The Shortest History of Europe

by John Hirst

The Romans were better than the Greeks at fighting. They were better than the

Greeks at law,

They were better than the Greeks at...

The Greeks did geometry

as a guide to the fundamental nature of the universe.

That underneath all this variety there must be something simple, regular, logical which explains it all.

Something like geometry.

The Jews came to believe that there was only one god.

The foundation of the law was the Ten Commandments,

Christians retained the Ten Commandments and they remained the central moral teaching in the West until recent times.

The Greek view was that the world is simple, logical and mathematical. The Christian view was that the world is evil, and Christ alone saves. The German warriors’ view was that fighting is fun. It

This is the third link: the church preserves Greek and Roman learning.

Not everything is the king’s was the foundation of European thinking about government.

This is our last link: German warriors support Christianity.

The Greeks were superior to the Romans in nearly all branches of learning, but not in law.

which should be used to refine the laws of any particular society and which no society committed to justice should flout.

‘The Glorious Revolution’.

The pope, who survived in Rome, also acknowledged the eastern emperor and in the pontiff’s eyes, despite all the barbarian invasions and the collapse of the empire in the west, the key parts of the old order were still intact.

There was a pope in Rome and there was an emperor, a Christian Roman emperor, who now resided in Constantinople.

The danger to the pope came from the Lombards, who were a second wave of German invaders in the eighth century.

Charlemagne, though poorly educated himself, encouraged education and became the patron of learned men, who were ordered to find and copy the ancient manuscripts. Nearly all the Latin works that have survived were copied in Charlemagne’s time.

Without him the classical inheritance would have been very slim.

The German

kings were the only kings

who were elected. The practice of the Germans before they came into the Roman Empire was to run a mixed syst...

was a royal family whose male members would be the candid...

Patricia Crone, whose ideas have shaped so

The program was much more National than Socialist. Hitler wanted an end to party division,