Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History 500-1000
Julia M. H. Smith
Number of quotes: 50
Book ID: 83 Page: 28
Section: 4B
By the end of the first millennium, Latin had become the mark of an elite, inseparably associated with the authority of kings and clergy alike throughout much—but not all—of the early medieval West.
Quote ID: 2168
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 30
Section: 3A1
An idiom of power, clearly indebted to Roman precedent, helped bring new kingdoms into being, and clergy played the role of midwife.
Quote ID: 2169
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 31
Section: 4B
Throughout the ancient world, Latin implied cultural superiority. Like Greek, the lingua romana was regarded as the language of learning, law, and rationality—those hall-marks that, Romans opined, raised their own world to a higher level than those around them. To a Roman, the peoples who lived beyond the imperial frontiers were unkempt and ferocious, ‘barbarians’ whose way of life contrasted unfavourably with that of the inhabitants of the empire. The term ‘barbarian’ was laden with heavy cultural and linguistic prejudice: ‘as much distinguishes a barbarian from a Roman as a four-legged creature from a two-legged one, or a dumb girl from a man with the power of speech’, wrote the late-fourth-century poet Prudentius.{17}
Quote ID: 2170
Time Periods: 01234
Book ID: 83 Page: 31
Section: 4B
From an imperial perspective, Greek and Latin marked out a superior society that had no respect for the ignorant and uneducated.Based on education, the distinction between Roman and ‘barbarian’ was cultural not racial, and thus never formed an impermeable barrier.
Quote ID: 2171
Time Periods: 014
Book ID: 83 Page: 33
Section: 1A
Its abandonment in eighth-century Ireland and replacement by Latin as the language for the display of secular status became possible only once Latin itself was no longer associated with powerful neighbours just across the Irish Sea. By then, Latin had acquired a completely different significance as a mark of Christianity.
Quote ID: 2172
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 83 Page: 34
Section: 2E1
The Irish chose to keep their sacred books in Latin. They seized with enthusiasm upon the dictum of Isidore of Seville, that, among the variety of tongues after the Tower of Babel, there were three ‘sacred languages’, those of the sign posted over the dying Christ on the cross (John 19:19-20) and of the Bible: Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.{22} For the Irish, the sacred books remained in the sacred language.
Quote ID: 2173
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 35
Section: 3A1B
In addition, from the late seventh century at the very latest, Anglo-Saxon kings began assenting to formal Latin documents that reorganized and recorded for posterity claims to landed property. Issued in the king’s name but drafted by churchmen, these documents—known as charters—adapted the forms of Roman provincial bureaucratic documentation with which continental missionaries were familiar. That seventh-century Anglo-Saxon kings could neither have read nor understood these Latin documents mattered little: from a royal perspective this was symbolic writing and an assertion of a new form of power; from an ecclesiastical one a means of securing a landed endowment, establishing enduring institutional structures and enhancing the clergy’s political influence.
Quote ID: 2174
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 37
Section: 3A1
It had been self-evident that fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-century kings of the Goths, Burgundians, Franks, and Lombards should legislate and govern in Latin, not only because they often relied on the assistance of late Roman legal experts but also because they were deliberately insisting upon their role as successors of the Roman emperors.
Quote ID: 2175
Time Periods: 567
Book ID: 83 Page: 47
Section: 4B
By the seventh century, and in some places rather earlier, monastic communities found themselves the main guardians of the educational traditions and literary heritage of Antiquity. 3F
Quote ID: 2176
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 77
Section: 2A4
In the late eighth or early ninth century, the ‘servant of God’ Auriolus wrote, or had written out for him, a talisman to keep hail off his and his neighbour’s fields. He folded then fastened its two slate leaves together, text inside; after nine incantations to ensure its efficacy, he buried it in his field near Carrio, where it remained until unearthed by farmers in 1926. Auriolus adjured ‘all you patriarchs Micheal, Gabriel, Cecitiel, Oriel, Raphael, Ananiel, Marmoniel, who hold the clouds in your hands’ that they ‘go across the mountains and return neither when the cock crows nor the hen clucks, neither when the ploughman ploughs nor the sower sows’. He also adjured Satan not to harm the trees, harvest, vines, or fruit bushes and added prayers to God attributed to St Christopher before ending ‘in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen, amen, ever amen, alleluia’.{28} Auriolus’s slate not only indicates the persistence of enduring regional textual habits;{29} it also suggests a broad-spectrum approach to eliminating hail, simultaneously invoking archangels, saints, and Satan while mixing prayers, incantations, and adjurations in a powerful cocktail of diverse traditional practices and local wisdom.
