 Now, every visitor to Rome knows that the Pope in Latin is the Pontifex Maximus, one only has to confront the Trevi Fountain to be confronted by a superfluity of, to the case of Maximus, presenting themselves as in triumphal form all over this 18th century fountain. The fountain replaced 15th century fountain. This is the earliest depiction of it. Historians usually point to this first Trevi Fountain of 1453, during the Pontificate of Nicholas V, as the beginning, as the point at which the Popes first started calling themselves the Pontifex Maximus. But how and why did the Pope come to adopt what had originally been a pagan and imperial title? The Trevi Fountain is fed by the Aquavirgo, a Roman aqueduct. It's a nearby, just around the corner indeed, from the fountain. The aqueduct is still visible with an inscription commemorating its restoration by Claudius in 46 A.D. And in this contemporary pair of contemporary illustrations, you can see on the left that the aqueduct is made to look like a fountain, as if one had inspired the construction of the other. Indeed, the basin that you can see in the depiction on the left was created at a later date to compound or tighten the parallels between the two. But in fact, what you see on the left is merely a set of arches supporting an aqueduct, whereas what you see on the right is in fact a fountain. So what we can see in putting these two contemporary 17th century images together, an argument for the origins of the papal title, Pontifex Maximus, in the direct imitation of classical epigraphy, in this inscription on the top commemorating Claudius's restoration of the aqueduct. Claudius is called amongst other titles, Pontifex Maximus. But Milton, in Paradise Lost, reminds us that Pontifex Maximus admits of more than one interpretation. For Milton, the pontifical represented the ability of the papacy to bridge hell and bring it onto earth. For him, the Pontifex was a symbol of sin and death brought about by the papacy. So this contributed quality of the title, Pontifex Maximus, gives our question its edge, how and why adopt a pagan and imperial title for the papacy. Thomas Hobbes, also writing in the 17th century, speculated that Constantine, the Emperor Constantine, had transferred imperial religious authority to the pope. After converting to Christianity, he had handed over the authority represented by the title to the pope. And as successors to this pope, Sylvester, then justified their supremacy as bishops of the city of Rome, in particular the imperial capital, by employing this repurposed title for themselves. But modern historians have generally looked to the Renaissance revival of classical epigraphy, or generally, as the motivator for the popes adopting this title for themselves. He represented here in the prison of Ciriapra D'Ancona. And yet this merely raises a new question. Why in the 15th century did the pope begin to see himself in the title of Pontifex Maximus? If he had not done so before, why at this moment did he see himself as the Pontifex Maximus? And indeed it leads to a subsidiary question, which came first, the development of an imperial papacy, a papacy which had an imperial identity, or the papal adoption of an imperial title. The text Maximus is current as the title for the pope by the High Renaissance. And indeed Erasmus used it when writing to Pope Leo the Tent, for example, used it in his letters. But it doesn't occur to him ever in his usage of it that it was a historically derived title, as we can see here in this passage from his later dialogue, The Cicerovianus. In this passage, Erasmus is emphasizing the gap that exists between his world and that of Roman antiquity as part of an argument as to why an arch-Cicerovian vocabulary, a vocabulary derived entirely from Cicero, cannot really be applied. He makes the point that things such as the Pontifex Maximus no longer exist. He equates the Pontifex Maximus neither with the hope and his capacity as the head cult of the chief Roman deity, the Flamendialis, or in his capacity as the overseer and the head of the Roman captain, the sumus chivitatis perfectus. So Erasmus highlights here a weakness in a historical ethnographic explanation. That is to say a weakness in an explanation that has the Pope seeing himself as the Pontifex Maximus in ancient inscriptions. Nowadays though, the usage doesn't even present itself, or it doesn't even register as problematic. Papa, one of the other Latin terms for the Pope is also, of course, the Italian word for the Pope, and basically now has an Italian connotation, Papa Francesco, Papa Benedetto, for example. So Pontifex Maximus is the Latin term most casually accepted as simply meeting Pope. And yet it is to this day not part of the official chitulature, despite its usage online. It's not part of the official papal title. So, what questions are we asking here? We've set out the historical question, but there's some other questions that I want us to