In our story we are now jumping ahead in time after the crucial event, the Sack of Rome by Visigoth king Alaric I on August 24, 410 and its implications to the Kingdom of God, De Civitate Dei.
We go ahead of this fundamentally important event because knowing about the world after it helps us to grasp the significance of those events. The world that existed after the fall of Western Rome is in the time line between Classical Antiquity and Early Middle Ages. This was the Period of Migrations in Europe, Near East and North Africa that has largely shaped this part of the world as we know it today.
Scholars, historians, archaeologists, sociologists and others, are heatedly discussing what constituted the identity of the many people mentioned in the historical sources about the Migrations Period, whether they formed kinships as genetically related tribes, social ideas or what.
It may well be that several factors affected the way the people identified themselves as belonging to a specific group and obeying its leader, for example being a "Gothic family" in Moesia or being a brave in a certain village in Classical period Gaul with Asterix and Obelix.
My point in this blog is that eventually it was Rex Regum who gave these people those identities that have grown into modern nation states of Europe and elsewhere. One example of this are the Franks under King Clovis I as we shall see later on.
The arrival of Christ in the midst of these peoples through His apostles already in the first millennium A.D. gave them national identity, written language, structures of government around the Church, early seeds of civilization that has flourished ever since. After all, His Father in Heaven has given all people on Earth to His rule and He has been very busy ever since with us.
These nations, French, German,Swiss, Austrian, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian ... were not invented by the romantic nationalists of modern times. Instead, these are ancient people who have roamed Europe in Iron Age, settled, moved, migrated, fought wars, suffered hunger, enjoyed rich yields of their agricultural fields and cattle, looted treasures, slaughtered people, hunted animals and build houses and villages and cities and empires... and at one point something decisive happened to them - they met Jesus Christ.
And the rest is history - literally, literal history!
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