Hello everyone. As 2022 draws to a close, I thought I'd do something a little bit different. You see, most of my posts have focused overwhelmingly on textual sources because they're what I've mostly worked with and very rich and fascinating they are too. But they're only a fraction of what's out there in terms of the whole sum of what survives from the early medieval period. And since all societies across Europe, Asia and Africa in the early medieval period were at best partially literate, with only a minority (sometimes a very small one at that) being able to read and write documents, texts arguably provide quite a distorted view of how most early medieval people saw and experienced their world. And in all ages of human history, the way we have experienced the world has been, first and foremost, through some or all of the five senses - hearing, seeing, touching, smelling, tasting. Of all these, the visual is the most easy for us to access because a fairly substantial number (though not as large as we'd like) of buildings, images and objects do survive from the early medieval period. Though no landscape has remained unaltered since the early medieval period traces of it do nonetheless remain - from grand projects like Offa's Dyke on the border between England and Wales and the Nahrawan Canal in central Iraq to more mundane things like field boundaries and woodland clearings. Touching what early medieval people touched is also somewhat possible, though most museums, heritage sites, libraries and archives do not take kindly to random members of the public doing such things for good reasons. Hearing, smelling and tasting are a lot more difficult. That is very much the domain of experimental archaeologists, who will painstakingly try and reconstruct what an early medieval Latin mass would have sounded like, what a busy commercial street in tenth century Constantinople, Cairo or Cordoba would have smelt like (no one has done anything like that yet, to my knowledge, but maybe that'll be the new frontier of the future) or how Anglo-Saxon bread would have tasted (you can actually try this at home yourself).
I've decided on the visual, since that's probably the one I'm most qualified to talk about, though I'm sure those of you reading this who are actually cognisant in archaeology, art history and epigraphy will find plenty of fault in what I say. I've decided to try and do a foolhardy task - to tell the history of early medieval Afro-Eurasia (the Old World you might say) in ten objects. This is obviously going to be a very selective history - not all aspects of early medieval life will have justice done to them. Nor will all the regions of the Old World. The Iberian Peninsula, Eastern Europe (unless Byzantium counts), Iran, Central Asia, China, Japan and Sub-Saharan Africa are all going to be conspicuous by their absence here. Meanwhile, the very label early medieval is being stretched to its limits here as these objects span the whole period this blog produces posts on - the fifth to twelfth centuries. I don't want to get into a long discussion about periodisation, but 400 - 1200 is the most generous periodisation for the early medieval that still has some sense in it. And of course, for a lot of the regions that we will be talking about here, notably South and Southeast Asia, a lot of people would argue that the label "early medieval" is inappropriate no matter what the periodisation and that we should throw out all that Eurocentric baggage. I must say that I'm not in that camp, which strikes me as postcolonialism gone too far. All it really does is keep premodern African and Asian studies, which are themselves quite small self-contained fields in Europe and North America given that they require the mastery of some very difficult languages and source material, isolated from the mainstream of medieval history. Basically, just so long as we don't hold up Europe as the gold standard for historical development we're good, and by doing some comparisons we can see what's similar and shared and what's particular and unique about what we study. But now let's get on the exciting part - meet our ten objects!
Object number one: a child's tombstone from Trier, 400 - 500 AD (Trier Cathedral Museum, Germany, visited 11 May 2022)
The inscription on this Roman tombstone, found in the grounds of the abbey of Saint Maximin at Trier, in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany, reads (according to my own faulty translation:
Valentina lies here in peace. She lived for three years, six months and five days. Her kinsmen placed this inscription here.
Below it are two doves. The doves are an important Christian symbol - it was a dove carrying an olive branch that Noah saw when the Great Flood ended. The gospels of Matthew and Luke also claim that the Holy Spirit appeared as a dove at the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan. Because of this, doves symbolised peace, hope and the soul, and thus were more than appropriate to have on a tombstone - they became a very common motif on late Roman tombstones from Edict of Milan in 313, which officially made Christian worship legal in the Roman Empire, onwards. Indeed, there are plenty of tombstones just this one in Trier alone, to say nothing of other places where late Roman cemeteries have been found.