have in mind as we're going forward. One of them is about looking and seeing. These inscriptions of Pontifex Maximus are around and round from antiquity. So how do people start seeing the Pope in a term commonly used in these ancient inscriptions? People previously saw the inscriptions, but didn't necessarily see themselves in them. And as we shall see, even in the 15th century, Popes are only seen in the inscriptions after the title has been developed by humans for literary reasons, and then adopted, but for reasons entirely removed from that epigraphic presence. So historical epigraphic explanations, you'll see, are postfect. Another question I want us to have in mind is the relationship between style and ideas. So we tend to think normally that style is posterior to ideas. That is, we have a thought, we have an idea, and then we think of the correct style in which we want to present it. But in the Renaissance, and indeed in other ages, where rhetoric ruled, that need not be the case. So our story is also a case study in the social and cultural implications of literary values, the implications of the revived classical Latin of the Renaissance humanists. And in probing here further the relationship between literature and epigraphy and literature and history, we also get at the historicity of the papacy itself. How the papacy began to be conceived as a historical institution. Go back to the beginning. The Romans credited the term Pontifex Maximus, created the office of the Pontifex Maximus to the creation of Pneuma Pompilius, the, well, at least partly legendary, as second king of the Romans in the legal period, and often presented as a law giver, as a creator of institutions. As you can see here, Varro, in his dictionary of the Latin language, presents approaches the title through etymology, whereas Livy and his antiquarian history of Rome much more focuses on the role of individuals in the creation of this office. In practice, the Pontifex Maximus was an elected office. He was the chief of the College of Pontiffs, charged with oversight of religious matters, so that, if you like, the chief operating officer of Roman religion. It wasn't technically the supreme priesthood, nor indeed the priesthood of the supreme deity. Jupiter had his own personal, dedicated priest, the Flamendialis, who would qualify for that role. But it was a position of high status in Republican society, and it was, for example, key to the rise of Julius Caesar, who famously borrowed a colossal amount of money to purchase the office for himself. And having done so, advertised it on a series of coins issued in his name, with the equipment of Roman religion displayed quite prominently on it. And you can see on the coin on the left, Caesar is represented wearing the headdress of the Pontifex Maximus. The term became part of the package of titles and offices, which the first emperor, the founder of the Principate Augustus, took up unto himself, along with various other offices, the king of the people, and so on and so forth. You can see here in his race, Gesti, his autobiography, his discussion of his accepting, taking on this title. He did this in part to present himself as the heir to Julius Caesar, was part of legitimizing his position as the successor to Caesar. But Augustus took this particular role less for power as such than because one of its functions had to do with morality, social morality. And he used his role as Pontifex Maximus as the foundation for his series of attempted moral reforms of Roman society. The other thing that the Pontifex statue presents in wearing full robes of the Pontifex Maximus. Thereafter, the term becomes a fundamental part of imperial titulature down to the late empire. One of millions of examples of board of enjoy in which the emperor Claudius is given this title among many, many other titles, Victor Triumph for the figure of this or that group. Now, historians have long accepted that the Christian emperors maintained the title even as they interfered quite actively in the Christian religion. Early modern historians often argue that the moment Constantine converted to Christianity he seeping in his successor ceased to call themselves Pontifex Maximus, but in fact it's quite clear that the fourth century Christian emperors continued to call themselves the administrator of head of the pagan Roman religion. However, by the late fourth century it seems that this situation was no longer tenable and the historian Zosimus, writing in the sixth century but looking back informs us or tells us that Gratian was the last to use it. It's part of a somewhat labored joke that Zosimus isn't a great joke teller but he makes an attempt in this case to indicate that because Gratian has declined to accept the robes of the Pontifex Maximus there will be a new Pontifex Maximus who is the emperor Maximus who's about to kill him. So that's the explanation for that particular criticism. So, you're looking at in addition