The Rise of Western Christendom

Up to 400 A.D., two very different social orders faced each other across the Rhine and the Danube. But they were not social orders based upon unbridgeable and unchangeable differences in ecology, in technology, and even in mindset. For this reason, the contrast between “Romans” and “barbarians” – though it seemed so clear to the imagination of contemporaries – was constantly eroded by the facts of nature. The two groups shared a temperate climate which ensured that both Romans and “barbarians” were settled farmers. loc: 569

He argues that emperor, military, and civilian populations alike needed the idea of a “barbarian threat” to justify their own existence. The threat of invasion justified high rates of taxation. It justified the splendid palaces and cities ringed with high walls which overlooked the Rhine and the Danube, from the North Sea to the Black Sea. It gave a raison d’être to a powerful and well-paid military class. Above all, it enabled the emperor to stand tall as the defender of civilization. loc: 581

By the year 1000 A.D., what could be called a “European” Christianity had only recently been established, with the conversion of Germany, of parts of Eastern Europe, and of Scandinavia. The drama of the expansion of Christianity into northwestern Europe should not blind us to the fact that, seen from the viewpoint of the older, more deeply rooted Christian populations of North Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, Syria, the Caucasus, and Mesopotamia, what we call Western Christendom was out on a limb. It was the Christianity of a peripheral zone. loc: 618

The constant presence of a profane, pre-Christian world, which pushed deep roots into the past and into the hearts of Christian believers, provided the populations of what we now call Europe with an invaluable “structural reserve” – a space for the profane that could be constantly drawn upon.11 Without the tenacity of its gnarled, pre-Christian roots, modern Europe would have lacked the imaginative and intellectual “roughage” provided by an unresolved tension between the sacred and the profane. loc: 634

Above all, the warring Christian churches of Asia and Africa turned the Middle East into a vast echo chamber, resounding with lively conversations. The literature of every church was characterized by debates with real or imagined rivals,19 and by lists of questions and answers addressed to the learned by the faithful.20 Such constant debate and questioning created a common language of thought which embraced all faiths, local languages and regions. loc: 684

The Hijâz, in which the prophet Muhammad received his message, was part of the great echo chamber of religious ideas that had developed throughout the Middle East in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. loc: 713

Rome slowly lost its grip on the imagination and on the value systems of the inhabitants of the empire and their neighbors in the course of the fifth and early sixth centuries. loc: 791

He does not find evidence of widespread destruction in the wake of imagined barbarian hordes. Nor does he find a catastrophic drop in the standard of living of the Roman populations. Still less does he find evidence of monolithic barbarian immigration into Roman territory. loc: 792

All over Europe, relatively well-to-do men and women – Romans and barbarians alike – had begun to vote with their feet against Rome. After centuries in which Rome had been the central point of reference for ideas of civilization, of proper conduct, and of proper gender relations, they had begun to see that, despite the fears of many of them, there was nothing wrong about not being Roman. loc: 800

the late Roman state was notorious for its unusual fiscal appetite. Indeed, apart from demanding taxes, the Roman empire had never done as much for its citizens as our exalted image of Rome might lead us to expect. loc: 810

it created the image of a barbarian threat so as to justify its fiscal demands. Nor did it bring much security to the civilian population. loc: 812

But there was one thing the fourth-century Roman state did well, which was to extract money from its subjects. Paradoxically, as Wickham and others have pointed out, high taxation did not ruin the populations of the empire. Rather, high tax demands primed the pump for a century of hectic economic growth. loc: 822

The collection of taxes offered unparalleled opportunities for enrichment for landowners, tax collectors, and bureaucrats. What was gathered through taxes was redistributed at the top, in the form of gifts and salaries paid in solid gold. This process created the swaggering new class loc: 825

once the gravy train was jolted by a series of military crises, none of which were catastrophic in themselves, the great engine of enrichment stalled and, eventually, stopped. What strikes Wickham was the speed with which upper-class Roman society sank back to a low level. loc: 831

Trade dwindled. Horizons became more limited. As Wickham sees it, we end, around the year 600 A.D., with a world of smaller units, ruled by low-pressure states. The local aristocracies declined into genteel poverty. loc: 835

in Wickham’s opinion, if anyone was happy in the early Middle Ages, it was the peasantry. Freed at last from the double pressure of landlords and tax collectors, they settled back to enjoy a low-profile golden age. loc: 839

in one way, the barbarian invasions and the civil wars of the early fifth century did prove decisive. They broke the spine of the empire as a tax-gathering machine. loc: 843

The empire governed through enlisting the support of the local elites. These were members of the minor nobility. Their wealth and horizons did not extend far beyond their city or their province. loc: 850

“the key factor in the break-up of the Empire was the exposure of a critical fault-line between the imperial government and the interests of the regional elites. loc: 853

“The Destruction of Central Romanness.” By this he meant the loss of the ability of the Roman state, its servants, and those with an interest in maintaining the ideology of empire at full strength to impose their will on the “local Romans” of the provinces. loc: 856

Put bluntly: what brought down the western empire was the speed with which the barbarian armies were able to create local power blocs through collaboration with the local Romans. For the local elites, the barbarians brought a Rome of sorts to their own region. loc: 865

The western empire was not so much destroyed as eroded and finally rendered unnecessary by a score of little Romes, rooted in more restricted areas of control. loc: 869

Many features which we nowadays tend to associate with the fierce barbarians of the north began as customs of the Roman military. loc: 887

Of these military habits, the most upsetting to the civilian population was the zest for civil war. loc: 891

the true “killing fields” of the fourth century were not along the frontiers. They were in northern Italy and the Balkans, where sanguinary battles were regularly fought between rival emperors. loc: 895

What happened in the fifth century was that civil war expanded to include “proxy war” through the use of barbarian groups. loc: 897

all the major breakthroughs by the barbarians either were part of maneuvers directly connected with civil wars, or at least were made possible by the distraction caused by civil wars. loc: 899

It was not the barbarian invasions in themselves that changed the face of Europe. It was the synergy between barbarian groups, the long Roman practice of civil war, and the opportunism with which local Romans exploited both barbarians and civil war conditions for their own purposes. loc: 902

“convulsion”: an involvement of all segments of the population in a shake-up from which a very different society would emerge.55 loc: 907

the intense personal loyalty expected by a leader of his followers, which seemed to characterize barbarian society, did not come from a purely Germanic, heroic past. It came, rather, from the practice of the late Roman army. The Roman armies cohered because of a binding personal oath of the soldiers to the Emperor, loc: 913

Throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, Britain, Gaul, and Spain were crisscrossed by small armies engaged in the short, “dirty” wars loc: 926

The militarization of society seems to have happened more rapidly in Britain than anywhere else. The local elites took up arms with gusto. loc: 939

“Local Romans” had evolved so differently in different regions that they were no longer recognizable to each other. But now their menfolk all carried swords. loc: 948

This was a process of drastic “simplification.” In its upper reaches, the variety of statuses and professions which had characterized late Roman society had withered away. Civilians were squeezed out. We are left with a stark division between the clergy and a militarized aristocracy, loc: 951

we are looking at the last, vigorous chapter of the history of the Roman family. Up to 700 A.D., it was assumed that the Christian family cared for their own dead. The clergy played little role in burial and none whatsoever in the arrangement and decoration of tombs. loc: 1024

When the balance between family and clergy was finally upset, after 700 A.D., a tectonic plate shifted deep within the Christian community. The Christian family surrendered a large part of their care of the dead to the clergy. For, as Michel Lauwers has shown, in his book on the “birth of the cemetery,” the medieval cemetery was the creation of the clergy. loc: 1031

it was a Christianity in which the churches were not in the hands of the clergy. They were in the hands of private patrons who paid the salaries, provided the buildings, and set the tone for whatever clergymen they decided to hire, with little or no reference to the bishop. loc: 1045

Bowes points out that the distinction which early medieval bishops drew increasingly between the “public” space of the church and the “private” space of the household was a new one. It left the household depleted. The household was now treated as purely “private” space. loc: 1052

Only bishops and a celibate clergy (along with a few leading members of the laity, such as kings and their counsellors) were allowed to take initiatives in the “public” space of the church. This meant that only they could be singled out as the protagonists of narratives of the expansion of Christianity. loc: 1057

a profound but barely chronicled mutation of Christianity signaled a yet deeper change – the decline and fall of the Roman household. loc: 1061

At lower levels of society (and especially in the new Christianities of the north) the role of the family remained central to humbler Christians – to petty noblemen, to well-to-do farmers, even to peasants. loc: 1068

Put bluntly, Christianity did not come to Europe in a single, neatly wrapped package, with a crisp structure of popes, bishops, priests, and laity. It was constantly challenged to define its own identity. Like any other group in search of an identity, it did so by asserting its origins and its boundaries. Christians insisted that Christianity reached back to a heroic, “primordial” past – to the world of the Apostles and the martyrs. loc: 1086

The destruction of pagan temples was as much an exercise in boundary definition as it was the expression of a pre-existing Christian rage against paganism. loc: 1115

most acts of destruction were carefully focused. They were driven by local needs to create a Christian identity. Apart from the notorious lynching of Hypatia, attacks concentrated mainly on buildings and statues. loc: 1117

It was the premeditated, fratricidal mutilation of a religion beside which many Christians had grown up and to which many of them still felt only too close. loc: 1123

a community’s sense of identity depends, to a very great extent, on its ability to talk itself into accepting historical narratives that link members of the present-day community to their imagined, “primordial” past. loc: 1137

most groups of barbarians emerged from nondescript beginnings. They did not carry ready-made ethnic identities with them when they crossed the Roman frontier. As a result, Franks, Goths, Anglo-Saxons, and many like them spent the next few centuries persuading themselves and others that they were they: each was a glorious group; each had a long history. loc: 1140

the same processes of identity formation were at work: primordial heroes, carefully exploited situations of conflict, the constant task of urging Christians to remember who they were. As with the barbarians, the definition of what constituted a Christian changed from generation to generation. loc: 1167

But a final blunt question must be posed: how engulfing was the Christian identity created by these writings? I think that the answer to this is – not as much as one might expect. loc: 1184

the church still had to compete with a strong streak of secular values that remained soundproof to Christianity. The “structural reserve” of the profane was not entirely obliterated by the triumph of the church. loc: 1186

Altogether, the cities of Christianized Europe were less claustrophobic than we might think. Profane institutions continued. Not every city was controlled by powerful bishops of noble background. Bishops still had to deal with resolutely profane figures of authority – tax collectors and the leaders of the militias of the cities. loc: 1206

Roman law guaranteed protection for Jewish communities. loc: 1214

despite a few incidents of mob violence led by bishops, the secular tradition held firm. Dumézil shows that many bishops were anxious to maintain the Roman laws that protected Jews. loc: 1218

it was only in Visigothic Spain, in the seventh century, that the Roman laws that had protected the Jews were brushed aside, in a hubristic attempt by king Sisebut (612–621) to include all subjects of the Visigothic kings in a single, sacralized commonwealth. It was only then – and only in Spain – that the barrier of the secular laws, which protected Jews from Christians, was pushed aside, and, with it, an ancient vision of a society with room for more than one religion. loc: 1224

I fastened with particular interest on the seventh century (especially in chapters 9 through 11). For this century marks a watershed in western Christianity. Features that we have come to associate with western Christianity in all future ages – such as cemeteries, large monasteries, and a growing concern with the otherworldly perils of the soul – become visible in this period. loc: 1259

seventh century northern Gaul, the heartland of the Merovingian kingdom, was one of the richest areas in Europe. By regaining control of their peasants, after the great convulsion of the fifth century, the leading families of Francia emerged as “the first truly medieval nobilities of Europe. loc: 1275

It is not true that Charlemagne pulled Europe out of the deep crater made by the barbarian invasions and the fall of Rome. His achievements were based on a solid foundation of prosperity and a desire for responsible government that had already been laid down by his Merovingian predecessors. loc: 1285

We cannot understand the tenacity of paganism if we do not realize the sense of warmth and intimacy which pagans experienced as they worshipped their many gods. These gods crowded into the huge gap between heaven and earth, filling it with energy and life. The gods bridged heaven and earth. Their rustling, benevolent presences filled the physical world. They hovered close to human beings, ready to answer their prayers. They reached down yet further to touch the natural world. Every year the gods breathed abundance into the earth, infusing it with their own unflagging energy. loc: 1294

Having brusquely dismissed the intermediary gods of paganism as demons, they had to find some other way to close the gap that had opened again between heaven and earth. loc: 1300

Were heaven and earth still distant? Had God, as Christ, come down fully to earth? Had he truly identified himself with human beings, so as to reach out and heal their sufferings? Or had he merely brushed the earth with his presence, loc: 1303

it reminded them of other, fateful gaps in their own society – between rich and poor, emperor and subjects. If God had not truly bent down to listen to humankind, by sharing human nature, why should the rich and powerful bother to bend down to listen to those who called upon them for help and mercy? loc: 1308

in the world of Gregory of Tours, was a more low-key but equally urgent concern: how to recover the charge of divine energy that had once pulsed through the natural world, bringing abundance to the crops and healing to the human body. Gregory’s answer concentrated on the “presence” of the saints. loc: 1315

The saints joined heaven and earth in a more intimate manner. They brought down to earth a touch of the abundance and healing scent of the Paradise in which they lived. loc: 1320

This Christianity had continued to think of the human race as deeply embedded in a universe shot through with living presences. Only a thin veil separated humans from the heavy, healing scent of Paradise to which the saints had passed. loc: 1326

What seems to have happened in subsequent centuries, in the West, was that earth and heaven drifted apart. Paradise was there. But it became more distant. It came to be thought of as a place far beyond this world. loc: 1329

It was the altar, and the priest who stood at the altar, that now joined heaven and earth. loc: 1342

Looking at this debate we can sense a parting of the ways between two Christendoms. In Byzantium, the worship of icons rested on an unchanged belief that, somehow, heaven and earth were not too far apart. loc: 1349

The scholars around Charlemagne were now less certain. They had come to live in a world where heaven and earth no longer mingled with such ease. Only great sacral objects, guarded in the churches by the clergy – the Eucharist, the Scriptures, and the tombs of the saints – were the points where heaven and earth could be imagined to meet. The rest was profane. loc: 1353

for centuries after the fall of the Roman empire of the West, the eastern empire remained a constant military presence in the western Mediterranean, as was shown by the conquest of the emperor Justinian and by the subsequent tenacity of the Byzantine holdings in Italy, loc: 1395

For the entire period between A.D. 535 and 800, Rome was a frontier city. It lay on the western periphery of a great, eastern empire. loc: 1398

The eastern empire (and not Rome) lay at the hub of a worldwide Christianity, which stretched as far into Asia as it did into Europe. loc: 1403

the theological issues which were debated most fiercely in Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch in the fifth and sixth centuries (as we shall see at the end of chapter 4 and in chapter 7) resounded for centuries in the West. loc: 1404

the rise of Islam and the consequent conquest and conversion to the new faith of most of the Middle East, of North Africa, and even, for half a millennium, of southern Spain, seems to place an insuperable imaginative barrier between ourselves and an ancient Christian world where North Africa, Egypt, and Syria had been the most populous and creative regions of the Christian world. loc: 1414

a version of the potent religious myth of the pristine purity of the Primitive Church. This myth began to be formed around the end of the fourth century. It has been wielded with great effect by ecclesiastical reformers from the age of Augustine and John Cassian up to and beyond the Reformation. loc: 1776

we should not be misled by the writings of the Fathers of the Church into mistaking their elevated views for the rougher texture of life as really lived by Christians. We should not expect to find a modern “sanitized” Christianity in the Early Church any more than we would find it in the early Middle Ages. loc: 1788

Early medieval Christianity, in the forms which it took after A.D. 400, cannot be treated as a “fallen” religion: it did not represent a regression from the more elevated standards of its own Early Christian and late antique past into “archaic” modes of thinking. loc: 1815

this study of the social and ecological history of the Mediterranean world in pre-industrial times reminds us that change was the essence of Mediterranean life. The ecology of the region ensured that, throughout its history, the Mediterranean has always been crisscrossed by patterns of movement, causing goods, ideas, and persons to flow from point to point. These frequently coagulate at one nodal point or another. But they just as frequently shift away from ancient and apparently unchallengeable centers of “superior” civilization. loc: 1828

the Roman cities and the patterns of “intensification” on which they had been based suffered from a period of drastic “abatement.” But, at the same time, as we see both in sixth-century Syria (in chapters 7 and 12) and in the seventh-century valley of the Seine (in chapter 11), the effect of the evaporation of the post-Roman cities on the Christian culture of the age was “cushioned” by extensive relocation to the countryside. loc: 1850

In much of Europe, it was in a largely rural environment that one would find the “goods” which maintained a Europe-wide “symbolic system”: the texts, the relics, the spiritual guides, and the skilled practitioners of teaching, music, art, and architecture. loc: 1855

For it was in the early Middle Ages, and not earlier, that the Christian imagination took on its peculiarly western shape. We are dealing with a series of irrevocable “precipitations” of ideas which had existed in diffuse form in late antique Christianity, but which had never been brought together with such decisive clarity of focus until the seventh and eighth centuries. loc: 1908

the early Middle Ages represented the age par excellence of “applied Christianity.” In East and West alike, we are dealing with persons who were deeply committed to bringing the Early Christian past into the present. They wished to make it available in the condensed form of digests, anthologies, and encyclopedic compilations; to turn the recommendations of ancient Christian authors and the rules of former Christian councils into a finely calibrated system of rules, adjusted to the needs of pastoral guidance; loc: 1940

Paradoxically, as literacy appears to have receded in western Europe, the religion of the elites of both the Latin and the Greek Churches became, if anything, more “textualized”: it drew its guidelines and its sustenance from the texts of former authors. The notion of the “Fathers of the Church” was created in this time. loc: 1948

The problem was not to create a new message, nor to contest old ones, but to make sure that a message whose alloy had already been tried and found true in the days of the Fathers of the Church should sink ever deeper into the hearts of individuals and of the Christian people of entire Churches. Even in its most settled areas, early medieval religion had the aspects of a “missionary religion. loc: 1963

Gregory the Great did not turn away from the classical past either because it was pagan or because he found it to be in an irreparably damaged state. He simply found it a distraction from the main business of life, which was to prepare the soul for judgment. loc: 1998

He shared with these philosophers the austere assumption that there was only one permanent and all-important object on which the human mind could always work, slowly but with effect, to bring about irrevocable change: and that was the raw stuff of human nature itself. loc: 2003

We have entered an altogether more “sacramental” world, different from that of Augustine. It is not a cruder world. But it is a world with different hopes, oriented toward different forms of achievement. The world made sense. It showed the way securely to a beauty which lay beyond itself. loc: 2015

To stand in a church such as Sant’Agnese is to come close to the principal intellectual and religious agenda of early medieval Christianity. This was a form of Christianity which, in its art and in much of its literature, strove “to remove the dividing line between Earth and Heaven. loc: 2031

The truth is that the elites of early medieval Europe were considerably poorer than those of Roman times. Furthermore, their deployment of wealth was dominated by concerns which did not lead to the piling up of large architectural monuments. loc: 2060

For kings and aristocrats had been, in many ways, the principal victims of the general “abatement” of the age. The ending of the relentless system of taxation which had characterized the later Roman empire considerably weakened their ability to extract wealth on a regular basis from their inferiors. loc: 2065

No longer policed and bullied every year to pay taxes, the peasantry slipped quietly out of the control of their landlords. loc: 2067

It was only with the ever more secure establishment of the landed basis of the Frankish aristocracy in the eighth and ninth centuries, under strong and wealthy kings, that the aristocracies could gather in enough wealth to support more ambitious ventures. loc: 2070

the enormous importance, in the period between A.D. 400 and 800, of the gift-giving relationship. loc: 2076

spasmodic accumulations of wealth (often made from “windfalls” of plunder and the spoils of war) were disbursed to impress relatively small groups of important people – one’s peers and, above all, one’s military followers.39 It goes without saying that holy places received long-term landed endowments. loc: 2080

kings and aristocrats, surrounded by small but indispensable retinues of warriors, would pile gold, silks, and precious objects of all kinds (from Byzantine ivories to the opulent and exotic fur of polar bears) on the altars of small but exquisitely built and ornamented churches loc: 2091

Here were places where profane wealth was transformed by contact with the sacred. loc: 2097

Inevitably, the predominance of the gift-giving relationship defined Christianity as an aristocratic preoccupation. Early medieval Europe was a period of sharply differentiated access to the sacred and to the bodies of knowledge which clustered around it. loc: 2113

The peasantry were considerably less passive and less isolated from Christianity than we had thought.45 But their access to it was different, and was frequently judged, by their betters, to be dangerously unconventional. loc: 2122

by the time of Charlemagne the system of rents and taxes, which had been dislocated to the advantage of the peasantry by the unravelling of the Roman empire, had come to be re-established in new forms. Tithes became compulsory on all baptized Christians – peasants among them. And, with the regular extraction of tithes, the Christianization of Europe enters a new rhythm. In many areas, the later ninth century has been called “the age of the parish.”46 The coming together of church and village (often through the intervention of local landlords – lay or ecclesiastical) occurs at this time in many regions. loc: 2126

Part I Empire and Aftermath A.D. 200 loc: 2140

1 “The Laws of Countries”: Prologue and Overview loc: 2142

Western Europe became what it now is because the relations which the Roman empire established with the “barbarians” along its northern frontiers proved to be quite unusual. loc: 2257

the “barbarians” of the Roman West were hardly “barbarians” at all. For they were farmers, not nomads. loc: 2260

Nomads were treated as a despised but useful underclass. It was assumed that these wanderers, though often irritating, could never constitute a permanent threat to the great empires of the settled world, loc: 2269

Effective nomadism, in its normal state, depended on the maximum dispersal of families, each maintaining the initiative in maneuvering its flocks toward advantageous pasture, with a minimum of interference from a central authority. To change from herding scattered flocks to herding human beings, through conquest and raiding, under the leadership of a single ruler, was an abnormal and, usually, a shortlived development in the long history of the nomadic world. loc: 2286

The further from their native steppes the Huns found themselves, the less access they had to those pastures that provided the vast surplus of horses on which their military superiority depended. loc: 2292

What the Huns and the Avars brought, in the long run, was not the end of the world, as many had feared at the time, but a hint of the immense spaces which lay behind them. loc: 2298

In eastern Europe, the nomads remained a constant presence throughout this period and beyond. In western Europe, however, the true nomad world, which produced Attila and, later, the Avars, remained remote if imposing. loc: 2307

yet Romans tended to assimilate all “barbarians” to the rootless and violent image of the nomads loc: 2309

Rather, Roman and non-Roman landscapes merged gently into each other, within a single temperate zone. loc: 2321

what we hear is a world slowly penetrated, on every level, by Roman goods, by Roman styles of living and, eventually, by Roman ideas. loc: 2327

the lands outside the Roman frontiers were inhabited by peoples who shared with the provincial subjects of the Roman empire, in Britain, Gaul, and Spain, the same basic building-blocks of an agrarian society. They too were peasants. They, too, struggled to wrest their food from the heavy, treacherous earth, loc: 2336

Livestock played a prominent role among the “barbarian” peoples of the north European plain and elsewhere. loc: 2352

abundant cattle gave greater access to protein, in the form of meat and dairy products, than was common among the undernourished peasants of the Mediterranean. Hence the pervasive sense, among Romans, of the “barbarian” North as a reservoir of mobile and ominously well-fed young warriors. loc: 2355

When the Gothic villagers in Moldavia and the Ukraine began to be subjected to Hunnish raids, in 374, their first reaction was to seek permission to place the Danube between themselves and the Huns by settling in the Roman empire. In return for an offer to provide regular military service, they were allowed to become Roman subjects. They crossed the Danube not so as to “invade” the Roman empire, but as immigrants, who sought to resume their lives as farmers, loc: 2368

Politically, the arrangement turned into a disaster: driven by famine and enraged by the systematic exploitation of their refugee camps, the remnants of the Gothic nobility (soon renamed and known to us ever since as the Visigoths) rallied its warriors to defeat and kill the eastern emperor at Adrianople (Edirne, European Turkey) in 378. loc: 2372

the Roman frontier did not mark a chasm between two totally different worlds. It was an artificial divide, destined, within a few centuries, to become irrelevant. loc: 2380

Looking across from their side of the frontier, the Romans saw a society which, by their standards, was totally illiterate. loc: 2387

It was also, palpably, a society dominated by its warriors. Compared with the peasants and slaves who supported them, the warriors of “free Germany” were only a small proportion of the males of each tribe. loc: 2389

What they saw, rather, was a vast and “underdeveloped” landscape whose principal “cash crop,” as it were, was an abundant surplus of violent young men. loc: 2395

The frontier region became a vortex which sucked warrior groups toward it. Faced by a harvest of young men which was so easy to garner, the Roman authorities changed their recruiting grounds from the Roman to the German side of the frontier. loc: 2400

The emperors always needed troops to fight the bitter civil wars which characterized the third and fourth centuries. loc: 2402

In the first and second centuries A.D., the establishment of large Roman armies on the frontiers and the foundation of Roman-style cities behind them brought wealth and demands for food and labor which revolutionized the countryside of northern Gaul, Britain, and the Danubian provinces. loc: 2413

On the Roman side of the frontier, hitherto unimaginable coagulations of human population were gathered into newly founded towns. loc: 2418

Agrarian society was congealed into more solid structures, designed to aid the permanent extraction of wealth from the tillers of the land. Behind the frontiers, in northern Gaul, great, grain-producing villas (whose owners even experimented with primitive harvesting machines) came to dominate an increasingly subservient peasantry. loc: 2424

details show a barbarian world slowly changing shape under the distant gravitational pull of the huge adjacent mass of the Roman empire.20 loc: 2436

The Roman frontier was not violently breached by barbarian “invasions.” Rather, between 200 and 400, the frontier itself changed. From being a defensive region, which kept Romans and “barbarians” apart, it had become, instead, an extensive “middle ground,” in which Roman and barbarian societies were drawn together. loc: 2439

after 400, it was the barbarians and no longer the Romans who became the dominant partners in that middle ground. loc: 2442

the emergence of the Irish Sea as a Celtic “Mediterranean of the North.” Around the Irish Sea, the Romanized coasts of Wales and northern Britain were joined to Ireland and the western isles of Scotland to form a single zone which ignored the former Roman frontiers. loc: 2451

the Frankish kingdom created by Clovis (481–511) represented a return to the days before Julius Caesar, when successful warrior kings had straddled the Rhine to join Germany with the “Belgic” regions of northern Gaul. loc: 2453

From Ireland all the way to the Danube, centers of Christian learning came to flourish in what had once been the “barbarian” side of the Roman frontier. Early medieval Christianity was at its most vigorous in regions which, half a millennium previously, had been regarded by cultivated Romans as lands beyond the pale of civilization. loc: 2470

2 Christianity and Empire loc: 2478

After 224, the Sasanian kings of Iran turned the loose-knit Parthian kingdom, whose rulers they had supplanted, into a formidable empire. The Roman empire, also, emerged from a period of crisis with the power of the emperors greatly strengthened. loc: 2482

We must remember what a fragile institution the Roman empire had been, even at the height of its power, in the first and second centuries A.D. Its inhabitants thought of themselves less as subjects of an empire than as members of a uniquely privileged “commonwealth of cities. loc: 2487

The towns of the Roman frontier provinces, such as London, Paris, and Cologne, were impressive in contrast to the underpopulated, rural landscapes in which they stood. loc: 2494

They were mere “agrotowns” by modern standards. Yet these towns were seen as privileged oases of Roman civilization. loc: 2496

Compared with a modern state, the Roman empire remained profoundly undergoverned. loc: 2503

The town council was recruited from 30 to 100 or so of the richest families in the region. As members of the town council, representatives of these leading families were held responsible for running the city and for collecting the taxes of the territory assigned to it. In peaceful (or less provident) times, they exercised virtually unimpeded control over their locality, loc: 2507

From the point of view of the emperors, who had to defend the empire in times of emergency, the disadvantage of this system of indirect rule was that it depended for its smooth functioning on a “cozy” relationship with the city-based elites of every region. loc: 2517

The upper classes of the Roman empire never amounted to more than 3 percent of the overall population. Yet they owned a quarter of all the land of the empire and 40 percent of its liquid wealth. loc: 2521

Between 238 and 270, bankruptcy, political fragmentation, and the recurrent defeats of large Roman armies laid bare the weaknesses of the old system of government. loc: 2529

The Roman empire over which the emperor Diocletian reigned, from 284 to 305, was an empire in the true sense of the word. The Roman state was considerably more present to all its subjects than had been the case a century earlier. loc: 2532

Diocletian ensured closer control over each major region of the Roman world by delegating his powers to a coalition of co-emperors, loc: 2536

For most of the time, the Roman world was divided in two, with an emperor in the Latin West and another in the Greek East. They treated each other as colleagues. loc: 2539

What had changed was the presence of empire itself. The empire was no longer a “commonwealth of cities.” The elites lost their unique advantages of wealth and local status. They now looked increasingly outside the horizons of their city to the imperial court. loc: 2547

The same process of centralization took place in each province. A metropolis, a “mother city,” emerged as the permanent capital of each region, leaving other cities in the shade. loc: 2554

It was assumed, as a matter of common sense, that there were many gods, and that these gods demanded worship through concrete, publicly visible gestures of reverence and gratitude. loc: 2574

Great emphasis was placed, in traditional Roman circles, on religio, the apposite worship of each god. The notion of religio stressed (and even idealized) social cohesion. loc: 2582

Hence religiones, very much in the plural – clearly differentiated ways of worship, each one appropriate to a specific god and a specific place – were the hallmark of polytheism in the Roman world. loc: 2585

The gods were not airy abstractions. They were vibrant beings, who hovered rank after rank above and around the human race. The lower orders of the gods shared the same physical space as human beings. They touched all aspects of the natural world and of human settlement. loc: 2597

