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Originally Posted by glyn
It changed its outlook and where once citizens could hold whatever religion they wanted (even though the state had its Pontifex Maximus and the Army were followers of Sol Invicta) in 391 AD Emperor Theodosius prohibited all religions other than Christianity.
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It was never the policy of Roman Rulers to allow any religion if that religion did pay respects to the emperor. The Romans dispensed great suffering on the Jews and Christians in the classical period. Nevertheless, the early Empire was much more religiously tolerant than the Empire of Theodosius.
The soldiers of the Empire were heterodox and were often the ones responsible for spreading the cult of Isis from Egypt, Manichaeism from Persia, or Mithraism from unknown locales. The idea of Sol Invictus can be applied to the idea that Caracalla started, Mithras, or El-Gabal, a rather strange invention of the Severans about which I know very little.
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Constantine was the first Emperor to convert to christianity (he also made himself Pope!) but he still maintained his faith in Sol Invicta. Like the Vikings, christianity seemed to weaken them. They eventually freed the slaves, the Army was filled with non-Romans of lesser ability, immigrants outnumbered Romans and there was a lack of leadership. Their time at the top was over. No empire lasts forever.
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You will be hard pressed to cite examples where Christians were less motivated to preserve their Empire than their pagan forebears because of their religion. Like I wrote before, any slackening in the Roman will is probably not associated with Christian theology.
The new Christian administration provided a valuable anchoring point in resistance to the various centrifugal forces ripping the empire apart at the time. The papacy and Eastern patriarchates were the most stable institutions in the empire as it fell apart.
One can hardly imagine the Eastern Roman Empire existing without Christianity. Indeed, the Virgin Mary provided hope to the defenders of Constantinople and the Eastern Empire in many cases, most notably in the Avar and Persian siege in 626. Byzantine Rulers after Heraclius almost always had Christ on the reverse of their coins.
There was never a time when immigrants outnumbered local Romans during the Germanic invasions. By most accounts, the invading German armies were small compared to the conquered Roman population. For example, Gaul kept up a distinctly Roman culture for at least a century under Frankish dominion. The dominance of Roman culture is evinced by the fact that in most areas of Western Europe where Roman rule had been around for centuries, the invading Germans adopted a Romance tongue.
Slaves were not freed through any act of Christian kindness. The slaves disappeared as the difference between free peasants and slaves slowly lessened in the later empire. It appears that the fourth and fifth centuries were periods of economic hardship in which the independent agrarian class largely became serfs, dominated by Roman nobles with questionable allegiance to the central government.