Quote ID: 2178
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 129
Section: 2A4
The Christian doctrine of marriage was based firmly on the practice of the later Roman Empire, as encapsulated in a ruling of Pope Leo the Great (440-61) that a legitimate marriage was one between a free man and a free woman of equal rank, and that it involved the kin of the girl giving her in a formal betrothal into a marriage that was endowed with property and publicly celebrated.2A
Quote ID: 2179
Time Periods: 456
Book ID: 83 Page: 217/218
Section: 3A1,3D2
By the early eleventh century, Europe had evolved a culture distinctive for its integration of sacred and profane power, characterized by kings who ruled in close association with the personnel and institutions of the Christian religion, identified themselves as ‘Christ’s own deputy’,{3} and presided over efforts to promote their own particular vision of a Christian society.
Quote ID: 2180
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 222
Section: 3A1,3A2A
In the course of the early Middle Ages, Christianity ‘had gained many kingdoms and had triumphed over the mightiest kings and had crushed through its own power the necks of the proud and the sublime’. When Radbod, bishop of Utrecht (899-917), wrote those words in the early tenth century he cannot have known that they were as much prophetic as retrospective.{5}
Quote ID: 2181
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 223
Section: 2E6
As Julian, bishop of Toledo (680-90), affirmed, ‘everyone who is truly a Christian should in no way doubt that the flesh will be resurrected of all persons who have been born or will be born and who have died or will die’.{6} On this point, there was indeed agreement.
Quote ID: 2182
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 223
Section: 4B
In effect, early medieval Christianity was neither centralized nor systematized. Not a single, uniform cultural package to be adopted or rejected as an entity, it comprised a repertoire of beliefs, social practices, and organization forms that could be adopted and adapted piecemeal. Thus Christianity jumped from one cultural and political context to another, repeatedly mutating and reconstituting itself in ways that preserved its core features.
Quote ID: 2183
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 83 Page: 224
Section: 4B
Pluralisms and possibilities remained the hallmarks of early medieval Christianity—or, better, of early medieval Christianities—and enabled this universal religion to take endlessly varied local forms. Christianity thus reinforced the localisms so characteristic of the early Middle Ages.
Quote ID: 2184
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 83 Page: 226
Section: 3G
Charlemagne’s wars against the Saxons were notorious for their bloodshed and unremitting determination to crush Saxon society and religion, substituting Christianity at swordpoint.{10}
Quote ID: 2185
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 227
Section: 3A1,3G
In these circumstances, acceptance of Christianity bore all the marks of political spectacle, carefully staged.
Quote ID: 2186
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 228
Section: 2A1,3A1
Royal baptism might also aim to tie future rulers into an alliance; during Otto III’s visit to Gniezno in 1000, he became godfather to a newborn son of the Christian Polish prince, Boleslaw Chobry (992-1025), in a ceremony rich in symbolic importance. He also strengthened the bond by giving Boleslaw both a royal crown and another replica of the Holy Lance (still to be seen in Cracow).To ask whether religious or political motivations underlay such baptisms is misplaced, for the distinction was meaningless in an age in which identities were as much social as personal and in which religious expression was more usually communal than individual.
Pastor John’s note: p. 218
Quote ID: 2187
Time Periods: ?
Book ID: 83 Page: 230
Section: 2A4
Such ‘do-it-yourself’ Christianity was the concomitant of the slow seepage of religious change through informal channels of contact in the absence of an organized priesthood: although sparsely documented, it must have flourished all around the margins of institutionalized Christendom and in remote, internal pockets.