The location of the cemetery this was found in is worth noting as well. This grave was found in the grounds of the Abbey of Saint Maximin in Trier, founded in the sixth century, destroyed by the Vikings in 882, rebuilt in the tenth century and again, after a fire, in the thirteenth. I passed by it when I was walking from Trier Hauptbahnhof to my accommodation in a village in the hills of the Moselle valley outside Trier. Before the abbey, there was an early Christian basilica and cemetery that had grown up around the tomb of Saint Maximin (d.346), one of the earliest known Christian bishops of Trier, a courtier at the courts of Constantine II and Constans (sons of Constantine the Great) and a renowned defender of the doctrine of the Trinity against the Arian heresy which we have talked about here briefly before. This cemetery was located in what was essentially a suburb of Trier, or Augusta Treverorum as it was then known. You see, Roman law forbade the dead from being buried inside the city walls. So the location of this burial is very much in keeping with ancient Roman tradition, going back at least to the days of the Early Republic. The Christian symbols, however, represent a more recently established tradition, as does the decision to have this toddler buried in close proximity to a saint - the cult of the saints itself being a very recent development. Saints were believed to be able to intercede for those who had recently departed to help them get to heaven, which was why as we get into the early middle ages proper, kings and aristocrats chose to be buried in monasteries.
But above all, it reveals one of the few things that stayed completely same throughout our period (400 - 1200). That is, high infant mortality. We have no concrete statistics for it in this period, but in all ages before modern medicine almost a third of children did not live past the age of five. That's why life expectancy in this period was so low. Its not because everyone was dropping dead in their thirties (I've encountered more than enough early medieval octogenarians and nonagenarians to disprove that), but because more than 30% of all the people born in this period would have never lived to see adulthood at all. This continued to be more or less the case even into the Industrial Age. For example, in England and Wales in 1850, 16.2% of babies born died before their first birthday and approximately a further 11.2% did not live to see their fifth - cumulatively, that's about 27.4% of children dying before the age of five in early Victorian England. By contrast, in 2020, just 0.4% of children in England and Wales did not live to see their fifth birthday. For this we have to thank the huge quantum leaps in medicine and healthcare that were made in the twentieth century. Still, huge disparities remain around the world i.e. the infant mortality rate (deaths before the age of one) is still 1.1% in Ecuador, 4.7% in Mozambique and 5.7% in Pakistan. This tombstone really reminds us of how harsh life could be across this period.
Of course, going on in the backdrop when this tombstone was placed there was indeed the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Trier had been an absolutely thriving place in the fourth century AD, when it was the de facto imperial capital in the West. Having the imperial court that far north is part of what explains why so many deluxe Roman villas survive from the fourth century in Britain. However, after the rebellion of Magnus Maximus in the 380s, who we've met a few times before, the western imperial court moved permanently back to Milan, and later Rome and Ravenna. In 406, the Roman magister militum (head of the armed forces) Stilicho, decided to remove all field armies from the Rhine frontier to deal with Radagaisus, an Ostrogothic leader who wanted to sack Rome and sacrifice all the senators to Odin and Thor. Radagaisus was defeated and executed near Fiesole in Tuscany, but in the winter the Rhine froze over and the Burgundians, Vandals, Swabians and Alans, who were all fleeing the coming of the Huns from Mongolia to the Great Hungarian Plain, crossed into Gaul.
The countryside around Trier will have been ravaged a lot by the barbarians in 407, though the city itself doesn't seem to have been sacked that year - a fate that befell Metz and Rheims to the west. Shortly after this, half a dozen usurpers appeared in Gaul and one of them, Constantine III (later believed to be King Arthur's grandfather), withdrew all Roman field armies from Britain later in 407. The end of the Western Roman Empire was still far from inevitable at this point, and no one could have foreseen it then, but this can with some justification be called the beginning of the end. Trier and the Moselle valley still remained firmly under Roman imperial authority, though it was attacked by the Franks several times in the early fifth century, and was sacked by Attila the Hun during his invasion of Gaul in 451.
After 461, the imperial centre lost control of Gaul north of the Loire. The emerging Visigothic kingdom in Aquitaine and the Burgundian kingdom in Savoy cut off the corridor between it and the still centrally controlled and very Roman Provence. To add to this, Aegidius, the commander of the Roman field armies in Gaul, whom we've met so many times before because our friend Adhemar of Chabannes remembered him almost 600 years later and talked a lot about him, refused to recognise the western emperor Libius Severus (r.461 - 465). But its unclear if Aegidius, who was based in Soissons, actually controlled Trier.
