We must candidly admit that we have created a 'dark age' to feel superior to the past. - Peter C. Brownell

The new mayor has no intention of discriminating against anyone. I think the issue relative to the personnel policy has been settled by the City Council. It is not my intention to try to reverse or overturn that policy.

[...] the model of Charlemagne's renewed Roman empire was not Augustus, but Justinian, the devout Catholic depicted in the mosaics of San Vitale. Justinian was the direct, if inadvertent, ancestor of the idea that a "Christian republic", a Holy Roman Empire, would always exist in Western Europe to serve the interests of the papacy and to ensure the libertas of the Catholic church . (Part 2, chapter I, p. 108)

We Europeans have guiltily built the fracture between Europe and Islam, while instead the roots of these two worlds have been intertwined for a millennium.