Not all gods were equal. Some gods were considerably higher and more distant from human beings than were others. The religio that these high gods received depended, to a large extent, on the self-image of their worshippers. Mystical philosophers yearned for the higher gods and, beyond them, for union with the One, the metaphysically necessary, intoxicating source of all being. loc: 2599

It was considered crucial to maintain these diverse religiones. For all the gods, high and low, local and imperial, played a role in maintaining civilized life. They protected the Roman empire. loc: 2607

Diocletian was a man who took religio seriously. The previous year he had declared: The ancient religion ought not to be censured by a new one. For it is the height of criminality to reverse that which the ancestors had defined, once and for all, things which hold and preserve their recognized place and course.14 loc: 2616

Constantine let it be known to Christians that he considered that he had owed his victory outside Rome to a specific and unique sign from the One God which they worshipped. loc: 2629

Constantine’s “conversion” was a very “Roman” conversion. It consisted in the fact that he had come to regard the High God of the Christians, rather than the traditional gods, as the proper recipient of religio. Worship of the Christian God had brought prosperity upon himself and would bring prosperity upon the empire. loc: 2634

Only 12 years later, in 324, did he take over the eastern half of the empire in a series of bloody battles. And he did all this without attributing his success in any way to correct religio toward the ancient gods. It was in this pointed absence of piety toward the gods, as the traditional guardians of the empire, that his subjects came to realize that their emperor was a Christian. loc: 2638

This concern for universal uniformity, devoted to the worship of one God only, was the opposite of the colorful variety of religiones, of religious festivals each happening in its own place at its own time, which had characterized the empire when it had been a polytheist “commonwealth of cities.”17 loc: 2649

the period after A.D. 250 represented a new situation. Both empire and Church had changed. The empire had become more intrusive and more committed to an ideological stance. The emperors came to see Christianity, for the first time, as an empire-wide phenomenon. An empire in crisis needed the protection of the gods. It was the duty of the emperors to foster the old religion and to halt “impiety” on an empire-wide scale. The suppression of Christianity was no longer a matter for the “local government” of the cities. loc: 2658

empire-wide edicts against the Church as a whole. The first of these was issued in 250, and again in 257. A final set of measures, known to Christians as the Great Persecution, was instituted by the emperor Diocletian in 303. The Great Persecution continued in parts of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt for 11 years. It marked the coming of age both of the new empire and of the Christian Church. loc: 2663

the Christian Church had changed as much as had the empire. It was no longer a low-profile constellation of tiny groups. It had become a universal Church, claiming the loyalty of all believers, at just the same time as the Roman empire had become a true empire, with ideological claims on all its subjects. loc: 2667

In 303, as in 250 and 257, the imperial authorities singled out these leaders for attack. Bishops and clergy – and not the Christian rank and file – were arrested and forced to sacrifice. loc: 2670

At a time when the laws of the emperors were regarded as the source of all order (and were carefully collected and preserved even by humble persons) the Church claimed to possess, in the Christian Scriptures, its own, universal code of law. loc: 2676

While the religiones of the gods were subject to the vagaries of local custom, and were seldom written down, it was only necessary to open a codex of the Scriptures and to read in them the law of God as to which religio was correct and which was not. The message was unambiguous: He that sacrificeth to other gods shall be utterly destroyed. loc: 2685

Last, but not least, the officials of Diocletian destroyed Christian churches. loc: 2689

What mattered, however, is that, in the Christian image of themselves, the Christian churches were “growth points.” They welcomed converts, and expected them to remain loyal. To level these walls, therefore, was to halt an institution that was widely perceived to be capable of “runaway” growth. loc: 2694

in the course of the third century, the Christian communities had expanded rapidly and unexpectedly. loc: 2700

What would have struck a contemporary was that the Christian Church was unlike the many trade associations and cultic brotherhoods which proliferated in the Roman cities. These tended to be class- or gender-specific. loc: 2718

The Christian church, by contrast, was a variegated group.25 In that respect, it was not unlike a miniature version of the new empire. High and low, men and women met as equals because equally subject, now, to the overruling law of one God. loc: 2720

What was striking about the Christian groups, rather, was their intense sense of order and of belonging to a network of similar communities which stretched from one end of the Roman world to the other. loc: 2733

It takes some leap of the modern imagination (which has come to be saturated for centuries by Christian language) to understand the novelty of seeing every human being as subject to the same universal law of God and as equally capable of salvation through the conquest of sin, brought about through baptism followed by permanent and exclusive membership of a unique religious group. loc: 2736

Salvation meant, first and foremost, salvation from idolatry and from the power of the demons. loc: 2740

Christians developed this division of the gods in a more radical direction. They ascribed to all gods without exception the unreliable qualities of the lowest gods. loc: 2744

Christians never denied the existence of the gods. Rather, they treated all gods, even the highest, as malevolent and unreliable. loc: 2748

They merely used the traditional rites, myths, and images of polytheism as so many masks, so as to draw the human race ever further away from the worship of the One true God. loc: 2749

Christ, they believed, had already broken the power of the demons in the invisible world. Now his servants could be seen to drive them from their last hiding places on earth. Exorcism rendered palpable the preordained retreat of the gods, loc: 2757

At the time, the Christian idea of martyrdom was a dangerous novelty. It turned the religious life of the cities into a religious battlefield. For martyrdom came to be seen (by both sides) as a fully public clash of gods. loc: 2763

In a world where execution was a form of public spectacle, witnessed by the entire urban community, martyrdom was perceived by Christians as an unmistakable sign of the power of Christ. Through the heroism of the martyr, the power of God was displayed for all to see in the very center of every city. loc: 2773

What Constantine picked up from Christianity was a grassroots certainty that the Christian God “stood close by” to grant “victory” to his worshippers in every emergency. It was a small step for him to apply this belief to the success of his own armies and to the security of his own empire. loc: 2782

Most Christians were denied the “triumph” of martyrdom. The one triumph that was always possible, however, was the triumph over sin and, eventually, the triumph over death. The Christian funeral was a victory parade. loc: 2785

For the community of the living, however, triumph over sin was the principal concern. It was an urgent and difficult matter. We must remember that, in the Early Church, sin (despite the associations that have accumulated around the notion in later centuries) was a largely novel and helpful concept. loc: 2792

the notion of “sin” which was current in Christian circles made sense of the world in terms of a single, universal human condition. loc: 2795

Christians did no more than sharpen the assertion of ancient philosophers that philosophy was a skill of self-transformation. loc: 2799

The Church was a “school of virtue” open to all. They claimed to be able to transform the human person entirely, through conversion and baptism, in a manner which shocked traditional pagans, as wildly optimistic and, even, as irresponsible – for it seemed to offer easy, “instant” forgiveness of crimes. loc: 2804

Christians held out the prospect of total transformation of the person through conversion and baptism: loc: 2807

Unlike the ferociously individual self-grooming of the philosopher, the handling of “sin” was a communal concern in Christian circles. loc: 2812

A Christian gathering of around the year A.D. 200 was expected to include gripping scenes of moral “exorcism,” through the penance of notable sinners. loc: 2815

In the course of the third century, the handling of sin came to be taken over by the bishop. The bishop was presented as the searching mercy of God personified: loc: 2821

Repentance invited concrete and fully visible reparatory actions. Christians had inherited from Judaism the practice of giving alms “for the remission of sins.” This was a crucial inheritance. loc: 2828

Money and goods given “for the remission of sins” ensured that wealth gained in “the world” (through craftsmanship, trade, and landowning) flowed, without inhibition, into the Church. loc: 2831

In a period of financial recession, the Christian communities, with their habits of regular giving by small persons, were better equipped to weather the storm of political insecurity and inflation loc: 2840

Through giving to the destitute, at the furthest edge of the community, the act of almsgiving made present on earth a touch of the boundless care of God for all mankind. loc: 2844

Altogether, the act of giving was a central part of the day-to-day practice of the Christian community. As a result, the churches of the late third century emerged as remarkably cohesive and solvent bodies. Christians were known to look after their own. loc: 2850

Philosophical speculation and moral self-improvement were regarded as upper-class pursuits, not open to the average person. Many philosophers and moralists were pious persons. But philosophy and morality owed little to religio – to the cult of the gods. They were thought of as human activities, developed over the ages by human beings. They were learned from and enforced by human beings: by one’s father, by one’s teachers, and by the frankly man-made laws and customs of one’s city. loc: 2866

What was surprising to contemporaries about the Christian Church was the extent to which activities, which had tended to be kept separate under the old system of religio, were fused into one. Morality, philosophy, and ritual were treated as intimately connected. loc: 2871

In the Christian churches, philosophy was dependent upon revelation and morality was absorbed into religio. Furthermore, commitment to truth and moral improvement were held to be binding on all believers, irrespective of their class and level of culture. loc: 2874

3 Tempora Christiana: Christian Times loc: 2887

around A.D. 420. All over the Roman empire, articulate Christians, such as Isidore, claimed to enjoy the inestimable advantage, in a time of rapid change, of belonging to a group convinced that history was on their side. loc: 2893

What happened on earth in the fourth century merely made plain the previous, supernatural victory of Christ over his enemies. It was a “mopping-up” operation. The dislodging of the demons from their accustomed haunts – the removal of their sacrificial altars, the sacking of their temples, the breaking of their statues – was presented as the grandiose, and satisfactorily swift, equivalent, on the public level, of the well-known drama of exorcism. loc: 2897

We should not underestimate the fierce mood of Christians in the fourth century A.D. loc: 2909

The unexpected conversion of Constantine in 312, and his subsequent support of the Church, seemed to be a triumphant vindication of this militant view of the world. loc: 2913

Once the Great Persecution had ended, the Christian churches ceased to be small, alienated groups, able to control the behavior of all their members. Large congregations came to contain many wavering believers. For such persons, polytheism was dangerous simply because it was still there: it was still so well established and so seductive. loc: 2918

After 312, first Constantine, then his devout son, Constantius II (337–361), and, finally, Theodosius I (379–395) progressively forbade public sacrifices, closed temples, and colluded in frequent acts of local violence by Christians against major cult sites loc: 2933

The word “pagan,” paganus, began to circulate among Christians. This word emphasized the marginal status of polytheism. Usually, paganus had meant “second-class participant” – civilian as opposed to regular soldier, lower as opposed to high official. loc: 2945

We are dealing here less with direct Christian influence on the legislative program of the emperors from Constantine onward than with the demand of an entire, upper-class society for firm guidelines, from above, on issues which had previously been left to local law and to local public opinion. loc: 2953

bring together the edicts of his Christian predecessors in a single bound book, a codex. The subsequent Theodosian Code appeared in 438.11 It was the most compact and the most long-lasting monument of this great age of organization. loc: 2960

Religious belief as such was now treated as a subject for legislation. loc: 2967

Now it was “thought-crime” itself – wrong views on religion in general, and not simply failure to practice traditional rites in the traditional manner – which was disciplined. loc: 2969

But they still carried in the backs of their minds a model of the supernatural world which was not polarized in the dramatic manner proposed by their bishops. Their monotheism was that much less clear-cut. loc: 2988

For such persons, the venerable religious past of Rome could not be thought of, in its entirety, as a demonically manipulated illusion. They still lived in a multilayered universe. The daemones were lower powers, to be invoked for lower needs. loc: 2999

Despite the official version of the Christian Church, which had stressed the dramatic “End of Paganism”, the conversion of Constantine only marked, at best, the beginning of the end of polytheism. loc: 3008

Constantine and his successors did not bring about the end of paganism. But what they did bring to the Christian churches was peace, wealth, and, above all, the ability to build up, at a surprising rate, a strong local position. loc: 3012

Constantine became a Christian donor of overpowering generosity. He set up great basilica churches loc: 3015

They spoke far more loudly and more continuously of the providential alliance of Church and empire than did any imperial edict or the theorizing of any bishop. loc: 3018

Bishops and clergy received immunities from taxes and from compulsory public services. In each city, the Christian clergy became the only group which expanded rapidly, at a time when the strain of empire had brought other civic associations to a standstill. loc: 3033

imperial supplies of food and clothing, granted to the clergy to distribute to the poor, turned the ferociously inward-looking care of fellow-believers for each other, which had characterized the Christian churches of an earlier age, into something like a public welfare system, loc: 3039

As the fourth century progressed, it became increasingly plain that the Christian bishops, by conquering the cities from the bottom up, were in a position to determine the policies of the emperor. loc: 3045

These were churches built, from the ground up, as it were, by local initiatives. They were not invariably amenable to control by a distant emperor. loc: 3057

Athanasius was a portent of a new age. He combined an ability to provoke the unrelieved suspicion that his local power, as bishop, was based on peculation and violence, with a gift (a sincere gift, but one that he put to use with great political acumen) for presenting himself as the representative of a timeless and universal Christian orthodoxy, loc: 3066

By the end of the fourth century, the “Arian Controversy” was narrated in studiously confrontational terms: it was asserted that “orthodox” bishops had defeated “heretics”; and, in so doing, they had offered heroic resistance to the cajolery and, at times, to the threats, of “heretical” emperors. loc: 3078

This view of the “Arian Controversy” was constructed after the event. It contains little truth. But it inspired the career of one of the founders of western Catholicism, Ambrose, bishop of Milan (ca.339 loc: 3081

He stood up to emperors when their religious policies conflicted with his own, and he rebuked them memorably when he considered that they had sinned. loc: 3084

The story of Theodosius’ penance before Ambrose for the massacre of Thessalonica, in 391, was repeated throughout the Western Middle Ages (and still is repeated today) as the classic example of the beginning of the problem of the conflict of Church and State. loc: 3088

The expanding power of the Christian churches had placed in the hands of the bishops the levers of power. loc: 3092

A civic-minded, secular aristocracy still resided in them. The cities could be controlled. It was, if anything, the countryside which proved more intractable. Newly Christianized by more radical forms of Christianity, the countryside always threatened to slip from the orderly embrace of the Christian empire. loc: 3097

In Syria, also, the roads had long been travelled by bands of charismatic preachers who owed nothing to the “world.” Pointedly celibate, and filled with the power of the Holy Spirit, their travelling bands were a sight to be seen. loc: 3103

They were the “unique ones,” the “lonely ones.” In Egypt, the Greek word monachos, “lonely one,” from which our word “monk” derives, loc: 3106

in Persian Mesopotamia, Christian radical ideas had led to the foundation, by a visionary, of the first new religion to emerge out of Christianity. Mani (216 loc: 3112

Manichaeism spread throughout the entire length of the sweep of settled life, from the Mediterranean to China, loc: 3120

Checked by savage persecution within the Christian empire, the public appeal of Manichaeism soon waned in the West. loc: 3130

In Syria and Egypt, by contrast, monasticism was infinitely complex. In many ways, it settled down as a humdrum movement. loc: 3136

Upper-class Christians, women quite as much as men, became avid readers of monastic literature produced, in the first place, in Egypt. loc: 3139

A decade previously, Martin (335–397), a retired member of the Imperial General Staff and future bishop of Tours, had created a monastery on the cliffs overlooking the Loire outside his episcopal city. His monks were men of good family. loc: 3152

As Bishop of Tours from 371 to 397, Martin re-enacted, in the countryside of Gaul, the victorious rout of the demons, which, as we have seen, formed the basic Christian narrative for the spread of the faith. He did so with the collusion of a circle of landed aristocrats. loc: 3155

the religious revolution associated with the reign of Constantine went hand in hand with a social revolution – the creation and stabilization of a new, and self-confident, upper class. loc: 3172

For them, conversion to Christianity was a conversion, above all, to the almost numinous majesty of a Roman empire, loc: 3175

In this public culture, Christians and non-Christians were free to meet on neutral ground. Men of different religiones could collaborate to maintain a Roman world restored to order. loc: 3192

A “post-pagan” world was not, by any means, necessarily a Christian world. loc: 3197

In this period, also, the Feast of the Kalends of January positively blossomed throughout the empire. loc: 3199

a feast which celebrated with ancient, religious fervor (although without blood-sacrifice) the unflagging vigor of a Roman order, as this was mysteriously renewed at the start of every year. loc: 3201

His congregation, though good Christians, were also loyal members of their city: they would not forgo that great moment of euphoria, in which the fortune of the city, and of all within it, was renewed. loc: 3209

These examples point to the existence of a strong, religiously neutral public culture in the later Roman empire. But the continuance of such a culture depended on the continued stability of West Roman society. loc: 3215

The late fourth century was an age of renewed civil wars, which involved the stripping of frontier garrisons. In 406, Gaul experienced a major barbarian raid. In 410, Rome was sacked by Alaric the Visigoth. Neither of these was a definitive disaster; but public morale was badly shaken. loc: 3219

After almost a century of stability in a “restored” empire, the upper classes of the Roman West had to face, once again, the essential fragility of the empire in which they lived. loc: 3223

“The golden tissue” woven by shared office and by friendships based on a shared upper-class culture had become unravelled. loc: 3238

Paulinus had redefined pietas, the essential Roman virtue of loyalty to friends and to one’s homeland, in starkly Christian terms. Piety to Christ was all that mattered for him. loc: 3240

In one way or another, all the great Latin converts to the ascetic life, though they wished to imitate the distant monks of Egypt by dropping off the edge of the world, ended up in positions of prominence in the Catholic Church. Their behavior was watched. Their books were read. Their ideas were hotly discussed. loc: 3254

For them “conversion” did not mean a change of belief. It meant, rather, a dramatic hardening of the will to follow a more uncompromising form of Christianity loc: 3258

Augustine loc: 3260

For him the convert emerged as a person sheathed in the will of God. loc: 3262

For Pelagius, and his many supporters, the “grace” of God did not work in this manner. God’s “grace” consisted rather in God’s decision to create human nature in such a way that human beings could follow his commands through the exercise of their own free will. loc: 3272

Once the accretion of evil habits, contracted through contact with the “world,” had been washed away through the transformative rite of baptism, every Christian believer was both able and obliged to reach out for perfection. loc: 3274

The controversy placed human agency at the center of attention. The subsequent qualified acceptance of the views of Augustine by the Latin Church, in preference to those of Pelagius, placed God at the center of that agency. loc: 3281

Human beings could not simply make themselves good, when they pleased, by their own free will. They depended intimately on God’s grace for constant inspiration and support. loc: 3282

by rallying to Augustine, Latin Christians of the fifth century made plain that they needed heroes, not self-improvers. Heroes, as many late Roman persons knew, were made by God. loc: 3285

What Christianity needed was the certainty that the Church contained members of the elect. The Church would always produce men and women who were the stuff of heroes because filled with the grace of God. loc: 3291

In Augustine’s world, the “elect” and the “predestinate” were reassuringly visible. In the first case, they were the martyrs. These were universally acknowledged heroes of the faith. Their memory was celebrated in every city loc: 3294

grace had conferred true freedom on them – the freedom of the militant to act and to endure. loc: 3298

They were joined, in Augustine’s mind and in the growing practice of the Church, by those who had not died for the faith, but had, rather, struggled to uphold and to extend it. loc: 3303

to bring a whole pre-Christian culture out of their stormy past into the service of the Catholic Church. loc: 3305

he emerged as far more consequentially egalitarian than was Pelagius. Augustine’s theology of grace embraced more believers. It had room both for acknowledged heroes and for the average Christian. loc: 3308

each Christian was equal to every other, because all Christians were equally dependent on the grace of God. loc: 3314

Augustine saw the Catholic Church as a united community precisely because it was a community of sinners as well as a community of heroes loc: 3327

Human beings could not glory. But an institution could do so. What was truly glorious on earth, for all the imperfections of its individual members, was the Catholic Church. loc: 3336

without Catholic baptism, Augustine was convinced, it seemed impossible (to human minds, at least) that God would grant forgiveness of the original sin loc: 3337

He was the first Christian that we know of to think consistently and in a practical manner in terms of making everyone a Christian. loc: 3343

He saw no reason why the normal pressures by which any late Roman local community enforced conformity on its members should not be brought to bear against schismatics and heretics. He justified imperial laws which decreed the closing of temples and the exile and disendowment of rival churches. loc: 3347

the City of God, a book which he began to write in 413, as an answer to pagan criticisms and to Christian disillusionment, provoked by Alaric’s sack of Rome in 410. loc: 3353

A common sin had made all men and all women, quite irrespective of race, of class, and of level of culture, equally aliens from that Heavenly Jerusalem. All were summoned, with stark impartiality, to become Christians and so to begin the long, slow return to heaven, their true homeland. loc: 3357

Augustine’s “Glorious City,” and its entrance-point on earth, the Catholic Church, was not a small place. It was a “city” for all ages and for every region: loc: 3371

4 Virtutes sanctorum … strages gentium: “Deeds of Saints … Slaughter of Nations loc: 3380

After the civil wars of the late fourth century and the barbarian raids which began in 406, as a result of the stripping down of frontier defenses caused by the civil wars, the age of peace was over. loc: 3419

The military and fiscal apparatus associated with the reformed empire of the fourth century failed, ingloriously, to protect the frontiers. loc: 3422

the West was rapidly returning to political conditions which resembled the state of the western Mediterranean before the conquests of Julius Caesar. loc: 3428

In the eastern Mediterranean, by contrast, Constantinople rose to the fore as “New Rome.” The emperors of Constantinople still stood for Roman law and order as it should be. loc: 3431

in the end, local loyalties were what counted for most. If the empire failed them, they would find their own ways of looking after themselves and their region. loc: 3444

with the empire no longer available to protect their privileges, they would have to learn to live in a world in which a hitherto despised group of outsiders, known to them as “barbarians,” were both their partners and, in many ways, their masters. loc: 3450

In every region of the West, these Romani formed a small but determined group, perched at the top of their local society. loc: 3452

local aristocracies, who now struggled to maintain their power through collaboration, for the first time, with non-Roman warlords. loc: 3457

What went first, in this period of unrest, were the wide horizons associated with the post-Constantinian Christian empire. loc: 3459

The sacking of a city had become a normal event. It was not even a particularly bloodthirsty event. It was the cynical “shakedown” of a Roman city by a small wandering army: loc: 3473

what was more painful still was the increasing recognition that regional societies, cut loose from the empire, could maintain a level of order, even of prosperity, but only if they could reach a modus vivendi with the “ loc: 3479

what Sidonius’ letters deliberately suppressed, through conjuring up vivid, classical images of “barbarian” life, was an ugly fact. The barbarians were not at all unlike the Romans. They were potentes, “men of power,” whose claim to land and taxes rested on their military ability. loc: 3501

Many had been in imperial service for generations. They were products of the middle ground, in which Roman and barbarian customs had come to merge along the frontiers of the empire. loc: 3504

The fourth-century Roman empire needed loyal soldiers. It often preferred those soldiers who did not share the values and inhibitions of the traditional landowning aristocracy. Soldiers, indeed, were positively encouraged to be a class apart – to remain alien and abrasive. In any case, for over a century, imperial armies had been filled with foreigners or near-foreigners. loc: 3514

What mattered for these viri militares, these men of war, was loyalty. As long as the Roman army survived, Romans and barbarians within the army were held together by a common loyalty to the Roman state. loc: 3519

“Romans” and “barbarians” met as equals in the Roman armies because they were equally servants of the emperor and of no one else. loc: 3522

In the fourth century, the privileged position enjoyed by the Roman army as a separate group, which stood a little to one side of Roman civilian society, had enabled barbarian warriors within the Roman army to rise to power. loc: 3530

they now came as substitutes for a Roman army which had vanished. Inevitably, the takeover itself was not without incidents of violence. But this violence was not continuous, nor was it decisive. loc: 3533

It is profoundly misleading to speak of the history of western Europe in the fifth century as “the age of the barbarian invasions.” Such a melodramatic view assumes, in the barbarians, a level of autonomy and of destructive potential which they did not possess. It was, rather, an age of brutal “downsizing.” This was caused by the sudden and unexpected relaxation of the power of the Roman state. loc: 3536

What frightened contemporaries was not the prospect of endless “barbarian invasions.” It was the prospect of a power vacuum in their own region. Hence the speed with which “Romans” found themselves collaborating with “barbarians” – that is, with hard men of military background – to salvage what they could of the old order by creating local centers of strong rule. loc: 3540

In the first generations, at least, the “barbarians” offered their services in the traditional manner. They came as “guests” of the local populations. loc: 3547

the “barbarian settlements” did not involve great social upheaval. loc: 3558

They were settled in such a way as to make them look, as much as possible, like Roman soldiers. loc: 3560

Over large areas of Gaul, Spain, and, eventually, after 476, even in Italy, military men of non-Roman origin became prominent members of local society. This situation soon led them to compete with the Romani on their own terms. They quickly turned their military privileges into solid, Roman gains – land, gold, clients, and slaves. loc: 3569

Visigothic and Burgundian noble men and women rapidly became indistinguishable from their upper-class Roman neighbors. loc: 3573

These “barbarian” soldiers were no longer defined in Roman society by loyalty to a distant emperor. A Visigoth or a Burgundian drew his privileges from serving in the army of his king. Each king had his own royal seat. loc: 3579

Each city acted as the power base of a local militia, which claimed to be the army of a separate gens, of a separate tribe, loyal to its own king. loc: 3581

The emergence of “ethnicity” as the basis of a new ruling class in the post-imperial West was the exact reverse of the process which had led to the formation of a Roman imperial civilization in the West in the first centuries of the empire. loc: 3585

Now, the emphasis was placed on the opposite – on ethnic diversity. Different barbarian groups insisted on their separate identities, as Goths, Franks, and Vandals. loc: 3588

in the conditions of the fifth and sixth centuries, separateness, stridently asserted, rather than assimilation, seemed to open up the shortest route to power and wealth. loc: 3592

They depended on the support of large numbers of armed followers who continued to think of themselves as “fellow-tribesmen.” With their wives and families, such persons were barely distinguishable, in their economic condition, from the unfriendly Roman populations in which they found themselves. Their Gothic-ness and their right, as free men, to bear arms, was their only claim to privileged treatment. Without it they would have rapidly sunk to the level of Roman serfs. loc: 3596

But the identification of each army with a specific ethnic group was never complete. loc: 3603

In reality, active membership in a specific army and the privileges attached to military service – and not ethnic origin in and of itself – defined membership in a specific gens loc: 3606

the militias of the fifth century were a haven for renegades of every sort loc: 3614

Disloyalty to the traditional civilian values of the Roman elites was in the air, loc: 3615

barbarians, also, were sincere Christians. loc: 3619

the Visigoths, in particular, had received the faith in the glory days of the empire, in the reigns of Constantius II and Valens. They were committed to what had been the current orthodoxy of the Danubian provinces at that time. It is only in retrospect that we call it “ loc: 3619

The result was a stand-off, where “Romans” and “barbarians” went about their separate ways. loc: 3624

Although they were often pious Arian Christians, most barbarian rulers tended to keep their beliefs to themselves. The only exception was the Vandals in Africa. loc: 3629

Arian rulers rarely victimized Catholics. Indeed, they shared with them the same religious language. loc: 3633

Catholic Christianity of the western Mediterranean came to see itself, in exceptionally stark terms, as a religion on the defensive. loc: 3638

Solid walls, many of them built in the insecure days of the third century A.D., surrounded the compact nucleus of what had once been sprawling classical cities. loc: 3651

Walls and bishops went together. The virtutes, the miraculous deeds, most appreciated in holy bishops in Gaul were those in which their prayers ensured that the walls of their city would hold firm. loc: 3656

The fate of each region depended on the morale of its urban centers. Apart from the occasional, chilling grand raid (such as those associated with Attila) most warfare, in fifth-century Gaul, was a small-scale affair. The control of whole regions was decided by a war of nerves, loc: 3665

The townsfolk were particularly vulnerable to such scare tactics. They needed leaders on whom they could rely, to maintain their spirits and to mitigate the disruptive effects of small, vindictive raids. They found these in the Christian bishops. loc: 3670

The local church became the “fixative” which held whole populations in place. loc: 3673

More important still, the buildings of the church spoke of the day-to-day determination of cities to survive and to be seen to survive. loc: 3680

At a time when secular building had come to a standstill, these churches represented an impressive coagulation of wealth and collaborative energy. loc: 3684

In these churches, daylight was trapped in the unearthly shimmer of gold mosaic and multicolored marbles. To all who entered them, they brought to earth a glimpse of Paradise. loc: 3688

An age of great basilicas fostered a piety of great assemblies. The mechanisms of reparation for sin, which had long been familiar to all Christian communities, took on a distinctively communal meaning in Gaul and Italy. Group penance, linked to penitential forms of intercessory prayer, was a discipline which curbed the widespread mood of sauve qui peut loc: 3693

It was more usual to rally round a bishop who could claim to speak in the name of the ancient Christian heroes of the city. The saintly dead represented collective loyalty at its most familiar and most intense. loc: 3704

In return for protection obtained through their prayers, the saints demanded reverentia, fully public tokens of respect, from their pious clients. loc: 3715

Barbarian kings, even barbarian kingdoms, came and went. Bishops drawn from the “Roman” aristocracy remained. loc: 3734

As a result of this process of the aristocratization of the Church, Gaul became very different from Italy, North Africa, and the eastern empire, whose clergy tended to represent, rather, the middling classes of the cities. Gallic bishops tended to come into their city “from on top. loc: 3737

Simplicius, the son and son-in-law of former bishops, was the ideal choice. He had built a church for the city. He had stood up to the Visigoths. “Time and again … he has acted as spokesman of the city, before skin-clad kings and purplerobed emperors. loc: 3745

this development coincided with a religious revolution. Many of these aristocratic bishops had also become monks. loc: 3752

Cassian’s Institutions of the Monastic Life were written in 420. They provided reports of the monastic life in Egypt, loc: 3762

In the hands of a skilled writer, the codex, once again, helped to bring the traditions of the eastern Christian world close to the West. loc: 3765

Equally important, at the time, was the island monastery of Lérins, opposite Antibes, founded in 400 loc: 3771

The monastic discipline of Lérins was designed to break forever, in young men of noble family, the springs of worldly pride. loc: 3779