the last known epigraphic use of the title which is an inscription commemorating the rebuilding or the restoration of the Ponticestio in Rome in 1770 by the three emperors representing the first valence and creation all of whom call themselves Pontifex Maximus amongst many other titles. It's important to note this context of this last epigraphic usage because this is also the last bridge built in Rome until the Renaissance. There are no bridges built after this for another thousand years. Alan Cameron's pointed out recently that a sort of replacement title started being used in Cretus, sort of distinguished Pontif, something like that was used occasionally by Christian emperors in the 6th century. That's a benefit. Now what did not happen was a straightforward handoff at this point of the title from the emperor to the pope as is of course suggested by the famous Forge document the Donation of Constantine in which the Constantine after having been cured of lack of sea by the Pope Sylvester hands over sort of supreme authority to the papacy. So this is not what happens. Early Christian titular term is a complicated messy problem especially in the Latin language because many of the titles are translations from Greek terminology. The hierarchy of the early church was in flux, practice varied from place to place. As long as we've worked on this problem it has indicated that the term Pontifex from where we get heard was very early in use for bishop and indeed for Christ and it came into the Latin language in 2nd century translations of early Christian texts from Greek into Latin. But in fact the early Christian usage of the term Pontifex maximus is actually as a term of abuse for the pope. You can see here Titolien is a great author of sort of angry denunciations and this is one of many and he is claiming at any rate that someone he calls the Episcoporum probably therefore Pope, Felix I by chronology has allegedly issued an edict saying it's basically fine to commit adultery or fornicate as long as you say sorry afterward. I mean this seems unlikely but in any case as you can see he's as the Pontifex but wait for it he's calling himself a Pontifex maximus so it's clearly a term of abuse. The closest that we have in this early period to an exclusively papal title is Summa's Pontifex the highest it emerges in the 5th century under the Pope Leia I and it's part and parcel of the doctrine of heterine supremacy the idea that the pontif in Rome because of Peter is the supreme pontif in Christendom the basic point here is that Pontifex maximus is not used in the middle ages as a title for the pope but there is medieval usage of Pontifex maximus as a label for others and it falls into three streams that we're trying to have a quick look at the first stream we might call the historical stream it's used in discussion of the Roman past it has an essentially neutral connotation but it can be positive here in the text on the left Augustus is recalling a Pontifex maximus who was a virtuous figure it's part of his much larger project of carving out a secular space for Roman officialdom to find a way for Roman officialdom to be neutral either good nor bad it's quite separate, a secular world as separate from the world determined by God's plan from the 9th century visitors to Rome record pagan monuments the manuscript on the right is the famous Eindselen what it said the pilgrim from Eindselen who arrives in Rome reports many of the inscriptions pagan inscriptions which he sees but he made this record of people observing these inscriptions does not feature any particular comment on them you can see here this is the beginning of the inscription we looked at a moment ago on the Ponticesti the last inscription featuring the term these visitors didn't evidently recognize anything people in what they saw or if they did they didn't say so now the second stream of usage is what we might call historical or exegetical it originates in the translation of the term high priest from Hebrew or Greek into Latin you can see here and this is taken from Abid it's used occasionally for Christ but typically for old and new testament figures in the Latin Chronicle tradition so any Latin Chronicle text will when it treats Old Testament history pre-Christian history will use the term as you can see here Pontifex maximus of the dues the third category is certain special contextual uses denoting an office perhaps or perhaps instead for rhetorical emphasis in this example here the historian Wittekin of Corvée writing about the Saxons in the 10th century describes the coronation of Otto I in Germany as king this takes place in 936 he doesn't go to Rome until 962 you can see here Wittekin calls the archbishop of Mainz who crans Otto I calls him Pontifex maximus and if you glance through this text you can see it's full classicizing references even the fact that Aachen is said to be near a town that's founded by Julius Caesar and their magistrates