The rise of Christianity to political power produced on the whole less change of policy than might have been anticipated.  The Christian rulers had to deal practically as best they might with a very mixed, turbulent, and semi-pagan world.  The leading fathers of the Church were inclined to tolerate prostitution for the avoidance of greater evils, and Christian emperors, like their pagan predecessors, were willing to derive a tax from prostitution.  The right of prostitution to exist was, however, no longer so unquestionably recognized as in pagan days, and from time to time some vigorous ruler sought to repress prostitution by severe enactments.  The younger Theodosius and Valentinian definitely ordained that there should be no more brothels and that anyone giving shelter to a prostitute should be punished.  Justinian confirmed that measure and ordered that all panders were to be exiled on pain of death.  These enactments were quite vain.  But during a thousand years they were repeated again and again in various parts of Europe, and invariably with the same fruitless or worse than fruitless results.  Theodoric, king of the Visigoths, punished with death those who promoted prostitution, and Recared, a Catholic king of the same people in the sixth century, prohibited prostitution altogether and ordered that a prostitute, when found, should receive three hundred strokes of the whip and be driven out of the city.  Charlemagne, as well as Genserich in Carthage, and later Frederick Barbarossa in Germany, made severe laws against prostitution which were all of no effect, for even if they seemed to be effective for the time the reaction was all the greater afterwards.[144]

It is in France that the most persistent efforts have been made to combat prostitution.  Most notable of all were the efforts of the King and Saint, Louis IX.  In 1254 St. Louis ordained that prostitutes should be driven out altogether and deprived of all their money and goods, even to their mantles and gowns.  In 1256 he repeated this ordinance and in 1269, before setting out for the Crusades, he ordered the destruction of all places of prostitution.  The repetition of those decrees shows how ineffectual they were.  They even made matters worse, for prostitutes were forced to mingle with the general population and their influence was thus extended.  St. Louis was unable to put down prostitution even in his own camp in the East, and it existed outside his own tent.  His legislation, however, was frequently imitated by subsequent rulers of France, even to the middle of the seventeenth century, always with the same ineffectual and worse results.  In 1560 an edict of Charles IX abolished brothels, but the number of prostitutes was thereby increased rather than diminished, while many new kinds of brothels appeared in unsuspected shapes and were more dangerous than the more recognized brothels which had been suppressed.[145] In spite of all such legislation, or because of it, there has been no country in which prostitution has played a more conspicuous part.[146]