From the sources 14: conquest, conversion and what it meant to be a Christian in the eighth century

One version of Carolingian Christianity. The obverse side of Harrach ditpych, made as an ivory book cover for a gospel book by the so-called "Court School of Charlemagne" c.800. At the top we can see the four evangelists, on the middle right the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, the middle left the Nativity, the botton right the Crucifixion and the bottom left Mary and Mary Magdelene visiting Jesus' tomb and finding it empty. So very focused on the Bible and the core of the Christian story in the gospels, fitting the profoundly religious ethos of Charlemagne's court. The reverse side (below) was carved in Visigothic Spain or Lombard Italy sometime between 700 and 750. It shows the apostles Peter and Paul, important symbols of the Institutional church. Photo credit: yours truly.

A very different side of early medieval Christianity is shown in this stone carving from the Cologne region in Western Germany. We don't know the date of it - it could have been made any time between 600 and 1050. We have no idea who made it either, but they were certainly much lower in social standing and prestige than the court of Charlemagne, hence the much cruder artistry. It shows Christ as a charismatic, superhero-like figure, taming the beasts during his 40 days in the wilderness. 

One of Charlemagne's greatest and most controversial achievements has got to the conquest of Saxony. Some of you might be asking, where's that? 

Basically, if we were to divide modern Germany into quarters, Saxony in the eighth century would very roughly correspond to the top left quarter. Indeed, for those of you who know your Cold War history, eighth century Saxony almost (but not exactly) corresponds to the British Zone of Occupation from 8th May 1945 - 1st January 1947. It was also the ancestral homeland of the Angles and Saxons who came over to Britain in the fifth century. 

An early twentieth century map of Old Saxony. Credit: By Gustav Droysen - General Historical Hand Atlas, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2465783. Compare to the map of the British Occupation Zone in post-WW2 Germany (below).

Credit: By User:52 Pickup - Based on map data of the IEG-Maps project (Andreas Kunz, B. Johnen and Joachim Robert Moeschl: University of Mainz) - www.ieg-maps.uni-mainz.de., CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4951565

This was a heavily forested region of Northern Germany that had never known Roman rule. It had no cities or roads. And it knew very little of "government." The Continental Saxons had no kings or written laws. They were basically lots of different independent tribes who, so far as we can tell, all spoke Old Low German. Each tribe was ruled by an ealdorman, who had the power to raze the villages of anyone who opposed his authority though we know little else about them. The Saxon social hierarchy was divided into three groups - the nobles (edhilingi), free peasants (frilingi) and slaves (lazzi).  In times of great external threat, they would all come together under the leadership of temporary war-leaders that are called duces in the Latin sources. The instinctive English translation of this word is "dukes", but that is misleading. Representatives from all the Saxon tribes and all three castes met in annual assemblies at a place called Marklo, where they confirmed their unwritten tribal customary laws, settled disputes and made decisions about whether or  to go to war. So while the Continental Saxons were generally quite primitive, they didn't lack political organisation altogether either. And most importantly of all, they were Germanic pagans, who worshipped Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frey, Freyja and a whole host of more local deities. 

Here are the Merseburg charms, a short list of spells and prayers written in Old High German verse from pre-Christian Saxony preserved on a flyleaf a ninth century sacramentary, inserted there by a monk of the monastery of Fulda sometime before 1000 AD. It was discovered at Merseburg Cathedral Library in 1841 by Georg Waitz, a titan of medieval academic history, and was studied extensively by Jakob Grimm of Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales fame. This is one of the very few pieces of evidence, written or material, we have for what the religion of the Pagan Continental Saxons actually was like. It raises so many questions as well. Why would a Saxon monk include vernacular pagan charms, no doubt ones recited by his ancestors, in a book of hymns and rituals written in Latin for use in Christian church services? Credit: By Unknown scribe - https://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/korax/rsc/viewer/Korax_derivate_00002549/VDS_Ms%20Cod%20I%20136_088.tif, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78257477

Why was it such a big achievement for Charlemagne to conquer Saxony? Its not hard to see the answer. There was no central government to negotiate surrender with, no capital to lay siege to and no head of state to kill or take prisoner. The contrast here with Charlemagne's conquest of the Lombard kingdom in Italy in 774 or the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 couldn't be more obvious. Basically, as the primary sources make incredibly clear, the conquest couldn't succeed until every last Saxon tribe, indeed every last free Saxon male, submitted to Charlemagne. The lack of roads and cities it even more difficult, to the point the Franks had to try and create the infrastructure (fortified towns, canals etc) from scratch in order to conquer Saxony. 

What's more, it was totally unprecedented. The Romans had completely given up trying to conquer Germany in 17 AD, setting the frontier at the strategic chokepoints provided by the rivers Rhine and Danube. Contrary to German nationalist mythmaking, this was not because of Arminius (a.k.a Hermann the German) butchering Varus and the Roman legions at the Teutoburger Wald. Indeed, Augustus' grandson Germanicus Julius Caesar had led expeditions to avenge Varus and punish the Germanic tribes in 15 AD. However, the more time Germanicus spent in Germania, the more he realised that the conquest simply wasn't worth it. Compared to Gaul or even southern Britain, Germany was just too poor and underdeveloped and its people were just too resistant to the idea of Roman rule, so that it would be a lot of hassle for too little gain.

The Merovingians (481 - 751) had managed to bring much of central and southern Germany into their Frankish kingdom, and slowly Christianise it with the help of Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries. But with Saxony, the most they were ever able to do was, every couple of generations, defeat the Saxons decisively in battle, ravage as much of their territory as they could and force them to pay tribute in herds of cattle. Meanwhile, the Saxons regularly raided over the rivers Main and Rhine into Frankish territory and sometimes took sides in internal political struggles in the Frankish kingdom. Thus when the Carolingians took over, it seemed politically advisable to neutralise the Saxon threat. Moreover, an important part of the Carolingians' image as kings involved them being enthusiastic defenders and promoters of Christianity, and by the mid-eighth century peaceful attempts at converting northern Germany were getting nowhere. Charlemagne needed to take a different approach to the Saxons from his Merovingian predecessors, or even from his grandfather and father - namely wholesale systematic conquest. 

As I said earlier, and this was something that Charlemagne's biographer Einhard and every historian after him remarked on, the task wasn't easy. The conquest of Saxony took 32 years (772 - 804) as a result of constant rebellion, truce-breaking and resistance to Christianisation on the part of the Saxons. Charlemagne had to respond to this with severe brutality. The most infamous incident was at Verden in 782 where the Frankish sources say that 4,500 Saxon prisoners of war were slaughtered at Charlemagne's orders. Einhard also claims that Charlemagne deported ten thousand rebels from Saxony and forced them to live elsewhere in Gaul and Germany. Its perhaps no surprise that the Saxon wars have provoked a lot of unease in modern times. The massacre at Verden would definitely be considered a war crime today, and certainly reveals a dark, ruthless streak to Charlemagne's leadership. He had of course shown such a streak on a few other occasions. Let's not forget this was the very same Frankish king who divorced his first wife (the Lombard princess Desiderata) then waged war against her father, defeated and humiliated him. He also may or may not have murdered his nephews, Richard III style. Yet I think anyone who claims the conquest of Saxony amounts to a "genocide" is taking it too far. Much like with the comparable case of Oliver Cromwell at Drogheda and Wexford in 1649 (I recently taught this to my Year 8s), some perspective is needed. As Charlemagne saw it, he was punishing oath-breakers, not exterminating an inferior race. Indeed, much of the Saxon nobility converted and became part of the post-conquest ruling class, and the Carolingians allowed the Saxon language and tribal customary laws to survive. And the Merseburg Charms I showed you earlier show the process of Christianisation was in truth a lot more complex than conversion at the point of a sword (more about that later). 

