Northern Italy in the Roman World by Carolynn E. Roncaglia

Author:Carolynn E. Roncaglia
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2018-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Ambrose’s Mediolanum

Dramatic changes to Mediolanum were also brought about by the church, and particularly by its ambitious and vociferous fourth-century bishop, Ambrose.

Ambrose came from a senatorial family. His father was praetorian prefect of the Gauls when Ambrose was born at Trier; his brother managed the family estates in North Africa.87 Ambrose received a typical elite education at Rome before being elected bishop of Mediolanum in 374.88

The bishopric that Ambrose occupied was one of political prominence. There is little evidence about bishops in third-century northern Italy, but by the 370s bishops are attested at Aquileia, Ariminum, Bononia, Brescia, Claterna, Comum, Mediolanum, Mutina, Parma, Patavium, Placentia, Ravenna, Ticinum, Tortona, Tridentum, and Vercellae—that is to say, nearly all of northern Italy’s important towns.89 These bishops—as well as the deacons, presbyters, monks, and other churchmen under them—constituted a new organized authority in the region, one paralleling that already established by the state.90

The elevation of Mediolanum to an imperial seat, for example, brought prestige to its religious leaders, and the bishops Auxentius and then Ambrose used their position in that town to influence church affairs in other towns.91 An illustration can be found in the story of an unnamed bishop of Ticinum who found himself entrusted with a sum of cash by a local widow. When the widow went into debt, her creditor appealed to the secular authorities—to the magister officiorum—who then ordered the bishop to surrender the widow’s money. The bishop in turn appealed to Ambrose, and after a conclave with Ambrose the bishop physically barred the authorities from retrieving the widow’s money from its hiding place.92 Worth noting in this story is that both parties, those in the church and in the imperial bureaucracy, appealed to their superiors—the magister officiorum to the emperor and the bishop at Ticinum to the more powerful bishop at Mediolanum. In the case of the former, the hierarchical relationship is clearly acknowledged by laws defining orders of precedence, but with the bishops the relationship is very much modeled on the perceived authority of their sees.

The hierarchical relationship between the two towns’ churches is again demonstrated by Ambrose’s ordination of bishops of other towns, including a bishop of Ticinum in 397 and Gaudentius in Brixia, the latter of whom, tellingly, brought back to his church saints’ relics, both those that he picked up in Caesarea on pilgrimage and those of the saints of Mediolanum. Likewise, in Ticinum the basilicas of Saints Gervasius and Protasius and of Nazarius and Celsus were dedicated to Milanese martyrs.93 That Ambrose found the relics of the first two martyrs in 386, in the midst of the bishop’s quarrel with the emperor Valentinian over the latter’s profession of Arianism, emphasizes the political nature of Ticinum’s choice of new saints.94 Relics of these saints given to Ticinum’s churches were undoubtedly the personal gifts of Ambrose, and by accepting the relics the church authorities at Ticinum were showing loyalty to Ambrose at a time when the Milanese bishop was involved in a very public dispute with the emperor and his family.

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