Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book investigates how Christianity changed politics and how politics changed Christianity over the course of the early Middle Ages. Early Christians in the pagan Roman Empire developed a ‘secular’ understanding of politics, where the religious identity of their ruler was irrelevant; by the time the synthesis of early medieval Christianity was achieved in the ninth-century Carolingian Empire, however, a new model of ‘Christian kingship’ had emerged, suggesting that sinners and non-Christians could not be legitimate rulers. The book traces the slow, complex, and only ever partial way in which the concept of ‘Christian kingship’ arose in the Latin West over the five centuries up to 840. It takes a comparative approach that is sensitive to regional variation, the interconnected nature of the post-imperial Latin West, and the continuous influence of the Eastern Roman Empire based in Constantinople, while also drawing on recent work in anthropology and the global history of sacred kingship. R.A. Markus influentially suggested that the early Middle Ages was a period of ‘de-secularization’, and this book provides a detailed exploration of what that would have meant in practice for early medieval politics. It argues that ‘Christian kingship’ arose, above all, not because of ‘Church versus State’ struggles nor legitimizing appeals to irrational religion by rulers, but because of people’s search for good government. Christianity was central to the politics of the early Middle Ages, providing a means for debating and mediating the relationship between rulers and ruled.</jats:p>