Comparison Of Roman Emperor Constantine And The Frankish...

In early European history, power seemed to be everything. However, power was obtained through how much land one acquired. It was held to those who were politically clever and used certain strategies in order to gain territory and ultimately power. One of the strategies in which both the Roman Emperor Constantine and the Frankish Merovingian King Clovis used was the driving force of religion. Through faith, one can move mountains; this is exactly was these men did. They used people’s faith to aid them in obtaining authority over land. Throughout this essay I will recollect the Christian religion’s history in order to draw a correlation between the church and the state; moreover, how the forth mentioned men utilized their conversions to Christianity as means of manipulation to gain power and territory. In the dawn of Christianity, many were threatened by the conception of having a single omnipotent and omni-benevolent god to confide in. Nonetheless there were those who fo und the Jesus Christ’s message rather compelling. The notion that people may be redeemed and granted eternal life in heaven simply by their faith in Jesus Christ, appealed to many living within the walls of the Roman Empire. At this point in time polytheism was nothing out of the norm. In fact, this belief was most predominant in the Roman Empire. Worshippers of gods like Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, amongst countless others, conducted public sacrifices and performed rituals to please the gods. However, when