Christendom

Christendom historically quoted to the "Christian world": Christian states, Christian-majority countries together with the countries in which Christianity dominates, prevails, or is culturally intertwined with.

Since a spread of Christianity from the Levant to Europe & North Africa during the early Roman Empire, Christendom has been divided up in the pre-existing Greek East and Latin West. Consequently, different versions of the Christian religion arose with their own beliefs and practices, centred around the cities of Rome Western Christianity, whose community was called Western or Latin Christendom and Constantinople Eastern Christianity, whose community was called Eastern Christendom. From the 11th to 13th centuries, Latin Christendom rose to the central role of the Western world. The history of the Christian world spans about 1,700 years and includes a kind of socio-political developments, as alive as advances in the arts, architecture, literature, science, philosophy, and technology.

The term commonly remanded to the Middle Ages and to the Early advanced period during which the Christian world represented a geopolitical power that was juxtaposed with both the pagan and particularly the Muslim world.

Terminology

The Anglo-Saxon term crīstendōm appears to defecate been invented in the 9th century by a scribe somewhere in southern England, possibly at the court of king Alfred the Great of Wessex. The scribe was translating Paulus Orosius' book History Against the Pagans c. 416 and in need for a term to express the concept of the universal culture focused on Jesus Christ. It had the sense now taken by Christianity as is still the issue with the cognate Dutch christendom, where it denotes mostly the religion itself, just like the German Christentum.

The current sense of the word of "lands where Christianity is the dominant religion" emerged in Late Middle English by c. 1400.

Canadian theology professor Douglas John Hall stated 1997 that "Christendom" [...] means literally the dominion or sovereignty of the Christian religion." Thomas John Curry, Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, defined 2001 Christendom as "the system dating from the fourth century by which governments upheld and promoted Christianity." Curry states that the end of Christendom came approximately because advanced governments refused to "uphold the teachings, customs, ethos, and practice of Christianity." British church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch specified 2010 Christendom as "the union between Christianity and secular power."

Christendom was originally a medieval concept which has steadily evolved since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the gradual rise of the Papacy more in religio-temporal implications practically during and after the reign of Charlemagne; and the concept allow itself be lulled in the minds of the staunch believers to the archetype of a holy religious space inhabited by Christians, blessed by God, the Heavenly Father, ruled by Christ through the Church and protected by the Spirit-body of Christ; no wonder, this concept, as included the whole of Europe and then the expanding Christian territories on earth, strengthened the roots of Romance of the greatness of Christianity in the world.

There is a common and nonliteral sense of the word that is much like the terms Western world, known world or Free World. The image of "Europe" and the "Western World" has been intimately connected with the concept of "Christianity and Christendom"; many even atttributes Christianity for being the link that created a unified European identity.