A New History of Christian Empire: Excavating Pope Sylvester’s Oratory, 1636

Abstract

This article examines how antiquarians in Rome used archaeological evidence—a site excavated from under the church of San Martino in Monti in 1636—to argue that Pope Sylvester (314–335) exercised spiritual and temporal authority over the Roman Empire. The document which had formed the bedrock of papal sovereignty, the Donation of Constantine, was shown to be a forgery in the early modern period. Protestant reformers pointed to the document’s contradictions to dismantle the Catholic Church’s claims that its preeminence originated in the privileges bestowed on Sylvester by the Emperor Constantine. I use archival materials and a history of the site published in 1639 to describe how antiquarians claimed that they found the house church of Sylvester, which he converted into a church after Constantine’s baptism and then used to host a Roman Council in 324 (before Nicaea). I offer a new perspective on Catholic confessional historiography by observing how antiquarians used material evidence to provide a foundation for early papal power in the Roman Empire, thereby bypassing the need for spurious documents such as the Donation. This new tradition, which lives on today despite modern archaeological critiques, illustrates the malleability of Catholic epistemologies and historiography in the wake of textual criticism.

1. Introduction

In 1632, workers dug up a metal, circular object with three points in a garden near the Lateran basilica in Rome (Filippini 1639, p. 51).1 The object was about five centimeters wide and had a cross inscribed on it. Inside were the words: “Sancto silvestro ancilla sua votum.”2 Antiquarians believed they had found the crown of Pope Sylvester (314–335), the “pope” who baptized the emperor Constantine according to Christian tradition.3 For seventeenth-century antiquarians, the crown’s authenticity was linked to its primitive form (it did not take the form of the three-tiered medieval diadem, and therefore must have come from an earlier time).4 Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), the nephew of Pope Urban VIII (1623–44), quickly acquired it for his relic collection (Campione, 80).

This article discusses how antiquarians used excavations under the church of San Martino in Monti (in whose gardens the crown was discovered), to show that Pope Sylvester exercised spiritual and temporal authority in ancient Rome. I draw evidence from the Carmelite monastery’s anonymous Campione, a late seventeenth-century manuscript that describes the history of the church; church visitations; church records in Rome’s Archivio di Stato; and a history of the church of San Martino in Monti, the Summary of the antiquity of the church of Saints Sylvester and Martin (Ristretto di tutto quello che appartiene all’antichità della chiesa dei SS Silvestro e Martino), published courtesy of Francesco Barberini in 1639. These texts sought to show that the archaeological site below the current church of San Martino in Monti had functioned as a primitive Christian worship site under Pope Sylvester before the baptism of Constantine, and that Sylvester had enlarged the church after Constantine’s conversion. Roman guidebooks through the nineteenth century maintained that the site, “The Oratory of Saint Sylvester,” enjoyed a special status as one of Rome’s oldest churches.5

The site, and its association with Sylvester, has been shown to date to the patronage of Pope Symmachus in the sixth century (Brandenburg 2005, p. 111; Claridge 2010, pp. 337–39). Its artwork, in turn, dates predominantly to the ninth century. For this reason, scholarly attention to the 1636 discovery has been limited to archaeological studies of the subterranean space, and art-historical analysis of the mid-seventeenth-century reconstruction of the church (Silvagni 1912; Boaga 1983, pp. 1–17; Roccoli 2004).

Because the conclusions drawn about the oratory in the seventeenth century have not held up to archeo-historical critique, little work has been done to understand the ways it was discovered and interpreted, and their significance for our understanding of post-Tridentine Catholicism. I suggest, rather, that the discovery of the oratory illustrates how seventeenth-century Catholics sought new epistemologies to offer support for more nuanced histories of the early church. Antiquarians pointed to material evidence–the underground site and its objects–to argue that Sylvester wielded power in the ancient Roman world in a time when the traditional, textual source for the argument, the Donation of Constantine, was universally regarded as a forgery.

According to Catholic tradition, Pope Sylvester was the leader of the Roman church after Constantine’s victory over Maxentius in 312 and the legalization of Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 313.6 We lack fourth-century sources about the life of Sylvester. The only contemporary reference we have to the baptism of Constantine comes from Eusebius of Cesarea, who wrote that Constantine had been baptized before his death by Eusebius of Nicomedia in 337 (Jones 1978, p. 84; Edward 2006, pp. 137–59).

