ABSTRACT
The ‘top-down’ model for explaining the conversion of Western Europe to Christianity, and the subsequent maintenance of the religion amongst the population, may involve the power of secular rulers, as we have seen, but it surely must involve also the power of the Church as an organisation. If we are to argue for the ‘top-down’ model, we need to explore how developed that power was in our period. The purpose of this chapter is to attempt that, focusing on bishops, including the bishop of Rome, or the pope, who appear in the sources for our period as men of great power and influence in the world as well as in the Church itself. How extensive was this power, what was its nature, and on what did it depend? How far did the bishops occupy a position at the head of a hierarchy of power, which in the case of the pope embraced the whole of Western Christendom? How far did they have a machinery enabling them to reach down to the lowest levels of Christian society?
