Gone Medieval - The Rise of Christianity

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

In the fourth century AD, the Christian faith exploded out of Palestine, overwhelming the paganism of Rome, converting the Emperor Constantine in the process. Almost a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion was deeply ingrained within culture and society. In this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Professor Peter Heather, author of Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, about how Christianity rose to wield authority across nearly all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe.First published November 2022Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I'm delighted to be speaking today with Peter Heather, who is Chair of Medieval History at King's College London, and his latest book entitled Christendom looks at how a fringe religious cult in the Roman Empire came to dominate Europe and European outlooks in the medieval period. Thank you very much for joining us, Peter. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me. How critical or problematical at its fall was early Christianity's integration with Roman institutions and structures.

Did it help to build Christianity up but cause problems when Rome fell? Or was it a central part of Christianity's early success? I think it's really critical to the first major transformation, which makes Christianity into a successful mass religion. That's not necessarily they're generally, held view. But it seems to me when you look very closely at the evidence, that it's strongly suggesting that. And in some really key ways, numbers, for instance, Christianity becomes the religion of the empire in the fourth century after the conversion of the emperor, Constantine. And if you look at what

evidence we have for what Christianity looks like before Constantine's conversion, then there aren't many of them. There's no authority structure. They're divided into locally autonomous communities. and because they're locally autonomous, they don't have clearly defined sets of beliefs because there's no one to make a decision as to what correct belief is. They're clear a few things are out of court, but they don't have a positive set of beliefs to hold to, and their religious practices are appropriate for a small and highly devout sect. You don't join a Christian sect easily. It takes many years.

You're expected to live a very disciplined life. You reject the norms of most people's lives, children, and making money and all the things that people generally do. And that's prescribed practice. That's what people are meant to do. So this is not a religious prescription that can apply to many people. So I think that the sort of big sea change that starts to happen with the conversion of the empire into a Christian state is that we start to turn Christianity into a mass religion with all the kind of beliefs and moderating. practices that that requires. So at the fall of the Roman Empire, is Christianity's continued success a result of that early flexibility and adaptability? Or is there a core of continuity at the centre of it?

Or is it kind of a mixture of both? Is there a solid core of continuity that helps people and appeals to people, but around that it's able to mould itself to a changing European political landscape? It is exactly that combination of the two things. And I think the way this shows up, The Roman Empire has two halves and they fall at different moments and they have different religious consequences and the consequences brings out precisely why it is adaptability plus core that's so important because in the eastern half of the empire or the vast majority of it is conquered by the rising forces of Islam under Muhammad first of all and then his immediate successors. And what happens there is that you create an alternative religious state structure in Islam

and the local provincial elites of the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, Southern and Eastern Mediterranean, who converted to Christianity under Roman rule in the 4th and 5th centuries, then convert to Islam in the 8th and 9th centuries. And there you see the crucial effect of being part of a state that's organized around a religion. It exercises a huge amount of constraint, particularly on elites, I think, because they have so much to lose. So the vast majority come into line. The contrast with the Western half of the empire shows the importance of that, because in the West we get new fragmented political structures, but none of them are exactly hostile to Christianity.

Some of them have alternative forms of Christianity, but they're not hostile to Christianity, and therefore elites are not challenged in the same way in the Western half of the empire, the surviving post-Roman elites as the way they are in the East. And Christianity can survive that immediate shock of fall. And then it shows its capacity to adapt, because it had already been adapting in the Roman world,

and then it adapts further. And in the early medieval west, I think you see it's successful adaptation to two primary constituencies of new converts. First of all, it's only at this point that Christianity really starts to reach out to peasants who make up the vast majority of the population of Western Europe. 90% or more of people are peasants engaged in primary agricultural production spread out across the vast landscapes of Western Europe. and Christianity had not made a further adaptation up to this point to reach out to them. It's a post-Roman project spreading Christianity to peasantry in a structured and systematic kind of way. So we make one set of adaptations for them. But then our elites, and this is true of the incoming portion of the new elite of Western Europe,

who are not of Roman origin, but also the survivors from Roman origin, they become warrior aristocrats and their lives are associated around. fighting. And this should be slightly problematic for Christianity, whose founder famously said, turn the other cheek and certainly said, love your enemy, slicing your enemy, and indeed your friends up as a kind of standard mode of living, which is what Western early medieval elites of both Roman and non-Roman descent have to do. This ought to be a problem for Christianity, but early medieval Christianity finds a way to make itself relevant to them as well. So I think the further adaptations that we see in the early medieval West are exactly towards a religion

that will work for peasantry and a religion that will work for warrior aristocrats. I am always struck by the amount of kind of mental and moral gymnastics that go on to justify war in the name of religion or fighting men who call themselves Christian, as you say, going around bashing other people, which is directly at odds with what Christ actually taught. So I guess that the willingness of Christianity to engage with the reality of political life must have been fairly central to its success, that willingness to confront those issues and find a way for Christianity to exist alongside those issues. Yes, absolutely so.

