germanic consolidation under catholicism

At the same time as Pagan Germanic conquerors were making a deal with the Roman Church following the fall of the Roman Empire, a new religion was emerging in the east that would act to consolidate Germanic power in Europe.

Preached by Mohammed - incorporating features of Christianity and other religions - Islam was an attractive unifying religion that took advantage of bitter theological arguments and power struggles between the eastern and western Christian bishops to sweep through the Middle East and reclaim most of the territory ruled by the Christians of the old Eastern Roman Empire.

Syria, Palestine and Persia converted to Islam in 637, Egypt in 641 and then Africa, penetrating to central Asia and the frontier of India and China. By 715 the Moslems had conquered Spain (ruled by the Germanic Visigoths), and the Christian nobles of Spain rapidly converted to Islam in order to retain their land, wealth and power in the same way that Pagan Roman nobles had rapidly converted to Christianity after the 390 policy of Emperor Theodosius.

All that remained of the eastern Roman empire of Heraclius was a wide area around Constantinople which was known as the Byzantium Empire

It was the Germanic Franks, led by Charles Martel, who stopped the Moslems at the Spanish border in 732 and gained southern Gaul for the Franks; and it was his grandson, Charlemagne, d. 814, who had bestowed upon him by Pope Leo III the ambiguous title of Holy Roman Emperor in 800 for saving the good pope's life.

Far more than the bishops, the Germanic Franks could see the remarkable parallels between the rise of Islam (and the fall of eastern Christianity) and the rise of Christianity (and the fall of Paganism). Charlemagne did not want western Christianity - and his kingdom - to suffer a similar fate, so he cracked down harder on his subject people than any Pagan Roman emperor ever did - brutally enforcing total obedience to Christianity (which, to him, encompassed his kingdom), burning all heretics and those who refused baptism.

The marauding Pagan Vikings, however, were more of a threat to Charlemagne and his descendants - and other European states - than the Moslem Arabs in terms of lost land.

The lower Loire and Seine were abandoned to the Vikings about the same time, 866, that the Vikings conquered York, Eastern Mercia and East Anglia in Britain, forcing the Germanic Saxon King Alfred to make a treaty in 900 creating a frontier between West Saxon territory and the Danelaw. In 879 the Vikings took Flanders, in 882 Cologne and Trier were taken, but Paris was saved by the Capetian, Odo, who, in 888, became first king of Francia unrelated to former rulers. In 911, the Frankish king Charles the Simple finally legitimized the authority of the Vikings by granting them the area around Rouen (the Duchy of Normandy), and they eventually settled down and became Christians.

While Spain thrived under the Moslems, seeing a flowering of culture and learning, the rest of Europe was thrown into the Gothic Dark Ages under oppressive Germanic Catholicism.

The argumentative Roman and Constantinople Christians finally parted company with a schism in 1054 - followed in 1096 by the 1st of 8 Crusades against the Moslems in the Holy Land - but despite Gregory VII's papal infallibility announcement in 1073 and Thomas Aquinas's (born 1225) announcement that faith and reason are compatible, doctrinal controversy and outright disbelief continued to plague the Roman Catholic Church. It took a brave Scot, John Duns Scotus (born 1270), to contradict Aquinas by holding that faith and reason are incompatible.

the germanic deal with rome

Italy's nearest land neighbors - the Germanic tribes - had always been troublesome, but once the seat of the empire's power moved to Constantinople the Persian Empire became a bigger threat and the Empire came to rely more and more on Germanic soldiers to fight its wars until the Germans, inevitably, had so much military power that they usurped the emperorship in the west for themselves and with successive migrations of Germanic tribes into Italy - and elsewhere in Europe - the ethnic mix of Rome changed to reflect the new Germanic arrivals.

By 390, Emperor Theodosius -- a Visigoth (Germanic) Spaniard who had converted to Christianity and was heavily influenced by the Bishop of Rome, Ambrose -- attempted a new policy of SOCIAL UNIFORMITY by imposing upon everyone the observance of Christian traditions that led to the persecution of the traditional Pagans (as well as other religions).

By 410, Rome itself was "sacked" (according to the Christians) or "delivered" (according to the Pagans) by King Alaric of the Germanic Goths. The Germanic tribes - the Angles and Saxons - had by then also taken over Roman Britain, almost obliterating the native Britons in the same way that the Greeks and Phoenicians (Syrians) had obliterated the native Latini in Italy.

By 491, with the death of the Roman Emperor Zeno in the East, there was no longer an Roman emperor in the west and the Pagan Germanic tribes had total control of western Europe.

The Germanic tribes were not Christians and their own religion -- although Pagan -- differed from that of the Romans. They did not worship Roman gods. What set them aside from the Romans was their ethnicity. The Germanic tribes were predominantly white skinned, blond-haired and blue-eyed like the Vikings -- from which they probably descended -- and the Romans were predominantly olive skinned, black-haired and brown-eyed like the Syrians and Greeks, from which they definitely descended.

At this point in time, western Europe might also have unshackled itself from other foreign eastern influences such as the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity, but the complete economic and social breakdown of the old western Roman Empire caused more and more Romans -- most of whom were by now Christian converts, and of Greek and Syrian ethnicity -- to turn to religion for salvation and successive bishops of Rome harnessed these fears so successfully that the Germanic conquerors were forced into making a deal.

In return for agreeing to the conversion of all Pagan lands in the west to Christianity, the Bishops of Rome would pacify the natives and give temporal control of them to the Germanic conquerors. The deal also included mutually beneficial ways in which the spiritual and temporal rulers would enrich each other.

There is no concrete evidence of this deal, but the rise of fabulously wealthy Germanic kingdoms ruled by divine right and Papal blessing -- and the emergence of the Holy Roman Empire -- shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire in the west attests to the fact that something very fishy happened in Rome.

How else could the proudly Pagan Germanic tribal leaders have agreed to the mass conversion of their people -- first by mild means such as incorporating Pagan traditions into Christian practices, but later by brutal means -- if there was not incredible wealth to be made from it? And how else could the Greek-Syrian Church of Rome -- sacked, impoverished and left in ruins -- have agreed to barbarian kings ruling the land if there was not incredible wealth to be made from it, too?

The more people tithing to the Church, the richer the Pope became. And, the more people scared out of their wits by the fear of Abraham's God, the easier they were to control and tax and the richer the Germanic kings became.

It was a clever deal, mutually beneficial to both the Pope in Rome and the Germanic leaders, and it persisted until recent times.