| Zusammenfassung: | The political assignment of the provinces of Illyricum from the West to the East in the late fourth century had ecclesiastical implications in terms of who exercised patriarchal responsibilities over the churches in the affected provinces. The letters of the Collectio Thessalonicensis reveal that Rome saw itself as preserving a responsibility for those churches even after the transfer. In this paper it is argued that the papal vicariate of Thessalonica, by which the Roman bishops delegated some of their patriarchal responsibilities to the bishop of Thessalonica, developed piecemeal and by accident. The argument is made here that in 402, at the start of his episcopate, Innocent I of Rome wrote to Anysius of Thessalonica confirming what he believed his predecessors (Damasus and Siricius) had granted Anysius, but what he in fact did was to expand Anysius' role as papal vicar because he misunderstood the arrangement made by his predecessors, which was more limited. The misunderstanding was due to the fact that Innocent was a new bishop who had not yet grasped the intricacies of the situation.
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