The other thing that happens in the post-Roman West is that Roman emperors have provided a kind of central authority structure for Christianity, the first one it had ever had. And that disappears with the disappearance of Western Emperors. But the powers of emperors are inherited by the Roman emperors, are inherited by the Roman emperors, the kings of the success states. So Christianity functions on a sort of kingdom by kingdom, region by region basis with the new royal leaderships at the head of it. And they're in charge of crucial things like appointing bishops. So I think one of the things that really makes the adaptation easier than you might expect is that it's the same kind of people who are making up both

the church leadership and the non-church leadership in these kingdoms. They're all related. They all know each other. Your cousin or your brother might be a bishop, even if you're a warrior commander, and you find a form of piety, because you're not about to condemn your own brother. That's never going to happen. And indeed, quite often, you can't tell exactly how often, but it's pretty frequent. Bishoprics are used as nice retirement jobs for people who've done regular service for kings up to whatever point in their life, early 30s, mid-30s or whatever. There's actually a composite early medieval elite of which bishops are firmly apart and that helps make the kind of jump that's required. You don't not condemn killing conveniently. There are lots of pagans around.

Quite a lot of the killing is done of pagans and that's fine. But even where you're having to kill other Christians, then the kinds of penances that are enforced tend to be very small. A couple of weeks on bread and water and that'll do fine. And you can always get someone else to do it for you anyway, I imagine, in practice. But the gospel prescriptions about not killing are preserved in theory, but the practice is extremely light. There are other ways in which Christianity then actually fosters warrior culture. Most of these, especially in Anglo-Saxon context, where lots of kings fighting each other. In Britain, you have lots of small kingdoms, and they're constantly at war. Kings are dying by the time they're 30, or early 30s. You don't

make it to old age, that's not the pattern. And the problem, if you like, is not dying or not, because you are going to die, but dying with honour and dying with your kind of heroic name preserved. And the new kinds of literacy that comes with Christianity provides new and more permanent mechanisms for preserving the memory of kings. And it can also redefine what power is. There are moments when mind stupidity amazes me. I taught Bede for 20 years before it suddenly dawned on me what was going on in his stories of King Oswald of Northumbria, who was one of the first Northumbrian kings to be converted to Christianity. And Oswald won one great victory over pagans, but then about two years later is sliced into pieces, literally, losing a battle against the pagan king, Pender of Mercia.

On the face of it, that doesn't make him an obvious Christian hero, because he loses two pagan king and ends up with different bits of him in different places. There's still a spare head in the tomb of St Cuthbert in Durham, which might literally be Oswald. It's not really been tested, but there's not a bad chance that it's actually Oswald's head. But the point is, eventually dawned on me, as I said, 20 years later, is that Bede follows the account of his death, with seven chapters of the miracles done by his body after death, or different bits of his body, and by the blood, and they dug a hole to get all the blood-infused soil out. And they dug a hole, to do further miracles. So there's a new way for a king to be glorious and powerful. It's

Oswald's Obi-1-Kinobie moment. If you strike me down, you'll just make me more powerful than you can ever imagine. So the king is much more glorious because of his death and because he died a proper Christian king. Living, that doesn't matter. It is the state of grace and the state of glorious Christian grace at the moment of your death, which is what really matters. That's amazing. Well, I hope everyone listening who came for the Christianity chat is enjoying the Anglo-Saxon Star Wars chat equally as much. I think that's a wonderful parallel though. It's absolutely spot on. How important is the emergence of the papacy as a leadership function in Latin Christianity in the West? Does it help to unify and solidify? Does it cause rifts?

