ASPIRATIONS AND MYTH

Churches have always been proud of their antiquity and jealous of the prestige and the status that went with it. Their past was seen as the promise of future glory, and – more important – as the foundation of aspirations legitimated by their origins. Among the major sees scattered around the Mediterranean, Ravenna was a comparative newcomer. That did not prevent it staking claims to ancient rights and privileges; but a past to legitimate them had to be freshly created. Inevitably, myth came to overlay the historical record. In the case of the church of Ravenna, fact and myth are especially hard to disentangle. Its relations with the see of Rome were determined by its comparatively recent rise to importance on the one hand, and the compensating myth it propagated about itself and its ancient traditions and status on the other. Happily, it is over the earlier history which does not concern us here that the haze of legend lies most impenetrably. It dissolves sufficiently to allow us to see the facts of Ravenna's more recent rise.

In ad 400 Ravenna was a minor bishopric, subject to the metropolitan authority of the Roman see. In 402, however, the imperial court took refuge among its marshes from Milan, too exposed to the threat of invasion. This was to be the start of a rapid advance in its secular prestige, and of a corresponding ascent only a little slower in its ecclesiastical status.