While the Edict of Milan made Christianity a legal religion within the Roman Empire in 312 AD, its would not be until the Emperor Theodosius I in 381 AD that it was declared the state religion of the Roman Empire. This would be maintained in the Eastern Empire until its last days in the 15th century, but the Western Empire had a relatively brief period where the Christianity flourished under Imperial patronage. While most of these authors are Latin, they do represent a formal centralizing of church authority and tradition in the West, which would be emulated in future generations as the golden age of Latin Patristics.