There were three major early sources for the life of Sylvester, dated to between the end of the fourth and the sixth centuries. Already in the mid-fourth century Sylvester’s biography began to include details intended to enhance the Roman pope’s position by showing that Sylvester had baptized Constantine, and received special privileges. The Actus Silvestri, composed originally between the end of the fourth and the first half of the fifth century, received its final form under Pope Hadrian I (772–795) (Canella 2013, pp. 241–57).7 The second source was the Constitutum Silvestri, part of a series of documents forged in the beginning of the sixth century by proponents of Pope Symmachus (Wirbelauer 1993, p. 228).8 The third source was the Liber pontificalis, which was most likely composed at the end of the fifth century using the Liberian catalogue as well as parts of the Actus Silvestri (Duchesne 1886, p. 170; Loomis 1917; Wirbelauer 1993; Franklin 2017).

According to the story developed (likely to credit Sylvester for the emperor’s conversion) between the late-fourth and early-fifth century, Constantine instated a persecution of Christians during the early years of Sylvester’s pontificate (314–335).9 Constantine contracted leprosy and, loath to follow the prescriptions of his priests to bathe in the blood of young children, dreamt that Peter and Paul instructed him to seek out the Christian pope. Constantine found Sylvester hiding outside Rome. Sylvester then catechized the emperor, assigned him a week of penance, and baptized him—healed of his leprosy—at the Lateran palace. The grateful emperor built the basilica of Saint John Lateran, as well as other cemetery churches. Sylvester was therefore given a special position in the history of the early church as marking the transition from pagan to Christian empire.

In the eighth century an apocryphal document called the Donation of Constantine, or the Constitutum Constantini, claimed that after being baptized, Constantine gave Sylvester supremacy over Jerusalem, Alexandria, Constantinople, and Antioch.10 He also gave the Roman pope control over all the regions of the western empire. The story of Constantine’s conversion by Sylvester then became a symbol for papal preeminence, and was evoked in moments when the popes advocated in the face of Holy Roman Emperors or temporal rulers (Ullman 1962; Maffei 1964; Hiatt 2004; Lieu 2006, pp. 298–322). In the thirteenth century, for example, images of the story of Sylvester and Constantine were painted in a chapel dedicated to Sylvester at the church of Santi Quattro Coronati in the heat of conflicts between Pope Innocent IV and Frederick II (Pohlsander 2004, p. 28; Barelli 2009). Sylvester’s story remained popular throughout the Middle Ages because it provided a historical justification for the spiritual and temporal ambitions of the papacy; Sylvester was the spiritual leader of a Catholic empire over which the emperor (Constantine) had given him temporal control.11

2. The Early Modern Revival of Pope Sylvester

Pope Sylvester’s place in Roman Catholic historiography enjoyed a special notoriety in the early modern period. Around the year 1444, the humanist Lorenzo Valla used his skills as a Latin philologist to show that the Donation of Constantine was a forgery likely created in the eighth century (Jardine 1977).12 Valla’s treatise, published in 1517, was popular among the Protestant Reformers for whom it became a symbol of the triumph of textual criticism over tradition, and the corruption of the Catholic Church. John Calvin used it to refute the Catholic tradition of papal primacy in his Institutes (Calvin 1987, pp. 7, 11, 20; Gordon 1999). The Magdeburg Centuries, the history of the church developed by a group of Protestants in the mid-sixteenth century, regarded the forging of the Donation as a crucial moment when the Roman Catholic church diverged from its apostolic roots to follow corrupt, temporal concerns (Olson 2002, p. 200). In 1628, the Calvinist David Blondel revisited the question of the document’s forgery (Schaff 1912, pp. 269–78).13

Valla’s refutation of the Donation of Constantine is commonly understood as symbolic for three early modern paradigms: the shift from the tradition-based authority of the church to the individual, text-based knowledge of the humanists; the eventual fragmentation of Christendom; and the disentanglement of the Roman church from the politics of increasingly powerful European rulers. It follows that the tradition of the Donation must have died away because the document had been invalidated by textual criticism. Pope Sylvester would, moreover, have lost his standing among Catholics as the historic emblem of papal preeminence.

