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

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I consider myself a history buff and love ancient Roman and modern Asian history, but basically haven't paid attention to the Middle Ages/Mediaeval history since high school. As Holland's newest book shows, that was certainly a mistake. According to Holland's The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West, the early Middle Ages, around the turn of the millennium, proved to be an extremely important time not just in European history, but also the separation between church and state and the idea of progress more broadly.

Before the millennium, many Christians in Europe became apprehensive as, in the Book of Revelation, St. John predicted that the Antichrist would rule the world and the end of days would be near. The exact date was uncertain, but though to be a thousand years after Christ's birth (1000 AD) or his resurrection (1033 AD, the more accepted number after nothing happened in 1000 AD). During this time, Europe (coincidentally?) suffered internecine warfare, rogue knights, Viking raids, threats from a rising Islamic Caliphate, and a host of other problems. When the millennium came and went, both religious and secular leaders realized they had better solidify their own dominions on earth since the end of days might take longer than expected. However, unlike James Reston's The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D., Holland's book does not focus on the myths and legends surrounding the millennium, but rather the historical developments.

The thrust of the book focuses on the political and religious changes that accompanied, and were influenced by, the millennium. Most important for Holland's story is the rise of the papacy. Before the millennium, the papacy was simply an office available for ambitious roman elites. The line of popes consisted of more than a few incompetents, youthful puppets, dilettantes, and gigolos. Furthermore, many bishops received the positions through bribery and other patronage (known as simony). By the mid-1000s, religious reformers, with a stronghold in the monastery in Cluny, succeeded in installing one of their own, Pope Leo IX. Thereafter, popes increasingly exercised their temporal and religious authority, with Pope Leo IX being the first to declare a holy war (against Norman marauders in Italy). The story culminates when Gregory VII excommunicates the Saxon King Henry IV when the latter sought to appoint and control local bishops, as kings had traditionally done. Henry successfully begs for forgiveness at Canossa, but not before the world realizes that the papacy is powerful and that the Pope controls religious affairs. Holland argues this led to the division between church and state that has proven so crucial to Western civilization (and contrasted to Islam, where Islamic law covers both secular and religious issues).

The years surrounding the millennium marked a time when Europe ceased trying to imitate the ancient Roman Empire and started to forge its own distinct future. Initially, European kings, such as Charlemagne, simply sought to emulate Roman emperors and even went to Rome to be crowned by the Pope. During the early Middle Ages, Europe also underwent a transformation in political authority. Holland describes the rise of knights and castles as responses to weak governments in the West and the ambitions of local elites. Proselytization of the barbarians also plays a bigger role. It is particularly interesting to see how Saxons, Vikings, and other warrior tribes "reinterpret" Christianity to endorse their traditional warrior customs.

This book is great because, in addition to being a history lesson, it also describes the origins of so many things still with us today. For example, in the Frankish, Saxon, and other kingdoms, we see the beginnings of the modern nation states of Western Europe. Holland also describes how the Scandinavians, Hungarians, and others who had been outside the Roman Empire were eventually Christianized. We also see the first major incidents of anti-Semitism, in Orleans in 1010 (Holland claims that before then, Christian communities had been largely tolerant of Jews). Also, next time somebody tells you that you need to "go to Canossa," you'll know what to do.

Holland has a great knack for finding wonderful anecdotes and enjoys repeating them at face value. He breathlessly recounts how heredity was a significant issue for heirs because, "as the ancients had long since proved, both sperm and menstrual blood were suffused with the essence of an individual's soul." Hence, princes needed to assure competitors and subjects that they had inherited the prior king's noble traits through his semen. Meanwhile, the Scottish, trying to claim a noble heritage for their proud peoples, claimed to have descended from the Pharaoh's daughter who had found Moses in a bulrushes. her name - Princess Scota of course! One of my favorite stories was the advice Polish bishops gave for punishing a rapist: "nailed his scrotum to a bridge, [and] then, 'after a sharp knife has been placed next to him,' be confronted with the unpleasant options of self-castration or suicide." Thou shalt NOT lust.

