When Augustine landed in Kent in 597, what we call the Roman Empire was still raging against the dying of the light. After a prolonged struggle, the Empire had reconquered Italy (only to lose a large part of it to the Lombards shortly after). It held onto Northern Africa and even, by the thinnest of threads, parts of southern Spain. The economic heartlands in Egypt and Syria were undergoing a kind of golden age. The laws of the Empire had been recently codified once again in an enormous effort, proving the ability to shore up a massive amount of intellectual resources. Roman diplomacy if it did not control, then at least retained the ability to vastly influence those parts of the Empire that – no doubt, in the minds of courtly panegyrists and propagandists, temporarily – found themselves outside its borders.

But, as is the case so often with revivals, it was no longer the same old Rome, although its political and literary class did their utmost to pretend otherwise. Its point of gravity was in the East. Its machinery altered, its interests more divided. It was a late act, an empire transformed: its landscape was different from one, two, or three hundred years before; its infrastructure was weaker, its resources spread thinner over too large a territory. Nevertheless, at this moment, when the mission sent by Pope Gregory landed on the shores of Kent, nothing was yet decided, it was still the Empire. The members of the mission knew they were part of a world which had adapted, but in no way did they think of their world as a world in decline and fall.

What they encountered on the island of Britain differed greatly from what the Empire on its last tour looked like. Nonetheless, Rome was here too. On this island that Belisarius in his hubris reportedly wanted to give to the Goths in exchange for Sicily sixty years before, Roman roads still criss-crossed the landscape. Some (if not most) had different functions than transportation, but their gravitational pull still warped the environment around them. Roman city walls surrounded the now mostly empty urban spaces. Roman forts dotted the shore. Underneath this visible infrastructure, even more Roman legacy could be found.