Origins of Modern Europe, The
R. Allen Brown
Number of quotes: 37
Book ID: 256 Page: 3
Section: 1A,4B
Western civilization is derived from Western Europe which was Latin Christendom, and this begins in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. with the amalgamation and the fusion of the classical culture of the declining Roman Empire, the Germanic customs, habits and attitudes of the invading ‘barbarian’ races, and Christianity, subsequently Latin Christianity. These are literally the elements, . . .
Quote ID: 6456
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 256 Page: 4
Section: 1A,3D2
As for the classical inheritance of Greece and Rome, the barbarians, it has been well said, came not to destroy the Roman Empire but to enjoy it: the learning of the ancients was not in the event lost but was first preserved.
Quote ID: 6457
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 256 Page: 5
Section: 3A1
. . . the explanation of the two world wars of the twentieth century lies more in the policies of Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century than in those of Bismarck in the nineteenth.
Quote ID: 6458
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 9
Section: 1A,3A1
Then again, if there is to be a medieval period, when does it begin and at what point does it end? The year 476 marks no clean break: it is easy enough to see the Roman Empire declining, but difficult if not impossible to say when it ends. A recent writer has suggested that from one point of view ‘the Roman Empire achieved its fullest development in the thirteenth century’,{1} and what are we to do with that Holy Roman Empire which survived until 1806?[Footnote 1] R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, Pelican History of the Church, vol. 2 1970), p. 25.
This is the quote:
Quote ID: 6460
Time Periods: 157
Book ID: 256 Page: 15
Section: 1A
In the beginning was the Word, but in the beginning also was the Roman Empire. We must begin with that since the origins of the medieval world, and therefore the modern West, are found in the fusion of Roman and Germanic, classical and barbarian elements, while the third element, Christianity, was also inherited from Rome.
Quote ID: 6461
Time Periods: 047
Book ID: 256 Page: 18
Section: 4B
Yet it must also be added, again by anticipation, that the ideal of unity imposed and achieved by Rome took a millennium to wear off even in the West, and was given a perhaps inadequate expression by the ‘Roman Empire’ of Charlemagne and Otto the Great, and a much more adequate expression by the Papacy of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, claiming supreme political as well as spiritual authority. It is in this latter sense that, in the words of R.W. Southern, ’It is not absurd to say that the Roman Empire achieved its fullest development in the thirteenth century’, and the same writer points out the Hobbes’ gibe in the seventeenth century about the Papacy being the ghost of the Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof ‘has greater truth than he realized’.{1}
Quote ID: 6463
Time Periods: 017
Book ID: 256 Page: 19
Section: 3D2
Doubtless the barbarian invasions of the fifth century seemed dramatic enough at the time, but the invaders came, as we have seen, to enjoy rather than destroy the Empire, they were scarcely, as we have yet to see, a new phenomenon when they came . . .
Quote ID: 6464
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 256 Page: 22
Section: 1A,3C
But meanwhile in getting so far we have gone too fast, and there are two important factors yet to be inserted among the causes of the slow decline of Rome. The first is the Emperor Constantine, and the second, closely related, is Christianity.
Quote ID: 6465
Time Periods: 14
Book ID: 256 Page: 24
Section: 3D2
And so it came about that of the barbarian tribes moving into the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century, all save the still pagan Franks in Gaul and the Anglo-Saxons in England were not just Christians when they came but Arian heretics, to add one more disruptive element to a disintegrating world.
Quote ID: 6467
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 256 Page: 31
Section: 3D2
This is a quote . . . the late Belgian scholar, Henri Pirenne, at the end of his book, Mohammed and Charlemagne, . . .‘(I) The Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, . . .
Quote ID: 6469
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 256 Page: 32
Section: 3D2
Pirenne’s book must be read in its own right, but it is probable that most historians would nowadays subscribe to his insistence upon continuity in the fifth and sixth centuries and be reluctant to proclaim an absolute end to the Roman Empire in the West as the immediate result of the barbarian invasions.3D2
Quote ID: 6470
Time Periods: 156
Book ID: 256 Page: 35
Section: 3D2
. . .it has been said of Clovis that without him ‘Gaul would not have become France’,{1}. . .. . . .
. . . though it is too late now, by long-established habit, to call him anything but Clovis, he is in a real sense the first of the long line of French kings Louis. Clovis ‘lived and died a Frankish chieftain, a warrior of the Heroic Age, a man of blood and a seeker after gold’,{2} yet the most important event of his reign, notwithstanding the bloodshed and the wars, was his conversion to Christianity, and Christianity in its Catholic, orthodox and Roman form.
