On this day in history 3: RIP Charles the Fat and the end of an era?

 

On 13^th January 888, the Carolingian emperor Charles the Fat breathed his last and died of a stroke. He had been the first Carolingian to have ruled over the whole of his great-grandfather Charlemagne’s empire since 840. But in November 887 a coup d’etat from his nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, ousted the emperor from his powerbase in East Francia (Germany), after which his credibility and as a ruler and his physical health both rapidly deteriorated. To make matters worse, Charles had no son to succeed him. And after Charles, no one was able to put back the empire together again. The story of his life can appear thus: a long period in which nothing very much went on, then a momentous rise and then a crushing downfall in which all the good luck he previously had deserted from him. But what exactly happened? How did Charles rise and downfall both come about so quickly and unexpectedly? And why did the Carolingian Empire fall apart, this time irreversibly?

The seal of Emperor Charles the Fat, from Bayerisches Nationalmuseum Munich. Photo downloaded from Wikimedia Commons. Charles appears like a Roman Emperor with his laurel wreath, and has the trademark Carolingian look - short hair and a moustache. The seal is inscribed with the words Karolus Magnus ("Charles the Great"), and thus is consciously trying to portray Charles the Fat as a worthy successor to his great-grandfather. Whether he at all was, I leave that for you to decide.

The rise

Charles the Fat was born in 839 at Neudingen in the Black Forest. His father was Louis the German (806 – 876), the middle son of Emperor Louis the Pious (r.814 – 840). When Charles was only in his nappies (or should I really say, his swaddling clothes), civil war broke out between his father and uncles over the division of the empire. This went on for a few years but then at the Treaty of Verdun in August 843 they agreed on how to divide the empire between them. Louis got the territories east of the Rhine and north of the Alps – East Francia or, as we now call it, Germany.

King Louis the German reigned there until his death 33 years later with a great deal of success. East Francia was the least developed of the Frankish kingdoms and presented the greatest difficulties of travel and communications. The old Roman road network ended at the Rhine and Danube, and more than half of the kingdom was covered in dense forests. Yet Louis managed to rule the kingdom effectively with what was at once a firm grip and a light touch, and never faced any serious rebellions from his aristocracy. He was also probably the only ninth century (post-814) Carolingian monarch not to have failed in any of his patriarchal duties. Neither he nor his wives got caught up any sex scandals, he produced three healthy sons who survived to adulthood and he managed to keep those sons from running riot – any rebelliousness from them was headed-off successfully. In 865, Louis the German decided to establish his three sons as sub-kings over the three main divisions of his realm. His eldest son, Louis the Younger, was going to get Saxony (then the area of northern Germany between rivers Rhine, Elbe and Weser). His middle son, Carloman, was going to get Bavaria (bigger than the modern German state of Bavaria because it included what is now Austria as well). Meanwhile, the youngest, Charles the Fat, got Alemannia (modern day Baden-Wurttemberg and German-speaking Switzerland).

When Louis the German died in 876, his kingdom was divided between his three sons in this exact manner. Their uncle, Emperor Charles the Bald, tried to conquer East Francia for himself, but as we saw a week or soago, Louis the Younger thwarted his scheming uncle’s ambitions at the battle of Andernach. And after Charles the Bald’s death, Carloman crossed the Alps and became the new king of Italy. Charles the Bald’s son, Louis the Stammerer, lasted only two years in West Francia and when he died the kingdom was divided between his two sons, Louis III and Carloman. Louis the Stammerer also had a son from his second marriage, Charles the Simple, who was born a few months after his father’s untimely death at the age of only 32 on 10 April 879.

In May 879, it would have seemed like the Carolingian empire was going to remain divided for quite some time to come. Five cousins, all of them great-grandsons or great-great-grandsons of Charlemagne, now ruled in separate kingdoms. Much more ominous was that in October 879, Boso, the son-in-law of Charles the Bald and his former viceroy in Italy, was elected king in Provence by the local nobility. This was the first time a non-Carolingian (read: anyone who was not a male-line descendant of Charlemagne) had reigned anywhere between the Pyrenees, the North Sea and the Adriatic in more than a century. And this was also the first time a region had actually tried to secede, rather than just being apportioned to another member of the Carolingian family. Reunifying the Carolingian Empire would have thus seemed like an impossibility then.