The proud eye and haughty step of the “natural-born” leader of Gallic society were curbed by a monastic discipline of humility. This deliberately “humbled” body was now ready for new, fully public action. loc: 3784

once he had shown in this drastic manner that he had abandoned his past as a pampered nobleman, Germanus was free to apply the skills of his aristocratic background to his life as a bishop. loc: 3791

His biography was a stirring assertion of the faith that, once chastened by spectacular ascetic effort, the old skills of public life, exercised by a former aristocrat and public servant, might come again, in higher form, to serve the Catholic Church. loc: 3803

Such images of the bishop proved decisive in later ages. In many provinces of the West, they placed the aristocratic bishop at the center of the Christian imagination. loc: 3814

The bishop of Rome was called a papa. The word meant “grand old man.” The word “pope” comes from this courtesy title. But a papa of the fifth century was in no way a “pope” as modern persons know him, as the undisputed head of a worldwide Roman Catholic Church. loc: 3827

Throughout the fifth century, the papa, the pope of Rome, could be relied upon to provide authoritative, reassuringly old-fashioned advice on how a well-run church should function: loc: 3831

It would, however, be a serious anachronism to see the bishops of Rome as being, at this time, central to the Latin Churches of the West. loc: 3847

on a day-to-day basis, they looked eastward, and not toward the north. What happened at Constantinople meant more for them than what was happening in Gaul. loc: 3850

What truly mattered was the meteoric rise in their very midst of Constantinople. By the early fifth century, Constantinople had become a world capital. loc: 3862

Antioch and Alexandria were ancient Christian cities. They were now as large as Rome itself. The patriarchs of these two cities vied with each other to secure the election of their own candidates to the bishopric of Constantinople. Each sought to discredit the bishop set up by the other. Each attempted, at different times, to bring the bishop of Rome into the struggle on their side. loc: 3867

The emperors of “New Rome” had not forgotten the West. Indeed, they were positively anxious to invoke the safely distant prestige of the Latin bishop of Rome, as the imagined guardian of the faith of Saint Peter, as a counterweight to the all too present, ever-insistent claims of the Greek bishops of Antioch and Alexandria. loc: 3873

The ancient imaginative model of the universe (to which we referred in the last chapter) no longer helped them. This model had stressed the chasm between the higher and the lower reaches of the universe. loc: 3894

What mattered less, now, was not how to get from the lowest to the highest, from man to God. The issue was how to understand the unique manner in which God had come down to man – how the highest had been joined to the lowest in the person of Christ. loc: 3899

Large Christian congregations needed to know the answer. They needed to feel that God was with them on ground level, as it were. loc: 3904

Athanasius had insisted, God in person had come down to earth in human form. loc: 3909

In attacking Arius and views associated with men such as Eusebius, Athanasius realized that the Christian people needed to be able to say Emmanuel, “God is with us. loc: 3918

Because Christ had come down to earth among men, it was that much easier to turn directly to him. The intermediate powers of the mundus did not have to be invoked for help in earthly matters. loc: 3924

It was possible to call on the name of Jesus in all situations, knowing that, through his Incarnation, he had come to know every danger and every temptation, that he had overcome them all, and that his power was still immediately available to help the believer to do the same. loc: 3930

For Nestorius, who was patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, the Alexandrian solution was repugnant. It seemed to bring God so close to humanity as to implicate an all-powerful and deathless being in the dishonor of suffering. loc: 3942

God’s power and majesty were not affected by the Crucifixion of Christ: for it was his chosen human Son and servant, not God himself, who had suffered on the Cross. loc: 3945

The Alexandrians saw the matter very differently. It was vital for them that the Incarnation had made of God and man a single, indissoluble whole – a single “nature.” For this reason, the intransigent followers of the theology of Cyril came to be known as Monophysites loc: 3951

they presented Christ as a unique being, in which humanity and divinity had come together to form a distinctive and undivided whole. loc: 3954

This was a real and intimate link, not a mere touching of two eternally distinct spheres – the human and the divine. In Christ, God had, indeed, shared in human suffering. To speak of God as having been, indeed, crucified, in the person of Jesus, was to remind him of the shared suffering which bound him indissolubly, almost organically, to the human race. He could not forget those with whom he had once shared the universal taste of death. loc: 3960

In a time of affliction, no matter how cruelly distant God might seem to be, Monophysites believed that God could be summoned by these words, that spoke to him of his own sufferings as a human being. loc: 3967

The cult of the Virgin Mary as Theotokos, as “she who gave birth to God,” was pushed to the fore in an atmosphere that demanded one thing of God: that his relations with mankind should rest not on a mere partnership with mankind but on the tender, wordless kinship of shared flesh. loc: 3970

Christ must listen to those who prayed to his mother; for it was she who had rendered him fully human. Only she could remind him, with the authority of a mother, of what he shared with the afflicted human flesh of those who turned to him. loc: 3977

The Council of Chalcedon was summoned by the emperor Marcian in 451, loc: 3981

Marcian was a newly installed, military man. Like most monarchs who find themselves in a weak position, as a newcomer to power, Marcian needed to show, as soon as possible, that he could do something decisive and spectacular. loc: 3984

Marcian did not wait for a consensus to emerge among the eastern bishops. Instead, he opted heavily for a theological statement drawn up by pope Leo. loc: 3986

To Latin theologians, it was a perfect statement of the faith. It gave due weight both to the divine and to the human elements in the person and life of Christ. But this was precisely what was wrong with it. To the Egyptian followers of Cyril of Alexandria, Leo’s careful balancing of the divine and the human in the person of Christ seemed to suggest that, in Christ, the divine and the human could be separated in the first place. loc: 3990

The opponents of Leo insisted that divine and human had been joined in Christ in such a way that the human person of Christ was totally transfused with divine power. loc: 3994

In their opinion, the council had divided the human and the divine in Christ and had thereby destroyed the solidarity between God and human beings. loc: 3998

The entire quality of a post-polytheist civilization was at stake. The Christians had ousted the gods who had once joined heaven and earth with such ease. They had exalted one God at the cost of making him seem very distant indeed from humankind. They were left to struggle with the manner in which this High God had joined humanity in the person of Jesus Christ. Only by resolving this conundrum could they bring heaven and earth back together again. loc: 4002

Part II Divergent Legacies A.D. 500 loc: 4454

6 Reverentia, rusticitas: Caesarius of Arles to Gregory of Tours loc: 4459

Even if the gods and their ceremonies were banished from the city, they still hung above it in the heavens. We must remember that late antique persons, Christian as well as pagan, did not look up into an empty sky. The mundus loc: 4468

All over the Mediterranean world, the cities and the rural landscapes were thought of as nestling in the embrace of a natural world that was heavy with religious meaning. The natural world, the mundus, was shot through with unseen powers who had yet to take on Christian faces. loc: 4477

The Christian Church had emerged, by A.D. 500, as the sole public religion of the Roman world. Paganism had been officially abolished. But the real battle with paganism in western Europe had only begun. loc: 4481

The natural world, from the highest heavens to the humble earth in the fields, had to be “demystified,” because only when “demystified” in this way could the natural world be filled up again, but now with Christian figures, most especially with the figures of the Christian saints. loc: 4484

the bishops were not the only persons responsible for bringing churches to the peasantry. All over Europe, from southern Italy to Portugal, great landowners began to set up chapels, monasteries, even substantial basilicas, on their estates. loc: 4494

Local markets had always taken place at pagan country shrines on the estates of landowners. Now these shrines were replaced by a church. This was a time when local markets had become more important. loc: 4498

The spread of Christianity in the countryside of western Europe is linked to processes of which we still know little, to the redistribution of trade and of patterns of settlement in a post-imperial age. loc: 4501

The bishops of the city were seldom faced with stubborn rural paganism. Rather, they were faced with varieties of “home-grown” Christianity, which constantly threatened to slip beyond their control. The principal concern of articulate bishops in the sixth century was not how to suppress paganism. It was how to impose a “correct” interpretation on a bewildering range of religious practices, most of which claimed to be “ loc: 4506

The natural world absorbed the energies of over 90 percent of the inhabitants of every region, as farmers and as pastoralists. They depended every year on the erratic fortunes of the weather and on the harvest. loc: 4510

In an agrarian world, human existence depended on the outcome of unseen struggles in the upper air. loc: 4513

Christianity had to make sense to populations who had always thought of themselves as embedded in the natural world, and who had always expected to be able to impinge upon that world, so as to elicit its generosity and to ward off its perils, by means of rites which reached back, in most parts of Europe, to prehistoric times. loc: 4519

The spectacular rise of the Christian Church at the expense of the pagan temples merely distracted attention from the humble day-to-day relation between humans and the sacred loc: 4534

The Christians of the Greek East tended to see their world in terms of the triumphant narrative which had emerged in the age of Constantine. As we saw in chapter 3, they tended to treat the present as a bright new age. They were “Christian times. loc: 4545

This did not mean, in fact, that many regions of the Eastern empire were Christianized any more rapidly than were those of the West. The Greek intelligentsia continued to include distinguished pagans: Christians called them “ loc: 4560

In western Europe, by contrast, different attitudes prevailed. The collapse of the Roman empire in the West seriously weakened the Constantinian myth of a Christian empire, whose manifest destiny had been to banish all paganism from the face of the earth. loc: 4569

the burden of making the world appear Christian fell on the shoulders of the local bishops and their clergy. City by city, region by region, it was conscientious bishops who set the pace in grappling with the pagan past. loc: 4573

The Latin bishops whose views have come down to us (largely because their writings were copied out and circulated) are interesting because they had one thing in common. They tended to take their cue from the more inward-looking and pessimistic streak in the thought of Augustine of Hippo. loc: 4578

each believer had to continue, even after conversion and baptism, to battle with the tenacity of evil customs within himself or herself. And these “evil customs” inevitably included parts of the pagan past. loc: 4583

Caesarius, bishop of Arles from 502 to 542.22 Caesarius was devoted to Augustine. loc: 4596

he presented paganism as no more than a fragmented collection of “survivals.” It consisted of a set of “sacrilegious habits” and inert “evil customs. loc: 4611

Caesarius was very much a Gallo-Roman noble and a product of the austere monastic discipline instilled at Lérins. He had a strong sense of belonging to an elite. Paganism was not only repugnant to him. He thought of it as culturally inferior to his own well-groomed version of Christianity. loc: 4620

To fall back into pagan ways was, quite frankly, to show lack of grooming. It was to behave like rustici, like boorish peasants, loc: 4622

To prune rusticitas in this way meant that Caesarius had to challenge an entire mentality. He had to dethrone the ancient image of the world. In his preaching, the mundus, the physical universe, was drained of its autonomy. It had no life of its own apart from that given to it by the will of God. loc: 4631

Time, for instance, was detached from nature. Time no longer registered the organic throb of the natural world, as this was shown in the changing of the seasons. Instead, Christian time registered the great acts of God in history. loc: 4635

To think that human wills could intervene to change the course of nature in a material world where all events depended on the will of God was, in the opinion of Caesarius, the height of stupidity. loc: 4647

Yet non-Christians and Christians alike had remained intensely interested in exploring new ways of making contact with the mundus and the invisible powers within it. They needed these powers as much as they had before, and they were quite prepared, despite the disapproval of their bishop, to experiment with new combinations of rituals. loc: 4662

The spread of the Christian cult of the saints in the course of the sixth century did more to place a Christian face upon the natural world than did the preaching of a man such as Caesarius. loc: 4684

These religious habits focused on the notion of reverentia. By reverentia sixth-century Latin Christians meant a reverential attention to the saints. loc: 4687

Reverentia created “habits of the heart.” It assumed that the saints were still active and present on earth, and that good and bad fortune depended on the manner in which they were treated by their worshippers. Reverence of that kind – a readiness to see the hand of the saints in day-to-day affairs loc: 4690

The man whose vivid and abundant writings were devoted to maintaining this view was Gregory, bishop of Tours from 573 to 594. loc: 4696

Justinian (527–565) had attempted to put the clock back in the western Mediterranean. He reconquered all North Africa for the Roman empire and nearly conquered all of Italy. He eventually ruined the Roman social order in Italy by his failure. Worse yet, between 542 and 570, bubonic plague burned out the heart of the once formidable eastern Roman empire and emptied the coastline of the western Mediterranean. loc: 4704

By the end of Gregory’s life, power and, with it, cultural confidence had begun to tilt insensibly away from the Mediterranean and toward northwestern Europe. loc: 4707

Gaul under Frankish rule was not all that different from what a provincial society had been like, in reality, in the last centuries of the Roman empire, once we take away the grandiose self-image with which the empire had invested its rule in the provinces. It was a confederation of regions. Each region was ruled, in a rough and ready manner, by its local aristocracies in the name of a distant court.41 What had changed was the texture of these aristocracies. They were no longer made up of civilians. Among the Franks, military men predominated. loc: 4713

The carrying of arms and the presence of armed retinues were features of everyday life, even within the walls of Christian churches. loc: 4719

For the Frankish kings had brought order to Gaul. The rise of Clovis and the establishment of a strong monarchy in the former territories of the Roman limes in northern Gaul and along the Rhine (which we described in chapter 5) brought stability to the entire province after the desperate uncertainties of the fifth century. loc: 4724

It was Fortunatus’ Italy, and not Merovingian Gaul, that was “the sick man of Europe.” Italy had been ravaged by incessant wars. It was in the grip of an economic depression which threatened, in many areas, to bring urban life to an end in what had once been the most heavily urbanized region of western Europe. loc: 4737

a new, non-Mediterranean economy had begun to enable the Frankish aristocracy and their Roman collaborators to accumulate wealth in a manner that would prove decisive for the future position of Francia in western Europe. loc: 4743

Old “Roman” families had survived all over Gaul, from the Rhine to Aquitaine. In the course of the sixth century, they merged with the Franks to form a new class of potentes, of “men of power” of mixed Frankish and Roman descent. The lay members of this new aristocracy were united by a shared Catholicism and by a shared avarice. loc: 4747

And in this new mixed nobility, made up of Frankish and Roman “men of power,” none throve more than did the Gallic bishops. loc: 4751

The local aristocracies needed them. They were constantly appealed to as arbiters, as peacemakers, and as diplomats. Each, in his own city, was law and order personified. This was not simply because many bishops had been aristocrats. They were sincerely looked up to as the “high priests” of their region. loc: 4754

The bishops presided over the distributive system connected with almsgiving and with pious donations. In this capacity, they “redeemed” the wealth of the laity by turning it into spectacular shrines and buildings. loc: 4764

the bishops were expected to demonstrate the importance of their Church by stunning displays of wealth.49 In so doing, they performed nothing less than a kind of supernatural alchemy. loc: 4766

By lavishing wealth on the saints, the bishop had sent “treasure” on to heaven to benefit the souls of the donors. And this “treasure in heaven” was reflected back to earth in shrines which shone like frozen drops of supernatural splendor. The shimmer of the tomb was a guarantee of the further “blaze” of miraculous power loc: 4773

in sixth-century Gaul, the bishop did not merely support the indigent. He poured wealth and energy into maintaining an entire urban community.53 The image of the good Catholic bishop as a “father” of his city was formed in this period. It became what was, perhaps, the most long-lasting institutional ideal in western Europe. loc: 4788

To call Gregory’s book a History of the Franks is seriously misleading. Sin and retribution for sin, not ethnicity, was Gregory’s all-consuming interest. In writing the history of his own times, Gregory ensured that the misfortunes of well-to-do sinners, Frankish and Roman alike, would be long remembered. loc: 4827

He wrote of them because he was convinced, and needed to convince others, that those who came to a bad end did so because they had offended God and his saints. loc: 4830

Gregory had good reason to write as he did. He was little concerned with the survival of paganism in Gaul.61 But he was deeply worried by the ease with which alternative versions of Christianity sprang up whenever he and his Catholic colleagues relaxed their vigilance. loc: 4853

What he found, rather, was a world characterized, in city and country alike, by fertile religious experimentation. Christian rituals and Christian holy figures were adapted by local religious experts to serve the needs of persons who would have considered themselves to be good Christians. loc: 4864

The saints, as Gregory understood them (and not as persons such as Leubella claimed to know them), must be seen to have been able to meet every local emergency, to account for every local legend, and to be associated with every beneficent manifestation of the sacred.65 loc: 4867

To ensure this, Gregory worked and wrote ceaselessly. As a result, the natural world regained some of its magic. loc: 4870

For Gregory, a “relic” was a physical fragment, an enduring “trace” that had been, as it were, left behind in the material world by a fully redeemed person, a saint, who now dwelt in God’s Paradise. loc: 4873

the basilicas of the saints in Gaul stood out in a dark, violent, and malodorous world as places where Paradise could be found on earth.69 loc: 4887

To come to the tomb of a major saint, such as Saint Martin at Tours, was to breathe in a little of the healing air of Paradise. loc: 4896

To be healed at such a place was to experience a sudden flowering of the body. loc: 4899

Over the centuries, the Christian churches of Gaul had produced, and still produced, in his opinion, a number of persons, of both sexes and of every class, race, and region, who now lived in Paradise. loc: 4913

These unearthly events were intimations that innumerable holy men and women, dwellers of Paradise, stood ready, in all places, and even in the most out-of-the-way areas, to help Catholic worshippers in their everyday needs. loc: 4923

Through these many saints, Paradise itself came to ooze into the world. Nature itself was redeemed. Because of his faith in the proximity of Paradise, Gregory allowed sacrality to seep back into the landscape of Gaul. The countryside found its voice again, to speak, in an ancient spiritual vernacular, of the presence of the saints. loc: 4926

5 On the Frontiers: Noricum, Ireland, and Francia loc: 4018

At the time when the Roman empire was still in existence, the soldiers of many towns were supported by public money to guard the frontier. When this arrangement ceased, the military formations were dissolved and the frontier vanished. loc: 4024

The empire whose fall in 453 had truly altered their lives was the empire of Attila. The disintegration of Hunnish domination north of the Danube left small barbarian tribes, no longer subject to Hunnish control, free to infiltrate as they wished into the “Roman” territories on its southern banks. loc: 4037

barbarian tribes from across the Danube – such as the Rugi, in the region around Lorch – pressed in to “eat” the Roman cities. They had no wish to destroy them. Instead, they offered the inhabitants high-handed and unpredictable protection in exchange for tribute and occasional levies of skilled manpower. loc: 4042

Always short of manpower, and particularly of skilled craftsmen, the barbarians across the frontier absorbed Romani at an alarming rate. Slave-raiding was a grim feature of life on the frontiers. loc: 4057

It was largely the frontier districts that were exposed to violence and loc: 4077

What happened in Noricum happened also in Britain. The withdrawal of the Roman armies, after 406, left a power vacuum on the island. An entire governmental elite vanished. loc: 4086

The settlement of Saxon pirates in around 440 as billeted “guests” in the traditional late Roman manner proved a failure. Small Saxon bands, free from governmental control of any kind, came to settle permanently in Britain where the English Channel met the North Sea. loc: 4093

Saxons participated in the civil wars in which local leaders of Roman background fought each other for control of the island. loc: 4097

They depended on the forced mobilization and circulation of wealth through relentless taxation for the support of the Roman armies. Once that great machine had been brought to a halt, in a “post-imperial” world, the economy of the entire island of Britain (and, one suspects, of other areas of western Europe) rapidly lost its sophisticated Roman face. Britain slipped back into conditions more brutally simplified even than the Iron Age societies which had preceded the coming of the Romans. loc: 4103

Far from destroying Roman Britain, the Saxons slowly fought their way into a world which had already ceased to be “Roman” once its elites ceased to have a part in the massive tax structures set up by the late Roman state. loc: 4110

The atmosphere of a declining province may have favored Pelagianism. The Pelagians of Britain may have thought of themselves as “Old Christians,” as an embattled minority in a superficially Christianized province. loc: 4133

In the sixth century, this heavy emphasis on the moral purity of the few may well have led to the rise in western Britain and in Ireland of notoriously uncompromising forms of monasticism. Altogether, in post-imperial Britain, the monks and bishops were critics of their society. They did not claim, as in Gaul, to be its leaders. loc: 4137

In Britain, it seems as if old Roman centers had vanished and even the simplest forms of goods had ceased to circulate. Yet networks of information survived. At a high level, groups of committed religious experts, literate clergymen in Britain as elsewhere, maintained a quite surprising degree of inter-communication with each other. loc: 4143

Whatever the Christian religious experts might do, real power, in Britain, fell, by default, into the hands of men of war. Unlike that of Gaul, the history of fifth-century Britain is dominated not by “Roman” bishops but by “tyrants” and successful local chieftains. loc: 4151

Further south, in western Britain, hard men defended a drastically simplified, but still “Roman” provincial landscape. The “tribal” cities founded by the Romans still formed the basic territorial units into which the land was divided. Estates were organized around former Roman villas. loc: 4164

Once the barrier of Roman control was removed, the northern and western parts of Britain and the hitherto utterly non-Roman eastern coast of Ireland came together to form a single “Celtic Mediterranean” of the north. loc: 4180

By 430, substantial colonies of British Christian slaves must have existed along the east coast of Ireland, along with the “Roman” British merchants who collaborated with the Irish warlords to stock the fields of Leinster with new labor and the households of the chieftains with new women. loc: 4189

Palladius, had been sent to “the Irish who believe in Christ.” Palladius’ mission was seen by him as the logical consequence of a campaign to halt the spread of Pelagianism in Britain loc: 4193

seen from Rome, the Irish mission was something of a “moon shot.” It showed, to the great satisfaction of Prosper and of his patron, pope Leo, that the Catholic Church was truly universal, and that, as the bishop of Rome, Leo had a particular responsibility for Christians beyond the frontiers of the empire. loc: 4199

To “land a man on the moon” – that is, to place a Christian bishop in a totally non-Roman Ireland – showed the majestic reach of the Catholic Church, as Augustine had defined it, as a City for all nations.21 loc: 4204

Sometime in the 440s, Irish raiders fell on an unknown city of Britain. A well-to-do 16-year-old, Patricius, the son of a deacon, from a family of town councillors, was among the captives. loc: 4209

In his exile, he turned to an ascetic brand of Christianity to which he had given no thought when he was a young man from a clerical family in Britain. loc: 4211

Patricius escaped from slavery, returned to Britain, and, once ordained, decided to go back to Ireland. It was a hotly contested step for a British bishop to take. Patricius’ subsequent career in Ireland was dominated by the same concerns as preoccupied the bishops in Gaul, loc: 4216

What ensured the permanent success of the Christian communities in Ireland was the quickening pace of exchanges around the “Celtic Mediterranean.” These exchanges led to the establishment of Christian communities along the eastern coast of Ireland in the course of the late fifth and early sixth centuries. loc: 4235

The Irish churches had few of the grandiose ambitions and collective intolerance which had characterized the post-Constantinian Christian empire loc: 4238

Christianity tended to spread family by family and túath by túath – small tribe by small tribe. loc: 4240

The religion of some families, but not of others, the Christian churches enjoyed an almost total absence of persecution. Christians were considerably less concerned with how they might Christianize their neighbors than with how to preserve their own identity. loc: 4243

Patricius and his successors had been able to receive from the laity of Ireland land, gold, cattle, even their own daughters, as nuns given to Christ.29 To get something for nothing was the ultimate feat of the trickster. loc: 4262

To present a missionary as a trickster-god, rather than as a triumphant exorcist and destroyer of temples, was an unusual way of remembering the coming of Christianity to a northern land. loc: 4268

After the 460s, northern Gaul resembled Britain. It was a land without empire. loc: 4274

In this increasingly militarized world, the Franks were by no means newcomers. Many had served in the high command of the imperial armies in the fourth century. loc: 4278

The Franks who were led by king Childeric, in the 470s, were wilder men. Childeric was a Merovingian. loc: 4286

Childeric’s son, Clovis – Hlodovech, “glorious warrior” – inherited the many strands of his father’s authority in Gaul. He was a pagan; yet he received a letter from Remigius, the Catholic bishop of Rheims: loc: 4296

Clovis may have issued, in Latin, a law code for his Franks. The Lex Salica, the Laws of the Salian Franks, took the paganism of the Frankish inhabitants of the Rhine estuary for granted. loc: 4313

By the end of his life, in 511, Clovis had altered the entire nature of Frankish kingship. He eliminated a confederation of Frankish “royal” chieftains, and ensured that the kingship was held by his own Merovingian family alone. loc: 4320

Clovis moved slowly. He took a Christian wife from the Arian Burgundians, in around 490 – queen Chlothild. Yet he did not take the obvious further step of adopting Arian Christianity. loc: 4335

A shared Arian faith, which was pointedly different from that of their Roman subjects, linked the Visigoths of Toulouse with the Vandals of Carthage and the Ostrogoths, now firmly established under their king Theodoric, at Ravenna. loc: 4338

Clovis may have sensed that he could hold out for yet more undivided loyalty on the part of his Romani loc: 4340

There was no reason why all the inhabitants of a region should not share the same religion, and, even less, why a ruler should be excluded, as a heretic, from the faith of his subjects. loc: 4344

the Arian Visigoths of southern Gaul were prepared to do everything, barring an official conversion to Catholicism, to enlist the whole-hearted loyalty of their own Catholic subjects. loc: 4346

For Clovis, it was now or never. Such loyalty shown to an Arian ruler by grateful Catholic bishops, if once consolidated within the Visigothic kingdom, would have blocked forever the road to the south. loc: 4354

Clovis’ invasion of the Visigothic south came to be seen only in retrospect as an anti-Arian crusade by a Catholic king. At the time it may not have had a strong religious tone. It was a show of force, ostensibly intended to collect arrears in tribute. Its real purpose may have been to test the loyalty to the Visigoths of the southern Romani loc: 4362

the Catholic nobility of the Auvergne, including the sons of Sidonius Apollinaris, turned out in force to support the Arian Visigoths against these fierce interlopers from the north. But Clovis beat them all the same. An entire southern society, Catholics and Arians alike – along with their king, Alaric II – died together, at the fateful battle at Vouillé (or, possibly, at Voulon), south of Poitiers, in the early summer of 507.43 loc: 4365

On Christmas Day 508, he was baptized with his entire army by Remigius, Catholic bishop of Rheims. loc: 4370

Far to the south, in what is now Morocco and western Algeria, Moorish chieftains of the High Atlas absorbed the Roman cities of the plains. They emerged as common “kings of the Moorish and Roman peoples.” The symbiosis of Berber warrior highlanders with Latin-speaking townsfolk ended only with the arrival of Islam. loc: 4385

A similar development also occurred at the southern end of the Red Sea, where the trade of the entire Indian Ocean came within easy reach of Alexandria. The warrior kingdom of Axum straddled the straits of Bab el Mandeb. This kingdom joined the highlands of northern Ethiopia (a formidable reservoir of warlike tribes) to the Yemen. loc: 4392

We know of the rise of Clovis principally from the account of Gregory, the Catholic bishop of Tours. loc: 4416

Gregory placed great emphasis on Clovis’ supposed hatred of Arian heretics. He also recorded, without a hint of moral condemnation, the king’s unsavory rise to power among the Franks. loc: 4420

From Hadrian’s Wall to the Atlantic coast of Morocco and the Horn of Africa, the idea of Rome had shrunk to ever smaller dimensions. Rome and its history were no longer central to the imagination of the inhabitants of the former periphery of the empire. loc: 4443

A sense of the Roman past was replaced by a different past – the past of the Old Testament. loc: 4445

8 Regimen animarum: Gregory the Great loc: 5498

Ever since the arrival of the armies of Justinian in Rome, in 536, the city had become the “window on the West” of the emperors of Constantinople. This was an empire of awesome dimensions. loc: 5502

Yet, of all the major cities of the empire, Rome was by far the most desolate and the most exposed to danger. After the decades of inconclusive warfare which followed Justinian’s invasion of Italy, Rome was a ghost of its former self. Its population had dropped to around 50,000. loc: 5508

The sheer size of the eastern empire rendered its Italian provinces peripheral. loc: 5512

The Lombards came to Italy in 568, allegedly summoned from the Danube by East Roman generals. They took over the Po valley and, by occupying Spoleto and Benevento, they gained control of the Apennines, the mountain spine of Italy. What was left to the empire were the coastal plains. loc: 5535

To the “Romans” who inhabited imperial territory, the Lombards were the “enemies of the Roman name” par excellence. They were regarded as “the most unspeakable nation.”3 Tales of atrocities committed by Lombard war-bands were recounted with horror by refugees from central Italy as they arrived in Rome. loc: 5544

The areas which accepted Lombard rule were like the Sklaviniai of the Balkans. They were regions which had grown tired of empire. A strong state was not for them. loc: 5550

Confronting the Lombards along the estuary of the Po, an imperial viceroy, the exarch, took up residence at Ravenna. loc: 5559

For generations to come, not only the Lombards, but also the other kingdoms of the West – the Frankish kingdoms and Visigothic Spain – maintained a healthy respect for the ability of the East Roman empire to reach out to destabilize distant “barbarian” kingdoms. loc: 5568

in 589, the Visigoths accepted Catholicism under their king, Reccared. They did so on their own terms and from their own Catholic bishops. It is significant that the pope at Rome was held at arm’s length throughout the entire process of conversion. loc: 5579

The conversion of the Visigoths, and the strident royal propaganda which announced the foundation of a Catholic monarchy, common to Goths and Romans, showed a new self-consciousness on the part of the western “barbarian” kingdoms. Goths and Franks now claimed to be both Catholic and “barbarian,” and proud of it. loc: 5584

The wars which followed Justinian’s reconquest and the subsequent infiltration of the Lombards had brought to an end a very ancient world. In the first half of the sixth century, the culture and society of Italy had been dominated by the senatorial aristocracy of Rome. loc: 5591

It was the return to Italy of the new “Roman” empire of Justinian which spelled their ruin. As politicians, landowners, and residents of large and vulnerable cities, they bore the brunt of a prolonged and peculiarly destructive war between the East Romans and tenacious Ostrogothic armies. loc: 5602