. . . .
. . . another of the great moments in history, but it may seem entirely characteristic of this marvellously personal age that it was the direct result of a vow taken in a hard-pressed moment on the battlefield . . .
Quote ID: 6471
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 256 Page: 36
Section: 3G
The reception of Clovis and his Franks into the Catholic and Roman Church points the direction of the future and is doubled in importance because of the future pre-eminence of the Franks. Immediately it welded Clovis’ dominions into something more resembling a unity, for in a world not only overrun by uncouth barbarians but also threatened by Arian heretics, it gave him the support of the surviving Gallo-Romans, his hitherto reluctant subjects, clinging to their faith as a symbol of vanishing ‘Romanitas’, as it gave him the support also fo the Gallic bishops. When in 507 Clovis marched against the Arian Alaric II, king of the Visigoths, he did so with the blessing of the Church and under the protection of St. Martin of Tours, which he himself had sought. And Clovis had the victory, slaying Alaric in the fight by his own hand. ‘Thou hast girded me, O Lord, with strength unto the battle; Thou hast subdued under me those that rose up against me. Thou hast also made mine enemies turn their backs upon me, and thou hast destroyed them that hate me’.{2}When he died in 511 at the age of forty-five, Clovis by his victories against the Visigoths and Burgundians had more or less subdued all Gaul: he had thus founded the kingdom of the Franks; and he had made it Christian.
Quote ID: 6472
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 256 Page: 39
Section: 3A2A,3A4C
Christianity, when it came to the Franks and their Merovingian kings after the baptism of Clovis, may seem for long to have sat lightly upon them, or, rather, they moulded it to their own desires and needs, seeking the God of Battles rather than the God of Love. Thus Wallace-Hadrill writes: ‘The Franks had no hesitation in bringing their thank-offerings to the shrines of miracle-working Gaulish saints such as St. Martin of Tours, under whom they had won their battles and amassed their treasures; and no sense of moral obloquy or incongruity pursued them when they left the shrines to cut the throats of unloved kinsmen.’{1}
Quote ID: 6473
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 256 Page: 40
Section: 3D
Bede in England has the splendid story of King Sigeberht of Essex who was slain by his own kinsmen because, under the influence of new-found Christianity, he took to forgiving his enemies in flagrant contravention of the barbarian’s code.
Quote ID: 6474
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 42
Section: 3G
That element Pepin obtained from the Church, who, in the person of St. Boniface, not only crowned but anointed him as king in 751, while three years later the new Pope, Stephen II, further anointed and consecrated him king, together with his two songs Charles and Carloman. . . Charlemagne. . . .
. . . it is on this double occasion of 751 and 754 that the sacring of kings begins, to be carried over also to other nations, and with it the nature of kingship changes from the comparatively irresponsible Germanic lordship of a war-leader wielding a personal regality over his followers to the responsible concept of Christian kingship. King by the Grace of God (Rex Dei Gratia), anointed with holy oil and consecrated in the sacrament of his coronation as a bishop was consecrated, the monarch will henceforth be part priest as well as king, rex et sacerdos, the defender of the Church and of the Faith, as much responsible for the soul’s health of his subjects as for their material well-being and his own. And though the radically reforming Papacy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries will come to regret and deny the sacerdotal element in kingship, it will remain -
Not all the water in the rough, rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed King
The voice of Shakespeare speaks for the ‘modern’ period, the England of the Tudors and the Stuarts, the France of Louis XIV and beyond.
Quote ID: 6475
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 43
Section: 3G
Thus Pope Stephen II in 754, blessing in their turn the sons of Pepin ‘with the grace of the Holy Spirit’, bound the Franks ‘by an interdiction and the threat of excommunication that they should never in future presume to choose a king sprung from the loins of any save those whom the divine piety has deigned to exalt and has purposed to confirm and consecrate’{1} - i.e. the Carolingians. So too, more generally, the power and status of kingship were greatly increased by the monarch’s new sacerdotal role as a vicar of God on earth, . . .
Quote ID: 6476
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 46
Section: 3G
. . . for the heathen Saxons were forcibly converted in a devastating exercise in militant Christianity.Alcuin of York, scholar and intellectual, a principal adviser of Charlemagne, head of his palace school and one who devoted his life to the conversion of the heathen Germans, dared to criticize the methods of his master. ‘One ought . . . to recognize’, he wrote, ‘that faith comes of free-will, not of compulsion. How can a man be compelled to believe what he does not believe? You may force a man to the font, but not to the Faith’.{1}
Quote ID: 6477
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 49
Section: 3G
The emphasis of the Carolingian Renaissance was literary, the editing and copying of the basic sources of wisdom, and not only of the Bible and the Fathers - Cyprian, Jerome, Augustine, Gregory the Great - but also Boethius and, behind him, Vergil and other classical authors.