Map of the Carolingian kingdoms as they would have looked c.880. From Wikimedia Commons. Apologies for the map being in Spanish. Territories in pink are Charles the Fat's, territories in green are Louis the Younger's, territories in purple are Louis III of West Francia's, territories in red are Carloman's and territories in orange are Boso's.

Yet if Carolingian political history in the ninth century teaches us anything, its that nothing is set in stone politically and that accidents and the pressure of events can be game-changing. Indeed, already in June 879, Charles’ brother Carloman abdicated as king of Italy and Bavaria due to ill-health, and so his kingdom was divided between his two brothers – Charles the Fat got Italy, and Louis the Younger got Bavaria. On 12^th February 881, Charles the Fat was crowned Emperor in Rome, which didn’t make any practical difference to his power but at least gave him symbolic prestige and technically made him the most senior Carolingian monarch. And on 20 January 882, Louis the Younger died. Charles the Fat was thus now the only Carolingian ruling anywhere east of the Rhine.

 Charles was by far the elder statesman compared to his West Frankish cousins. By working together, the West and East Frankish branches of the Carolingian family managed to crush the usurper, Boso of Provence – they didn’t defeat him completely, but by August 882 his kingdom had been reduced to nothing more than his principal stronghold of Vienne. From then on until his death in 887, Boso was essentially nothing more than a local count, all except one that called himself a king. The Vikings also raided up the Rhine in 882 – Alfred the Great had vanquished the Great Heathen Army in England at the battle of Ashdown in 878, so the Danish Vikings had moved their operations to the Continent. While the major cities of Aachen, Cologne and Trier were sacked by the Vikings, Charles was able to use shrewd diplomacy (and a good bit of bribery) to get the Viking leaders to accept Christianity and become his vassals. By 884, he was also able to secure peace on his eastern frontier with Sviatopluk, the ruler of the Great Moravian Empire. It was also in 884 that his West Frankish cousin, King Carloman, died, having outlived his elder brother by only two years and without any male heirs. Charles’ only competition from within the Carolingian family was a five-year-old boy, Charles the Simple. The West Frankish aristocracy knew who was the most sensible choice of candidate. On 12^th December 884, Charles the Fat was able to just waltz in and receive the West Frankish crown. Now the whole of Charlemagne’s Empire was finally reunited once again under one Carolingian ruler.

But did this situation last? Apparently not. Some might say that it was inevitable. Charles was in charge of the largest state Western Europe had known since the days of the Western Roman Empire, and indeed would ever see again except briefly under Napoleon and Hitler, in an age when information could only travel at the speed of a horse. And unlike the western Roman emperors of old, Charles lacked a large, salaried bureaucracy, a tax system or a standing army. And there were undoubtedly huge differences in language, culture and ethnicity between his subjects. Take the inhabitants of Saxony. Their great-grandparents had been pagans, they still had no roads, cities or written law and they spoke an early form of Low German. They therefore had precious little in common with the inhabitants of Italy or Aquitaine. Moreover, given how the Carolingian Empire had consisted of almost half a dozen kingdoms only five years ago, surely people would have wanted a local king who could be more responsive to their needs than an inevitably distant emperor?

But yet, as always, the Carolingians can surprise us. For the first three years that Charles the Fat ruled over an undivided empire, it looked like it was all going to work because Charles the Fat was very good at delegating power to trusted subordinates, as any successful Carolingian ruler had to. For example, in West Francia, the kingdom he was least present in, he entrusted the governance of the northern regions of the realm firstly to Hugh the Abbot and then to Count Odo of Paris as margraves (military governors) of Neustria, of the southwest (Aquitaine) to Margrave Bernard Hairy Paws and the southeast (Burgundy) to Margrave Richard the Justiciar. While they all came from established aristocratic families, these were men who owed their power and position, above all else, to Charles the Fat and the Carolingian state and could easily have been unmade if they rebelled or were seriously disloyal. And as Simon MacLean has shown, contrary to what some previous generations of historians have claimed, Odo, Bernard and Richard show no signs of attempting to secede or trying to rule as kings in all but name in their own regions – they always obeyed Charles’ instructions and relayed their decisions back to him.