With the reconquest of Justinian, the aristocrats were pushed aside. They were replaced by an alliance between “emperor’s men” – East Roman officials and army officers – and the petty gentry of the provinces who had grown up in the shadow of the great senatorial families. This new class of provincial gentlemen formed the backbone of the “Roman,” that is, the imperial, order in Italy. They were military men, with little traditional culture. loc: 5611

What was threatened, in this social revolution, was the very existence of a leisured class, and of the styles of culture and religion that went with such a class. Up to A.D. 550, money had been available, especially in Rome, to maintain the huge expense of aristocratic libraries. These libraries would house, copy, and circulate an ever-growing body of Christian literature. loc: 5618

Cassiodorus moved his library to Vivarium in around 550. As he outlined his hopes, in the Institutes of Christian Culture (a text finalized in 562), Cassiodorus presented his monastery as a place where the classics of Latin Christian literature would be copied and circulated, where translations of Greek works would be undertaken, and where the basic skills of Latin grammar and rhetorical analysis were maintained, as a sine qua non for the understanding and the accurate copying of the Scriptures. loc: 5653

These books made the culture of a very ancient world available to a less privileged generation, which could no longer count on having teachers available, in their locality, to explain difficult texts to them by word of mouth. loc: 5657

Even in its preliminary stages, Latin culture was passed on by largely oral methods. Reading aloud and memorizing texts through recitation had played as much of a role in Roman education as it still does in Islamic schools in Africa and Asia. loc: 5661

Cities could no longer pay for public teachers, nor aristocrats for private tutors. For the first time, books were that much more free to take on a life of their own. Books, and not the human voice, explained other books. loc: 5664

With the advantage of hindsight, it is easy to think of Cassiodorus’ activities as no more than a salvage operation. We all too readily imagine him gathering in what little remained of the aristocratic culture of Christian Italy, and making it available, in a brutally simplified form, to an age that was fast slipping into barbarism. loc: 5671

the social revolution associated with the imperial reconquest had not brought about the end of the world. A rich legacy of Latin texts had survived the dislocation of war. The issue would be how these texts would be used, by whom, and to what purpose. loc: 5686

This was a view of the heart of classical Rome. And it was dead. In the fourth century, over 1,500 chariot races had taken place every year in the Circus Maximus. Now the great racetrack lay deserted. loc: 5696

the occasional crash of falling masonry showed that Rome, the Rome of the pagan past, had not been levelled by invading barbarians. It had simply been allowed to fall down through neglect. loc: 5700

The view to either side, along the Aventine and the Caelian hills, told a different story. The mansions on these hills had witnessed the birth and triumph of an idea of Rome linked to the Christian aristocracy. loc: 5702

This was a style of piety which still left room for devout and well-read lay persons. In this respect, Gregory took for granted a Mediterranean-wide ascetic sensibility, which was common to both the Latin and the Greek worlds. He shared the basic assumption of all East Romans: lay persons had the same vocation to sanctity as did monks. What held lay persons back from full perfection were curae, the manifold “cares” of “the world,” associated with a life constrained by obligations to society. loc: 5723

For Gregory, as for his East Roman contemporaries, the ascetic call to experience the presence of God was open to everyone. Lay persons were challenged to pursue such piety to the best of their ability, quite as much as were the more sheltered monks. loc: 5733

It was only a little later that Gregory decided that he should renounce “the world” and become a monk. It was a decision based upon acute disquiet. He felt that he lacked the moral strength to combine a life of public “cares” with a religious vocation. He had to seek the shelter of a monastery. loc: 5750

Gregory had fled to a monastery to avoid the pious layman’s exposure to worldly cares. Within a few years, he had fallen back, once again, and this time heavily and forever, into just such a life of “care.” To join the Roman clergy was to re-enter public life at its most exacting. Given the clerical traditions of his family, Gregory could not escape this call to duty. loc: 5767

From the works of Augustine Gregory had taken Augustine’s fierce longing to return to God.36 For Gregory, all of human life was an exile. Human beings had been cast out of Paradise, and yet the desire for Paradise – to stand in rapt contemplation in the presence of God – still pulled at them. loc: 5795

Yet God was always close. He was far closer, indeed, for Gregory than he had been for Augustine.40 Gregory was sure that he could see God’s hand in every detail of the material world. loc: 5804

One feature, however, made Gregory starkly different. His spiritual guidance did not take the form of anecdotes or of letters of advice. Rather, he deliberately derived his insights from an extended, allegorical exegesis of an entire book of the Bible – the Book of Job. In doing this, Gregory was the heir of a long tradition of allegorical reading, in which every line, indeed every word of the Bible, if read with prayer and with “spiritual” understanding, would reveal a secret for the present day loc: 5829

Augustine’s exploration of the journey of his own soul, in the Confessions, still speaks to modern readers. But by pouring his spiritual experience into the alien form of allegory, Gregory seems to us, by contrast, to have drained all life from it. loc: 5836

Yet this is not how a sixth-century listener would have heard Gregory. To enter any book of the Bible was to listen to the voice of God which still spoke, in its insistent whisper, to every soul. loc: 5840

To make an allegorical exegesis of a book such as the Book of Job was to follow a guiding thread, valid for all times, all places, and all persons, placed cunningly by God in the text of a holy book, so as to help the soul in its long, winding journey back to Paradise. loc: 5846

In his insistence on moral issues, Gregory was a throwback. He brought into the late sixth century an ancient strand in Roman thought – the austere tradition of ethical guidance earlier associated with the Stoic sages. loc: 5857

In 590, Gregory’s fate was sealed: he was made pope. loc: 5871

A man who had passed, for a few years, into the contemplative stillness of monastic seclusion, Gregory found himself crushed beneath the oceanic pressures that weighed on every Catholic bishop in the sixth century. loc: 5875

In the first place, the pope was the city of Rome. The pope fed the city from “the patrimony of Saint Peter. loc: 5879

the pope and his colleague, the bishop of Ravenna, were the bankers of the East Roman state in Italy. Only the Church possessed the treasure and the ready money with which to pay the East Roman garrisons and to advance sums of cash to a penniless administration. loc: 5881

It was Gregory, also, who had to deal with the Lombards. He negotiated constantly with neighboring Lombard warlords and attempted to contain their aggression loc: 5885

What was harder for Gregory to deal with was sullen resentment within the city of Rome itself. His election had not been universally popular. The Roman clergy was a tight oligarchy, largely drawn from the local nobility. loc: 5895

They had tended to admire monks, but from a safe distance. They did not wish to be ruled by one. loc: 5898

the short treatise which Gregory published in 591, the Regula Pastoralis, the “Rule for Pastors. loc: 5925

One thing was certain in Gregory’s world – power was there to stay. Gregory lived in a world where Christianity now touched every level of life. Power, in such a world, meant attention both to the most exalted and to the most humble aspects of existence. loc: 5928

The issue was how this surreal accumulation of duties could possibly be combined with the care of souls. How could the active life of a bishop remain linked to an ideal of spiritual wisdom loc: 5935

Gregory thought that he had found the answer in the figure of the Apostle Paul. Paul was the ideal pastor. Here was a man, Gregory pointed out, whose activities had moved in an unbroken flow from the heights of mystical contemplation to laying down rules on the conduct of married persons, loc: 5937

Condescensio, a compassionate stepping down to the level of every person in the Christian Church, was the key to Gregory’s notion of spiritual power. loc: 5942

the ideal pastor of Gregory must learn to be “intimately close to each person through compassion, and yet to hover above all through loc: 5946

It was the intimacy of the care of souls which concerned Gregory. He paid little attention in his treatise to public preaching. He gave no guidance on how to give a sermon. What interested him, above all, was face-to-face spiritual guidance. loc: 5949

it placed the souls of entire congregations in the hands of a spiritual elite. They were to be the “subjects” of a new generation of “doctors of the soul. loc: 5966

The rule of souls was not a job for amateurs. Amateurs – magnates turned bishops, in Gaul; emperor’s men, in the sees of Italy and the Roman East – were what Gregory feared most. loc: 5972

Gregory knew the Regula, the Rule, of Benedict and wrote the only account that we have of Benedict’s life. loc: 5982

Benedict’s monastery at Monte Cassino no longer existed. It had been sacked by the Lombard war-band of duke Zotto. loc: 5983

Here was an abbot of inspired certainty of touch, who knew how to lead his tiny flock of monks through every spiritual and material emergency. And he had done this by exacting absolute obedience. Each monk was bound to his abbot and to his fellows by an awesome code that was summed up in a single phrase: obedientia sine mora, “obedience without a moment’s hesitation. loc: 5991

As abbas, the abbot was truly the “father” of his monks. He was the representative among them of God the Father. loc: 6003

The Regula Pastoralis was to be Gregory’s equivalent of Benedict’s Rule. It was a Rule for Bishops. This was a daring solution. As we have seen, Christians, both in the West and in the eastern Roman empire, had come to see their bishop as a distant and majestic figure. loc: 6009

Now Gregory placed the most intimate and penetrating model of power available to the Christian experience of his time – the abbot’s exercise of his authority over monks – at the heart of the bishop’s role. He gave episcopal power a sharply pastoral stamp. loc: 6012

What Gregory had unwittingly created was a Europe-wide language of power. For, by the year 600, western Europe had become a mosaic of contrasting political systems. loc: 6020

Above all, Gregory’s pastoral language spilled over easily into thought about the responsibilities of Christian lay rulers. His heavy emphasis on the responsibilities of the ruler for the souls of his subjects was immediately adopted, by the Spanish clergy, to lend an added note of solemnity and urgency to the moralizing legislation of the Visigothic kings of Spain. loc: 6023

he created the language of an entire governing elite. With the Regula Pastoralis to guide them, the kings and clergy of Latin Europe no longer needed to look to the surviving “Christian empire” of East Rome to guide them. Gregory had given them a mission to rule and code of conduct as clear and as all-embracing as any that had once inspired the governing classes of the Roman empire. loc: 6033

The ruins of Rome play such a poignant role in his writings because they were a statement of the obvious. They spoke plainly, and to everyone, of the swift and hidden race of history toward its end. loc: 6065

What mattered now was praedicatio, the gathering into the Christian Church of what remained of the human race, so as to face the dread Judgment Seat of Christ. loc: 6070

It was a thought calculated to greatly concentrate the mind. For Gregory, the age of praedicatio was not an age of panic. It was, rather, an age of unexpected excitements. loc: 6072

Gregory would suddenly descend from the heights. He would end with a simple tale of a miracle. This showed his listeners how close to heaven they already stood without knowing it. loc: 6081

In the Dialogues, Gregory looked out all over Italy for signs, for flashes from the other world, as it were, that would wake up sluggish Christians before it was too late. loc: 6089

In 589 (just after Gregory returned to Rome from Constantinople) the entire political elite of the last, non-Catholic, Arian kingdom of the West, the Visigoths of Spain, adopted Catholicism. loc: 6097

In 597, an exceptionally large party, headed by a monk from Gregory’s own monastery (named, significantly, Augustine), received permission from Ethelbert to settle in the royal center of his kingdom, in the ruins of a Roman town that was later called Canterbury. loc: 6114

Gregory died in 604. He had come to expect the unexpected. But even he could hardly have foreseen how unusual the future might yet be. Within a century, a new Christianity had emerged in northern Europe. loc: 6125

7 Bishops, City, and Desert: East Rome loc: 4951

The public rituals performed by the bishop and his clergy made the city holy. His presence as honorary chairman of the town council, assisted by the local notables, made it orderly. loc: 4983

But the great patriarchs were an exception. Unlike in Gaul and Spain, there were few landed aristocrats among the clergy. The average bishop in the East Roman empire was a careworn and humdrum person. He was a glorified town councillor. He owed his position to the manner in which he stood between his city and an imposing imperial administration. loc: 4988

Bishops in the eastern empire were cogs in the machine of a fiercely intrusive and centralized governmental system. loc: 4992

By A.D. 500 the Christian bishop and his clergy had been encouraged by the emperors to take over many of the duties which had once been performed, in classical times, by the town councils. loc: 4994

The church had become the new avenue to local status and prestige. loc: 4998

In the fifth and sixth centuries, the clergy were responsible for a wave of new building which changed the urban fabric of the cities of the Middle East. loc: 4999

Church building on this scale signalled the definitive triumph of Christianity in the East Roman empire. loc: 5005

In a Christian empire, Christianity was now thought to hold the high ground of an entire civilization. It was an age of synthesis, marked by great confidence that the ancient skills of classical Greece – rhetoric, poetry, history-writing, philosophy, and art – could be used to express the Christian message. loc: 5007

the imperial government used the clergy as its local watchdogs. loc: 5010

Altogether, the bishops of the East were deeply identified with the defence and stability of their cities, and so with the fate of the empire: loc: 5019

ever since the reign of Constantine, the achievement of doctrinal unity was held to be the raison d’être – indeed, the crowning achievement – of a Christian empire. loc: 5030

Throughout the late fifth and sixth centuries, the imperial government was convinced that, given the right mixture of command and persuasion, a strong imperial line on Christian dogma would create a united, “orthodox” Church. This course of action failed. loc: 5032

In the long run, neither the East Roman state nor the cities through which it ruled proved to have sufficient coercive force or moral authority to impose religious unity. loc: 5038

Though now dominated by impressive Christian monuments, every East Roman city included much that spoke of forms of celebration and of attitudes to power and prosperity which owed nothing to Christianity. loc: 5048

The bishop often found himself responsible for the maintenance of such shows. loc: 5064

For each city still needed its “Church of Satan.” The Hippodrome (the place of chariot races) was crucial to the youth culture of the East Roman cities. loc: 5068

Young men – and especially the privileged sons of the civic elites – had always supported competitive activities in their cities. Now this competition became both more clear-cut and more uniform throughout the empire. Each city came to be officially divided between two principal “factions” – the “Blues” and the “ loc: 5070

The frequent bloody clashes between rival gangs of supporters of each faction were tolerated because the shows themselves had taken on an imperial tone. They took place to celebrate the city’s loyalty to the emperor. loc: 5074

the competition of the factions ensured that, in all cities, all heads remained turned toward the emperor and his representatives. loc: 5076

the young men of the “Blues” and the “Greens” actively competed to show their enthusiasm for the distant emperor. loc: 5079

Hence, although the Hippodrome was denounced by Christian writers as the “Church of Satan,” it stood for a mystique of empire which reached back deep into the Roman past. loc: 5088

In Syria and Egypt, by contrast, it could appear as if the cities, the centers of imperial government and the place of residence of most bishops, were enclaves of profane living in the midst of a population made up of God-fearing farmers. loc: 5095

Prosperous and ostentatiously pious, the world of the countryside, in northern Syria and elsewhere, expressed its cohesion through great pilgrimages to spectacular holy men and to the monasteries associated with them. loc: 5107

A new, dramatic form of Christianity had emerged, in a new Christian landscape, in the vital defensive zone between Antioch and the eastern frontier. loc: 5112

the most significant divide of all in the Christian imagination of the East Roman empire was not that between town and countryside. It was between the “desert” and the “ loc: 5115

Unlike the ascetics of “the desert,” persons “in the world” were caught in obligations to society. For that reason, they were not free to give all of themselves to Christ. loc: 5118

The “world” as a whole was overshadowed by the presence of “angel-like” holy men associated with the “ loc: 5123

in the territories of the Eastern empire, the Holy Spirit was thought to have raised up holy men and women in great numbers outside society, in the desert. Their authority came from the fact that they remained in the desert, to one side of the institutional structures of the Church. loc: 5130

Hence a significant difference between East and West. A western bishop, such as Gregory of Tours, tended to look for traces of Paradise among the holy dead. In the eastern Mediterranean, by contrast, living persons were thought capable of regaining Paradise on earth. loc: 5141

They ringed a careworn society with the shimmering hope of Paradise regained. They effected a symbolic exchange on a deep imaginative level. Having drained from themselves all hint of the dark passions that ruled the world, they validated the world by constantly praying for it: loc: 5154

Holy persons – men, in the desert, and women, more usually in the safer seclusion of the towns and villages – were constantly available to offer spiritual counsel and the support of their prayers. loc: 5163

Ascetic representatives of the “desert” met the deep longing for solidarity and for spiritual guidance which the official leaders of the Church – bishops and clergy now deeply implicated in a largely urban world of power and status – could not provide. loc: 5170

What is abundantly plain in these vivid interchanges is the power of prayer ascribed to holy persons. loc: 5188

Constantinople in the 520s was characterized by a quite exceptional combination of anxiety and high purpose. They knew that they lived in a changed world. The Roman empire of the West had fallen. loc: 5201

To call this empire “Byzantium,” and its subjects “Byzantines” (from Byzantium, the former site of Constantinople), is a modern practice that denies the continuity with the Roman empire to which the people of the sixth century were fiercely attached. loc: 5205

In 527, Justinian succeeded his unprepossessing uncle, Justin, who had reigned from 518. loc: 5222

Justinian threw himself headlong into the new myth of Constantinople as the true Rome, the heir of Rome’s manifest destiny. loc: 5223

In 528, all pagans were given three months in which to be baptized. In 529, the pagan professors of philosophy at the Academy in Athens were forbidden to teach in public. All knowledge was Christian knowledge: loc: 5229

The Codex Justinianus, the Justinianic Code, brought the Theodosian Code up to date. The Codex appeared in 529, the Digest and the Institutes in 533.39 The Roman law which was later revived in medieval Europe, and which became the basis of all subsequent codes of “civil” law in western Europe and the Americas, loc: 5236

Then, on January 13, 532, Constantinople exploded. For the first time ever, the Blue and the Green factions united, under the common rallying-cry of Nika, “Conquer.” They wished to replace Justinian’s advisers, and eventually to overthrow Justinian himself. Thirty thousand citizens died in a massacre inflicted by Justinian’s troops loc: 5245

Justinian used the destruction to go beyond his predecessors. The city’s main basilica was replaced by the stupendous new church of the Hagia Sophia, loc: 5250

In the years in which the Hagia Sophia was being built at Constantinople, Justinian set out to reconquer Italy and Africa. loc: 5262

In Italy and North Africa, it brought the empire back for centuries. loc: 5272

Throughout the early Middle Ages, the popes were subjects of the East Roman emperors. Up to A.D. 800, every papal document sent to western bishops and to western rulers was dated by the regnal year of the emperor in Constantinople, loc: 5275

The bubonic plague, however, was nature’s rare, but deadly, comment on an expanded empire and on the creation of an Asia-wide economy which went with this expansion. loc: 5294

We do not know for certain from where the bubonic plague came, when it escaped its deadly pocket – perhaps from the Middle Ganges but, more likely, from the Great Lakes of Central Africa. But once released, it moved swiftly. loc: 5302

Along the principal highroads of Syria and Asia Minor it left a swathe of deserted villages, of roadside inns filled with corpses, and an uncanny silence over the land, as the harvest lay ungathered on either side of the road. loc: 5304

The plague soon reached Constantinople, rapidly killing a third of its population. loc: 5307

But a vast empire, already stretched to its limits, had less chance of recovery. Plague remained endemic in the Middle East until the middle of the eighth century. loc: 5315

Plague, in particular, burned out the heart of the maritime world on which the military exploits of Justinian had depended and crippled the provisioning of the cities of his empire. loc: 5317

After 542, this size became Justinian’s most unrelenting enemy. Each distant frontier had to compete with every other for the allocation of diminished resources. Italy and the Danube lost out to the most formidable emergency of all. loc: 5322

From 540 to 628, the “running ulcer” of war with Persia dominated the politics of the East Roman empire. The clash of superpowers throughout the Middle East, in a series of military and diplomatic encounters which ranged from the Caucasus to Yemen, made the other frontiers of the eastern empire seem of secondary importance.52 loc: 5326

Italy was instantly neglected. Reduced to a military sideshow, imperial rule could not be securely established throughout the peninsula. loc: 5330

The Lombard invasion proved decisive for Italian society. It coincided with nothing less than a social revolution. The final frontier established after 568, between the “Roman” enclaves along the coast of Italy and the territories controlled by Lombard dukes and kings, was not only a military frontier. It exposed a deeper social and geographical fissure in Italian society itself. loc: 5334

Lombard rule represented a victory of a more rural world over a weakened, imperial Mediterranean. loc: 5338

After 550, Slavic tribes penetrated the mountainous hinterland of the Balkans. loc: 5341

As with the Lombards in Italy, so with the Slavs; their settlements were not the result only of military conquest. They showed that an entire landscape had come to reject the imperial order. Established in the hinterland, away from the coast, the Sklaviniai, in effect, were stateless zones. Their inhabitants, Slav and “Roman” alike, were happy no longer to pay taxes or to provide soldiers for the emperor. loc: 5344

Despite so many violent dislocations, following the plague of 542 and the revival of war with Persia, Justinian maintained the momentum of his quest for religious unity. loc: 5350

He was confident that he could reinterpret the entire tradition of the Greek Fathers of the Church (a tradition which both sides held in common) so as to make the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon acceptable to Monophysite dissidents. loc: 5354

He shared with the Monophysite opposition a deep reverence for the theology of Cyril of Alexandria. One of the principal reasons for Monophysite opposition to the Council of Chalcedon was that it seemed that Cyril (though dead by that time) had not been sufficiently respected by the council. loc: 5365

These bishops were known to have attacked Cyril vehemently. It seemed to Justinian that the part of the proceedings of Chalcedon which accepted these bishops as orthodox could be disowned in order to appease the Monophysite supporters of Cyril. loc: 5370

This meant the formal condemnation of what became known as the Three Chapters – a tripartite dossier of the works of Theodore of Mopsuestia, Theodoret of Cyrrhus, and Ibas of Edessa. loc: 5375

Justinian’s enterprise in condemning the Three Chapters had lasting and disastrous effects upon his relation with the Churches of western Europe. Because of the decisive role played in it by the Tome of pope Leo, Chalcedon had been regarded by Latin clergymen as “their” council. Every part of it was held to be above criticism. Justinian paid little attention to western opinion. loc: 5378

Latin opponents of Justinian’s decision on the Three Chapters treated East Rome as an alien world, truly “Greek” in its devious and tyrannical ways. loc: 5385

What is remarkable is that the Monophysites, who stood so close to Justinian in their basic assumptions, remained unimpressed even by his attempt to make the Council of Chalcedon inoffensive to them. loc: 5391

The Monophysites were quick to take advantage of this weakening of imperial control. Between 542 and 578 Jacob Baradaeus (Burdona, the “rag man”), the Monophysite bishop of Edessa, took the fateful step of ordaining an entire Monophysite counter-hierarchy. loc: 5426

Not surprisingly, the Monophysites came to be known as “Jacobites,” from the numerous ecclesiastical progeny of Jacob Baradaeus. loc: 5430

The generations after Justinian were marked by disastrous wars with Persia, by increased violence between “Blues” and “Greens,” and by the strengthening of the dissident, Monophysite Churches. loc: 5450

The great basilica churches of the eastern world had become places of newly elaborated liturgical drama. They offered a form of “sacred theater” which strove to rival the ever-present “Church of Satan” – the ancient theater and the Hippodrome. loc: 5459

Monophysites and Chalcedonians would not have disagreed with each other so passionately, if they had not shared a spiritual world in which the great themes of Christ’s Incarnation and suffering on the Cross had reached new peaks of drama in the liturgy, preaching, and hymn-writing of the age. loc: 5464

John’s Monophysite theology may have made him particularly prone to look to the poor in this way. For if Christ had taken on human flesh with such absorptive power as to render it divine, the humblest human body, because it bore the same flesh as Christ, was as charged with sanctity as was the Eucharist itself. loc: 5475

they put relentless pressure on the rich to support the poor who lay shivering in the streets of the city. loc: 5479

It was in this manner, with an emphasis on the Christ-like nature of the common man, that sanctity was thought to have flowed back from the desert into the settled land. loc: 5483

Large Christian groups, Chalcedonians quite as much as Monophysites, were prepared to forget ancient loyalties to their cities. Religion provided them with a more certain, more deeply felt basis of communal identity. loc: 5493

Part III The End of Ancient Christianity A.D. 600 loc: 6132

9 Powerhouses of Prayer: Monasticism in Western Europe loc: 6135

Gregory the Great has been called, with some justice, “the last ancient man.” In the century which followed his death – the seventh century – the Christian world changed dramatically. In the Middle East, a new world religion was born only a few decades after the death of Gregory – Islam. The consequent Arab conquests marked the end of the ancient world order in the Middle East and in North Africa. loc: 6137

Equally important, for western Europe, was the emergence of a new cultural zone in northwestern Europe, in the Frankish kingdom of northern Gaul, in Ireland, and in Saxon Britain. loc: 6140

The seventh century, and not the inconclusive political crisis that we call the “barbarian invasions” of the fifth century, witnessed the true break between the ancient world and what followed. loc: 6148

The seventh century appears to us to be something of a trough in the overall development of European civilization. It is awkwardly placed between the last centuries of the ancient world and the creation of a new world, which we associate with the age of Charlemagne and with what we tend to call (whether rightly or wrongly, we shall see) “the Carolingian Renaissance. loc: 6161

Between A.D. 550 and 650, western Christianity finally took on the face which it would wear throughout the Middle Ages and into modern times. loc: 6166

This mutation did not involve a change in doctrine. It was based, rather, on a profound change in the imagination. The result was nothing less than a new view of sin, of atonement, and of the other world, which, in turn, laid the basis for a distinctive notion of the individual person and of his or her fate after death. loc: 6170

By the year 600, at least 220 monasteries and convents existed in Gaul.2 In Italy, we have records of around 100.3 With few exceptions, monasteries still clung to the contours of a very ancient world. loc: 6178

monasteries and convents were thought of as adjuncts to the religious life of the cities. loc: 6186

Most monasteries were poor. Benedict insisted that his monasteries should attempt to be self-supporting.7 But this ideal was seldom realized. Monks usually shared in the general poverty of their region. They were as vulnerable to shortages as were any other small farmers. loc: 6204

It is important to stress the relatively low-profile quality of early western monasticism. Monks did not yet enjoy the high status of a holy caste, totally separate from the laity, which they enjoyed in later centuries. Rather, monks, nuns, and lay persons found that they had much in common with each other compared to the bishop and his clergy. loc: 6219

They wore ostentatiously nondescript, “religious” dress. But few monks were ordained, and, as women, no nuns were. They were a singularly colorless group. loc: 6223

Yet the laity plainly needed monks and nuns and wanted them to stand out as special in a way that they did not expect the clergy to be. loc: 6227

For the laity had also begun, at this time, to offer their children at an early age to monasteries and convents. loc: 6237

Like any other product of nature, children were the gift of God quite as much as was any good harvest. Why, then, should children not be offered to God much as the “fruits of the earth” were offered? loc: 6245

It was lay persons who wished to join monasteries and convents or to offer their children to them in fulfillment of vows. It was lay persons who wished to stay close to them so as to benefit from the example, the prayers, and the spiritual advice of their inmates. It was, above all, lay persons who came increasingly to wish to endow and protect them, even if they did not themselves become monks or nuns. loc: 6256

monasteries existed for the exceptional cases. They gave freedom to those called to a sharper, more exacting style of Christian life. They sheltered sensitive souls in love with God, as Gregory himself had been. But they also existed for the amelioration of sinners. Many sinners needed “conversion.” For sixth-century Christians, indeed, “conversion” had come to mean not a change of belief but a change of life. It meant joining a monastery so as to “purge” one’s sins. loc: 6267

They were to subject their behavior to meticulous supervision, accompanied, when necessary, by instant punishment – blows from the strap included. loc: 6279

Seen from the outside, monasteries were like the slave households to which Romans would long have been accustomed. All monks were equal because all were placed under the fatherly but absolute control of their abbot. loc: 6291

What changed in the West, in the course of the sixth century, was the emergence of the belief that entire convents and monasteries possessed a collective power of prayer that was somehow stronger than the prayers offered by any one holy person. loc: 6299

A well-organized monastery could function as a powerhouse of prayer on behalf of the community as a whole. loc: 6302

All over the Christian world, women’s monasticism had begun very much as a branch of family piety. A pious household would be proud to have “its” virgin. She would be secluded in the back of the house. loc: 6310

Virginity brought a particularly charged form of the sacred and placed it alongside the profane world loc: 6314

a woman, as a virgin, was believed to carry an intact soul fully revealed through an intact body. The fact that this body had been left untouched seemed to show awesome self-control on the part of the woman loc: 6319

In 508, Caesarius of Arles (of whom we have already heard in chapter 6) set up a convent under his sister, Caesaria. The Rule which he composed for her in 512 became a classic. loc: 6333

Such a community was well worth the care which Caesarius put into it. For what Caesarius had created, out of a pool of pious women gathered together by his sister, was nothing less than a “holy place” as effective as the shrine of any local saint. This was an environment where the “world” (and, it was hoped, even sin itself) stopped at the convent door. loc: 6342

Precisely because it stressed a stunning juxtaposition of the utterly sacred and the profane, a woman’s piety could act as a bridge between the new barbarian, military elites of northern Gaul and what had previously been a largely “Roman” form of religion, cultivated by the leisured and still largely civilian elites of the south. Impressive royal women had begun to do this early in the century. loc: 6353

In her new inviolate status, as a “dedicated” person, Radegund emerged as a gift-giver in truly royal style. loc: 6375

She brought her body into contact with all that was most loathsome to an upper-class person. She regularly bathed the poor, massaging with her own hands the scabby, worm-eaten heads of beggar-women.36 By such extremes of highly physical piety, she brought a touch of fierce holiness to the highest levels of society in Frankish Gaul. loc: 6381

In the deliberate seclusion of the relic of the Holy Cross, we are dealing with an intensely focused sense of the holy, shielded from the world by virgin women. This was different from the old-fashioned holiness associated with the great urban shrines of Gaul. loc: 6407

Access to the holy was restricted. Because of this, the holiness associated with the convent seemed to be that much more vibrant and more awesome, as befitted a convent thought to be a powerhouse of prayer. loc: 6412

