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The Council proclaimed: "Rome is at the head of the world", [9] reinforcing the developing theocratic doctrine that subordinated secular affairs to spiritual authority. [ 10 ] In Italy, Arnold of Brescia defended the idea of total poverty and wanted to force the Pope to renounce all his temporal powers.
Rome's vocation [in the pre-Nicene period] consisted in playing the part of arbiter, settling contentious issues by witnessing to the truth or falsity of whatever doctrine was put before them. Rome was truly the center where all converged if they wanted their doctrine to be accepted by the conscience of the Church.
The Romans fought off all invaders, most famously Attila, [42] but the empire had assimilated so many Germanic peoples of dubious loyalty to Rome that the empire started to dismember itself. [43] Most chronologies place the end of the Western Roman Empire in 476, when Romulus Augustulus was forced to abdicate to the Germanic warlord Odoacer .
The Roman expansion in Italy covers a series of conflicts in which Rome grew from being a small Italian city-state to be the ruler of the Italian region.Roman tradition attributes to the Roman kings the first war against the Sabines and the first conquests around the Alban Hills and down to the coast of Latium.
With Rome's great military victories, vast numbers of slaves were imported into Italy. [28] Significant mineral wealth was distributed unevenly to the population; the city of Rome itself expanded considerably in opulence and size; the freeing of slaves brought to Italy by conquest massively expanded the number of urban and rural poor. [29]
Up to that time, he remained in Germany, while a deposed duke, Crescentius II, ruled over Rome and part of Italy, ostensibly in his stead. In 996 Otto III appointed his cousin Gregory V the first German pope. [82] A foreign pope and foreign papal officers were seen with suspicion by Roman nobles, who were led by Crescentius II to revolt.
The so-called Domus Aurea, meaning golden house in Latin, was constructed atop the burnt remains of Rome after the Great Fire of Rome (64). Because of the convenience of this many believe that Nero was ultimately responsible for the fire, spawning the legend of him fiddling while Rome burned which is almost certainly untrue.
Map of the Roman Empire with the distribution of Christian congregations of the first three centuries AD. The growth of early Christianity from its obscure origin c. AD 40, with fewer than 1,000 followers, to being the majority religion of the entire Roman Empire by AD 400, has been examined through a wide variety of historiographical approaches.