Having said that, I don't think the book works as well as Holland's other books (Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West and Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic) simply because he covers too much. Unlike those two books, which covered pivotal events, The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West really deals with a 150-year time period. There aren't really any central characters, and this period of history covers so many kings, princes, and popes that it simply becomes difficult to remember them all. Furthermore, the narrative often skips around to different parts of Europe and occasionally goes on tangents (I'm still not sure how important the Russians were to all of this). However, at the end of the day, I think Holland rightly felt he had to put in this background because, unlike the history of Julius Caesar, few readers know enough about the early Middle Ages to appreciate the significance of the millennium and Canossa. In that sense, for readers (like myself) who have little background in Mediaeval history, it is important to not get too overwhelmed by the details and keep the larger picture in mind. If you do that, you'll be shocked this history changes your view of the West.

This work covers the history of the great kings in Western Europe and Popes from about the time of Charlemagne (800 AD) to the beginning of the crusades in 1095. The title is misleading, although the idea of the end of the world coming 1,000 years after the birth of Christ figures prominently. If there is a focus, and the author presents one for consideration, it is the conflict between Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor, and Pope Gregory VII (everyone will think of their meeting at Canossa in 1077.) More specifically, the theme is the rise of the Roman Catholic Church to temporal power and assuming the authority to make and unmake kings as ordained by God. It was during this time that the Roman Catholic Church truely gained its European ascendancy that held until the Protestant Reformation.

It was this theme that attracted my interest, but then the work devolved into a recounting of the actions of kings and leaders from Spain to Poland during these almost 300 years. The narrative becomes disjointed, skipping around from land to land and losing its focus. In some respects the scope is simply too broad to go into the detail the author attempts, but then at other times he omits crucial details that would help to explain certain actions and attitudes. Otto of Northeim, for example, is passed over in a very few words, although he was important in Germany during his lifetime.

The author's scholarship is impressive, and this is indeed a scholarly work with much to offer. The problem lies in its organization. It seems like the author gets sidetracked on peripheral events like the Viking invasion of England that are hardly important in contributing to his basic theme. The core of the matter lies in Italy, France and Germany, and the interplay between those three area as influenced or controlled by the Pope. I think the author would have been well-advised to limit his scope to that and reduced the size of his work accordingly. He is correct that this time period (actually from about 1050 to 1100) laid the political foundation to the second half of the Middle Ages and even up to the French Revolution, and it is important to understand how that came about. But the digressions, like the author's treatise on Cluny, add little except for the specialist, and then they are not sufficiently detailed to be substantially worthwhile.

All in all, this is an interesting book with impressive scholarship. I recommend it to individuals who want to learn about this age, but expect to have some difficulties putting it all together in a meaningful manner.

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 excitement, pushing and shoving their way down into the shrine, ensured that it did not have to be."

The key to Holland's expansive story is in the winter of 1076, when clerics had realized that whatever the significance of the counting of the years, no apocalypse was going to happen according to the schedule they had previously assumed. The German king, Henry IV, came to the Alpine stronghold Canossa to seek absolution from Pope Gregory VII. Gregory had excommunicated Henry and freed his vassals from their allegiance to him because of a basic question: who was going to appoint bishops and give them their office? Kings or popes? Temporal or spiritual powers? Barefoot, clad in rough wool, Henry waited for three days before Gregory relented. There was a resultant division of church and state, and Gregory became, Holland says, "godfather to the future." Holland argues that it has made our modern world, because although Gregory won the day, the church thereby set up its own independent regulations, administration, and revenue sources. Kings would do the same for their separate states. Gregory's revolution had extraordinary unintended consequences: "A piquant irony: that the very concept of a secular society should ultimately have been due to the papacy. Voltaire and the First Amendment, multiculturalism and gay weddings: all have served as waymarks on the road from Canossa." As extreme as that may sound, Holland gives a history of a revolution that makes it believable, a revolution that has been forgotten not just because it is distant but because it was complete.