Radegund thought in “imperial” terms. Her prayers embraced the Frankish kingdom as a whole. She and her nuns were the spiritual guardians of that state and of the kings who struggled to control it. loc: 6419

11 Medicamenta paenitentiae: Columbanus loc: 6796

As befitted a sapiens from Ireland, Columbanus had brought with him to Francia something of an enclave mentality. He was fiercely loyal to his teachers and to the precious stock of books that he had already mastered. loc: 6809

Their message had a starkness which makes even Gregory, for all the urgency of his belief in the approach of the Day of Judgment, seem to belong to a sunnier world. loc: 6832

And God had promised to those who served him: I shall dwell in them and will walk in their very midst.5 But this would happen only when the will and the body had lost their pride and their fierce lust. The body itself was a sight of horror. But this was because the body, with its labile flesh and slimy fluids, was no more than the horrifying externalization of something infinitely more slippery and corrupt – the “insatiable, rabid leech” of the unbroken will. loc: 6836

But the secret of the success of Columbanus lay in his transparent confidence that the “training of all trainings” would work. Ground down by mortification, the will and the body would finally surrender to the presence of God: pain would be turned into desire. loc: 6866

Columbanus had brought a fierce asceticism, directed at every stage by forms of confession and penance which, as we saw in the last chapter, had been developed by spiritual guides in sixth-century western Britain and Ireland. It was the Irish system of “tariffed penance” which gave those who followed Columbanus the confidence that, by following his “training of all trainings,” they would go straight to heaven, “purged” of their sins. The convents and monasteries which sprang up all over northern Gaul after his death were treated as mighty powerhouses of prayer precisely because they were known, also, to be powerhouses of atonement. loc: 6894

A new cultural zone, characterized by distinctive forms of religious life, was created in north-western Europe in the course of the seventh century. The Channel, even the Irish Sea, ceased to exist. Ireland, Britain, and the lands north of the Seine came closer together than they had ever been in Roman times. loc: 6902

Equipped with bristling Latin, he acted with an almost total disregard of his Irish origins. He inspired and admonished Frankish bishops and Roman popes alike as one sapiens to another, as one learned man moving among his equals. He felt himself to be part of a network of religious experts which stretched without a significant break across Latin Europe from the Irish Sea to Rome. loc: 6908

His intervention marked the beginning of a dramatic shift in the geographical location of monasticism and the culmination of the long process, which we described in chapter 9, by which monasteries came to take on a leading role in society. loc: 6914

Columbanus found the most secure and prosperous region in western Europe. Known as Neustria, the “New Western Lands” of the Franks, or simply as Francia (from which we derive the modern word for France), this was a region of royal courts and of impressive royal and aristocratic villas. These were true palaces, towns in miniature. They controlled a wealthy countryside where Roman cities had never been prominent. loc: 6917

In northern Gaul and further to the northeast toward the Moselle and the Rhine (in what was called Austrasia) a new Frankish aristocracy had come into being. They were no longer adventurers and henchmen living off spasmodic royal bounty. They were heavily intermarried with Gallo-Romans. loc: 6920

Honor and gift-giving, the essence of social relations in Columbanus’ Ireland, were matters of great importance to them also. loc: 6924

Those who approached Columbanus thought instinctively in terms of the gift exchange. They would endow and protect monasteries and convents in return for having a powerhouse of prayer and atonement in their midst. They sought the surge of honor and prestige which came from close association with a holy place. loc: 6928

For the first time, we find large numbers of Frankish landowners of the north anxious to found monasteries and convents so as to place islands of untouchable holiness in the midst of their estates. loc: 6946

the Merovingian kings positively basked in the glow of a holiness which they themselves had a hand in creating, through declaring them to be special, “immune” zones. loc: 6963

The new monasticism associated with the “medicines of penance” brought to Gaul by Columbanus was so popular because it had given an up-to-date, crisp answer to an ancient question. loc: 6979

How can a lay person – a person ‘in the world’ – be saved? loc: 6982

No uniform system existed in Latin Christianity for the imposition of penance and the forgiveness of sin. What could be done with sin, indeed, remained an open question. loc: 6984

For the average believer, the tradition established by Augustine in his controversy with Pelagius proved more significant. As we saw in chapter 3, Augustine denied that any Christian could ever be without sin, loc: 6994

Penance, for Augustine, was not a spectacular remedy for occasional great sins. It was, rather, a frame of mind. It was a lifelong process, because sin, also, was the lifelong companion of the Christian. loc: 7000

Hence the austerity of Gregory’s message. The more Christians strove for perfection, he believed, the more clearly they would see their own imperfection. For this vision of the self Gregory uses the word horror. By this, he did not mean the fear of Hell. Rather, he referred to a nightmare sense of vertigo experienced by pious persons at the sight of the sheer tenacity, the insidiousness, and the minute particularity of their sins. loc: 7010

No obligation to confess existed in the Church at this time. Rather, confession and the “medicines of penance” were actively sought out by pious persons. loc: 7025

The widespread “penitential” mentality also led to greater preoccupation with death and the afterlife. In the literature of the time, the moment of death stepped into the foreground. loc: 7033

For death was the test of penance. It was on their deathbeds that the souls of the saints were shown to have been “purged” of sin. loc: 7034

if entry into heaven depended on complete atonement of one’s sins, through penance, it was very hard to see how the average believer would ever get to heaven. loc: 7048

The landscape of the other world included, of course, a well-known Heaven and a Hell whose horror was only hinted at. But it also included a new, intermediate region characterized by agonizing delay. “Unpurged” souls seemed blocked there. loc: 7056

Stories such as this marked, in retrospect, the beginning of a new age. Medieval persons looked straight back to the fourth book of Gregory’s Dialogues as the foundation charter of their own distinctive belief in Purgatory – that is, in an intermediate region of “purging” fire, where souls waited for a given period before they could enter heaven. loc: 7061

The seventh century saw the flourishing of a new Christian genre – tales of the “Voyage of the Soul. loc: 7065

What is remarkable about such visions is the attempt to piece together a story of the soul after death. Stories which delineated the soul of each individual in terms of its precise individual sins and merits had not been widespread at an earlier time. Nor had so starkly “otherworldly” a perspective on human life been common. loc: 7099

For what truly mattered for those who wrote was now the dread occasion when, at the moment of death, the individual soul confronted the massed ranks of angels, saints, and greedy demons who guarded the thresholds of Heaven and Hell. loc: 7118

Heightened interest in the fate of the souls of average Christians after death caused western Christianity to become, for the first time, an “otherworldly” religion in the true sense. Religious imagination and religious practice came to concentrate more intently on death and the fate of the dead. loc: 7121

All aspects of human life could be explained in the light of two universal principles – sin and repentance.50 Sin explained everything. Secular rulers exercised their power (so Gregory had said) so as to suppress sin and to encourage repentance. loc: 7125

Disasters struck and kingdoms fell because the sins of the people had provoked the anger of God. Prosperity came when the people repented of their sins and regained the favor of God. loc: 7127

Above all, the human person was seen, with unprecedented sharpness, as made up of sin and merit – and nothing else. And death and the afterlife were where sin and merit would be definitively revealed by the judgment of God. loc: 7130

Barontus’ otherworldly experiences may seem bizarre to us. But they addressed with new precision the problem of how much of the present self survives, as a unique individual, still subject to the laws of sin and repentance, even beyond the grave. For this reason, the journey of Barontus has rightly been described as “a first sketch of the awareness of the self on the part of the individual in Western Europe.”51 loc: 7137

We cannot know for certain whether Christians of the ancient Mediterranean world had been more confident than were pious persons in the seventh century that they would go to heaven. What we do know is that they retained complete confidence in the ancient Roman traditions of the care and burial of the dead. In the Christian communities, as among non-Christians, death, burial, and the subsequent “care” of the dead were matters for the family. The clergy played singularly little part in such matters. loc: 7148

Their families offered food, wine, and money at the Christian Eucharist so that their dead should still be “remembered” as part of the Church. But the relationship between the “remembrance” of the dead and their fate in the other world provoked little speculation. The gravestones themselves were singularly mute: most were content to announce that the dead persons were “in peace.” This may have meant no more than that their spirits were “at rest” because they had been properly buried and cared for by their kin. loc: 7157

In the course of the fifth and sixth centuries, these very ancient burial practices changed significantly in only one respect as a result of the cult of the saints. To be buried near a holy grave was to gain the hope of standing beside the saint, one’s patron and protector, on the day of the resurrection. loc: 7164

What did matter, however, was what the Christian family could do for the dead. Here the seventh century was a decisive period. For it is in this century that the family’s “care” of the dead, which had been largely independent of the clergy, came to strike up a closer alliance with the clergy. The clergy defined more clearly the rituals which they had to offer; loc: 7176

The issue, then, was who prayed best. For the powerful the great new monasteries were powerhouses of prayer for the dead. loc: 7186

The tradition validated by the Dialogues of Gregory the Great emphasized the Mass as the only ceremony which could truly help the soul in the other world. loc: 7189

Christian families had continued for centuries to “feed” the dead by eating around their tombs. Even their “offerings” on behalf of the dead at the ceremony of the Eucharist were thought of as an ethereal form of “feeding” their lost ones. loc: 7192

Only in the seventh century did the Eucharist – the Mass – lose this quality of a “meal” relayed from the family to the dead. The Mass came to be spoken of, rather, as a “sacrifice” which only a priest could offer. loc: 7198

the Mass was offered at a time of danger. The soul was now thought of as being placed in a position of peril in the other world. Its sins might outweigh its merits and so expose it to being waylaid by the demons, loc: 7200

The ancient rituals performed by the family, such as bringing food and drink to “nourish” the soul, could not allay so sharp a peril. Only the Mass could do that. loc: 7201

emphasis on the celebration of the Mass as the only ritual which was truly necessary for the care of the dead enabled a “grassroots” Christianity to spread all over northern Europe. By A.D. 700, even the smallest tribe in Ireland had its own Mass priest. They took care to maintain him. loc: 7206

He performed for them the one ritual which was now deemed basic to a Christian group, by “singing for the absent ones” (the dead). loc: 7209

By the year A.D. 700, western Christianity had taken on features which would continue from that time until the present day: a highly individualized notion of the soul and a lively concern for its fate in the afterlife; a linking of the Mass to a notion of the “deliverance” of the soul, which opened the way to the medieval doctrine of Purgatory; a widespread emphasis on confession as a remedy for sin; a landscape dotted with prestigious and well-endowed monasteries. Little of this had been there in around the year 500. loc: 7212   • Delete this highlight

Note: Summary Edit

in the course of the seventh, a very ancient Christianity, common to the eastern and the western shores of the Mediterranean, slowly lost its grip on the minds and habits of Christians in many regions of the West. loc: 7217

It was the changes of the seventh century which, for good or ill, have caused western Christianity to stand alone among its Christian neighbors. loc: 7224

As “Europe,” the northwestern frontier regions of the former Roman empire had come to be aware that they possessed an identity of their own, different from the less familiar lands to their south and east. loc: 7237

12 Christianity in Asia and the Rise of Islam loc: 7241

in the immense territories of Asia, Christianity appeared to be the dominant religion. It was already the religion of one world empire, the empire of the Romans, and it was widespread in the Persian empire also. loc: 7292

The terrible incursion of the plague, in 542–3, had been a reminder that the East Roman empire lay at the western end of a commercial system which included all of Asia and the Indian Ocean. loc: 7313

Small Christian communities, adapting differently to different environments along the way, were part of a steady trickle of information, merchandise, and displaced persons which took place along the entire length of the Silk Route, from Antioch to China. We should not underestimate the “conductivity” of such a route. News travelled quickly along it. loc: 7318

Those in the west (in what is now modern eastern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel) were subjects of the Christian empire of East Rome loc: 7325

those to the east (in an area which coincides roughly with modern Iraq) belonged to the pagan, Zoroastrian empire of Sasanian Persia. loc: 7326

These two empires were spoken of as “the two eyes of the world.”7 For almost 70 out of the 90 years between 540 to 630, they were at war. loc: 7327

because it was highly professional warfare, waged by strong states, its impact, although atrocious, was limited. The 70 years of warfare between East Rome and Persia eventually led to the exhaustion of the two states which conducted it. But it did not lead to a total destabilization of society and to a breakdown of law and order. loc: 7339

The traditional agora which marked the center of public space was replaced by the courtyards of great Christian cathedrals. loc: 7345

less dedicated to self-consciously “classical” ideals of public space loc: 7348

If anything, after the plague, districts in the hinterland throve at the expense of the Mediterranean cities. loc: 7353

the generals and the troops who fought across these Near Eastern landscapes were usually foreigners to the region. The armies of the “Romans” were largely recruited in Asia Minor and the Balkans; those of the Persians came from the closed world of the Iranian plateau and from the steppes of Central Asia. loc: 7363

Both empires fought to control a Syriac-speaking “heartland” whose language they did not understand. loc: 7366

Culturally and religiously, Syria and northern Mesopotamia were a vortex. It was a region where ideas and forms of piety and culture met, were transformed, and spread westward to the entire Mediterranean and eastward as far as western China. loc: 7372

Culturally and socially, the political frontier between East Rome and Persia meant little. The true frontiers of the sixth- and seventh-century Near East were ecological. loc: 7394

Armenians were prominent in the armies of both empires. They came from a culture which relished heroes. loc: 7420

the clerical elites of Armenia moved, within 50 years, from an oral culture into literacy. As a result, Armenian historiography echoed directly the preliterate world of the epic minstrels. loc: 7436

If these proud warriors related to the Church at all, it was in the manner of the warrior elites of the barbarian west. loc: 7449

Armenian Christianity required heroic foundation myths if it was to survive at all. This was provided by an epic encounter between the Christian aristocracy of eastern Armenia and their overlord, the Persian King of Kings. At the famous battle of Avarayr, in 451, a faction of the nobility, led by Vardan Mamikonian, died fighting against the Persian army of the King of Kings, Yazdkart II (439 loc: 7458

Armenian writers presented their heroes as avatars of a militant Israel. loc: 7478

By the middle of the sixth century, a Monophysite “dissident” Church had become established throughout the eastern provinces of the Roman empire. A tentacular network of counter-bishoprics, monasteries, and village priests and holy men of anti-Chalcedonian views stretched from Egypt, Nubia, and Axum across the Fertile Crescent, loc: 7485

Monophysitism, in its various forms, was the dominant, and certainly the most vocal, faith of the western Syriac world. loc: 7489

The leaders of the Church in Persia were conservatives. They deeply disapproved of the radical Christology of the Monophysites. They believed that God had graciously revealed himself fully to the human race through a chosen human being, Jesus Christ. But God had not blurred his identity with that of Christ. loc: 7494

the churches in Persia rallied, explicitly, to anti-Monophysite doctrines, thereby founding what has been known, ever since, to Western scholars (largely on the strength of Monophysite polemics), as the “Nestorian” Church.28 loc: 7515

The Christians within the Persian empire had begun to feel at home. They no longer looked westward, toward the Roman empire.29 loc: 7522

The emergence of a silent majority of Persian Christians in the hinterland coincided with a dramatic transfer of Syriac high culture to the Persian side of the frontier in Mesopotamia itself. Nisibis became one of the great university centers of the Near East. loc: 7534

In the culture of the Syriac-speaking world, holy books were supposed to saturate the heart. They did so by being translated into melodious sound, carried by the magical sweetness of the human voice. loc: 7543

Hence the importance of the qeryana, the “reading aloud” of the Scriptures. Through the qeryana, the Syriac language was raised to a new pitch. It became a tongue rendered sacred through the repeated, exquisite recitation of the Word of God. loc: 7546

Carried in this way, on the voices of young men, a culture based upon reading aloud the message of God in the church was particularly well suited to the task of “internal mission” which maintained a remarkable degree of cultural and religious unity among the Christians of the East, whose churches stretched from Mesopotamia to China. loc: 7557

The expansion of the “Church of the East” was due to the sheer size and strategic position of the Persian empire. The Persian territories of Mesopotamia were no more than the western fringe of a political system which reached as far as the middle of Asia. The rulers of this empire were aggressively Zoroastrian. Yet their strong rule indirectly fostered the spread of Christianity throughout an officially pagan empire. loc: 7568

Their wars against East Rome were slave-raids on a colossal scale. Thousands of Christian captives were settled in new towns and villages both in Mesopotamia and along the fertile but precarious oases which edged Central Asia. loc: 7575

Usually, as long as subject religious groups were loyal and paid their tribute, they were not greatly troubled. loc: 7584

Moving with little difficulty in a pluralistic society, groups of eastern Christians fitted with ease into the vast horizons which opened up from Persian Central Asia. loc: 7598

Through the Soghdians, Christianity became a religion of the nomads who gravitated around the western frontiers of the Chinese empire. loc: 7607

In the Turfan oasis of western Chinese Sinkiang, invaluable manuscripts of Manichaean scriptures were found. As we saw in chapter 3, Manichaeism was the perpetual Doppelgänger of Syrian Christianity. It also reached Inner Asia at this time, and would survive in China until the fourteenth century. loc: 7613

First, the Roman empire seemed to collapse. Between 610 and 620, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria fell to Persian armies. Then, in 627, the emperor Heraclius (610–641) struck back into the heart of the overextended empire of Khusro II. loc: 7633

Heraclius’ triumph took place against the background of a war-weary Middle East. The cities of the Fertile Crescent had been emptied by massive deportations. loc: 7638

In this long war, one area of the Near East had attracted little attention. It was taken for granted that the Arabs of the steppelands and the deep desert of Arabia were insignificant. loc: 7644

The Arabian peninsula became a gigantic echo-chamber, in which the conflicting political and religious options of the Near East were closely observed, and the weaknesses of the competing empires were sharply assessed. loc: 7656

All along the steppelands which ringed the villages of Roman Syria and Persian Mesopotamia, Arabic-speaking tribesmen were partners in the economic life of the region. Food could not move without their camels. Marginal land would not remain fertile without the dung of their herds. The goods produced by the large villages would find no market if they did not pass, southward, into the lands of the Arabs. loc: 7661

In the first place, the increasing demands of war between the two empires rendered the Arabs indispensable. Arab sheiks controlled the vital routes across the steppelands which joined Roman Syria to Persian Mesopotamia. loc: 7669

Faced by this situation, the Arab leaders could always merge back into the desert. The arid steppeland was a place of refuge and a reservoir of tribal fighting men, feared for their swift raiding. loc: 7674

the Christian conquest of Yemen did not take place before the pros and cons of Christianity and Judaism had been hotly debated, in Arabic and in a manner which resounded throughout the Arab world. Far from the inhibitions imposed by dominant orthodoxies, the central issues of both faiths were open to fierce contention: loc: 7708

Such debates would have been unthinkable in the orthodox empire of Justinian. But they were perfectly normal in Arabia. loc: 7717

The Arabian peninsula was not an empty space, crossed only by nomads. It had many settlements like Mecca. They were tiny ecological cracks in the austere, lava sheath of the Arabian desert. Their population outnumbered the true nomads. But they depended on these nomads for the circulation of goods on which each settlement depended. loc: 7728

They were tribesmen. In the absence of a state, safety depended on membership of a clan which was prepared to defend its members, its livestock, and its wells against all comers. loc: 7730

the tribe was everything. loc: 7732

The “international trade” which mattered more, in the Arabia of Muhammad, was a trade in religious ideas, carried with remarkable “conductivity” from north to south. And this trade in ideas gained immensely in explosive content as it entered a tense world where tribe was always pitted against tribe and oasis against oasis. loc: 7741

Religious differences were part of the ceaseless battle for prestige between the tribes. loc: 7745

In 610, when he was 40, the visions began to come. They came from the One God (in Arabic: Allah), “the Lord of the Worlds.” For the next 20 years, the messages came irregularly, in sudden, shattering moments, up to his death in 632. In them, so Muhammad believed, the same God who had spoken to Moses and to Jesus, and to many thousands of humbler prophets, now spoke again, once and for all, to himself. loc: 7748

Qur’ân and the Syriac qeryana come from the same root qr’, to read, to cry aloud. Both accorded the fullest measure of authority to a religious message when it was carried, directly, by the human voice. loc: 7756

What Muhammad recited was, rather, a direct rendering of the eloquence of God as he spoke to the human race. loc: 7764

For the messages relayed by God through Muhammad claimed to undo the past. His messages declared that neglect and partisan strife had caused Jews and Christians to slip away from, even to distort, the messages which they had once received from their prophets, Moses and Jesus. loc: 7767

Jesus had not been God and had never claimed to be treated as if he was God: loc: 7770

He was acutely conscious of having been sent by God to his fellow-countrymen to warn them, in clear Arabic, to change their pagan ways. They were to return to the original purity of an uncorrupted past. They were to realize that they were the descendants of Abraham, loc: 7776

“Islâm,” and the word used to describe its adherents, “Muslims,” came from the same Arabic root, slm – to surrender, to trust in one God. It summed up an entire view of history. It was a history where, in what truly mattered for human beings – that is, their relationship to God – nothing had ever changed. loc: 7783

A remarkable group of young men, caravan merchants and warriors, had been the Companions of Muhammad throughout his career. They had defended his cause with arms, in the authentic Arab manner. loc: 7801

To fight the new Companions of Muhammad, however, was not fun. It was lethal, for the Companions fought in earnest. They did so in order to defend their religion. Very soon they struck out, to “humble” stubborn opponents. loc: 7806

the sheer aggression of the followers of Muhammad changed the rules of the game.61 loc: 7810

In 622, Muhammad and his Companions emigrated to the more northerly oasis of Medina. This was a hijra – an emigration of a leader and his armed band to find a new place to settle. By this move, they had re-created themselves as a new tribe, a small nation in arms, like any other Arab tribe, but more determined. loc: 7812

In 630, Muhammad and his Companions returned in triumph to Mecca. They purged the Ka’ba of its idols. loc: 7815

The Companions of Muhammad were blunt men in a society inured to war. They were as convinced as the emperors Justinian and Heraclius had been that God blessed the armies of those who trusted in him. loc: 7826

They sent an embassy to [Heraclius] the emperor of the Greeks saying: “God has given this land as an inheritance to our father Abraham and to his posterity after him. We are the children of Abraham. You have held our country long enough. Give it up peacefully, loc: 7829

10 The Making of a Sapiens: Religion and Culture in Continental Europe and in Ireland loc: 6427

Latin won its final triumph as the spoken language of most of the former territories of the Roman empire in the very last, more desperate centuries of Roman rule. loc: 6434

A simple Latin, shared by all classes, replaced the previous local languages, loc: 6441

this Latin later came to be known as the “rustic Roman tongue.” It was from this workaday “rustic” Latin that the “Romance” languages of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal developed. loc: 6442

Education had always been a preserve of the upper classes of the Roman world. But these upper classes had been fluid. loc: 6451

This education was provided in the cities, and specially in the major cities. loc: 6454

refined Latin and the civilization that went with it could only be found in a few privileged places. We should never underestimate how “rustic,” indeed, how “barbarous,” large tracts of the Roman world remained, loc: 6456

In the fifth and sixth centuries, the cities of the West could no longer support the expense of maintaining their schools. loc: 6463

In the later empire, highly educated civilians had acted, as it were, as a mandarin class, spread all over the empire. They owed their homogeneity to a remarkably uniform education. It was they who kept government going, both at court and on the local level. loc: 6464

But in many kingdoms, most notably in Francia and in Visigothic Spain, the old distinction of military and civilian had broken down. A mixed aristocracy had emerged. These men knew that they served their king better, and received more generous rewards, if they opted at an early age for military careers loc: 6471

A well-educated and intellectually sophisticated man such as Gregory the Great was quite capable of thinking that “the classical tradition” was not for him. It was no more than “worldly wisdom. loc: 6488

Gregory observed that “worldly wisdom” encouraged pride in noblemen and intellectual competitiveness, leading even to heresy, in clerics. loc: 6491

It hindered the mind from concentrating on the main business of life, which was to steel the soul for the Last Judgment. loc: 6494

whether they had become monks or not, their minds had passed through the monastery. They consciously opted to devote their talents to the study of the Bible and to the grimly practical task of amending their own lives. loc: 6506

The ecclesiastical culture of the late sixth- and seventh-century West was dominated by a “culture of wisdom” overwhelmingly directed to moral issues, which was analogous, in many ways, to the strenuous concern for moral improvement which had dominated philosophical thought in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. loc: 6527

Gregory the Great. His writings were intended to mark a decisive shift toward what he called moralitas. By this he meant far more than “morality.” It was nothing less than the transformation of the self, through the amendment of sinful habits and the development of “compunction” – a sharp stirring of the heart which fostered the love of God. loc: 6530

As late as the middle of the seventh century, young men were sent to the court of the Frankish kings so as to learn “the subtlety of words.”16 This steady trickle of young men, eager to gain “subtlety of words,” ensured that, in western Europe, power still bore, at times, an old-fashioned Latin face. loc: 6557

The practice of Roman law demanded an ability to write and to read. Hence, practical Latinity reached down, through royal officials, through the Church and through the great landowners, to touch local societies all over the West. loc: 6566

on islands embraced by an Atlantic Ocean which was believed to guard the very end of the world, a significantly different form of Latin Christian culture had come into being. loc: 6591

These two dialects of Celtic were not mutually intelligible, and, at this time, neither of them was a written language. Hence, those who wished to share a common Christian culture found themselves forced to use a Latin based on Christian books as their only vehicle of written communication. Only in a Latin patiently learned from books could British and Irish Christians with any pretensions to learning write to each other, teach each other, argue with each other and enjoy the pleasure of denouncing each other. loc: 6599

By the end of the sixth century, a network of Latin-using monks, clergymen, and scholars stretched from southern Wales and along the coast of Ireland from Leinster to Antrim. This network stood out in high relief in a world which was still only partly Christianized, and which owed little or nothing to Rome. loc: 6609

An enthusiastic nationalist tradition has claimed that an entire range of classical Latin books were transported to the island at the time of the “barbarian invasions.” They were saved by the Irish from the barbarism into which, so these enthusiasts assert, Continental Europe had irrevocably sunk. loc: 6621

This is a myth which has no scholarly support. loc: 6624

Altogether, it was the Latin of a small, self-chosen caste of sancti, of unflinching Christians perched on the edge of the world. loc: 6634

The cultural ideal of these circles was the sapiens. This was a man who had mastered Latin from books, who had made his own the wisdom of the Bible and of a Christian inheritance made available in a few, stubbornly valued texts, and who knew how to deploy this hard-won knowledge in a Latin rhetoric calculated to communicate the awe and the urgency of such wisdom. loc: 6637

The renowned austerity of what we call “Celtic” monasticism derived, in part, from a distinctive style of reading Christian texts. What had been brought to Ireland and Britain, through books, was the heroic Egypt of the fourth century. The Irish wanted to experience to the full the rigors of the Egyptian desert. They were prepared to perch on offshore rocks in the Atlantic in order to do so. loc: 6647

in Ireland and in western Britain, the identity and the stability of the Christian community were matters of real urgency. In potentially fissile and threatened congregations, the problem of how to deal with sin had to be faced with unaccustomed rigor. loc: 6664

“tariffed penance.”30 Each particular sin had to be confessed to a spiritual guide, who was usually a bishop, a priest, or a monastic director. A precisely calibrated penance, in the form of a fixed period of prayer, fasting, and similar self-mortification, was assigned to each sin. loc: 6667

the wise men of Britain and Ireland claimed to extend this basic categorization of the vices and their antidotes to cover every possible sin. There was no human sin that could not be itemized and healed.31 loc: 6680

Troubled average Christians (and not only ascetics) were offered an opportunity to gain, and constantly to regain, the favor of God. This was a society where Christians constantly looked for the hand of God in every notable fortune and misfortune. loc: 6686

But, precisely because it had a strong “elective” element in it, the system contributed decisively to the creation of an inner ring of Christian lay persons, who felt particularly bound by ties of confession, penance, and atonement to their local church or monastery. loc: 6697

They also represent an attempt to mold society according to ideals found in the Old Testament. In the “holiness code” of the Book of Leviticus the wise men of the British Isles found an all-embracing code of behavior, based on the avoidance of various forms of “pollution.” This code had guaranteed the order, the identity, and the sovereign dignity of the people of Israel. It made of Israel a “people of God. loc: 6715

A Christian community where confession and penance for precise sins were taken seriously (and we can imagine many communities in Ireland and Britain where they were not!) was a community which, like the ancient people of Israel, had a proper sense of the order of things. It could be sure of the blessing of God. loc: 6723

No strong state existed to enforce law and order from on top. Instead, the peace of society was maintained, as it were, “horizontally,” by a balance of power, established through constant negotiations between roughly equal kin-groups. Any injury to one group, or to any member of the group, would be met by violence on the part of the other. But violence could be bought off. It could be atoned for by compensation. loc: 6730

themselves a rough equality of status, was carried out in the name of honor. Honor – enech, “face,” in Old Irish – was the mercurial essence of all social relations in the Celtic world. To insult or injure a person and his kin-group, or to fail to meet agreed obligations to them, was to “leave shit on the face. loc: 6735

To offer compensation to offended neighbors was to “wash their face” – to acknowledge and restore their damaged honor. loc: 6738

We are dealing with a society knit together by an endless balancing and testing of honor. It was characterized by conflicts which tested the honor of rivals and by endless negotiations which restored this honor, through intricate forms of compensation and mutual surety. loc: 6743

But the Penitentials did more than this. They assumed, in many ways, that an analogous relation existed between God and the sinner as between an offender and the person of higher status whose “face,” whose honor, he had damaged. To do penance was to restore the honor of God. loc: 6752

The face of an injured God demanded to be “washed clean” by the self-abasement and penitential self-mortification loc: 6755

the Celtic Penitentials shared the same “missionary” zeal. They were the product of men confident that they could set up, in their own land, an echo of the holiness associated with the monks of Egypt and with the ancient people of Israel. They were also confident that this holiness would be achieved by bringing to all who wished it well-tried and effective “medicine” for their every sin. loc: 6767

