The Birth of the West, Collins - B

                                               This is the story of how different  individuals and institutions came together a little over a thousand years ago to lay the foundation of the culture we now live in. 'Rome, Germany, France and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century' is the book's subtitle.  From a lawless dark age, there emerged stability and a well-ordered world, partially thanks to the conversion to Latin Christianity of Poland, Hungary, northern Germany and particularly the Vikings. Rome itself was emblematic of conditions in the west. While Byzantium grew and the Muslims spread their religion and knowledge around the Mediterranean, the city's population had dropped to 30,000 from over a million during the 1st century A.D. Rome was a perfect storm of failed governance involving the assassination and kidnapping of Popes and, in one instance, the exhumation of a Papal predecessor who had been dead for almost a year, dressing him up, and remonstrating against his performance. The center of the Christian world was a ghetto ruled over by local mobs. The Papal States were virtually defenseless and as late as 846, Saracens raided the eternal city.  A generation  later, the Vikings besieged a Paris of 3,000 inhabitants for eleven months.  In what had been Charlemagne's Empire, stretching from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the Elbe, there was now chaos, war and total dysfunction. His heirs kept further subdividing his empire, which itself had no particular geographic, linguistic or administrative coherence.  The deaths of the last Carolingians opened up opportunities for men of talent, and Otto I of the Saxons and Hugh Capet in France stepped to the fore.   Otto I was crowned Holy Roman Emperor after he had brought a modicum of peace and stability to the eastern lands of Charlemagne's former empire.  He also helped secure portions of southern Italy from the Byzantines when his son and successor, Otto II, married Theophano, the Emperor's niece.  The son's peaceful succession  established a pattern and set in place an Empire (neither Holy nor Roman according to Voltaire) that lasted over 800 years.  Otto III appointed Pope Sylvester II, a reformer who had a very positive effect on the Church. He abolished simony, nepotism, clerical marriage, encouraged monastic reform, established new monastic orders,  and reformed the episcopacy throughout the continent.  "We have now come full circle. We began with the parochialism of Rome and the Papal State. Now we have come to the beginning of the massive reform of the papacy that the German emperors from Otto I onward had called for and struggled to achieve for one hundred years.  That reform was to make the papacy the greatest power in Europe after a gargantuan struggle with the very empire that had initially reformed it.  What is important here is that by 1050 the chaos of the late ninth and early tenth centuries has been overcome and a new polity had emerged, the German Reich.  Europe had been born, but it still needed a reformed church and papacy.   And the reform of the papacy led, in turn, to a struggle to define the politics of the West and still influence our ideas on the separation of church and state."    I do not know enough about the era to know if the author makes his case.  But,this book is very well written and has a wealth of information about the era for those so inclined.