Emperor Theodosius II commissioned and published the Codex Theodosianus, or Theodosian Code, in 439. It is a large anthology of legal issuances and statements from as far back as the era of Constantine, sole ruler of the empire from 324 to 337, and the latest sources come from the time of Theodosius II himself. The selections translated here were, in their own times, written in different contexts and sent to different audiences. There are edicts, made for a more general audience and applicable to many; there are decrees, which arise from the adjudication of a specific case; and there are letters written to specific city, provincial, and imperial officials, containing orders from one or another emperor. Yet as parts of this anthology, they are presented as having equal weight and equal applicability; they are statements by emperors, which establish a precedent of law, presented in this “Code” and accessible to officials and judges for consultation.

The focus of the chapter is on those features of the late Roman world in the West which were the environment of early papal jurisprudence. These include: the sheer number of clerics and monks, the heterogeneity of these two Christian elites, their relation to existing secular legislation on status and occupations, inconsistency in ritual systems, contested meanings of baptism and its place in the religious year, the symbolic significance of time, the disruption to society of the barbarian invasions, the two Christian systems of marriage (episcopal and imperial), and the spatial structures of empire and church. The chapter attempts to elucidate two overlapping sources of tension which played a part in generating the first papal jurisprudence: the multiplicity of semi-autonomous evolving systems, and uncertainty about where or whether to draw a line between non-negotiable principles and legitimate variation.