Almost everything about catholic faith revolves around events that (allegedly) happened in the Middle East. Most of the holiest sites seem to be there in relation to the bible’s depiction of events. So wouldn’t it make sense that the pope/vatican would place its power center as near as possible from the holiest sites? How did it come to be Rome? Was this a decision based on the current political climate at the time or was there a reason based on faith/rethoric of the church?
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Because Rome was a thing and once the emperor converted, the center of gravity for the early church was built near the center of political power. Before that it had been a loosely aligned group of the movement which DID have its hub in the eastern Mediteranean.
Eventually the empire split and Constantinople became a thing, but eventually the power center there came to a point where they had irreconcilable differences with the Roman leadership and that’s how we came to have the Orthodox church (as compared to the Roman Catholic Church).
Even as the empire came apart piece by piece, the pope in Rome retained a huge amount of social and religious power, and that only increased once the schism happened.
The center of the Catholic world, politically and administratively, continues to be Rome. It’s a continuation of the coalescense of power that happened way back in the 4th century.
edit: the WESTERN part of the empire came apart and the Pope retained a lot of power, which is a related tangent, but the EASTERN empire (with Constantinople) managed to hang on in good form for nearly a thousand years more, finally crumbling in the 14th-15th centuries, with Constantinople itself only falling in the 1450s. And they, having been the western end of the Silk Road, had been a big part of keeping spices and goods moving between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The Ottomans who took over reduced the trade flows enough that Europe started looking for sea routes to replace the overland routes…and that’s why Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Yes, the fall of the last claimants to the Roman Empire is what set up the age of European colonial land grabs and the modern world. History echos loudly today, even if we (or at least Americans) didn’t really learn much about it in grade school for whatever stupid reason. I loathe whoever approved the curriculum for my history lessons, they can go screw themselves.
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