It has also made German nationalists question whether they should see Charlemagne as a German national hero. Notably, the Nazi Party in their early days in the power condemned Charlemagne as a French imperialist under the influence of  who heartlessly slaughtered the racially pure Aryan Saxons. Indeed, at a Nazi rally in 1934, 4,500 torches were lit in memory of the Saxons slain in Verden, and 4,500 memorial stones were erected for them as well. The pro-Nazi playwright and pseudoarchaeologist Edmund Kiss imagined Charlemagne torturing the Saxon war-leader Widukind into converting to Christianity by having blonde haired, blue-eyed Saxon maidens raped by dusky Jews and Moors. As always, these sauerkraut-flavoured fascists with a passion for ancient Hindu symbols and goose-stepping made monstrous distortions of German history to further their own genocidal white supremacist ideology. 

The Sachsenhain: the Nazi memorial to the Saxons slain by Charlemagne in 782. Its truly disturbing to think that the massacre of 4,500 Germanic warriors more than a thousand years earlier was seen by Hitler's supporters as an act of inhuman cruelty, but when they went on to engage in the industrial mass-murder of millions of Jews, communists, homosexuals, disabled people, Slavs etc less than a decade later it was seen as the right course of actiom.

The consequences of the Conquest of Saxony were huge. Within three generations of the conquest, the Saxons had been completely converted to Christianity and a network of bishoprics and monasteries had been established all over the region. The Saxon aristocracy had become much wealthier and more powerful, and gained much more landowning rights vis a vis the free peasantry. Then in the tenth century, the Carolingians were replaced in the lands east of the Rhine by a new dynasty of kings and emperors who themselves hailed from Saxony and claimed descent in the maternal line from Widukind himself - the Ottonians (919 - 1024). And in the High and Late Middle Ages, Saxony was part of the heartlands of Western Christendom, producing missionaries, Teutonic crusader knights and Hanseatic merchants. Finally in the sixteenth century, it would give birth to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Other than through violence, how was this transformation achieved? Fortunately for us, like with a lot of other events in Carolingian history, the conquest and Christianisation of Saxony has generated quite a lot of primary sources by early medieval standards. The one that follows is a Capitulary (royal legislative directive) that Charlemagne issued for the Saxon territories. The date is uncertain. Traditionally it has been dated to 785, when Widukind submitted to Charlemagne and accepted baptism, resulting in a seven year lull in hostilities between Franks and Saxons. But recently, Yitzchak Hen, Robert Flierman and Ingrid Rembold have suggested that it was more likely written a decade later, in 794 or 795. 

The dating does make a significant difference. If it was written in 785, then it would have come from a victorious Frankish king, still in his prime, confidently asserting his authority over the conquered Saxons. But if it was written in 794 or 795, then it would have come from a stressed-out, middle-aged ruler who had just been through the fourth (and last) great crisis in his reign. In 792, Charlemagne's own eldest son, Pippin the Hunchback (768 - 811), had plotted with a group of Frankish nobles to assassinate him and usurp the throne. The conspiracy was foiled, and most of the conspirators were executed, though Charlemagne was merciful to his own son - he had him tonsured and imprisoned in a monastery instead. In the same year, the Saxons revolted, Gaul was hit by a devastating famine, Arabs and Slavs invaded the southern and eastern frontiers and war had begun with Avar Khaganate in Hungary. To add to this, a new heresy called Adoptionism was spreading into the Pyrenees from Spain. Charlemagne therefore needed to make a statement about his authority and what direction the regime was going to go now. This he did at the Council of Frankfurt in 794, where Charlemagne condemned both Adoptionism and the worship of images supported by the Greek Church as heresies, fixed grain prices and reformed the coinage. All of this basically showed that he was a good orthodox Christian king who cared for the physical and spiritual welfare of his people. He then embarked on his final military campaign in Saxony. 

Its in this context that I think Charlemagne's Capitulary for the Saxon Territories makes the most sense. It would made a good muscular statement of his power and authority as a Christian ruler in a time of crisis/ post-crisis. We've seen other examples of how Carolingian rulers used legislation to this effect, such as the Edict of Pitres (864) issued by Charlemagne's grandson, Charles the Bald. We might not have to go as far as the late Patrick Wormald in seeing most early medieval royal law-making as really being an exercise in propaganda. But there is some merit in this kind of view, considering that there's always a gap between what the law says and what society does. That gap was going to be even bigger in the Carolingian Empire, which possessed only a skeletal government bureaucracy and lacked standing armies, police forces or even professional lawyers and judges (north of the Alps anyway). And Wormald was undoubtedly right to think that laws, first and foremost, reflect the mindsets of the people who make them.

The Capitulary for the Saxon Territories basically lays out the laws by which Saxony will be governed once it is conquered. It prescribes the death penalty for 11 different crimes and transgressions, probably more than any other single legislative act in early medieval history, that some historians have called it the "Terror Capitulary." But what makes the Capitulary so interesting to me, is that it tells us so much about what being a Christian meant to Charlemagne and his advisers as they made one final push to convert the pagan Saxons. 

(All of the following source quotations are taken from Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69)

Chapter 4: If anyone, out of contempt for Christianity, shall have despised the holy Lenten fast and shall have eaten flesh, let him be punished by death. But nevertheless, let it be taken into consideration by a priest, lest by chance anyone from necessity has been led to eat flesh. 

Chapter 6: If anyone deceived by the Devil shall have believed, after the manner of the pagans, that any man or woman is a witch and eats men, and on this account shall have burned the person, or shall have given the person's flesh for others to eat, or shall have eaten it himself, let him be punished by a capital sentence.

Chapter 8: If anyone of the race of Saxons hereafter concealed among them shall have wished to hide himself unbaptised, and shall have scorned to come to baptism and shall have wished to remain a pagan, let him be punished by death. 

Chapter 9: If anyone shall have sacrificed a man to the devil, and after the manner of the pagans shall have presented himself as a victim to the demons, let him be punished by death.

Chapter 15: Concerning the lesser chapters all have consented. To each church let the parishioners present a house and two mansi of land. And for each one hundred and twenty men, noble and free, and likewise liti, let them give to the same church a man-servant and a maid-servant.

Chapter 16: And this has been pleasing, Christ being propituous, that whencesoever any receipts shall have come into the treasury, either for the breach of peace or for any penalty of any kind, and in all income pertaining to the king, a tithe shall be rendered to the churches and priests.

Chapter 17: Likewise, in accordance with the mandate of God, we command that all shall give a tithe of their property and labour to the churches and priests; let the nobles as well as the free men, and likewise the liti, according to that which God shall have given to each Christian, return a part to God.

