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i n t r o d u c t i o n Sometime around the year 49 ce, a Jewish tent maker and itinerant preacher, Paul of Tarsus, later known as Saint Paul, born in the first decade of the current era, paid a visit to Philippi in northern Greece. There he established the first Christian church on European soil. Paul had grown up in Tarsus, a largely Greekspeaking cultural center in present-day Turkey, near the Mediterranean Sea. As a youth he had studied in Jerusalem to become a rabbi and had joined the Pharisees , a Jewish sect. Before converting to Christianity near the age of thirty, he had actively persecuted the growing band of Christians, as they were beginning to call themselves, who probably numbered under a thousand at the time. After his conversion, he spent considerable time in Damascus and Antioch in Syria (now Antakya in Turkey), at first proselytizing fellow Jews but later expanding his ministry to include Gentiles. After arriving in Greece about 49, Paul established Christian congregations in a number of cities, including Thessalonica and Corinth, where he stayed for a year and a half. According to Christian tradition, he died a martyr in Rome at about age sixty. Despite suffering severe persecution at times, the Christians grew rapidly in number during the first three centuries after the death of Jesus. In 313 the Roman emperor Constantine (c. 272–337), who had embraced Christianity, issued an edict granting religious toleration throughout the empire. He also moved the capital of the empire from Rome to the Greek colony of Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus, separating Europe and Asia. He renamed it Constantinople. By the fifth century, Christianity comprised five ecclesiastical jurisdictions, or patriarchates, centered in Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—with Rome claiming primacy. Already tension was growing between Latin Rome in the West and Greek Constantinople in the East. Within a century or two, the pope in Rome and the patriarch of Constantinople were scarcely talking to each other (and, in the mid-eleventh century, excommunicated each viii Introduction other). By the time Roman Catholic crusaders attacked their eastern brethren in 1204 and sacked Constantinople, the rupture was beyond repair. Although the patriarch of Constantinople served as the titular head of the Eastern Orthodox Church, he did not acquire the power of the pope. Indeed, the emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire succeeded in controlling the patriarchate and in nominating the patriarch of their choice. The patriarch was officially elected by the ecclesiastical council, but the election had to be approved by the emperor, who in fact imposed his candidate. The emperors chaired the councils and succeeded in imposing their views on major issues, such as the presence of icons in the churches or a possible union with the Western Catholic Church. The Eastern Church was built on a hierarchical model. The patriarch controlled the metropolites, who controlled the bishops, who controlled the priests. Even the nomination of a metropolite had to be approved by the emperor. The monasteries elected their local leader, the hēgoumenos, but he remained under the control of the local metropolite. As Christianity grew in the Greek-speaking world, science (or, more properly , philosophy) was in decline. For nearly a millennium, beginning with the early sixth century bce, the Greeks, sometimes drawing inspiration from the Egyptians and Mesopotamians, had dominated the world of science. Following Pythagoran ideas of a world based on numbers and harmony, Plato formulated the idea that, as the most symmetrical body is the sphere, the cosmos must have a spherical shape and that the celestial movements must be circular and uniform. Soon after, Aristotle taught a coherent system that explained the phenomena in the heavens and on the earth as well as life forms. But even if his system aimed to explain everything, it did not become a dogma as it would later in the Middle Ages, and many other philosophical schools flourished. Epicurus (unlike Aristotle ) believed in the existence of the void, Aristarchus of Samos proposed a system where the sun is the center of the world, and the Stoics believed that the universe conflagrates and is reborn eternally. By the third century bce, the center of Greek scientific activity had shifted from Athens to Alexandria, Egypt, where an important mathematical and astronomical school flourished in affiliation with its Museum, which was a school plus a library, founded by the Greek dynasty of Ptolemy. Two great Alexandrian scholars, Euclid and Ptolemy...

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