A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Constantine himself told Eusebius of Caesarea that one of the crucial experiences in his Milvian Bridge victory had been a vision of ‘a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and an inscription, CONQUER BY THIS’.4 The association of the sun and the Cross was no accident. A military leader and a ruthless politician rather than an abstract thinker, Constantine was probably not very clear about the difference between a universal sun cult and the Christian God – at least to start with. As he began showering privileges on the Christian clergy, it is unlikely that many of them considered whether the Emperor should be given a theological cross-examination before they accepted their unexpected gifts. What interested Constantine was the Christian God rather than the Christians. It would hardly have been worth his while from a political point of view to court favour from Christians, for, however one calculates their numbers, they were still a decided minority in the empire, and noticeably weak in those crucial power blocs, the army and the Western aristocracy.

The site Constantine chose was an ancient city enjoying a superb strategic site at the entrance to the Black Sea and the command of trade routes east and west: Byzantion. He renamed the city after himself, as previous emperors had done in imitation of Alexander’s precedent: Constantinople. The old name persisted, eventually modified in academic Latin to Byzantium. It was destined to provide a new identity for the Eastern Roman state, whose capital it remained over the next millennium, in what has commonly become known in history as the Byzantine Empire.12 But for countless numbers of people of the eastern Mediterranean over that millennium and beyond, Constantinople would simply be ‘the City’, the dominant presence in their society, their religious practice and their hopes for the future.

Constantine quadrupled Byzantium in size, and although virtually none of the buildings which he provided survive, the Great Palace of the emperors remained on the same site from its first completion in 330 until the death of the last emperor in 1453. This new Rome reflected the new situation of tolerance for all, but with Christianity more equal than others. Traditional religion was put in a subordinate place: the core centres of worship were Christian churches of great magnificence. They included a church in which Constantine proposed to gather the bodies of all twelve Apostles to accompany his own corpse: a mark of how he now saw his role in the Christian story, although the coffins alongside his own had to remain mainly symbolic in default of enough relics of the Twelve.

The bishop clearly attracted the Emperor’s attention by some skilled self-promotion at the great Council of Nicaea in 325. He returned home armed with instructions to start an expensive programme of church-building, the preparations for which revealed a sensational double find beneath the stately imperial Capitoline temple built by Hadrian (see p. 107). What emerged was the exact site of Christ’s crucifixion and the tomb in which the Saviour had been laid. It is possible that there had been a continuous Christian tradition as to the whereabouts of these sites and that therefore there was not much revealing to be done.16 Less plausibly, it was not long before the Jerusalem Church was announcing that the actual wood of the Cross had also been rediscovered, and within a quarter-century another enterprising Bishop of Jerusalem, named Cyril, was linking that discovery to an undoubted historic event: a state visit to the Holy City in 327 by Constantine’s mother, the dowager Empress Helena.

There was now a proliferation of relics of the wood of the Cross. Earlier the usual Christian visual symbol for Christ had been a fish, since the Greek word for ‘fish’, ichthys, could be turned into an acrostic for the initial letters of a Greek phrase, ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’, or similar devotional variants. Now the fish was far outclassed not only by the new imperial Chi-Rho monogram referring to the same word, but also by the Cross.

Significantly, imperial Christianity came to follow the political division of the empire which had originally been established by its archenemy Diocletian, when he split the administration of his empire between east and west, with a dividing line running through central Europe to the west of the Balkans, and a separation of North Africa and Egypt. In Europe, that boundary is very largely that existing today between Orthodox and Catholic societies, with fairly minor adjustments, even to the division of Slavic peoples between Orthodoxy and Catholicism. Moreover, the Church started using a technical administrative term which Diocletian had adopted for the twelve subdivisions he created in the empire: ‘diocese’. In the Western Latin Church, this has become the term for an area under the control of a bishop.