and so on and so forth this is a whole classicizing agenda literary agenda to underpin the imperial aspirations of the Saxons other uses of this sort might be a bit more pointed Pontifex maximus as the best bishop rather than specifically the pope in other words making an argument that our bishop is just as important as the pope a good example of this is Agnellus of Rebena who calls the bishop of Rebena the Pontifex maximus and probably what he's doing is saying to Rome I see yours some as Pontifex and I raise you a Pontifex maximus so equally the Pontifex maximus can simply denote a special or otherwise distinguished pope and collects just a second from the end becomes bishop local history writers called the Pontifex maximus for example one potential exception to this is a small collection of texts that come out of Montecassino all of them are connected to the circle of Petrus Diacnis otherwise known as Petrus Bibliotecarius who's the resident librarian and antiquary in the mid 12th century and as you can see from these two examples Pontifex maximus is used of historical popes and especially in the second example you can see classicism the sort of classicizing literary agenda seems to be indicated but these are real outliers they pop up in the circle of this individual and they sort of go nowhere they disappear after his demise another way to approach this is to note instead key points where the term isn't used for the pope and there are many instances where we might expect it to be where we don't find it the whole rhetoric of Petrion's supremacy the donation of Constantine the in-house set of biographies of the pope, the Libra Pontificalis papal bulls, papal communications of all sort it is never used in these contexts nor indeed the literature of the investiture contest papal imperial tensions none of these instances where the papacy is attempting to assert itself in the secular sphere having more than just spiritual power none of these instances does the term appear so the obvious question is why not basic problem is one of worldliness that Pontifex maximus is as we've said a pagan and imperial title that it's connected to a world rather than spiritual dominion the basic articulation of this problematic is to be found in the writing of Pope Galatius the first in Pope 492-6 on what King comes to be known as the two swords doctrine of the separation the equal separation of powers as you can see here in reviewing Old Testament history before Christ some men were both priests and kings famously Melchizedek being an example of this and then the devil copied this amongst his own people that is to say the pagan Romans in this context such that the emperors called themselves maximi Pontifex each one called themselves Pontifex maximus and therefore they were claiming to be priests and kings at the same time but now that Christ has come the emperor isn't a Pontifex anymore nor does the Pontifex claim to be an emperor it's the two swords doctrine so you can see here the same ideological objection which we may imagine motivated the emperor's refusal of the title separation of powers now the two swords doctrine endures to the age of Petrarch 14th century and the term Pontifex maximus gets used in it we can see here rather unusual text 14th century antiquarian and of course here at large Giovanni Cavallini the first reader of Livy one of the first readers of Livy after antiquity and he treats he discusses Roman history in the context of this reading and here he deploys the term Pontifex maximus in his discussion of why the pope should be based in Rome rather than in Avignon or elsewhere and you can see what he does is through the rather odd analogy of the two charnel houses and their location in one district Monti he has one of these represent the authority of Caesar what he calls the first monarch of the Romans the emperor in other words and the other of these houses represent the authority of the Pontifex maximus so as you can see in the second paragraph he goes on to say that these two houses in Rome one of them looks to the authority of Imperium the other looks to the authority of Pontifichium if you like so it's a rather labored analogy one doesn't normally think of charnel houses as sources of food and sustenance for winged birds but nonetheless this is how they're presented and therefore imperial and sacred authority are separate Caesar versus Metellus but both belong in Rome and we can see in his switch of terms that Pontifex maximus in the first paragraph becomes the historical precedent for some of the Pontifex in the second paragraph now if there is a medieval context for the subsequent papal development of the term it starts with Isidore of Seville a great etymologist dictionary assembler of the 6th and 7th century in his etymologies a great medieval encyclopedia in which Caesar decided the ambiguous usage of Pontifex maximus in his general discussion of ecclesiastical hierarchy it's not really