of tax-collectors. The Mediterranean had become transformed into a jigsaw of local communities, and therein lay both its weakness and its strength.
One concept which long outlived the reality of a unified Mediterranean world was that of an enduring Roman Empire. Both east and west drew upon a common reservoir of ideological notions of a divinely ordained, universal empire which had been evolved in the days of the great Christian emperors, Constantine and Theodosius. The Byzantines called themselves RhÅmaioi (Romans) and had no difficulty in maintaining the claims to universal rule which had been energetically proclaimed by Justinian. The west also drew upon Late Roman traditions as an ideological basis for its kingship, but had to adapt notions of universal empire to transformed political conditions and the predominance of ecclesiastical thought. St Augustine of Hippo recognized the decline of the empire but considered it secondary to God's instruments for salvation, the visible Church and the true community of the just ('the City of God'), while writers in Visigothic Spain saw God's mandate as having passed from the weak and heterodox Romans to the powerful Catholic rulers of the Germanic west. In general, however, the west was content with a vague recognition of the universal authority of the remote emperors of Constantinople, because of the lack of any coherent ideological alternative and the widespread equation of the Roman Empire with the 'Fourth Kingdom' of the Book of Daniel, destined to survive until the coming of Antichrist. The ambivalence of western barbarian kingdoms can be seen in the laws which the Lombard king, Rothari, issued in 643; an unashamedly traditional Germanic code was written up in Latin, almost certainly by a Roman official, and was prefaced by a short history of the Lombard people and a pious statement of the purposes of legislation borrowed from the Novels of Justinian.
A new and more coherent attitude in the west emerged with the coronation of Charlemagne in 800 following the papacy's
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