The Mission to Constantinople in 968 and Liudprand of Cremona

Traditio ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
pp. 55-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon N. Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Detailed Record ◽  
East West

Of the documents that concern the relationship between Byzantium and Western Europe in the early Middle Ages, none is more famous or more frequently read than Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitana, Liudprand of Cremona's description of his mission to Constantinople in 968 for Otto I. Much has been learned from his vivid if acid narrative about the Byzantine court of Nicephorus II Phocas and about East-West relations in the tenth century. Over the last forty years research has reached beneath the vivid prose in search of the true significance of that mission. But since Liudprand's is the only first-hand, detailed record of an embassy to Constantinople of that era, some scholars have given it more contemporary importance than it actually had, and, by extension, they have turned Liudprand's thoughts into subtle expressions of official Western policy. The danger in these inquiries has been to divorce the mind and moods of the creator from his creation and bestow on Relatio undeserved exaltation. The problem is to keep the document in its perspective while draining every sentence of its implications.

Bastard Feudalism and the Framing of Thirteenth-Century England

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Coss
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
The One ◽  
The Relationship

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.

The Construction of Ottonian Kingship

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antoni Grabowski
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century

German historians long assumed that the German Kingdom was created with Henry the Fowler's coronation in 919. The reigns of both Henry the Fowler, and his son Otto the Great, were studied and researched mainly through Widukind of Corvey's chronicle Res Gestae Saxonicae. There was one source on Ottonian times that was curiously absent from most of the serious research: Liudprand of Cremona's Antapodosis. The study of this chronicle leads to a reappraisal of the tenth century in Western Europe showing how mythology of the dynasty was constructed. By looking at the later reception (through later Middle Ages and then on 19th and 20th century historiography) the author showcases the longevity of Ottonian myths and the ideological expressions of the tenth century storytellers.

Vir Dei: secular sanctity in the early tenth century

1972 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 41-53
Author(s):  
Derek Baker
Keyword(s):  
Individual Differences ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Life Crisis ◽  
Literary Convention ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Middle Ages

As recent anniversary studies have emphasised, the vir Dei, the man of God, has been a christian type since the time of St Antony, and whatever pre-christian elements were embodied in the Athanasian picture the Vita Antonii possessed a christian coherence and completeness which made of it the proto-type for a whole range of literature in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In hagiography the Antonine sequence of early life, crisis and conversion, probation and temptation, privation and renunciation, miraculous power, knowledge and authority, is, in its essentials, repeated ad nauseam. Martin, Guthlac, Odo, Dunstan, Bernard are all, whatever their individual differences, forced into the same procrustean biographical mould: each is clearly qualified, and named, as vir Dei, and each exemplifies the same - and at times the pre-eminent – christian vocation. Yet if the insight provided by such literature into the mind of medieval man is instructive about his society and social organisation, and illuminating about his ideal aspirations, the literary convention itself is always limiting, and frequently misleading. As Professor Momigliano has said, ‘biography was never quite a part of historiography’, and one might add that hagiography is not quite biography.

The Jellinge Stone: from prehistoric monument to petrified ‘book’

2018 ◽  
pp. 235-251
Author(s):  
Michelle P. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Burial Ground ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages

Like the previous chapter, Michelle Brown’s contribution represents an instance of the integration of Christian and pre-Christian Germanic knowledge in the early Middle Ages. Brown explores the context and meaning of the distinctive late-tenth-century rune-stone carved at the royal burial ground of Jellinge in Denmark, viewing the monument as a book in stone and a symbol of conversion and of changing political agendas in Scandinavia in the tenth century. Ranging widely across early medieval art, Brown explains that the stone (like the Auzon/Franks Casket, to which she also alludes) draws upon both Christian and pagan Norse traditions ‘to form a new, integrated iconography that formed a distinctive expression of the Scandinavian experience of cultural synthesis and conversion’.

The cosmology of the early medieval emporia?

