Eighth Century Church Chronology

R. Grant Jones has compiled a church chronology of 20 centuries. It's an enormous amount of work - I've cribbed here just the references to Gaul and a few others pertinent to the Face of the Goddess series:

701+ The Roman liturgy was imposed on the Western church through this century. The process was nearly complete by the death of Charlemagne.

702 King Egica of Spain encouraged the free population to search for runaway slaves. See 694 above.

707 The Saracens conquered North Africa.

711 Spain fell to the Saracens. According to some, the victory of the Saracens in Spain was also victory for the Roman underclass, being freed thereby from their Gothic overlords. Nevertheless, some 30,000 Christians were sent to Damascus as slaves as booty for the caliph.

717 The Saracens besieged Constantinople. Leo III (717-741) became emperor. In an act which can only be termed ironic given subsequent events, Leo had the icon Hodogetria (She who shows the Way) carried in procession around the city walls. Subsequently, Leo defeated the Saracen fleet. In 718, Leo again defeated their fleet, even though it had been reinforced. A Bulgar army attacked the Saracens, killing 22,000, and the latter retreated to Cilicia.

721 Saracens invaded Aquitane but were routed by Duke Eudo at Toulouse.

722 Final persecution of the Montanists.

722 Gregory II commissioned Boniface to preach the gospel east of the Rhine. Under the protection of Charles Martel (mayor of the palace from 714-41), he concentrated his activities in Thuringia and Hesse.

723 Boniface cut down the sacred oak at Geismar in what is now Hesse, Germany. He used its wood to build a chapel.

732 Battle of Tours (Battle of Poitiers). Franks under Charles Martel turned back the Saracens. Eudes (Odo), duke of Aquitaine, had rebelled against Frankish rule and had called the Saracens to come to his aid. He then turned to Charles Martel for aid against the Saracens. [Thus, some consider the Arab invasion to have been in support of a Gallo-Roman revolution against their Frankish overlords. At the battle of Provence in 739, in this view, the revolution was finally crushed.]

747 A Frankish synod prohibited clergy from carrying weapons or wearing ostentatious clothing. A synod held in Germany under Boniface (perhaps the same?) forbade clergy from hunting (see 517, 673), going about with dogs, and keeping hawks.

750-800 The onset of “the little optimum,” a period of relative warmth in Europe which lasted until the second half of the twelfth century (roughly 1150-1200). The mild weather may have been a cause for the population increase associated with this period.

751 (754?) Pepin III (751-68), Mayor of the Palace in France, turned to Rome for legal assistance in deposing the Merovingian king. He asked, “Is it wise to have kings who have no power of control?” The pope responded, “It is better to have a king able to govern. By apostolic authority, I bid that you be crowned king of the Franks.” St. Boniface anointed Pepin with oil, and crowned him king of the Franks. At this time, Zacharias (741-52) was bishop of Rome.

753 Pope Stephen II (752-7) turned to Pepin the Frank for support against Aistulf. Stephen had appealed to Constantinople, but was ignored.

754-75 Persecution of Christians by the caliph al-Mansur. He doubled the tribute due from Christians. The tax was extorted by torture.

754 (and again in 756) Pepin defeated Aistulf and turned the lands of the old exarchate of Ravenna over to Stephen (an action known as the Donation of Pepin). These became the States of the Church. The Franks, in following years, referred to these states as the Roman Empire, and the true Romans in the Empire ruled from Constantinople, they called Greeks.

The significance of this is that the bishop of Rome was transformed from a subject of the Eastern Roman emperor into an independent secular sovereign, not dependent on any other sovereign, with an independent territory and with possession of supreme state authority on this territory.

767 The Council of Gentily. The Emperor Constantine V “Copronymus” sent ambassadors to Pepin, King of the Franks. Pope Paul I (757-67) also sent representatives. The acts of the council are lost, but it appears that the veneration of images was discussed, and the Franks were persuaded that the iconophiles were in the right. One late source states that the filioque was also discussed. From this time, Constantine V made no new attempts to gain support for iconoclasm in the West.

774 The Lombard king Desiderius quarreled with Hadrian, bishop of Rome, over ownership of cities from the former exarchate of Ravenna. Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom, captured its capital (Pavia), and proclaimed himself king of the Franks and Lombards. By making himself king of the Lombards, Charlemagne contravened the Donation of Constantine. But the pope got his cities.

Charlemagne spent Easter in Rome, where Pope Hadrian greeted him with the honors formerly bestowed on the exarch. Hadrian asked Charlemagne to confirm the Donation of Pepin, and Charlemagne complied, recognizing Hadrian as ruler of two thirds of the Italian peninsula. (Charlemagne’s act is sometimes referred to as the Donation of Charlemagne.)

In the view of some, one of Charlemagne’s chief political aims was to prevent revolution from the non-Frankish indigenous population, who still considered themselves Romans and felt a loyalty to the Roman empire, still in existence and ruled from Constantinople. To break this bond, he began a campaign to paint the Romans as “Greeks” and heretics. Hence, his church’s condemnation of the 7th Ecumenical Council’s ruling on images (Frankfurt, 794) and its insistence on the filioque (Aachen, 809).

Charlemagne wished to impose uniformity over the church in his territories. Hadrian gave him a collection of canons (the Dionysio-Hadriana) for church government, and Roman liturgical books to use as a model in worship.

793 Muslim raiders from Spain burned down suburbs of Narbonne in France.

797 Irene had the eyes of her son, the Emperor Constantine VI, put out. He died from his injuries. From this point until she was deposed in 802, Irene was empress.

799 In April, the late Pope Hadrian’s nephew Paschalis led a crowd in an assault on Leo III, the new pope (795-816). They attempted to tear his tongue out and blind him, but he escaped.

Abrahamic similarities? Or not?

A conservative Norwegian blogger who calls himself Fjordman (or not! Since he's anonymous for all we know she's a radical Afghan) has a great essay at Global Politician about the differing sociopolitical circumstances attending the births of Christianity and Islam, and why Greek natural philosophy is a good fit for Christianity but not Islam.

According to Islamic sources, Muhammad and his followers pillaged their neighbors and killed some of their critics. Jesus and his apostles never did anything like this. While Islam became a major world religion because Muhammad and his successors conquered a vast empire by force, Christianity became a world religion by slowly conquering an already established empire, the Roman Empire, from within. It would no doubt have appeared laughable to the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate had somebody told him when he ordered the execution of Jesus of Nazareth that this man’s followers would control the Roman Empire about three centuries later, yet that is exactly what happened. In many ways this constitutes an even more unlikely and fascinating event than the fact that the Arabs managed to conquer the Byzantine and Persian Empires after these had mutually exhausted each other through war.

That Christianity gradually formed within a Greco-Roman political and cultural context had a huge impact on its development. In some cases it was clearly an extension of Judaism; for instance the Christians adopted the entire Hebrew Bible as their own, including the Ten Commandments. While many Jewish ethical ideas with no Greco-Roman precedent were continued and spread though the vehicle of Christianity, either directly or in an altered form, Christians added some new ideas of their own and adopted others from their Greco-Roman environment. The Christian emphasis on pictorial arts and sculpture as a means of worship, for instance, clearly owed vastly more to the Greco-Roman than to the Jewish tradition.