The Roman Church During the Laurentian Schism: Priests and Senators

Abstract

The interest of the Laurentian schism, which broke out on the death of Pope Anastasius II in November 498, lies not in any doctrinal content but rather in the tensions with Rome that it reveals and the contribution it made to papal ideology and historiography by the propaganda it stimulated. The papal break with Constantinople in 483, the Acaian schism, has been advanced as an external factor in the schism because it caused many of the senatorial nobility of German-ruled Italy to look back with nostalgia toward the Empire and to oppose papal stands on doctrine. Furthermore, senatorial discontent did not die down during the pontificates of the masterful and contentious Gelasius (492–496) or the weaker Anastasius 11(496–498) who, the caput senatus Festus assured the Emperor, would be brought to sign the Henotikon. Attention has been directed towards the internal roots of the schism, among them the late-developing interest of senators in church affairs, specifically through their claims to influence in papal elections and over church revenues, drawn for the most part from endowments from their own class and families, just as a century earlier their predecessors had sought to retain control over the revenues of the pagan cults. These claims had been put forward on the death of Pope Simplicius in 483 at a meeting of the senate with a group of bishops under the presidency of the praetorian prefect Basilius but they had been rejected once by Gelasius, an opponent of several senatorial traditions and a reorganizer of the church's property administration, and again by Symmachus in March 502.1