Western Civilization

Finally, Christianity fulfilled the human need to belong. Christians formed communities bound to one another in which people cou ...

Between the years 235 and 284, there were twenty-two emper- ors, and only two of them did not suffer a violent end. German tribe ...

ROMAN EMPERORS Studies of some Roman emperors of the first and second centuries includeA. Goldsworthy,Augustus: First Emperor of ...

C H A P T E R 7 Late Antiquity and the Emergence of the Medieval World CHAPTER OUTLINE AND FOCUS QUESTIONS The Late Roman Empire ...

Constantine also converted to Christianity, starting a process that gave the late empire a new state religion. After Constantine ...

of Constantine’s reign, the army had also been reorgan- ized. Military forces were divided into two kinds: garri- son troops, wh ...

To maintain the tax base and keep the empire going despite the shortage of labor, the emperors issued edicts that forced people ...

followers of Arius, a priest from Alexandria in Egypt. Arius believed that Jesus had been human and thus not truly God. Arius wa ...

OPPOSING VIEWPOINTS Two Views of the Huns The first selection is a description of the Huns by Ammianus Marcellinus (ca. 330–ca. ...

(thee-AHD-uh-rik) (493–526), marched into Italy, killed Odoacer, and established control of Italy in 493. By the end of the fift ...

northern and central Italy. Unlike the Ostrogoths, the Lombards were harsh rulers who cared little for Roman structures and trad ...

destroyed the Visigothic kingdom itself (see “The Rise of Islam” later in this chapter). The Frankish Kingdom Only one of the Ge ...

Under German customary law, compurgation and the ordeal were the two most commonly used procedures for determining whether an ac ...

THE FRANKISH FAMILY AND MARRIAGE For the Franks, like other Germanic peoples, the extended family was at the center of social or ...

papal authority over the Christian church in the West, although few people in Europe at this time looked to the pope as the chur ...

At the same time, moderation did not preclude a disciplined existence based on the ideals of poverty, chastity, and obedience. B ...

life. Irish monasteries produced extraordinary illumi- nated manuscripts illustrated with abstract geometric patterns. Their emp ...

willing to assimilate old pagan practices in order to coax the pagans into the new faith: We wish you [Abbot Mellitus] to inform ...

contained all the knowledge anyone needed. Others, however, thought it was not possible to separate Chris- tian thought from cla ...

because of human beings’ inclination to sin. And yet the City of the World was still necessary, for it was the duty of rulers to ...