In the following pages I will qualify this narrative by showing that Catholics sought new evidence that might buttress Sylvester’s historical-political position of privilege (and therefore the tradition that the Roman pope had imperially-sanctioned power) by bypassing the necessity of the forged Donation. Confessional historians such as Cesare Baronio (described in more detail below) acknowledged that the Donation was inauthentic, but this did not mean that historical-devotional interest in Sylvester died out. In contrast, interest increased in the post-Tridentine period in the texts and sites associated with Sylvester. While mid-sixteenth century guidebooks wrote that Sylvester consecrated six churches, for example, a popular guidebook published from 1600 on sustained that he (not Constantine) consecrated thirty and was therefore the great patron of building in Rome (Panciroli 1600).

Post-Tridentine popes also continued to promote the artistic narrative tradition, popular in the Middle Ages, of the story of Constantine’s leprosy and conversion under Sylvester. Sixtus V (1585–1590) had the halls of the new Lateran palace decorated with frescoes depicting the story of Sylvester and Constantine. Soon afterwards, Clement VIII (1592–1605) commissioned a fresco cycle on the transept of the Lateran basilica that depicted Constantine’s leprosy and baptism, and Sylvester’s dedication of the Lateran basilica (Mandel 1994; Freiberg 1995).14 It is important to note that the frescoes included Sylvester’s consecration of the basilica and Constantine’s donation of objects to it, but excluded a scene depicting the donation.

Catholics in Rome also looked to archives and manuscripts to write a history of the Catholic church that would confirm some of the traditions associated with Sylvester (Kelley 1998, p. 173; Backus 2003, p. 375; Cameron 2005, p. 142). Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici (1588 to 1607) is widely known as the confessional response to the Protestant historical critique of the church laid out in the Magdeburg centuries (Pullapilly 1975; Gulia 2009; Zen 2010; Bollbuck 2021, pp. 28–37).15 Baronio acknowledged that the Donation was a forgery, and sought to show that the Donation did not provide the fundamental basis for papal primacy by turning to other documents that demonstrated the special privileges of the Roman pontiffs (Coleman 1914, pp. 206–8).16

Baronio noted in the Annales, for example, that Sylvester convened a council in Rome in the year 324 (Baronio 1592, p. 277). The council was attended by Constantine, the prefect of Rome, and 284 bishops. The purpose of the council according to the narrative was to plan for the Council of Nicaea (325), talk about stabilizing ecclesiastical discipline, and discuss the defense of the Church. The narrative is significant for a number of reasons. First, it sought to upset the Council of Nicaea as the first church council condoned by a Roman emperor. Second, it sought to show that Sylvester was regarded as the head of the church, which was especially significant because the Roman bishop was not present at the Council of Nicaea. Finally, the presence of Constantine at the apocryphal council condoned Sylvester’s position of power within a Christianizing Empire. Baronio did not, however, specify where this council occurred.

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, efforts to rewrite Sylvester’s story linked a careful rereading of Sylvester’s biography in the textual record to Rome’s topography. The Actus Silvestri, Constitutum Silvestri, and Liber pontificalis contained (apocryphal) details about Sylvester’s life that were resurrected at the beginning of the seventeenth century. According to the Liber pontificalis Sylvester built a church out of land near the Baths of Domitian donated to him by a Christian named Equitius after Constantine’s conversion:

“He built a church in the city of Rome, in the garden of one of his parish priests who was called Equitius, and he appointed it as a titular church of Rome, near the baths of Domitian, and even unto this day it is called the church of Equitius.”17

Subsequent editions also substituted the baths of Domitian for the baths of Trajan, which were a supplement to the baths of Titus.18 We lack sources from the time of Sylvester (314–355) until the rule of Pope Symmachus (498–514) that describe the founding of a church on the property of the family Equitius, or that list the titulus Equitii in catalogs before the time of Symmachus.

The Constitutum Silvestri and Liber pontificalis also described a council convoked in Rome in 325 after the Council of Nicaea. Here, Sylvester made a number of important proclamations pertaining to papal governance, liturgy, and the rights of bishops. Constantine, Helen, the prefect of Rome, and 277 bishops attended the council. The decrees included the condemnation of Arius and his followers according to the precepts of the Council of Nicaea, as well as a number of ordinances having to do with church governance.

For our purposes, these texts are also important for what they did not say. They failed to specify three things. First, they did not specify that Sylvester built a church over his own home. Second, they did not mention that Sylvester convened the 325 Roman council at the site of his church. Third, they do not mention a Roman council convened by Sylvester before Nicaea in 324.