Does it do away with some of that early flexibility that the Christian church had enjoyed? The rights of the papacy is incredibly important, but it's much later than you think it is, unless you're an expert. The experts, no, it's later. But I think it's much later than the general public and myself before I started thinking about this in preparation for writing the book, ever really imagined. And actually, even in some of the literature, they keep talking about the papacy and they talk about it in the early medieval period. And that's seriously problematic. The papacy has huge prestige within the Christian world from the get-go, from early on, because it is founded by apostles, by Peter and also Paul died in Rome as well. So Rome has,

has the remains of two apostles. But there are other Christian communities that were founded by Apostles, Antioch and Alexandria in particular, and they have the same status in the early Christian world that Rome does. And there's a crucial distinction between prestige and authority. Prestige means it's somewhere that you ask its opinion. Authority is you have to obey its orders. And no one is obeying its orders in early Christianity. They do ask its advice occasionally. The first big, collection of people letters of advice is made around about the year 600 and it goes back over the previous two centuries or so. And he can find 42 letters of advice over that 200 year period, which means that there's been one every five years. This is not frequent. And they are letters

of advice. They don't tell you what to do. They say, we've thought about it and we think this is the right thing to do. But actually, we do know that what happened when you received one of these letters of advice is that if it was advising you to do what you wanted to do, you did it. And if it wasn't, you ignored it. That's the early medieval pattern. And this doesn't really change until the 11th century. The 11th and 12th century, after the millennium, you actually see the claim, first of all, prestige that had always been there being turned into a claim for real religious authority, for controlling things like high ecclesiastical appointments, settling right doctrines, settling rules and regulations for correct behavior for clergy and ordinary Christians. Those are the things that being in charge of a religion

means that you should be in charge of. And you only see a claim that the papacy should be in charge of that being formally put forward in the 11th century. And then there's a process of a hundred years or so where that claim comes to be recognized in practice. So it's not until the second half of the 12th century that the papacy, as we understand it, a controlling centre for Latin Christianity run from Rome actually comes into existence. And you can see the difference in the number of questions being asked. By the time we get to the second half of the 12th century, the frequency of questions is up to about 40 a year, from one every five years.

And they are orders that you get back in return. don't just get advice back in return. It's a completely different ballgame. But the fascinating thing, to come to the second half of your question, does it lose the flexibility? No, it doesn't. Because the process that has created the papacy is an extraordinary one. And it's probably the thing that most surprised me when I first realized what was going on. And that is, there's always been popes saying how important they are from Rome, but that isn't the process that makes the Pope important. What makes Pope important is clergymen from the rest, particularly of Northern Europe, revamping the papacy to turn it into a religious authority structure that can function across Latin Christianity.

It is created by consumer demand amongst senior clergy from outside Rome, who move into Rome and clean up its act. Totally changed the ballgame of its range of functions, totally change how popes are elected. Basically up to that point, the papacy had been a kind of tool of central and southern Italian land-owning elites, and they used it because the papacy controlled quite extensive revenues, particularly from the 8th century onwards, then you controlled the papacy to control the distribution of those revenues. The Northern European clergy tidy all that up, kick out the influence of these Italian aristocrats, and turn the papacy into a leadership structure for Northern Europe. So because it's created that way, then these clerics bring in all

their agendas and the papacy becomes a tool for implementing those agendas. In other words, for responding flexibly to what's on the minds of these clergy who are practical clergy engaged in administering religion across northern Western Europe at that time. So the papacy, at least in that first generation, the moment of its creation, is a tool for implementing agendas effectively that are already existing within the Christian church. I think it's a fascinating reversal of what Most people, including me probably, would imagine if they think about the papacy, you'd imagine it being the Pope in Rome trying to impose himself across the whole of Europe. But what you've actually got is places in Europe crying out for someone in Rome to take a lead and to impose themselves and to create more structure. It's quite an interesting kind of bottom up rather than top down way for the papacy to claim its authority.

Yeah, it is the thing that most surprised me. The explanation for it is in a sense quite straightforward. forward and that is the spread of Christianity across wider and wider reaches of the European landscape and the contrast I think comes out nicely if you look at Europe in the time of the emperor Charlemagne who's famously crowned emperor on Christmas Day 800 then charlemagne is running all of Latin Christendom except for Britain and Britain has just this tiny little thing on the edge of the greater landmass and actually British clergy is so impressed by what everyone's on the continent that they follow it closely anyway.

