W. Robert Godfrey

I hope that's clear, and if it's not, I'll be reiterating it as we go along.

So, warming up, first part, church and society, looking at something of church history.

I've already made the point that one of the mistakes that sometimes are made when we come to medieval history is to forget the continuing connection east and west.

to simply take the textbook date of 476, which almost any textbook will tell you is the date when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West.

So many textbooks say, well, when the Roman Empire collapsed in the West, that was the end of the ancient period in the West, and medieval history started in 477.

If history were that neat, it would be easier to write

And we'll actually talk in a minute about where that date 476 came from.

But it does raise an interesting question for us to pause a minute over.

When did the Roman Empire end?

And it turns out that's a little trickier question than you might have thought.

We know when the Roman Empire began.

It's when Octavian, the nephew of Julius Caesar, was able to defeat Anthony and Cleopatra, the last major resistance to his authority, and to establish himself as Augustus, as the worthy one, the honored one, the august one, and become emperor.

And this was in the period of 27 BC until his death in 14 AD.

So it is relatively easy to say when the Roman Empire began, but when did it end?

Well, as I've already said, many have said it ended in 476 with the collapse of the Western Empire.

The trouble is that when Augustulus Romulus died in 476 AD,

the West elected another emperor who's always been neglected by history and probably didn't really amount to much, but still, Augustulus Romulus didn't amount to much either.

So the Western Empire did sort of continue, at least struggle along a little while after that.

And besides that, there's still the empire in the East, centered in what was Byzantium, modern-day Istanbul.

The emperor there continued to insist that he was the Roman emperor and that the Roman Empire survived.