Free Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes; Fourth Edition by Eamon Duffy

shared religious loyalty to the Apostles, and Damasus encouraged him by sending him relics of the Apostles – the silver casket in which they came to Milan from Rome survives in the church of San Nazaro. Ecclesiastically, Ambrose’s northern Italy was as yet a raw frontier. Its handful ofbishoprics were scattered over vast, largely pagan areas, and nothing bound them together, or to Milan, except their common allegiance to Rome and Rome’s Apostles. Ambrose’s dominance in the region reminds us of the limitations of the papacy’s leadership in the West, but it also reminds us of the powerful symbolic and practical need for that leadership. If the fourth-century papacy had not existed, it would have had to be invented.
    IV T HE B IRTH OF P APAL R OME
    The conversion of Constantine had propelled the bishops of Rome into the heart of the Roman establishment. Already powerful and influential men, they now became grandees on a par with the wealthiest senators in the city. Bishops all over the Roman world would now be expected to take on the role of judges, governors, great servants of state. Even in provincial Africa Augustine would complain bitterly of the devouring secular responsibilities of the bishop. In the case of the Bishop of Rome, those functions were complicated by his leadership of the Church in a pagan capital which was the symbolic centre of the world, the focus of the Roman people’s sense of identity. Constantine washed his hands of Rome in 324, and departed to create a Christian capital in the East. It would fall to the popes to create a Christian Rome.
    They set about it by building churches, converting the modest tituli (community church centres) into something grander, and creating new and more public foundations, though to begin with nothing that rivalled the great imperial basilicas at the Lateran and St Peter’s. Over the next hundred years their churches advanced into the city – Pope Mark’s (336) San Marco within a stone’s throw of the Capitol, Pope Liberius’ massive basilica on the Esquiline (now Santa Maria Maggiore), Pope Damasus’ Santa Anastasia at the foot of the Palatine, Pope Julius’ foundation on the site of the present Santa Maria in Trastevere, Santa Pudenziana near the Baths of Diocletian under Pope Anastasius (399–401), Santa Sabina among the patrician villas on the Aventine under Pope Celestine (422—32).
    These churches were a mark of the upbeat confidence of post-Constantinian Christianity in Rome. The popes were potentates, and began to behave like it. Damasus perfectly embodied this growing grandeur. An urbane career cleric like his predecessor Liberius, athome in the wealthy salons of the city, he was also a ruthless power-broker, and he did not hesitate to mobilise both the city police and the Christian mob to back up his rule. His election had been contested, and he had prevailed by sheer force of numbers – as the Liber Pontificalis put it, ‘they confirmed Damasus because he was the stronger and had the greater number of supporters; that was how Damasus was confirmed’. 19 Damasus’ grass-roots supporters included squads of the notoriously hard-boiled Roman fossores , catacomb diggers, and they massacred 137 followers of the rival Pope Ursinus in street-fighting that ended in a bloody siege of what is now the church of Santa Maria Maggiore.
    Damasus and Ursinus were competing for high stakes: as the pagan historian Ammianus Marcellinus commented sardonically,
    I do not deny that men who covet this office in order to fulfil their ambitions may well struggle for it with every resource at their disposal. For once they have obtained it they are ever after secure, enriched with offerings from the ladies, riding abroad seated in their carriages, splendidly arrayed, giving banquets so lavish that they surpass the tables of royalty… 20
    Ammianus’ gibe about gifts from rich women was no random shot. An imperial decree in 370 forbade clerics from visiting the houses