In 590, Columbanus asked Comgall for permission to undertake the terrible mortification (for an Irishman) of leaving the island, so as to live as a stranger among total strangers. Of all the penances which an Irish monk might face, self-exile “for the love of God” was the most drastic. It meant a total loss of social identity. loc: 6787

It gave him a free hand to create his own version of a proper monastery – that is, an Irish monastery – on the alien soil of northern Gaul. loc: 6792

13 “The Changing of the Kingdoms”: Christians under Islam loc: 7844

The Arab victories of the subsequent years left the inhabitants of the Near East, Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian alike, stunned. loc: 7865

In 636, the East Roman army was crushed on the steep eastern slopes of the Golan, at the battle of the Yarmuk (in modern Syria). A year later, at Qâdisiyya (in modern Iraq), the Persian army suffered a similar fate. Egypt fell in 642. Crossing the Zagros on to the plateau of Iran, the Arabs routed the last Persian king at Nihâwand, in 642, and soon controlled Central Asia as far as Samarkand. Carthage fell in 698, and the Visigothic kingdom of Spain collapsed in 711. At the same time, far to the east, Arab armies were raiding northern India and had made contact with the western outposts of the Chinese empire. Nothing like this had happened since the days of Alexander the Great. loc: 7866

The age of Rome was over. Its end was in sight. The new “kingdom of the Arabs” had replaced Rome. It was the final, gigantic flare-up of human grandeur, pride, and violence before the return of Christ to earth and the Last Judgment. loc: 7878

A sense of the approaching end of time was in the air. loc: 7891

From the Arab point of view, the most surprising development of the seventh century was the survival of their empire, and its eventual transformation from a momentary “kingdom of the Arabs,” whose leaders happened to be Muslim, into a true Islamic empire, built to last. loc: 7908

The Arab leadership was riven by feuds. In 656–61 and again in 683–92 the Arabs of the western, Syrian territories were pitted against the eastern Arabs of Iraq in fierce civil wars. Yet, despite these strains, a permanent Islamic empire emerged. loc: 7925

Coming after generations of breakdown, where anything could have happened, the vast new state was not only the result of conquest. It was the result of the ability of its rulers and public servants to turn conquest into law and order. And this ability came from a firm vote on the part of the silent majority of the settled populations of the Near East for the stability of empire – of any empire – over potential anarchy. loc: 7928

once the military frontier between Rome and Persia had been expunged by the Arab conquest of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, the Near East became a more natural unit. Its separate parts fell together after centuries of division. Strong rule which maintained this unity was good for everyone. loc: 7945

The new Islamic empire was associated with the rule of the Ummayads of Syria – the family of Ummaya, members of the clan of the Quraysh, from which the Calif Mu’awiya had come. This empire linked the former subjects of East Rome and Persia in a single political and economic system, whose local administrative underpinning was recognizably continuous with all that had gone before. loc: 7947

The cultural frontier between the world of Persia and the Mediterranean world of Rome had been expunged. loc: 7955

The pressure of civil war led to a need to assert a common and fully public ideology – a mainstream on which all sides of the Arab, Muslim community could agree. There was a real danger that the Muslim community would disintegrate and that Muslims would lose their identity. loc: 7968

A remedy for this danger could be found only in the assertion of a common Islam and in an increased emphasis on a common Arab heritage. loc: 7971

The Qur’ân was written down in 660. In the Qur’ân, the messages of Muhammad seemed to be removed from time and space. Though delivered in Arabic and to Arabs, they were for all places and all peoples. loc: 7973

These messages were now rendered intelligible by commentaries and by supplementary narratives which placed Muhammad and his preaching in a hyper-real, strictly local, and Arabian context. The exact circumstances of Muhammad’s utterances and actions in Mecca and Medina were evoked with loving circumstantiality. By this means, the landscape of the Hijâz was fixed forever in the minds of Muslims as far apart as Spain and China. loc: 7975

The creation of an Arabic historical tradition was one of the great intellectual achievements of the early Middle Ages. loc: 7988

the state set in order by the successors of Mu’awiya, notably by the Califs ‘Abd al-Malik (685–705) and al-Walid (705–715), was a defiantly Islamic, Arabic state. loc: 7995

By the year 700, the public spaces of Syria, Egypt, and Iraq had begun to look distinctively Muslim and Arabic. loc: 8007

Above all, Muslims seized on the traditions of public building which had led, in East Rome, to stupendous monuments such as Constantine’s church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem and Justinian’s Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, as we saw in chapters 3 and 7. They were fully conscious of the need to compete with Christians. It was in this spirit that the Calif al-Walid built the Great Mosque in Damascus: loc: 8011

They followed, in a new idiom, a thoroughly Roman ideal. They created public spaces in which to make stunning visual statements of the prosperity and innate superiority of their empire. loc: 8020

Arabic soon emerged in the Near East as something more than the official language of an empire. It was increasingly seen by Christians and non-Arabs as the one language in which every human thought and every human feeling – from love, war, and the desert hunt to the most elevated of metaphysical abstractions – could be expressed. loc: 8331

The transfer of the center of the Islamic empire from Damascus to Baghdad, which was founded in 762, completed the triumph of Arabic among the Christians of the Near East. loc: 8347

Men whose culture reached back to the days of the foundation of the School of Nisibis now became transmitters of Greek learning to the Arabic-speaking elites of Baghdad. loc: 8358

As far back as the fifth century, Syrian Christians had tended to value a philosophical and technological culture which was soundproof to confessional differences. Now, at the Muslim court of Baghdad, a perennial “Greek” wisdom was patiently put together, in Arabic, loc: 8367

To Muslim observers, East Rome, Rûm, was the only Christian region which really mattered. Constantinople was the capital of the last, proud empire to resist the call of the Prophet. loc: 8375

The East Romans replied in kind. Their image of Islam became the basis of all later Western images of the Muslim world. loc: 8378

They regarded Islam as a purely ethnic religion. Muslims were “Saracens,” “Ishmaelites,” or “Hagarenes” – that is, descendants of Ishmael, Abraham’s bastard son by his servant Hagar. Islam, for them, was no more than “a new, deceptive heresy. loc: 8380

Constantinople, the heart of the East Roman empire, remained the goal which Muslim armies strove to reach. It is a measure of the resilience of the Christian empire of East Rome that it took them 800 years to do so. loc: 8384

The empire of Rûm was always present to the Muslims. By contrast, the West was a distant place. It was viewed by Muslims much as it had been viewed by previous civilized Near Easterners, Greeks and Syrians. It was a vast, indeterminate land, inhabited by unkempt and warlike peoples. It was marginal to the great “changing of the kingdoms” which had taken place in the ancient heartlands of civilization. loc: 8396

Even after the Arab conquest of Spain, in 711, no one in the north was certain that the invaders who had reached the western Mediterranean had come to stay. loc: 8413

The Muslim threat to the rest of western Europe was largely confined to the Mediterranean regions of Gaul. loc: 8420

Northern Europe had changed greatly since the 630s. The pious Saxon pilgrims came from a region that had barely been touched by Christianity in 630. Between 630 and 730, with the conversion of the British Isles, an entire new, northern dimension was added to the Christianity of the West. loc: 8432

16 Micro-Christendoms loc: 9206

Looking back over a remarkable century, Bede lingered with particular affection on moments when the presence of books unleashed, in the privileged few who handled them, a sense of breathless hurry. loc: 9209

Behind Bede’s achievement lay two generations characterized by the massive transfer of goods from Gaul and Rome to northern Britain. The unusual wealth of the kings and aristocracy of the frontier kingdom of Northumbria had made this possible. loc: 9230

He founded the monastery of Jarrow in 674 and that of Wearmouth (where Bede lived most of his life) in 682. loc: 9233

Wealth meant the ability to move with ease across Europe, not as a penniless pilgrim, as Columbanus and other Irishmen had done, but as a Christian aristocrat, in search of Christian goods. loc: 9234

He returned to Northumbria with a “boundless store of books of every kind.” An entire library, collected by this northern magnate as he made his Grand Tour of Christian Italy, loc: 9237

The twin monasteries housed some 600 monks. They were maintained by the services of many thousands of tenants. Bede had access to over 300 books, some of which had once belonged to Cassiodorus’ Vivarium. It was the largest library to be assembled north of the Alps at this time. loc: 9247

A steady drift of books into Britain ensured that fragments of a Mediterranean world, whose history we have followed in previous chapters, now came to rest at the far end of Europe. Each book opened a window down the centuries. loc: 9250

We must remember that the arrival of so much book learning involved a reorganization of local resources as dramatic as any that had once accompanied the establishment of Roman legions along Hadrian’s Wall. Hundreds of unmarried men had to be supplied and fed. loc: 9258

The monasteries needed to be supported. They received as endowments large estates, amounting to thousands of acres in all. loc: 9261

Altogether, by modern standards, book production involved an immense outlay of labor and resources. To write a book was the equivalent of putting up an entire building. To assemble a library was a crushing investment. loc: 9264

From Ireland to Kent, each area in the British Isles had developed, as it were, its own, distinctive “micro-Christendom.” These had been built up through the skilled deployment of resources (often slender resources) that usually had come to each region from abroad. Each region was convinced that its own local variant of a common Christian culture was the “true” one. Each believed that it mirrored, with satisfactory exactitude, the wider macrocosm of worldwide Christian belief and practice. loc: 9294

The kings of Northumbria were givers on a heroic scale. But they (and other Saxon kings) needed to know which were the correct building blocks for setting up their own “micro-Christendom” – a local Christendom, that is, which mirrored the majestic certainty of a “true” Christianity, preserved somewhere in distant lands. loc: 9305

Such a need explains the meteoric career of a man such as Wilfrid (634–709). Wilfrid was the first native Saxon to become archbishop of York. He held that office only from 669 to 678. loc: 9308

He found, in the shadow of the great shrine of Saint Peter, a guaranteed source of personal superiority. loc: 9317

When Wilfrid arrived back home, in around 660, sheathed in inflexible certainty, he could not have picked more explosive topics for debate than the issue of the correct date of Easter and the correct form of the tonsure. loc: 9331

Under king Oswy, the Northumbrian kingdom had to face the consequences of its triumphant expansion. It risked falling apart. loc: 9333

The two issues – the Roman against the non-Roman tonsure and the correct annual dating of Easter – were designed to engage the passions of lay persons and clergymen alike. In an almost totally illiterate society, the precise nature of visible gestures and the precise timing of festivals spoke volumes. Conflicts over fully visible practices counted for more than any conflict of ideas. loc: 9343

each hairstyle made a clear declaration of identity, distinguishing laity from clergy, warrior from farmer, “Roman” from barbarian. loc: 9346

uncertainty on the correct date of Easter affected the timing of mass baptisms of the newly converted (which usually took place at the high festival of Easter) and upset the rhythms of the royal court, where (as we saw in the case of king Oswald) a warrior-king was expected to show his most exuberantly Christian face at the Easter feast. loc: 9349

Hence, to challenge the customs of the great monastery of Iona was to do nothing less than to pit loyalty to Saint Columba against loyalty to Saint Peter, and to render Oswy, as king of Northumbria, the arbiter between the two. loc: 9356

As archbishop of York, from 669 to 678, Wilfrid claimed to be an out-and-out “Roman.” But his actions made clear that, in reality, he wished to out-Irish the Irish. He was a prince of the Church, and an ecclesiastical empire-builder in a mold to which the British Isles (Irish and Saxon alike) had grown accustomed. loc: 9374

Bede and his generation knew that Wilfrid, with his strident, entrepreneurial “Roman”-ness, had been the pace-setter for their own more secure enjoyment of the cultural riches of the Mediterranean. loc: 9423

The seventh century was characterized throughout western Europe by a massive “involution” of the economy. Entire regions fell in upon themselves, drawing little from the outside world. The decline of trading networks in the western Mediterranean coincided with the disruption caused by the Arab invasions, and with the consequent hardening of political and confessional boundaries all over the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. loc: 9428

Throughout the Christian world, Christian churches had become profoundly regionalized. Christianity was a patchwork of adjacent, but separate, “micro-Christendoms. loc: 9433

Hence the emergence, at this time, all over Christendom, of “encyclopedic” works, which organized all previous knowledge in easily accessible form. loc: 9437

What had once been scattered with insouciant abundance through so many great, long books, not all of which were now available at any one time in any one region of Europe or the Middle East, could be absorbed in compressed form. loc: 9440

The example of this encyclopedic tendency which is best known to western Europeans came from the Visigothic kingdom of Spain. Bishop Isidore of Seville (ca.560–636) was the younger brother of Leander of Seville, the friend of Gregory the Great. Immediately after Isidore’s death, his Etymologies were published by his disciples. This was a 20-book summation of all knowledge. loc: 9455

In the case of Spain, as in the case of other conflicting Christian regions, there was a competitive edge to such collections of knowledge. The Visigothic kings of Spain and their episcopal advisers, of whom Isidore was among the most enthusiastic, wished to create their own version of a “true” Christian commonwealth in thinly disguised competition with the “kingdom of the Greeks loc: 9465

Having established a firm alliance with the Catholic bishops through their conversion from Arianism in 589, the Visigothic kings of Spain succeeded in holding together for over a century the largest undivided political unit in seventh-century Europe. loc: 9475

new royal capital of Toledo. loc: 9482

Toledo was spoken of as a “new Jerusalem.” Its hilltop crowned with palaces and shrines, it was a solemn urban theater where bishops and kings together acted out the great hope of a self-sufficient “micro-Christendom.”38 loc: 9484

the importance attached to the uniform observance of “correct” Catholic rituals in Spain. loc: 9488

cultic anomalies were treated seriously as the first, troubling symptoms of a wider potential for disorder. loc: 9496

In 711 the worst happened, and precisely from the direction which the Visigothic kings had always feared. loc: 9503

The Visigothic kingdom, though “established with ancient solidity,” was the only western Christian state to fall, with ominous speed, to the armies of the “unspeakable Saracens. loc: 9506

Irish clerical scholars fastened on the Etymologies. It was just what they needed. They called it the Culmen, “the summit of all learning.” Such a book gave members of the Christian clergy, a caste defined by their arcane learning, the means to master the entire exotic world which had been opened up to them by their mastery of the Latin tongue. loc: 9516

Theodore of Tarsus belonged to a generation of extraordinary Greek scholars on the run. Many sought to flee the advance of the Arabs by settling in the extreme western end of the East Roman empire, at Rome and Carthage. They were men of ascetic vocation, used to being “strangers.” They moved all over the East Roman world from one monastery to another. loc: 9533

From the safety of their western retreats, they instantly engaged in bitter controversy loc: 9539

The emperor had wished to proclaim that Christ was truly human and truly divine, but that the core of his being, his will, was unique and utterly undivided. Christ never suffered the normal human agony of indecision. He had a “Single Will” – hence the term Monothelite, loc: 9543

To the opponents of this “Monothelite” formula, it appeared that such a view robbed Christ of his full humanity, and made him that much less accessible to human beings. They thought that the “Monothelite” formula implied that Christ had not truly wept, and that, when faced with the prospect of crucifixion, Christ had not felt, for a moment, the full weight of human indecision and of human horror at the approach of death, before deciding freely to go forward to his fate. Such feelings were possible only in a being which possessed free will, and who could feel the terrible pull of alternatives like any other human being. loc: 9546   • Delete this highlight

Note: Another example where Brown makes sense of the competing Christian doctrines that I find so picayune and esoteric. He explains them so that their importance becomes evident, at least to the people at the time. They still seem picayune and esoteric to me. Edit

the imperial government had reached out to crush opposition with the extraordinary brutality of a regime reduced, by the Arab invasions, to a state of perpetual emergency. loc: 9553

The pope who chose to send Theodore as archbishop to a distant land, Vitalian (657–672), wanted to maintain good relations with the emperor by avoiding controversy. Theodore, a learned Greek refugee in his prime, was a potential trouble-maker. loc: 9556

It was precisely his learning and his long experience, as a refugee, of divergent customs which ensured that Theodore was a spectacular success in Britain. loc: 9561

Up to his death, at the age of 88, Theodore ruled all the churches of Saxon Britain from the see of Canterbury.52 But it was as a “philosophus,” a man of diverse and exceedingly exotic learning, that Theodore took the learned classes of the British Isles by storm. loc: 9570

Theodore answered them courteously, sharing with them a store of information gathered from distant Christian regions. loc: 9577

Gregory was an outstanding representative of the allegorical method. For him, the Bible was a great encoded message, sent by God to cast fire into the heart. It echoed with the mighty whisper of God. It was for this “whisper” that the devout Christian should listen, reading the Bible, as it were, “between the lines” – paying less attention to the text itself than to a message from God which lay beyond the text. loc: 9588

The school of Antioch, by contrast, saw the Bible first and foremost as a challenging text. Its different books had been written at specific times, by specific authors. One had first to discover exactly what these authors meant before one could go on to draw upon the Bible to nourish higher flights of contemplation. loc: 9591

For Theodore, therefore, the Bible required explanation at the most basic level. The reader had to be told what a given word actually meant, what the immediate concern of the author of a given book had been, to what precise historical context and to what customs he referred. This was a basically “encyclopedic” approach. And the scholars of Britain loved it. It provided them with just what they needed – an introduction that gave them a purchase on the unimaginably distant, Middle Eastern world in which the Bible was set. loc: 9596

in Lindisfarne, the challenge of “Roman” grandeur posed by Wilfrid was met by vigorous competition. Hence an extraordinary flowering of manuscript production took place in a “native” style. This flowering was the answer of the north to Wilfrid. It produced some of the greatest artistic achievements ever to come out of the “Celtic” world. loc: 9614

the Christian mystique of copying the Scriptures was yet further tinged with the magical awe that had always surrounded the áes dana, the “people of skill,” the master-craftsmen whose legendary cunning provided secular rulers with the ornaments and jewelry appropriate to their status. loc: 9619

The flowering of a “native” style of art in northern Britain went hand in hand with the first emergence of Anglo-Saxon as a language of religious poetry. loc: 9644

Converted warriors came to monasteries to do something more urgent than master the Latin language. As in northern Gaul, they came to save their souls, through prolonged penance under a strict rule. They saw the monastery as a powerhouse of atonement. loc: 9667

They practiced a penitential asceticism in the hope of a “good death. loc: 9675

To write in Anglo-Saxon (as also, to write in Old Irish) was not necessarily to address a lay audience outside the clergy. It was needed so as to educate the clergy itself. loc: 9680

Christianization often took place, on the ground, through a wide penumbra of half-participants who had gathered around the monastery. Much of this was “self-Christianization,” based on a zest for knowledge of arcane matters and on a search for new sources of supernatural power loc: 9687

The upper-class monopoly of Christianity remained fragile. Marginal figures, largely untouched by Latin and even by literacy of any kind, played a crucial role in interpreting the new religion to the majority of their fellows. Visions came to such persons. loc: 9694

Suddenly, one night, he received the gift. In a dream, he was ordered to sing the story of Creation. Having been tested carefully at the monastery, Caedmon was allowed use his gift. He set to work, turning the stories of the Bible into Saxon heroic verse. loc: 9720

There was nothing “popular” or “folkloristic,” in a modern sense, about such Anglo-Saxon verse. Versification was a noble’s skill, an intricate instrument of social memory, usually deployed in warrior epics and in the praise of royal lineages. loc: 9736

A visionary and royal quality clung to the most powerful example of the Anglo-Saxon religious poetry of the age. loc: 9741

the Dream of the Rood, though written in Anglo-Saxon and transcribed in runes, was by no means the reflection of a purely local culture. It had been called into existence by a cult of the Cross which stretched from Scotland to Armenia. loc: 9755

The emphasis which the poem placed on the heroic willingness of Christ to face death echoed issues stirred up by the Monothelite controversy in Rome and Constantinople. loc: 9759

As a victory-bringing sign, the Cross was known to warrior aristocracies throughout the Christian world. loc: 9761

the “micro-Christendom” of Bede’s Britain was still part of a Christian “global village.” It shared with the many “micro-Christendoms” which stretched, like so many beads on a string, from Iona across Europe and the Middle East to Iran and Central Asia, a common pool of images and attitudes inherited from ancient Christianity. loc: 9766

In the eighth century, the balance of power in Europe shifted. As missionaries in Frisia and Germany, Anglo-Saxons (as we may now call them, for Bede had effectively given them that name) came to be swept up in the greatest political revolution to occur in western Europe since the passing of the Roman empire. loc: 9770

these developments engulfed the Christian populations of much of Continental Europe in a kingdom of truly “imperial” dimensions, known to us as the Carolingian empire. loc: 9775

Regional “micro-Christendoms” survived. But at the top of a victorious society, dominated by Franks, their various representatives came together, for the very first time, to create what they considered to be the only true “Christendom” that mattered. loc: 9777

15 Christianities of the North: The Saxons of Britain loc: 8865

In early 596, a mission headed by Augustine, the prior of Gregory’s family monastery on the Caelian Hill, set out for Britain at the behest of Gregory the Great. As we saw at the end of chapter 8, they had been invited by Ethelbert, the pagan Saxon king of Kent. loc: 8868

The pagans with whom Christians came into contact in this period were, by and large, alert entrepreneurs of the supernatural. Religion had always been an important part of their lives. loc: 8879

the Saxons had established themselves in Britain. It was a piecemeal business. They did not drive the local inhabitants before them. Rather, they rose to the top in a time of political collapse, establishing themselves securely in certain enclaves, while leaving others relatively untouched. By the year 597, pagan groups known as “Saxons” had taken control of about a third of the island of Britain. loc: 8886

the Saxons faced Christian Celtic kingdoms which were far more extensive than modern Wales, and which had become more consolidated since the first chaotic days that followed the withdrawal of Roman rule. loc: 8896

The Christianity of these kingdoms had been strengthened by the monastic renewal which had done so much to establish a remarkable Christian culture on both sides of the Irish Sea. loc: 8897

in many areas, pagan Saxon lords controlled a peasantry for whom Christianity had survived, even without an organized clergy, as a “folk religion. loc: 8903

Like other northern societies, from Ireland to southern Sweden, aggressive dynasties, with more effective military retinues and greater control of local resources, had begun to turn societies that had known little or no state system into “ loc: 8919

hard-dealing warrior kings, they fought to create ever larger pyramids of client kings, who would provide them with yet more goods and services. loc: 8923

Saxon kings appreciated, though from a safe distance, the solid success represented, throughout northern Europe, by the Christian Frankish kings. loc: 8936

The Saxon “kingdoms” were made up of agglomerations of dependent chieftaincies, bullied into submission and tribute. loc: 8940

Along with the spoils of war, it was from their monopoly of exotic goods that strong kings were able to reward their followers. They strove to create around them, in their palaces, a warrior elite dependent on royal generosity alone. loc: 8943

the kings of the Saxons have been treated as “sacral” experts. Forms of “sacral kingship” are ascribed to them. They are said to have been held responsible for the well-being of their subjects and for the religious rituals which achieved this well-being. loc: 8949

They, and they alone, would be responsible for missionaries, and for distributing the rare goods of a new religion, which had come to Britain from across the sea. loc: 8952

To adopt Christianity from outside (indeed, from Rome itself) was to give the fragile Saxon kingdoms, the “Nation of the Thugs,” a triumphal new charter for their occupation of Britain. loc: 8961

Ethelbert knew how to control foreigners, lest the world they represented should undermine his own prestige. loc: 8971

By accepting baptism from a representative of pope Gregory, Ethelbert could hope to make contact with the safely distant, imagined center of the Latin Christian world. Beyond Rome, he would gain recognition from the Roman emperor himself, the greatest ruler in the world, whose subject the pope was known to be. loc: 8977

Gregory set out his plan to revive the entire ecclesiastical structure of the former Roman province of Britain, with a metropolitan bishop at London and York, each with 12 colleagues under his supervision. To be patron of such a structure would have given Ethelbert the Britain-wide “presence” for which he strove. loc: 8994

no dramatic burst of temple-breaking (such as had characterized the heroic days of Saint Martin of Tours and the reign of Theodosius I) accompanied the arrival of the new religion. Gregory wrote that pagan shrines were not to be destroyed. Rather, they were to be reconsecrated with holy water. loc: 9000

Ethelbert’s Laws were issued in what we now call Anglo-Saxon. It is a remarkable indication of firm purpose and adaptability. Within a decade, unknown Roman or Frankish scribes, working with a Saxon king, had turned a Germanic dialect into a written language. They did so in order to create documents which would protect their Church. The Laws made plain that the new foreigners enjoyed the personal protection of the king. loc: 9023

Christianity reached the Saxon kingdoms on sufferance and, for well over a generation, its representatives were carefully “screened” by kings and noblemen who knew exactly what they wanted from a foreign religion. loc: 9050

Ethelbert’s daughter, Ethelburga, who had been given as a wife to the formidable overlord of northern Britain, Edwin. Despite his marriage, Edwin took some years to decide to become a Christian. Like Clovis, he did not convert until he had won a stunning victory over his rivals. The victory put him in control of a windfall of booty and tribute. Booty would enable him to offer substantial rewards to his followers. He could form a new aristocracy, pliable to his wishes. It would be a Christian aristocracy. loc: 9054

Because it was less tied to the land and its cults, many of which concerned women and simple farmers, Christianity emerged as an entirely appropriate religion for the all-male (and frequently unmarried) war-band of a warrior king, which lived a prestigious life a little to one side of settled society. loc: 9074

Edwin had ensured that the “coming” of Christianity to the Saxons of northern Britain was a royal moment. loc: 9084

Yet Edwin had only a few more years to live. His death in battle in 633, when fighting a formidable alliance between Celtic Christian kings and a major pagan Saxon warlord from the Midlands – both equally anxious to cut Edwin’s “empire” down to size – was followed by the collapse of Christianity in his kingdom. loc: 9091

It was the Irish Christianity of Iona which saved Christianity in the north of Britain. The successor to Edwin, Oswald, had been baptized at Iona when an exile, loc: 9095

Oswald’s “northern” option proved decisive. For it brought the northern Saxons, through Iona, into the orbit of the Christianity of Scotland and northern Ireland. loc: 9103

For the rest of the seventh century, a Christianity formed in Iona stretched in a great arch joining what is now northern England, Scotland, and Ireland. loc: 9105

And, in the gift-exchange between an “exotic” Christianity and its Saxon patrons, the Northumbrian kingdom was the greatest gift-giver of all. The victories of the Northumbrian kings against the British gave them land, booty, and slaves. The efflorescence of Christian culture in seventh-century northern Britain is known as the “Golden Age of Northumbria.” It was a “Golden Age” which rested on much real gold. loc: 9117

Bede settled down to write his Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in 731. loc: 9132

Bede went out of his way to create a new unity. He viewed Britain as a whole, much as Gildas (whom he had read with care) had done. He endowed the Saxon kingdoms with a providential role in the island. loc: 9136

They were a new people, united, if in nothing else, by their common adherence to Catholic Christianity. Bede was the first author to speak of the disparate groups of settlers no longer simply from the outside, as “Saxons.” He talked of them from the inside. He used a name which the tribes of Northumbria and others had used for themselves. He treated them as a single gens Anglorum, a single “nation of the English. loc: 9138

he wished to present the gens Anglorum as a single people, like the People of Israel, newly established in their own Promised Land, the island of Britain. loc: 9142

Bede gave the nondescript patchwork of military adventurers who had settled in eastern Britain the common name by which they have come to be known in later ages – the “ loc: 9149

By the same token, the flashes of peace and grandeur enjoyed by the Angli under major hegemonial rulers, such as the kings of Northumbria, could be ascribed to their willingness to accept the faith and to listen to Christian bishops. Bede presented the missionaries, bishops, and great holy men of his century as worthy heirs of the Hebrew prophets. loc: 9161

a raw sacrality – the product of fiercely maintained local memories – flickers around a figure such as king Oswald of Northumbria. Oswald was Edwin’s successor. He had been baptized at Iona. loc: 9169

The elaboration of the cult of Saint Oswald took place in the same decade as Muslim armies, staffed by warriors who regarded themselves as potential martyrs, swept into Syria and Iraq. Oswald became the first warrior king in Europe who, simply by the fact of having died a violent death in battle, was believed to have gained the supernatural powers usually associated with a Christian martyr or ascetic. loc: 9189

Once they had tested the new religion to their satisfaction, the kings of Saxon Britain and their aristocracy (not only in Northumbria, but all over the island) emerged as givers to the Church on a heroic scale. Slowly but surely, in the course of the seventh century, Saxon Britain came to resemble northern Francia, loc: 9194

It was a rich world, where kings and their courtiers sought to atone for their sins and to secure the future fame of their families. loc: 9197

14 Christianities of the North: Ireland loc: 8438

Far to the north of Continental Europe and the Mediterranean, in the British Isles, in Scandinavia, and even further east, between the Baltic and the Black Sea, we meet societies in which new forms of power were being created, new religions were tested, and exotic goods avidly sought out. loc: 8442

At the other end of Europe, overlooking the North Sea, the spectacular complex of Saxon burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, perched on the coast of Suffolk, is equally impressive in the variety of its objects, and in the mobilization of labor that must have gone into their creation. loc: 8448

not only horses, but also human beings, were sacrificed on the occasion of a great royal burial. loc: 8455

an unprecedented range of foreign objects (gathered by plunder, tribute, or gift-exchange) were transformed, by the magic of skilled craftsmen, into prestige goods that were distributed as royal bounty. This was the alchemy by which all that was most foreign was turned into a source of local power and prestige for rulers and their aristocracy. loc: 8480

In such a world, successful warrior kingship and a demonstrative relationship with victory-bringing deities went hand in hand. loc: 8487

These societies were not in any way cut off from the rest of the world. Nor were they placid backwaters, whose inhabitants preserved unchanged the traditions of a barbarian, “tribal” society. Few societies of the West in the sixth and seventh centuries were changing as rapidly as they were. New, more forceful styles of rule emerged. loc: 8489

