Provinces Built on the Shape of the Roman Empire

The archbishop office grew directly out of Roman civil geography: the early church organised its provinces to match Roman administrative provinces, and the bishop of the provincial capital, the metropolis, gained a customary precedence over the other bishops of the province that hardened into the office of metropolitan or archbishop by the fourth and fifth centuries. Councils of the period, including Nicaea in 325, already assume the metropolitan's right to a role in consecrating the bishops of his province.

That Roman-shaped geography still marks the office today, even where the empire that produced it is thirteen centuries gone. Canterbury and York in England, the ancient patriarchal sees of the East, and the primatial sees of national Catholic and Anglican churches all descend from the same logic of a senior city bishop overseeing a province. In practice the power attached to the title now varies enormously: an archbishop of a small, honorary province may have almost no authority over his suffragans, while the Archbishop of Canterbury, without any formal jurisdiction over other Anglican provinces at all, functions as the symbolic centre of the entire Anglican Communion, a role that recent disputes over sexuality have strained close to breaking.