ty to the hundredth milestone ; while the Jesuit Sirmond extended it to the much greater official district of the Vicariiis Urbis, viz., the ten provinces of Campania, § 58. THE LATIN rATRIAKCH. 291 wider sense, however, it extended gradually over the entire west of the Roman empire, thus covering Italy, Gaul, Spain, Illyria, 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 the ecclesiastical reason, that Rome was the only sede^ apostoUca in the West, while in the Greek church three patriarchates and several other episcopal sees, such as Ephesus, Thessalonica, and Corinth, shared the honor of apostolic foundation. Then again, he stood politicalh' alone, since Rome was the sole metropolis of the West, while in the East there were three capitals of the empire, Constan- tinople, 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 Justi- nian, on the ground of political distribution, in his 109th ]^o- velle, 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, Samnium, Apulia with Cala- bria, Lucania and Brutii, Sicilia, Sardinia, and Corsica. The comparison of the Roman bishop with the Alexandrian in the sixth canon of the Xicene council favort? the latter view ; since even the Alexandrian diocese likewise stretched over several ptovinces. The Prisca, 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 translation of the canon in question : " Antiqui moris est ut urbis Romse episcopus habeat prin- cipatum, ut suburbicaria loca [i. e. here, no doubt, the smaller province of the Pnefectus] et omncm provinciam suam [i. e. the larger district of the Vicarius, or a still wider, indefinite extent] sollicltudine sua gubernet." Comp. Mansi, Coll. Cone, vi. 1127, and Hefele, i. 380 sqq. ' According to the political division of the empire, the Roman patriarchate em- braced in the fifth century three prsefectures, 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 prtefectura Galliarum, with the dioceses of Gaul, Spain, and Britain ; (8) the prjefecture of Illyricum (not to be confounded with the province of Illyria, which belonged to the prtefecture of Italy), which, after 379, was separated indeed from the Western empire, as Illyricum orientale, but remained ecclesiastically connected with Rome, and embraced the two dioceses of Macedonia and Dacia. Comp. Wiltsch, 1. c. i. 67 sqq. ; Maassen, p. 120 ; and Hefele, i. 383. " Contra JuUanum, lib. i. cap. 6. 292