Prosper of Aquitaine and Pope Leo the Great The Primacy of the Pope as Reflected in a contemporaneous Chronicle

Prosper of Aquitaine and Pope Leo the Great. The Primacy of the Pope as Reflected in a Contemporaneous Chronicle Prosper of Aquitaine, one of the 5th-century continuators of the Chronicle of Jerome, was a close assistant to Pope Leo. This Leo is known for his rejection of an all too close relationship between the Roman state and the church. Typically, this position is explained by Leo's experience with imperial interference in dogmatic issues during the height of the debate on Christology around the year 450. However, the paper at hand analyzes the picture of the papacy (2), of Pope Leo (3), of the Council of Chalcedon 451 (4) and of the emperors (ch. 5) given by the chronicle of Prosper, thus trying to get a historical deeper understanding of the position taken by Leo. A close examination of Prosper suggests that Leo's renunciation of the emperor's influence on church matters may in fact have been a result of already longer-standing experiences the contemporaries had made with increasingly weak emperors in the west of the Roman Empire.