A few more (rummaging around the hard disc here)
596 - St. Augustine Shows Bad Timing
Augustine, emissary of Pope Gregory I, arrives at the court of King
Ethelbert and immediately approaches the king's Christian wife, as planned.
He could hardly have chosen a worse time - Ethelbert has chosen to rid
himself of his unloved spouse under the influence of Mercia, and the
meddlesome monk is sent packing. England is Christianised by missionaries
from Ireland. The wave of Anglo-Saxon missionaries travelling the continent
in the 8th and 9th centuries spreads the word of the Celtic church, not
England's particular brand of Rome-oriented Catholicism. As a result, the
reform orders do not materialise, the papacy never manages to force its
claims for universal authority. Europe remains a continent of national
churches, dominated by kings and run by charismatic ascetics.
1948 - Israel is Grateful
In the wars that marred the inception of the state of Israel, the Haganah
was outnumbered and outgunned by its Arab enemies, abandoned by the west
and, thanks to a UN embargo, unable to obtain weapons even against cash on
the open market. The only nation willing to part with the sinews of war
even in small quantities was then Socialist, soon to be Communist
Czechoslovakia. Victorious, Israel did not forget and developed a close
attachment to Prague and its allied government. The ideals of the Kibbuzim
movement appealed to the Warsaw Pact governments, and while Stalin himself
had no interest in a Jewish ally, Khrushchev shrewdly spotted the
potential. In the rise and fall of the Soviet empire, Israel became key to
the 1967 seizing of the Suez canal against American-supported Egypt, the
First Gulf War against Iran (where several Arab nations allied with Israel
in fear of US-sponsored Islamism) and the violent suppression of the
Islamic Revolution in Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. After the fall of the
Berlin Wall, a still Communist Israel has become an international pariah
state surrounded by western-allied Islamist nations and abandoned by its
former allies in Russia and eastern Europe. Antisemitism is rife in most of
the world.
Flavius Chrysostomos, bishop of Rome 311-339
Flavius Proiectus, son of a wealthy family and student of rhetoric and
philosophy, converted to Christianity in his late twenties and quickly
established himself as one of the movement's religious leaders by virtue of
his education, intellect and social status. One of the first 'Latins' to
gain the respect of the predominantly Greek bishops (named 'Chrysostomos'
in reference to his amazing rhetorical gift), he devoted himself to serving
the poor and living a life of privation in hope of the salvation of his
soul. Chosen as bishop of Rome in 311, the aging clergyman, scarred by his
experience of the persecutions, met ambitious young Constantine after the
battle of Pons Milvicus. The emperor approached him to feel out the
readiness of the church establishment to back his claim to power. Flavius,
incensed at this intrusion of worldly affairs into his religious life,
rebuffed the ruler and in the next twenty years devoted every ounce of his
considerable energy to denouncing those Christians who strayed from the
path of renunciation of worldly life to cooperate with earthly authority.
The growing influence of the Flavian movement in the West frustrated much
of Constantine's attempt to use the church as part of his power structure,
leaving imperial authority comparatively weak. Eventually denounced as a
heresy in the East, Flavianism remained strong and moulded nascent western
Christendom into a world where religion was a matter of local charity,
shunning the temptations of politics and reviling the lust for power that
the partly pagan and universally secular Germanic dynasts exemplified.