Chapter 18: That on the Lord's day no meetings and public judicial assemblages shall be held, unless perchance in a case of great necessity or when war compels it, but all shall go to church to hear the word of God, and shall be free for prayers and good works. Likewise, also on special festivals they shall devote themselves to God and to the services of the church and shall refrain from secular assemblies. 

Chapter 19: Likewise, it has been pleasing to insert in these decrees that all infants shall be baptised within a year; and we have decreed this, that if anyone shall have despised to bring his infant to baptism within the course of a year, without the advice or permission of the priest, if he is a noble he shall pay 120 solidi to the treasury, if a freeman 60, if a litus 30.

Chapter 21: If any man should have made a vow at springs or trees or groves, or shall have made any offering after the manner of the heathen and shall have taken a repast in honour of the demons, if he shall be a noble [he shall pay] 60 solidi, if a free man 30, if a litus 15. If, indeed, they have not the means of paying at once, they shall be given into the service of the church until the solidi are paid.

Chapter 22: We command that the bodies of Saxon Christians shall be carried to the church cemeteries and not to the mounds of the pagans.

Chapter 23: We have ordered that diviners and soothsayers shall be handed over to the churches and priests. 

From these chapters from the Capitulary I've shared with you we can see the following patterns in what made one a Christian, according to Carolingians:

1. Baptism is absolutely essential to making someone a Christian, and therefore everyone over the age of 1 year old must be baptised or face consequences.
2. Christians must fast during Lent, attend Church on Sundays and celebrate Christian holy days by not working or attending any kind of public meeting other than religious services. 
3. Christians do not make human sacrifices, pray in sacred groves or bodies of water, burn witches or consult fortune-tellers - these superstitions make you a relapsed pagan in need of punishment.
4. Christians must be buried in churchyards. 
5. Christians must live in a parish community and provide for their local priest, including by compulsory payment of the tithe.

All the ways in which it defines being a Christian are either through external acts i.e. getting baptised, going to Church on Sunday, fasting in Lent etc, or negative i.e. not making human sacrifices. Nowhere in the legislation does it talk about what Christian ideas and teachings the Saxons should know, other than they shouldn't be believing in certain pagan superstitions like polytheism, nature worship cannibalistic witches or fortune-telling. The bit about witches is worth re-iterating since it corrects the misconception that early medieval Christians burned witches - on the contrary, they saw witch-burning as a pagan superstition be outlawed! In these senses, being a Christian in eighth century Saxony was very different to being a Christian in twenty-first century Britain. If you asked someone nowadays what makes someone a Christian, the first things they would talk about would be believing that Jesus is God and following the teachings of the Bible. And its well known in the modern West that there are plenty of people who are baptised, have church weddings and funerals, attend the occasional Sunday service and celebrate Christmas and Easter, but do not consider themselves Christians because they don't "believe" in Christianity. 

A lot of this apparent weirdness can be attributed to the fact that this a piece of government legislation was issued in a region that was still in the process of being converted to Christianity. Certainly, no one in eighth century Gaul, Italy or Anglo-Saxon England, regions where everyone had "converted" to Christianity by 700, was concerned about human sacrifices. But there were lots of condemnations of "pagan" customs and superstitions i.e. the Anglo-Saxon monk and missionary Saint Boniface complained in the 740s that people were celebrating the New Year in the "pagan fashion" by singing, dancing and feasting outside St Peter's Basilica in Rome. We've also seen before how Agobard of Lyon condemned belief in weather magic, popular among the Burgundian peasantry, as unchristian. Boniface and Agobard were of course extreme puritans by the standards of the day and the people they were condemning would have likely seen nothing "pagan" about their own activities. But it does go to show that even in the areas that were already long since converted, Christianity was still being defined, and it was very much the Carolingian dynasty's mission to make sure everyone was following "correct" Christianity.

Its also in the period 700 - 900 that in Gaul, Italy and Anglo-Saxon England we get lots of legislation mandating infant baptism and observing Christian fasts and holy days. Carolingian Saxony was, however, unusual in making church attendance compulsory. The King of Mercia and his bishops at the Council of Clovesho in 747 simply said that all people should be allowed to attend church on Sundays. Likewise, the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories, is unusual in legally enforcing Christian burial for all. While most churches elsewhere in western Europe had graveyards by 900, there was no legal requirement that worshippers be buried in them. That was the decision of individuals and their families. Most Frankish and Anglo-Saxon bishops only required their flocks to receive communion bread and wine three times a year. Its also in this period that the practice of confessing your sins to a priest, originating in sixth century Ireland, became widespread and mandatory across Western Europe. Meanwhile, Frankish and Anglo-Saxon churchmen were prescribing religious penances for all kinds of crimes and misdemeanours, and were getting creative with all kinds of public religious rituas. Finally, it was in this period that a parish system was being established - most villages in Gaul and Italy had a local church, though Germany and Anglo-Saxon England lagged behind.

So in many ways the Capitulary for the Saxon Territories reflects the general flavour of eighth century Christianity for most ordinary lay people. It was all about what you did in public and how you belonged to and participated in a community through various festivals, rituals and obligations. But what you actually believed deep inside didn't come into it very much.

Oh, and as a final bonus, here is a link to Charlemagne's own verified descendant, Christopher Lee, singing in a death metal band about the massacre at Verden in 782.   

Most of you will know that Christopher Lee over the course of his very long theatrical career played a vampire, a Bond villain, a wizard, a Sith Lord and a dentist. But a blessed few know that he played Charlemagne too. 

References:

Paul Edward Dutton, Carolingian Civilisation: A Reader (Second Edition), Toronto University Press (2009), pp 66 - 69

Patrick Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West, Hambledon Continuum (1998)

Paul Fouracre, Frankish Gaul to 814, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 85 - 109

Julia Smith, Religion and Lay Society, in Rosamond McKitterick (ed), The New Cambridge Medieval History Volume 2: 700 - 900, Cambridge University Press (2008), pp 654 - 678

Ingrid Rembold, 'Quasi  una  gens: Saxony and the Frankish world,c. 772–888', History Compass 15 (2018), pp 1 - 14 

Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, Two Lives of Charlemagne, edited and translated by David Ganz, Penguin Classics (2008)

Encounters with the medieval past 1: the early middle ages in ten objects part 2 (800 - 1200)

Happy New Year! Its now 2023 and we're back for the next half of the early middle ages in ten objects. When we left off we had reached the eighth century and were in Indonesia. Let's see where our journey will take us next.

Object number six: the hunting knife of Charlemagne, made in Anglo-Saxon England or Scandinavia, 750 - 800 AD (Aachen Cathedral Treasury, Germany, visited 13 May 2022)

Moving away from Indonesia to the other end of the Eurasian supercontinent, to the area I actually have expertise in, lets look an object from the same century. This is the so-called "hunting knife of Charlemagne." We don't actually know if it belonged to Charlemagne, since its existence is not documented, but we do know that the knife is at least contemporary to him and somehow found its way to Aachen. Its got a simple horn handle with a silver hilt. But where the craftsmanship that produced it really comes into its own is with the blade. It is made from steel that has been pattern-welded. Pattern-welding is a metallurgical technique that the Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples living around the North Sea had mastered by the early seventh century - quite a lot of the weapons found in the Sutton Hoo hoard were made using this technique.

