A major change that affected the region toward the
end of the Roman
period was the spread of Christianity. As elsewhere in the empire, it
was the adoption of the new religion by the emperor Constantine in the
first half of the fourth century that initiated a general conversion.
By the time the Roman Empire in the west came to an end in the fifth
century, the Christian church was a major institutional and
intellectual force in Gaul. The establishment of the church was crucial
for the future of European culture. It gave canonical status to a
heritage that would otherwise have been utterly irrelevant to the
peoples of the region, that of ancient Israel. But it also conserved
the literary heritage of the Greco-Roman world. Christianity no doubt
lowered the tone of elite life in late antiquity; but thanks to its
bishops and monasteries, its organizational resilience, and its
commitment to the survival of literate culture, it may have prevented
the kind of discontinuity that followed the collapse of the
civilizations of the Indus Valley or Mycenaean Greece. Without the
church, the best we could imagine might have been the slow accretion of
a new literary heritage around Germanic runes and Irish ogham-folk
scripts that the early Germans and Irish somehow derived from the
writing systems of the Mediterranean world.