3. The Discovery of the “Oratory of Saint Sylvester”

Post-Tridentine Catholics believed that Sylvester’s ancient oratory had been located in the area of San Martino in Monti but had not survived the ravages of time. According to Baronio, Sylvester’s titulus Equitii was constructed near Domitian’s baths (also known as Trajan’s baths) (Baronio 1592, p. 277). The presumption was that the site was likely in the vicinity of the current church, but had been destroyed by Pope Symmachus at the turn of the sixth century; contemporary guidebooks and the records of the 1624 visitation wrote that Symmachus had erected the church of San Martino in Monti from its foundations.19 Interest was piqued in the church in the mid-sixteenth century when humanists discovered it had been an ancient titular church, culminating in Carlo Borromeo’s noted patronage in 1570.20 There were no efforts to see if an ancient site existed, however. By the 1630’s the church of San Martino in Monti was in disrepair (Boaga 1983, pp. 1–17; Silvagni 1912).

The discovery of what was believed to be the oratory of Sylvester is linked in historical records to the patronage of the Carmelite prior Giovanni Antonio Filippini, who became the prior of the monastery of San Martino in Monti in 1636. Filippini was heir to a number of properties in Rome proper and the countryside which had allowed him to amass a substantial fortune.21 Records in the Roman Archivio di Stato show that he spent 40,000 scudi rebuilding the old church of San Martino in Monti and monastery.22 According to Filippini, the Carmelites had been inclined to think that there was an oratory under their church, but there was no “memory of any sort” among the public of such a place (Filippini 1639, p. 17).23

The discovery of the circular object (described at the beginning of this article) in the adjacent gardens in 1632, with its inscription to Saint Sylvester, also gave cause to believe that this site had concrete links to the fourth-century pope. One of the lesser-discussed parts of Lorenzo Valla’s treatise was his reference to an object, a jeweled diadem that Constantine gave Pope Sylvester according to the Donation; a diadema in Roman times referred to an object made of cloth, and certainly not a papal crown, Valla argued (Valla 2007, p. 43; Grafton 1995, p. 11). No formal treatise was composed about the object–contemporaries must have known that it would not stand up to scrutiny. Rather, it acquired local importance as a relic associated with the life of Sylvester; Pope Urban VIII’s preeminent nephew acquired it for his relic collection, and it was later returned to the Carmelite monastery’s reliquary.

Filippini began excavating under the Church of San Martino in Monti in 1636, and his book describing the new history of the church, the Summary of the antiquity of the church of Saints Sylvester and Martin, was published in 1639. The discovery of what he claimed was the ancient oratory of Sylvester was also described in the Campione. This manuscript drew largely from the text of Filippini but also contained some important details about the life of Filippini, and church patronage from the 1640’s and 1650’s.

a.

The House Church

In order to arrive at the site, Giovanni Antonio Filippini gained access to an ancient staircase that opened from a grate in the ground on the western side of the confession of the church. The oratory was located eight meters below the church. Filippini wrote that a tunnel had to be dug in order to reach the various rooms and main altar, and that much of the space had actually been filled with dirt. He had workers “dig out and repair the baths, that is to say the underground church, which had been filled and rendered unusable, by uncovering the floor…” (Campione, p. 83).24 Filippini believed that he found a house church in the south-eastern part of the archaeological site. It was a square room with a marble altar and rounded niche covered in images. The most significant image was a mosaic effigy of Mary, the discovery of which led patrons to believe that Sylvester had dedicated this church at its inception to Mary.

Filippini pointed to a number of artifacts in his Summary to suggest that the underground site had pre-Constantinian origins. First, workers discovered bricks with stamps dated to Domitian’s rule (Filippini 1639, p. 91). The topographical work of Andrea Fulvio had confirmed that San Martino was constructed over the Baths of Domitian, associated in the Liber with Sylvester’s early church (Fulvio 1588, pp. 91–92). The discovery of the bricks in this site supported the textual tradition of the Liber. Second, he found an inscription in ancient script “similar to the gothic” that stated that this was the “domus” of Sylvester (Filippini 1639, p. 7).25 He did not provide a date for the inscription, but he claimed it was old enough to have preserved an accurate memory of the space as a house church. Third, according to the Liber pontificalis, Sylvester had been the first pope to order that mass be said over marble altars.26 There was, indeed, a marble altar in the subterranean space (Filippini 1639, p. 8). Finally, the space adjacent to the oratory was composed of a series of small rooms. Filippini argued that the structure of the rooms was reminiscent of a home, meaning it was fair to surmise that this had comprised the house of Sylvester.

