The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died

by Philip Jenkins

The continuing strength of Christianity in Asia is obvious if we look at the distribution of the world’s believers around the year 1000, roughly at the halfway point in the story of the faith. Still, at that point, Asia had 17 to 20 million Christians, with a further 5 million in Africa. The European continent as a whole had some 40 million people, including Russia. Of those Europeans, at least a quarter either were still pagan or else lived in countries that had only very recently undergone formal conversion. That overall total would also include the Muslim inhabitants of Spain and Sicily, perhaps 4 or 5 million, in addition to European Jews. By this point, a reasonable estimate would suggest that Europe had some 25 to 30 million Christians, many whose faith was very notional indeed