The case of Ireland makes this plain. In the course of the sixth century, Christianity emerged as the dominant religion because it was adopted by the royal and noble families who controlled Irish society. loc: 8502

A period of “slump,” of aimless violence and recession of cultivation, came to an end in the fourth century A.D. as a result of a “boom” in the provincial economy of Britain in the last century of secure Roman rule. As the Roman defenses of Britain collapsed in the fifth century, trade was followed by extensive slave-raiding. loc: 8508

A túath was frequently named from the “plain” that it controlled – a patch of arable land surrounded by mountains and bogland. Such a “plain” could support only a midget community. A small class of persons of royal and noble descent (perhaps no more than 70 families in each túath) dominated the local farmers. These aristocrats were known as errid, “men of the chariot,” from memories of archaic warfare which had long since vanished. They dominated the farmers through their control of the livestock of the region. loc: 8516

From top to bottom, therefore, Irish society was a society held in balance by an intricate web of mutual obligations created by gifts. In this society, nothing was for nothing. loc: 8526

the nobles and the farmers had in common the precious quality of “freedom.” This was highlighted by the fact that they were slave-owners. loc: 8531

What we call the “conversion” of Ireland was, in fact, the decision of the nobility of the land to make their own, quickly and very much on their own terms, the religion of their foreign slaves. loc: 8539

Columba belonged to an earlier generation. He was born in 521. Within his lifetime, Christianity changed from being the religion of an articulate minority to become the exclusive faith of powerful royal clans. loc: 8549

A few years later, in 563, Columba decided to leave Ireland as a penitential exile. loc: 8557

He sailed northward, across the sea to Scotland. There he settled in Iona, in the territories of a different Irish clan, the Dál Riata. These Irish eventually gave their name to Scotland, for they were known as scotti, the name for sea-rovers. loc: 8558

Iona lay between northern Ireland and Scotland. It was cut off from the mainland of Argyll by a stretch of “glass-green” sea. Here was the classic “desert” of Egypt, the home of the great monks of old, now re-created, in a Celtic idiom, in the remoteness of an offshore island in the wild Atlantic. loc: 8571

Yet, in reality, Iona was situated at the center of the political world of the North, on the seaways where Ireland and northern Britain met. loc: 8576

Iona emerged as the center of a spiritual empire which stretched from Ireland along the northwest coast of Scotland as far as the Hebrides, Loch Ness, and to the north of the Great Glen of Scotland. loc: 8583

It was an unusually extensive spiritual empire. It stretched from western Scotland deep to the southwest into the heart of Ireland and, to the southeast, it reached down throughout northern Britain, through the influence of its sister monastery, Lindisfarne. loc: 8586

In 635 the Irish monks of Iona converted the leading Saxon warlords of the north – the Northumbrian dynasty of Bernicia. This extensive kingdom straddled Hadrian’s wall. It controlled the lowlands of Scotland and cast its shadow (and with it, the shadow of an Irish Christianity, based on Lindisfarne and ultimately loyal to Iona) as far south as the river Thames. loc: 8590

Through the continued protection of Columba, the monastery of Iona was believed to hold in its hands the fortunes of the competing warrior kingdoms of the north. loc: 8601

In 700, he persuaded 51 kings and 40 churchmen to agree to the Cáin Adomnáin, Adomnán’s Law, an Ireland-wide Law of Innocents. The Law of Innocents protected women and clerics from the effects of intertribal violence.20 The ability to create such a law was a sign of the way in which Columba’s spiritual empire had worked its way deep into the fabric of political life in Ireland and beyond. loc: 8608

His comments on forms of Christian worship encountered in the Holy Land show that he wrote as one sapiens to others, wherever they might be. He shared with them up-to-date religious concerns which preoccupied an intellectual elite scattered all over Europe, loc: 8617

Adomnán’s Life of Columba marked the culmination of an age in which great monasteries and ambitious bishops had carved out for themselves extensive ecclesiastical “empires” in Ireland. loc: 8623

Each strove to amass dependent monasteries and bishoprics.23 As a result of fierce competition, these religious centers emerged as the equivalent of the great high places of pagan times which had once acted as intertribal joining points. loc: 8634

Such competition brought about a sudden flowering of Irish hagiography. Each major center strove to bring its long-dead founders into the present. loc: 8654

Challenged by the claims of Kildare, Muirchú moccu Machtheni soon followed, in around 695, with a Life of Patricius, written to defend the prestige of the see of Armagh. loc: 8661

Muirchú’s eyes were not those of a modern scholar. He gave his readers what they wanted. This was not an eccentric British bishop, but a religious leader larger than life, cut to the measure of the modern “heirs” of Patricius, the great bishops of Armagh. loc: 8666

Quite apart from the climatic vulnerability of the land, what wealth existed in Ireland was hard to tap. “Base clients” – small farmers owing dues – were the foundation on which the intense aristocratic culture of Ireland rested. But, unlike the serfs of “Roman” Europe, “base clients” carried arms and owned their own farms. There was a strict limit above which they could not be exploited. loc: 8684

This insistence on the return of gifts affected the implantation of Christianity on the ground in Ireland. What the Christian Church offered was presented, quite frankly, as a “gift” in return for a “gift.” The laity supported the clergy and the monasteries in various ways by offering their wealth and services. In return, the local church or monastery was expected to offer the counter-gift of Christian blessing loc: 8695

The laity were not seen as the “subjects” of the clergy, as tended to be the case in Continental Europe. Rather, they thought of themselves, in a very Irish manner, in terms of entitlement. Their gifts gave them access to the blessing that was to be had in the little wooden and stone churches loc: 8704

Confession and penance were not imposed on the Christian population as a whole (as would be the case in later Catholic practice). Rather, they were the concern of an “elective elite. loc: 8718

Within a wider, nominally Christian population, an inner ring formed around the church, made up of pious lay persons, the áes aithrige, the “people of penance. loc: 8723

The Christian clergy had few illusions about the world in which they lived. It was a world ringed by extensive areas on which Christianity had little or no purchase. loc: 8733

At the center was the home and around it was grouped the comforting presence of fully domesticated animals, extending from the dog (who might enter the house) to the cow and the domesticated pig. But beyond them, in the world of the boglands, the woods, and the mountains, there lurked the grim antithesis to well-ordered living. loc: 8735

Human wolves, untamed warriors and brigands, occupied the unchurched edges of society. They were a constant presence at the time. loc: 8750

On the ground, the “Christianization” of Ireland was a distinctly piebald process. The truly remarkable achievement of the sixth and seventh centuries was, rather, the Christianization of one section of Irish society – the Irish learned class. This took a quite distinctive turn. loc: 8763

The complexity of Irish society had created a need for experts. “Speakers of the law,” brithemain, were the guardians of legal memory. Poets, filid, “seeing men” endowed with an almost uncanny gift for remembering the past, moved freely all over Ireland. loc: 8766

The arrival of Christian Latin culture, in the next century, gave the learned classes what they needed – the opportunity to write. loc: 8774

To join the Church, as a monk or clergyman, was to obtain, at once, an entire new skill. loc: 8778

Of the traditional experts of Ireland, only the druids, the purveyors of non-Christian religious knowledge (who may, in any case, have had less interest in the deployment and preservation of words by writing than did lawyers and poets) were banished to the “wild.” They sank to the level of common sorcerers. The other learned classes established a symbiotic relationship with the Christian clergy. loc: 8791

the introduction of literacy into Ireland unleashed a surge of creativity within the most traditional sectors of Irish upper-class society. Newly endowed with the skills of literacy, the guardians of traditional law and of traditional memory, the lawyers and the poets, entered with gusto into a new age. loc: 8798

But, of course, to carry authority, they had to write in Irish, not in Latin. Hence the emergence of Old Irish as a written language. loc: 8801

Irish went into letters with surprising rapidity and speed.51 Nothing like it had happened before in Europe. loc: 8802

Hence the traditional learned class in Ireland confronted a double challenge. To put their own traditions into writing in their own language, they must first learn the “blessed white language” of the Latin Scriptures. They went to school as clergymen and monks. loc: 8812

no learned persons in Ireland gained their literacy in any other setting than in Church schools loc: 8819

written Irish was just one face, among many, of a clerical culture still dominated by Latin.54 It enabled the clergy and its allies to adopt, in Irish, a tone of command. What was produced were legal texts. loc: 8822

Forms of legal practice, many of which reached back to at least 1000 B.C., passed into writing at this time, through the pens of Christian scribes, to enjoy a further millennium of use.56 loc: 8835

the Old Testament had given Celtic Christian communities, in Ireland and Britain, a vision of an entire society, organized around the principles of sacredness and pollution. loc: 8839

there was nothing that happened in “barbarian” Ireland that had not happened in the Old Testament. This meant, in effect, that the blessing of God might rest upon the ways of the Irish as it was known to have rested on the Chosen People of Israel, despite their rough ways. loc: 8842

a sanguine view of local custom was allowed to develop, under the aegis of appeals to the practice of the Old Testament. The “sewing together” of church and people in Ireland, in the sixth and seventh centuries, had resulted, by the beginning of the eighth century, in a “sewing together” of pagan past and Christian present that was unique in the history of Europe. loc: 8860

Part IV New Christendoms A.D. 750 loc: 9787

17 The Crisis of the Image: The Byzantine Iconoclast Controversy loc: 9790

By A.D. 700, the former world empire of East Rome, known to the Muslims as Rûm, had become a sadly diminished state. It had lost its eastern provinces and three quarters of its former revenues. For two centuries on end, until around 840, it faced near-annual attack from the Islamic empire loc: 9796

Between 717 and 843, western Asia Minor, the coastlines of Greece and the Balkans and, at the furthest edge of the Ionian Sea, Sicily and Calabria were firmly incorporated into a new political system. loc: 9822

The modern term “Byzantine” (which we have avoided until now) is apposite for the compact, Greek empire which replaced the old-world grandeur of the “Roman” empire of the East. loc: 9825

the new elites of the empire were hard men, soldiers and ranchers, who did not pretend to possess urban graces. They were a warrior elite, not unlike their contemporaries in western Europe. But they were pious Christians, loyal servants of Christian emperors in a time of constant emergency. loc: 9834

The inhabitants of such a rural society, if they looked outside their village at all, looked up directly to their emperor. They identified themselves through loyalty to a Christian emperor, loc: 9837

even Constantinople was a depleted city. loc: 9842

The inhabitants were largely immigrants from the Balkans. They had lost all sense of the classical past. loc: 9844

The Byzantine Church was increasingly cut off from Latin Christianity and from the Christian communities in the Middle East. It became more compact as its horizons narrowed. loc: 9851

the custom of venerating painted images of Christ, of his Mother, and of the saints became the center of a virulent controversy among the leaders of the Byzantine church. loc: 9860

around A.D. 730, what was at stake in this issue was by no means trivial. It was about how to find, in a society thrown into a state of perpetual mobilization, fully acceptable symbols around which to rally the religious determination of a much-battered “baptized people.” The beleaguered Christians of the Byzantine empire believed that, if they looked to God for help, then they had to be sure that the manner of their worship was acceptable to him. The survival of the empire was at stake. loc: 9869

They had come to believe that icons brought Christ, his Mother, and the saints down among the Christian people. loc: 9874

Such images made Christ, his Mother, and the distant saints “present” at a precise place, where they could receive the prayers of those who needed them. They met an unchanging need to sense, close to hand, the loving “presence” of invisible protectors. loc: 9887

images of Christ and the Virgin had been carried in processions to invoke their protection. The solemn movement of an image seemed to make it live, as it swayed above the crowd. loc: 9908

many Byzantines regarded the cult of images as a novel and exaggerated form of devotion. Those who were called (by their enemies) the Iconoclasts, the “icon-smashers,” were far from certain that such images were “pleasing to God. loc: 9914

They pointed out that, in his Ten Commandments, God had expressly forbidden the worship of images made by human hands. Now some Christians were inclined to agree with the Jews. loc: 9920

Islam presented itself as a true and incorrupt religion very much through criticizing contemporary Christian practice. Strict Muslim theologians even claimed that no artist had the right to “endow” an image with “life” by representing a living creature. loc: 9924

The Iconoclast emperors, Leo III (717–741) and Constantine V (741–775) considered themselves to be good Christians. And, as good Christians, they believed that the Christian congregations of their empire should not be encouraged to turn, in their time of need, to unreliable objects of devotion. loc: 9936

They were too close for comfort to the little images of the gods which pagans were remembered to have used. loc: 9941

they did believe that images were out of place in Christian churches. To make them special and to “worship” them, as many Christians appeared to have been doing, was an impious action, calculated to provoke the anger of God. loc: 9949

in the debate for and against the worship of images were not theological arguments. Rather, what counted for them were incidents in which God appeared to show his displeasure at the “idolatrous” worship of images. loc: 9953

From 730 to 787, the initiative lay with the Iconoclasts. Iconoclast emperors and their advisers claimed to offer to their subjects something better than icons. They upheld the image of the Cross. loc: 9961

The Cross had been the “victory-bringing sign” under whose auspices Constantine was believed to have won his battles and to have founded the Christian empire. loc: 9964

The Byzantines were the “people of God” like the People of Israel. They now thought of themselves as being as beleaguered as the People of Israel had been. Leo feared that his empire might be altogether deserted by God, as the People of Israel had once been deserted by him, because, by worshipping images, they had lapsed into idolatry. loc: 9977

Constantine V (741 loc: 9986

As his armies slowly turned the tide of the Muslim advance, he could count on the loyalty of the populations which he had defended so successfully, and on the active enthusiasm of troops who proved increasingly victorious. The soldiers knew that they had won their battles without the help of icons. loc: 9987

Constantine would purge the Church of occasions for “idolatry” just as the pious king Hezekiah of Israel had once “purged” the Temple of Jerusalem of the “idol” of a brazen serpent. By so doing, Hezekiah had turned away the danger of invasion and conquest by the Assyrians. loc: 9994

The death of Constantine V in 775 and the weakening of his dynasty led to a drastic swing of policy. loc: 10009

Not surprisingly, the restoration of images did not last. By 815, what is known as “the second Iconoclasm” was back in power. For the best part of a century, strong, successful rule had come to be associated with the absence of images. loc: 10015

The endless warfare between Byzantium and Islam had overshadowed Balkan affairs. Yet, ever since the Great Plague of the age of Justinian (as we have seen in chapter 7) the hinterland of the Balkans slipped out of the control of the Byzantine emperors. The empire retained its grip on the coastline; but in the mountainous hinterland large swathes of territory became “stateless” zones. Slav settlers moved into them. loc: 10019

they looked for leadership to the nomadic confederacies which had formed to the north of the Danube, in the steppelands of Moldavia and the Ukraine. First the Avars and then the Bulgars acted, as it were, as a “counter-empire” to Byzantium. Their presence effectually neutralized imperial attempts to dominate the Slavs and to regain control of the Balkans. loc: 10022

a semi-nomadic Bulgarian Khanate, which had established itself on both sides of the Danube in the course of the eighth century. The Bulgars called themselves “Children of the Huns. loc: 10027

From their base on the Danube, they threatened the rich, disciplined plains of Thrace, on which Constantinople depended for its food supply. loc: 10028

In 811, Khan Krum (802–814) defeated and killed the emperor Nicephorus. loc: 10030

Nicephorus’ successor, Leo V, knew what he should do. The message was clear. The revived worship of icons had, once again, angered God: loc: 10034

The pressure of Muslim invasions diminished. The beleaguered Byzantine empire of the 730s clambered back painfully, by the year 840 and afterwards, into the position of a world power. After 840, an unprecedented degree of wealth and leisure returned to the elites of Constantinople. With this came a greater degree of cultural self-confidence. loc: 10054

The victory of icons did not represent, at the time, the “natural” victory of the immemorial religious ideals of the majority of Greek Christians. Rather, the period of the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” and the measures taken to consolidate the Iconophile position were marked by creative new solutions, which had little to do with the past. loc: 10070

Without the Iconoclast emperors and their willingness to jettison much of the cumbersome legacy of the later Roman empire, Constantinople would almost certainly have fallen to the Muslims long before 1453. loc: 10075

In much the same way, the Iconophiles jettisoned much of the East Roman Christian past. loc: 10077

they used their victory to incorporate the worship of images into what was, in effect, a novel religious system. loc: 10078

John Damascene (as he is usually called), was acclaimed as the last great Father of the Church, and his defense of holy images has been held to be the classic statement of the Orthodox position. loc: 10096

John’s most decisive intellectual maneuver was to claim for images the same unambiguous ability to represent the unseen that earlier authors had claimed only for the liturgy and for the sacraments of the Church. loc: 10117

In his treatises, Pseudo-Dionysius endowed the entire material world with a sense of the holy. God lay behind it. He had created the visible universe to act as his own, immense icon. A vast “code” of visible symbols, deliberately placed by God in the world, linked humanity to an invisible God. loc: 10126

the cornerstone of Pseudo-Dionysius’ argument: “we are led to the perception of God by … visible images. loc: 10129

They were essential to God’s revelation of himself. They formed a bridge, wished by God himself, with which to cross the vertiginous chasm between the seen and the unseen. loc: 10132

What Christians represented on their “holy” images was, basically, what God, the saints, and the angels wished them to represent, as a merciful concession to the weakness of the human mind. loc: 10141

They also asserted that every image that was venerated in their own days had been venerated, in exactly the same form, since the days of Christ and the Apostles. loc: 10144

All images, therefore, reached back ultimately to the days of Christ and the Apostles. It was a breathtaking claim, which made time stand still. loc: 10147

John’s assertion that icons had always been part of Christian worship was further validated, in the ninth century, by appeals to visions. loc: 10152

The faces and figures of saints and Apostles, of the Virgin, and of Christ himself rose up the walls, from ground level, each one occupying its accustomed, carefully allotted space. Every church endowed in this way with images, John of Damascus had said, acted as a “spiritual hospital. loc: 10176

In the fifth and sixth centuries, the founders and donors of new churches, lay persons and clergymen alike, had filled the basilicas of the eastern empire with every form of visual magnificence. They had striven to bring Paradise down to earth; and it was still a very ancient Paradise. loc: 10181

In such a church, the liturgy also made full use of incense, of chanting, and of shimmering lights. It engulfed the senses. In church, worshippers were surrounded with the sights, the smells, and the sounds of Paradise. loc: 10189

After the ninth century, it is as if the heavy atmosphere of Paradise had cleared a little. The liturgy remained as splendid as ever. loc: 10192

what was expressed most forcibly in icons was something different. It was the desire to see clearly recognizable human faces of the saints and, through these faces, to enter into a direct relationship with invisible protectors – with Christ, with the Virgin, and with the saints. loc: 10196

The clergy now insisted that icons should be concentrated, in an orderly fashion, within the walls of the churches and that their worship should be intimately connected with the regular celebration of the liturgy. loc: 10207

Now all icons claimed equal respect because all of them had been declared equally holy. They were holy because of the holiness of the persons whom they represented and because of their placing in a church where the liturgy was celebrated. loc: 10213

Religious images now clustered in churches and (later) in the special “icon corner” of private houses. loc: 10217

In the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries there had been no lack of Christian religious images. They were all over the place. loc: 10218

They were talismans. The holy “presences” portrayed on them acted on their own accord to ward off the demons. loc: 10221

What came to count, in the view of the clergy at least, was the creation of precise “habits of the heart,” through the conscious worship of the tranquil, carefully characterized faces seen on icons. loc: 10225

Never before in the history of Christianity had a determined and highly cultivated elite taken in hand, with such firmness and with such theoretical certainty, the schooling of the visual imagination of an entire “baptized people. loc: 10232

The greatest and most lasting triumph of post-Iconoclast Byzantium lay in the diplomatic offensive of the late ninth and tenth centuries which led to the conversion of the Slavs of the Balkans (in around 860), of the kingdom of Kiev in the Ukraine (in 987), and eventually, through Kiev, of the northern Slav lands that came to be associated with Russia. loc: 10249

Up to the present, in a vast sweep, from the Balkans to Alaska, it is still possible to step into an Orthodox church and to be confronted with the same vision of a heavenly court, each member of which is clearly defined by a facial expression and by a style of dress that is a recognizable echo of the revived classical art of post-Iconoclast Byzantium. loc: 10264

Byzantine control continued in southern Italy. But in order to retain Sicily as the westernmost bulwark of a naval empire based on the Aegean, all Italy to the north of Calabria was neglected. In 751, Ravenna fell to the Lombards. loc: 10273

The popes soon found such protectors. After 751, the northern Franks, and not the emperors of Constantinople, came to be recognized as the arbiters of Italian politics and as the privileged protectors of the popes in Rome. loc: 10277

Charles had already taken over northern Italy. According to the glowing account of the pope’s envoys, he had “conquered all the West” and had even “subjected barbarous tribes to the Christian faith. loc: 10280

the clerics around Charles, for their part, were pleasantly disappointed. It struck them as a slipshod and theologically incorrect document. It showed that the Church “of the Greeks” no longer held a reliable form of Christianity. loc: 10286

When, in 794, he summoned a council of all the bishops of his extensive kingdom to meet in his palace at Frankfurt, he had no doubt as to his role. Like the Byzantine emperors, he also saw it as his duty to reform the Latin Church as a whole. loc: 10299

It was due to the emergence of a new, more academic, standard of orthodoxy, based upon what a group of scholars patronized by Charles considered to be the correct reading of “Roman” texts. loc: 10307

a new political order had emerged in the West. It was connected with a new dynasty, with the “Carolingian” descendants of Charles Martel. Both its rulers and its clerical elite were confident that they knew how to absorb and to educate whole new Christian peoples. loc: 10311

they were confident that they lived in a uniquely privileged Christendom, and that they were even entitled to an “empire” which could be treated as the equal of the “empire of the Greeks. loc: 10314

18 The Closing of the Frontier: Frisia and Germany loc: 10320

The nobility of Austrasia had emerged as a distinct group in the late sixth century. They controlled the frontier territories of northeastern Gaul and the lands east of the Rhine. After 700, they rallied increasingly to a family that came from the Maas/Meuse (in Belgium) and the Ardennes. This family was led by Pippin of Herstal (d.714). loc: 10329

As “mayor of the palace,” Pippin of Herstal had acted as the strong “vice-king” to a largely symbolic Merovingian ruler. loc: 10332

Charles “the Hammer.” He revived the ancient “terror of the Franks.” By the time that he died in 741, Charles the Hammer had shown his supporters what success in war could do, in acquiring new wealth to be distributed among themselves. loc: 10333

Charles’ armies looted the Christian regions of the south and imposed a northern hegemony on them. loc: 10336

Charles Martel’s victory over the Muslims at the battle of Poitiers, in 733, is what is most usually remembered about him. His systematic ravaging of the south of France is passed over in silence. His greatest conquest, however, was less spectacular but more decisive. He took over Frankish Neustria. As we saw in chapter 11, Neustria had been the heartland of Merovingian Gaul. Paris and the rich, well-watered lands around the Seine lay at its center. It was the most stable and prosperous region in Europe. loc: 10361

Slowly but surely, the landowners of the region imposed a “seigneurial” system on the peasantry. Greater control of the peasantry enabled the aristocracy to regain, for the first time in four centuries, a level of security and of guaranteed affluence that had once been enjoyed by the villa-owners of the Roman empire. In controlling Neustria, Charles controlled the economic and cultural core of northern Europe. loc: 10366

For much of his life, Charles Martel found himself faced by bitter enemies in a “winner take all” situation. But once he had emerged as victor, a consensus was formed around him and his family. loc: 10370

the Franks became the dominant partners in a confederation of widely differing regions which had always been associated, in a looser fashion, with the hegemonial rule of the Merovingian kings. loc: 10374

The combined Frankish aristocracy of Neustria and Austrasia were on the way to becoming the first truly international elite since the Roman senatorial order of the fourth century. loc: 10384

they did not lose their sense of belonging to a single, highly privileged group. Frankish noblemen loc: 10390

the Frankish kingdom. It had been formed in a Roman frontier zone. In the sixth century, the ancient limes had still traced an unmistakable line, which marked the joining of two worlds. The weight of a long Roman and Christian past loc: 10397

To the east of the former Roman frontier, a Frankish system of landowning had spilled over from northern Gaul and the Rhine valley, and had begun to penetrate eastward into central Germany loc: 10404

the Frankish model showed that a local nobility, with strong rulers behind them, could tame a once-evasive peasantry in such a way as to extract an unprecedented surplus of wealth. loc: 10406

The coming of Christianity to these regions amounted to a closing of the frontier. What had once been an open world, characterized by loose social and political structures and by far greater fluidity in its religious allegiances, found itself drawn into an ever-tighter system of political and religious control. loc: 10419

Further to the south, in the region between the upper Rhine and the upper Danube, in what is now northern Switzerland and southwest Germany, in the area in and around the Black Forest, Christianity had long been present. This was the territory of the Alemanni. But the Christianity of the area was not organized on a Frankish model, with bishoprics and large monasteries. Christianity had remained, in effect, a family cult. loc: 10428

Further east along the Danube, Christianity was a folk religion which had survived since Roman times. It had flourished with little clerical control. loc: 10438

In comparison with Francia, with its royal dynasty and aristocratic landowners, the power of local chieftains in pagan Germany was weak. loc: 10443

In Francia, Britain, and Ireland, kingship – and an increasingly strong kingship at that – was identified with civilization. loc: 10450

The decision made in the course of the eighth century to convert such peoples to Christianity, by force if need be, loc: 10458

In Ireland and Saxon Britain, the imaginative barrier of the limes did not exist. What mattered was peregrinatio, the act of becoming a stranger to one’s country for the sake of God. After that, one could go anywhere. loc: 10474

if one had become an exile to save one’s own soul, the sense of urgency which drove one to that desperate remedy might also lead to a sense of the urgent need to save the souls of others. loc: 10477

The first of this new generation of strangers, Willibrord (658–739), was a product both of Wilfrid’s micro-Christendom in Northumbria and of Ireland. loc: 10491

He was encouraged to preach to the Frisians of the Rhine estuary, who had recently fallen under Frankish domination. loc: 10495

The choice of the “Anno Domini,” A.D., dating communicated a sense of time that was as universal, as independent of local traditions, as Willibrord’s vision of the world was independent of local frontiers. All time began with the beginning of Christianity and, by implication, all time was about the time it took for Christianity to reach its fulfillment, through the conversion of ever more pagan regions. loc: 10513

Frisia was a standing rebuttal of the growing Christian conviction that paganism was synonymous with underdevelopment. loc: 10526

Radbod was careful to maintain the pagan rites which gave so much prosperity to his people and which separated them from the Franks. The Franks, in turn, were prepared to believe the worst of Radbod. loc: 10532

Those who gave to Willibrord, by contrast, were a new generation. loc: 10554

They had broken with the pre-Christian code that had linked them, as chieftains, to their followers, in death as in life. They were great landowners, and their followers had become mere peasants. They had been greatly enriched by their own lord, Pippin, so they were ostentatiously faithful to Pippin’s invisible Lord, the God whom Willibrord served with such apostolic zeal. It is in these small ways that an open frontier came to be closed, region by region, through the establishment of a new, more tightly organized social system along the edges of the Frankish kingdom. loc: 10556

Wynfrith came to be known as Saint Boniface (675–754), the “Apostle of Germany. loc: 10563

Boniface reminded the Saxons of Britain, on one occasion, that the Old Saxons claimed to be kin to them: “we are of the same blood and bone. loc: 10579

as Bede presented it in his memorable Ecclesiastical History (which appeared in 731), conversion to Christianity had made the Anglo-Saxons special and had turned Britain into their Promised Land. As an Anglo-Saxon, Boniface intended to re-enact among the Germans the triumphal coming of Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons of Britain. loc: 10582

Altogether, nothing in Germany was quite what it seemed. Boniface had been sent, in the words of the pope, “for the enlightenment of the German people who live in the shadow of death, steeped in error. loc: 10610

What he found, instead, was much Christianity, and almost all of it the wrong sort. Cultic practitioners exchanged rituals. Pagans baptized Christians. Christian priests sacrificed to Thunor, ate sacrificial meats, and presided at the sacral funerary banquets of their Christian parishioners. Theirs was an oral Christianity, which mangled essential Latin formulae. loc: 10612

More disturbing yet, for Boniface, were Christian rivals – clerical entrepreneurs who had moved into the new territories from Ireland and Francia. loc: 10622

Far more dangerous than rival bishops were those who, in Francia and Germany, threatened to create their own idiosyncratic version of a Christian mission. They did so from elements long associated with a dramatic style of “frontier” Christianity. loc: 10636

Aldebert represented an older strain of Christianity – the Christianity of the charismatic holy men who had brought the faith to so many regions of western Europe and the Mediterranean. loc: 10651

Boniface made himself unpopular by securing Aldebert’s condemnation. He had taken away from the people of Francia “a most holy Apostle, a patron saint, a man of prayer, a worker of miracles. loc: 10664

Boniface, by contrast, was not a charismatic figure. Rather, he radiated “correct” ecclesiastical order. His task turned out to be less to convert the heathen than to clear up anomalies and to put an end to long habits of compromise. He had brought from the “micro-Christendom” of Saxon Britain a blueprint of “correct” Christianity which he was quite prepared to impose on the ancient Christianity of Continental Europe. loc: 10671

After 742, the pope had authorized him to act as the privileged counsellor of Pippin and of other “rulers of the Franks,” in summoning councils to effect a reform of the Frankish Church. loc: 10686

In northern Francia and in the Rhineland, Boniface was by no means the hero of his generation. He faced determined opposition from bishops who regarded him as an interloper. He returned their scorn with a vengeance. loc: 10689

Boniface had died as a martyr. But he had lived very much as a schoolteacher, bringing order and instruction to untidy lands. loc: 10722

The convent was to be a “sacred” place. Only then could it act as a powerhouse of prayer and a place of atonement. loc: 10730

