'With the near approach of the year one thousand,' Charles Williams wrote in The Descent of the Dove, 'Christendom everywhere expected the end. It did not come. The first millennium . . . closed and the second opened with no greater terror than the ordinary robberies, murders, rapes, burnings, wars, massacres and plagues, and the even less noticeable agonies of each man's ordinary life.'
In the year 1000, an important part of ordinary life in Europe was the Christian church. With the 'conversion' of Constantine in the early 4th century, the persecuted church had become the tolerated church and then, before long, the official religion of the Roman Empire. The invasions of the 'barbarians' from the north and east introduced chaos in the empire but extended Christianity through the conversion of the European tribes, and the 'centre' of the church shifted for the third time - from the Jewish Christian world of the eastern Mediterranean, to the Greco-Roman world of Rome, to the converted tribes of northern and central Europe.
Not only had the Christian church spread widely by the year 1000 but it had also divided. Several smaller churches, usually designated as 'Nestorian' and 'Monophysite', had developed in the aftermath of the christological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries; these maintained adherents in Asia and Africa. A much larger division, soon after the beginning of the new millennium (1054), was the culmination of centuries of tensions and produced the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
