Decline of the Roman Empire

Today in class we started a new chapter and PowerPoint and discussed the answers to the previous test. Our homework was to read and outline page 123 in our textbooks, and post it to our blogs. 

Rise of Christianity:

• Christianity evolves from cult status to established, official structure
• They conflicted with Roman beliefs of all these other gods.
• It is the law to worship the Roman gods.
• Christianity appealed to the poor, and since there were many poor, their numbers grew.
• As it grew, even some Roman leaders embraced Christianity.
• In AD 313: Constantine has a battlefield conversion
• He issues the Edict of Milan
• Not only no persecution, but actually making it the official religion of Rome.
• The Roman Empire and Christianity are now linked in power and influence.
• Sometimes emperors, named the next Pope

AD 180: Rome has a problems: Pg 123

• The empire helped bring changes to peoples living outside as well as inside its borders.
• The Germanic barbarians became so much a threat that the emperors could hold them off only by building up the army.
• In the long run, they failed to hold the empire together, but lasting results for the future development of the West.
• As long as Rome had prospered, the emperors had taken little notice of Christianity's growth and spread.
• They sometimes harshly persecuted it and sometimes deliberately tolerated it.
• The burden of government and the army became too heavy to bear, the barbarian attacks grew too fierce to be resisted, and the empire began to collapse.