A.D. 381 heretics, pagans, and the dawn of the monotheistic state ( PDFDrive )

quite humble dwellings, disappear, as they had in Britain. The aqueducts into
Rome were cut in the late sixth century, and it is not until the sixteenth century
that any were reconnected. The size of cattle slumps below pre-Roman levels. 6
A vivid image of the desperation of the age survives from the letters and
works of Gregory the Great, pope from 590 to 604. In his embattled Rome, the
population had recovered to some 90,000 from a low of 30,000 in the mid-sixth
century, although most of the newcomers were refugees from the Lombard
invaders in the north. He paints a grim picture of the world as he sees it: ‘Towns
are depopulated, fortified places destroyed, churches burnt, monasteries and
nunneries destroyed; fields are deserted by men, and the earth, forsaken by the
ploughman, gapes desolate. No farmer dwells here now; wild beasts have taken
the place of throngs of men. What goes on in other parts of the world, I do not
know: but here, in the land in which we live, the world no longer announces its
coming end, but shows it forth.’ Rome itself is disintegrating: ‘the senate is gone,
the people perish, pain and fear grow daily for the few who are left: a deserted
Rome is burning ... we see buildings destroyed, ruins daily multiplied.’
Gregory’s world is pervaded by the sense of living ‘in the last times’. 7 While he
keeps close contact with southern Italy and Sicily, where there are Church estates
and it is still possible to reach Carthage and the Dalmatian and the Gaulish
Mediterranean coast by sea, the rest of Europe is by now largely out of reach.
His mission for the conversion of England in 597 was in the circumstances a
major undertaking.
It was not only the Germanic tribes, Anglo-Saxons, Franks, Burgundians and
assorted Goths, who were building new kingdoms out of the void; much of the
former western empire, the entire coast of North Africa, southern Spain and
Sicily, was lost in the seventh century to the Arabs, who swept up as far as
Poitiers in France before they were defeated. With the relationship with the older
and more sophisticated Greek church breaking down, and so much lost to Islam,
Rome emerged as the single isolated religious centre of the barbarian west. 8
The Church had an advantage over the fragile secular rulers as its hierarchy
had survived the social breakdown; bishops had become increasingly sought
after for their administrative skills. A position in the Church enabled aristocrats
to maintain their status, as in the case of Sidonius Apollinaris, a former prefect
of Rome before the fall of the western empire, who was consecrated Bishop of
Clermont in 470 and who lived out his life on his estates in Gaul in uneasy
proximity to the local Gothic rulers. Fundamental to the consolidation of Church