Pattern-welding involved the use of steel (an iron alloy typically containing 0.2 - 1% carbon) and another iron alloy (typically phosphoric iron). The bars of the two alloys then got hammered together, twisted and welded into the body of the artefact. After this, the artefact would be grinded and polished on a whetstone (there was a thriving trade in these in the eighth century) and the metal would be etched with acid, revealing the decorative patterns - typically they would appear rope-like. Stuff like this really brings home the basic truth that people in the "Dark Ages" weren't stupid.

So how did the knife get to Charlemagne? Well, it could have been purchased through trade or given as a diplomatic gift. What has become abundantly clear, ever since the publication of Richard Hodges' seminal work "Dark Age Economics" (1982), is that from the seventh century onwards there was a thriving North Sea trading zone that linked up the emerging Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in lowland Britain with northern Francia, Frisia, Denmark, Norway and southern Sweden. Anglo-Saxon ports like Hamwic (Southampton) in Wessex, Lundenwic (London) which came under Mercian control by the 730s, Gipeswic (Ipswich) in East Anglia and Eoforwic (York) in Northumbria traded with Continental trading towns or emporia like Quentovic in Francia, Dorestad in Frisia, Ribe in Denmark, Kaupang in Norway and Birka in Sweden. There were also diplomatic ties between Anglo-Saxon and Continental rulers. Indeed, in 796, Charlemagne had sent a letter to King Offa of Mercia. The Mercians had by this point conquered Kent and Sussex, while the kings of Wessex and East Anglia recognised Mercian overlordship, making Offa the most powerful ruler in Britain and a near neighbour to Charlemagne's Empire separated only by the English Channel. Before the letter was sent, a diplomatic incident had occurred in which Mercian merchants were barred from all the ports in Charlemagne's Empire because Offa had refused Charlemagne's offer of a marriage alliance in which one of his daughters would marry into the Mercian royal family. The letter was sent to remedy the situation and itself discusses the following:

1. Mercian pilgrims coming into Frankish ports, presumably on their way to Rome, are to be granted complete free movement. 
2. Mercian merchants have to pay tolls on their goods when they arrive in Frankish ports, but will also enjoy full legal protection on Frankish soil and can have any business disputes with the locals resolved in the Frankish courts. 
3. On behalf of the late Pope Hadrian I, all the Mercian bishops will receive gifts of ecclesiastical vestments, and Charlemagne himself presents Offa with a gift of a ceremonial belt, two silk cloaks and an Avar sword (the Frankish conquest of the Avar Khaganate was taking place at exactly this time).

While the letter of 796 doesn't provide us with an answer as to how the knife got from Anglo-Saxon England to Francia and into Charlemagne's possession. But it does provide us with the necessary context and some possibilities as to how it might have - it could have been acquired through trade, or it could have been given as a diplomatic gift by Offa or another Anglo-Saxon ruler to Charlemagne. Like with a lot of other objects from this period, we simply can't know anything conclusive about its provenance or early history unless it found its way into the documentary sources. And a lot of the objects mentioned in the documentary sources sadly no longer survive - like the Avar sword Charlemagne gave to Offa.

Charlemagne would have undoubtedly been pleased to receive the knife. One of the things we can most clearly establish about Charlemagne's personality is that he enjoyed hunting. Einhard, his friend and biographer, of course talks quite a bit about Charlemagne's love of hunting. Notker the Stammerer, writing three generations after Einhard, tells a number of anecdotes about Charlemagne's love of hunting, including one about how he shamed his courtiers for dressing in fancy silks and satins on a hunting trip while he himself dressed in simple wool and sheepskin. At the same time, hunting was a sensible thing for any early medieval king to do. It provided fresh game for dinner. It gave opportunities to display masculine strength and courage such as when taking down a wild boar. It also allowed the king to bond with his aristocrats over a shared experience (much like a corporate teambuilding event in today's world) whilst at the same time reinforcing rank and precedence. The hunt was a formal and ritualised affair (much like foxhunting still is in the UK today), and as Notker's anecdote suggests things like dress (or indeed weaponry) could be very important in showing social distinctions. Charlemagne's decision to reside permanently at his new palace at Aachen from the mid-790s may well have been influenced by his love of hunting - it was very close to the forests of the Ardennes, teaming with wild beasts of all kinds. Though it probably also had something to do with his love of swimming (the thermal springs there had been used for bathing since at least Roman times), and the fact that it was located in the original powerbase of the Carolingian family (roughly where France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Germany intersect with each other).

Yet it is worth noting that the sheath, which is made of leather, gold, precious stones and glass, was actually made later, sometime in the eleventh century. This shows that the knife had a history of use after Charlemagne's death in 814. And with any historical artefact, you have to ask the question: how and why does it survive to us today?

The answer to this comes with later politics. In the year 1000, the nineteen-year-old Emperor Otto III opened up Charlemagne's tomb in Aachen and found that the Carolingian monarch's body had not decayed and was in perfect condition - commonly identified as a sign of holiness and potential sainthood since at least the sixth century. Otto III trimmed Charlemagne's nails and replaced his nose with a gold one, but may have fiddled around with the emperor's tomb in other ways. Why Otto III did this has created much debate and controversy among historians, as has just about everything else he did during his remarkably short life (he died before his twenty-second birthday). He's quite possibly the most controversial ruler in medieval German history, and there's some stiff competition there. For this particular incident, its a question of whether Otto was planning to make a case for Charlemagne's sainthood as part of his political programme, or whether this was just an episode of teenaged silliness. We don't really know either way, because Otto did not last very long after that. But more than a century and a half down the line, another German emperor actually did do what Otto might have been planning. 

On 29th December 1165, Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa held a magnificent ceremony at Aachen, and Charlemagne was officially declared (canonised) as a saint. That this was done to make a very explicit political point, there's no reasonable doubt. You see, Frederick I Barbarossa had refused to support Rolando of Siena in the papal election of 1159, because he was anti-imperial. Indeed, as papal legate in 1157, Rolando had suggested to Barbarossa that the Empire was nothing but a fief of the papacy, and that the emperor therefore owed homage to the pope as his feudal lord, and for that was nearly run-through with a sword by Otto von Wittelsbach, Barbarossa's right-hand man, narrowly saved by the emperor's timely intervention.  Frederick Barbarossa thus backed his own candidate, Cardinal Octavian, known for his pro-German and imperial sympathies, and thus in 1159 two popes (Alexander III and Victor IV) were elected, who then promptly excommunicated each other. The Empire thus entered a state of cold war with the papacy, and when Victor IV (Cardinal Octavian) died in 1164, Barbarossa proceeded to elect another pope of his own - Paschal III. Barbarossa thus desperately needed to show that the authority of the German emperors came directly from God, not from being crowned by the popes. Already in 1158, his chief propagandist, Rainald Von Dassel, archbishop of Cologne, had claimed that the emperors ruled in direct succession from Augustus Caesar. Before then the Romans had enjoyed a special place in God's plan for humanity since the foundation of the city of Rome itself by Romulus. The Empire, the imperial office and its sacred authority were thus older than Christianity itself. But Barbarossa needed more than that. He needed to show that Charlemagne, the first emperor to be crowned by the pope, didn't actually need the pope to make him holy and give him sacred authority. And what better way to do that than make Charlemagne a saint!