clear if you read especially the first five lines it's not clear what office he's talking about characteristically he's straddling all testament and classical knowledge is it often sort of follows the method of not quite knowing how everything fits together but knowing that he has to fit everything together so as you can see the Pontifex in the second paragraph and the Pontifex maximus it's all rolled into one so the Pope is not really his concern here but his definition is so wide that it could be the Pope or he could be saying that any bishop could also equally well be the Pontifex medicines so his other ambiguity is such that the meaning of this definition must depend on the assumptions the reader brought to it the most important medieval reader of Isidore the great canon lawyer who quotes him in extensa when treating church hierarchy of his own but if you look here again he's discussing the so many pontificates clearly the Pope's and he passes directly from considering the Pope to Isidore's treatment consequently any reader of Isidore in ration would conclude that the Pontifex is the Pontifex maximus is the Pope Renaissance humanists begin to use the title Pontifex maximus from the Pope in a literary context towards the end of the 14th century the first usage that we have found it's tricky to talk of first usage in this context but its first appearance in the record that we have is in Boccaccio's fragmentary life of Petrarch it's not finished it's not one of his major works and it occurs simply as a marker of date just to talk about Petrarch as a way of identifying something happening in the pontificate or under the Pontifex maximus Benedict XII there's no obvious agenda it then starts to appear again in one of the earliest bodies of writing where it seems to have a bit of a tradition in the letters of Leonardo Bruni the early Florentine humanism right from after the period when he arrives at the papal courier and begins working as a secretary for the Pope he doesn't seem to have read Boccaccio's life in Petrarch or at least doesn't seem to be alluding directly to him he doesn't use it as a source in some of his works on Petrarch so it's unclear exactly where he's getting it from but he's not the only person to be using this title in the period copyists even rather deeply into the 15th century as in this example still find his usage to be quite strange pagan imperial title being used for the Pope and we put this as a good example of this this is a copy of Leonardo Bruni's letter collection from the mid 15th century Bruni is writing about how he was perceived eagerly and heard eagerly by the Pontifex Maximus and but the scribe has interpreted the abbreviations differently and has changed what would be Maximo to Maxime so he's made it an adverbial expression turned it into a neutral adverbial expression so he hasn't instead of being heard by the Pontifex Maximus he hasn't been heard by the Pontifex in particular because the copyist isn't really comfortable with this usage it doesn't recognize it what can we say about Bruni's usage well it's unintrusive like in that previous context it doesn't really add any particular meaning to the weather it can be prominent but it's incidental these two examples which seem to be amongst his earlier usages one is in response to a letter of recommendation and the other is in response to an offer by Nicola Nicoli the ardor of humanist taste in Florence the big snob of the city who kind of suggests that he might want to take up the job of chancellor in his hometown and Bruni elegantly refuses he doesn't use it always in all of his correspondence and never when writing on behalf of the Pope and particularly with a select set of avant-garde, Florentine and humanist correspondence this is an important source for the proliferation of Quantifex Maximus as the title for the Pope appears to be Bruni's magnum opus his history of the Florentine people this is written between 1415 and 1442 when the entire work is published as the city's official history but the first six books are already published in 1428 and the first book was written by 1416 but the date 1428 is important for when this first appears Bruni's history of the Florentine people is a remarkable and important work he models himself off of Livy and he is choose along with his adoption of a classicizing language he is choose all post classical words for clarities there is no Episcopus there is no Papa there is an Archbishop's he refers to with the Latin term and the Pope is only termed Quantifex for Quantifex Maximus his first usage in that work in this history and thus in the first book which appears for the public in 1428 is in his narrative of Italy's salvation by Pope Leo I in 452 when Pope Leo turns Attila the Hun and stops him from progressing further towards Europe it fits the pattern of Bruni's extreme classicizing tendency and as we can see from this passage it comes attached to no pro-Papal ideology in fact