Valentinian and Marcian, glorious victors and triumphators, ever Augusti — to Leo, most reverend archbishop of the glorious city of Rome.
Valentinian and Marcian Announce Their Accession and Request Leo’s Leadership for a Synod to Ensure Catholic Peace
We have come to this supreme empire by God’s providence and the election of the most excellent senate and entire army. Therefore, for the revered and Catholic religion of the Christian faith — by whose virtuous aid we trust our power is governed — we deem it just to address first, with sacred letters, your holiness, who holds the primacy in the episcopate through divine faith: inviting and beseeching your holiness to pray to the eternal Divinity for the strength and stability of our empire — that we may have such intent and desire that, with all impious error removed through a synod held under your authority, the greatest peace may prevail among all bishops of the Catholic faith, remaining pure and untainted by any crime.
Enacted at Constantinople, in the seventh consulship of our lord Valentinian Augustus and that of Avienus, most illustrious man.
Footnotes
- ↩ Tuam sanctitatem principatum in Episcopatu, divinae fidei possidentem — “your holiness, who holds the primacy in the episcopate through divine faith.” Three elements of this phrase deserve attention. First, principatum — primacy — is the same word Valentinian used in Letter LV (“the primacy of the priesthood over all”) and that Leo himself uses throughout the corpus for Peter’s received authority. The two emperors are using Leo’s own theological vocabulary. Second, in Episcopatu — in the episcopate, over the episcopate — this is not an honorific precedence of rank among colleagues but a primacy that is held within and over the episcopal order as such. Third, and most distinctively, the ground given is divinae fidei — of divine faith, through divine faith. Valentinian in Letter LV had grounded the primacy in antiquity; the Gallic bishops in Letter LXV had grounded it in the Petrine mission; here both emperors ground it in divine faith itself. The convergence of three independent formulations — apostolic derivation, ancient tradition, divine faith — all arriving at the same conclusion, is itself evidence that the primacy was understood in the fifth century as an objective institutional reality, not a procedural convention.
- ↩ Te auctore — “with you as the authority,” “under your authorship.” The synod is to be held not merely with Leo’s presence or his legates’ presence, but with Leo himself as its auctor — the one who authorizes and gives it its governing character. This is a decisive advance from Theodosius’s posture: where Theodosius had defended Ephesus II and refused Leo’s repeated requests for a new council, Marcian’s very first communication with Leo is a request that a synod be held under Leo’s authority. The political revolution of Theodosius’s death is already visible in a single Latin phrase.
- ↩ The consulship of Valentinian VII and Avienus = 450. Theodosius II died July 28, 450; Marcian became emperor August 25. This letter therefore dates to late August or September 450, within weeks of Marcian’s accession. It is the first Eastern imperial communication to Leo after the year-long Theodosian obstruction, and its tone could not be more different from Letters LXII–LXIV. What a year of letters, legates, and coordinated imperial pressure could not achieve, a riding accident accomplished in an instant. Chalcedon was now on the horizon.
Historical Commentary