I'm not giving this book a one star rating because it is a bad book. Indeed it's a good book, a book I've read many times since it came out in 2008 under the title "Millenium". This publisher has got a lot of nerve re-packaging this existing book with a new title and cover art and selling it as Tom Holland's latest. What a sham! My wife ordered this book for me for my birthday, and I've been anticipating it for weeks. It was delivered this afternoon and I'm just speechless. I, and many thousands of other readers already own this book in it's original form.
So if you love Tom Holland's writing, in part because of the rich historical writing in his book Millenium, then don't bother picking this book up. You already own it.
If however, you haven't read this book, it's well worth the read. I just find it hard to recommend it in it's current form, as the publisher has committed what I would consider a fraud. Get the original edition instead.

After having read Rubicon, Holland's masterpiece of popularization, this book was rather disappointing. It is about the approximate period of 900 to 1100 C.E., the convulsive transition between the Dark Ages and the great renascence of the Gothic era. This is an extraordinarily complex moment, not only in internal evolution of the Latin West but from the three civilizations (Viking, Hungarian, and Moslem) pressing it from all sides. Unfortunately, in contrast to the focus on key watershed events of Rubicon, this makes for a sprawling and diffuse narrative that Holland does not quite pull off.

The book begins with the moment when Henry IV (the future Holy Roman Emperor) is forced to pay penitence to Pope Gregory VII, that is, when a worldly leader must acknowledge for the first time his inferiority before the power (moral or otherwise) of the leader of the Latin branch of Christianity. Holland then promises that the book will examine the beginnings of modernity, when the imprecise promises of apocalypse and Christ's return to bring about justice in the next world did not occur when expected, at the turn of the first millennium, gave way to new political and spiritual arrangements that had to be undertaken on Earth. Unfortunately, by the end of the book, he did not do this. That being said, the journey through the book is in many ways deeply rewarding.

For starters, the West (i.e. Latin Christendom) had been under siege for centuries. First, a new eastern faith, Islam, had eaten away at Christendom to establish a fractious empire that was moving into Europe from two directions. Second, the Vikings and Hungarians, both savage pagan fighting forces, were also making inroads and sowing destruction. Third, inside the West, no coherent and durable political entities had emerged since the collapse of Rome, which perpetuated socio-economic and military chaos. In this lack of order, dynasties (e.g. Carolingian) emerged for a short time, only to collapse after a few generations like most pillage-based empires. Meanwhile, the church cowered before whoever was the current tyrant and meekly obeyed. Nonetheless, peasants were relatively free, there was great diversity in terms of religious observances, and oases of order (e.g. the Cluny monastery) flourished. While Holland covers these effectively, there are so many quirky details thrown at the reader that it is impossible to see where the narrative is going at times, particularly as he digresses too often into some interesting personal story about the powers that be.

Then a period of stability began. To accommodate Western Kings, the pagans began a long period of conversion to Christianity. This established a certain commonality and coherence to the emerging civilization, eventually rendering it far more manageable. In addition, with the construction of castles - a sign that the barbarian migrations were at last ending as ethnic/linguistic groups settled into the geographic spaces that many still occupy today - the stage was set for tighter political and economic control; this involved the brutal subjugation of the peasantry into organized serfdom. Moreover, the Arab advance had slowed, though the Turks were a new threat.

At the same time, the Christian Church faced a number of challenges. Feeling besieged quite literally, its leadership knew it had to offer more to its members during the Millennium hysteria and questioning. Not only did this lead to the creation of the knighthood - an attempt to marry brute force to Christian ideals - but to a reform movement from within the church. This established the notion of heresy, which narrowed Christian option and set the stage for the creation of an ideological apparatus with power to kill. In terms of behavior, this led to a renewed emphasis on penitence and saintly living, culminating in the accession by acclamation of the ascetic Hildebrand as Gregory VII, in defiance of both the Holy Roman Emperor and the Roman elites. This in turn generated a terminal conflict with King Henry IV, who was successively excommunicated, absolved, re-excommunicated, re-absolved, and then returned after civil war challenges to depose the Pope by force and install his own sop.

Unfortunately, the book had long lost its narrative thread by this point, the beginning of the Gothic era. THough Gregory VII had died in despair and exile, his spiritual successor Urban II, the shrewd and guileful Odo of Cluny, instituted many of his reforms and sparked the Crusades to retake the holy lands of the Near East. The book completely collapses at this point: Holland mentions that reforms were made, that economic developments gathered steam, that a new era dawned, but he neither analyses nor even characterizes them in any detail. That means he fails to explain "the epic rise of the West" of the subtitle, which must have been a mere marketing tool.