it comes in the context of a brutal attack on papal arrogance now I said that this is a Florentine history but Bruni is very concerned about the extent, nature and origins of papal power because those things have implications for Florentine independence indeed he was committed to representing papal power as a break from the Roman Empire not a continuation thus a break from the Roman Empire to which Florence was certainly subject but this is not a continuation which makes Florence continually subject so his solution as we can see in this passage also in that first book is to present the papacy as a historical institution of the Constantinian settlement so what happens when Constantine converts to Christianity and establishes Christianity as the Roman state religion so thus the papacy in Bruni's telling here is dependent on the empire but I want to draw our attention to that final passage because it includes this kind of barbed remark about the canon lawyers of the Curio after he makes this case he says well I submit these questions to the judgment of those more learned in canon law, more learned in the use of Pontificium the law of the Pontus which probably suggests that Bruni's own source for some of this is in fact Gratian that we saw earlier and Isidore's usage in Gratian because Bruni has been spending about 10 years surrounded by canon lawyers at the Roman Curio when he writes this passage but that said the neutral linking of Pontifex and Pontifex Maximus to Pope as Gratian did is perfectly amenable to Bruni's classicizing literary agenda which is what he cares about now immediately after the publication of those first six books Bruni's usage seems to be picked up by his followers in 1428 onward major Florentine and other Italian humans begin using the title quite widely in their own work Francesca Fiellova, Anto Barcellini and so on up here is the first usage of the title for the Pope and in fact it's in England when the papal nutcio Pietro D'Amonte writes to the abbot of Sinaldo telling him about the great success that Eugenius IV of Pontifex Maximus had in uniting the Eastern and the Roman Churches a success that didn't last very long but that's the usage other humanists right after 1428 start developing more distinctive usages Lorenzo Vala addresses the Pope as Pontifex Maximus when he dedicates his treatise on the true good to Eugenius IV but already five years later in 1439 he's demonstrating his sensitivity to the title's historical significance when he demolishes the donation of Constantine the forged document which purported to effect the transfer of secular power and supremacy over the Roman Empire to the Pope it's a philological tour de force and one of his one of the things he latches on to is the historical error in not calling Constantine Pontifex Maximus which the forger reveals his late date by not having called Constantine this because Vala knows well that Constantine held the title and hadn't renounced it the forger could fail precisely to establish a historical foundation for papal titulature by having an imperial Pontifex Maximus transfer the title to a papal sumus Pontifex that would have been an ideal solution for the forger but the forger knew no history so he wasn't able to do that so I draw our attention to this because I think it still shows the importance here looking at the Constantinian moment is key for the nature of the papacy as an institution but differing from Bruni Vala is using the title in the course of making a historical argument our most important literary usage by a Renaissance humanist however is that of the polymath architect, writer writer of treatises athlete Leon Batiste Alberti now Alberti uses Pontifex for bishop always that represents a break from how Bruni uses the term Bruni used Prisul Alberti calls all bishops Pontifex he even writes a treatise on bishops which he calls Pontifex now he also often uses it for the pope both for bishops and for the pope but in his famous treatise on architecture Durei Edificatoria as you can see here I put two passages from that he uses Pontifex Maximus exclusively as a title for the pope in Durei Edificatoria it's often an incidental usage as we can see here but it's the first systematic usage of the title for the pope now this development is significantly this development in a treatise on architecture an in a treatise on architecture that was shown to Pope Nicholas V is crucial for our story because this is the point at which the humanist literary practice that I've been discussing starts to affect the faith the most notable example of this and the one of which we began is the restoration of the aquavirgo, the aquavirginate and the building of the Trevi Pantum by Nicholas or under Nicholas V in 1453 Alberti was in Rome at this time and almost certainly involved in the project and so we can now say that these two images that we looked at earlier are not in fact related which is to say the 15th century inscription