Trier after 461 was under the control of Count Arbogast, a descendant of the Frankish leader by the same name who had served as magister militum for the western Roman Empire in the late fourth century. Count Arbogast himself, like many Roman generals of barbarian ancestry (Stilicho and Flavius Aetius to name a few) was thoroughly Roman himself and like any good Roman aristocrat he had received an excellent literary education. Our only sources for his life are his correspondence with the Gallo-Roman aristocrat and bishop Sidonius Apollinaris and with his cousin Bishop Auspicius of Toul, preserved in a ninth century Carolingian manuscript called the Austrasian Letters (once again, thank the Carolingians for preserving all our ancient sources). Count Arbogast relied on the surviving units of Roman limitanei (garrison and border defence troops) and Frankish mercenaries for military defence. We do not know when his rule ended, but it was sometime after 470. Adhemar of Chabannes, writing in the eleventh century but using much earlier sources (though from well after the time of the events themselves), claims that Childeric, the father of Clovis, took Trier for the Franks and sacked and burned the city to the ground sometime in the 470s. But there's no contemporary source that says this, and by Adhemar's day the all-out destructiveness of the barbarian invasions was already being played up in the standard histories - the cataclysmic vision of the fall of Rome didn't have to wait until the Renaissance. Some instead think that Arbogast simply gave his allegiance to Childeric, again without much foundation. At any rate, as far as the archaeology is concerned, Frankish style graves do not appear in the area around Trier until after 500. So, as this gravestone itself attests, Trier remained firmly Roman during the turbulent fifth century and, like in many other parts of the erstwhile Western Roman Empire, the early middle ages took a long while to arrive there.
Object number two: socks from Roman Egypt, 400 - 500 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)
Lets now take a look at the other side of the Roman world, to the eastern Roman Empire. This pair of red woollen socks was knitted with needles in Egypt sometime in the fifth century, though they might actually be fourth century - like with a lot of archaeological material, dating is difficult (I shall resist any temptation to make awful puns). Their odd, cloven shape can be explained by the fact that they were meant to be worn with sandals - a hugely unfashionable look now, though I may be a little behind the curve on current cultural trends, but the height of fashion then. They were excavated in the 1890s in a burial ground in Oxyrhynchus, a town founded in the Ptolemaic Era (323 - 31 BC) by Hellenistic Greek settlers in the Middle Nile Valley. Many other finds from there are also displayed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as in other museums in Europe and North America.
Why does clothing survive so easily from Egypt but not from other parts of the Roman Empire? The answer to that is that all source material survives better in Egypt than in any other part of the Roman Empire. The extremely dry climate, except by the Nile itself which is incredibly fertile, means that most organic material doesn't perish so easily as it does in places with wetter, more temperate climates. Given that papyrus, which rots very easily in temperate climates, was the main writing material of the ancient Romans in Classical times and in Late Antiquity, we have more surviving documentation from Egypt than we do anywhere else in the Roman Empire, and thus we know more about ordinary provincial Egyptian society than for any other region of the Roman Empire. Indeed, its possible to say that we know more about ancient Roman life from Egyptian rubbish dumps, including those at Oxyrhynchus, than we do from all the works of Cicero, the Vindolanda Tablets or even the remains of Pompeii. Amidst these Egyptian rubbish dumps we have lots of ordinary documents which survive in quantities unparalleled anywhere else in the Roman Empire - soldiers' letters home, wills, land purchases, shopping lists, petitions etc. At Oxyrhynchus, even lost poems of Sappho and plays of Sophocles, and some of the earliest ever copies of the Gospels, have been found there. Thus, Roman Egypt has the potential to cast quite a distorting mirror on the Roman world, as the ancient historian Brett Devereaux explores here (I do highly recommend his excellent blog).
We have no idea who these socks belonged to, though they most likely belonged to a peasant. The Egyptian peasantry in the late Roman period (third to seventh centuries in Egypt) were fairly prosperous and largely independent of aristocratic landlords, though they did have to pay high taxes to the Roman state. Surviving land registers from (surprise, surprise) Oxyrhynchus, show that taxes were paid routinely and proportionately in Egypt, even by the Apion family - one of the wealthiest families in the Eastern Roman Empire, whose home base was in Oxyrhynchus itself. They were also becoming more culturally Roman in this period - during fourth and fifth centuries, temple complexes to native Egyptian deities started to be abandoned (in part due to Christianisation), hieroglyphics ceased to be used for writing inscriptions and the Egyptians ditched their venerable taste for beer and started drinking Palestinian wine instead.
