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. As Christian missionaries spread Rome's cultural legacy beyond the traditional boundaries of the Classical world, the Church was preserving Rome's imperialistic spirit. While the power of the Roman emperors and their officials in the West declined during the fifth and sixth centuries, Christian ecclesiastics gained increasing control over civic and secular affairs. In the East, the prominent metropolitan bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople had perpetuated the intercity rivalries of the old civic elites. In the West, the abandonment of Rome for Milan as the emperor's principal residence in the mid-third century had long prepared the way for the separate authority of the pope, bishop of Rome.
