Pope Severinus
?–640 CE · Rome
Severinus, a Roman son of a man named Avienus, was elected promptly after Honorius's death in 638 but waited well over a year for imperial confirmation. Emperor Heraclius withheld approval, pressing the pope-elect to endorse the Monothelite formula of the Ecthesis; Severinus's representatives refused. During the impasse, imperial troops under the exarch's agents are reported to have plundered the Lateran treasury. Finally confirmed and consecrated in 640, Severinus reigned only about two months before dying. His brief tenure exemplifies the conflict between Rome's doctrinal stance and Byzantine imperial religious policy in the seventh century.
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RomeרומאItaly
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Rome in this era
Rome passed from weakened Western emperors into Ostrogothic hands under Theodoric (493) and then was bitterly contested during the Byzantine reconquest (535–554), yet its bishop — Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) — steered the church, organized missions, and preserved classical learning through the turmoil.
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 Gregory the Great, Pope Boniface III, Pope John IV, Pope Honorius I, Pope Boniface V, Pope St. Adeodatus I
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Pope Severinus’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Pope Severinus’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.