The Churches of Orthodox tradition reserve it for the territories of the whole group of bishops who look to a particular metropolitan or patriarch, such as the Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, or the Bishop of Constantinople, who is now known as the Oecumenical Patriarch. For the area presided over by a single bishop, they use a word which the West has redeployed for much smaller pastoral units served by a single priest: the parochia or parish. The West has another term equivalent to diocese, from a Latin word for a chair, sedes, which comes into English as ‘see’.

Less than a century before, the heap of charges against Bishop Paul of Samosata had included the complaint that he had sat on a throne like a ‘ruler of the world’; now all bishops did this.25 The idea of a seated bishop presiding over the liturgy but also pronouncing on matters of belief and adjudicating everyday disputes, became so basic to Western Christian ideas of what a bishop represented that the Church annexed a second Latin word for ‘chair’, cathedra, previously associated with teachers in higher education, and used it for the city church in which the bishop’s principal chair could be found: his cathedral. The buildings which the Church now put up for the worship of their great congregations reflected the bishops’ role as politicians and statesmen: churches borrowed their form not from the temples of the Classical world, which were not designed for large congregations, and which in any case had inappropriate associations with sacrifice to idols, but instead from the secular world of administration.

In a brilliant miniature study, the twentieth-century liturgical scholar R. P. C. Hanson indeed established that in general, up to the end of the third century, bishops were free to improvise a form of words around set themes which would be considered appropriate for the great drama of the Eucharist. They were after all the Church’s teachers, as their cathedra chair came to symbolize, and they could be trusted to include the right material. In the fourth century the situation changed: the liturgy, like the buildings in which it was celebrated, became more fixed and structured. From that era onwards, architecture and manuscript evidence come together for the first time to offer a flood of light on these matters at the heart of Christian experience.

Armed with this combination of knowledge, we could enter a basilica to look eastwards towards the table of the Lord’s death and resurrection. We would remember the martyred servant of Christ whose bones were incorporated in it, and who by his or her suffering had a place guaranteed close to the Lord in Heaven. In the great services of the Church’s year, we would also see the living representative of God on earth, the bishop sitting in his chair, flanked by his clergy. This was a model of the Court of Heaven; and naturally everyone at the time would expect splendour at a Court. It was an age when clergy began to dress to reflect their special status as the servants of the King of Heaven. The copes, chasubles, mitres, maniples, fans, bells, censers of solemn ceremony throughout the Church from East to West were all borrowed from the daily observances of imperial and royal households. Anything less would have been a penny-pinching insult to God.

With Ethiopian backing, a local Miaphysite ruler, Abraha, now came to establish a kingdom in southern Arabia which had Miaphysite Christianity as its state religion. This might have become the future of the Arabian peninsula, had it not been for a major disaster of engineering: in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure. After more than a thousand years of existence, it was never rebuilt until modern times. A complex and wealthy society which had flourished on the irrigation provided by the dam was ruined for ever, and with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia. Five hundred miles to the north, in the same decade that the dam failed, there was born an Arab destined to be a new prophet: Muhammad

In its present arrangement, after an initial proclamation of God, who is given the titles of mercy and compassion traditional in Arabian religion, the Qur’an passes to a long sura which takes its name of ‘The Cow’ from its references to stories of Moses and the Children of Israel in their Exodus from Egypt. The name of Mary, the mother of Jesus, occurs almost twice as often in the Qur’an as in the New Testament, and she gives her name to one of its suras. By contrast, there is one silence in the Qur’an which is startling once it is noticed: the name of Paul of Tarsus. Such naming and silence may have been the emphases of the Jewish ‘Ebionite’ Christians long before (see p. 107); and that provokes interesting reflection.

