The Clockwork Mansion

In order to explain the rise of the prince-bishops, you first need to talk about the fall of Rome. The important thing to understand is that this (see image right) is not the fall of Rome. It is Roman politics as usual during late antiquity. The fall of Rome is that this (see image right) had become Roman politics as usual. This is an important detail to get right, because this is the environment in which rule by the church started looking more attractive, at least from the standpoint of ordinary citizens. From the standpoint the people in power, rule by the church (or at least handing church officials varying amount of secular power) could also be attractive, because they didn't want to be dealing with this (see image right) either, even if they had been the people doing this (see image right) five minutes ago.

This all of course a heavily simplification since I promised this writeup like 36 hours ago and I haven't managed to get my hands on The Inheritance of Rome just yet. 
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In LaGaRa terms you (presumably) don't have a single realm that corresponds to the Roman Empire (or at least not that one the entirety of LaGaRa sees itself as succeeding in the manner of IRL medieval europe), but it does have an a period that if you squint is somewhat analogous to late antiquity: Whatever was going on immediately after the Breaking. Like with late antiquity, this would be an event that disproportionately hit secular institutions (I.E. basically all pre Breaking governments) and created a new generation of leaders (the Heroes of the Breaking) with limited administrative experience, while their religious counterparts (I. E. the literal Nine Magic Gods) preserved more continuity.

In the next post I will explain how this system began to fall apart since that happened pretty much immediately afterwards and well before what we think of the 'standard' medieval landscape began to take shape.