A major factor in the consolidation and expansion of Christianity in the West was the growth in the prestige and power of the bishop of Rome. Pope Leo I the Great made the primacy of the Roman bishop explicit both in theory and in practice and must be counted as one of the most important figures in the history of the centralization of authority in the church. The next such figure was Gregory I the Great, whose work shaped the worship, the thought, and the structure of the church as well as its temporal wealth and power. Although some of Gregory’s successors advocated papal primacy, it was the popes of the 11th century and thereafter who sought to exploit claims of papal authority over the church hierarchy and over all Christians. Even while still a part of the universal church, Byzantine Christianity had become increasingly isolated from the West by difference of language, culture, politics, and religion and followed its own course in shaping its heritage. The Eastern churches never had so centralized a polity as did the church in the West but developed the principle of the administrative independence ... (200 of 126,827 words)From the schism to the Reformation
- Christ as Ruler, with the Apostles and Evangelists (represented by the beasts). The female figures are believed to be either Santa Pudenziana and Santa Práxedes or symbols of the Jewish and Gentile churches. Mosaic in the apse of Santa Pudenziana basilica, Rome, ad 401–417.
- Detail from Expulsion of Adam and Eve, fresco by Masaccio, c. 1427; in the Brancacci Chapel, Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.
- Moses expounding the law, illuminated manuscript page from the Bury Bible, about 1130. In Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
- Greek Bible. Page from The Gospel According to Matthew, 6th century ad.
- Statue of Diocletian’s tetrarchy, red porphyry, c. ad 300, brought to Venice in 1258.
- Marble colossal head of Constantine the Great, part of the remains of a giant statue from the Basilica of Constantine, in the Roman Forum, c. ad 313.
- Apse of the church of St. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, Italy, second half of the 6th century.
- World distribution of Christianity, c. 2000.
- Communion of the Apostles, panel by Justus of Ghent, c. 1473–74; in the Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, Italy.
- St. Augustine, fresco by Sandro Botticelli, 1480; in the Church of the Ognissanti, Florence.