Quote ID: 6478
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 49
Section: 3G
The most famous event in the reign of Charlemagne took place on Christmas Day, 800, when in the church of St. Peter at Rome Pope Leo III crowned him Emperor. ‘On the most holy day of the Nativity of the Lord, as the king rose from prayer before the confessio of St. Peter to hear mass, Pope Leo placed a crown on his head, and he was acclaimed by all the people of the Romans: “To Charles Augustus, crowned by God, great and pacific emperor of the Romans, life, and victory!” And after these acclamations he was adored by the Pope in the manner of the princes of old, and the title of patrician was discarded and he was called Emperor and Augustus.’{1}
Quote ID: 6480
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 50
Section: 3G
On a golden bulla or seal attributed to Charlemagne as Emperor there is engraved the legend ‘Renovatio Romani imperii’, i.e. ‘The revival of the Roman Empire’; but obviously in no strict sense was Charlemagne’s Empire, differing even in territorial extent, a revival of the Roman Empire, which in any case, legally, historically and visibly, still existed at Constantinople - though in saying this we must also remember that the Roman Empire in the West had never officially or definitely ended or been abolished, . . .
Quote ID: 6481
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 51
Section: 3G
. . .”the dispensation of our Lord Jesus Christ is conferred on you Charlemagne as governor of the Christian people” rector populi christiani,...spoken by Constantine 6th
Quote ID: 6482
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 52
Section: 3G
The empire conceived by Alcuin and realized, so far as the dreams of men can ever be realized, on Christmas Day 800, was the empire of the Christian people, an empire of the faithful, the empire, in short, of Latin Christendom now coming to be identified as Europe.{1} As such it was, in a real but new sense to fit the times, the Roman Empire, since it comprised all those peoples on the mainland of Europe who were members of the Roman Church and for whom Rome was the spiritual capital and something more, and for whom (as indeed for us) it was difficult any longer to think of the surviving Roman Empire in the East as in any real sense ‘Roman’ at all. Thus ‘his Charlemagne’s Roman empire was to represent the rebirth of the ancient pagan Roman empire in the guise and shape of a new Latin-Christian one . . .
Quote ID: 6483
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 53
Section: 4B
The pattern of the future thus comes more sharply into focus, and what had once been the single world of imperial Rome is now formally two, with Islam a third world de facto.
Quote ID: 6484
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 53
Section: 3G
. . . and this was evidently the cause of the king-emperor’s annoyance and his off-repeated remark, recorded in Einhard’s biography, that if he had known what the Pope would do he would never have entered the church, Christmas or not. Certainly when the time came, in 813, to designate his successor, he himself placed the crown on the head of his son Louis, and in his own palace church at Aachen, not at Rome.
Quote ID: 6485
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 55
Section: 4B
. . . the medieval Church had a near monopoly of literacy. . .
Quote ID: 6486
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 58/60
Section: 2C,3A1
Bishops in, as it were, historically recognizable form scarcely appear to our knowledge before the second century, but when they do we can begin to see also the organization for the Church inevitably following the pattern of Roman civil organization. In the West, not the least of the ‘non-religious’ contributions of the Church to the future will be the preservation of something of the fabric, and much of the concept, of classical Roman government and administration . . .. . . .
Thus early ecclesiastical organization, like Roman society and administration, was essentially urban, a bishop residing in a city and presiding over the Christian community within it, and presiding also over the wide surrounding and dependent countryside of the city, which will become his diocese. The majority of early Christians being townsfolk, and the countryfolk outside the towns being backward in respect of religion, the Latin word for countryman, paganus, became synonymous with unbeliever, and hence the word ‘pagan’.
. . . .
. . . the inevitable following out a stage further of the pattern of Roman civil administration. Thus when, as was necessary, conferences, councils or synods were called to discuss ecclesiastical affairs, it was natural and convenient that they should assemble at the principal city, the capital or metropolis of an existing Roman province, and thus a certain pre-eminence accrued to the bishop of that city, who will in due course become the metropolitan, i.e. the archbishop.