Reading the Qur’an quickly makes it apparent that Muhammad’s relationship with Judaism was more conflicted than his relationship with Christianity, perhaps because it was more intimate.7 It is possible to interpret his image of himself and his destiny as the last in the succession of Hebrew prophets, and his initial mission as a resolve to restore a monotheism concentrated on the Jerusalem Temple, which Christians had compromised. To begin with, Muhammad instructed his followers to pray facing Jerusalem, and he only altered the direction of prayer to Mecca after a murderous disagreement with the Jews of Medina. From that moment, the possibility of a united movement of Jews and followers of Muhammad ended and the Muslims formed their own single community (ummah).8 That concept of a united ummah has survived all subsequent divisions in Islam, including the great and so far permanent rupture between Sunni and Shī’a, but alongside it has been the concept of various People of the Book.

Between 634 and 637, three battles crippled the armies of Byzantium and the Sassanians. In February 638, only eight years after the Emperor Heraclius had triumphantly restored the True Cross to Christian Jerusalem, the city fell to Muslim forces after a year’s siege; it was in any case a shadow of its former self, devastated only a quarter-century earlier by the Sassanian Shah Khusrau II. Sophronios, the Melchite or Chalcedonian Patriarch of Jerusalem, insisted on making the surrender in person to the Caliph Umar.

Umar signified the triumph of Islam on the vacant site of the Temple by building a mosque above the ruins. In doing so, the Caliph achieved what the Emperor Julian the Apostate (see p. 217) had planned long before: to restore honour and splendour to this long-desecrated sacred site which Christians had deliberately spurned, and whose memory had been so vital for Muhammad. In the early 690s the Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik outdid Umar’s first monument with an extraordinary domed structure, now often called the Mosque of Umar – a double error, since it was built neither as a mosque nor by Umar. The function of this ‘Dome of the Rock’ seems originally to have been to mark the victory of Muhammad’s revelation over Christianity, by creating a building which would be as impressive as anything that Christianity had put up – the Caliph would have known the reputation of the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, then already a century and a half old (see pp. 429–31).

From their conquest of Alexandria and all Egypt by 641, they took a half-century of hard fighting to reach the Straits of Gibraltar, but then they went on to seize virtually the entire Iberian peninsula: they were checked in their advance northwards only in central France at a battle near Poitiers in 732 or 733. The two Christian victories at Constantinople and in France between them preserved a Europe in which Christianity remained dominant, and as a result the centre of energy and unfettered development and change in the Christian world decisively shifted west from its old Eastern centres. By contrast, a crushing Islamic victory over Chinese armies in what is now Kyrgyzstan in 751 laid open Central Asia to Islam, bringing eventual ruin to the Church of the East.

Whether Christians found themselves oppressed in the new situation depended on the personality and outlook of the Muslim authorities. At various times discrimination was deliberately burdensome: so under a number of governors and caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty, who were the first conquerors and who ruled from Damascus in the seventh and eighth centuries, Christians faced the destruction of churches and the strict enforcement of a host of petty humiliations and restrictions, while under the last great Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (reigned 847–61) they were forced to wear distinctive clothing in yellow – an anticipation of a measure which, in later centuries, Christian societies would take against their Jewish minorities in Europe.

Some of their rulers took Christian names; the greatest Mongol ruler of them all, Temüjin, who in 1206 was proclaimed ‘Genghis Khan’ (‘Ruler of the Ocean’), had been the vassal of a Christian Kerait khan and married his overlord’s Christian niece.30 It was through Temüjin’s leadership that, in the space of a few decades, the Mongols became a world power to terrify people from the Mediterranean to the China Sea. His successors were convinced that they had been destined for world supremacy, and for a while it looked as if they were right.

As a result of Genghis’s carefully planned set of alliances with Christian Kerait Mongol princesses, a series of Great Khans had Christian mothers, including Kublai Khan, who in the years up to 1279 fought his way to become the first Yuan emperor of China. Under Kublai Khan, Dyophysite Christians returned to the centre of power in China.

The Yuan rulers of China quickly conformed themselves to the rich and ancient culture which they had seized and, worse still, successive Yuan monarchs showed themselves steadily more incompetent to rule. Their overthrow by the fiercely xenophobic native Ming dynasty in 1368 was a bad blow to Christianity in the empire. It still had yet to interest more than a minority of Chinese. It is perhaps appropriate that the only apparent modern linguistic survival of the Syriac missions in the Far East is the word for ‘tomb’, qavra, used by the Turco-Mongol people known as the Uyghur, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China.

