is a better fit, even if it only satisfies two indications contained in the formula: the years of Caesar David and perhaps of Caesar Martin. These two dates, however, are the least likely to have undergone corruption: both numerals are spelled out in full, differently from all the others that could have easily lost their ‘i's in manuscript transmission.⁷¹ While perhaps not a smoking gun, the original of the Meaux formula comes with much likelihood from a document issued by Pope John iv in May 640, that is, several months before the date of his ordination proposed by Duchesne (24 December 640), and thus supports the chronology proposed in this paper.⁷² Incidentally, it also allows us to narrow down the date of the elevation of Martin to the dignity of Caesar to the period between 16 May and 8 November 639.⁷³ It also perhaps throws some light on the early days of the monothelete controversy: the intriguing omission of the regnal years of Heraclius may reflect the estrangement between Rome and the court of Constantinople resulting from Heraclius’ attempts to impose the Ekthesis on the Roman Church.⁷⁴

Finally, no document of Pope Theodore is dated to his last year in the chronology of Duchesne (648/9). In general, very few of his documents are known from originals, incidental mentions or later forgeries, suggesting that the Palestinian pope was more interested in the great politics of the monothelete controversy than in the affairs of the Western Churches.

This survey shows that there is no obstacle to the modification of the dates of several seventh-century bishops of Rome proposed in this article. Even if this change does not have cataclysmic consequences, it provides a more secure point of reference for historians of the early medieval Christian world and allows a better contextualisation of documents pertaining to Italy, Gaul, Britain and Ireland. It also results in significant modifications to the chronology of the beginnings of the monothelete controversy and thus throws a new light on the seventh-century schism between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome.⁷⁵ For now, it is fitting to end with a homage to Louis Duchesne and his edition of the Liber pontificalis, as irreplaceable today as it was at the time of its publication 135 years ago. This little gloss to his chronological framework is a proof of this.