Resumen de I vescovi et il governo della cità (IV-VI secolo d.C.)
This paper concerns the role of bishops in the government of the late antique City. By making them responsible for 'nourishing the poor' - with the support of imperial legislation and a superior status that some privileges granted them - Constantine ensured that they continued to publicly carry out many functions as peacemakers and in the protection of their faithful, which they had exercised within their own congregation even before the end of persecutions. These activities were in close relationship with the city government and its defense but they did not concern its administration. Until the first half of the sixth century, in any region of the Empire, the extension of the areas in which the episcopal patronage came to be exercised never implied the integration of the bishop into the bureaucracy or his assimilation to imperial officials. Therefore, the Pragmatica Sanctio (cap. 12), commissioning the bishops and the highest local notables of the election and control of the provincial governors, was a real innovation. Being anticipated by the provisions of some Justinian Novellae, it reflected the institutional changes that in the last years of the Ostrogoth kingdom were also maturing in the Italian peninsula, as some letters of the praetorian prefect Cassiodorus indicate. In the Byzantine East, as well as in Merovingian and Frankish Gaul, new relationships were established between political authorities and bishops, so that the latter's patronage finally differed in nature, no longer only in extension, from that exercised in previous centuries.
