precepts came to provide the standard pattern for eastern monasticism.

Although monasticism was rapidly adopted in the west, it underwent a number of changes in the process. It became a fashionable aristocratic movement as senators set up monasteries in their city palaces and on their estates. Some bishops established monasteries for their cathedral clergy, and the movement came to be promoted by the episcopate as an ideal to counter worldliness in the Church. Although a few figures such as the former soldier, St Martin of Tours, broadened its impact through missionary work, many of the Gallic monastic centres in the Jura mountains and on the Riviera left little lasting mark once their original charismatic founders died, although the austere Gallic ideal bore remarkable fruit when it became the basis of ecclesiastical organization in Ireland and Celtic Britain. The search for a formula which would combine order and stability with spiritual fervour continued, and the writings and examples of figures such as John Cassian were utilized in the constructive and imaginative Rule devised by St Benedict of Nursia. In the long term Benedict's blueprint for a tightly knit community following an orderly routine of prayer, work, and study became the norm throughout the Latin west, but in the short term its impact was limited. Benedict's foundation of Monte Cassino was sacked by the Lombards around 577, and although the saint's renown was spread by a life written by Pope Gregory the Great, there is no evidence that his Rule was followed in Rome. Gregory, himself a monk, greatly extended the role of monks by appointing them to key posts in the papal administration and assigning them important tasks such as the mission to England led by Augustine, a monk from his own monastery.

Throughout western Europe the Church came to rely increasingly on monks, since the collapse of Roman urban society left the secular clergy morally and materially ill-equipped for the immense tasks of conversion and reform which confronted it. The same developments weakened the traditional aristocratic monasticism, of which Cassiodorus' scholarly house at Vivarium is a late but distinguished example, and the main momentum

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