Mutilated, strangled, suffocated or beaten to death: these are just some of the methods used to get rid of popes in the early medieval period. An incredible 33 per cent of all anointed popes between 872 and 1012 died in suspicious circumstances. It’s safe to say that the path to Christian dominance in Europe was rocky at times.
Peter Heather’s revisionist history of the rise of medieval Christendom directs attention to these moments. Though the subtitle is ‘The Triumph of a Religion’, his account is anything but triumphalist. In fact his argument gains momentum through the challenge it poses to simplistic accounts of Christian ascendency.
Pope Gregory the Great forced his peasants to convert to Christianity through threats of rent rises
The dominant historical narratives written in 20th-century Britain went like this: Christianity spread from Palestine across Europe from the 4th century onwards, through a gradual, constant process of personal conversion, underwritten by the truth of Christian doctrine.
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