Rome Falls, the Papacy Rises

The barbarians arrive

For centuries Rome had held its northern frontier along the Rhine and Danube rivers against the peoples beyond, whom Romans called "barbarians." Many Germans had already settled inside the empire as farmers and soldiers. Some rose to high command. Then, in the 370s, the Huns, fierce horsemen from the Central Asian steppe, crashed into the Goths living north of the Danube. In 376 tens of thousands of Gothic refugees begged to be let into the empire. Mistreated by Roman officials, they rebelled, and in 378 they destroyed a Roman army at Adrianople, killing the emperor Valens.

From then on the Western empire slowly unraveled. In 395 the empire was permanently divided between the sons of Theodosius I, with one emperor in the East (at Constantinople) and one in the West. The East was richer, more urban and better defended. The West, poorer and under constant attack, began to crumble.

The Western empire falls apart

The sack of Rome

On 24 August 410, the Visigoths under Alaric, a Christian of the Arian kind, entered and plundered the city of Rome. Rome was no longer the capital, since emperors now lived at Milan and later Ravenna, but it was the symbol of the whole civilized world. It had not fallen to a foreign enemy for 800 years. In Bethlehem, Jerome wrote that the city which had taken the whole world was itself taken. In Hippo, Augustine of Hippo began The City of God to answer those who blamed the Christians (see Augustine).

Notably, Alaric's men largely spared the churches and those who sheltered in them. The basilicas of Peter and Paul became places of refuge. It was a small sign that Christianity was already reshaping even the conquerors.

The next decades brought more invasions. The Vandals crossed the Rhine in 406, swept through Gaul and Spain, and in 429–439 conquered Roman North Africa, Augustine's homeland and the breadbasket of Italy. The Visigoths settled in southern Gaul and Spain, the Burgundians in the Rhône valley, the Franks in the north. Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded Britain after the Roman legions left around 410.

Leo the Great

In this collapsing world, one institution stood firm: the church. And within the church, the bishop of Rome grew in stature. The key figure was Leo the Great, pope from 440 to 461. He was a strong administrator, a fine preacher and a clear theologian. His Tome helped define the faith at the Council of Chalcedon (see Ephesus and Chalcedon).

Leo also articulated, more fully than anyone before, the theory of papal primacy. Christ gave Peter the "keys of the kingdom" and made him the rock on which the church is built (Matthew 16:18). Peter lives on, Leo taught, in his successors, the bishops of Rome. So the pope speaks with Peter's authority over the whole church. Leo saw himself as Peter's "unworthy heir," and he expected other bishops to obey him.

Leo also acted as a political leader. In 452 Attila the Hun the Hun invaded northern Italy. Leo went with a delegation to meet him near Mantua, and Attila withdrew. Legend later said that Peter and Paul appeared in the sky with swords. More likely, disease in Attila's army and a payment of gold played their part. But the image of the pope saving Italy where emperors could not was powerful. In 455, when the Vandals sacked Rome, Leo persuaded their king, Gaiseric, to spare the population from massacre and the city from burning.

The end of the Western empire

By the 460s the Western emperors were puppets of Germanic generals. In 476 one of these generals, Odoacer, deposed the boy emperor Romulus Augustulus. He did not bother to appoint a new one. He sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople and ruled Italy as king. Historians traditionally date "the fall of the Roman Empire" to 476, though few people at the time thought it a turning point. In the East, the Roman Empire continued for nearly another thousand years.

Life did not simply stop. Roman law, cities, Latin and many institutions continued under Germanic kings. The Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great, who ruled Italy from 493 to 526, was an Arian Christian who governed with Roman officials. The most famous was Boethius, a Christian philosopher and translator of Aristotle. Arrested on suspicion of treason, Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy in prison before his execution in 524. It became one of the most-read books of the Middle Ages.

The two powers

As emperors weakened, popes began to define the relationship between church and state. In 494 Pope Gelasius I I wrote to the Eastern emperor that the world is governed by "two powers": the sacred authority of bishops and the royal power of kings. Of these, he said, the authority of priests is weightier, because they must answer to God even for kings. The "two powers" (or "two swords") doctrine became the basis for medieval debates about church and state (see Popes Against Kings).

Clovis and the Franks

Most of the Germanic invaders were Arian Christians, converted by missionaries such as Ulfilas (see Arius and Nicaea). Their Catholic Roman subjects saw them as heretics, which kept the two peoples apart. One people was different: the Franks, still pagans, settled in northern Gaul.

Their king, Clovis I, married a Catholic Burgundian princess, Clotilde, who urged him to convert. According to the historian Gregory of Tours, during a desperate battle Clovis promised to believe in Clotilde's God if he won. He won, and around 496 (some say 508) he was baptized as a Catholic, not an Arian, at Reims, along with thousands of his warriors. "Bow your head, proud Sicambrian," said the bishop. "Burn what you have adored, and adore what you have burned."

The choice had huge consequences. Clovis now had the support of the Catholic bishops and Roman population of Gaul. He went on to defeat the Arian Visigoths and unite most of Gaul. The Franks became the papacy's most important allies, leading eventually to Charlemagne. France would later call itself "the eldest daughter of the church." Over the following century the other Arian kingdoms either disappeared or converted to Catholicism. The Visigoths in Spain did so in 589.

Justinian's reconquest

In the East, the emperor Justinian I (527–565) dreamed of restoring the whole Roman Empire. His generals reconquered North Africa from the Vandals and, after a devastating twenty-year war, Italy from the Ostrogoths. He also codified Roman law in the Corpus Juris Civilis, the foundation of most European legal systems. He built the great church of Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom") in Constantinople, for a thousand years the largest church in the world. On entering it, he is said to have exclaimed, "Solomon, I have surpassed you!" His wife, Theodora, a former actress, was a formidable political partner and protector of the anti-Chalcedonian Miaphysites.

But the reconquest exhausted the empire. The Gothic wars ruined Italy far more than the barbarian invasions had. A terrible plague struck in 541. In 568 a new Germanic people, the Arian Lombards, invaded Italy and took most of it. Rome was left isolated, nominally ruled from Constantinople but in practice increasingly dependent on its own bishop.

It was in this battered city, in 590, that a former prefect turned monk named Gregory the Great reluctantly became pope. His story opens the next era: Gregory the Great and the Conversion of Europe.