Quote ID: 2188
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 231
Section: 3A1
Indeed, it succeeded so well in offering an overarching, umbrella identity that, by the early eleventh century, ‘Christendom’ and ‘Europe’ had become virtually synonymous.
Quote ID: 2189
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 235
Section: 3A1,3A2,4B
When it came to the mutual reinforcement of political and sacral power, there was no better model than Christianity.
Quote ID: 2190
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 235
Section: 4B,3A4C
Thus, however stark the triumphalist antithesis of Christian truth and pagan error became, this conceptual dichotomy did not generally inform everyday religious experience, except for Christian armies urged into battle specifically to defeat pagans.
Quote ID: 2191
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 237
Section: 3A2A,3G
That it was a key task of kings to assist churchmen in the extirpation of error had been established by Louis’s grandfather, Charlemagne.. . . .
…the royal responsibility for the correction of religious error gave a new twist to the distinction between Christian and pagan. An energetic Christian king such as Louis the German not only ‘humb[led] the pagan heathens’ on the battlefield; he worked closely with his leading bishops to inculcate correct Christianity amongst his subjects.
Quote ID: 2192
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 239
Section: 3A1,3A4C
In 1155, in the changed climate of the twelfth century—changed by the emergence of claims to universal papal monarchy and fusion of the many local Christian communities of earlier centuries into a single, much more homogeneous Christendom—Pope Adrian IV authorized the invasion of Ireland by the English king Henry II (1154-89) on the grounds that it would be to Henry’s eternal credit ‘to enlarge the boundaries of the church, to reveal the truth of the Christian faith to peoples still untaught and barbarous, and to root out the weeds of vice from the Lord’s field’.{25} The Irish, then, were all but outright pagans, outside the church: their lack of correct Christianity justified invasion and conquest.
Quote ID: 2193
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 243
Section: 3A1
Furthermore, churches put their considerable legal and administrative expertise at royal disposal, thereby transmitting at least some late Roman bureaucratic skills and judicial principles to early medieval rulers. The intense symbiosis of royal and ecclesiastical affairs was the practical expression of the early medieval ideologies of Christian rulership.One corollary was the readiness of churchmen to lecture kings about their responsibilities. Whether by royal request or on their own initiative, clergy wrote letters, treatises, and admonitions to kings, encouraging, exhorting, or chastising.
Quote ID: 2194
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 251
Section: 3A1,4B
During Antiquity, ‘Europe’ signaled one of the three continents of the known world. But in the centuries from c.500 to c.1000, much of the continent came to adopt a new identity, as Christendom, the community of all baptized believers in Christ and the Christian God. Men and women from the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle now had something in common.
Quote ID: 2195
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 252
Section: 3A1
Differently put, Christianity brought with it the late Roman legacy of institutionalized power, well resourced, ideologically justified, and of cosmological significance.. . . .
But, even here, Christianity brought kings new justifications for ruling, new tasks and obligations, new powers to exercise. And, when effective royal government broke down in southern France and Italy in the later tenth and early eleventh centuries, the ideals and obligations of ethical power were maintained and asserted by churches.
Quote ID: 2196
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 255/256
Section: 1A,4B
Even so, Rome’s hold over the imagination of all the inhabitants of Christian Europe was long since assured. Northern writers dreamed on, without mundane reality interrupting their idealized visions of the ‘queen of cities’.{8} Famed throughout the triple world by Franks, ‘faithful Christians and emperors’, it was secure in its reputation as ‘mother of kings and glory of Italians’,{9} ‘the mother of martyrs, the domicile of the apostles’,{10} ‘the capital of the world . . . mother of all churches’.{11}
Quote ID: 2197
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 256
Section: 4B
…a powerful idea but a shabby urban experience.Pastor John’s note: Rome
Quote ID: 2198
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 262
Section: 4B
Because Christianity was the main vector for the transmission of the literacy culture of the Roman world and churches the main agents of its preservation, the form and content of these myths were liable to be influenced by both biblical and classical origin tales.{16}Pastor John’s note on page 263: The Mormons aren’t the only ones with a mythological origin.
