Rome's legacy both spiritual and administrative would be retained by Justinian and his successors in Constantinople, now new hub of Eastern Holy Roman Empire with the Haghia Sophia as its spiritual jewel.
The emergence, in the seventh century, of Islamic faith in Arabia and its virulent dissemination as rival religion and cultural way of life, both ideologically and militarily opposed to Christian values, would curtail Constantinople's imperial ambitions in Africa and Near Asia. Islam's proselytic armies, all filled with new spiritual zeal, would conquer all of Mediterranean Africa and implant itself on European continent in Spain and Portugal, creating in the process a brilliant civilization of architectural excellence, of the arts and letters, of science and learning, at Cordoba and Seville.
The Moslem Empire of Umayyad Caliphate based first at Damascus, then under rival dynasty of Abbasids transferred to Baghdad, making it the seat of world learning during the period of the Dark Ages in Europe, spreading their new Abrahamic religion all the way to India on the Asian continent; in all of the regions conquered by Alexander the Great.
While the Greek Byzantine Empire established its unrivaled presence in Europe, the Roman church of Latin christian faith desperately searched for a king to uphold their religion in Western Europe. They found their temporal savior in Clovis, king of the Franks; a romanized tribe of Teutons now occupying northern Gaul. The alliance between the Frankish nation and the latin church of Rome would seal the revival of western Europe through the dark ages, as the Franks conquered over three centuries all of France, Germany and Italy, bequeathing to the Latin church its Episcopal domains that would enrich its fortunes and prestige, thus legitimize the dissemination of the Christian faith all across the continent. Charles Martel, the founder of the Carolingian dynasty would stop the Moslem incursion in Europe from Spain at the battle of Poitiers.
Its greatest king, Charlemagne would reunite Europe under his reign, ostensibly resuscitating the Roman Empire, being crowned its first Holy Roman Emperor in 800 AD by Pope Leo III.
His coronation signified to the world the return of Imperial power in west; the alliance between the two swords of the new Feudal Age; where the temporal lord shared power and money with the spiritual head, the latin Church, to govern the new Empire. All based on verbal allegiance of feudal clans to both King and Church. Kaiseridée was reborn in Western Civilization in a hierarchal, vertical construct, where written law was limited to religious matters in the form of Canon law.
It would be the root of subsequent contention; as the successors to Charlemagne, the Hohenstaufen dynasty that ruled Germany and parts of Italy after the separation of Carolingian Empire at the Treaty of Verdun splitting it into three kingdoms : France, Lotharingia, and Germany, would oppose the Holy Roman Emperor to Pope Gregory VII, author of the Gregorian reforms of the Latin church that would encroach on the Emperor's rights to appoint bishops. The Investiture quarrel would tear asunder the entente of the two symbolic swords of feudal power and plunge the Christian faith into a period of civil war, during most of the Middle Ages.
The Pope's intransigence in favor of a christian theocracy in the West would be epitomized by his treatise Dictatus Papae, a refutation of temporal powers and an affirmation of Papal superiority in christian lands. Written by the monk Hildebrand, later elected Pope Gregory VII, his subsequent humiliating treatment of Emperor Henry IV marked the ages. Obliged to kneel in penitence at feet of Pope, to ask for pardon and not suffer the irredeemable ostracism of Excommunication and eternal damnation falling on his soul, the Emperor would create a precedent and would encourage the latin church to preach the call of virulent christianity to fight the incursions of the Moslem Infidel in Holy land. 'God wills it' chanted by the people at Clermont Ferrand in France. It would start a bloody confrontation of clash of civilization between Christianity and Islam that would mark the Feudal age with its mark of intolerance.
As the Latin church of Rome grew in power with the successful capture of Jerusalem by the First Crusade, the Orthodox church of Byzantium Empire faded in its wake. The two Christian churches had split apart during the religious quarrel of the Schism. In the context of the Crusader invasion the two Empires were now openly in political contention; for the wealth of Orient represented by the silk and spice routes, for the control of territory in Mediterranean region, notably Apulia and Sicily, bordering the Episcopal states. The Franco-Norman conquest of these regions would further exacerbate this imperial rivalry.
The Crusades would mark the decline of feudal power and the emergence of commercial power in Europe. The birth of commercial capitalism.
The iconic moment of that age was the confrontation between Abelard, the scholastic, and Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, dogmatic ideologue of the Christian faith. As a self taught philosopher Abelard spent his life trying to reconcile Reason with Faith, using his brilliant knowledge of dialectics to reason in his search for truth. His reputation made him the most prominent philosopher of that age in Paris, fast becoming the capital of Christian canonic teaching.
Having found that religious dogma in the Canon imposed a suffocating hold on man's ability to sincerely search for truth, he declaimed that "to believe Man has first to understand the logic of the Church's teachings". This was in direct contradiction of Christianity's basic tenets of blind faith as taught by Saint Augustine of Hippo; as did all successive Popes as the proselytic zealots like Bernard of Clairvaux, initiator of the Templar Order statutes, author of a brilliant justification of Templar intransigence as 'soldier-monks' in his treatise "de laude Novae Militiae" as cleansers of the Infidel in a Just War in Holy Land. All affirmations that were abhorrence to Abelard as they transgressed the teaching of the Evangelists, who promoted the peaceful dissemination of the religion of Love.
Abelard, a nominalist philosopher, went as far as to suggest that the Pope's word did not reflect God's will as the Pope was but simple man and not incarnation of Jesus. Bernard of Clairvaux had Abelard declared a heretic at the Council of Sens in 1140, seeking the support of Pope Innocent II to achieve his inquisitorial mission; whereas Abelard had come in good faith to debate issues of theology with this iconic founder of the Cistercian Order.
This corruption of debate into zealous diatribe marked the intransigent mind set of the Church henceforth in Christian lands, that would lead to the tragedy of what ensued in the Inquisitorial period.
A similar trend was perceivable in the other Abrahamic religion of the age; in Islam, where its most brilliant scholars, Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroes (Ibn Rushd), tried to reconcile science and philosophy with the teachings of the Quran. Vain task, as shown by the evolution of Islamic culture over the Medieval period.
The irrepressible urge for freedom and culture of the Italian people would express itself during the Christian age, after the crumbling of Rome's Empire, around the Papal seat of Latin Church in Rome that fueled its social network with spiritual values. Frustrated by the Imperial will of foreign kings its own nascent regional political will centered in its mercantile city Republics; these latter would create an entrepreneurial culture and tradition rarely matched, around the city republics of Venice, Florence and Genoa, in the face of both Moorish maritime and Imperial landed encroachments.
It would create modern commercial capitalism in the West organised around the monetary system of Venice which gave birth birth to the Renaissance culture as did Florence with its pre-industrial artisanal wealth in Tuscan region in conjunction with Sienna and Pisa, rival sister cities, icons of that age.
Where western civilization was reborn after a relative decline of a thousand years that had benefitted Byzantine Constantinople and subsequently Arab Damascus, Baghdad, Cordoba, Granada and Cairo.
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