Quote ID: 6487
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 256 Page: 62
Section: 2D1
. . .‘For the solidity of that faith which was praised in the chief of the Apostles is perpetual: and as that remains which Peter believed in Christ, so that remains which Christ instituted in Peter . . .’ Spoken by Pope Leo I (440-61AD)
Quote ID: 6488
Time Periods: 3
Book ID: 256 Page: 62
Section: 3F
It has been said of Leo I that he ‘carried the Papacy as far theocratically as it could go’,{2} and certainly we have reached here in theory the ultimate papal position, ‘To deny the Pope is to deny Peter: to deny Peter is to deny Christ’.
Quote ID: 6489
Time Periods: 5
Book ID: 256 Page: 63
Section: 2C,4B
We know, but they did not, that the last visit of a Roman Emperor to Rome took place in 663, and that the last Pope to visit Constantinople was Constantine I in 710. For centuries the Popes (who began to appropriate the title papa, pope, once applicable to any bishop, . . .
Quote ID: 6490
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 65
Section: 3A3
As the fabric of the Roman state collapsed and civil government ceased, whatever local administration, justice, public order or public works there were devolved upon the bishop, who undertook them faute de mieux as the one surviving public figure capable and concerned. ‘You are the salvation of your country’, wrote Venantius Fortunatus in Merovingian Gaul to Felix, bishop of Nantes, who amongst other good works altered the course of the river Loire for the benefit of his diocese, ‘you who give to the lands what justice requires and restore to them the joys of the past....Voice of the principal citizens, light of the nobility, defender of the people, you are the port in which shipwreck can be escaped’.
Quote ID: 6491
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 256 Page: 66
Section: 3F
Succeeding to the papacy at a time when all Italy was in utter confusion and despair, he found himself at the head of the only stable institution in a changing world’.{1}In this local government and in Gregory’s equally careful administration of the lands belonging to his church, the ‘patrimony of St. Peter’, all over Italy, historians have seen the origins of the Papal States, and through both the Roman bishop, like other bishops, is becoming, of necessity, a temporal power. ‘Head of a strong central organization, unquestioned arbiter of justice, armed with the Keys of Peter and the old majesty of Rome, he [Gregory] is an almost superhuman figure.
Quote ID: 6492
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 256 Page: 67
Section: 3F
Footnote 2 Gregory’s original plan, of two equal metropolitan archbishops at London and York (a clear extension of former Roman civil government in Britain) ......
Quote ID: 6493
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 256 Page: 70
Section: 2D1
The fact, as all believed, that St. Peter was physically present in his tomb at Rome, still speaking and still working through his Vicar, the Pope, was an aspect of the doctrine of Petrine authority that all could grasp and was not the least of the factors which drew men to Rome.{2}
Quote ID: 6494
Time Periods: 34
Book ID: 256 Page: 71
Section: 3F
There was the iconoclastic controversy instigated by the Emperor Leo III in 726 as an attack upon the worship of images. When the Pope would not conform, the estates of St. Peter in southern Italy and Sicily were confiscated and, worse, archbishoprics and provinces hitherto under the jurisdiction of the Roman bishop in Greece and again in southern Italy and Sicily were withdrawn, and placed under the patriarch of Constantinople. By these means, Rome in effect ‘was cut off from the imperial church, of which it had hitherto regarded itself as the head’,{1} and in effect also was ejected from the ‘Roman’ Empire.
Quote ID: 6495
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 72/3
Section: 3A1
Some other word than ‘forgery’ should be coined for the compilation of spurious documents in the early Middle Ages, for in a world which had almost lost but was beginning to seek again the authority of the written record as opposed to oral tradition, they carry little or none of the ugly immoral associations of forgeries in later periods. about the Donation of Constantine. . . without any necessary attempt to defraud - and so it is, on a more majestic scale, with the Donation of Constantine, the date and exact purpose of which nevertheless remain unknown. An ‘extraordinary perversion of history’ it undoubtedly is, and a ‘dream-world of Roman theocracy’{1} it may be said to embody, but it also embodies beliefs, ideas and ideals, current, most would agree, in the late eighth century, of the claims of the Pope to a universal temporal authority in the West as the visible successor in Rome to the Caesars, and it is at least probable that the imperial coronation of Charlemagne on Christmas Day, 800, was intended to put the concept into practice as the delegation of such temporal authority.
Quote ID: 6496
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 256 Page: 139
Section: 2C
Simony is the sin of Simon Magus, who, the Bible tells us, offered money to St. Peter for the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is, then, the sin of the purchase of spiritual office: there is no doubt of its prevalence in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and it is almost impossible to do justice to the vehemence with which the reformers of the day denounced it.
Quote ID: 6497
Time Periods: 7
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