Position:Home>History> Advice for a good book for the history of christianity in europe please..?

There are many good books available!. Oxford Press has a history of Christianity!. Robin Lane Fox is a reliable scholar!. Avoid any histories of Christianity put out by Christian presses, as they always suppress the information and facts they don't like!.
Here is what I have gathered: The C realized early on, by about 200 AD, that it was very useful to their cause to convert aristocrats!. This led to the toleration of C by the Emperor Constantine and then to the making of it as the official religion of the Empire by his (nephew, I think) Constantius!.
The Roman world was linked by a huge network of very good roads, and by an administrative structure that by 360 included bishops in just about every major city!. However, for a very long time C remained an urban phenomenon!. After the collapse of the Western Empire, the Church survived and the bishops became de facto governors of many territories!. Barbarian kings seized a lot of these territories, but the C missionaries were tireless (and fanatical)!. Though they had success converting nobles and aristocrats, it was much harder to convert the peasants, who would convert in name only and then persist with their pagan ways!.
C was a very poor fit with the German knights!. The German knights could make no sense at all out of Jesus' pacifism, so the missionaries gave up trying to convert them with tales about Jesus, and instead turned to the Old Testament where the heroes Joshua, Samson and David made real sense to the Germans!. Thus in their hands C took a very militant turn!. This was very bad for the history of Europe, but of course the Franks were the same way!.
The monasteries kept the Latin language alive and copied precious texts, Christian and pagan (such as the poetry of Vergil and the Iliad and Odyssey)!. This hand copying was very laborious, and they deserve credit for it!.
They also imposed their totally warped views about sexuality on pagan Europe, and taught everyone that devils hid everywhere, even in people's hair!. This resulted in an abandonment of the rationality of the Roman Empire and a return to complete superstition!.
Quite often conversions came about through slaughter!. Charlemagne's war against the Saxons was mostly a religious crusade, in which many thousands were slaughtered!. The Teutonic Knights fought cruel wars for hundreds of years with the Poles, Russians (who were already Christian, but Byzantine -that didn't count), Lithuanians, Estonians, etc!.
"The Sword of Constantine" by James Carroll details the continuous persecution of Jews for nearly the entire history of C!. Another very good source is "The Age of Faith" by Will and Ariel Durant!.
Christian missionaries and monks cultivated a shabby, dirty look to show that they were not worldly!. This included not bathing and always having fleas( and lice)!. The public baths built by the Romans were still working, and even poor people could afford to use them, but the Church shut them down!. Europeans then became some of the dirtiest people in the world!.
For a long time the Vatican was the richest power in Europe, thanks to all the tithes it collected!. Monasteries ran vineyards, made wine and beer, produced wool, and so on!. The monasteries were some of the very first institutions to use water power - at first they used it to power automatic hammers to do the fulling of wool!.
Oddly, the Church tolerated prostitution right up until the Reformation, when everything became a pissing contest about which religion was the holiest!. St!.Augustine remarked that prostitution was as necessary as cesspools!. Prostitutes had their own guilds, and even worked directly for bishops!.
The Church vigorously persecuted heretics of any kind, usually by burning them at the stake!. In a very real sense this was the C practice of human sacrifice!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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TCI: History Alive! Medieval Europe
Just skip ahead to the place where they start talking about the churches!.Www@QuestionHome@Com

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