Of all the various Christian understandings of the word ‘Catholic’, the most commonly used is a description for the Church over which the pope in Rome presides, and with that usage there go claims for an overriding and objective authority among all other Christian bodies, which the contemporary papacy has so far done nothing to repudiate.1 A more neutral description of the ‘Catholic Church’ would be ‘the Western Church of the Latin Rite’. The point of this admittedly cumbersome label is that it acknowledges the equal historic status of the various Churches of Orthodoxy in eastern Europe and the Middle East, whom we have still to meet, not to mention the various Churches of Asia and Africa which decided after the fifth century to ignore or repudiate the Chalcedonian Definition of the nature of Jesus Christ.

The way in which the history of Catholic Christianity has been told obscures just what a near-miss Arian Christianity proved in the West. If the balance of preferences among barbarian monarchs had been swayed by the Spanish Visigoths rather than by Clovis of the Franks, European Christianity could have remained a decentralized Arianism rather than a Roman monarchy; and the consequences are incalculable. No wonder Clovis remained so celebrated.

When missionaries from Ireland and Scotland started spreading their faith in northern and central Europe in the seventh century, they brought tariff books with them; these were the first ‘penitentials’ or manuals of penance for clergy to use with their flocks. The idea was hugely popular – who would not jump at the chance of being able to do something concrete and specified, however hard, in order to lift a burden of guilt? It became the basis of the medieval Western Church’s centuries-long system of penance: a practice whereby everyone repeatedly confessed their sins to a priest, who then consulted his book or his memory and awarded the necessary penance. Despite its success and acceptance into the Church’s pastoral practice, the whole system directly contradicted Augustine’s theology of grace, and that was to become an issue which helped permanently to split the Western Church in the sixteenth century Reformation, as we will see.

Trade naturally benefited from the new prosperity and the rulers of peoples on the margins of Christian Europe, drawn further into trading networks, saw the advantages of adopting the faith of their neighbours, in a remarkable series of parallel developments.5 To the east, Poles, Hungarians and Czechs all began succumbing to Christian missions, although it was some time before their monarchs made decisions between Eastern and Western Christianity (see pp. 458–65). Likewise around 1000 Christianity began making renewed progress in Scandinavia – first a conversion in Denmark ordered by its king, Harald Bluetooth, around 960 under pressure from the Ottonian emperors, then a more gradual spread through what is now Norway and Sweden, even as far as remote Iceland.

Perhaps the most perfect of all is the cathedral of Chartres, which, by a succession of miraculous escapes and the protection afforded by intense local pride, has preserved its twin spires, its sculpture and its stained glass almost unharmed from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Chartres Cathedral is a hymn to the glory of God and of the Mother of God, the shrine of whose tunic it was built to protect (so far, successfully). It rides its hill over the plains of northern France with no rival on the horizon, visible to its pilgrims further even than the bounds of the diocese ruled by its bishop (see Plate 31).

While Christian leaders had once simply tried to stop Christians from being soldiers (see pp. 156–7), now the Church came to see warfare as something it might use for its own purposes. The notion of holy war, crusade, entered Christianity in the eleventh century, and was directed against the religion which from its earliest days had spoken of holy war, Islam. The Carolingians had done their dubious best to present their campaigns in northern Europe as wars for Christianity (see p. 349), but the difference now was that Christian warfare could actually be seen as the means to win salvation. The first impulse in this was sparked by a spectacular if wholly unusual outrage: in 1009 the mentally unstable Caliph al-Hâkim of Egypt ordered the systematic demolition of Constantine’s Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Churchmen began suggesting that a solution to such grievances might be a reconquest of the Holy Land. But before that became a practical possibility, Christianity won a great victory in the central Mediterranean, in the island of Sicily, which had been contested between Muslims and Christians since the early days of Islam. The victorious armies were led by warriors whose ancestors had come from the north, a restless Scandinavian people whose northern origins were commemorated by their name, Normans. They carved out niches for themselves in widely separated parts of Europe: northern France (‘Normandy’), as far east as the plains of what is now Ukraine and Russia, and most ambitiously, after 1066, the whole Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. But the Normans’ achievements in Italy were perhaps their most significant.

