Montana and Thomas
freed slaves of the Roman Church, recipients of Gregory the Great's letter of manumission (595)|Rome
This entry is not a single individual but a pair of correspondents/recipients, Montana and Thomas, known almost entirely from a single famous document: Pope Gregory the Great's letter of manumission (Registrum Epistularum VI.12, July 595), addressed 'Montanae et Thomae.' In it Gregory frees these two slaves of the Roman Church, declaring that since the Redeemer took on flesh to restore mankind to its original freedom, it is fitting that those held in servitude be returned to liberty. Montana and Thomas are otherwise unattested; nothing certain is known of their lives, ages, or fates beyond this act of emancipation, which survives chiefly because of its significance in the history of late-antique manumission and the Church's slaveholding, not because of the individuals themselves. The record's grouping with the Hormisdas and Isidore of Pelusium collections and its placeholder coordinates appear to be data-merge artifacts rather than evidence of a wider correspondence.
0
Letters sent
2
Letters received
2
Total letters
2
Correspondents
Top correspondents
All letters (2)
←hormisdas #56←gregory great #6012
From Hormisdasc. 516 AD
Do not think our mind is idle or indifferent regarding your case, for we think of your hardship no differently than...
From Pope Gregory the Greatc. 595 AD
Since our Redeemer, the Maker of every creature, vouchsafed to assume human flesh for this end, that, the chain of slavery wherewith we were held being broken by the grace of His Divinity, He might restore us to pristine liberty, it is a salutary deed if men whom nature originally produced free, and whom the law of nations has subjected to the y...