Plague - The Destroyer of Empires

[Nathan Ross]

We know the early church has been quite the... "drain" throughout history.  I wonder how much of state and military was funding was redirected to these early churches, which were then sacked by the barbarians?

By the time the Goths sacked Rome in 410, they were Christians too; same with the Vandals in 455. On both occasions church property was (at least officially) respected. Although some churches were pillaged, mostly it was private wealth that was taken.

But the church was a drain - mainly because, as the Roman aristocracy became Christianised, they preferred to donate their extraordinary wealth to the church, rather than using it to maintain the cities. Peter Brown's Through the Eye of a Needle (2012) is a vast chunk of a book, but full of detail about this handover from private aristocratic wealth to church wealth, particularly in the 4th-6th centuries.

It's hard to tell how much plague - and other woes - led to the growth of Christianity in the 3rd century. The church in some places - North Africa, and Rome itself - expanded massively, but this could have been the work of a vigorous clergy in these areas. The experience of the persecutions probably did more to weld the scattered Christian congregations together: by AD311 (when Galerius revoked the last persecution edict) Christians probably numbered only 5-10% of the Roman population, but they had shown themselves resilient and united, and able effectively to defy imperial orders. It was Constantine's patronage, I think, that really led to the Christianisation of the empire: once the elite classes in particular realised that the new faith gave them a road to imperial favour, it became unstoppable.

As for literacy - once again, I suspect it's to do with urbanisation. You need cities to produce a large literate population, and with the decline of the cities in the later Roman west, literacy fell. (You could argue that the Antonine Constitution of 212 started this process, of course).

Literacy in Europe only rose again with the growth of the Italian city states. We see the first universities in Italy in the 12th century, and by the 13th century, in cities like Milan, Venice and Florence (population 100K+) literacy was probably something like 33%, equivalent to the Roman empire's heyday. Of course, these sorts of figures are hard to establish with any certainty, but it's no surprise that the Renaissance began in Italy a good century or two before anywhere else in Europe!