Episcopal Crisis Management in Late Antique Gaul: The Example of Exsuperius of Toulouse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract In the first quarter of the fifth century the provinces of Gaul experienced their most dramatic shakeup since Julius Caesar, with the Rhine crossing of Vandals, Suebi and Alans, the retaliation from Roman forces in Britain under the usurper Constantine III, and the establishment of the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse under Wallia in 418. Exsuperius was bishop in Toulouse throughout much of this time. Most of what we know about him comes from the challenges that confronted him. Not only did he face the crisis of hostile forces besieging his city, but he faced internal ones as well, with famine resulting from the siege and, at an earlier time, dissent being expressed to the asceticism and Christian discipline he promoted. While famine and theological dissent were regular features of what bishops had to deal with, responding to a siege was not something most bishops in previous generations had experienced. This article investigates how Exsuperius responded to these crises of varying magnitudes and argues that, although he is reported by Jerome as being solely responsible for averting the external threat, he was probably part of a team of negotiators, and that, with regard to the internal threat, he allied himself with Innocent I, the Roman bishop. The literary encounter between Toulouse and Rome in Innocent’s Epistula 6 reinforced Innocent’s position as the leading Western bishop, as well as offered support to Exsuperius in dealing with the crisis he faced.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".