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Church, and the overwhelming imperial priority of unification, might put Pope and Emperor at odds. But Rome itself was increasingly remote from the centre of imperial affairs. No emperor since Constantine had lived in Rome, and even the Western emperors based themselves in the north – at Trier, Aries and especially Milan. Milan had been the centre of Constantius’ attempts to impose Arianism on the West, and an Arian bishop, Auxentius, remained in office till his death in 374.
    Auxentius was succeeded as bishop by an impeccably orthodox career civil servant, the unbaptised Governor of the city, Ambrose, and it was Ambrose, not Damasus or his successor Siricius (384–99), who would become the dominant figure in the life of the Western Church in the last quarter of the fourth century. Ambrose set himself to increase the influence of the see of Milan, taking on the metropolitan role over the north Italian bishoprics formerly exercised by Rome, involving himself in episcopal appointments as far away as the Balkans, attracting clergy and religious to the city from Piacenza, Bologna, even North Africa. He presided over the creation of a series of great churches which would establish Milan as a Christian capital, in a way which Rome itself, still dominated by paganism, could not hope to do. The Basilica Nova at Milan, now buried under the present Duomo, was a gigantic church, almost as big as the Pope’s cathedral church of St John Lateran, and unique outside Rome. Inheriting a bishopric in which Arianism was deeply entrenched, Ambrose set himself at the head of a movement to restore Nicene orthodoxy, mobilising the bishopsof the West behind the Catholic cause. Above all, in a series of confrontations with the imperial family he marked out the boundaries of secular and ecclesiastical power, refusing to surrender any of the city churches for the use of Arian troops in the imperial army, denying the right of the imperial courts to judge in ecclesiastical cases, preventing Church funds being used to rebuild a synagogue destroyed in a religious riot, and finally excommunicating the Emperor Theodosius for having ordered the punitive massacre of civilians at Thessalonica after the murder of an imperial official. Ambrose was the real leader of the Western Church, and his biographer Paulinus significantly remarked of him that he had ‘a concern for all the churches’, a Pauline text often invoked by the popes.
    The career of Ambrose is a salutary reminder of the limits of the papal primacy in the age of the great councils. But Ambrose’s dominant position in Italy was built on a high doctrine of the papacy, not on an attempt to erode it. He had been brought up as a child in Pope Liberius’ Rome. A sister had taken the veil as a nun from Liberius’ hand in St Peter’s, and the Pope was a familiar visitor to the house. Ambrose had been fascinated as the women of the family clustered around Liberius, kissing his hand, and the boy had amused and infuriated his relatives by imitating the Pope’s stately walk and offering his own hand to be kissed by the womenfolk. It was from Liberius’ career that he had his first lessons in resistance to imperial diktat, and there was nothing anti-papal about Ambrose’s campaign to increase the influence of Milan. Indeed, the high prerogatives of the papacy were vital to Ambrose, for he frequently justified his activities as being carried out on behalf of the Pope. In 381 he masterminded the Council of Aquilea, which had despatched a letter to the Emperor in support of Damasus against the antipope Ursinus, in which Rome was described as ‘the head of the whole Roman world’. From Rome flowed ‘the sacred faith of the Apostles … and all the rights of venerable communion’. 18 Not surprisingly, Ambrose’s Arian enemies saw him as Damasus’ toady, obsequiously buttering up the Pope to increase his own influence. For his part, Ambrose promoted the cult of Peter and Paul in Milan as a pledge of