ABSTRACT
The patronage of translators and the translation activity in general is indicative of the active phase of transmission. Translators connections to the papal court varied widely: some were papal officials, some diplomats engaged also in interpreting sometimes even popes themselves were active translators. The history of the papal library before its transfer to the Vatican has never been told, mainly because of the scarcity of evidence for periods such as the seventh to ninth centuries. In standard historiography, the story of the medieval papacy is generally held to extend roughly from Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII, with an extended epilogue in Avignon. Apologetic literature targeting various heretical tendencies in Byzantine theology is a clear mirror of the growing and increasingly selective knowledge of Greek patristic thought among the upper echelons of the Western clergy. The history of medieval Greek-Latin translation is deeply marked by the papacy's changing policies toward the Greeks.