When Alfred the Great starts to revamp the Anglo-Saxon church after the depredations of the Viking invasions, he follows Carolingian models what Charlemagne and his successes have put in place. But Charlemagne is still claiming the same kind of religious authority that late Roman emperors did. So when you look at the 9th century is a great period of revamping of Christianity in Western Europe, but all the energy and all the money comes out of the Carolingian courts. It's not that Charlemagne's organizing everything, but clergymen.

and he appoints and clergyman he funds, clerical institutions that his imprimatur validates, that's where all that energy comes. Rome plays no part in that at all. So we have one authority structure that does cover all of Latin Christendom at that time. But from the 9th century onwards, we see a vast amount of new Christian states. For one thing, the Carolingian Empire fragments into a number of success of states. But equally important, we add Czech Republic and the Slovakian Republic. We add Poland. We add the Scandinavian monarchies, Norway, Denmark, Sweden as Christian state. A great deal of the Iberian Peninsula, the Reconquista movement is underway. So a lot of Spain is added back into Latin Christendom.

And by the time we get to the 11th century, there is no one king. We have a Holy Roman emperor, but he runs Saxony and northern Italy. And there's a vast constellation of other rulers who run the rest of Latin Christendom. And if any one of those calls a council, only his own bishops will come to it because the other rulers won't let their bishops go. So if the king of France calls a council, the bishops of Germany won't go to it and the Anglo-Saxon bishops won't go to it and all the rest of it. I think the way it works is this, that the Carolingian moment creates in people's minds the reality that Latin Western Christendom should be a unit and should function as a religious unit, should have exactly the same standards for its clergy, for its ordinary peasantry, for the pot. population, one church, one standard. And Charlemagne's authority means that he can deliver on that vision. But by the time we get 200 years later, the year of a thousand, then there is no political

authority that can deliver unified religious leadership. And the clergy turn their minds towards revamping Rome to play that role. Is there a Pope who you would consider to be the most significant in this period who does the most to reinforce the papacy's authority? Or is it kind of a genuine team effort over a period of decades and centuries? It's definitely a team effort. You can pick out some really crucial individuals. Leo the 9th in the middle of the 11th century is a critical individual. He's a North German bishop and he's put in place by a Holy Roman Emperor who's sick of all the decadence and corruption in Rome because the Italian aristocrats are back in and they're having fun. So there are three popes, three Italian popes of differing degrees of dodginess. There at the time

that Leo is actually imposed. But Leo has this vision that the papacy should reach out and play this broader role. So he does some really crucial things. He starts to change how popes are elected, to make it a purely clerical matter to exclude these Italian aristocrats from sticking their fingers into the pie. And he starts to impose judges who travel outside of Italy to take the papal will positively. In the old days, not only were there no papal structures outside of Italy, but you had to wait for someone to ask you a question before you even said something, whereas now proactively we're taking papal authority outside, and he even goes outside of Italy himself.

And he holds a series of reforming councils to which hardly anyone comes to start with. But it's the symbolic moment. And what they're particularly cracking down on are clergy who've been appointed in some way by secular authorities, and particularly clergy who've paid for their position. This is called Simon E, after Simon Magus, in the acts of the apostles who tried to buy the power to control the descent of the Holy Spirit. So that's why it's called so many. And he holds some crucial small-scale councils.

So he confronts about half a dozen French bishops at one council and says, you're a simoniac. You have bought office. He'd obviously heard that he had. Unfortunately, the unfortunate man dropped down dead. Thus, I think, confirming the point. But the others all immediately fell on the floor off as you might and say, sorry, yes, we did. And Leo forgives them and puts them back in office. He doesn't throw them out of office. But the point is being made. So Leo redefines the papacy as a proactive focal leadership for Western Christendom.

That's a crucial moment. Then the rest really is a process. You have to turn that kind of willingness and desire to see the Pope as a practical religious leader for Western Europe into one. that will actually function as such. The thing is, Rome is a very long way from much of Western Europe. The best travel time, I think, from England to Rome in the medieval period is five weeks, and that was really going it. That means it's very expensive. If it takes a long time to travel somewhere, it's very expensive to travel somewhere as well.