The Pope’s message was now riding on currents of apocalyptic excitement which even the papacy could not control. The mainstream armies which he inspired did not behave as bestially as those raised by a charismatic preacher called Peter the Hermit. As they gathered in the cities of the Rhineland in 1096, they perpetrated Christianity’s first large-scale massacres of Jews, since this was an identifiable group of non-Christians more accessible than Muslims to Western Europeans spoiling for a fight, and generally not able to put up much resistance. It would not be the last time that recruiting for Crusades led to such atrocities.

In 1099 Western soldiers, exhausted but triumphant from winning the great city of Antioch after an epic siege, captured Jerusalem itself in a frenzied attack. Aware of a rapidly approaching Fatimid relief force, they indulged in hasty and vicious slaughter, and later more calculated executions of Jerusalem’s Muslim and Jewish inhabitants and defenders. The scale of this massacre has been recently challenged,40 but whatever qualifications one makes, it was savage enough to arouse astonishment and fury in the Islamic world. The Temple site, for the first time in its chequered history, became given over to Christian worship; the Al-Aqsa Mosque became a church, the Dome of the Rock a cathedral.

Jerusalem had fallen in 1187 to the armies of the Kurdish military hero Saladin (Salāh al-D n); its inhabitants were treated with ostentatious magnanimity to contrast with the atrocities of 1099. It was only temporarily restored to Christian rule between 1229 and 1244, and in 1291 Islamic armies pushed Westerners out of their last strongholds in Palestine.

Despite prodigious expenditure of heroism and resources over two centuries, no crusade equalled the success of the first.

The Templars built churches in the circular plan of what they thought was Herod’s Temple, puzzlingly ignoring the fact that it had been destroyed by the Romans, and not realizing that the building that they were imitating was actually the Muslim Dome of the Rock (with an equally puzzling triumph of wishful thinking, they confidently identified the Al-Aqsa Mosque, standing beside the Dome of the Rock, as Solomon’s Temple).

During the 1620s, the Medici Grand Duke of Florence made serious though in the end abortive preparations to demolish the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and re-erect it stone by stone in his own capital city: to have done this in 1099 might have saved Western Europe a good deal of trouble.

Their models were from outside the Christian world: they copied in a remarkably detailed fashion the institutions of higher education which Muslims had created for their own universal culture of intellectual enquiry, especially the great school of Al-Azhar in Cairo – now-familiar institutions like lectures, professors, qualifications called degrees.5 These were the first Christian universities – Christian, but not under the control of the Church authorities.

Otherwise the West had known little of Aristotle’s work. By contrast, scholars in the Islamic world and the Jewish communities whom the Muslims sheltered had direct knowledge of Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved largely by scholars of the Church of the East (see pp. 245–6 and 266). Gradually, Aristotle’s texts reached the West. The first influx came through the Spanish Christian capture of Muslim Toledo and its libraries in 1085, and then much more through contacts established during the Crusades (one of their more positive results). Once they were translated into Latin, the effect was profound: Western thought, enriched afresh by manuscripts containing Classical learning, experienced another movement of renewal, which has been called the twelfth-century Renaissance.

By the end of the twelfth century, the Western Church was thus facing challenges both from heresy and from the potentially uncontrollable nature of scholastic thought, bred in new institutions, the universities.