was not inspired by the nearby classical exemplar rather it emerged from this literary tradition dating back certainly to the beginning of the 15th century if not into the 14th which we've been tracing and the tradition, the literary tradition entered high humanist architectural circles through the person and the writing of Alberti and the construction of this in particular the setting up of this inscription in 1453 and indeed the year 1453 sees a papal roll out of the new title at building works across the city not least at Santa Stefano Rotondo across the vestibule you can see here linked to Alberti's associate, Bernardo Rosalina the text here commemorates how the church of the Proto-Marver Stephen which had fallen into disrepair was entirely restored by Nicholas 5th Pontifex Maximus in 1453 and indeed this pope stamping his arms and titles across the city is remarked on by the contemporary diarist Stefano Vincenzo indeed in his pontificate there's a general usage of the title as of Pontifex Maximus as the papal title not just in monumental public contexts like the fountains and churches but here on the left in the funerary slabs for Innocent the 7th a pope in 1404 to 6th as I illegally photographed it in the back and brought it you can see both Nicholas the 5th calls himself Pontifex but also calls his predecessor Pontifex here on the right you can see similarly a funerary slabs set up by Nicholas the 5th for Giovanni Padgio which again calls the pope by this title however under Nicholas the 5th's immediate predecessor Eugenius IV we see an initial private take up of the title and perhaps this is what we should expect the term was in use in humanist circles since the beginning of the 15th century and it finds itself gradually being deployed in new context so here what we're looking at is the Del Valle family tomb on the capital and in the various inscriptions they're hard to see in this photo they're there, it has to be the Pontifex Maximus references start to appear from the 1440s during the Pontific of Eugenius IV and indeed we can forge a direct connection between these private actors taking up the term and the circle of Eugenius IV himself on the left you're looking at the tomb of Antonio Rideau Pectus Gurbes, Prefect of the city it may ultimately take this form in the 1470s but the point is that he had a direct connection to the pope you can see on the right the Fiorrete Doris on the Vatican that is Antonio Rideau leading the representatives of Rome out of the city to greet Eugenius IV and Segasment of Luxembourg on their arrival interestingly though on the doors Eugenius IV is just called Pampa now as always we have to allow for survivor vagaries of survival and loss we have one possible employer when from 1433 in which Eugenius IV may have called himself Pontifex Maximus is preserved in the Silighe, the epigraphic collection of Ketris Sabina it's commemorating the construction of a dorm of the city of Rome and in Rome however this is a sort of general struggle for control over the university between the papacy and the city and various other actors so it's actually a bit difficult to pin them initiative for this inscription nonetheless we might construct for ourselves two stages a two stage process in the papal adoption of the title private initiative beginning under Eugenius IV and papal usage continuing under Nicholas V so what are the implications of this well first a little bit more history after Nicholas V the title steadily becomes a more and more prominent part of papal epigraphy the papal epigraphic titulature and it begins to appear farther afield particularly interesting case is in the two tombs for Nicholas V's mother one in Salzana and one in Spolet which seems to be early usages of the title outside of Rome one of the most famous examples is this one right here under Pius II who sets up this loggia in Siena the loggia is a classic feature of Tuscan aristocratic architecture and this represents his family's return to prominence on the back of his papacy and is a major architectural statement and across the front is inscribed to Pius II Pontifex and Exynos the title is also seemingly used on his tomb inscription the monument has been moved it's now in Saint-Beret de la Valle and it's a composite monument but the original parts have that on the earliest parts have that on the main inscription now let's move the generation later by this time people around the pope are now looking for an imperial explanation for a title that has by this point already been adopted so for our story the most symbolically important statement of this new imperial ideology connected to the title is that by Sixtus before and in 1475 with the opening of the Ponte Sisto the Ponte Sisto the first bridge built in Rome since later antiquity built on ancient foundations but this is the first new bridge since the Ponte Cestio that we saw before and this is actually quite an exciting moment for us and hopefully