Over the protest of Leo the Great, in the fifth century, the council of Chalcedon decreed that the bishop of "New Rome" ought to enjoy the same honors and prerogatives with the pontiff of ancient Rome, on account of the equal rank and dignity of the two cities. In the following century, encouraged by past successes the bishop of "New Rome,"--John, surnamed the Faster, because of the austerity of his life, assembled a council of eastern bishops on his own account, to decide on charges brought against the patriarch of Antioch. It was on this occasion that he made such an assumption of the title of acumenical or universal bishop, that Gregory the Great supposed him to be aiming at a supremacy over all the Christian churches. In spite of the opposition of Gregory, the Faster, sustained by the emperor, continued to wear the title, though, it is said, not in the sense that Gregory supposed. The contest continued from this time forward with little interruption until that fatal schism came between the east and the west with which the reader has already been made acquainted. [14] The patriarchs of New Rome retained their hold upon the east; but the decay, moral and spiritual, which blighted those churches steadily went on, until at the last, Mohammedan civilization displaced Christian civilization. The crescent rose triumphantly above the cross, and the east sank into a settled gloom out of which it has not yet been able to rise. In the west it was otherwise. There all was activity. The Roman pontiffs not only sent their missionaries to the barbarians to preach the supremacy of the popes, but the barbarians came to Rome. They came with arms in their hands and as conquerors, it is true, and in the closing years of the fifth century obtained an easy victory over the western division of the empire. But if imperial Rome was vanquished, there arose above its ruins papal Rome, in majesty no less splendid than that possessed by imperial Rome in her palmiest days; and in the course of time the victorious barbarians bowed in as humble submission to the wand of the popes, as their ancestors had to the eagle-mounted standard of the emperors. Moreover, the barbarous nations that fell under the influence of the Roman missionaries were accustomed to hold their priests in a superstitious reverence. In portions of Western Europe the Druid priests had reigned over both people and magistrates, controlling absolutely the jurisdiction of the latter; and, in the case of the supreme priest, according to some authorities, [15] the reverence of the barbarians amounted to worship. This reverence, on their conversion to Christianity, was readily transferred to the supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church; and made possible that spiritual and temporal despotism before which monarchs trembled and the world stood in abject fear.