WIth these severe deficiencies noted, I confess that much of my disappointment may be due to the fact that I don't know this period of history all that well, which is a question of the audience Holland was writing for - the very well informed, not the novice. In other words, I was trying to learn too much about the basics that simply were not covered well enough here. I did know much more about Julius Caesar and hence Rubicon was a much more enjoyable read. Nonetheless, Rubicon was far better focused into a coherent narrative, a format in which a tight story could be told with great success. That was not possible for the Millennium period.

Recommended. Holland over-extended himself on this one, but it is well worth the effort. His writing style is truly wonderful - playful yet serious, clear and wide-ranging. I will simply have to find what I was looking for - the making of Europe - somewhere else.

The first half of the book reads pretty straightforwardly, holds your attention, and is engaging, but then the second half creeps up right around the turn of the Millennium, and wham! -- the storyline gets really confusing, and rather disjointed, really quickly. So many characters are introduced and shoved by the wayside in a seemingly random manner. It is a bit of a disappointment, especially after the first portion of the book was presented so well. Getting through the second half of the work was a real chore and not much fun I am sorry to say. I had high hopes for The Forge of Christendom, but it just did not live up to its potential.

I found this to be a nicely woven tapestry of the histories of several peoples, tribes and regions in the wake of the fall of the Roman empire. The document reads in a linear fashion, like a novel might, only buttressed by prime-source research and documented with extensive footnotes. The author's easy style (and the compactness of his work) masque the extensiveness of the research that girds the work, and the complexities of the interwoven histories. In it is revealed the foundation of modern Europe that emerged after Constantine utterly changed the course of Christianity by 180 degrees with the words, "In this sign, conquer." This work will become required reading for any student of Western Civ, or even world history. How nations emerged, the papacy evolved, and the changing nature of Christian spirituality (and militancy) are the brightly colored threads in this tapestry.

Now, if I could get hold of Holland's editor, I would tell him (or her) why I marked it down to four stars. Two reasons stand out in my mind. First, a quibble: the repetitive use of a few pet phrases (especially the utterly meaningless 'As well he might...' used over a dozen times). I would have had my college papers sent back to me with bright red lines scratching out all of these, even the first use. It's a cliche, and beneath the otherwise glittering prose in this work. Second, I felt rushed at the end. Already a brisk and easy read, at a good pace, I felt the last chapter turned into a sprint, and lacked some of the illustrative detail that makes most of this book stand out as a perfect example of painting with words - a refreshingly spare amount of them at that.

I very much look forward to a sequel: how we get from now-formed French, English, German and Spanish kingdoms to the Reformation.

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.

I picked up this novel after reading Holland's Rubicon and Persian Fire, due partly to my preference for the author's narrative style of presenting history, and partly due to the intriguing subject matter.

I've read a number of works on the Middle Ages and am passingly familiar with the characters and the events that shaped the history of the era. Nevertheless, as he did so well in his earlier two works, Holland has a way of taking well known subject matter and giving it enough of a twist to capture the reader's attention. In addition, his narrative style of presenting history is far preferable to the dry, textbook style utilized by many other authors.

In this work, Holland examines the Middle Ages, roughly from the reign of Constantine to the early 12th century, through the prism of the spread of Christianity, the sometimes extreme tension between religious and secular rulers, and challenges posed by adjacent pagan and Islamic encroachment.

Whether you are a well read student of the era, or a newcomer, I can highly recommend Forge of Christendom and other historical works by this author.

Tom Holland has done it again, but this time even more impressively than before. In Rubicon, Holland brought the Roman Republic and its fall to vivid life. In Persian Fire he enlightened us with a wonderful exposition of a defining period in the seemingly eternal struggle between East and West. Here he gives us a unique understanding of the source of the evolution the modern West. It is erudite, entertaining, educational, detailed, surprising and, all in all, Holland's finest historical work to date.