The textual record described above did not state that Sylvester had a home on the property of Equitius which was subsequently transformed into a church. This detail, rather, was inferred by Filippini in his examination of the subterranean site and the contemporary belief in the proliferation of house churches during the persecutions.27 It was reasonable to assume, Filippini believed, that Sylvester would have privately administered sacraments in a house given to him in the remnants of the baths of Titus before the conversion of Constantine. Mid seventeenth-century visitation records referenced the images, inscription, and altar as decisive “proof” that this was indeed the oratory of Sylvester.28 The oratory was therefore held up as the oldest existing church space within the city walls according to this new story.

b.

The Expanded Church

What was more, Filippini advanced a theory that Sylvester incorporated the oratory into a larger church, making it the oldest imperially-sanctioned church in Rome. Giovanni Antonio Filippini claimed that he had found two subterranean churches, the house church used by Sylvester before the persecutions, and an expanded church built after the baptism of Constantine. Since the textual tradition wrote that Sylvester dedicated the property from Equitius as a church after the emperor’s baptism, it was reasonable to assume (if one accepted the theory that the titulus equitius had been a house church before Constantine’s conversion) that it was later adapted into a larger church. This theory was carried forward in Church tradition; according to the 1660 visitation, “Saint Sylvester consecrated his home in the form of a church in the baths, under the name of Equitius.”29 What was more, Catholics claimed that Sylvester’s church was one of the first imperially-sanctioned churches in the empire: “In this saintly place all the faithful expressed thanks to Christ for the freedom he gave Christians to practice Catholic rights and for publicly opening the churches dedicated to God to the entire Empire.”30 By expanding the house church soon after the conversion of Constantine, therefore, Sylvester provided a place for imperially-sanctioned worship according to this new tradition.

Patrons argued, moreover, that Sylvester’s titular church served as the seat of the pope for several years before Constantine’s construction of the Lateran. Filippini surmised that Sylvester’s church was constructed in 322. The construction of Saint Peter’s basilica dated to the year 326, and the Lateran basilica to 335. The author of the late-seventeenth manuscript in the Carmelite archive argued—based on comparing the lists of benefices given by Constantine to San Martino in Monti and the Lateran to the value of the scudi—that it was likely that Sylvester’s church was constructed before the Lateran.31 Sylvester’s church therefore assumed a crucial historical significance as the ancient papal seat for years before the imperial donation of the Lateran to the papacy. It followed (if one believed that Sylvester built the church in 322) that the papacy had exercised spiritual authority with the blessing of the Roman Emperor regardless of the transfer of imperial property to the popes.

c.

The Roman Council of 324

Filippini also surmised that Sylvester had exercised political authority over the Christian empire in this very site by convening the Roman synod of 324 described by Cesare Baronio here. According to this historical vision, the Roman pope had worked in collaboration with the emperor to make decisions about heresy and discipline before Nicaea. The historical locus of spiritual and temporal power in the church shifted from east to west with Sylvester as the leader of the nascent church. According to Filippini, if Sylvester had convened a council, he must have done so in a church. Seeing as the Lateran was not constructed until 335, then Sylvester must have held the council in his own church.

It was similarly argued that Sylvester also convened the Roman Council of 325 described in the Liber pontificalis at this site. Soon after Filippini’s discovery (but before the publication of Filippini’s text) a history of the council of Nicaea published in 1637 wrote that:

“Saint Sylvester thought it best to convoke a council in Rome, and the bishops called on May thirtieth in that year [325] convened in the titular church of Equitius built by Saint Sylvester, richly embellished by Constantine, today called San Martino in Monti.”32

The author of the Campione anticipated that few people would believe that so many people had gathered in such a small and inconsequential church, and marveled himself that Sylvester would have held these important events in such a desolate, narrow place (Campione, f. 70). It was possible, the author argued, because the baths were still in fairly good condition; the adaptation of the early church from the baths did not necessarily mean that the church had been constructed from crumbling ruins. The church, moreover, was the only church space in this time that had undergone formal construction. Sylvester’s church had also been given a number of valuable donations by Constantine, and therefore had a finer pedigree than most had thought.

