Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The political thought of the Middle Ages is above all a Christian and ecclesiastical thought. Its ramifications are, of course, too extensive to describe fully in a single chapter. We shall here concentrate on one complex and important issue: the question of the respective roles of regnum or imperium and sacerdotium — royal or imperial and priestly authority. We select this question at the cost of omitting much that is important; but we do so because, in terms of the controversial literature that it produced, it is the main driving force of ideological debate from the fifth to the fourteenth centuries.Down to the fourth century, Christianity was regarded with an official hostility that expressed itself most notably in recurrent persecutions of the Church by the Roman authorities. But in 312, in circumstances somewhat obscured by hagiography, the emperor Constantine himself became a Christian, and in 313 published an edict — the Edict of Milan — granting toleration to the Christian faith. Thus began the process of assimilation by which, under Theodosius I (378–95), Christianity was transformed into the established religion of the Roman Empire. But this process produced a difficulty that was to persist for a millennium. The Byzantine emperors still perceived themselves as sovereigns of the civilized world, with nothing lying outside their scope. The emperor, as supreme, is head of ... log in or subscribe to read full text