W. Robert Godfrey

It was more what we would call a civil war than a real war of reconquest.

But when Justinian conquered Italy, Italy for a time became unoccupied.

area, not really feeling that the Byzantine presence was their people coming back to rescue them, but really foreigners now there.

And so some say this is where the Western Empire really ended.

This is when the division between East and West became palpable with Justinian's control of parts of Italy.

He never was able to control absolutely all of it.

But he managed to reestablish a Byzantine presence or an Eastern Roman presence in Italy that lasted down to the middle of the eighth century.

So there's long history, long shadows to these things.

So Justinian is a sort of point at which the East reaches a measure of separation from the West, not an absolute separation.

There could be a lot of contact, a lot of back and forth, so much so that when Charlemagne was crowned emperor in 800,

Charlemagne sent to the Eastern emperor and said, will you ratify my election?

Will you approve my election?

And the emperor said, yes, ratify this election.

So there was this ongoing sense we want to have some measure of connection back and forth.

Well, if Justinian marks the point at which there is a break between East and West, then Pope Gregory I

marks the point at which the papacy begins to emerge as an increasingly independent authority in the West.

I say begins to emerge because nothing is as simple as we would all like it to be.

There continued to be connections between East and West, but with the emergence of Gregory, known to history as Gregory the Great, Gregory I, as Pope, we begin to see the Pope becoming an increasingly independent operator in the West.

The Pope beginning to be, in the early centuries of the Middle Ages, the strongest independent figure in the West, a rallying point

for many in the West, the papacy becoming an institution of continuity of history.