CHAPTER 12: Twelfth Century
The Humiliati, Henrician, Waldensian Christian sects appear.
Militant monastic orders are established in the Holy Land.
Peter Abelard is one of the first scholars to explore Christianity from a rational perspective.
The first European universities are founded.
The Investiture Controversy seeks to establish who has the authority to appoint bishops.
Magnificent Gothic cathedrals begin to be constructed in Europe.
The Second Crusade to the Holy Land is conducted.
The Cathars continue to be exterminated on the orders of the popes.
Eastern Germany and Western Poland are Christianized by the Wendish Crusade.
The Swedish Crusades are conducted against Finland.
Saints and pilgrimages to the saints’ shrines become more important in Western Europe.
After being invented by the Chinese, and adapted by Muslims, paper-making is introduced to Europe.
The concept of a purgatory is further refined.
Archbishop Thomas Becket is assassinated in Canterbury, England.
The Chivalric Code is introduced.
Bishops are being instructed to investigate the faith of their congregants.
The truce in the Holy Land is broken and warfare returns., resulting in the fall of Jerusalem and another crusade.
The Mongols creep closer to Christian territory.
Forgeries continue to be exposed in the Church.
CHAPTER 13: Thirteenth Century
The Latin crusades begin to target Eastern Orthodox Christians.
The Fourth Crusade conquers the Christian capital of Constantinople.
The Dominicans, Franciscans, Apostolic Brethren, and Free Spirits Christian sects appear.
The Albigensian Crusade finishes the Cathars.
Waldensians, considered heretics, are burned at the stake.
The Magna Carta is agreed upon in England.
The teaching of Aristotle begin to reemerge in Europe to the displeasure of the Church.
Inquisitions are established by the Church in Europe.
More crusades to the Holy Land, and one against the Christian Stedingers.
The Bible is forbidden to be read in any language other than Latin.
Hebrew scriptures are burned in France.
Ritual murder becomes a common reason to persecute Jews.
The Latin empire ends with the Greeks retaking Constantinople.
Thomas Aquinas continues to reintroduce scholasticism to Europe.
Witch hysteria is on the rise in Europe.
The Latin crusaders are driven off the Middle Eastern mainland.
Christian Coptics in Egypt face intense persecution by the Muslim rulers.
The pope tries to form an alliance with the Mongols against the Muslims.
A controversy arises in the Catholic Church about whether saints can be dismembered to collect relics.
CHAPTER 14: Fourteenth Century
Muslims are driven out of southern Italy.
The Ottoman Turks take over most of Asia Minor.
The Knights Templar are persecuted in France.
The Beguines, Beghards, Lollards, Fraticelli, Flagellants Christian sects appear.
The Roman Inquisition begins to persecute witches and sorcerers.
Dante’s The Divine Comedy paints a vivid picture of the inferno of Hell.
Jews are blamed for the great plague that engulfed Europe.
The Shroud of Turin first appears.
The Nestorians are severely persecuted by the Ming dynasty of China.
John Wycliffe seeks a reformation of the Church and translates the Bible into English.
Lithuania becomes the last country In Europe to be Christianized, converting rather than being invaded.
Mongolian warlord Timur rampages through Asia and ends Nestorianism wherever he goes.
CHAPTER 15: Fifteenth Century
Europe, for the first time, becomes the center of world Christianity.
Jan Hus becomes an important reformist in Bohemia, resulting in the Hussite Crusades.
Catherine of Siena becomes a folk hero in Italy.
Classical Greek writing is translated into Latin and fuels the Italian Renaissance.
The Russian Orthodox Church becomes independent of the Greek Orthodox Church.
Gutenberg invents the printing press which leads to increased literacy and scholasticism in Europe.
The Ottoman Turks conquer Constantinople and attack the Balkans and Italy.
The Portuguese begin to find alternate trade routes to the Far East.
The Spanish Inquisition is established and Jews and Muslims are driven off the Iberian Peninsula.