Now every saint needs their relics. So Frederick Barbarossa and his advisers got them together. Like with a lot of saints' relics, many of the ones they chose were completely fake - the so-called "hunting horn of Charlemagne" was actually made in tenth century Egypt and so it couldn't possibly have ever been in Charlemagne's possession. But the hunting knife of Charlemagne was indeed from his lifetime, and so far as we can tell today it did actually belong to him. Still, many people at the time remained totally unconvinced. And in 1177, Frederick Barbarossa gave up with his struggle against Pope Alexander III and came to terms with him at the Peace of Venice. Two years later, at the Third Lateran Council, Pope Alexander III declared Charlemagne's sainthood invalid, along with all other decisions made by Barbarossa's anti-popes Victor IV and Paschal III. Alexander's successor, Innocent III (r.1198 - 1216), softened his position somewhat and allowed Charlemagne to be a figure of purely local veneration in Aachen and four other German towns. 

The ultimate failure of the German emperors to canonise Charlemagne is a huge contrast to what happened elsewhere. Other European monarchies were much more successful in getting a royal saint and thus proving that their authority was sacred. Norway acquired its royal saint, Olaf Haraldsson (r.1015 - 1028), within a generation of its conversion to Christianity when Bishop Grimketel of Nidaros canonised the recently deceased king as a saint. Though this was of course before the papal revolution, the papacy did not retrospectively quibble with it. Hungary got its royal saint, King Istvan I (r.1000 - 1038), when Stephen's grandson King Laszlo I got his wish on 15th August 1083 from none other than Pope Gregory VII. Around the same time as Frederick Barbarossa was locked in his cold war with the papacy, King Henry II of England, who had backed Pope Alexander III in the election, got his wish (and that of the monks of Westminster Abbey) granted on 7th February 1161 when Alexander issued a papal bull declaring Edward the Confessor to be a saint. And past the end of our period, the French monarchy got St Louis IX (r.1226 - 1270) canonised in 1297 as part of a compromise over church-state relations between King Philip IV the Fair and Pope Boniface VIII. So really, how well you got on with the legitimate pope was what decided everything. Its a huge myth that the papal revolution of the eleventh century secularised kingship, and that royal authority only became sacred and God-given again with the Reformation and the rise of absolutism in the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, of course, the knife of Charlemagne was preserved in the cathedral treasury at Aachen, where it still is to this very day. 

Object number seven: a monumental lapidary inscription of Abbot Audibert, 838 AD (Castelvecchio Museum, Verona, Italy, visited 10 June 2022) 

This monumental inscription on a large medallion of white marble was made in the year 838 by Abbot Audibert. That Audibert chose a circular shaped block of stone rather than the traditional rectangular one is itself noteworthy, though as is so often the case we can't know his reasoning. Following in the tradition of ancient Roman monumental inscription, such as the one we saw on the tomb in part 1, it is written in square capitals. Some basic religious imagery also features in that the image of the cross has been carved onto the stone medallion and part of the inscription is written inside it. The inscription itself is fairly simple and reads (again, all faults with the translation are my own):

Abbot Audibert renovated this oratory of Saint Donatus in the twenty-fifth year of the lord emperor Louis [838].

Apart from this, we know nothing about Abbot Audibert. Unlike Alcuin, Theodulf of Orleans, Adalhard of Corbie, Benedict of Aniane, Rabanus Maurus, Lupus of Ferrieres, Hincmar of Rheims and a whole host of other Carolingian churchmen I haven't cared to name, this Veronese abbot didn't write any books and stayed well-clear of court politics. Nor is there any mention of him in any published ninth century charters (from a quick google search). By his work shall ye know him!

What we can tell is that Audibert obviously wanted to be remembered for posterity as a builder and restorer of churches, otherwise he wouldn't have put up this inscription. In this sense, he followed expectations of what made a good bishop or abbot that went back to at least the fifth century Roman Empire. We can also tell that his education was not up to the standards expected of a senior cleric in the Carolingian period. For example, he uses the ablative oratorio where the accusative oratorium would be more appropriate and domino where the genitive domini should go. Alcuin or Lupus of Ferrieres would be senseless with rage if they saw these grammatical mistakes. This taps into the question that historians have debated a lot since the 1970s - how far down did Carolingian educational reform really go? 

As a final thing to note, Audibert dated his inscription according to the year of the reign of Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 - 840) he wrote it in. Emperor Louis the Pious had been crowned as co-emperor and Charlemagne's successor in 813, so twenty-fifth year of his reign mentioned on the inscription would have been 838. All official documents of the Carolingian monarchs were dated according to regnal year, as indeed are those of British monarchs today - Elizabeth II passed away in her 71st regnal year and we are currently in year 1 of the reign of Charles III. That a relatively minor, local figure not connected to the Carolingian court and not living in a Carolingian powerbase would date his inscription like this is indicative of the strong royal authority and legitimacy the Carolingians had across their empire by the 830s. By contrast, the use of AD dating, which began to enter mainstream use in Western Europe in the eighth and ninth centuries, or other alternative methods of reckoning the years on an official document or inscription would indicate an ebbing-away of royal power or that an attempt to replace the reigning dynasty was on the cards. Indeed, some regions, like Catalonia in the years after 987, continued to date their charters according to the regnal years of the Carolingian monarchs even after Carolingians ceased to reign anywhere. 

Object number eight: an ivory casket panel of the rape of Europa, made in Constantinople, 980 - 1010 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Moving eastwards and towards the end of the first millennium, the next object I've chosen is an ivory panel which belonged to a casket made in Constantinople sometime in the closing decades of the tenth century, or possibly at the beginning of the eleventh. It depicts the Greek and Roman myth of the Rape of Europa. In the centre of the panel is Europa riding on the back of Zeus/ Jupiter, who is disguised as a white bull. Europa is clinging on to the bull's neck as he swims through the sea whilst waving her scarf. A cupid flies down to crown her with a laurel wreath, while another cupid wades into the sea with a flaming torch before the bull. On the left, Europa's female companions watch in amazement with their arms outstretched. On the right, Ares/ Mars and Aphrodite/ Venus begin to embrace each other on the further shore where Europa and the bull are headed, perhaps a foreshadowing of what is to come - Zeus, being Zeus, would go on to have sex with Europa, and King Minos was born.

This isn't the only ivory casket panel from the tenth and eleventh century Roman Empire (what most historians would now call the Byzantine Empire) to show scenes from Classical mythology. Just opposite this object in the exact same room in the V&A, you can find the much more intact Veroli Casket, also made in Constantinople and in roughly the same timeframe. The panels on the Veroli Casket show various images of the god Dionysus/ Bacchus, as well as scenes from the stories of Bellerophon and Iphigenia. We're clearly dealing with a cultural environment in which knowledge of the Greek and Roman myths was highly prized. Wealthy people would thus have stories from them displayed on their more luxurious household objects, to demonstrate how learned and cultured they were. The fact that the casket panel is made from carved elephant ivory, imported to Constantinople from Africa at great expense, shows that it was also meant to demonstrate the owner's wealth. Whoever it belonged to must have been a very wealthy member of the Roman elite, possibly a high-ranking bureaucrat or military officer at the imperial court in Constantinople or a senator - the Roman senate still existed in the East until the thirteenth century. 