And the crucial thing is the development of a codified system of church law, which uses the papacy to make all its key extra-discipline. decisions. There's a lot of church law around by 1,100, but it's been made in different places by different people over 800 years. So you get lots of different answers to the same question. And to some crucial new questions, you get no answer at all. So we see between something like 1075 and 1150, particularly associated with Bologna law schools, we see an attempt to make order out of this chaos. So you have to work out, what is the real. answer to any question. And then you also compile a list of new questions that need to be answered

or questions that were left unresolved that you can't make up any argument that tells you what the right answer is in that particular case. And from about 1150 onwards, this is what sparks off this sudden arrival of 30 serious questions to the papacy every year, rather than one every five years that you only bother with if he gives you the right answer. And you start collecting those decisions, adding them to the restructured, reordered law codes that you've produced out of the original chaos. And by 1225, 1230, you have a coherent body of church law based on papal authority, a lot of encompassing new papal decisions. And the astonishing thing is that the Catholic Church sees no reason to change this again until 1917. It's all been answered. The answer to the life, university,

and everything is there. It's meeting the dangerous point of feeling like you know everything. We've answered all the questions. There are no more questions. Nothing else to worry about. All done. Because you've got it all on paper, and you can easily transport papal authority,

even as far as Iceland, you send the law books. So no longer do you have to come to the Pope in Rome. The Pope comes to you in the form of this set of the authorised papal decisions. And that's what solves the problem of distance. And you talked a little bit there about how the Carri-Lingian Empire, particularly under Charlemagne, kind of unifies things and as that fragments, the papacy is able to kind of fill that need for a unified Christian authority. To what extent did the tensions between monarchs and popes and the

papacy in terms of who had religious authority? I'm thinking things like the investiture crises and things like that. How does that define Christianity's trajectory? Because it quite often pits Rome against kings who want to claim that they have divine authority that Rome wants to claim for itself. You absolutely get that and it's part of that process at the same time simultaneously as we're sorting out the mess that is church law, we are getting these occasional conflicts and they can be very firmly entrenched and take a long time to resolve. So the investiture controversy lasts over 50 years more or less or you get occasional dog fights like Henry II against Thomas Beckett in the 12th century belongs in the same mode because kings aren't very comfortable about

giving up the idea that they're divinely appointed. It's even more important because the church controls substantial landed asset within every kingdom. England is the best documented one because of Doomsday Book. So you can see that ecclesiastical institutions control about a third of the productive landscape of England in 1086. Most people think that's probably about right for the rest of Western Europe as well, that England is not odd in that perspective. And of course, those assets are very important to the running of kingdom, not least at this stage, because the number of warriors a kingdom can put in the field is based on its landed holdings, and church institutions are required to do that too. So they have to use part of their landed holdings to warriors to turn up and fight when the king

wants it. And you get some nice returns from the mid-12th century in England, about 100 years after Doomsday book, which tell you that the larger monasteries and bishops, between them, provide about one-third of the military manpower of the kingdom. And it's even more important because kings tend to appoint bishops and abbots. That means that the military contingents that come from ecclesiastical institutions tend to be just a touch more reliable than those that come from other magnates and aristocrats with whom kings might be in conflict. Kings aren't very happy about the idea that they might lose the control over person who's in charge

of these crucial military contingents, and that's to be negotiated, as well as the ideological point. And it bends in a score draw, which it takes a long time to work their way to, because there's so much ego at stake here. The papacy, particularly under Gregory the Seven, and does, was overreaches itself and tries to claim that it should have complete untrammeled control over senior appointments. And kings can't concede that. And the papacy does not have enough leverage to make that happen in a regular way. So we have to reach a compromise, which is that kings will have a veto and that to get their way in some areas, they will then give the papacy the right to make other appointments. And you get this kind of messy compromise

emerging, but it's one that has to respect the parameters that the assets controlled by the church are just too important for those to be completely independently controlled. They have to be reckoned as part of the kingdom stock of assets. Therefore, the church has to answer in some way to kings as well as to popes. But what we do is the solution to the investiture dispute, for instance, is to make a distinction for the first time between the secular and the sacred. Before that, Charlemagne doesn't recognize any distinction between secular and sacred. Secular is a concept invented by churchmen to rob kings of their religious power and authority. A very clever piece of work one Sunday afternoon in the Vatican, I think, probably to.

come up with a concept of secularity. But kings appoint bishops to their secular responsibilities. So all the law courts that their churchmen run and the military contingents that are stationed on the lands that they control. But simultaneously, church is appointing the bishops to their spiritual responsibilities. The fact that it's the same person's got, combining both hay, we don't worry about that. Yeah. I'm frequently kind of impressed, I think, by the.

