'A fascinating story about a religion in a surprisingly precarious position' Dan Jones, Sunday Times'Superb storytelling ... captivating and profound' Literary Review'A pageturner' The SpectatorIn the fourth century AD, a new faith exploded out of Palestine. Overwhelming the paganism of Rome, and converting the Emperor Constantine in the process, it resoundingly defeated a host of other rivals. 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, as Peter Heather shows in this compelling history, there was nothing inevitable about Christendom's rise to Europewide dominance.In exploring how the Christian religion became such a defining feature of the European landscape, and how a small sect of isolated congregations was transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome, Heather shows how Christendom constantly battled against both socalled 'heresies' and other forms of belief. From the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which left the religion teetering on the edge of extinction, to the astonishing revolution in which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christendom's chameleonlike capacity for selfreinvention and willingness to mobilize welldirected force.Christendom's achievement was not, or not only, to define official Christianity, but from its scholars and it

Binding: Paperback;736 pages; Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; Classification: HBG; Weight: 640 g; Dimensions: 131 x 201 x 43

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