Pelagius I

Pelagius had been the ablest man in the Roman church for twenty years before he was pope. A noble's son, deacon, and envoy in Constantinople, he had fed Rome from his own fortune during Totila's siege of 546 and gone out to negotiate with the Gothic king; in Constantinople he had written the fiercest Western defense of the Three Chapters and then, after the council of 553 and a spell in prison, changed his mind. Justinian named him pope. Rome, which had watched Vigilius broken, took him for the emperor's creature and for the man who had betrayed his predecessor; when he arrived in 556 only two bishops and a priest of Ostia could be found to consecrate him, and most of the clergy stayed away.

He answered with an oath. In Saint Peter's, holding the Gospels and a cross above his head, with the general Narses beside him, Pelagius swore before the people that he had done Vigilius no harm and that he held the faith of the four councils. It quieted Rome; it did not quiet the North. Milan and Aquileia, with the bishops of the Veneto and Liguria, refused communion with a pope who had accepted the condemnation of the Chapters, and the schism of Aquileia would last until 698.

He died on 4 March 561 and was buried in Saint Peter's, the pope who had made the church solvent and could not make it like him.