Born c. 540

Died 604

Italian pope

When Gregory I, or Gregory the Great, became pope in 590, the church and indeed all of Western Europe was in ruins. People still believed that the Western Roman Empire, smashed by barbarian invasions more than a century before, could be resurrected with the help of the Eastern Roman Empire in Greece. Gregory himself started out with that belief, but when he got no help from the emperor in Constantinople, he began building the church as a powerful, self-sufficient political entity.

A Roman prefect

As with many figures from the premodern period, little is known about Gregory's early life. He was born in about 540, a member of a wealthy Roman family. The family enjoyed great political power as well, but the Rome they lived in was a mere shadow of its former glory: two centuries of destruction by barbarian tribes such as the Lombards had...