The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

by Tom Holland

Book Overview

At the approach of the first millennium, the Christians of Europe did not seem likely candidates for future greatness. Weak, fractured, and hemmed in by hostile nations, they saw no future beyond the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385520581
• ISBN13: 9780385520584
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Doubleday Books
• Length: 476 Pages
• Weight: 2.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A must read for history buffs!

This is a well written and engaging story of a brief period of time in a small part of this planet. If you like history, and a good tale, you'll love this book.

The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

Holland does Gibbon. Full of orotund phrases, but not as purple as Norwich in his prime, but mellifluously enjoyable. Not as focussed as some histories of the period, but given the area he has to cover, highly informed. Structurally, the two main themes are the medieval zeitgeist surrounding the year 1000, the popular fears and superstitions surrounding Christ's return, an area that could have been sketched out with a little bit more detail. You can infer a degree of what he outlines by movements such as the Cluniac and the Puritanism of some levels of the Church, but you keep falling back on the same problem when covering the medieval period, the lack of documentary evidence for the population outside the Church and imagination can only carry you so far. On the other theme, the Investiture Crisis, he is on surer ground. The book opens with Henry IV's dangerous ride over the Alps in the middle of winter to throw himself at the mercy of the Pope and a sequence of events that would culminate in the accession of a series of anti-popes. In between, there is a savage outline of wars and conspiracies that that these events bracket, convulsions that in part mark the end the barbarian invasions that wracked Europe from the end of the Roman Empire, whose authority leaders like Henry and Gregory were determined to resurrect. Holland by inference lays to rest the modish continental idea that the barbarians did not destroy the Roman Empire but transformed it by the simple process of illustration. Population shifts, administrative, fiscal and legal breakdowns over the five hundred or so years since its collapse and there were still those barbarians, whether Norman, Magyar, Saracen or Slav causing disruption to the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope who had set themselves up as the successors of those Caesars in the West, aping its form and style and the Roman Empire of the East, who regarded themselves as the legitimate successors. The examples of the past proved to strong a lure not to aspire to, the history of medieval Europe is in one form or another an attempt to recapitulate on an idealised state and the struggles of different interest groups to impose their version of it. The role of the barbarians was ,up to the First Crusade(which Runciman included in those barbarian invasions), to validate that ideal.

Reads like a novel.

Tom Holland makes the reader feel that the Kings, Emperors, Popes, Caliphs and Saints of the 10th and 11th centuries were all personal aquaintances of his. As he describes the various revolutions, persecutions, schisms, coronations, superstitions, and apocalyptic visions, his tone ranges from gossippy to scholarly. His sentence structure is truly daunting. Many times, the subject of the sentence is left behind with so many modifying phrases before the verb, it is hard to know who is doing what. But after the first chapter, I began to appreciate Holland's style, and indeed, continued to be amazed with his writing style all the way through the book. Talk about meaty sentences!...Having read "Persian Fire" back in 2006, I knew Holland was a skillful writer, but I don't remember sentences like these. The deluge of information and dates combined with portraits of individuals caused me to take notes as I read. Then at the end of the book, I was happy to find a timeline that lists all of the events of the book. The 22 page bibliography is impressive! This author has done extensive research and has been able to write history that includes legends and superstitions of the times, and how they impacted the people. The belief in the coming of the Apocalypse was real and for some people, terrifying and life-changing. Anyone who has studied this time period will still learn things that were never considered in other "History" books. As Tom Holland recounts the spread of Christianity to the pagans, and the horrors of "holy" war -- which seemed to be constant -- he recounts miracles of soon-to-be Saints as though he witnessed them himself. He weaves people in and out of his narrative, illustrating how nepotism played an active role in the church as well as in the royal lineages (and sometimes, not-so-royal lineages. Any would-be saint would expect to be dug up after his body had decayed, and only the bones were left. Most cathedrals, churches, monasteries, etc. would give anything to obtain these "sacred relics". It tended to insure a high volume of pilgrims to their town, along with continued miracles as well.

A Forgotten Revolution

It wasn't so long ago that we were all fascinated with the change of millennium, jumping into the two thousands of years. There were worries: everyone with a computer remembers that shortcuts by twentieth-century programmers were supposed to mean that computers would crash when they unexpectedly came across years with a first digit of two rather than of one. It's interesting that our worries with the big date change were technological. They didn't come to pass. When the calendar had advanced to year 1000, the worries with the big date change were religious. They didn't come to pass, either. Those millennial worries, and the history surrounding them, are the theme within _The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West_ (Doubleday) by Tom Holland. This is a big, sprawling book of a strange time; although Holland starts out with Constantine, the book traces history most closely a century before and after year 1000. It's clear that there were fewer people paying attention to the calendar in 1000 than to the calendar in 2000, and probably only religious experts knew of the first millennial change. Holland admits that how much import was given to the year 1000 is controversial, and historians accelerated the controversy around the year 2000 because of contemporary themes. The history he gives, however, full of tumult between leaders and governments of nations and religions, shows that those who were reading the signs of the impending apocalypse did have worrisome events to hang their worries on. His book is a wide-ranging look at the tumult, with plenty of detail and many forceful characters. Throughout this book, there are those who expect the Antichrist to arrive, Jesus to arise again, and the world to end. They are disappointed, of course, as such believers always have been; so far, the world simply has not conformed to prophecy no matter how devoutly believed in. The belief in such end times did, according to Holland, change behavior. Otto III, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, planned to abdicate his position, "And I will offer it instead to one who is better than me." It is a measure of his self esteem that the "one who is better than me" was Jesus himself. Otto planned to climb the hill Golgotha, kneel, pray, and thus bring forth the end of days. Instead, in Rome, he caught malaria and died. There are plenty of stories here that sound weirdly unreal to modern views. Holland has fun reporting them at face value, making this, among other things, an entertaining collection of anecdotes. For example, in Aquitaine, the monks felt the relics in their monastery were in need of an upgrade. They announced that they had discovered that the head of John the Baptist was buried within the monastery. "Quite how it had ended up there, buried within a mysterious pyramid of stone, was never fully explained. The enthusiasm of the pilgrims who soon descended upon the monastery, crowding the narrow stairways in their

Great story

The author fills in a lot between the lines of history to make a compelling story to which we can all relate. Very interesting creative non-fiction. Well worth reading.