The Three African Popes of Rome, and Why It's Been 1,500 Years Since the Last One

According to the Liber Pontificalis, the historical register recording the succession of Roman bishops from antiquity onward, three popes in the Catholic Church’s first five centuries came from Roman Africa, the Roman administrative province covering roughly the coastal regions of modern Tunisia and parts of Libya and Algeria: Victor I, who reigned from 189 to 199 AD; Miltiades, also called Melchiades, who reigned from 311 to 314 AD; and Gelasius I, who reigned from 492 to 496 AD. No pope from the African continent has served since Gelasius I’s death, a gap of roughly 1,500 years and counting.

Victor I holds the distinction of being the earliest of the three and the first African pope on record. His papacy is best remembered for the Quartodeciman controversy, a dispute over whether Easter should be celebrated on a fixed date calculated independently of the Jewish Passover calendar or tied directly to it, a disagreement that split churches across the Roman world along regional lines. Victor pushed forcefully for uniformity around the fixed-date calculation and threatened excommunication against bishops in Asia Minor who refused to fall in line, an assertion of papal authority over distant regional churches that later historians have treated as an early marker of Rome’s bishop claiming authority beyond his own immediate diocese.

Miltiades governed during one of the most consequential turning points in early Christian history. His papacy coincided with the 313 AD Edict of Milan, issued by the emperors Constantine and Licinius, which granted Christianity legal toleration across the Roman Empire after centuries of intermittent persecution, and Miltiades also convened the Lateran Synod that same year to adjudicate the Donatist controversy, a bitter dispute within North African Christianity itself over how to treat clergy who had cooperated with earlier Roman persecution.

Gelasius I, described in the Liber Pontificalis as “natione Afer,” of African birth or extraction, reigned nearly two centuries after Miltiades and is remembered as a significant theologian in his own right. Historians disagree on exactly what that description means: some read it as evidence Gelasius was born in Roman Africa, in what is now Tunisia, while others argue the more likely scenario is that he was born in Rome to a family of African descent, since “natione Afer” was also used elsewhere in the period to denote ancestry rather than birthplace. developing influential doctrine on the relationship between spiritual and secular authority that shaped later medieval church-state theory. His death in 496 AD marks the last time a pope traced his origins to the African continent, a fact frequently cited in discussions of the Catholic Church’s historical diversity and, more recently, in speculation about whether a future pope might again come from Africa, a continent now home to one of Catholicism’s fastest-growing populations.