Pope St. Nicholas I
820 CE–867 CE · Rome
Nicholas I, called 'the Great,' was the most forceful pope of the ninth century, asserting papal authority over kings, bishops, and patriarchs alike. He compelled the Frankish king Lothair II to abandon his attempt to divorce his queen, overruling the bishops who had complied. He upheld the appeal rights of bishops to Rome against powerful metropolitans, championing papal primacy. In the East he clashed with Patriarch Photius of Constantinople over the contested Constantinopolitan succession and the Bulgarian church, a dispute that sharpened the developing Eastern-Western estrangement. Drawing on a robust theology of Petrine authority, Nicholas helped define the high medieval claims of the Roman see.
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RomeרומאItaly
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Rome in this era
Between the 8th and 15th centuries Rome was the seat of the popes and capital of the Papal States, which grew from the Frankish king Pepin's grant of 756; Charlemagne was crowned emperor in St Peter's in 800. The city shrank far below its ancient size, and from 1309 to 1377 the popes resided at Avignon before returning to Rome.
About Rome
Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
In Rome at the same time
Pope St. Leo IV, Pope Formosus, Pope Stephen VI, Pope Benedict III, Pope Sergius II, Pope Gregory IV
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Pope St. Nicholas I’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Pope St. Leo IV, Pope Formosus, Pope Stephen VI, Pope Benedict III, Pope Sergius II, Pope Gregory IV, Pope Valentine, Pope Eugene II, Pope St. Paschal I
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Pope St. Nicholas I’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.