The Church in the Middle Ages
Marius Ostrowski explains why the Church was so dominant in the Middle ages, but also sees traces of a growing secularism.
The thousand-year span of the medieval era, which coincided in essence with the period of the church’s greatest power and status, was framed by the collapse of two once-mighty civilisations. At its start in AD 476, the Western Roman Empire, the superpower of the ancient world, cracked under the multiple strains of military, social and economic turmoil, and at its end the shrinking Byzantine Empire was finally obliterated by the Ottomans in 1453.
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