โ Scribed by Tom Holland
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In AD 900, few would have guessed that the splintering kingdoms of Christendom were candidates for future greatness. Hemmed in by implacable enemies on three sides, and by ocean on the fourth, it seemed that the Christian people had nowhere to turn. Indeed, there were many who fearedcast in the Millennium's shadowthat they were nearing the time when the Antichrist would appear, drowning the world in blood and heralding its end. But the Antichrist did not appear, and Christendom did not collapse. Instead, forged from the convulsions of those terrible times, there emerged a new civilization as the Christian people set to the heroic task of building a Jerusalem on earth themselves. With an epic sweep that transports us from the crucifixion to the First Crusade, and from the glitter of Constantinople to the bleak shores of Canada, Tom Holland's The Forge of Christendomis a brilliant study of a truly fateful revolution: the emergence of Western Europe for the first time as a distinctive and expansionist power. It was the age of Otto the Great and William the Conqueror, of Caliphs and Viking sea-kings, of hermits, monks, and serfs. It witnessed the spread of castles, the invention of knighthood, and the founding of a papal monarchy. Above all, it brought people to fear that the end days might be at hand, and yet alsowith an effort so prodigious that it has the power to move us stillto invent themselves anew. A momentous achievement: for this was nothing less than the founding of the modern West. It is an epic story that Tom Holland renders with the narrative skill and wide-angled scope of a novelist and the careful scholarship a historian. It will transform its readers' conception of the origins of the Modern West.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
The Forge of Christendom is a study of a truly fateful revolution: the emergence of Western Europe for the first time as a distinctive and expansionist power. It was the age of Otto the Great and William the Conqueror, of Caliphs and Viking sea-kings, of hermits, monks, and serfs. --from publisher d
Of all the civilisations existing in the year 1000, that of Western Europe seemed the unlikeliest candidate for future greatness. Compared to the glittering empires of Byzantium or Islam, the splintered kingdoms on the edge of the Atlantic appeared impoverished, fearful and backward. But the anarchy
In AD 900, few would have guessed that the splintering kingdoms of Christendom were candidates for future greatness. Hemmed in by implacable enemies on three sides, and by ocean on the fourth, it seemed that the Christian people had nowhere to turn. Indeed, there were many who fearedcast in the Mill
**At the end of the day, Death visits everyone. Right before that, Charlie does.** You might meet him in a hospital, in a warzone, or at the scene of a traffic accident. Then again, you might meet him at the North Pole - he gets everywhere, our Charlie. Would you shake him by the h