A. D.

The Visigoths, led by Gaiseric, settle in North Africa and challenge Rome. Ireland before St. Patrick According to the most ancient traditions of Ireland, her history had been linked to that of the Mediterranean world long before the coming of St. Patrick and the religion of Rome. Even after St. Patrick, the history of the country was to remain, the preserve of an oral tradition handed down by a class of minstrels or bards. In western Europe, these minstrels were the latest heirs of an heroic Iron Age society, of which the earliest example known to us was the Greece …

In the spring of 432, Laoghaire, ruler of a petty kingdom in northern Ireland, gathered his court near Tara to celebrate the annual rites of his pagan religion. The Christian missionary Patrick, appeared in the midst of the gathering, confounded the King’s magicians with a miracle of fire and — on Easter Sunday — converted Laoghaire. Patrick went on to strengthen the fledgling Christian Church in the Emerald Isle and to establish a religious tradition that was to endure for centuries. As Continental Europe slipped into the Dark Ages, following the collapse of the Roman Empire, it was the monks …

The Arian threat occured in the fourth century, which opened with the triumph of Christianity in the Roman Empire, closed with the beginning of the Dark Ages. Leaders of the barbarian tribes, massing outside the Empire’s frontiers, had already infiltrated their agents into the high places of imperial politics. The old order of Roman imperial administration, already severely weakened in the late third century and only partly restored by the reforms of Diocletian, was gradually disrupted during the years following Constantine’s death. Thus, the gulf between the East, where the imperial system continued and the West, where conditions of virtual …

Constantine’s victory at the Milvian Bridge, ensures the spread of Christianity, throughout the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire, at the end of the third century A.D., was at the point of collapse. Struggles amongst rival emperors brought frequent civil wars, while barbarian hordes threatened the borders. Early in the new century, a soldier named Constantine proclaimed himself Emperor and immediately set out to make good his claim in a series of campaigns that took him, by the summer of 312, to the edge of Rome. Constantine had a momentous vision — a vision in which he was told, that he …

A. D. is not meant to imply a time when fires were burning continually from 312 A.D. to 1204 A.D. Yet fires there were: fires lit by zealous men that consumed the ancient gods, ancient cultures and eventually men themselves. The rise of Christianity, to its position as the official Church of Constantine’s Empire, was accompanied by fires, in which the temples and other treasures of ancient cultures were destroyed — for example, the library at Alexandria. Then the Islamic fires from the desert seemed to consume the gardens of late antiquity, where vases and statues had survived from the …