Indeed

This is relatively accurate. To call it informal de facto civil management of some of the many dozens of tribal governments that arose in western Europe isn't amiss. The de jure heir of Rome was its conqueror Odoacer, King of Italy, who led a mixture of a couple of these tribes (he was an Arian and possibly Goth, Hun, or Heruli). He was killed by Theodoric the Ostrogoth. The Ostrogoths were first defeated in Rome by Belisarius in 536 (for Eastern Emperor Justinian), and the city was besieged repeatedly over the next 20 years. In the early 8th century the Lombards took de facto control of Italy while everyone pretended the city was still Byzantine, then Pepin of the Franks defeated them and donated some of Rome to Pope Zachary in 756, at which point the east's influence can be said to have ended. So the only continuity is same city, same succession of bishops, different negotiations in each era.

Now, please don't use that Adventist number 1260 (538-1798), for several reasons I discovered last year. First, it was conceived by heretic Millerites in the 1840s, based on earlier questionable schools who thought 1798 was important. Second, since Miller had to adjust his 45-year final gapped endpoint from 1843 to 1844, the epoch should have been 539-1799, but those are even less well-fit dates to any epochal events. Third, nobody really took Rome in 538 anyway, that was merely the end of the first siege when the Ostrogoths left the gates first time (they had been ejected in 536, and kept coming back for the whole Gothic War); 538 was just a convenient, but legally meaningless, marker for those who liked calculating from 1798. Fourth, the connections of the 1260 to ten nations are utterly spurious and based on a source that twisted the text of Daniel to mean the first ten nations of admitted dozens, by an arbitrarily dated list. So if one wants to defend the idea that this is an important 1260 one will need to remove all the original heresy-inspired baggage associated with this number and to demonstrate the meaning of all the associated prophecies without sketchy summaries; it's a much taller order than what I had thought for many years of listening to Adventists and half-permitting their historical possibilities. But they all arose because people saw the pope fall to Napoleon in 1798 and then spent decades constructing theories about him being the deadly-wounded beast, based on what research they could scavenge while constantly starting their own splinter and schism congregations around the UK and then the US.

There is no constancy of this 1260 years that could be called "lockhold" control, merely of successful negotiations and party-changes with the wind of politics. There were times of power and perhaps single events of "nobody moving a foot without permission", but what you have is several centuries of chaos, probably a couple centuries of mafia-style familial control, and then three centuries of constant wearing down by Protestants. Of course we have good records that are not taught about the Medicis and all their in-laws, and I had fun reviewing them for a series in October for c/Christianity (search "XCV" there). There were many negotiations behind the scenes, but most of them have come to light. Further research is to be encouraged.

For present purposes I would refer readers to a nice graphic depicting 11 power centers over history, including Rome itself, the Vatican, and the Jesuits, each of which consist of a mixture of cabalists and sincere brokers. It's important to define the true enemy as the satan and satanists, and to recognize every human institution as an experiment that may be more or less infiltrated by the enemy. This is the perspective of the Bible, which also indicates that there is a 1260 still to come.