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 age of Hellenism. At the dawn of our own age, in 1204 A.D., the crusaders plundered and set fire to Constantinople and destroyed, for the time being at least, the Empire of the Romans. The Byzantine Empire and in particular Constantinople itself, with its glittering palaces, its baths, its art treasures and its luxury, was coveted as much by the tenth-century Ottonian Germans as by the Franks — the Latin Christians of 1204 A.D. The fires of faith, the bright lights of destruction, the explosions of fanaticism, the everlasting wars and feuds that filled this era — was there ever a year when there reigned a peace comparable to the pax romana that Augustus had envisaged, or the pax mongolica, that the great Mongolian khans created, at the height of their power ? All the undoubted devastation should not make us forget that the fires of faith brought life as well as destruction. The contents of this post demonstrate that the dynamic forces that created the western world had their origin in these troubled centuries, and that the foundations of European culture up to the present day were laid over a thousand years ago. We know both a great deal …
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