Cristiandad : El triunfo de una religión

In the fourth century AD, a new faith swept through Palestine. It swept away the paganism of Rome and converted Emperor Constantine. Nearly a thousand years later, all of Europe was controlled by Christian rulers, and the religion, deeply embedded in culture and society, exerted a monolithic hold over its population. But, as Peter Heather shows, Christianity's rise to dominance across Europe was anything but inevitable. Exploring how the Christian religion became such a defining feature of the European landscape, and how a small sect of isolated congregations transformed into a mass movement centrally directed from Rome, Heather shows how Christianity constantly battled so-called "heresies" and other forms of belief. From the crisis that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which left the religion on the brink of extinction, to the astonishing revolution in which the papacy emerged as the head of a vast international corporation, Heather traces Christianity's chameleon-like capacity to reinvent itself. The achievement of Christendom was not, or not only, to define official Christianity, but —from its scholars and jurists to its provincial officials and missionaries in the most remote corners of the continent— to transform it into an institution that wielded effective religious authority over almost all the disparate peoples of medieval Europe. This is its extraordinary story.