Pan-Christianity

Christendom by A.D. 600 after its spread to Africa and Europe from the Middle East. Ethiopia and the Indian Malabar Coast not pictured.
The Church of the East at its largest extent during the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages, efforts were made in order to establish a single Christian state of Pan-Christianity by uniting the countries within Christendom.[1][2] Christian nationalism may have played a role in this era in which Christians felt the impulse to recover lands in which Christianity flourished.[3] After the rise of Islam, certain parts of North Africa, East Asia, Southern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East lost Christian control.[4] In response, Christians across national borders mobilized militarily and a "wave of Christian reconquest achieved the recovery of Spain, Portugal, and southern Italy, but was unable to recover North Africa nor—from a Christian point of view, most painful of all—the Holy Land of Christendom."[4]

See also

References

  1. ^ Snyder, Louis L. (1990). Encyclopedia of Nationalism. St. James Press. p. 282. ISBN 978-1-55862-101-5. Major religions in the past, especially Christianity, have attempted to include all their adherents in a large union, but they have not been successful. Throughout most of the Middle Ages in Western Europe, attempts were made again and again to unite all the Christian world into a kind of Pan-Christianity, which would combine all Christians in a secular-religious state as a successor to the Roman Empire.
  2. ^ Snyder, Louis Leo (1984). Macro-nationalisms: A History of the Pan-movements. Greenwood Press. p. 129. ISBN 978-0-313-23191-9. Throughout the better part of the Middle Ages, elaborate attempts were made to create what was, in effect, a Pan-Christianity, an effort to unite "all" the Western Christian world into a successor state of the Roman Empire.
  3. ^ Parole de l'Orient, Volume 30. Université Saint-Esprit. 2005. p. 488.
  4. ^ a b Lewis, Bernard Ellis; Churchill, Buntzie Ellis (2008). Islam: The Religion and the People. Pearson Prentice Hall. p. 76. ISBN 978-0-13-271606-2.