Chris Wickham > Quotes

“he sacked Rome in 410, an event which shocked the Roman world much as 11 September 2001 shocked the United States, a huge, upsetting, symbolic blow to its self-confidence; but it was without other repercussions,”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“To survive, Byzantine society and politics folded itself around the state.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Roman envoys to Attila’s court in 449 greatly offended the Huns when they said that, although Attila was a man, Theodosius II was a god; this was a self-evident statement in Roman eyes, even though the envoys were doubtless overwhelmingly Christian.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“There is a common medieval literary trope, and some actual cases, of enemies being invited to a meal to make peace, and then being killed while eating and drinking; it may have been a sensible strategy, for people’s guards were down, but it was very dishonourable indeed.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Theoderic ruled Italy from Ravenna, the western Roman capital, with a traditional Roman administration, a mixture of senatorial leaders from the city of Rome and career bureaucrats; he was (as Odovacer had also been) respectful of the Roman senate,”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“The gods were gone, but imperial status remained unchanged –divinus remained a technical term meaning ‘imperial’. The emperor’s position was all the more central in that the Roman empire was regarded as, by definition, always victorious, a belief that survived even the disasters of the fifth century.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“By around 480, as he put it, ‘now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away . . . the only token of nobility will henceforth be a knowledge of letters’; the official hierarchy had gone, only traditional Roman culture survived.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Augustine, as bishop of Hippo, appointed his monk Antoninus in the 410s to be bishop of a subordinate diocese at Fussala, one of Africa’s relatively few villages, in the hills of what is now eastern Algeria. Antoninus turned out to be a bad man - he was young and from a poor family, he was promoted too fast - and he terrorized his village, extorting money, clothing, produce and building materials. He was also accused of sexual assault. Augustine removed him, but did not depose him, and tried to transfer him to the nearby estate of Thogonoetum. Here, the tenants told Augustine and their landowner that they would leave if he came.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“from the 680s onwards references to a cult of religious images; such images had long existed too, but from now on they were regarded by many in a new way, as windows into the holy presence of the saint (or of Christ) depicted in them.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“did the Arabs actually create Europe itself, by breaking the unity of the Roman and post-Roman Mediterranean and separating out the European coasts from the Asian and African ones (with some fuzziness at the margin, the Arabs in al-Andalus and the Byzantines in Anatolia being the most obvious in this period)?”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“The history of Christian Europe has been studded with religious reform movements; they, so to speak, come with the territory of a religion based on an extremely long sacred text, the Bible, some of whose sections advocate moral values opposed to those of any political system or religious structure which has ever existed,”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Arabs had always been until then a marginal border people, used as mercenaries at best, but no meaningful threat – there was hardly even an armed defence on the largely desert Arabian frontier. They could hope that it would be reversed, but when the first Arab civil war of 656–61 did not lead to the break-up of the coherence of the new caliphate, and Arab raiding into Anatolia increased instead, it became clearer that the new political order was here to stay. The Romans did not understand what Islam was yet – it was initially seen as a simplified form of Christianity, not a new religion – but, either way, given the way east Roman political imagery now worked, this was as much a religious catastrophe as a military one, since the victorious Arabs were certainly not Orthodox Christians.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“They were certainly well led, however; and, as with the Germanic peoples two centuries before, it is likely that many Arabs had experience in the Roman and Persian armies (even if the main Roman-federated tribe, the Ghassanids, fought on the side of Heraclius).”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“The history of Christian Europe has been studded with religious reform movements; they, so to speak, come with the territory of a religion based on an extremely long sacred text, the Bible, some of whose sections advocate moral values opposed to those of any political system or religious structure which has ever existed, and which attentive readers can discover and rediscover at any time.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“This was the context, a moderately optimistic one except in the 810s and 820s, for one of the most interesting Christian conflicts of the middle ages, over the power of religious images.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Christianity spread across northern Europe more or less from west to east, slowly, but with greater speed after 950 or so. Ireland was first, in the fifth and sixth centuries; there followed Pictish Scotland, England and central Germany in the seventh century, Saxony – by force as we have seen – after Charlemagne’s conquests in the eighth, Bulgaria, Croatia and Moravia in the ninth, Bohemia in the tenth, Poland, Rus’ (covering parts of European Russia and Ukraine) and Denmark in the late tenth, Norway, Iceland and Hungary in the years around 1000, Sweden more slowly across the eleventh century.3 Only the far north-east of Europe was left out of this, the Baltic- and Finnish-speaking lands, the former of which would eventually, in the thirteenth century, turn into the only large and powerful pagan polity in medieval Europe, Lithuania, before its grand dukes went Christian as late as 1386–87.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“homicide levels in English medieval villages matched those of the most violent US cities of the twentieth century.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“the Christian churches of Armenia, Lebanon and Egypt are still Monophysite today.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Europe was now more economically complex, as we have seen; with that complexity came ambiguities of all kinds. And it is in societies where complexity and ambiguity give space for pragmatic solutions that women have in general found it most possible to negotiate space for their own protagonism.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Arabic language and Muslim religion which eventually won out, in all the areas of the caliphate except Iran.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“The veneration of sacred portraits – icons – has been an essential element of Orthodox Christianity ever since, and marked Byzantine religious culture until the empire’s end.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“the annual presentation of a county’s accounts by its sheriff to the Exchequer, so named because a chequerboard was used as an abacus by the royal treasurer to check the figures while the sheriff watched”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“(it was the first time a pope had ever come north of the Alps),”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“the appearance of Scandinavian Vikings in Ireland, Britain and Francia.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“(Admittedly, sometimes they were right, as in the gothic events of Christmas 896, when the corpse of Pope Formosus (891–6) was dug up by his enemy and successor Stephen VI and put on trial; but that horrified the Romans, too–Stephen did not survive another year. Normally, Roman violence to losers had its own stately logic.)”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Legislation presents a similar problem. It might seem obvious that a law does not describe how people behave (think of the laws about speeding), but early medievalists have had to face an entrenched historiography which presumes exactly this. Modern history-writing came out of a legal-history tradition, and well into the twentieth century people wrote social history, in particular, under the assumption that if a law enacted something, the population at large followed it. If, however, this is not true in contemporary society, with all the coercive power available to the legal system, how much less could we think it was true in the early Middle Ages, when states were weaker (often very weak indeed), and the populace even knowing what legislation a ruler had enacted was unlikely in most places.”
― Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000

“Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemporary scholarship.”
― Chris Wickham

“These were conquests that were never reversed, and they affected the whole geopolitics of Europe and Asia ever after.7”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“what early Muslims thought their religion was is likely to have been highly various.16 But what was”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe