Chapter four turns its attention to the Americas, to observe how the foundational statutes of Christian citizenship made their way into the legislation of colonial synods and councils. To guide the exploration of this corpus, the chapter follows the Archbishop Luis Zapata de Cárdenas of Santafé (1573-1590). A Franciscan with experience in Spain’s ethnically diverse interior frontier, once arrived in Santafé, Zapata developed an innovative program for the Christian evangelization of the native communities. Conducting a deep dive into the conceptual underpinnings of policies in Santafé and across the Indies, chapter four includes a horizontal analysis of synodal and conciliar reform in the subsequent decades. This chapter highlights how core values of the Spanish church – such as Christian education, the inculcation of policía, and the preservation of “good customs” – were under a continual legislative revision that involved actors on both sides of the Atlantic, an ongoing imperial legal revolution whose local changes were the product an era of global transformation.

The ecumenical synods of the Roman imperial period cannot be understood without understanding their forerunners, the Hellenistic artists’ associations. These were not organised on a pan-Mediterranean scale as the ecumenical synods were. Rather, they were regionally organised, reflecting the fragmented political world of the Hellenistic period. There were four major associations: the Athenian synod, the Isthmian-Nemean synod, mainly active on the Peloponnese and in Boeotia, the Ionian-Hellespontine synod in Asia Minor and the Egyptian synod connected to the Ptolemaic royal court. This chapter discusses their emergence in the third century bc and their involvement in festivals, politics and religion. In many respects their activities were a model for what would come later, for example their preoccupation with securing financial and honorific privileges for their members, their contribution to the organisation of festivals and their relations with political rulers such as Hellenistic kings and Roman generals.

The history of medieval Church law has been written largely from the perspective of the ius commune. Following in the footsteps of Gratian, modern scholars have focused their attention first and foremost on ecclesiastical law as a learned and universal phenomenon, privileging the development of canonistic doctrine grounded in papal decretals and the statutes of general councils and taught in the emerging schools of the Latin West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Yet, as jurists of the “classical period” themselves recognized, the picture of canon law in the high Middle Ages would be incomplete without a consideration of its production and reproduction at a regional and local level. In provinces, dioceses, and parishes, people might of course have gained an understanding of canonical legislation and jurisprudence from such seminal texts as Gratian’s Decretum, the so-called Quinque compilationes antiquae, and the Liber extra, but one should be careful not to overestimate the impact of these works. Though attested to in an impressive number of manuscripts and of undeniably great influence, their distribution was nonetheless spotty and they were surely not on the shelves of all medieval churchmen, including many of those wielding ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

A key figure in the Arian dispute leading up to and following the Council of Nicaea, Eusebius of Caesarea (bishop c. 313-39) was not only implicated as a central player in the broader theological developments of the early fourth century but was also one of the most significant formulators of ancient literary representations of the council itself. His writings contain an eye-witness account of the council; a broader narrative of Constantine’s interactions with Christian bishops; letters of Constantine addressing issues of theological or practical debate; his own letters to his home congregation at Caesarea and to other bishops involved in the controversy; and his theological polemic against Marcellus of Ancyra, the promoter of a more radical anti-Arian position. These texts simultaneously assist and complicate modern attempts to construct the precise nature and dynamics of the controversy, the council, and its aftermath. They also provide a fascinating angle by which to discern important features of Eusebius’s fertile authorial work: he stands as a careful and creative formulator of a powerful historiographic, theological, and political vision that would make a signal impact upon later competing accounts of the Council of Nicaea.