290 THIKD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590.
thus remarkably outranking even the church of St. Peter — ag if Peter after all were not the first and highest apostle, and had to yield at last to the superiority of John, the representative of the ideal church of the future. Tradition says that the emperor Constantine erected this basilica by the side of the old Lateran palace, which had come down from heathen times, and gave the palace to Pope Sylvester ; and it remained the residence of the popes and the place of assembly tor their councils (the Lateran councils) till after the exile of Avignon, when they took up their abode in the Vatican beside the ancient church of St. Peter.
As metropolitan or archbishop, the bishop of Pome had immediate jurisdiction over the seven suffragan bishops, after ward called cardinal bishops, of the vicinity : Ostia, Portns, Silva Candida, Sabina, Praencste, Tusculum, and Albanum.
As patriarch, he rightfully stood on equal footing with the four patriarchs of the East, but had a much larger district and the primacy of honor. The name is here of no account, since the fact stands fast. Tlie Poman bishops called themselves not patriarchs, but popes, that they might rise the sooner above their colleagues ; for the one name denotes oligarchical power, the other, monarchical. But in the Eastern church and among modern Catholic historians the designation is also quite currently applied to Rome.
The Poman patriarchal circuit primarily enibi-accd the ten suburban provinces, as they were called, which were under the political jurisdiction of the Poman deputy, the Yicarius Urbis ; including the greater part of Central Italy, all Upper Italy, and the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica.' In its
' Concil. Nicien. of 325, can. 0, in the Latin version of Rufinus (Hist. Eccl. x. C): " Et ut apud Alexandriam ct in urbe Roma vetusta consuctudo sorvctur, ut vcl illo M"ypti, vel hie suhurhicariarnin ecclesiariim sollioitudincm gerat." The wovdH nihHrh. eccl. are wanting in the Greek original, and are a Latin definition of the patriarchal diocese of Rome at the end of the fourth century. Since the seventeenth century they have given ri.se to a long controversy among the learned. The juri.st Gothofredus and his friend Salma.sius limited the rec/iones anhnrbicarivB to the small province o*" the Pnrfectua Urbis, i. e. to the city of Rome witli the immediate vicinity to the Inmdrcdth milestone ; while the Jesuit Sirmoud extended it to the much greater official district of the Vicariv^s Urbis, viz., the ten proviuces of Campanis
§ 58, THE LATIN PATRIAKCH. 201
wider sense, however, it extended gradually over the entire west of the Roman empire, thus covering Italy, Gaul, Spain J.llyria, southeastern Britannia, and northwestern Africa.^
The bishop of Rome was from the beginning the only Latin patriarch, in the official sense of the word. He stood thus alone, in the first place, for tlie ecclesiastical reason, that Rome was the only aedes apostoUea in the West, while in the Greek church thi'ee patriarchates and several other episcopal sees, such as Ephesus, Thessalonica, and Corinth, shared tlie honor of apostolic foundation. Then again, he stood politically alone, since Rome was the sole metropolis of the West, while in the East there were three capitals of the empire, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch. Hence Augustine, writing from the religious point of view, once calls Pope Innocent I. the " ruler of the Western church ; " ^ and the emperor Justinian, on the ground of political distribution, in his 109th Kovelle, where he speaks of the ecclesiastical division of the whole world, mentions only five known patriarchates, and therefore only one patriarchate of the West. The decrees of the ecu-
Tuscia with Umbria, Picenum suburbicarium, Valeria, Samniura, Apulia with Calabria, Lucania and Brutii, Sicilia, Sardinia, and Corsica. The comparison of the Roman bishop with the Alexandrian in the sixth canon of the Nicene council favors the latter view ; since even the Alexandrian diocese likewise stretched over several provinces. The Frisca, however — a Latin collection of canons from the middle of the fifth century — has perhaps hit the truth of the matter, in saying, in its transJisiiou of the canon in question : *' Antiqui moris est ut urbis Romae episcopus habeat principatum, ut suburbicaria loca [i. e. here, no doubt, the smaller province of the Praefectus] et omnem provinciam suam [i. e. the larger district of the Vicarius, or a still wider, indefinite extent] soUicitudine sua gubernet." Comp. Mansi, Coll. Cone. vi. 1127, and Hefele, i. 380 sqq.
' According to the political division of the empire, the Roman patriarchate embraced in the fifth century three praefectures, which were divided into eight political dioceses and sixty-nine provinces. These are, (1) the prsefecture of Italy, with the three dioceses of Italy, Illyricum, and Africa ; (2) the prsefectura Galliarum, with the dioceses of Gaul, Spain, and Britain ; (3) the praefecture of Illyricum (not to be confounded with the province of Ulyria, which belonged to the praefecture of Italy), whidi, after 379, was separated indeed from the "Western empire, as Illyricum orientale, but remained ecclesiastically connected with Rome, and embraced the twa dioceses of Macedonia and Dacia. Comp. Wiltsch, 1. c. i. 67 sqq. ; Maaasen, p. 12rf ; and Hefele, i. 383.
' Contra JuUanum, lib. i. cap. 6.