Vigilius

Vigilius was a Roman noble's son, the deacon Boniface II had tried to name his successor, and the envoy in Constantinople when Theodora chose him as pope in exchange for a promise to restore the Monophysite patriarch Anthimus. Belisarius installed him on 29 March 537 while Silverius still lived. He did not keep the promise; a letter of 540 professes Chalcedon in full. But he had a predecessor's death on his account, and Rome never trusted him.

Justinian's next project destroyed him. In 544 the emperor condemned the Three Chapters, three Antiochene writings Chalcedon had left in peace, to please the Monophysites; the West saw an attack on the council. On 22 November 545, while Vigilius was saying Mass in Santa Cecilia, imperial officers seized him and carried him to a ship on the Tiber, the crowd pelting the boat with stones. Held in Sicily for a year, he reached Constantinople in January 547 and was bullied and cajoled there for eight years. He condemned the Chapters in his Iudicatum of 548, and the African bishops excommunicated him; he withdrew it; he fled to sanctuary in a church and was dragged from the altar clinging to its columns; he refused to attend the council of May 553, which condemned the Chapters and struck his name from the diptychs; and in February 554, sick and alone, he submitted.

Justinian let him go home in 555. He got as far as Syracuse, where he died of gallstones on 7 June. Rome would not bury him in Saint Peter's; he lies in San Marcello on the Via Salaria, and Milan and Aquileia broke with Rome over what he had signed.