Stylus Productions

THE STORY OF THE CHRISTIANS

Volume XII: In the Days of Charlemagne

By 700 AD imperial Constantinople had seen her Balkan provinces overrun by barbarians, leaving only the well-fortified coastal cities under the firm control of the Romans-Byzantines. These newcomers to the Balkans were all pagans. The thinking of the Emperors and the Patriarchs was that if these barbarians could be converted to Christianity, they might be more amenable to imperial plans and dreams. It was a strategy that bore only limited and ephemeral fruit.

By 700 AD imperial Constantinople had also seen her Levantine and north African provinces overrun by the armies of Islam; little remained of her Asiatic provinces other than those in Anatolia, and many great Mediterranean ports and three great Patriarchates were now under Moslem domination. In 711 these armies of Islam were about to pass from Africa into Germanic Europe.

The Mediterranean-focused Roman Empire was no more; its peripheral provinces now found new focal points. This is the world we will enter in this volume of The Story of the Christians, the threshold era we refer to as the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, a distinction birthed by the scholars in the Renaissance.

By 500 AD the last pretenders to the throne of the western provinces of the Roman Empire were all dead, the last Rex Romanorum, King of the Romans, having been defeated and executed by the Frankish king Clovis. The western provinces of the Roman Empire had all been overrun and settled by Germans. The Roman populations over whom these Germanic peoples ruled were overwhelmingly Christian. These Christians were, by and large, pro-Nicene, that is catholic or orthodox. The Germans who ruled over these conquered Romans were for the most part Arian Christians, although there were notable conversions to catholic Christianity. But no “ethnic solidarity” or “religious unity” characterized the German rulers; neither did such sentiments exist amongst the conquered peoples. Marriage alliances, peace treaties, and wars were made and waged according to political expediency, not racial or religious affinity.

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