When Ravenna opened its gates some eighteen months had passed since the death of Honorius.  But the appearance of that “angel of God under the semblance of a shepherd” had not been the only miracle that had occurred on the return of Placidia to the imperial city by the eastern sea.  For it seems that on her voyage either from Constantinople to Aquileia, where she remained till Ravenna was taken, or from Aquileia to Ravenna, Placidia and her children were caught in a great storm at sea and came near to suffer shipwreck.  Then Placidia prayed aloud, invoking the aid of S. John the Evangelist for deliverance from so great a peril, and vowing to build a church in his honour in Ravenna if he would bring them to land.  And immediately the winds and the waves abated and the ship came safely to port.[2] It was in fulfilment of her vow that Placidia built in Ravenna the Basilica of S. John the Evangelist.

[Footnote 2:  The invocation of S. John is curious, and we have not the key to it.  For though he was a fisherman, so was S. Peter for instance.  It is interesting, though not perhaps really significant, to note that it is only S. John who notes in his Gospel (vi. 21) that, when the Apostles saw Our Lord walking on the water in the great storm, and had received Him into their ship, “immediately the ship was at the land.”]

The city of Ravenna at this time would seem to have been full of churches.  Its first bishop, S. Apollinaris, had been the friend of S. Peter who, as it was believed, had appointed him to the see of Ravenna.  That was in the earliest days of the Christian Church.  But we find the tradition still living in the fourth century when Severus, bishop of Ravenna, miraculously chosen to fill the see, sat in the council of Sardica in 344 and refused to make any alteration in the Nicene Creed.  About the end of the century Ursus had been bishop and had built the great cathedral church, the Basilica Ursiana, dedicated in honour of the Resurrection, with its five naves and fifty-six columns of marble, its schola cantorum in the midst, and its mosaics, all of which were finally and utterly destroyed in 1733.  There was too the baptistery which remains and the church of S. Agata and many others which have perished.

With the church of S. Agata we connect one of the great bishops of the fifth century, Joannes Angeloptes, who was there served at Mass by an angel.  While with the beautiful little chapel in the bishop’s palace, which still, in some sort at least, remains to us, we connect perhaps the greatest bishop Ravenna can boast of, S. Peter Chrysologus, for he built it.

Nor was Placidia herself slow to add to the ecclesiastical splendour of her city.  We have already seen that she built S. Giovanni Evangelista, rebuilt in the thirteenth century, in fulfilment of her vow and in memory of her salvation from shipwreck.  Close to her palace she built another church in honour of the Holy Cross, and attached to it she erected her mausoleum, which remains perhaps the most precious monument in the city.  The church and the monastery which her niece Singleida built beside it have perished.