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A fascinating story about a religion in a surprisingly precarious position Dan Jones Sunday Times

A pageturner The Spectator

A major new reinterpretation of Christendom by one of our foremost medieval historians

In 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 new history there was nothing inevitable about Christendoms 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 and intensely committed congregations was transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome Peter 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 of the eleventh century and beyond in which the Papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation Heather traces Christendoms chameleonlike capacity for selfreinvention and astounding willingness to mobilize welldirected force

Christendoms achievement was not or not only to define official Christianity but from its scholars and its lawyers to its provincial officials and missionaries in farflung corners of the continent to transform it into an institution that wielded effective religious authority across nearly all of the disparate peoples of medieval Europe This is its extraordinary story

Sweeping and engaging history a nontriumphalist history of the triumph of Christianity and all the more powerful for it Financial Times