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

if material success proved the truth of a religion, how would Christians cope when their kings suffered defeat after defeat, when their cities and churches were destroyed and plundered? As we will see, although Christians did their best to explain away these secular disasters, the constant sequence of catastrophes in the later Middle Ages proved devastating to hopes of Christian survival.