Stylus Productions

THE STORY OF THE CHRISTIANS

Volume X: The Age of Justinian

was far from a united Christianity. While the Pope in Rome, the Patriarch of Constantinople and the Emperor each tried to impose their own concept of church governance, the church in the east came to be split asunder, and national churches, independent of and hostile to the church in Constantinople, were coalescing.

During this period monasticism continued to spread in the eastern Mediterranean, but the monks were tamed, having been co-opted into the religious establishment. However, a new and fresh wave of Christian enthusiasm would take hold in the west, altogether outside the Roman Empire. The epicenter of this new Christian fervor was Ireland.

This would be the century of Justinian I (reg. 527-565), whose achievements included a codification of Roman law and the building of grand imperial churches. Justinian desired to make good on the claim of Augustus of the entire Roman Empire. But his attempt at the reconquest of the western provinces from the Germans left Italy in ruins and the city of Rome in shambles. The destruction of the ancient city of Rome was not the work of invading Visigoths or Vandals, but the result of the Byzantine-Ostrogothic wars of the sixth century. Rome would not recover for a millennium.

Chapters in VOLUME X:

1. Christianity and the Germans

2. Ravenna

3. Eastern Christianity Split Asunder

4. Pope, Patriarch, and Emperor

5. The Reign of Justinian I The Great

6. The Imperial Churches of Justinian

7. Pope Gregory I The Great

8. Monasticism Tamed

9. The Christianization of the Holy Land

10. The Triumph of Christianity

11. Britannia et Hibernia

By the beginning of the 6th century, notwithstanding the polite fiction that the Germanic rulers of the west governed by the sufferance of the Imperator Augustus in Constantinople, realists understood that the Roman empire had ceased to exist in the west. And yet, the Roman bureaucracy persisted in the west, and Latin remained the official language of law and government. And by about 500 AD it could legitimately be said that Christianity had triumphed, for even the Germans were Christians, albeit Arian Christians. But it

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