Of all the objects in this series, this is the second-most secular. This is because, while it depicts gods, these were gods that no one believed in by the time this object was made. The Roman East had been thoroughly Christianised in the fourth to sixth centuries. Some isolated pockets of paganism survived until quite late. The Maniotes, who lived in the middle finger of the Peloponnese and claimed descent from the ancient Spartans themselves, weren't converted until the reign of Emperor Basil I (r.867 - 886) according to the manual on statecraft and foreign policy written by his grandson Emperor Constantine VII (r.913 - 959). Needless to say, the Mani peninsula was an exceptional case, being a remote, mountainous, wild and effectively ungovernable region. Later on, French crusaders, Venetians and Ottoman Turks alike had only the most shaky control over the Mani, and the bandit clans and pirates that still dominated the region in the nineteenth century gave the modern Greek state a massive headache. It suffices to say that by the 980s, worship of Zeus and the other Olympian gods was no longer in anyone's living memory. Asides from a small Jewish minority, who were generally free of persecution, everyone in the Roman Empire was a Christian. 

Indeed, Christianity, specifically Greek Orthodox Christianity, is such a big part of how we view the medieval Roman Empire, or as we now prefer to call it, Byzantium. When "Byzantine Art" comes to mind, we tend to think of mosaics and icons with ethereal gold backgrounds, of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) in shapeless robes of lapis lazuli, of stern-looking and majestic-looking Christ Pantokrator (literally as ruler of the universe) and saints and emperors wearing timeless garments. Yet, like with a lot of what we think we know about Byzantium, this view of Byzantine art is ultimately misleading. Plenty of secular art of a very different style existed in the Roman Empire of the tenth to twelfth centuries.

Around the time this casket was made, the Roman Empire was going through what historians call "The Macedonian Renaissance." Under the so-called Macedonian dynasty of emperors (867 - 1056), contemporaries to Alfred the Great and the West Saxon kings of England, the Roman Empire enjoyed a new period of military success and cultural revival. A series of reconquests against the Arabs and Bulgarians led to Cilicia, Armenia, Northern Syria, Cyprus, Crete and the Balkans being reconquered. By 1025, at the death of Emperor Basil II, one of the greatest soldier emperors, the Roman imperial frontier was once again at the Danube and Euphrates for the first time since the seventh century. Just like in the time of Augustus, Trajan and Constantine, the Roman army was still the strongest, most disciplined and professional fighting force in all of Europe, and its generals had such a strong grasp of military tactics and strategy, they even wrote treatises on them.  A new building-boom for churches, both in the capital and in the provinces, was in motion and would continue into the twelfth century. And the study of Classical Roman literature and history was thriving. Great encyclopaedias of ancient Greek and Roman authors like the Excerpta Constantiniana and the Suda were compiled in the mid-tenth century under the orders of Emperor Constantine VII. Meanwhile, good working knowledge of Homer, Plato and Dio Cassius were essential parts of education for anyone who wanted to be a member of the governing class, as a civil servant, bishop or general. It was this kind of cultural milieu that produced art like this. Indeed, judging from the artistic style of the ivory panel, which pays a great deal of anatomical detail to the human figure and shows Europa, her companions, Ares and Aphrodite wearing recognisably Classical garb, its clear that the craftsmen who made it had some familiarity with Hellenistic and early Imperial Roman art. Indeed, Constantinople in this period was something of a veritable art museum that contained the best of ancient sculpture, almost all of which has since vanished without a trace. Thus this artwork represents a revival of Classical culture, and how the now thoroughly Christian Roman Empire still looked back fondly on its pagan past.

Object number nine: A coppery alloy statue of the Hindu god Ganesha, made in Thanjavur in southern India, 1000 - 1200 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, visited 10 December 2022)

Now for the penultimate object, we will be going yet further east and to a region, or should I really say, a subcontinent, whose history I know very little about. Of course, this ignorance of Indian history is far more widespread. Indeed, the recent move towards a "Global Middle Ages" hasn't done a particularly good job of integrating India into it, as opposed to China or West Africa. Often those who try to include the Subcontinent in global comparative histories make a frankly token effort and read just one book. Yet, from my perspective as a western early medievalist, India definitely belongs to a "Global Middle Ages." India was very much in the minds of early medieval westerners in ways that China and West Africa were not. The ancient Greeks and Romans had almost nothing to say about those latter two regions, and Western Europeans had no direct contact with them until the thirteenth century. The Islamic world, on the other hand, did have direct contacts with both China and West Africa through trade by the ninth century. Thus some would interpret this as simply indicative of Western Europe being a peripheral, backwater region in the early medieval period. That argument can be had, though as you can guess I'm not particularly sympathetic to it.

But India definitely was on the minds of early medieval Western Europeans. It was often mentioned by the Classical authors who were read in the fifth to twelfth century West. Early medieval Christians believed that in 53 AD St Thomas the Apostle had sailed over to Kerala in southern India and established a Christian church there. Our old friend Gregory Tours, writing in 590, describes how a certain passing acquaintance of his called Theodorus had visited the shrine of St Thomas in India and told him about it. Indian pepper was consumed at the Merovingian royal court in the seventh century and was known to the Venerable Bede in the early eighth. And in 883, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred the Great sent two envoys to India to provide gifts for the shrine of St Bartholomew - Caitlin Green has made a strong case for this being an event that actually happened. India also appears on an eleventh century Anglo-Saxon world map, whereas China doesn't. 

This object came from the Chola kingdom, located in the tip of the Indian peninsula. The Cholas wrote and spoke the Tamil language, one of the official languages of southern India and Sri Lanka. Tamil is a Dravidian language, which means its a language that was historically spoken by the indigenous pre-Indo-European inhabitants of the Indian Subcontinent, and still is spoken by their descendants today. By contrast, in northern India, the lingua franca was Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, related distantly to Latin and Greek, which occupied a similar position to Latin in the early medieval West, as a language of religion, administration, classical literature and elite culture. From my very limited outsider knowledge, the Cholas are fascinating but not easy to study. They have very different sources that we do for early medieval Western Europe, Byzantium, the Islamic World or China. We have no narrative histories for them, though we do have Tamil poems, king-lists and royal sagas. We also have lots of surviving copper-plate inscriptions in Tamil, which mostly record land transactions and other economic arrangements. We also have an abundance of temples and artworks surviving from the Chola period, though they're very difficult to precisely date. 