Quote ID: 2199
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 273
Section: 1B
Another poem (quite possibly by the same poet) underscores the point that both were transferable notions, equally potent as metaphors as they were as institutions:My Palaemon [Charlemagne] looks out from the lofty citadel of the new Rome and sees all the kingdoms forged into an empire through his victories.
Our times are transformed into the civilisation of Antiquity.
Golden Rome is reborn and restored anew to the world!{30}
Quote ID: 2200
Time Periods: 17
Book ID: 83 Page: 275
Section: 3D2
Centuries earlier, the warlords who established kingdoms within the provinces of the crumbling western Roman Empire had legitimized their position by eagerly appropriating symbols of Roman rule—portraits on coins, seals, dress, insignia of office, flattering epithets. As Theoderic had said to Anastasius: ‘Our kingship is an imitation of yours, modeled on your good design, a copy of the only Empire. By as much as we follow you, so much we precede all other peoples.’{38}
Quote ID: 2201
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 83 Page: 275
Section: 4B
Increasing diplomatic contact between the Frankish and Byzantine courts also enabled direct observation and emulation, for the prestige of the Romaioi, the Romans, as the Byzantines understood themselves to be, elicited a mixture of grudging admiration and keen imitation throughout the early Middle Ages—and for long thereafter. Whether at the Carolingian or, later, the Ottonian imperial court, appropriation of aspects of Byzantine court culture and ceremonial took place…
Quote ID: 2202
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 276
Section: 4B
Thus we should not think of ‘empire’ only with reference to the two specific early medieval polities, Byzantine and (after 800) western, whose rulers were formally vested with the title of emperor. Far more than that, ‘empire’ was a widely used term for a particular kind of successful kingdom. It implied domination and hegemony—military, political, cultural.
Quote ID: 2203
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 276
Section: 3G
When Charlemagne placed the motto ‘the renewal of the Roman Empire’ on his seal in the spring of 801, he had already left Rome, never to return—and was certainly not outlining a practical political programme. Rather, he was investing his new-found title with the rhetorical mantle of historical authentication.
Quote ID: 2204
Time Periods: 7
Book ID: 83 Page: 276/277
Section: 3A1,4B
Having revived Charlemagne’s slogan, in the slightly but significantly altered form of ‘the renewal of the empire of the Romans’, Otto attempted to take it literally rather than metaphorically. In 998, he rebuilt the old imperial palace in Rome and set about governing form there, the first emperor to do so since the early fourth century.. . . .
Otto died before he could learn the lesson that, for a transalpine emperor, Rome was more useful as an idea than as a centre of government. As an idea, it drew on the antique past to confer a potent form of legitimacy; as a place of power, it was best left well alone, distant but powerfully evocative.
Quote ID: 2205
Time Periods: 47
Book ID: 83 Page: 282
Section: 2A3
From the time of Damasus I (366-84) onwards, popes had encouraged worship at the scores of early Christian graves in the extramural cemeteries and associated churches. Its martyrs were the city’s spiritual adornment, its link with the early Christian era and an earthly anticipation of a heaven populated with saints.
Quote ID: 2206
Time Periods: 4
Book ID: 83 Page: 285/286
Section: 2A3
At Europe’s outer margins, Rome was impossibly distant for all save the wealthiest few. But, as a place of holiness where the pious Christian dead lay buried in their multitudes, it could nevertheless be replicated and rendered accessible. The Irish did this by using the word ‘Rome’ to refer to a monastic cemetery.. . . .
Bardsey Island [off the coast of Wales]
. . . .
In ancient British custom, it is proverbially called ‘the Rome of Britain’ on account of the length and difficulty of the sea crossing, for it is situated on the very edge of the country, and also on account of the holiness and attractiveness of the place; holiness because the bodies of twenty thousand saints—confessors and martyrs—lie buried there; ….
. . . .
This Rome was paradise on an Atlantic island.