From the mid-twelfth century, a particularly persistent and pernicious community response to the occasional abuse and murder of children was to deflect guilt from Christians by blaming Jews for abducting the children for use in rituals. This so-called ‘blood libel’ frequently resulted in vicious attacks on Jewish communities. Sometimes higher clergy did their best to calm the community hysteria in such cases; sometimes they allowed shrine-cults of the murdered victims to develop. Recurrences of the blood libel persisted into the twentieth century as a blemish on Christian attitudes to Jews, spreading from the West into Orthodoxy in later centuries.

Christ too was now first depicted in art not as a King in Majesty or serene Good Shepherd, but as the ‘Man of Sorrows’, with the wounds of his crucifixion exposed and his face twisted in pain. The emphasis continued through the Reformation into sixteenth-century Protestantism, which centred on the death of Christ and his atoning work for humanity by his suffering. This constant exposition of the Passion had an unfortunate side effect. To dwell on Christ’s sufferings was liable to make worshippers turn their attention to those whom the Bible narrative principally blamed for causing the pain: the Jews.

Yet the tragedy remains: the heirs of the apostle of love, Francis, were among the chief sustainers of the growing hatred of Jews in medieval Western Europe. It was in this atmosphere that England pioneered Western Europe’s first mass expulsion of Jews when, in 1289, Edward I’s Parliament refused to help the King out of his war debts unless he rid the realm of all Jews; other rulers followed suit later. Such anti-Semitic ill-will continued to be balanced, in the untidy fashion of human affairs and with Augustine’s lukewarm encouragement, by perfectly cordial or straightforward relations between Jews and Christians, but the impulse to harass or persecute Jews became a persistent feature of Western Christianity which it has only now properly confronted in the wake of terrible events in the twentieth century.

The charisma of the Bishops of Rome is twofold, springing from the tomb of St Peter and from Europe’s equally long-standing fascination with Roman power and civilization. Gradually, in the series of accidents which we have followed from the first century to the thirteenth, Peter’s successors revived the aspirations of Roman emperors to rule the world, and they managed to prevent the successors of the Emperor Charlemagne from gaining a monopoly on this monarchical role in the Christianity of the West.

Orthodoxy has to a remarkable extent been moulded round one single church building, far more influential than even those crucial Western sacred places, the Basilica of St Peter in Rome and the Abbey Church of Cluny. This is the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia) in Constantinople, whose fabric has fared better than Cluny’s, but whose fate as a church converted to a mosque encapsulates the traumas of Orthodox history (see Plate 5). It owes its present form to the partnership of a Latin-speaking boy from the Balkans and a former circus artist of dauntingly gymnastic sexual prowess: the Emperor Justinian I and his consort, Theodora.

This raised a further possibility for Christians. They could not contemplate altering the total number of ten in the Commandments, which had been foundational for Judaism since at least the Deuteronomic period (see pp. 60–61), but they might renumber the Commandments. A renumbering would involve tucking the graven-image prohibition inside Commandment One, rather than making it a free-standing Commandment Two (that meant dividing up the Commandment against covetousness at the end of the sequence to preserve the number ten). This was the conclusion drawn by Augustine of Hippo, and in it he was followed by the entire Western Church down to the Reformation, when some (but, as we will see, not all) Protestants returned to the question and pointedly began numbering the Decalogue once more in the Jewish fashion, thus justifying their deep hostility to traditional ecclesiastical art (see pp. 618–19).

Iconophiles had more to offer. They thought that no officially sanctioned initiative is needed to bring something into the realm of the holy: the sacred can be freely encountered by everyone, because all that God has created is by nature sacred. Everyone can reach God through icons whenever they feel that God calls them. That became both the salvation and the strength of icons through the years in which they were torn down in churches: the little wooden tablets could take refuge in the privacy of people’s homes, and in this domestic space, it would often be mothers or grandmothers who exercised their customary power within the home to take the decision to save the image, and then impressed their love for this private source of divine power on their children.

Around the millennium, Constantinople was the biggest city in the world that Europeans knew, with around 600,000 inhabitants. It surpassed Islam’s greatest city, Baghdad, and dwarfed the Latin West’s best attempts at urban life such as Rome or Venice, which at best might each muster a tenth of such numbers.