In Egypt the experience of the fifth century was very different to in Gaul, where we were for object one, and the other western provinces. In part that was because the Eastern Mediterranean had always been richer than the West, and had been urbanised for much longer (indeed by millennia). But it was also in part thanks to the imperial capital, Constantinople being supremely well-defended, the eastern frontier with Persia being largely peaceful as the two empires faced the Hunnic threat together, which meant that the most economically productive, tax-rich provinces of Anatolia, Syria, Cyprus, Palestine and Egypt were kept safe from external attack. The Eastern Roman Emperors pursued shrewd diplomacy, which kept potential barbarian invaders like Alaric the Visigoth, Atilla the Hun, Geiseric the Vandal and Theodoric the Ostrogoth from being too troublesome for them. Indeed, the Eastern Roman Empire experienced something of an economic boom in the fifth and early sixth centuries, which made Justinian's reconquest of Africa, Italy and Southern Spain for the Roman Empire in the mid-sixth century possible, as well as Constantinople growing to at least half a million inhabitants and architecturally ground-breaking churches like Hagia Sophia being built. Perhaps these socks are somehow reflective of this late antique prosperity in Egypt.Notably, these socks are the only item in this group of ten objects I've chosen which are completely secular - they have nothing about them which relates to gods, myths, saints, worship or anything religious. They are also the only item which is at all representative of the lived experiences of 80 - 90% of the population of the early medieval world. In part that's due to biases of survival, in part due to my own personal choices and preferences. Much as I have respect for the work of the Annales school historians, especially Georges Duby (I'm not so fussed about Fernand Braudel), and the less dogmatic British and French Marxist historians like Pierre Bonnassie, Guy Bois and most of all Chris Wickham, elite culture really is my cup of tea. I just don't find peasants as interesting as aristocrats, clerics and scholars, which also links to the fact I've always preferred studying texts to archaeological material, though that's not to say I don't think peasants and agriculture boring and unimportant - my blogging record says otherwise. Thus I felt I had to bring them in there, somewhere, to remind us of the lived experiences of the great majority, even if in a token way.
Object number three: The Isola Rizza Dish, 550 - 600 AD (Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, visited 10 June 2022)
This magnificent silver dish was found amidst a late sixth century treasure hoard, excavated in a churchyard in Isola Rizza, a village near Verona in the Veneto region of Italy, in 1873. At the bottom of the bowl is an engraved relief medallion showing a clean-shaven cavalryman wearing a lamellar cuirass and a plumed Spangenhelm-type helmet and carrying a kontos spear charging over a fallen enemy soldier. Another who, like his fallen comrade, is bearded, wears no armour and carries an oval-shaped shield and a longsword called a spatha, appears to be fleeing the cavalryman.
Where this was made, and for whom, is uncertain. Historians such as Neil Christie have thought on stylistic grounds that it is an East Roman work, produced in Italy shortly after the completion of Justinian's reconquest in 554. They assume that it commemorates the defeat of the Ostrogoths by the East Roman armies of Justinian, and that the cavalryman is a Germanic (possibly a Goth or Gepid from Pannonia, modern day Hungary) or Steppe (possibly an Alan from the Caucasus) mercenary in Roman service. Meanwhile, the infantrymen are presumed to be Ostrogoths, though they could plausibly be Franks, who also tried to wrestle control of Northern Italy in the 550s but were repelled by the East Roman eunuch general, Narses. Their lack of armour indicates that they are fairly low-ranking free men serving their king as levies, not professional soldiers or aristocratic retainers. It is thus presumed that the dish was buried in 569, when another Germanic people, the Lombards, invaded Italy from across the Alps under their king, Alboin, and successfully took Verona after a siege. The assumption is that a worried local bigwig didn't want the Lombards getting their dirty hands on his nice shiny household silverware. But as is so often the case, the dating and provenance can be questioned. It could have been made by the Lombards and show an elite Lombard warrior on horseback running down some invading Franks or Slavs. Alternatively, a Lombard warrior may have acquired it in battle, with the East Romans. Or he might have been given it by the Avars, a Steppe nomad people from Central Asia who settled on the Great Hungarian Plain from the 560s and who definitely had mounted warriors that looked exactly like the one shown here - it was the Avars and Lombards who together destroyed the Gepid kingdom in Hungary in 566, before the Lombards invaded Italy. We will never have the answer.
