![]() ![]() Heather starts his story with Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in the first years and decades of the fourth century. This seemingly ancient history remains relevant to anyone thinking about ways politics, societies, and people work today in the 21st century. It’s a panoramic view that has much to tell us today about the nature of politics, power, and ideas, how and why some ideas win out while others fall through the cracks of history, and the ways ordinary people and elites alike respond to the ideological and philosophical changes swirling around them. ![]() He skewers some traditional narratives that purport to explain Christianity’s rise, offering a compelling argument of his own that the religion’s intimate relationship with the political powers of the day that ultimately determined its destiny. That’s the question British historian Peter Heather hopes to answer in his magisterial and fascinating new history Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300 -and answer it he does in convincing fashion. How did the small Jewish splinter sect emerge from the backwater Roman province of Palestine and then become the dominant religion of Europe over the course of roughly a millennium? ![]() The head of the colossus of Constantine at the Musei Capitolini in Rome. ![]()
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