This is the closing episode of the series' first arc, and it does two things. It forges the medieval inheritance — Magna Carta, Bracton's "the law makes the king," Aquinas's fourfold law and his lex iniusta non est lex, the line that ran straight to Martin Luther King's Birmingham jail cell — and then it stands on the summit and looks back across the whole road: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and the House of Wisdom, four civilizations braided into one cord and handed to the men wh

The medieval centuries in which the inheritance traced in the first three installments of this series was put to immediate political and legal use. Athens had given the West reason and the idea of the mixed constitution. Jerusalem had given it the covenant and the conviction that even kings stand under a law above themselves. Rome had given it natural law and the architecture of a republic. The House of Wisdom had preserved and transmitted the Greek philosophical inheritance