Christianity arrived in Europe from what is now the Middle East. Following his conversion outside Damascus Paul the Apostle, born in Tarsus near the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey, turned a small apocalyptic Jewish sect, founded in Palestine, into a new religion with a universal address.
Two letters by Paul, both probably written in Ephesus, also on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Turkey, are often taken to be significant moments in the development of the new religion. In his Epistle to the Galatians Paul insisted that: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free man, there is neither male nor female”. In the first Epistle to the Corinthians, he declared that: “Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing.”
Christianity quickly spread through the Roman Empire, and beyond to Ethiopia, Persia and India. It sustained Paul’s universal address – anybody could convert and be reborn as a Christian – but assumed that only its followers had obtained the full humanity offered by divine revelation. It was particularly attractive to oppressed groups in the Roman Empire, including slaves. The first state to adopt the new religion was the Kingdom of Armenia in 301. In 313, Constantine, the Roman Emperor, issued an edict in Milan that granted religious freedom to Christians. In 380, Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. It’s greatest intellectual was Augustine of Hippo, a convert from what is now Souk Ahras in Algeria. Much of Europe was still pagan, and would remain so for centuries, particularly towards the North and the East.
Augustine took the view that slavery was both inevitable and consequent to sin. The Christian Church did not oppose slavery but from 538 it began to insist that Jews and pagans be prevented from owning Christian slaves. Pope Gregory I, who held the Papacy from 590 to 604, took an obsessive interest in preventing Jews from owning Christian slaves.
Another new religion with a universal address, Islam, rushed out of Arabia in the seventh century. Its armies quickly defeated the Persian Empire and parts of Byzantium, the last remnant of the Roman Empire. Spain was invaded in 771. The advance into Europe was stopped near Tours, in modern France, in 732. Kwame Appiah writes that a Latin account of the battle, written in Spain in 754, marks the first use of the term Europe – previously a solely geographic signifier – to refer to a people.
The roots of the emergence of Europe as a political project on an international stage are often traced back to 27 November 1095. This is when Pope Urban II gave the speech, in the French city of Claremont, that authorised the First Crusade. The soldiers who would soon leave for Constantinople, and then continue on to Jerusalem, were offered divine forgiveness in advance for the sins to be committed against the enemy in the East. The Pope also issued a bull that introduced the idea of Terra Nullius (Empty Land). It meant that lands held by people who were not Christian could be expropriated. The profession of faith had become a universal vector of exclusion from the count of the fully human.
In 1096, the fervour aroused by the Crusade resulted in pogroms against Jews in parts of what are now France and Germany. Muslims and Jews were later massacred in Jerusalem when the city fell to the Crusaders in 1099. The Crusades to the East continued for almost two hundred years. There were also military campaigns against pagans, followed by forced conversions, in the North and East of Europe. The Fourth Crusade ended in the sacking of Constantinople in 1204. Most of its great library was destroyed but a few manuscripts – including philosophy from Ancient Greece – were returned to Europe. Along with manuscripts attained from Muslim scholars in Spain and Sicily, and translated from Arabic, they became the foundation of the secular intellectual resources that would be central to the development of the first universities in Italy, France and England, and the European Renaissance that began in the 14th Century.