The history of the Cholas goes back a very long way indeed. Indeed, they're first mentioned in northern Indian sources in the third century BC, as southern neighbours of Ashoka (304 - 232 BC), the ruler of the Mauryan Empire (321 - 185 BC). The Mauryan Empire was the first proper empire in Indian history, which controlled almost the entire subcontinent except the southern tip (where the Cholas were) but only for two generations before it broke up. Graeco-Roman sources also briefly mention the Cholas, such as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and the Geography of Ptolemy. However, the Cholas only really start to generate writings of their own from the seventh century AD. Alfred the Great's envoys, Sigehelm and Aethelstan, probably visited the Chola court if they ever made it to the Shrine of St Thomas in India in the first place - if they did, its a shame no records of it survive as I really want to know what it would have felt like to be Anglo-Saxon visiting India in the ninth century. In the late ninth and tenth centuries, the so-called Imperial Cholas formed a powerful Empire in southern India that by 1000 covered all of the modern Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Naddu and most of Karnatka and Andhra Pradesh, as well as the northern half of Sri Lanka. Their most powerful ruler was Rajaraja I (r.985 - 1014 AD), a contemporary of Aethelred the Unready, Basil II, Hugh Capet, Otto III and so many of the other people I'm interested in. He was an very skilled military commander who expanded the Chola Empire to its furthest extent and centralised government, turning the local tribute-paying vassals, autonomous chieftains and client kings into appointed officials dependent on the state. In the early decades of the eleventh century, Rajaraja created anthologies of all the great early Tamil poets, much like Constantine VII had done in the Roman Empire a few generations earlier. And In 1000 he organised a massive land survey of his entire empire, and reorganised all the administrative districts - its too tempting to make comparisons between Rajaraja and William the Conqueror (both of whom did live in the same century) here. Finally, Rajaraja also established trade links with Song China and Chola embassies were received at the Chinese imperial court in Kaifeng on multiple occasions in the eleventh century. After the mid-twelfth century, the Cholas went into decline but their dynasty didn't end until 1279. One has to be impressed with how long they lasted - more than a millennium and a half. Only the Imperial House of Japan (the Yamato), in continuous existence since 660 BC, can compare with them for sheer longevity. 

The Cholas were a staunchly Hindu dynasty and this is reflected in this artefact. It depicts the Hindu god Ganesh, and it was produced in Thanjavur, one of the most important Chola cities where Rajaraja I founded the great 66 metres tall Brihadisvara temple in 1010 AD. The statue shows Ganesh standing. In his four hands, he holds a noose, an elephant goad, a wood apple and a broken tusk. He wears a coronet, a necklace, armlets, anklets and a loincloth and has a regal bearing about him. His plump belly reflects his fondness for sweetmeats. According to some Hindu texts, Ganesh was beheaded by his father, Lord Shiva, when he accidentally mistook him for a rival. He promised to his wife, Parvati, to replace Ganesh's head with that of the first animal that would come along, and that happened to be an elephant. This statue of Ganesh would be used for religious processions, in which he would be carried on the parade up to the temple on a palanquin behind the statues of his mother, Parvati, and father, Lord Shiva. The statue would also receive prayers and offerings from people about to embark of business ventures. You see, Ganesh had originally been a God of agriculture, but by the eleventh century he was starting to be seen as a patron of merchants and commerce. Indeed, Chola India was experiencing an economic and commercial takeoff in the period this statue was created, much like the one going on simultaneously in Western Europe. Just like in eleventh and twelfth century Western Christendom in Chola southern India the explosion of religious devotion, artistic production and economic growth all went hand in hand. 

Object ten: Champleve enamel reliquary box of the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket from Limoges, France, 1180 - 1190 AD (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, visited 27 October 2022)

Our final object continues the previous object's theme of religious devotion, but brings me back to much more familiar historical territory and much closer to home. It is a reliquary casket, made to house the relics of the saint for veneration. which shows the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by four knights (though only three are depicted here) on 29th December 1170. The drama of the whole scene is very well-captured by the artist who designed it here. A knight decapitates the Archbishop of Canterbury while he nonchalantly picks up a chalice from the altar, appropriately laid out for religious services, as part of his duty of performing the mass. This makes him appear both if he has no care at all about what is going on around him and is just going to carry on with his duties to God (performing the mass was and is literally called "divine service"), and like he has heroically accepted martyrdom. There's no indication that he's trying to fight back, run away or bargain with the knights. He thus appears the perfect martyr for Christ. The knights, who are not wearing their armour like they are often depicted, appear suitably thuggish and menacing. The first knight decapitates Becket, while the other two advance with drawn axes and swords. Meanwhile two monks of Canterbury cathedral priory stand with their faces aghast and their arms held up in terror. On the rectangular roof panel above, we see on the left the dead archbishop of Canterbury in his funeral shroud while a bishop and a number of other clerics perform the customary funeral rites. On the right we see Thomas Becket's soul ascending straight up to Heaven, flanked by two angels carrying his shroud.

This reliquary box was one of 52 showing the same scenes (the martyrdom of St Thomas Becket, his funeral and ascent up to heaven) made in Limoges in the Duchy of Aquitaine in France, using the champleve enamelling technique. Limoges was one of the three leading production centres of champleve enamel objects in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, along with Cologne in the German Rhineland and Liege in what is now Belgium. Its been estimated that 7,500 champleve enamel objects manufactured in Limoges survive from the period 1160 - 1370; Limoges enamels went into swift decline following the Black Prince's sack of Limoges during the Hundred Years' War, though some were still being produced as late as 1630. The technique required to make champleve enamel caskets like this involves the following steps (you can also watch the video of it being done here):

1. A regular wooden casket is made.
2. Plaques are cut out from a larger sheet of copper and designs are drawn onto them using a mathematical compass or pointed tool.
3. Holes are drilled using a bow drill in the borders of the plaques to allow them to be nailed onto the wooden core.
4. Troughs are cut into the metal to hold the enamel.
5. The enamel is made by grinding glass with mortar and pestle, and mixed with water. 
6. The wet enamel is then laid on the plaques using a quill.
7. Once all the colours have been laid on to the copper plaque, the kiln is then fired up to 1000 degrees Celsius and the plaques are placed inside it - a medieval enameller would have needed to rely on his own judgement as to when the kiln was hot enough.
8. The plaques get fired in the kiln for a few minutes, then left to cool before the process gets repeated two or three times.
9. The plaques are then cleaned with a special stone, additional engravings for decoration are added and the exposed bits of copper get gilded.
10. The enamel plaques get hammered onto the wooden casket with nails.

Those medieval craftsmen were truly capable of some incredible things weren't they!

Its artworks like this reliquary box (and the fact that there are 52 others almost exactly like it) which really illustrate the historical significance of Thomas Becket's murder. In 1178, less than a decade after it happened, William II (r.1166 - 1189), the Norman king of Sicily, had a mosaic of Thomas Becket created in the cathedral-monastery complex he was building at Monreale in the hills just outside Palermo. I had the pleasure of visiting Monreale last July - its a wonderful place. In 1191, 21 years after Becket's murder took place, it was carved onto a baptismal font in a church in Skane in southern Sweden (then a part of the kingdom of Denmark). Across the next three hundred years, Thomas Becket's story would be told in countless artworks not just from England and France but also from Spain, Germany, Italy and Norway, and in 1232 in Poland a new Cistercian abbey church was dedicated to him. King Henry II of England, whose anger at the archbishop was generally acknowledged by contemporaries to be the root cause of Becket's murder, decided to make amends for it by building masses of new churches. These required vast amount of lead for pipes, roofs and stained glass windows, which were mined and smelted in the Peak District and Cumbria. The atmospheric lead pollution created by all this lead-smelting shows up in the cores of glaciers in the Swiss Alps. Close analysis of these by modern researchers has shown that this building boom in response to Thomas Becket's murder caused levels of lead pollution not seen since the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, and which would not be equalled again until the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Thomas Becket's murder was thus a significant event in environmental history.

