This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A sequence of 112 short Latin mottoes, each said to describe a future pope in turn, circulates under the name of Malachy of Armagh as the Prophecy of the Popes. The sequence was first published by the Benedictine monk Arnold Wion in 1595, more than four hundred years after Malachy's death in 1148, and Wion's own publication is the earliest point at which any trace of the text can be found.
No mention of such a prophecy appears in Bernard of Clairvaux's hagiography of Malachy, written shortly after his death by the friend and biographer best placed to know of it, nor in any source from the intervening four centuries. The mottoes' own internal evidence, matching the details of earlier popes far more precisely than those coming later, points scholars toward composition shortly before its 1595 publication rather than to the twelfth century Malachy actually lived in.
The gap between Malachy's own documented life, an archbishop's career of church reform ending in canonisation, and a prophecy first appearing under his name centuries after he could have written it, marks the Prophecy of the Popes as a work of its own later era rather than a survival from his. This record keeps the two apart, the historical archbishop and the text later tradition attached to him, rather than reading the prophecy back into a life it did not touch.