Columbus finds what he thinks is a shorter route to Asia by sailing west.
The Portuguese reach India by sailing around Africa.
English explorers reach North America.
CHAPTER 16: Sixteenth Century
The Protestant Reformation occurs in Germany and Switzerland and spreads through Europe.
The Spanish began to export Africans for use as slaves.
Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ferdinand Magellan, John Tyndale, Ulrich Zwingli, Andreas Vesalius, Michael Servetus, Teresa of Avila, Aloysius Gonzaga, and Johannes Kepler are introduced.
The Spanish subjugate the inhabitants of the West Indies, Mexico, and South America.
Following the arrival of the Portuguese, Christians in India become more disunited.
Luther at first sympathizes with the Jews, then later vilifies them.
The Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Capuchins, Barnabites, Jesuits, Mennonites, and Huguenot Christian sects appear.
Colonies are established in the land that will become the United States.
Henry VIII splits the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church.
Copernicus presents the concept of heliocentricity, clashing with established biblical interpretations of the universe.
The Council of Trent initiates the Catholic Counter-Reformation to take back control of Protestant Europe.
What remains of the Nestorian Church suffers a schism.
Bloody Mary returns England to Catholicism, then Elizabeth returns it to Anglicanism.
The devotion to the rosary is established.
The Holy League stops the Ottoman westward advance in the Mediterranean.
The Roman catacombs are rediscovered and explored.
As part of the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits go out to evangelize the world.
CHAPTER 17: Seventeenth Century
Jacobus Arminius, Francis Bacon, Vincent de Paul, Roger Williams, James Ussher, Rene Descartes, Jacques Marquette, Thomas Hobbes, George Fox, Blaise Pascal, Oliver Cromwell, John Milton, Benedict de Spinoza, John Bunyon, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, William Penn, Isaac Newton, and John Locke are introduced.
The Separatist, Dutch Reformed, Puritan, Presbyterian, Quakers, Malankara Orthodox, Syro-Malabar, and Trappist Christian sects appear.
Galileo invents the telescope, confirms Copernicus’s theory, and suffers retribution from the Church.
The Thirty Years War is fought, ending Protestantism in Bohemia and destroying vast swaths of Germany and other countries.
Permanent colonies are established along the east coast of what will become the United States.
The new Saint Peter’s Basilica is completed in Rome.
The Oberammergau Passion Play is first staged in Germany.
The English Civil War is fought, resulting in a Puritan government.
At Vienna, the Ottoman Turks are convincingly defeated by Christian forces.
Freethinkers of Europe decide to live by reason, not dogma, and introduce the Enlightenment.
CHAPTER 18: Eighteenth Century
Edmund Halley, John Wesley, Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, George Frederic Handel, Junipero Serra, Denis Diderot, Johann Sebastian Bach, David Hume, Benjamin Franklin, Carl Linnaeus, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, James Watt, Baron d’Holbach, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Immanuel Kant, Noah Webster, Edward Gibbon, William Carey, John Adams, and Napoleon Bonaparte are introduced.
European Jews begin to see emigration to Palestine as inevitable.
Baptist, Moravian, Ursuline, Evangelical, Shaker, Deist, Universalist, and Unitarian Christian sects appear.
English colonists in American enslave indigenous people and increasingly import African slaves.
The First Great Awakening occurs in the English colonies as a reaction to the Enlightenment.
The pacifist Quakers become one of the first Abolitionist groups.
The number of Christian charitable organizations is on the rise.
The historical critical study of the Bible begins to be popular.
American colonists win their freedom from English rule and develop a government that seeks to allow religious freedom.
The French Revolution creates a secular government, but the outcome is much worse that of the American Revolution.
Jesuits begin to be established colleges across the United States.
Following the American Revolution, settlers advance further into Native American territory and claim what they believe is their right to the land.
Russian missionaries take Christianity to Alaska.
The French find the Rosetta Stone in Egypt, eventually leading to the discovery of ancient Egyptian influences on Judaism and Christianity.