The Papacy and the Fall of the Roman Empire

This paper will briefly examine the roles of the papacy and the Latin Church as a whole during the early Middle Ages, i.e., from barbarian invasions through the age of Charlemagne (5th-9th centuries AD).

Despite the decline of the Roman Empire by the fifth century, the whole of civil infrastructure in what had been the western part of the Empire did not collapse. One reason for this was that some groups the Romans had considered barbarians had coherent forms of social organization that they imposed when making incursions in places formerly controlled by Rome, and landowning Roman aristocrats who could back up their assertion of power with military force functioned as rulers in local areas. However, the most persistently meaningful "macro" entity of social organization in Western Europe was the Church, especially the papacy.

The enemy of Rome until the fourth century, the Church by t

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Category: History - T