The Expansion of Christianity (1500-1800)

• Main Author: McManners, John
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressNew York, NY 1983
• Subjects: Tundra
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192852915.003.0010; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/58310623/isbn-9780192852915-book-part-10.pdf

Abstract BY the year 1800, Christianity girdled the globe from China to Peru. Yet three hundred years earlier, it had been the religion of Europe alone, hemmed in on the east by militant Islam, to the south by the desert, to the north by barren tundra, and to the west by the great ocean. Islam ruled in the land where Christ had been born and crucified. It had swept away the Christian communities of the North African coast, and its pressures were driving the Monophysite Copes of Egypt to convert to the Prophet; the sister Coptic church in Ethiopia survived only because of its wild remoteness in the mountains. In the Sudan, where Christianity had once been dominant, the faith of the Qur'an now prevailed.