Question: When did the city that was central to imperial life in the early fifth century, for the empire that the term 'The West' comes from, officially become Christian?

roman city life and culture changed greatly in the early middle ages. although italian cities remained inhabited, they contracted significantly in size. rome, for instance, shrank from a population of hundreds of thousands to around 30,000 by the end of the 6th century. roman temples were converted into christian churches and city walls remained in use. in northern europe, cities also shrank, while civic monuments and other public buildings were raided for building materials. the establishment of new kingdoms often meant some growth for the towns chosen as capitals. although there had been jewish communities in many roman cities, the jews suffered periods of persecution after the conversion of the empire to christianity. officially they were tolerated, if subject to conversion efforts, and at times were even encouraged to settle in new areas. <SEP> Around 100 CE, it had a population of about 450,000, and declined to a mere 20,000 during the Early Middle Ages, reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings interspersed among large areas of ruins and vegetation. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in Europe. <SEP> in japanese, they are usually referred to as bushi (武士?, [bu.ɕi]) or buke (武家?). according to translator william scott wilson: "in chinese, the character 侍 was originally a verb meaning "to wait upon" or "accompany persons" in the upper ranks of society, and this is also true of the original term in japanese, saburau. in both countries the terms were nominalized to mean "those who serve in close attendance to the nobility", the pronunciation in japanese changing to saburai. according to wilson, an early reference to the word "samurai" appears in the kokin wakashū (905–914), the first imperial anthology of poems, completed in the first part of the 10th century. <SEP> The Eastern Mediterranean was home to the highly urbanized cultures that had Greek as their common language (owing to the older empire of Alexander the Great and of the Hellenistic successors), whereas the West was much more rural in its character and more readily adopted Latin as its common language. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Western and Central Europe were substantially cut off from the East where Byzantine Greek culture and Eastern Christianity became founding influences in the Arab / Muslim world and among the Eastern and Southern Slavic peoples. Roman Catholic Western and Central Europe, as such, maintained a distinct identity particularly as it began to redevelop during the Renaissance. The geopolitical divisions in Europe that created a concept of East and West originated in the Roman Empire. Even following the Protestant Reformation, Protestant Europe continued to see itself as more tied to Roman Catholic Europe than other parts of the perceived civilized world. <SEP> The Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, and the Catholic Church each claim to be the historical continuation of this church in its original form, but do not identify with it in the caesaropapist form that it took later. Unlike Constantine I, who with the Edict of Milan of 313 AD had established tolerance for Christianity without placing it above other religions and whose involvement in matters of the Christian faith extended to convoking councils of bishops who were to determine doctrine and to presiding at their meetings, but not to determining doctrine himself, Theodosius established a single Christian doctrine (specified as that professed by Pope Damasus I of Rome and Pope Peter II of Alexandria) as the Empire's official religion. Nicene Christianity became the state church of the Roman Empire with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380 AD, when Emperor Theodosius I made it the Empire's sole authorized religion.