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Christendom : the triumph of a religion, AD 300-1300 / Peter Heather.

by Heather, Peter, 1960- author.

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New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2023.

Church history.

9780451494306 (hardcover) :

045149430X (hardcover)

xxiv, 704 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : color illustrations, maps ; 25 cm

First United States edition.

Introduction -- Part one: The Romanization of Christianity. "By this conquer..." -- Conversion in a Christian empire -- The altar of victory -- Part two: The fall of Roman Christianity. Nicaea and the fall of the West -- Islam and the fall of the East -- "Not angels": conversion in north-western Europe -- Latin Christianity restructured -- Culture and society in the post-Roman West -- Part three: Christian empire renewed. Christian expansion in a second age of empire -- Charlemagne's city of God -- Popes and emperors -- "God wills it" -- The economy of salvation -- Christendom and coercion.

"A major reinterpretation of the religious superstate that came to define both Europe and Christianity itself, by one of our foremost medieval historians. In the 4th century AD, a new faith grew out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome, and resoundingly defeating a host of other rival belief systems. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, ingrained within culture and society, exercised a monolithic hold over its population. But how did a small sect of isolated and intensely committed congregations become a mass movement centrally directed from Rome? As Peter Heather shows in this illuminating new history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise and eventual dominance. From Constantine's pivotal conversion to the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman empire--which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction--to the astonishing revolution of the eleventh century and beyond, out of which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleon-like capacity for self-reinvention, as it not only defined a fledgling religion but transformed it into an institution that wielded effective authority across virtually all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe. Authoritative, vivid, and filled with new insights, this is an unparalleled history of early Christianity"--Provided by publisher.

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