Quote ID: 2207
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 286
Section: 2E3
Canterbury, itself a former Roman city of regional importance, was the centre from which the earliest missionaries worked. Here, Augustine and his fellow Roman monks made for themselves a home from home.Pastor John note: Canterbury built an imitation of Rome
Quote ID: 2208
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 286
Section: 2E3
Rome’s cathedral, the Lateran, lay within the city walls and was dedicated to Christ the Saviour, and its adjacent baptistery church was dedicated to St John: thus Augustine built his cathedral, Christ Church, within Canterbury’s Roman defences, next to which his successor Cuthbert (760-60) added the church of St. John the Baptist. At Rome, the papal basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul both lay outside the city walls: at Canterbury, Augustine founded an extramural burial church, dedicated to Sts Peter and Paul together.. . . .
…the ruins of Roman-era Canterbury had been transformed into a replica of Christian Rome.
Quote ID: 2209
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 287
Section: 2E3
To achieve this, he imported stonemasons and glaziers to build his churches ‘in the Roman style he had always loved so much’ and stocked them with the books, liturgical vestments, and pictures he had brought back with him.{54} He fetched a Roman singing master to teach his Northumbrian novices to sing Roman chant and dedicated his churches to Rome’s two most important patrons, Wearmouth to St. Peter and Jarrow to St. Paul.PJ: Who is "he"?
Quote ID: 2210
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 288
Section: 2E3
The replication of Rome through name transference, building forms, liturgy, dedications, and imported martyrial relics signaled a strong desire for attachment to authoritative narratives of Christian origins and apostolic authenticity in the absence of locally available proofs.The main other region where Christian communities found imaginative ways to import Rome to their own locality was Germany. In the ninth century, abbots and bishops sometimes went to great lengths to acquire corporeal relics of Roman martyrs as one expression of this. Some also directly copied the most distinctive feature of Rome’s ecclesiastical architecture: the ground plan of St. Peter’s, with its unusual western orientation and circular crypt around the apostle’s tomb. To build such a crypt was to build in a deliberately Roman style.
Quote ID: 2211
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 291
Section: 2E3
Through architectural analogy, saints’ relics, and Episcopal liturgy, the holiest places in Christendom could be rebuilt and the events associated with them reenacted elsewhere. In the early Middle Ages, Rome was the ideal type of a Christian holy place.
Quote ID: 2212
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 291
Section: 4B
However much the political map of Europe had been transformed between c.500 and c.1000, Rome could not shake off its association with empire. Rather, its imperial dimension was reconfigured, formed anew to suit the needs of the powerful warrior kings of early medieval northern Europe.
Quote ID: 2213
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 83 Page: 292
Section: 4B
In Rome, the peoples of Europe found a common fascination.
Quote ID: 2214
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 83 Page: 293
Section: 3A1,4B
In 1049, another pope named Leo crossed the Alps. With Leo IX’s journey to Reims, a different story begins. It tells of the formation of a papal monarchy, exercising authority throughout Latin Christendom by means of a centralized judicial and administrative machinery of government. This story reaches its apogee in the thirteenth century, when the city of Rome functioned as the jurisdictional headquarters of an international ecclesiastical institution, regulating theological doctrines, social norms, political procedures, and rituals of worship throughout the Latin west.
Quote ID: 2215
Time Periods: 6
Book ID: 83 Page: 295
Section: 4B
To its north, the cultural hegemony of the Roman way of life had yielded to a matrix shaped by Christianity, a religion into which many separate Roman cultural elements had been gradually subsumed.
Quote ID: 2216
Time Periods: 56
Book ID: 83 Page: 295
Section: 3A1,4B
In short, from a world of Roman culture within which Christianity was one element in 500, by 1000 Europe had become a Christian world of which Roman cultural attributes formed one aspect.
Quote ID: 2217
Time Periods: 67
Book ID: 83 Page: 296/297
Section: 1A,3A1,4B
….the role of Christianity as a transmitter of many other aspects of Roman culture besides its normative creed. All of these are subsidiary, however, to its critical diagnostic: a cluster of dominant ideologies in which Rome held a central, inspirational place but no ascendant political role as it once had in Antiquity and would again, differently conceived, under papal guidance. To that extent, Europe after Rome is also Europe before Rome—after the crumbling of the political hegemony of the western Roman Empire but before the ecclesiastical hegemony of the international Roman Church.
Quote ID: 2218
Time Periods: 67
End of quotes