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CHAPTER 16
The Roman Church and its Bishops
Kristina SessaIntroduction: Narratives of Rise and Fall
Traditional narratives of the late ancient Roman church and its bishops under-
line the Ostrogothic period as a benchmark in its institutional and ideological
development. The political trajectory of Ostrogothic Italy, its rise and fall as a
state, has long provided scholars with both a historical and a heuristic frame-
work for interpreting the development of Roman episcopal authority and prac-
tices. The new political landscape, characterized by a tolerant Arian king and
a distant Catholic emperor, is thought to have created the conditions for the
emergence of an ‘independent papacy’, through which popes more efficiently
and assertively governed the church.1 However, when the Ostrogothic regime
fell to Justinian’s armies and the empire in Italy was reborn, so the Roman
church is said to have suffered precipitous decline. In the words of Trevor
Jalland, the end of the Ostrogoths marked “the gathering gloom of Byzantine
tyranny over the Church”.2 Simply put, the history of the Roman church from
ca. 476 to 554 has long been written as a narrative embedded within the
political and military history of the Ostrogothic government.3 Consequently,
it has thematically revolved around issues of church-state relations, inter-
ecclesiastical doctrinal debate, and the mercurial relationship between ‘the
East’ and ‘the West’ during an epoch marked by schism and ideological con-
flict pitting papal authority against imperial power in the determination of
Christian truths.4
1 Jalland, The Church and the Papacy; Caspar, Geschichte des Papsttums; Ullmann, Growth
of Papal Government and Short History of the Papacy; Llewellyn, Rome in the Dark Ages;
Schimmelpfenig, The Papacy; Amory, People and Identity; and Sotinel, “Emperors and Popes”.
2 Jalland, The Church and the Papacy, p. 342; see also p. 353.
3 Bury, Later Roman Empire, 1, pp. 464–6 and 2, pp. 151–290 and Stein, L’Histoire du Bas-Empire,
2, pp. 40–115.
4 See, for example, Moorhead, Theoderic; Noble, “Theodoric and the Papacy”; Amory, People
and Identity; Sardella, Società, chiesa, e stata; Sotinel, “Emperors and Popes”; and
Demacopoulos, Invention of Peter.