The Fall

Rather, what did for Charles and the unity of the Carolingian Empire was what did for the hopes and dreams of most Carolingian monarchs in the second half of the ninth century – simple biology. Charles the Fat found himself in quite a similar situation to that which Henry VIII would find himself in 1527. Charles could not, for whatever reason, produce any children with his wife, Empress Richgard. He did, however, have an illegitimate son, Bernard (870 – 891), who he’d had with a concubine before his marriage. The obvious solution was divorce. series of Frankish legal precedents had meant that by the mid-ninth century, it was only possible if marital infidelity could be proven. Illegitimate children were also barred from Carolingian royal succession under normal circumstances. Charles the Fat could have changed the rules to make it possible for Bernard to inherit and he may have been planning to, as a few throwaway lines in Notker the Stammerer’s Deeds of Charlemagne (written in 886) suggest. However, he went for the nuclear option, and in 887 tried to divorce Richgard by accusing her of having an adulterous relationship with his chancellor, Bishop Liutward of Vercelli. But Richgard didn’t go the way of Anne Boleyn in 1536. Much like when his cousin King Lothar II of Lotharingia (d.869) tried doing the same back in 858 – 865 by accusing his infertile wife, Queen Theutberga, of incest with her brother, it all blew up in his face. It was at that moment that Charles’ nephew, Arnulf of Carinthia, the illegitimate son of Carloman of Bavaria, who had long been marginalised from politics, decided to pounce as his uncle proved himself incompetent. In November 887, Carloman launched a successful coup d’etat with the help of loyal east Bavarian marcher lords and the Moravians. All of Charles’ supporters among the East Frankish magnates quickly deserted him, the Alemannians being the last. At a royal assembly at Tribur, Arnulf declared Charles deposed and the East Frankish nobility elected him as their king, deciding to ignore the issue of his illegitimacy. Charles had no fight left in him as the 48-year-old’s health wasn’t in the best condition (he may have been elipeptic), and he died of a stroke less than two months later.

The aftermath

With Emperor Charles the Fat gone, what would become of the Empire? Arnulf’s illegitimate birth proved to not be a barrier to him being recognised by the East Frankish aristocracy as the legitimate ruling Carolingian monarch. But outside of East Francia, the governing elites weren’t ready to accept this East Frankish coup d’etat. There was one alternative claimant to the empire from the Carolingian family, Charles the Simple, but he was just an eight-year-old boy. Indeed, there were technically two. Count Herbert I of Vermandois (848 – 907) was a great-great-grandson of Charlemagne in the male-line. His branch of the Carolingian family, the so-called House of Vermandois, were the descendants of Pippin of Italy, Charlemagne’s second eldest son. Pippin’s son Bernard had been blinded for rebelling against his uncle Louis the Pious in 817, but Bernard’s son, Pippin, had been allowed to become count of Vermandois in the kingdom of West Francia when he came of age. But, as I’ve said before, no one ever talks about the Vermandois branch of the Carolingian family, and no one even considered them as candidates for kingship in 888, despite the fact that by the dynastic criteria they were supremely throne-worthy. Count Herbert I of Vermandois was not willing to put himself forward as a candidate for West Frankish king, perhaps because the memory of what happened to his grandfather seventy years earlier made him risk averse. But apart from Arnulf (representing the East Frankish branch of the Carolingian family), Charles the Simple (the West Frankish branch) and Herbert (the Vermandois branch), all other branches of the Carolingian family had since gone extinct by 888.

What happened was that each of the kingdoms within the Carolingian empire elected a candidate from within its own aristocracy. In Italy, the aristocracy elected Margrave Berengar of Friuli (845 – 924), from the Unruoching family, as their king. In Provence, the local elites made the young Louis the Blind (880 – 928), the son of Boso, their king. In Upper Burgundy, the area around the Jura Mountains and Lake Geneva in modern day eastern France and western Switzerland, Rudolf (859 – 912) from the House of Welf was elected king by the nobles and bishops there. In West Francia, the magnates north of the Loire elected Margrave Odo of Neustria (857 – 898), the hero who saved Paris from the Viking siege of 885 – 886, as their king – the Viking threat still remained strong there, so they needed a “strenuous warrior” in charge. But those in Aquitaine elected Count Ramnulf II of Poitiers (850 – 890) as their king. Meanwhile, Duke Guy of Spoleto firstly made a bid for the West Frankish throne, but was deterred by news of Odo’s coronation, before then wrestling with Berengar for the Italian throne.

