THIRD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. nienical councils, also, know no other Western patriarchate than the Roman, and this was the sole medium through which the Eastern church corresponded with the Western. In the great theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries the Roman bishop appears uniformly as the representative and the organ of all Latin Christendom. It was, moreover, the highest interest of all orthodox churches in the West, amidst the political confusion and in conflict with the Arian Goths, Vandals, and Suevi, to bind themselves closely to a common centre, and to secure the powerful protection of a central authority. This centre they could not but find in the primitive apostolic church of the metropolis of the world. The Roman bishops were consulted in almost all important questions of doctrine or of discipline. After the end of the fourth century they issued to the Western bishops in reply, pastoral epistles and decretal letters,^ in which they decided the question at first in the tone of paternal counsel, then in the tone of apostolic authority, making that which had hitherto been loft to free opinion, a fixed statute. The first extant decretal is the Epistola of Pope Su-icius to the Spanish bishop Himerius, a. d. 385, which contains, character- istically, a legal enforcement of priestly celibacy, thus of an evidently unapostolic institution ; but in this Siricius appeals to "generalia decreta," which his predecessor Liberius had already issued. In like manner the Roman bishops repeatedly caused the assembling of general or patriarchal councils of the West {synodos occidentales), like the synod of Aries in 314. After the sixth and seventh centuries they also conferred the pallium on the archbishops of Salona, Ravenna, Messina, Syra- cuse, Palermo, Aries, Autun, Sevilla, Nicopolis (in Epirus), Canterbury, and other metropolitans, in token of their superior jurisdiction.'' * EpistolcB decretales ; an expression, which, according to Gieseler and others, occurs first about 500, in the so-called decrctum Gelasii de libris recipieudia ct non recipiendls. * See the information concerning the conferring of the pallium in Wiltsch, i. 68 sq. § 59. CONFLICTS OF THE LATIN PATKIABCHATE. 293 § 59. Conjlicts and Conquests of the Latin Patriarchate. But this patriarclial power was not from the beginning and to a uniform extent acknowledged in the entire West. Not until tlie latter part of the sixth century did it reach the height we have above described.' It was not a divine institution, un- changeably fixed from the beginning for all times, like a Biblical article of faith ; but the result of a long process of history, a human ecclesiastical institution under providential direction. la proof of which we have the following incontes- table facts : In the first place, even in Italy, several metropolitans main- tained, down to the close of our period, their own supreme headship, independent of Eoman and all other jurisdiction." The archbishops of Milan, who traced their church to the apostle Barnabas, came into no contact with the pope till the latter part