The Church in the Dark Ages is a magnificent history of the Catholic Church in the period from 350 to 1050. These are the centuries which saw the end of the Roman Empire in the West; the eruption of the Barbarians; the conversion to Catholicism of the Germanic peoples; the golden age of Byzantium and the growing rift between it and Rome; the Moslem attack on Christendom and the Islamic conquest of the Holy Places, and Charlemagne's attempt to re-create the Western Empire in a Christian form. We see the faith surviving the despair of defeat in the East, uncorrupted by the glamor of victory in the West, and untarnished by the moral squalor of the barbarized Europe to which, by the end of the period covered, its axis has largely shifted.
This superbly written history presents six centuries of the Catholic world in its entirety-the rise and fall of churches, empires and dynasties, the impact of the faith on the humble mass of its adherents, its influence upon learning, the arts, and the economics of the civilization it had preserved for the world.