medieval world's ability to not answer a question, to not actually resolve something, to leave something vague enough that both sides can feel like they've won and neither has actually lost. It seems to be so prevalent through everything that they do. And I guess it applies here to the success of the church as well, that it's able to leave some things a little bit blurry where it helps. Yes, it's deciding what battles you're going to fight in the end. What are the things that are really important. You could fight this battle, but you would get a massive confrontation and a breakdown in the kind of relations that you require in order to make other agendas pursuable. And there are some other big things going on at the same time, which some people realise. And in winning one

thing, you might lose two other things that you don't want to lose. So yeah, absolutely. It's much more important. Yeah, let the blurriness persist. Why did you want to write this book now? as Christianity kind of loses, I guess, its grip on Europe that it's had for more than a thousand years, does that change our view and our understanding of the medieval church? I think it absolutely must do. What does the modern transformation of Christianity do for our account of the past? What should it do for our account of the past? And it seemed to me that it has two really big impacts upon how you write.

You need to think much more carefully about, why Christianity won in the first place, because it's not a given. Christianity has lost, at least in the European landscape, very substantially, its capacity to keep hold of the hearts and minds of the bulk of population. People still write down their Christian, if they don't put down their Jedi's on sentences. Most of them mean, as opposed to anything else, they don't go to church, they don't structure their lives around cycles of the holy festivals of the Christian year and, you that level of piety is not in them. So the fact that it can lose now means it might have lost in the past. And in fact, if people had stopped and thought about it, we know it's lost in the past

because, as we mentioned Romans again, in the eastern half of the Mediterranean, southern part of Mediterranean, it loses to Islam. The beating heart of late Roman Christianity, most of the theology, most of the exciting developments in practice, they come out of the eastern southern Mediterranean. but the only reason that Christianity is a European phenomenon is because Islam took over the southern eastern Mediterranean and the vast majority of people became Muslim and that part of the Christian world was cut off and eventually worn down never completely disappeared but their minority populations. So actually we can see there's a real clear case study when you stop to think about it of Christianity losing in the past as well. So it's possible we need to have that

in there that sense of contingency. So that's one big thought that I think looking at the modern world brings in, and the other is change. Christianity is this classic thing of a singular noun that makes you think it's always been Christianity. Single noun, Christianity is a single thing, and there are important continuities within it. Already by 170, 180 AD, you've defined the canon of Christian holy texts. There's lots of writing around in the second century, but we know that it's going to be these four Gospels, not any other Gospels, and this selection of other writings. Mostly we've decided that remains an unshaken core plus the Old Testament of where you look for what right Christianity might be. So we have continuities and they're crucial, of course,

to the religion. The religion would exist without them. But a whole series of other things changed dramatically at different moments. The transition in the late Roman period from this small, highly devout sect to the first inklings of a mass religion with totally different authority structures, totally different patterns of required behaviour. behavior, totally different entrance procedures in each cycle. Looking to see what changes in Christianity and how it changes is at least as important as concentrating on the continuities. So we have to problematize what Christianity is, not just assume that it's the one thing. So I think those are the two sort of driving thoughts in my head that brought me back. And they are derived from looking at

what has happened to Christianity in the last sort of 100 years or so. Fascinating. I guess it removes the sense of the inevitable victory, which has to affect how we understand what did happen. in the past. Yes, I've started looking at the landscape differently. I had my religious phase. I call myself a lapsed Anglican and you just look at the landscape differently and you see all these churches everywhere and they're beautiful and I love them and I still like going to church. Occasionally I have no beliefs either way. Agnostic really cuts it, I think. But I think of them as like the leftover temples of Egypt from the pharaonic times. They're there and they're big. The whole of the population used to go to them and now their monuments, sitting there.

in the landscape. It affects how you look at things. Yeah. My unfair question to end on, if there's a brief answer to this, and it is a deeply unfair question, is there a simple answer to why Europe became the power base of Christianity through the medieval period? I don't think that there's a simple answer, but I think you can see the lines that make it happen. One is actually the Islamic conquest, bizarrely. I don't think the dominance of thinkers and Christian leaders from the eastern and southern part of the Mediterranean would have changed. It takes a long time before Western Europe puts up a kind of educational infrastructure that will generate sustained thought on the kind of intensity and scale

that was happening in the Eastern Southern Mediterranean between the 4th and 6th century. Arguably, it's the 12th century with the rise of the universities. That's a crucial moment in the development of Christianity is the 12th century. Parisian theologians define the afterlife in terms of heaven, hell and purgatory. And that defines pious. because your job is to avoid hell and minimize your time in purgatory and there are a set of behaviours and rituals to go through that allow you to do that. And all of that just comes out of Paris in the 12th century. There hasn't been a structure with the capacity to generate that much sustained,

