ABSTRACT
The social, political, and cultural values promoted by Christian empresses, emperors, clergymen, and male and female lay leaders, artists, and writers played a powerful role in the transformation of the late antique Roman world into the medieval West and the Byzantine Empire. It should be clear, however, that Christianity and its ecclesiastical institutions were not alien imports to that world, but organically grew out of it. Even as Christianity was helping to transform Classical Roman civilization, it was spreading the legacy of that civilization far beyond its traditional boundaries. Ireland had been known to Greek and Roman mariners and geographers since at least the late seventh century b.c.e. The famous Roman general Agricola had even contemplated invading it from Britain under the Flavians. Christian congregations gave a bishop a well-organized group of supporters whom he could mobilize against secular and ecclesiastical rivals through effective preaching.
