Christian Contraction in Asia and Africa

• How had Christianity become primarily a European faith by 1500, with its earlier and hopeful Asian and African populations weakened, destroyed, or obliterated? Islam was, in large part, the answer.

• The rise of a cosmopolitan and transcontinental Islamic culture — these were the factors that led to the shrinkage of Christendom in Asia and Africa, leaving Europe as the primary core of the Christian religion, as discussed in further detail in Chapter 9.

Asian Christianity

• Within a century or two of Muhammad's death in 632, only a few Christian sects remained in Arabia, Islam's origin.

• In Syria and Persia, where Christian populations were more concentrated, accommodating practices prevailed. Certainly, Arab conquest of these nearby areas involved violence, primarily against existing Byzantine and Persian armed forces, but not to force conversion.

• Thus, the Nestorian Christian communities of Syria, Iraq, and Persia, sometimes referred to as the Church of the East, resisted Islam's assault, but only as diminishing communities of second-class subjects, with minorities barred from spreading their message to Muslims.

• Later, in the thirteenth century, the Mongol conquest of China provided a small window of opportunity for Christian revival, as the religiously liberal Mongols accepted Nestorian Christians as well as members of other faiths. Several prominent Mongols, including one of Chinggis Khan's wives, converted to Christianity.

The Byzantine State

• A new administrative system granted nominated generals civil control over the empire's provinces and permitted them to recruit troops from the region's landowners. The empire's naval and mercantile vessels operated in both the Mediterranean and Black seas from that territorial base.

• The Byzantine state was a magnificent creation in its height. In Constantinople, political power remained tightly centralized, with the emperor claiming to rule over all of creation as God's worldly representative, referring to himself as the "peer of the Apostles" and the "single ruler of the universe."

• Due to attacks by aggressive Western European nations, Catholic Crusaders, and Turkic Muslim invaders after 1085, Byzantine territory shrunk. The Turkic Ottoman Empire dubbed the "sword of Islam" at the time, finally seized Constantinople in 1453.

• The imperial court attempted to replicate the majesty of what is believed to be God's heavenly court, although it was more akin to ancient Persian imperial magnificence.

Byzantium and the World

• Aside from its contentious relationship with Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, which was situated on the crossroads of Europe and Asia, had extensive interactions with its other neighbors. Byzantium perpetuated the long-running Roman war with the Persian Empire on a political and military level.

• Byzantium's cultural effect was very enormous. The Byzantine Empire preserved much of ancient Greek learning and transferred it to the Islamic world as well as the Christian West.

Political Life in Western Europe

• History must have felt more important than geography in the early centuries of this era, because the Roman Empire, long a fixture of the western Mediterranean region, was no longer there.

• Even as a new system evolved in Europe, much that was classical or Roman remained. On the political front, a series of regional kingdoms developed to supplant Roman power, led by Visigoths in Spain, Franks in France, Lombards in Italy, and Angles and Saxons in England.

• The Holy Roman Empire, as it was later known, was mostly limited to Germany and quickly devolved into a collection of feuding states. Despite their failure to resurrect anything resembling Roman imperial authority, these initiatives demonstrate the classical world's ongoing attraction, even as a new political system of warring kingdoms mixed Roman and Germanic features.

Accelerating Change in the West

• In the centuries after 1000, the rate of development in this nascent civilization accelerated dramatically. The globe of European Christendom had been subjected to numerous invasions for many centuries before this.

• Whatever ushered in this new era of European civilization, known as the High Middle Ages (1000–1300), traces of development and growth were everywhere. Europe's population increased from roughly 35 million in 1000 to almost 80 million in 1340.