Thus in 888, there were seven kings, or at least men who claimed to be kings, in the Carolingian Empire – more than there had ever been. And unlike on previous occasions when the empire had been divided into kingdoms, only one of their rulers was a Carolingian (a male-line descendant of Charlemagne) – Arnulf. Berengar, Guy and Louis did claim descent from Charlemagne, in Berengar’s case through his mother (a daughter of Louis the Pious), in Guy’s case through his great-grandmother (a daughter of Pippin of Italy) and in Louis’ case through his mother (a daughter of Charles the Bald). But Rudolf, Ramnulf and Odo had no Carolingian blood at all.

End of an era?

Was this, then, the end of an era? In some ways, it most certainly wasn’t. Carolingians continued to rule in East Francia (Germany) without a break until 911, when the royal line went extinct there with the death of Arnulf’s son, King Louis the Child. And in West Francia, after Odo’s death in 898, Charles the Simple finally got the throne he had been unfortunately passed over for on two occasions. Charles the Simple was deposed in 922 by Odo’s brother, Margrave Robert of Neustria (866 – 923), and locked away in a dungeon by his cousin, Herbert II of Vermandois, in 923. But Charles’ son Louis was invited back from exile in Anglo-Saxon England to become king in 936, and the Carolingians then continued to rule in West Francia all the way up to 987.

Also, and this is perhaps most important to stress, this wasn’t the moment when the nations of Western Europe sprung forth and agreed to go their separate ways. People living on both sides of the Rhine continued to identify as Franks until after 1000. And all of the kingdoms that emerged in 888 – West Francia, Aquitaine, Upper Burgundy, Provence, Italy and East Francia – were all based on political units that had either been created or endorsed by the Carolingians. None of them were the product of ethnic separatism. The kings did sometimes engage in meaningful forms of co-operation, and churchmen and intellectuals continued to move across kingdoms with ease in search of patronage and employment where they could get it. In many respects, Western Europe in the tenth century was still a Frankish world, even though the Carolingians no longer ruled over most of it.

But ultimately, I’d argue that 888 was still nonetheless the end of an era, for three reasons. The first is to state the obvious – the Carolingian Empire never came back. The imperial title continued to exist after 888 and was fought over by Arnulf, Louis the Blind, Guy of Spoleto and Berengar, but it basically meant nothing outside Italy and after 924 it was vacant. The Empire would be revived in the late tenth century by the Ottonians, the dynasty that succeeded the Carolingians in East Francia, after they conquered Italy in the 960s but it was territorially half the size of the realm of Charlemagne. Burgundy and Provence would not become part of the Empire (known from the late twelfth century as the Holy Roman Empire) until 1032. West Francia always remained independent from the German emperors, much to the gnashing of their teeth. And, as said before, no state in Europe would ever be as large as the Carolingian Empire until the incredibly short-lived empires of Napoleon and Hitler more than a thousand years later. The future of Western Europe was one of political fragmentation and inter-state competition, which would in due time give birth to overseas colonial expansion, the scientific, financial and industrial revolutions, constitutional democracy and the world wars.

The second reason is that it rewrote the rules for who could hold political power at the highest level. Ever since Pippin the Short and his sons were anointed by Pope Stephen II in 754, which we’ve talked about here before, it had been clearly established that only direct male-line descendants (his sons, their sons, their sons’ sons’ and so on) could rule as Frankish kings. This principle remained completely unchallenged until 879 with Boso of Provence, but outside of Provence his actions were seen as an illegal secessionist revolt and his fledgling independent kingdom was quickly crushed. But by 888, the goalposts had most definitely shifted, as only in East Francia did the magnates elect a Carolingian to be their king – in the other four or five kingdoms, they elected kings of less distinguished lineages. This is particularly striking in West Francia, where they elected Odo, whose family had only been established among the West Frankish aristocracy for one generation prior to him, when there were two Carolingian candidates they could have elected – Charles the Simple and Herbert of Vermandois. Its true that Charles the Simple was only a boy of eight, but that didn’t stop the seven-year-old Louis the Blind from being elected king of Provence in the same year. Clearly, family background and royal ancestry were no longer the supreme qualifiers for kingship. What exactly did make you a suitable candidate for the throne in all the different post-Carolingian kingdoms was, however, unclear and it would remain so for some time to come.

