Library of World Civilization – serie

The author seeks to show how its success in building up its authority and its legal and administrative machinery militated against its claim to spiritual leadership, and how an institution which rose through furthering the cause of reform later became an obstacle to reform and itself in need of reformation. In other words, he is concerned with the great dichotomies - to say nothing of the conflicting ideals and contrasting personalities - which make the history of the medieval papacy so dramatic and instructive. Professor Barraclough's writings on papal history cover a period of more than thirty years. They are based on extensive research in the Vatican Archives and other major manuscript libraries. The present volume is refreshingly original in judgment and constantly surprises the reader by its ability to place even the best-known episodes and personalities in anew and revealing light.

These centuries, as the author demonstrates, were the era in which the most deeply rooted of ancient institutions disappeared for all time. By 476 the Roman empire had vanished from western Europe; by 655 the Persian empire had vanished from the Near East. Mr. Brown, Professor of History at Princeton University, examines these changes and men's reactions to them, but his account shows that the period was also one of outstanding new beginnings and defines the far-reaching impact both of Christianity on Europe and of Islam on the Near East. The result is a lucid answer to a crucial question in world history; how the exceptionally homogeneous Mediterranean world of c. 200 A.D. became divided into the three mutually estranged societies of the Middle Ages: Catholic Western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam. We still live with the results of these contrasts.