Nonetheless, it does undoubtedly represent an even bigger sixth century change. That is the militarisation of society and the rise of warrior elites. Lots of silverwares from the fourth and fifth century Roman Empire survive, but they don't show scenes of contemporary warfare. Instead they overwhelmingly show scenes from classical mythology and literature and the pleasures of the imagination, and are overwhelmingly non-martial in nature. This reflects the educated and cultured civilian aristocracy, including senators, career bureaucrats in the imperial administration and local municipal officeholders, they were produced for. While it disappeared earlier in many other regions of the Empire, notably fifth century Britain which we discussed on this blog earlier this year, it survived in Italy into the first half of the sixth century under the Ostrogothic kings, where one would have been entirely forgiven for thinking the Western Roman Empire hadn't fallen at all. But Justinian's wars to recover Italy for the actual Roman Empire ended up being a messy and protracted affair, which resulted in the Italian economy being left in ruins, cities being depopulated and villas being abandoned for fortified hilltop villages (read: not proto-castles!). The invasion of the Lombards both took full advantage of this and made the situation worse. As elsewhere in the former Western Empire, economic and urban collapse combined with increased warfare and political instability led to the replacement of civilian aristocracies with warrior elites. In those circumstances, being able to quote Virgil from memory was less important than being able to wield a sword proficiently. And this new warrior elite, while they still loved luxury would have had a less of a taste for scenes of playful cupids, dancing girls, temples and bucolic dreamscapes and more of a taste for scenes of war and martial valour. None of this was to do with "Germanic influence." The rise of military aristocracies can be similarly seen in the areas of late sixth and seventh century Italy still under Roman control, just like it can be seen in both Anglo-Saxon England and Romano-British Wales as any comparison between Beowulf and Y Goddodin shows. In some ways all the different regions of the former Western Roman Empire were all headed down fairly similar cultural trajectories, whether they fell to Germanic invaders or not. Above all, the very uncertainties about this object's provenance are indicative of one thing about it - that it belonged to an unstable militarised frontier society.
And that links to our final point. The burial of weapons, jewellery and luxury items like silver bowls, which is so common in the former Western Roman Empire the fifth to seventh centuries but so much less common after. A lot of historians used to think that had something to do with paganism or ancient Germanic customs. All except, as Chris Wickham and Guy Halsall amongst others have ably demonstrated, actually it doesn't. Getting rid of moveable property to prepare for death was common in Roman times, and not just pagans but also Christians did it. Rather, what it shows is aristocrats and elites who were uncertain about their local power and status. The later sixth and seventh centuries in Italy was undoubtedly a time for elites to feel thus, due to all the constant warfare and political instability and upheaval. Elites in Anglo-Saxon England, where politics and society were much more primitive and unstable than in Lombard Italy, basically tribal, would have felt the same, which is why we find such rich hoards there like Sutton Hoo, or indeed the Harpole treasure discovered less than a month ago. But once aristocrats felt much more secure in their positions, as they did in Francia and Visigothic Spain by around 650 and in Anglo-Saxon England and Lombard Italy after 700, they started investing in more permanent displays of their wealth and local power by building churches and donating to monasteries. Its from this point on that grave goods disappear and treasure hoards become increasingly scarce. So the Isola Rizza dish we've discussed here, like the macho man of Marlow we discussed back in February, reflects the transition away from the late Roman civilian aristocracy to the early medieval warrior elite.
