Richard A. Fletcher (1) (1944–2005)

An unsatisfying short history of the interaction between Christianity and Islam from the death of Muhammad in 632 A.D. to the late 1400s. Considering this involved almost ceaseless conquest, crusade and oppression between two intolerant ideologies, Fletcher's book is disappointingly bloodless. He is at pains to adopt an academically neutral approach, which serves to be euphemistic when discussing the religious turmoil and also manages to lack any sort of heavyweight punch when it comes to show more passing historical judgement. Fletcher also abstains from any sort of anecdotal colour or drama or even acknowledgement of friction (I certainly feel the hand of the publisher's marketing department in the book's subtitle). Whilst a legitimate academic overview offering up avenues for further study, the book only identifies the 'what' of history, not the 'how' or the 'why'. It provides little for those seeking to understand the clash between these two civilizations, which sadly continues to influence the course of our world into the twenty-first century. show less

Richard Fletcher's liberal-minded account of the christianisation of Europe from just before the fall of the Western Roman Empire (if it could be said to have fallen at all, given the continuing role of the Church of Rome) to the end of Lithuanian paganism is well worth reading.

It is classic narrative history starting at the beginning and ending at the end with a couple of analytical chapters in the middle and end to give us some sense of what it may all have 'meant'. He writes fluently even show more if some readers are going to be boondoggled by the flow of obscure names.

His judgements are generally wise ones although he almost lost a star with an excessively (almost sneering, quite unlike him) dismissal of Marxist cynicism. There are good reasons to be cynical about the motives behind the process of christianisation.

He redeems himself somewhat by giving us sufficient evidence of the variety of political, social and economic motives for becoming at least ritualistically christian to allow us to make up our own minds while confirming that the churchmen involved were 'true believers'.

There is no incompatibility involved in class interests aligning themselves with activist faith-based imagined worlds - after all, we are going through a similar phase of mixed faith and cynicism in the alignment of government and business with the green agenda of St. Greta of Thunberg,

Historians, like philosophers, must be prepared to accept that it is possible for many impossible things not only to be thought before breakfast but subsequently aligned so that they appear to be coherent and logical in order to meet the practical needs of all sides. People are very clever.

Fletcher's weakness perhaps is only in accepting this process as more good than it was insofar as the 'victims' of both activist faith-bringers and warrior and then kingly elites were always going to be the poor bloody sods who had to till the fields and do the dirty work.

I found it heartening in his final chapter that so many of these poor sods still held onto their peasant magical thinking in preference to the magical thinking of intellectuals given that non-magical thinking (our own preferred mode of thinking) was still centuries away.

Was this conversion process benign or malign? Neither probably, much as imperialism, whether Roman or British, cannot be simplified into good or evil. There are benefits of order and relief of poverty in having kings and monasteries. There are disbenefits of exploitation and social control.

Certainly the character of the Church follows an age-old pattern repeated in many societies including ours today. The good tends to get shunted aside in favour of the bad as any form of possible alternative or dissent disappears.

Fletcher is good on the early emergence of the Adelskirche (church as nobility) as warrior societies dumped their war band pseudo-egalitarianism in favour of anointings and fixed land-holding. Clever romanised bosses and intelligent warrior kings could use the church for their own ends.

This is not to claim that the Church was ever just the creature of the aristocracy. This was a partnership that might even break down periodically. The Church had a lot going for it - soft power dominance, heirdom to Roman prestige, a core intellectual consistency, expertise.

The 1,000 year process of turning Western Europe into Western Christendom is shown to have had its logic in this book. As Fletcher wisely points out, the point was that the christians were simply more organised than the pagans to the point where you end up feeling sorry for the latter.

Christendom starts to turn nasty to the degree that its power becomes concentrated. The first major sign of what this may mean (although it was always implicit in Augustine's vicious attitude towards the Donatists) was the brutal treatment of the Saxon pagans by Charlemagne.

However, this arose from the frustrations of power politics. As so often, the battered Saxons became more christian than the christians who worried about their treatment when it came to battering the Wends and other Slavs, a Germanic neurosis that would last in some form until 1945.

The turn to evil (and that is what it must be called) takes place somewhere around the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh centuries with the generalisation of a crusading impulse that turned Christian warriors into precisely the same sort of thugs as pagan warlords.

It is a well-worn observation that children who are battered tend to batter their children and the behaviour of the Germans might be considered evidence in favour of that maxim when the evils of crusader ideology came home to roost in the Baltic.

What is interesting about this process is the unthinking role of some fanatic Churchmen, very different in character from earlier generations, not so much fanatic as enthusiastic, who had constructed a missionary ideal in stages during the early middle ages.

By the end of the book (the last half of the fourteenth century), we see a powerful and organised pagan kingdom in Lithuania, last man standing but too late to resist Christianity, undertaking highly skilled negotiations to ensure its political success by adopting the incoming religion.