coherent, coherent thought to come up with that answer until the 12th century. So I think if we hadn't lost the eastern and southern Mediterranean from the Christian world, it would have remained dominant, it wouldn't have been a European phenomenon. So that's one part of the answer. Two more parts. One is the adaptability. this capacity to meet the needs of different truancies and not be afraid to change Christianity in order to do it. Miracles are not there in pre-Constantinian Christianity. God doesn't do

miracles, doesn't make crops grow or cure you or whatever. The focus is on the fate of the soul after death and God helps you with that. That's what God is there for and the Holy Spirit is therefore and Jesus is teaching, not stuff to do with the here and now. The miraculous starts to come into Christianity in the Latin world, particularly in the 6th century, God starts making your crops grow, starts looking after you if you behave with proper piety. That kind of adaptability is absolutely there. And that continues going on. That's the first kind of type of piety that we see for the mass of population. Then in the 12th century, we get on to purgatory in minimizing your time by particularly sacramental action and holding masses for the dead and for your soul, etc., etc. So that's the

second thing, but the third thing is, I think, the alliance with power, because there are two simultaneous stories unfolding when you look at the development of Christianity. On the one hand, you've got all this invention and creativity and willingness to include and develop your religious practice to give people things that they need. And again, the early centuries of the second millennium, 11th and 12th century, you see a massive diversity and range of allowed piety. And visionaries like Hildegarde of Bingham are authorized. You don't just let anyone turn up and say what they're doing, but there is a willingness to accept a broader range of behaviours as legitimate.

But that is combined with a ferocious patrolling of boundaries for which power, the mobilisation of social and political power of elites and political structures is always there. Pope Gregory the Great at the end of the sixth century says it's perfectly all right to jack up the rents of peasant. who won't convert to Christianity to make them do in the same era, the third Council of Toledo in Spain says any amount of thumping short of death is fine too. So you can either tax peasants or beat the crap out of them until they become Christian. That's perfectly all right.

There is that undertone of coercion. And in the early millennium, and this is associated with the new papal authority structure, that element of coercion and power is still strongly there. The most obvious kind is this is the era of inquisition. when inquisition is first trundled out. An inquisition basically allows you to keep people in solitary confinement, to interrogate and torture them until they admit to what you want them to admit, and then you can either forgive them or burn them according to what you feel like doing.

It's an astonishing, coercive process. You don't see it unfolded over many places, but the fact that it exists at all is intimidating. In many ways, a kind of coercive mechanism that I suspect, is probably more crucial to the success of Christianity inculcating itself across Western Europe is actually more informal. From the 13th century, we start to get parish visitation record surviving. The English ones are really good and really funny. What happens is that a representative of the Archbishop Canterbury, for instance, goes around to all the parishes of Kent to see what

people are actually doing. And it records all the offences. And they are what you'd think they would be. People are not being pious. They are shagging people. They shouldn't be shagging. They are not obeying the rules properly and a whole series of fines and again beatings are there to make them do it. But the astonishing thing when you think about it is how do they know about sexual impropriety in very obscure little villages across different parishes in Kent? And the answer can only be, and actually there's been a major academic study that has nailed the point down, is that some people in the villages are telling them because there's no way else you would know. you couldn't know otherwise. So actually, you end up with something like the old Stasi informant mechanism

actually then enforcing things at village level in the 13th century. Getting rid of the East and the South, sustained creativity over centuries, but also a sustained dialogue and mobilisation of social and political power. That wasn't a very brief answer, but that I think is the answer. It was a very good and very interesting answer, though, thank you very much. Thank you so much for sharing all of that with this, Peter. It's been absolutely fascinating to talk to you. Thank you very much for joining us. It's been an absolute pleasure. It's been a long journey this book, but it's never ceased to

amaze, I have to say, and I hope to be able to share it with lots of people and give them a sense of the same kind of excitement and interest that I found in unraveling it. Well, Peter's book, Christendom, is out from Penguin Books and explores all of the things that Peter has talked about and much, much more about how Christianity came to dominate politics in medieval Europe. Thank you very much for listening to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Make sure you're following the podcast so that you get new episodes as soon as they're released. And if you know someone who might enjoy this episode, why not share it with them?

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