Before beginning a sketch of the attempts to found a permanent Barbarian government in Italy and to combine Barbarians and Romans in one people, it is necessary to speak of a rising power which already constituted the most important element in the situation. The Church was not only the one vigorous body in Italy, but it had already begun to foreshadow its future greatness. In the time of Constantine (323-337) and his immediate successors, the bishops of Rome had no primacy over other bishops, but they had claims to precedence, which they soon put to good use. Their city was the cradle and home of Roman dominion. St. Paul had lived and died there. Above all, as was universally acknowledged, the apostle Peter had founded their bishopric. Theirs, in an especial sense, was the Church to which Christ referred when He said to the apostle, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." The bishops of Rome also derived immense advantage from the absence of a temporal prince; whereas their chief rivals, the patriarchs of Constantinople, were wholly eclipsed by the presence of the Emperor. The removal of the great offices of government to Constantinople and the absence of any real civil life, had left Rome even then a mere ecclesiastical city, and the head of the Church became the most important personage there. It was so generally acknowledged that Roman bishops were entitled to that precedence in rank over other bishops, which Rome enjoyed over other cities, that in 344 an Ecumenical Council submitted a most important question to the decision of the Roman See. One hundred years later the great pope, Leo I, merely gave utterance to the general opinion when he said: "St. Peter and St. Paul are the Romulus and Remus of the new Rome, as much superior to the old as truth is to error. If ancient Rome was at the head of the pagan world, St. Peter, prince of the Apostles, came to teach in the new Rome, so that from her the light of Christianity should be shed over the world."