These little nodules of local support for places endowed with an aura of the supernatural, such as Leoba’s convent, brought about the “grassroots” conversion of Germany more effectively than did the high ecclesiastical policies associated with the leading missionaries. loc: 10740

the supernatural was strangely distant in Boniface’s world. What he and his followers considered themselves to have brought, rather, was the miracle of preaching and of “correct” instruction. loc: 10743

The document declared, in effect, that paganism, as such, had ceased to exist. All that the bishops had to deal with, now, were “survivals,” “superstitions,” paganiae, “pagan leftovers.” The continued existence of such practices merely showed the ignorance and the stubborn attachment to old habits of an unenlightened Christian people. loc: 10756

Christianization was no longer perceived as taking the form of an outright clash of supernatural powers. As we saw in chapters 2 and 3, this had been the principal element in all narratives of the triumph of Christianity. But in the eighth century, victory over the gods could be taken for granted. That victory lay in the past. The real task of the Church, therefore, was a mission civilisatrice. Education was as important as miracles. loc: 10765

the generation of Boniface and of his successors was characterized by a plethora of little books. These are neat books, copied in a business-like manner and meant to be carried and consulted. loc: 10772

Books of rituals were equally important. They provided the correct form of words for the administration of Christian sacraments. loc: 10776

Whether it came in the form of newly founded bishoprics and monasteries, which cast a net of Christian books and Christian teachers over the new territories, or in the form of an agrarian system based upon a greater measure of control over the lives of the peasantry, by the middle of the eighth century Christianity and order had begun to come in earnest, and hand in hand, to Germany. loc: 10792

missionaries were less important in Germany than was the unprecedented power and determination of the Frankish kings. loc: 10797

The “people of Israel” had chosen their kings so as to be effective, “to lead the people out to war.” The “people of the Franks” should do the same by choosing a new king, in fact Pippin the son of Charles Martel, to replace the ineffective Merovingian dynasty.46 loc: 10803

If there was a city of the ancient Mediterranean which had well and truly died and that needed to “re-create” itself, it was the city of Rome in around 750. loc: 10808

Centuries of neglect ensured that Rome had come to look like a bombed-out European city in 1945. loc: 10813

Yet the popes and those around them showed amazing tenacity and skill in “re-creating” Rome to meet the needs of its new, northern patrons. By the end of the eighth century, they had brought about a remarkable triumph of urban memory over a truly desolate urban scene. loc: 10820

This was not the first time that Rome had re-created itself. In the fourth century, Rome ceased to be the effective capital of the empire. As we saw at the beginning of chapter 6, the local aristocracy successfully maintained the prestige of the city for centuries by presenting Rome (in the words of a modern scholar) as a theme park of the classical past. Now, in the eighth century, a succession of exceptionally gifted popes turned Rome into a theme park of the Christian past. loc: 10828

What they presented was a Rome of the saints and a Rome which was a depository of the order and wisdom of the Early Christian past. loc: 10832

the visitors who came to worship the saints came also to observe, at Rome, the ceremonies and to find the books which linked them to a Christian past far more ancient than their own. loc: 10835

The northerners – Irish, Anglo-Saxons, and Franks – found in Rome relics of Christian saints from the earliest days of the Church. They also found texts which claimed to have caught the Christian past in amber. Things had always been like this, so the Romans told them, in Rome. loc: 10843

Duly consulted by the Frankish bishops in 751, Zacharias II declared that Pippin could be made king. The ceremony took place in the most up-to-date manner possible for eighth-century Christians – that is, by a return to the Old Testament. Pippin was anointed as king with oil by the bishops, for the kings of Israel had been anointed with oil. loc: 10851

Thus, with papal blessing, king Pippin initiated the “Carolingian” dynasty named from Charles Martel. Stephen got protection for Rome. Pippin invaded Italy so as to check the Lombard advance on Rome. loc: 10859

In 768, Charles became king of the Franks. He had a reign of 46 years ahead ofhim – a reign longer than those of Augustus and of Constantine. loc: 10866

The fate of the pagan Saxons was crucial to Charles’ new concept of Christian empire. Not only were the Saxons pagan, they were a surprisingly aggressive warrior confederacy loc: 10869

It was all the more essential for the prestige of the Carolingian family that the Saxons, who had come to adopt so much of Frankish ways, should be declared to be outside the pale as pagans, and that, as pagans, they should be well and truly defeated. loc: 10875

In 774, Charles became king, also, of the Lombards. He even made a short visit to Rome. It was the first time that a Frankish king had set foot in Rome. It was also the first time since the fifth century that a western ruler of such power had been greeted in Rome with the sort of elaborate ceremonies which the Romans knew so well how to put on. loc: 10880

Charles proved to be a generous donor. An influx of Frankish silver marked the beginning of a dramatic recovery in the fortunes of the popes, loc: 10883

For a decade, an entire Frankish order was challenged in the north. Charles found himself forced to take over more territory than he had, perhaps, first intended to do. loc: 10892

Only Romans had been so self-confidently barbaric in their treatment of unreliable neighbors. loc: 10895

He wooed the pro-Frankish faction in the Saxon aristocracy through lavish gifts and through the promise of incorporation in a new social order that would strengthen their hands against their own peasantry. loc: 10897

The royal will was unambiguous. In theory at least, the frontier was now definitively closed. No other rituals but those of the Christian Church could be practiced in a Frankish province. loc: 10903

In the reigns of Charlemagne and his successors, a substantially new Church was allied with a new political system, both of which were committed, to a quite unprecedented degree, to the “correction” and education of their subjects. loc: 10915

19 “To Rule the Christian People”: Charlemagne loc: 10917

After 785, Charles controlled the former European core of the Western Roman empire – northern Italy, parts of northern Spain, and all of Gaul – and had absorbed its German and North Sea periphery. He showed what a warrior king could do when backed by unprecedented resources. loc: 10920

Charles was not a warrior-chieftain in a fragile, epic mode. He trod with the heavy tread of a dominus, of a lord of Roman determination, capable of deploying resources on an almost Roman scale. loc: 10926

It was from Aachen that he intended to steer his “Roman empire.” For the last years of his life, from 807 to 814, he resided for large periods each year at Aachen, making it a fixed capital – a marked departure from the mobile kingship of earlier times. loc: 10953

The consolidation of the “greatly expanded kingdom of the Franks” required a continuous effort at “monarchy-making” such as had not been seen in western Europe since the reformed empire of Diocletian and Constantine. Loyalty could never be taken for granted. loc: 10976

Charles and those around him were faced by much resentment and by widespread noncooperation, not only in conquered territories but from Frankish families who still resented the rise to power of the Carolingian dynasty. loc: 10985

Charles controlled a spoils system that ramified throughout much of Europe. He manipulated with great skill a reserve of inducements which no ruler had possessed since Roman times. loc: 10989

Charles summed up in his own style of life a hierarchical social order which insisted on close bonds of loyalty between dependents and their lords. loc: 10995

The Carolingians had no mean opinion of themselves. They rose to power by claiming that they had brought the Franks out of a “dark age. loc: 11010

there is no truth in this myth. The Carolingians built on solid foundations, already set in place in Merovingian times, loc: 11012

They had their own view of where they fitted in to the overall history of Europe. It is revealing that, for the very first time, they spoke of the “barbarian invasions” as if they were a distinct period of history. They believed that this period had come to an end in their own, more fortunate times. Carolingian writers, indeed, were the first to propagate the myth of the “barbarian invasions. loc: 11027

After a period of turmoil, Alcuin implied, Charles’ empire enjoyed unprecedented prosperity and success because God was pleased with it. It had won the favor of God through having renewed the correct practice of Christianity. loc: 11035

For Alcuin and his colleagues, the Christian Church, and not the Roman empire, was the most majestic institution ever to have appeared in Europe. The Church reached back without a break for over half a millennium, linking the Frankish kingdom directly to the “ancient” Christian world. loc: 11040

Their Christian culture did not need to be “reborn” for the simple reason that they did not think that it had died. It just needed to be reasserted. Their chosen term, therefore, was correctio – “correcting, shaping up, getting things in order again. loc: 11052

We should not underestimate the anxiety that was the permanent shadow of the Carolingian program of correctio loc: 11057

if the emperors failed in their duty, then God’s wrath would be made plain in the decline of the kingdom and in renewed barbarian invasion. loc: 11060

The movement of “correction” from on top lasted longer than the reigns of Charles and of his son, Louis the Pious (814–840). It mobilized an unprecedented range of persons loc: 11069

It drew on a remarkable convergence of aims, which betrayed a hardening of the will to rule, and to rule “correctly,” on the part of an entire diffuse governing class. loc: 11073

As emperor, it was Charles’ business to uphold the “corrected” Christian order and to make it work. loc: 11076

Charles was at his most “imperial” on such occasions. This was because he was seen to be acting in a manner that revived, in Christian times, the action of the godly king Josiah, when he had promulgated the rediscovered Law to the people of Israel. loc: 11088

In secular matters, local laws prevailed, each in its own region. loc: 11095

In matters of religion the “Christian Law” was the true, universal law of Charles’ empire. loc: 11099

For the correct observance of Christianity gained the favor of God for the empire. loc: 11102

The insistence that the “Christian Law” should be applied correctly in all regions of the empire pushed to the fore a largely new group of persons. Charlemagne’s reforms created an empire-wide “nobility of the pen,” drawn from monasteries and from the clergy. This nobility of the pen was recruited largely from the Frankish aristocracy loc: 11105

In controlling the Church, Charles controlled a structure of power which was unusual in its extensive reach and in its ability to penetrate downwards so as to touch many layers of local society. loc: 11117

a monastery, as a locus of the holy, might become the nodal point of the society of an entire region. loc: 11122

a “social earthquake” had changed the face of Germany. Between half and a third of the land in most villages passed, by donation, into the hands of churches and monasteries. The Church had become an overwhelming presence in every locality. loc: 11126

Despite the ceremonial importance of Aachen in the last decade of Charlemagne’s life, the Carolingian empire never developed a single, all-absorbing center. Instead, the court acted as a “distribution center” both for books and for personnel. loc: 11136

The first need for such a trans-regional elite (in the age of Charlemagne as under the Roman empire) was for a common code of communication which enabled them to recognize and to feel close to their peers all over Europe. loc: 11145

Alcuin came to a Francia that had begun to develop the sine qua non for a collaborative venture of literati – a new, uniform script. What later became known as “Caroline minuscule” was a smaller script, more regular and altogether more legible than its predecessors. loc: 11167

a world that had come to want texts that were “user-friendly.” These texts were written out in such a way as to guide the voice of the reader. loc: 11185

Books in Europe were no longer what they had been in the ancient world: they became considerably more like books as we know them. More important at the time, they gradually became the same all over Europe. loc: 11196

Latin had been a language learned from books. It was a perfect language because it was a perfectly dead language. loc: 11223

When persons such as Alcuin came to areas of “Roman” speech on the Continent, the Latin he encountered struck him as “ loc: 11226

This was Latin written by persons who thought of themselves as, in some way, still “Romans.” They thought that they were writing Latin when, in fact, they were already writing proto-French. loc: 11228

“Correct” Latin, if spoken in the manner that scholars such as Alcuin advocated, could not be understood in the “Roman” areas of Merovingian Gaul, Italy, and Spain. loc: 11237

It was more important that the elites should understand each other. They still did so in the empire of Charlemagne. loc: 11242

Many persons in Carolingian Europe could read familiar Latin texts and could decipher the contents of important documents. The average clergyman fitted into this category. loc: 11250

Those who upheld “correct” Latin felt themselves to be on the defensive. “Rustic” Latin pressed in all around them. loc: 11268

The attempt of Charlemagne to maintain “correct” Latin throughout his kingdom can strike modern persons as fussy and misplaced. Yet Latin was to the Carolingian clergy what icons were to the Byzantines. Serious issues were at stake behind an apparently trivial issue of religious practice. For the new elite, “correct” Latin stood for an entire view of a world restored to order. loc: 11272

they were far from certain that the people would reach those pastures if they were not warned often that much of what they thought was Christianity was not Christian at all – that the Latin formulae that their priests used might be invalid loc: 11288

“Correct” Latin texts were to be the basis of a more wide-reaching reform of piety. loc: 11291

Hence the importance of the major shake-up of the Frankish Church which Charles expected to carry out in 789 through sending his representatives to all regions. We have the agenda for this shake-up in the form of the Admonitio Generalis, the “General Warning,” addressed to the clergy and laity of his kingdom. The General Warning was meant to be read as the foundation document of a new style of “corrected” Christianity. loc: 11293

much of Carolingian Europe was characterized by intense religious curiosity and by luxuriant forms of Christian practice. The experts considered these to be in need of constant pruning. loc: 11301

The danger was a Christianity of non-literate and half-literate believers who were convinced of their own essential orthodoxy. loc: 11312

a council of bishops in Tours in 813 declared for the first time ever that homilies – the selected sermons of former preachers such as Caesarius of Arles – were to be read out in Latin, but that they should also be translated, by the preacher in rusticam Romanam loc: 11323

Throughout his reign, Charles had reached out to impose oaths of loyalty on ever-widening sections of the population. loc: 11330

The oaths were administered in the vernacular of each region. Those who took them could never claim that they had not understood what was spoken on that occasion. loc: 11332

In a region such as Saxony, there was a very real need for loyalty. Here the danger did not come from charismatic leaders of a non-literate Christianity. It came directly from the pagan past. In Saxony, the gods had remained ever-present. loc: 11337

The establishment of a Christian order in large parts of Germany could not be taken for granted, It required constant vigilance. loc: 11357

Ever since the days of Boniface and king Pippin, royal law had made the payment of tithes compulsory. All members of the population were supposed to deliver a tenth of their agrarian produce to their local church. loc: 11368

In the Carolingian empire, the imposition of tithes was only one aspect, among many others, of a reinvigorated system for extracting rent and services from the peasantry, loc: 11370

“no tax in the history of Europe can compare with tithes in length of duration, extent of application and weight of economic burden. loc: 11372

those who paid it needed to be persuaded in no uncertain terms that the Church was worth it. loc: 11375

The “Christian people” must understand their faith more fully. They had to be encouraged to embrace with the well-schooled loyalty of good subjects a faith that offered services for which they were now expected to pay on a regular basis. loc: 11377

It was important that each Christian must be made fully aware of the exact nature of their baptismal vows, and so of the extent to which these vows bound them to God and his Church. loc: 11380

infant baptism meant that the godparents of each child vouched for their godchild. It was they who memorized and repeated the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer on the child’s behalf. loc: 11383

For centuries, all over Europe and also in Byzantium, a sponsor had been asked by the family to “lift” the baptized child from the font. This had been a largely profane ritual. Families had used it to seek out alternative patrons and allies, through involving them in the baptism of their children as “co-parents. loc: 11402

Charles and his clergy captured the old Frankish practice of “lifting” the child from the font by making of such sponsors, for the first time, “godparents” in the sense to which we have become accustomed. Godparents were incorporated in the baptismal liturgy. By memorizing the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed they were co-opted as the fully cognizant guarantors of the child’s oath of loyalty to God. loc: 11407

Altogether, with the scholar administrators of the Carolingian empire we are dealing with a singularly purposeful body of men. In their writings, many of them appear as the first technocrats of Europe. They claimed to know the Christian Law in its majestic entirety. They knew how to guide the Christian people to fulfill its goals. As landlords and bureaucrats, they kept lists of their congregations, for the purpose of extracting rents and tithes. loc: 11419

Previously, it had been taken for granted that demons did, indeed, have control of the lower air, and that ill-intentioned persons frequently allied themselves with the demons to cause harm. loc: 11435

Everyone believed that holy men and women had been raised up by God so as to hold an all too real counter-empire at bay. Christian priests, monks, and holy persons challenged the demons in the name of the yet greater power of Christ. But the demons remained, nonetheless, a massive presence. They were far from being “popular illusions. loc: 11438

The “Christian Law,” as Agobard presented it in a series of citations from the Old Testament, proved that all power in the supernatural world belonged to God alone. No human being could influence the weather. loc: 11442

Theodulph spells out with great care the basic religious assumptions which governed his own worldview. It was a worldview very different from that of Orthodox Byzantines. For Theodulph, God was a distant ruler, sharply separated from his creatures. God was to his creation “as a lord to his servants. loc: 11471

It was his will alone that bridged the chasm between himself and human beings. He did not offer to the human race a gentle flow of visual symbols, which linked the invisible to the visible world in a seemingly unbroken continuum, loc: 11474

He preferred to make himself known by his commands. Law was God’s greatest gift to mankind. loc: 11476

In Christian times, the consecratory prayers of the Mass and the text of the Scriptures acted for the Christian people as the Ark of the Covenant had once acted for the people of Israel. They were truly holy things. They were ordained by God. loc: 11490

In contrast to Byzantium, in Theodulph’s opinion, the world of Latin Christianity was right to value the shrines of the saints and the splendid cases which surrounded their relics. The unearthly brilliance of the gold and jewelled reliquaries in which the relics of the saints were encased showed that “the lords,” the saints, were “in” them. There was no doubt that this was where the saints were “present” on earth. Before such objects, the faithful should, indeed, bow with reverential awe loc: 11505

The art of the jeweller, and not that of the portrait painter, was the most prized. For the magical cunning of a craftsman consisted in taking raw wealth – precious stones, precious fragments of gold and silver (often unceremoniously hacked from ancient pieces, or in the form of coins extorted as tribute) – and transforming this mass of shimmering metal into condensed signs of power. loc: 11522

the craftsmen who produced the great votive crowns, the crosses, and the relic-cases of Gaul and Spain were not concerned to catch a “likeness.” Their task was to take “dead” matter, associated with the profane wealth and power of great donors – precious pigments, the skins of vast herds, gold and jewels – and make them come alive, by creating from them objects whose refulgent, intricate surfaces declared that they had moved, beyond their human source, into the realm of the sacred. loc: 11528

Theodulph’s religious world was dominated by a written text. Carefully copied and passed down through the centuries, the Holy Scriptures stood out as the unique manifestation of the will of God. It was through books, and not through icons, that God had chosen to lead the human race “by the hand. loc: 11533

An entire “Christian people” needed the sharp words of the Law, and the Greeks, with proud insouciance, took the “soft” option: they offered their charges the trivial medium of “little pictures. loc: 11549

Incorrect Christian worship might erode the boundary between the sacred and the profane. loc: 11555

They struck him as opening the way for a dangerous blurring of the sacred and the profane. In his opinion, Byzantine Christians had blurred the distinction between mere paintings and the truly “holy” tombs of the saints. Byzantine emperors had blurred the distinction between the human and the divine. loc: 11561

In Theodulph’s opinion, Charles’ empire was superior to Byzantium because, in the Latin Church, the profane and the sacred had been held apart. Neither was allowed to invade the other. Each had its proper place. Because of this, each enjoyed a certain merciful freedom from the other. Condemned by Theodulph to a humble profanity, Latin artists could feel free to “do their own thing. loc: 11567

In an analogous manner, French, Italian, and Spanish were declared to be “profane” languages, compared with the sacred quality of Latin. This set them free to evolve, loc: 11575

Altogether, the sharp separation of the sacred from the profane had opened up a neutral space. In that space, the entire pre-Christian past of northern Europe might find its niche. For the pre-Christian past could be allowed to flank the Christian present, provided that it remained resolutely profane. loc: 11578

the ancestral cultures of western Europe were free to contribute to the creation of vernacular literatures and of ethnic histories loc: 11582

20 In geār dagum, “In Days of Yore”: Northern Christendom and its Past loc: 11587

An ostentatiously Christian empire lay at the southern end of the trade routes which led across the North Sea. North of Dorestad and Frisia stretched non-Christian lands, characterized by fragile chiefdoms. loc: 11593

small kings rose and fell according to their ability to gain access to wealth, through plunder on the waters of the North Atlantic and the Baltic. But they were also traders. loc: 11595

The Northmen were pagans. They had remained fiercely loyal to their gods. Only gods could impart to their worshippers the suprahuman vigor and good luck which gave to individuals and to groups a competitive edge over their many rivals. loc: 11614

For Franks and Northmen alike, war was a matter of truly religious seriousness. Sacred words – Latin Psalms or, in Scandinavia, arcane runes – showed that the gods were close to hand, to enhance the efficacy of a warrior’s weapons. loc: 11627

contact with Scandinavia had intensified by 850. It had been fed by Frankish imperial policy and by trading relations between the Northmen and Dorestad. But, with this contact, Continental Christians found themselves confronted by a far wider world than they had expected. loc: 11640

The expeditions of the Northmen reached both eastward and westward. Scandinavian longships reached far to the east along the Baltic as far as Lake Ladoga, behind modern Saint Petersburg. Then they turned south, edging down the great river systems of what are now Russia and Ukraine, to reach Kiev on the Dnieper. These small bands of warriors and slave-traders from distant Sweden came to be known to the local populations as the Rus’ loc: 11649

The Dnieper flowed straight into the Black Sea where Constantinople lay, at its southern end. In 860, a fleet of Northmen (already known to Byzantines as the Rôs) even attempted without success to attack the city. loc: 11658

A century later, when the Scandinavian colonists of Kiev, the Rus’, decided to accept Christianity, they did it with characteristic canniness. loc: 11662

The conversion of Kiev was not an isolated event. It was part of a wave of official conversions to Christianity in Scandinavia and all over eastern Europe which took place in the decades before the year 1000. loc: 11676

The new wealth generated in northern Europe under this empire drew the Northmen ever further south. They came first as traders and, soon after, as raiders. After 850, what we call the “Viking raids” gathered momentum. They inflicted great damage on Ireland and England. On the Continent, the “Vikings” intervened, in increasing numbers and with great ferocity, in the civil wars which eventually destroyed the unity of the proud Christian empire of Charlemagne and Louis the Pious. loc: 11681

Often they intervened, ruthlessly, as the nominal allies of competing factions within the Frankish empire itself. But they came with one overwhelming advantage. The small and mobile fleets of the Vikings could strike anywhere along the Atlantic coastline of Europe and the British Isles. Thus, the Viking incursions were never massive. Rather, they generated the sort of terror loc: 11685

the greatest Christian shrines of northern Europe were easy prey to Viking raiders. The great centers of the golden age of Northumbria, Iona and the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, were offshore islands. Viking fleets edged up the great rivers, the Rhine and the Seine, which flowed through the very heart of the Frankish kingdom. They found churches and monasteries which the kings and aristocracies of Europe had filled with golden objects of devotion. loc: 11694

A “Viking” was an “entrepreneurial” king on the warpath, on the vík. He was in search of tribute and prestige. loc: 11706

In many ways, the Vikings were an unwelcome throwback to the untidy origins of the Christian kingdoms of Europe and the British Isles. They were what the warrior kings of Saxon Britain had been. loc: 11710

As a result of the Viking raids, Scandinavia filled up with Christian wealth, with Christian slaves, and with Christian ideas. loc: 11715

As a result, the Scandinavian world was sucked inexorably into the political and social structures of the Christian south by the very success of its pirate kings. loc: 11716

Anskar faced a society that was quite prepared to accept Christ. But it was prepared to do so only if Christ was treated as one god among many, and provided that his usefulness was first indicated to them through traditional forms of divination. loc: 11750

After 900, kings could be overbearing in Scandinavia, especially when they enjoyed the plundered wealth of England and Francia. Harald Bluetooth of Denmark (958–987) was typical of a new style of strong kingship. This new kingship owed more to the Christian countries which he had once terrorized as a raider than to older Scandinavian traditions of consensual chieftainship. Harald Bluetooth was in a position to do what Harald Klak had failed to do. He declared the Danes Christian. loc: 11769

the forceful Christian rule of Olaf Tryggvason (995–1000), who had established himself as king of Norway at Trondheim, loc: 11782

Olaf had imposed Christianity with great violence on the Trondelag, the region around Trondheim. loc: 11784

the Arctic Circle. To impose his views, Olaf had broken the will of an entire society of independent farmers. loc: 11785

If the Icelanders had become Christian, what needed to be remembered about the process was that they had done so by following the wise procedures of decision-making laid down in their pagan laws. loc: 11819

But the pre-Christian past of Scandinavia was still very much a part of the present in Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. loc: 11826

This would not have been so urgent an issue if Christianity had not come to be established in the British Isles and in much of northern Europe by persons who depended on the pre-Christian past for their own authority. loc: 11833

For the authority of kings, the codes of honor which determined the behavior of noble men and women, indeed, law and order itself, were rooted in that pre-Christian past. loc: 11836

Contemporary clergymen knew very well that the remarkable Christian culture of the island would not have happened if it had not been for the support of Christian kings. But then, what supported the kings? It was their genealogy. And this genealogy reached back, far beyond the coming of Christianity, to ancient gods. loc: 11843

Nobody doubted (least of all our author, the priest) that these kings were men whose vigor and good fortune could be ascribed to their royal lineage. As kings, they were, somehow, a little “larger than life.” And they were “larger than life” because they were descended from ancestors who were larger than human. They were descended from gods. loc: 11847

The skills of poetry and law had been taught to the men of Ireland by their invisible neighbors, “the tribe of the gods.” The gods could not possibly be dismissed as demons. They were the source of the high skills on which Irish society depended: “And though the faith came later, these arts were not put away, for they are good and no demons ever did good. loc: 11871

the clergy remained the only literate class in northern Europe. And yet it was the clergy who went out of their way to consign to writing – and so have made available to us – all that we know of the pre-Christian narratives, the poetry, and the laws of Ireland, England, Scandinavia, and Germany. loc: 11880

Many monks, nuns, royal chaplains, bishops, and their clerical dependents were noblemen and noblewomen. They continued to think of themselves as such in their new roles as religious leaders. loc: 11893

They knew very well what it was to be noble. They grew up in an overwhelmingly oral culture which was awash with stories and maxims. These told them how to behave as noble men and noble women. To be noble was to stand out. loc: 11896

It was to foster with gusto the memory of a past which lay on the edge of the Christian present. This was a past which was always a little larger than life. loc: 11897

All these attributes of aristocratic swagger were regularly adopted, at one time or other, by the upper-class clergy and monasteries of Saxon England and Francia. loc: 11907

They knew very well that, in an overwhelmingly oral society, epic memories were far more than entertainment. They were more, even, than titles to rule. They were the unwritten law codes of an entire warrior class. loc: 11910

Long after their conversion to Christianity, epic tales such as those which came together to make Beowulf constituted nothing less than the moral gene-pool of a warrior aristocracy. loc: 11938

Faced by a past which had by no means lost its solemnity, the solution favored by the clergy was to treat it simply, for the first time, as the past. Woden was a glorious ancestor, greater in some indefinable manner than his modern descendants. But he was not a god. That meant, in effect, that he could not come into the present. loc: 11970

What the gods could not be for Christians was what they always had been for pagans – creatures out of time, who, as it were, lived alongside the present and who were instantly accessible to their worshippers. loc: 11973

All over Europe, and even in Scandinavia, sacrifice to the gods – the most clearly visible gesture of pagan worship – was forbidden. Sacrifice appears to have died out. But, in an overwhelmingly non-literate culture, words carried from the past were quite as dangerous as was sacrifice. loc: 11998

What occurred all over northern Europe, therefore, was a competition of words, between pre-Christian and Christian spells. loc: 12012

Despite the strictures of the Carolingian elite, clergymen were quite prepared to act as “ritual practitioners” for their flocks. loc: 12018

What we meet in the north, by contrast, was a more horizontal model. Evil did not come from the sky. It was not “demonic” in that strict sense. It came across the open land, and it was utterly concrete. We are dealing with a patterning of the social imagination which saw settled human society as surrounded, on every side, by the encroaching wild. A “middle world” of human order was forever hemmed in by an “outer world,” whose grim or alluring denizens were quite as palpable as were human beings. loc: 12037

In Ireland, the people of “the Other Side” and the ancestors appeared rarely to humans. This was not so with the creatures of the wild who flanked the human race in Saxon England, Germany, and Scandinavia. There was nothing elusive or insubstantial about them. Their being drew substance from the inhuman landscapes which were known to be their appropriate haunts. loc: 12068

Grendel and his mother were the primal outlaws. They were the all too concrete, menacing counterparts of the heroic human figures who were believed to have been capable of holding them at bay in the distant past. loc: 12076

Even for this pious pilgrim, the encounter between human and dragon had been a real event at a real place that was as well known as any Christian shrine. loc: 12088

We are dealing with a moral topography which could be fitted with relative ease on to a sharp, Christian patterning of the world. loc: 12090

Far from being ethereal beings, or mere fictions, these creatures were still around. And they were spoken about often and with real art, because it was through them that northern persons grappled, in their own way, with the boundary between civilization and the brute violence which lurked along its margins. loc: 12095

Whether in Christian Armenia or in Christian northern Europe, we meet a patterning of the imagination which implied a sharp distinction between center and periphery, between settled life and a murmurous population of outcasts who inhabited its margins. loc: 12106

Seen in this light, the establishment of the Church may well have done no more than complete a process which had characterized religious change in Europe since prehistoric times. Europe has always had a religious history. As far as the prehistorian can reconstruct it, from the time of the spread of Bell-Beaker culture in the second millennium B.C. much of this history seems to have consisted in pushing to the margins beliefs, practices, and even social groups, to make room for new, differently organized, and more prestigious conglomerations of power, culture, and religious expertise. loc: 12110

What happened in early medieval Europe was, in many ways, a continuation of that age-old process. In a process which lasted over half a millennium, from around A.D. 400 to around 1000, Christianity came to hold the center. It came to stand for the world of order. loc: 12115

Around the fringes of a brightly lit Christian center, of which we know so much, beliefs from the deepest past of Europe still clustered. loc: 12123

And so we end the story of a slow revolution. After many centuries, “Christendom” and the idea of permanence had come to coalesce. This had come to be the case even around the uncertain shores of the North Atlantic. By the year 1000, Christendom was a notion which carried with it the charge of perpetuity. It was thought to be something that would last forever. loc: 12142