Significant is generally a word one would choose to apply to Thomas Becket. Becket's martyrdom provided the main inspiration for one of the few clauses of Magna Carta that is still on the UK statute books today "the English Church is to be free in perpetuity and to have its rights in full and its liberties intact." Thomas Becket's shrine at Canterbury eclipsed that of St Cuthbert at Durham as the most popular pilgrimage site in England, and had it not been for that then one of the greatest works of English literature (Chaucer's Canterbury Tales) would likely never have been written. As pointed out earlier, he was venerated in churches across Western Europe. Thomas Becket became such a powerful symbol of resistance to royal authority that Henry VIII had the saint's shrine destroyed and his bones pulverised to dust in 1538. And as a trainee secondary school history teacher, I can confirm that he's one of the most popular topics to teach in secondary schools at Key Stage 3 level (11 - 14 years old). Even schools with the most minimal commitment to teaching medieval history at Key Stage 3, as per the broad-brush, inspecific requirements of the National Curriculum, and which teach none at GCSE (14 - 16 years old) and A Level (16 - 18 years old), will teach Thomas Becket's murder. The other topics typically included within the bare minimum of medieval history taught at Key Stage 3 are the Norman Conquest, the Magna Carta, the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt and some more general stuff on medieval life, religion and justice. Its interesting to consider why Becket is such a popular topic to be taught to schoolchildren, typically in year 7 (11 - 12 years old). I have yet to teach it myself, though I suspect that among the reasons are that its an inherently gripping and dramatic story with some big personalities involved (Henry II and Becket) and lots of gore. Its a good topic for introducing Key Stage 3 pupils to the second order concepts of historical significance (ditto) and evidence and enquiry (we have plenty of contemporary sources and even an eyewitness account from Edward Grim, one of the monks who saw the murder). Finally, its the perfect case study for exploring the key theme of the relationship between the crown and the church in the Middle Ages. 

Which brings us on to the final thing for us to think about. Why did I choose to end the series of ten objects with this one? And does Thomas Becket belong in the early middle ages at all? I've tried to evade the question of periodisation until this point. But I don't think I can any longer. What I can say is that most historians would not consider Thomas Becket as early medieval. The general agreement among academic historians is that the Middle Ages, conventionally spanning about a thousand years of European history, make no sense as a single period and have to be broken up into smaller sub-periods. But what are those sub-periods and where do we draw the cut-off points. French and Italian medievalists generally divide the Middle Ages in two - into an "upper" and lower" medieval period, with the cut-off point typically being somewhere in the eleventh century. Meanwhile, British and German medievalists typically divide it into three - into an early medieval period, a high or central medieval period and a late medieval period. As to where exactly the early middle ages becomes the high or central middle ages, there is no agreement. Some would go as early as 900, with the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire giving birth to the early forerunners of the European states we now know and love (France, Germany and Italy), as well as generally pointing the way to a post-imperial future for the European Continent (tell that to Frederick Barbarossa, Charles V, Napoleon and Hitler). Others would go as late as c.1100, with similarly earth-shattering events like the Investiture Controversy and the First Crusade. Parochially, most English historians can't resist the power of 1066 as a marker for the great divide. But generally, from a European perspective, most Anglophone historians would go for sometime in the half centuries on either side of the year 1000 as the dividing line between early and high middle ages. Its between 950 and 1050 that the last of the barbarian invasions (Vikings and Magyars) cease and the final remnants of ancient Roman society disappear from Europe (i.e., agricultural chattel slavery). Its also when general signs that Europe is really entering the "real" Middle Ages start appearing - monastic orders, castles, knights, serfdom, primogeniture, giant Romanesque cathedrals and popular heresy. Very few historians, however, would take the early middle ages into the twelfth century. Partly because, if your early middle ages go beyond 1100, then you haven't got much of a high middle ages left before you have to move on to the late middle ages sometime around 1300 - unless, of course, you believe the middle ages really end in the eighteenth century (as some do). Also, can you really call the century that sees the invention of tournaments, Gothic architecture, the scholastic method, universities, Arthurian romances and windmills, as well as the earliest beginnings of merchant capitalism, the middle class and modern bureaucratic government, "early medieval" by any sane definition? 

Personally, I would go for 1000 as the end of the early middle ages - it really is as good an end-point as any. But I include the eleventh and twelfth centuries within my remit, just like how I include the fifth and sixth centuries there too despite some people's protests that that's still late antiquity. Change doesn't happen overnight and everything comes from somehow. And the period 400 - 1200, the timeframe covered by this series and more broadly by this blog, is quite simply what fits in all the bits of history that I love the most.

But for more than just completely subjective reasons, I think Thomas Becket deserves a place here in the story of the early middle ages in ten objects. In part, its to show that we have well and truly left the early middle ages. Lurking in the background of Thomas Becket's story is the papal revolution. The original dispute that led to Henry II and Thomas Becket falling out in 1164, over whether or not the clergy should be put under the jurisdiction of secular courts, was a direct result of the papal revolutionaries' sustained attempts since the mid-eleventh century to decrease the control of kings over the clergy. And the fact that Becket was canonised by the Pope in 1173, only three years after his death, is indicative of how the papacy was taking control of the process of making saints, one which would be complete by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. Becket's story thus illustrates how the papal revolution of the eleventh century had irreversibly changed medieval power relations and the church. The fact that Becket became venerated in places as far apart from each other as Scandinavia, Spain and Sicily also demonstrates how much Latin Christendom had both expanded and become more unified in the post-1000 period.

But some of Becket's story would have still been familiar to people from the early middle ages. In particular, what came towards the very end of it. On 12th July 1174, Henry II walked barefoot through the streets of Canterbury, entered the cathedral, ordered the very monks who had witnessed Becket's murder to whip him and received 300 lashings from them. The next morning he heard that the Scottish king, William the Lion, had been captured and northern England was finally safe from invasion. Shortly after that, his rebellious barons sued for peace and his sons, Henry and Richard, and wife Eleanor also surrendered, thus ending the three year political crisis and civil war that had engulfed England after Becket's death. Now this kind of phenomenon, of a king performing penance for the health and salvation of the state, would be completely recognisable to the Carolingians. There are echoes of Emperor Louis the Pious' penance at Attigny in 822 for the blinding of his nephew Bernard of Italy here. Political penance was generally a very early medieval thing as went with the grain of a very early medieval conception of kingship, originating in the seventh century, that the king was personally accountable to God for the moral and spiritual welfare of his people. Before the Carolingians, Visigothic kings had pioneered political penance, and after them the Ottonians and Anglo-Saxons made use of it too - Otto III and Aethelred the Unready would have congratulated Henry II on what he did in 1174. But as it turned out, Henry II's pilgrimage to Canterbury was the last great act of political penance done by a medieval king. In that sense, if in that sense only, the Becket controversy did indeed mark the end of an era. 

And so ends our story of the early middle ages through ten objects. I apologise for it not providing a coherent narrative. But what I have tried to do is at least provide some common themes and show the sheer richness of Eurasian history and material culture in this period. I hope that at least in that endeavour, I have succeeded. And as this is the first post of 2023, I would like to wish a Happy New Year to you all. 

Encounters with the medieval past 1: The early middle ages in ten objects Part 1 (400 - 800)

 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.