the birth of Spain as a nation-state, and as an incipient empire, gave shape to a new ideology of religious and racial unity – an ideal ultimately known by the name of ‘blood purity’ (limpieza de sangre), despite the absurdity of such a concept after centuries of intermarriage among Christians, Jews and Muslims.

His understanding of original sin was rather like that of the Greek fathers, in that he denied that it involved any inheritance of aboriginal guilt.

When at last the walls were breached, the Norman commander Tancred of Hauteville (d.1112) promised protection for the city’s inhabitants; but the crusader army disregarded his orders and – on entering the city – indiscriminately massacred Muslims, Jews and Arab Christians, not sparing women and children. The scale of the atrocity can scarcely be

Moreover, Civic Biology was a monstrously racist text, which ranked humanity in five categories of evolutionary development (with blacks at the bottom and whites at the top), advocated eugenic cleansing of the race, denounced intermarriage and the perpetuation of ‘degenerate’ stock and suggested ‘humane’ steps for the elimination of social

The idea of a ‘holy war’ is alien to Christian theological tradition. It is self-evidently incompatible with the recorded teachings of Christ, and would have been abhorrent to the mind of the ancient Church.

the Anabaptists were, by overwhelming majority, convinced pacifists. Typical of the movement was Menno Simonsz (1496–1561), the Dutch founder of the Mennonites.

The first true university in Western Europe, though, was probably that of Bologna in northern Italy, founded late in the 11th century. And the first major universities in the West were the late 12th-century universities of Paris and Oxford.

The great institutional renewal of the Roman Church, though, began when Pope Paul III (1468–1549) convoked the Council of Trent in 1545. This council continued (with occasional interruptions) under a number of popes until 1563. It instituted a massive reform and regularization of the Western liturgy, dealt systematically with a number of clerical

The generally invertebrate and even subservient response of many of the churches in Germany to the rise of the Nazis, however, was in part the result of centuries of European anti-Semitism, and in even larger part the result of cowardice.