for all of you because here are the Ponte Sisto inscriptions these are the original inscriptions which were previously at the middle of the Ponte Sisto were moved in restoration and since went missing and we are very pleased to be able to show these photographs because we have discovered them and they are now resting peacefully in a private area of the gardens of the Villa Borghese and they are being cared for and restored but this is an exciting this is the first time these have been revealed in their current state these inscriptions are written by the humanist and prefect of the Vacchi Library by Telemio Platini Platini also wrote Humanistic Lives of the Popes and which he began with Christ who will be referred to as both Emperor and Ponte Fex so in that context Sixtus who appears in that work as he appears as Ponte Fex Maximus in these inscriptions is presented as Christ's successor as Emperor and Ponte Fex another important antiquarian manuscript from the period even goes that next step of identifying the Cyplician Ridge over which the ancient Ponte Fex Maximus seemed to have some kind of role of oversight and maintenance with the rebuilt Ponte Sisto Ponte Sisto associates this rebuilt bridge built on ancient foundations with the seven bridge but that also suggests some of this imperial idea matching going on in this period so basically it's the succession of developments leading us to this point that finally makes that association with imperial titulature easier and suggests to us why it was Ponte Fex Maximus among all of the imperial titles that exist in ancient usage and in ancient inscriptions that became the Pope's own imperial title but it's also a matter of location so where we are standing here we're standing on the Ponte Garibaldi which is a modern bridge for traffic over the Tyvelyn road we're looking downstream at the Ponte Cestio and upstream towards the Ponte Sisto so these bridges were then immediate neighbors and in fact they would have been even more visible to each other and even more striking in their landscape before the embankment of the Tyvelyn towards the end of the 19th century when the bridges were longer and the area around them was lower so they would have been even more noticeable to the viewer and if you are on one of them you would be looking in one way to see Gratianus Ponte Fex Maximus and the other way to Sixtus Ponte Fex Maximus from this moment and through this secure route the Ponte Fex Maximus was back as the imperial bridge builder of antiquity Romanus thus construed had a major effect on the development of the imperial tendency to borrow the words from Pope Sixtus' medal that we saw two slides ago the Ponte Fex Maximus was a sacri cultur with cura reo publicarum that is the care the responsibility for public affairs that may be reo publicarum but really in the plural life alluding to this responsibility for two republics the Roman Republic and the Christian Republic both in peace and in war especially in that latter respect it reaches Xenon under Sixtus' nephew Julius II at the beginning of the 16th century the Rasmus when in Rome was once shocked to hear Pope Julius the dress in an oration adds the Roman maximus and described as thundering like the chief god of the Roman pantheon but the success of this ideology is why we take the papal adoption of this one imperial title for granted yet arguments about history and precedent began here what the historical precedent for papal power is would be central to the confessional histories of the subsequent century and that really goes beyond that but historicizing the papacy that is putting Roman history at the foundations of papal power had some interesting consequences as well and that's where King James I comes in comes in in the form of his letter to Pope Paul V written in response to Pope Paul in Cardinal Bellarmine's letters to the English Catholics calling for them to give their allegiance to the Pope and not to their King James so these are some of the interesting consequences that James picks up on because if the Pope was an heir via Augustus to an institution created by Pompilius then he was not really the successor to St. Peter under the institution of Crest but more to the point he was heir to an office created by a king subject to a king's laws and the laws of Numa for that matter only extend as far as the temporal power of Rome meaning that while the Pope's law was fine to stand within the papal state James had no problems with that James and his kingdom were free and in the process the Pontifex Maximus that title but created by the second king of Rome could be understood in fact as a concession that it was the king who was in charge of the church and of religious law so historicizing papal power as a means for its promotion in the hands of the papacy therefore also pointed the way towards its diminution the universality of the Catholic Church and leaving the door open to seize the real papacy thank you