Now there were only months left before the Ottomans closed in on Constantinople. The Emperor Constantine had at best eight thousand soldiers to defend it against Sultan Mehmet II’s besieging army of more than sixty thousand, backed by many more miscellaneous supporters.47 To call it a struggle of Muslims against Christians would ignore the fact that the majority of those fighting for the Sultan were Christian mercenaries. The ancient walls were not breached. The crucial Ottoman breakthrough into the city was only possible because the Byzantines’ Genoese general, Giovanni Giustiniani, badly wounded in fighting outside the city wall, insisted that one gate should be unlocked to let him back into the city and down to his ship. When an entrance had thus fatally been offered, the Ottoman forces poured in after his retreating party. The Emperor by contrast fought on until he was cut down – exactly how or where is uncertain, but the Ottomans made sure that they secured his corpse.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, a self-taught peasant leader, Kondratii Selivanov, founded a sect devoted to eliminating sexual lust from the human race. He based his teachings on a creative misunderstanding of particular proof texts in his Russian Bible, reading Oskopitel’ (castrator) for Iskupitel’ (Redeemer) when the New Testament speaks of Jesus, and reading God’s command to the Israelites as plotites’ (castrate yourselves) rather than plodites’ (be fruitful). As a result, his followers, the Skoptsy (‘castrated ones’), cut off their genitals or women their breasts to achieve purity.

Once the plague had begun retreating in intensity, there was a widespread impulse to build chapels and votive shrines on the part of survivors wanting to express their gratitude (and perhaps guilt) for their survival, but while plague still raged, there was an equally powerful impulse to seek someone to blame for God’s anger: either oneself, collective sin in society or some external scapegoat. All three thoughts united in a renewed and much grimmer version of the flagellant movement which had begun in Italy in 1260 (see p. 400) but now found widespread expression in northern Europe.3 There was no trace of the earlier flagellants’ emphasis on peace-making. On the contrary, outbreaks of flagellant activity became associated with quite exceptional anti-Semitic violence, which included the torturing and burning alive of Jews in groups. This was justified by accusations that Jews had poisoned wells and food supplies: the torture supplied the necessary confessions. In the Rhineland and in some other central European regions, Jewish communities were effectively wiped out; overall this was ‘the most severe persecution of Jews before the twentieth century’.

Yet renewed outbreaks of plague repeatedly broke through the Church’s supervision, bringing renewed panic, renewed flouting of Pope Clement’s prohibition on flagellant public processions and renewed troubles for the Jews.

One of the earliest, Henry III’s effort to start a Holy Blood cult in Westminster Abbey in the mid-thirteenth century, to rival King Louis IX’s sensational acquisition of the Crown of Thorns in Paris (see p. 475), never aroused popular enthusiasm and rapidly faded away; it had appeared prematurely.7 By contrast, after the Black Death, blood cults gathered momentum, and like so much else in Passion devotion they acquired an anti-Semitic edge, because they were often associated with stories that Jews had attacked wafers of eucharistic bread. So the anti-Semitism which had been such a feature of Western Christianity since the era of the early Crusades continued to intensify.

The significance of this contrast is that the Purgatory-centred faith of the north encouraged an attitude to salvation in which the sinner, lay or clerical, piled up reparations for sin; action was added to action in order to merit years off Purgatory. It was possible to do something about one’s salvation: that was precisely the doctrine which Martin Luther was to make his particular target after 1517. So the difference between attitudes to salvation in northern and southern Europe may explain why Luther’s first attack on some of the more outrageous outcrops of the soul-prayer industry had so much more effect in the north than in the south. He was telling northern Europeans that some of the devotions which most deeply satisfied them, and convinced them that they were investing in an easier passage to salvation, were nothing but clerical confidence tricks. This message was of much less interest or resonance in the Mediterranean lands, which had not paid so much attention to the Purgatory industry.