The third reason is that the tenth century, which followed shortly afterwards, has such a different feel to the Carolingian ninth century. This is true when it comes to both politics, intellectual life and the surviving source material. The Carolingian tradition, going back to Charlemagne himself, of kings issuing capitularies and other reforming legislation, had died in the 890s – Guy’s son and successor, King Lambert I of Italy, issued the last ever capitulary in 898. Tenth century kings did not legislate, whichever side of the river Rhine, Rhone, the Jura mountains or the Alps they ruled. In many ways, tenth century kingship on the Continent was a lot less ambitious than it was in the ninth century, essentially revolving around justice, ritual and warfare. Neither Otto the Great of East Francia (r.936 – 973) nor his West Frankish Carolingian contemporaries were interested in issuing new laws to reform government, society and morality like Charlemagne, Louis the Pious, Lothar, Louis II of Italy and Charles the Bald had been. This went hand in hand with changes in the theory and ideology of government and politics. To summarise it crudely, while some sense of kings upholding the common good of the kingdom remained, after 888 the idea that kings were responsible for the moral health and spiritual salvation of their subjects had fallen by the wayside. No tenth century king on the Continent would organise realm-wide collective penances for famines and military defeats like Charlemagne and Louis the Pious had done. And while a (diminished) number of intellectuals still strutted round the courts of West Frankish, East Frankish and Italian kings, they no longer advised kings on how to build a better world – no more Alcuin, no more Benedict of Aniane, no more Hrabanus Maurus, no more Agobard of Lyon, no more Sedulius Scottus and no more Hincmar. By contrast to the ninth century, the tenth feels a lot more like an age of tough realpolitik.

All of this impression of difference between the ninth and tenth centuries is reflected in, or indeed created by, the surviving source material. Take for example the Patrologia Latina, an anthology of all significant Christian Latin authors whose names we know from Tertullian (c.200 AD) to Pope Innocent III (d.1216), created between 1862 and 1865 by the French Catholic priest Jacques Paul Migne. The whole thing runs at 217 volumes (excluding indices). For the ninth century, Migne compiled together 30 volumes of works by Latin authors, the overwhelming majority of them writing in the Carolingian Empire. For the tenth century, however, he could only compile together 7 volumes. Given that the challenges of survival for ninth century texts are the same as for tenth century texts, this is a strong indication that there was much less intellectual activity in the tenth century than in the ninth, resulting from the change in political climate. Its also the case that by 900 all of the three major series of late Carolingian annals, The Annals of Saint Bertin, the Annals of Fulda  and the Annals of Saint Vaast had all ground to a halt. With the exception of the Annals of Flodoard, written between 919 and 966, the first half of the tenth century is almost a total vacuum when it comes to history-writing, which only began to revive itself from the 960s at the Ottonian court. The second half of the tenth century saw something of an intellectual revival, with lots of exciting stuff going on in mathematics, astronomy and the study of the Roman classics, but it was all largely divorced from a broader political programme. For example, when Otto III invited Gerbert of Aurillac, arguably the smartest man of the tenth century, to his court he wanted to see him demonstrate the mechanical pendulum clock he had invented, not give him advice about how to morally reform his empire. The Carolingian era really was a very distinctive, almost unique, moment in early medieval history, and 888 really did bring it to an end.

The beginning of a bold new era? Or just another geopolitical headache? Europe in the year 900. Looking at something like this can make it seem that Charles the Fat's reunification of the Carolingian Empire was just an insignificant blip, but hopefully this post has shown that it was more than that, and that the final breakup of the Carolingian Empire in 888 really meant something important.

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.