Object number four: a coin of Emperor Heraclius, 629 - 630 AD, Eastern Roman Empire (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 10 December 2022)
Moving east again, we at last have an item with a concrete, clearly identifiable date. This is the reverse of a gold solidus coin of the Roman emperor Heraclius (r.610 - 641), minted in Constantinople. The obverse of the coin, not shown here, has images of Heraclius and his two sons. But the reverse shows an image of the True Cross, believed to be the very cross on which Jesus Christ himself was crucified. Now coins are more than just items of monetary exchange, especially in late antique/ early medieval context. They could be a powerful vehicle for political propaganda. And this couldn't be clearer than in this case. In 628, as I've written about here in much more detail before, Heraclius had defeated Rome's eternal nemesis, Persia, and recovered the True Cross which the Persians had taken from Jerusalem in 614. The inclusion of the True Cross on a coin, a year later, was doubtless meant to celebrate Heraclius' triumph and portray him as a great Roman soldier emperor in the mould of Trajan and Constantine, as well as a defender of the Christian faith against the heathen Zoroastrian Persian foe. Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. Within the next decade Islam would spread out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Romans would lose Syria, Palestine and Egypt, which they had fought to hard to regain from the Persians, to the Arabs, and this time it would be forever. Nonetheless, Heraclius' victory immediately caught the attention of contemporaries not just in the Roman Empire but across the Christian world, and was a very well-known and celebrated moment in history for more than a thousand years after. Adhemar of Chabannes of course wrote about it in his Aquitanian monastic cell in the early eleventh century. And William Caxton wrote about it in Middle English in the late fifteenth century, and had Heraclius' story printed on his London printing press - his audiences in Yorkist and early Tudor England hugely enjoyed reading it. And a few decades earlier, the story of Heraclius and the True Cross had been immortalised in paint by the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. Linking to my first PGCE written assignment on teaching historical significance to schoolchildren, this is a nice illustration of how historical events can resonate both with people at the time and subsequently.
Object 5: a plaster cast of a relief showing a scene from the Gandavyuha Sutra, Borodbudur, Java, 700 - 800 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 10 December 2022)
This plaster cast of a high stone relief from the temple complex of Borobudur near Yogyakarta in central Java in Indonesia shows a scene from the Gandavyuha Sutra, a Buddhist text written in sixth century India. It shows how a pilgrim, Prince Sudhana, achieved enlightenment with the help of several Buddhist holy men, known as bodhisattvas. On the left, the prince receives instruction from the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (the large seated figure), and on the centre-right of the picture with his palms put together in reverence the Prince meditates and comes close to achieving full nirvana.
Now I must admit I know little about the history of Indonesia in this period. But there are many reasons why I chose it. Firstly, notice how, by showing the ascetic holy men Samantabhadra as a figure more than twice as large as Prince Sudhana, the artist is making him out as much more important. This image thus nicely illustrates how the universalising religions that emerged across Eurasia in like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam could potentially challenge the prevailing social hierarchies with their new ideas about morals and spirituality, even if the established elites willingly embraced them. Pagan Roman writers sometimes accused Christianity of being a religion of women and slaves. And while so many early medieval saints, bishops, abbots and abbesses were of aristocratic and royal backgrounds, to the point that German scholars speak of adelsheilige (noble saintliness) like its a concrete phenomenon, all early medieval people knew that the poor peasant could go to heaven at least as easily as a rich count. Meanwhile, on the other side of Eurasia, the Chinese imperial authorities were often afraid of Buddhism as socially and politically subversive, and the Tang emperors cracked down on it with full-scale persecutions It also reflects the power of holy men, especially those who practiced asceticism, to advise and educate rulers and even correct them for bad behaviours. A Carolingianist like myself can more than easily see the eighth and ninth century Frankish parallels here. Likewise, the importance of pilgrimage in this story would have resonated with people in the early medieval Christian West just as much as in the Buddhist world.
Secondly, what makes it interesting is indeed the most obvious. That it shows the spread of Indian culture and religions across south and southeast Asia. As I mentioned before, the first millennium AD sees the momentous spread of the three great universalising world religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, across Afro-Eurasia. Buddhism had already reached southeast Asia in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, around the same time as the Christianisation of the Roman Empire. Around the time this temple was being built, Islam had reached Spain and Central Asia and Saint Boniface was converting Frisia and Central Germany on behalf of Charles Martel and Pippin the Short. Its possible to find many parallels between the establishment of Hindu and Buddhist temples in peninsular India, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia and the creation of Christian monasteries in Northwest Europe, not just in the religious changes they brought but also the social and economic ones. Comparing Borobudur with the bishopric of Wurzburg and the nearby abbey of Fulda, founded by St Boniface and his disciples around the same time it was built, would be intriguing indeed. Likewise, the spread of Indian culture to Southeast Asia would have meant the spread of literacy, of the Vedas and the Indian epic cycles like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and of the Sanskrit language. Similarly, the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century and of Central and Northern Germany in the eighth century brought Latin, the Bible and the Roman Classics, which transformed elite culture there too. I must confess that while I know so little about Southeast Asia, I find the potential parallels between it and the Frankish and Anglo-Saxon worlds in the seventh to tenth centuries so intriguing that I'd love to explore them more.