In 1637, an inscription was placed above the tunnel leading to the underground site. The inscription attested that Sylvester had lived in these rooms, built a church, the titulus equitius, under Constantine in the place of the baths on the Esquiline, and convened a council.33 Attributed to Urban VIII, the plaque upheld that the once resplendent monument was worthy of godly reverence in the present.

The artistic program of San Martino in Monti was meant to teach the narrative about Sylvester’s church to the public. Two frescoes that depicted the inside of the Constantinian basilicas of the Lateran and Saint Peter’s were executed by Filippo Gagliardi in the 1650’s and placed in the aisle of the nave (Boaga 1983). Their execution and placement drew parallels between the historical privilege of this site and the Constantinian basilicas. A fresco dated to 1640 by Galeazzo Leoncino depicted Sylvester presiding over the Roman Council of 324 in Sylvester’s church. Sylvester was dressed in white papal regalia and diadem and sat elevated over a council of bishops in amphitheater-like seating. Barely detectable behind this considerable gathering of bishops is a crowd of clergymen. Seated below Sylvester to the right and left are Constantine looking quite young with a modest laurel crown, and his mother Helen. In the foreground Roman soldiers have put Arius and his allies in chains. The inscription underneath described the Roman council of 324.

By 1660, a new entrance to the subterranean church had been excavated underneath Leoncino’s fresco. The meaning of the image, and its placement, were clear: Sylvester was undeniably the head of a princely, well-established, and disciplined church. Sylvester had celebrated divine offices in this very place before Christianity was sanctioned by the emperor, and Sylvester’s church had been the first imperially-sanctioned church constructed in Rome. From this place, patrons argued for Sylvester’s exercised authority–argued through a pointed interpretation of textual and material evidence–over the early Christian empire regardless of the Donation.

4. Conclusions

Filippini went beyond the inherited textual knowledge about Sylvester (his Acts, the Constitutum Silvestri, the Liber pontificalis, and the Donation of Constantine) by arguing: (1) that he had found evidence of an early home; (2) that Sylvester had dedicated his home as a church several years before the Constantinian basilicas were constructed; and (3) that Sylvester had celebrated a council in this very place before Nicaea. By showing that Sylvester had tended to Christians in his home, and then in a church constructed before the Constantinian basilicas, this new topographically-based history sought to show that Sylvester exhibited centralized control over a number of already-extant house churches. Sylvester, as the religious leader of the council in 324, was presented as the designated head of the Church whose authority was recognized by Constantine. His rule from his own church before the Lateran basilica was even constructed obfuscated the need for Constantine’s Donation.

This narrative, grounded in the excavation of the site under San Martino in Monti, offered a founding moment of the Christian empire in which the Roman “pope” exercised spiritual and political autonomy. The story was given weight through the material evidence and topographical surety of an archaeological site. However tenuous (and errored) the supposedly concrete links were between the material evidence and textual narrative, the example points to how the Catholic Church sought to use archaeology to add rigor to doctrine and historiography.

The story of Sylvester’s ancient church has lived on until today. The chaplain Rene Veilliard concluded in the 1930’s that the oratory must have dated from the third-century persecutions because the brick and mortar matched construction of that time (Mâle 1960, p. 45). Today, the placard in front of the church and information about San Martino in Monti online affirm that the church sits over the oratory of Sylvester, where a council was held in 324.34

Modern studies, however, have failed to find any evidence that the space was used as a church before the end of the sixth century when Pope Symmachus (498–514) constructed the ancient church of San Martino in Monti iuxta S Silvestrum. Hugo Brandenburg says of the archaeological site that “It is impossible to imagine that Sylvester, who was the first bishop to live in the Lateran, would have installed a church in such a locality” (Brandenburg 2005, p. 111). The site would have been too small for a congregation, and the subdivisions would not have been conducive to any kind of liturgical ceremony. Brandenburg proposed that the third-century foundations functioned as a market stall, and were subsequently adapted in the sixth century into a deaconry or ecclesiastical social center. The frescoes date no earlier than the sixth century. This dating of Symmachus’ church corresponds with apocryphal stories about Sylvester that likely aimed to prop up Symmachus’ own position in Rome by connecting his church to the ancient pope (Duchesne 1886, p. 187).35 The first source that lists the titulus Equitii (and all other titulars in Rome), moreover, emerged during the papacy of Symmachus.

Regardless of its veracity, the case study illustrates two important facts about early modern Catholicism. The first is that there was no “universal” history of the early church. It is commonly accepted that Cardinal Baronio’s Annales was the principal source of Roman Catholic history in the post-Tridentine period (Roncalli 1961; Caraffa 1963; Jedin 1978). In many respects, this view is appropriate in the Roman context because Rome’s guidebooks borrowed vociferously from the Annales, and Baronio was regarded as the authority in questions of Church history. In recent years, scholars have examined local histories and liturgies across Catholic Europe to challenge the “universal” scope of Roman history (Ditchfield 2002; Harris 2007; Olds 2015) My research suggests that even in the city of Rome antiquarians and patrons debated—according to the discovery and interpretation of textual and material evidence—the details of saints’ lives offered by Baronio. Roman Catholic historiography of the early church was therefore dynamic rather than static.

What was more, the reach of these stories was primarily local. Stories were published in Rome primarily in the vernacular, and likely stayed for the most part in Rome. San Martino in Monti is a case in point; despite grand claims made about it, the story did not expand beyond local guidebooks and Filippini’s printed text in Italian.

Second, confessional historiography in Rome experienced a “material” shift in the first half of the seventeenth century. This case study was just one among many such cases in Rome in which archaeological evidence was used to ground the stories of early pontiffs, martyrs, house churches, matrons, and patrons in topographical details that often went beyond the traditional textual narrative. Beyond the discoveries in Rome’s catacombs, excavations uncovered the supposed bodies of Peter’s successors under St Peter’s Basilica, the bodies of ancient martyrs under a number of churches, and sites associated with ancient churches (Di Manno 2020). Antiquarians sought to show that the material objects, sites, and bodies were the source of their knowledge about the past, and that historical and doctrinal claims bore their authenticity from material evidence.

This material shift connected antiquarian traditions with deep roots in Rome to nascent forms of archaeology in seventeenth-century Europe. Antiquarians in Rome had looked since the fifteenth century to ancient topography and artifacts to revive classical antiquity, and construct narratives which would serve the present interests of their patrons (Lanciani 1902–1917; Jacks 1993; Stinger 1998; Barkan 1999; Bignamini 2004; Karmon 2011). In early seventeenth-century Europe–notably in Denmark and Germany with the work of Ole Worm and Philip Klüver, archaeological objects were increasingly being used to write local histories (Trigger 1990, p. 49).

The material shift also connected Rome to the intellectual climate of Europe, where empiricists sought truth not in tradition and text, but in the world around them. In Rome, for example, the Accademia dei Lincei was founded in 1603 in order to practice reasoned observation of the natural world (Bellini 1997; Freedberg 2002; Baldriga 2002). As scholars such as Anthony Grafton have noted, however, the idea that the “empirical shift” occurred uniformly is itself a myth; new discoveries in Europe and beyond were reconciled with old traditions and values in creative ways (Grafton 1995). While early seventeenth-century Rome is often depicted as a climate hostile to the sciences, recent scholarship has focused on the ways that the practice of observation and empiricism engaged with the values and institutions of the Church (Findlen 1996, 2004; Feingold 2003). Scholars have noted, for example, the ways that developments in the sciences such as engineering and medicine were accentuated by cultural, historical forms such as the cult of the saints and Roman architecture (Andretta 2011; Touber 2014; Long 2018). By examining closely the ways that new learning interacted with old traditions, often to enhance the position of the Catholic Church, scholars have observed that advancements in science often occurred in concert with religious interference (Donato and Kraye 2009, p. 6).

This study does not offer up Filippini’s examination of the oratory as “scientific” or “archaeological” in the modern sense of both of these words.36 Rather, I note that the interrelationship between new epistemologies and confessional historiography resulted in an effort to point to material evidence as the basis for historical truth. We know that antiquarians and their patrons interpreted material evidence according to history, doctrine, and personal gain. They understood, however, that in the intellectual climate of the seventeenth century archaeology could lend an empirically-grounded aura of Truth to Catholic history. This was the case with Sylvester’s oratory, which emerged from obscurity to unprecedented status as the site from which the pope who converted Constantine ruled a Christian empire.