Many of us will spend much of this year celebrating one of history’s great success stories. Now nearly 250 years old, the Declaration of Independence paved the way for our great nation.

The declaration’s anniversary should spark a renewed interest in American history. But those who seek knowledge about our heritage might not stop there. Some might ask how the American story fits into a larger picture.

“The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition” adds valuable historical insights. This reader recently finished volume one, a 1,200-page tome published last summer. The second volume hits bookstores this month.

In the first book, intellectual historian James Hankins recounts the story of the ancient Greeks and Romans, along with the rise of Christianity as a dominant force in Europe. Hankins’ account stops well short of the American Revolution. He makes only passing references to the Americas.

Yet he describes historical events and trends that should interest anyone who values this nation’s traditional freedoms.

Hankins compiles a “ledger of profits and losses arising from the West’s experience of the medieval centuries.” One theme “is how the modern world has benefited from the failures as well as the successes of medieval Christendom.”

One key failure involved a major power struggle dating to the late 11th century. “The bitter duel between the two great powers that claimed universal authority during the central medieval period, the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy, weakened and discredited both,” Hankins writes. “Their failure led to the revival of ancient Roman republican traditions of self-government in the Italian city-states and in the free cities of northern Europe.”

Rather than one dominant empire, Europe ended up with “rivalrous successor kingdoms”: France, England, the Dutch Republic, and Hapsburg Spain and Austria. “The premodern Eurasian world was one of empires ruled by monarchs, and the primary reason why Europe escaped that fate was the failure of medieval Christendom to achieve its political goals, whether they were to bring the Roman or Carolingian Empire back to life or establish a Christian version of the Islamic Caliphate.”

Gregory VII, “the greatest of all the medieval popes,” pursued what Hankins labels an “imperial papacy.” “He turned a movement to purify the church into a breathtakingly ambitious project to make the pope into a monarch over all of Christendom, a Western counterpart to the Islamic caliph.”

The pope’s plan “never came close to realization thanks above all to determined opposition from the German emperors,” starting with Henry IV.

“Henry IV initiated three centuries of conflict between the papal monarchy and the Medieval Empire,” Hankins writes. “The conflict metastasized into the pivotal political and ideological struggle of the Central Middle Age and, as such, was of immense significance for the future of European civilization.”

Space does not permit a detailed explanation of the Investiture Controversy that pitted Gregory against Henry, nor the battles between popes and emperors in the following decades.

Critical to our story is that “the struggle to counter the temporal claims of the papacy left the empire so weak that it could never hope to establish anything like the dominance in Europe enjoyed by the first Western emperor, Charlemagne,” Hankins writes.

Meanwhile, the popes’ actions “inevitably politicized and corrupted their spiritual authority and destroyed the legitimacy of their claims to temporal authority.”

The fight played a “paradoxical part,” Hankins argues, “in reviving political liberty as an ideal among the city-states of northern and central Italy. The hundreds of towns and cities that had come into existence there since the economic revival of the 11th century, in reaction to the empire’s attempts to dominate them, rediscovered ancient ideals of liberty.”

“The struggle between empire and pope, and the ultimate inability of either universal power to establish its supremacy, thus led in north-central Italy to the emergence of a city-state culture” resembling the ancient Greeks and Romans. Educated citizens recognized the historical republican forms of their new governments.

Eventually, “a full-blown republicanism emerged that was ultimately passed down to early modern Europe and the colonies of Great Britain in North America,” Hankins explains.

The politics of medieval Europe offer lessons for today. “It may perhaps be a source of comfort amid the present travails of the West that what appears from the outside as civilizational collapse can become, beyond all hope, the foundation for later achievements,” Hankins argues.

The American Patriots’ successes in 1776 and the following years are worthy of celebration. Hankins’ “Golden Thread” reminds us that history’s failures also can produce results that merit our applause.

Mitch Kokai is senior political analyst for the John Locke Foundation.