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

Timothy would probably have felt little hope for the future of Christianity in western Europe. Already in Timothy’s last days, Charlemagne’s vaunted empire was fragmenting, and falling prey to the combined assaults of pagan Northmen and Muslim Saracens. In the century after 790, ruin and massacre overtook virtually all the British and Irish monasteries that had kept learning alive over the previous two centuries, and from which missionaries had gone out to evangelize northern Europe. Spain was already under Muslim rule, and southern Italy and southern France seemed set to follow. In 846, Saracens raided papal Rome, plundering the Basilica of Saint Peter and the tomb of the Fisherman.