Gregory I
Pope and Doctor of the Catholic Church (c. 540–604), known as Gregory the Great, born in Rome into a senatorial family of great wealth and Christian tradition, he served as prefect of the city before renouncing civil life to found a monastery in his own family mansion on the Caelian Hill and adopt the Benedictine rule, a period he himself recalled as the happiest of his life. Sent as papal representative to Constantinople and later recalled to Rome, he was elected pope in 590 at a moment of deep crisis: the city was ravaged by plague, Lombard invasions threatened Italy, and Byzantine imperial authority had weakened drastically in the West, forcing Gregory to assume de facto civil and military responsibilities —negotiating with the Lombards, organising grain supplies and administering the Church's vast patrimonial estates— which consolidated the papacy's temporal role as the governing power in Rome amid the effective absence of imperial rule. Gregory is regarded as the last of the four great Latin Doctors of the Church (alongside Ambrose, Jerome and Augustine) thanks to his vast literary output, especially the Dialogues, a collection of the lives and miracles of Italian saints (including the most influential biography of Saint Benedict), the Moralia on Job, an extensive allegorical and moral commentary on the biblical book of Job, and the Pastoral Rule, a practical manual for bishops on the spiritual governance of souls that exerted a lasting influence on the medieval episcopate for centuries. Gregory actively promoted the mission to evangelise England, sending the monk Augustine of Canterbury in 597 to convert the Anglo-Saxons, an effort that laid the foundations of the medieval English Church. His figure symbolically marks the transition from late antiquity to the Latin Middle Ages, and tradition credits him —probably in exaggerated but not unfounded fashion— with a decisive role in systematising the liturgical chant later known as Gregorian chant.