A bit of Protestant churches such as a Church of England have inherited this diocesan structure directly, during a Protestant Reformation.

In the later on organization of the Roman Empire, the more and more subdivided provinces were administratively associated in a big unit, the episcopate. (Latin dioecesis, from a Greek term διοίκησις meaning "administration").

A Catholic Church directly inherited this Roman structure of authority in a period of the 5th and 6th centuries, as from each one bishop fully assumed a role of the previous Roman praefectus. A transport was facilitated per Christian practice of setting a areas of ecclesiastic administration super exactly coinciding by owning victims of a civil administration: inside modern days, numbers of an ancient bishopric, though late divided among many bishopric, has preserved the boundaries of an extended-vanished Roman administrative section. View farther reference on bishops within civil government at a entry Bishop.

In the Roman Empire
A earliest utilize of "diocese" as an administrative unit was in the Greek-speaking East, applied for example to tercet dominion— Cibyra, Apamea & Synnada— that were added to the province of Cilicia around a time of Cicero, world health organization mentions the fact in his familiar letters (EB 1911). the word, an same to a tax-collecting dominion, come to exist as applied to the territory itself.

In the reorganization of the empire that was begun by Diocletian and carried through by Constantine, a empire was divided into xii bishopric, of which a largest, Oriens, involved 16 provinces, & a little, of Britain, included quatern. a names of Roman bishopric when a eventually were inside 395 CE may be discovered at the entry Roman province.

From each one episcopate was governed by the praetor vicarius who was subjected to the praefectus. Between a 4th and 6th centuries, as a older administrative structure began to crumble, a position of the bishops in the Christianized Empire of Late Antiquity expanded to fill the vacuum. A senatorial aristocracy, especially in the provinces, remained a source of local authority. By this period, nevertheless, that authority was typically vested in the spiritual professional of bishop. These are so of little surprise that, when a Catholic and later a Eastern Orthodox churches began to define their administrative structure, they relied on the older Roman language to describe administrative units & hierarchy, & ecclesiastic & lay authorities blurred together. In the Eastern Empire, this became fundamental doctrine: view Caesaropapism.

Christian hierarchy
Christian usage in the modern feel of the sphere of the bishop's jurisdiction became platitude single inside a consciously "classicizing" structure of the Carolingian empire in a 9th century, but a usage experienced been ingesting across from either the good deal earliest parochia ("parish") from a surfacing of the Christian authority structure in the 4th century (look at EB 1911).

Around English-speaking countries, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints uses the term ward, rather than bishopric, to refer to the jurisdiction of the bishop and his counselors. Yet, the ward is non compeer within size to the Catholic episcopate; like, a stake is.