In essence, Christianity was the soft power survival of the massively prestigious and organised (superior even in collapse) world of 'Romanitas', the vehicle of both order and human exploitation in the interests of collaborating elites but also constraining those elites into right behaviour.

By adopting the 'right behaviour' of a modified christian 'Romanitas', elites got prestige, social control (through family members) and rights to human exploitation in return for modifying their behaviours to maintain some semblance of order and reduce the effects of their inhuman instincts.

So, neither entirely good not entirely bad, the christianisation process was simply how one set of humans in one part of the world managed themselves in a time of limited resources, controlling greed for plunder and employing the emotional and intellectual talents of a class of scribblers.

It was progress of a kind for land owners, merchants and intellectuals though it simply shuffled the cards for the rest of humanity (the bulk of it) as they remained under the control of collaborating plunderers of land and souls.

Older traditions and certainties and a lot of personal autonomy went out of the window although it is true that the Church would provide (at its best) relief from poverty and restraints on lordly behaviour (when it chose to exercise moral authority). As we say, neither good nor bad.

From the point of view of many ordinary folk, the early middle ages under Roman christianity might seem like a golden age sandwiched between an age of predatory enslaving pirates and warlords and the utter lunacy of the Church Reformers, Reformation and Counter-Reformation.

A well ordered and mostly sensitive and kind book with none of my sourness towards the utter absurdity of religious magical thinking, this is well worth reading if only because of its complete honesty in laying out the facts on which we can have our own opinion. show less

This is a fantastic history covering a critical episode shaping Europe and, through that, the world. Although the scholarly writing could have been pedantic, the author writes in an easy style and his love of history clearly shows.

One of the key aspects I enjoyed also demonstrated the sheer depth of Mr. Fletcher's knowledge of the subject. He often cites conflicting accounts and views and the problems and benefits with each. Additionally, he isn't afraid to show how much he doesn't know and show more how much of what is written is based on assumption, perspective, or inference.

Rather than approach the topic as Christian vs pagan or a conflict theory perspective, Fletcher approaches the topic from the unique conditions, motivations, and traditions inherent in the mission fields. He discusses the commonalities as well as specifics to each time, place, and people. Why were missionaries unsuccessful at one time period, but successful in others?

I appreciated his discussions of the evolution of the church. This is easily illustrated in the use of vernacular vs "sacred" languages controversies. The early manuscripts in Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Aramaic were the common languages of their day. Translating them to Latin was a big deal, not because Latin was holy, but because it was the common language. Cyril and Methodius translated the Greek rites and rituals into the local vernacular (Old Slavonic) so that the Christian message could reach more people. This caused controversy at the time because some felt the language of rites should be Latin, Greek or Hebrew - none of which were the vernacular of the mission fields. Part of the Russian Orthodox schism stemmed from the departure of Old Slavonic hundreds of years later (in addition to 2 vs 3 fingered crosses or 2 or 3 allelujahs). Fast forward to the 20th century controversies of the Second Vatican with its allowance of vernacular rites and liturgy or the fringe Protestant insistence that the King James Bible is the only true Bible. These vernacular vs sacred controversies have been ongoing for 1700 years, more or less, and are generally indicative of those with evangelistic Great Commission vs those tied to man's traditions.

Although I understood how monasteries worked at the edges of society to reclaim marginal lands for productive use, how the Orders worked as banking institutions and furthered the Western model of popular education, but I didn't understand their critical role in evangelizing Europe. There is still a considerable amount of uncharitable veneer from Reformers and Protestants toward shaping the conception of monks and monasteries, nuns and abbeys, as dried husks chanting ancient monotones, hoarding their spiritual gifts rather than following the Great Commission. In their time, monasteries were the vehicles of knowledge, missionary activity, and pastoral care.

Although scholarly, The COnversion of Europe is easily approachable and fills in many gaps that other histories of Europe leave out. This is essential reading to understanding European history as well as the evolution of the church. show less

I lived in England a couple years, back when I was nine and ten years old. So I learned the Kings and Queens of England in school, rather than the U.S. Presidents. But we started with William in 1066. We did discuss a bit the earlier folks... Ethelred the Unready - but not much.

One of our family dream adventures is to walk the Hadrian's Wall Path. Certainly I expect there to be a lot of Roman history along the way there. But surely some Anglo-Saxon history too. Maybe I could learn a bit of show more that to be better prepared?!

Fletcher's book did a great job on just sketching out life around the year 1000 in England. I really like how studying a detail creates a kind of point of perspective around which a whole cultural universe can be constellated. Fletcher looks at a feud between two Northumbrian baronal families, a series of murder and slaughters over a couple centuries. It's a nice thread that ties together a lot of history. Fletcher does a nice job of filling in enough context that a total novice like myself doesn't get too lost. But I expect folks much more knowledgeable won't be too annoyed. Fletcher seems to do a good job of providing sources and indicating the varying degrees of speculation involved in building a plausible coherent narrative. show less