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Hodges
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Imaginary World ◽  
Central Places ◽  
The Relationship

This characteristically thoughtful essay by Frans Theuws illustrates how far our analysis of central places in the early Middle Ages has advanced. Like his study of Maastricht (2001), it reveals a close reading of the archaeological and historical sources. Indeed, as Michael McCormick's encyclopaedic volume (2001) on the origins of the medieval economy shows with stunning authority, as archaeologists we have taken huge strides since Philip Grierson quipped, ‘It has been said that the spade cannot lie, but it owes this merit in part to the fact that it cannot speak’ (1959, 129). Hence it comes as no surprise that Theuws is exploring the ‘relationship between forms of exchange and the imaginary world from which “value” is derived’ (p. 121).

Exchange, religion, identity and central places in the early Middle Ages

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frans Theuws
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Imaginary World ◽  
Central Places ◽  
Prestige Goods ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractExchange in the early Middle Ages has traditionally been studied from a ‘technological’, ‘economic’ or ‘socio-political’ perspective, and has examined such issues as transport practices, supply and demand, or the ways in which exchange helps to maintain and reproduce the socio-political order. A particular focus of research has been the significance of the exchange of prestige goods for the power of the king and the aristocracy. There has been almost no analysis to date of the complexity of the exchange system as a whole, which – together with the exchange of commodities and gifts – includes the keeping of objects. Nor have archaeologists paid much attention to the relationship between forms of exchange (and the norms and values associated with them) and the imaginary world from which ‘value’ is derived in exchange. In the early medieval Frankish world there seems to have been a close relationship between exchange and the imaginary Christian world. In this contribution, I will attempt to examine the relationship between exchange and the imaginary world in the early Middle Ages, and to demonstrate how the results can modify the picture we have of central places like Maastricht (an old centre) and Dorestad (one of the new emporia).

Closer to the essence of the early Middle Ages. A reply

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 149-159
Author(s):  
Frans Theuws
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Study Groups ◽  
European Science Foundation ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
Roman World ◽  
Foundation Programme ◽  
Production Distribution ◽  
European Science ◽  
The Relationship

Ideas do not develop in a vacuum, they are stimulated by debate. The European Science Foundation programme on the ‘Transformation of the Roman world’, in which I participated, was a magnificent opportunity for the rekindling of this debate. The project entailed the creation of different study groups around such topics as economy, rituals and power, and culture. As a consequence, the realization dawned that the organizational separation into these social spheres generated just as many new perspectives as it hid from view. Once the separate spheres had been scrutinized, our perception of the relationship between rituals, economy and culture remained a key objective of research. It is most fortunate that Richard Hodges and John Moreland, representatives of the ‘production, distribution and demand group’, have now joined the debate because their contributions lead to further refinements, thus bringing us closer to the ‘essence of the early Middle Ages’.

Educated Wandering Jews, 800–1250

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maristella Botticini ◽  
Zvi Eckstein
Keyword(s):  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Byzantine Empire ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Jewish Diaspora ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
Business Opportunities ◽  
Vast Territory

This chapter shows that once the Jews became literate, urban, and engaged in skilled occupations, they began migrating within the vast territory under Muslim rule—stretching from the Iberian Peninsula to India during the eighth through the twelfth centuries, and from the Byzantine Empire to western Europe via Italy and within western Europe in the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. In early medieval Europe, the revival of trade concomitant with the Commercial Revolution and the growth of an urban and commercial economy paralleled the vast urbanization and the growth of trade that had occurred in the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates four to five centuries earlier. The Jewish diaspora during the early Middle Ages was mainly the outcome of literate Jewish craftsmen, shopkeepers, traders, scholars, teachers, physicians, and moneylenders migrating in search of business opportunities to reap returns on their investment in literacy and education.

Veiled Threats

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Firey
Keyword(s):  
Women Religious ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Ninth Century ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
History Of ◽  
Symbolic Value ◽  
The Veil

It has long been recognized that the veil taken by consecrated women religious draws upon nuptial associations and thus symbolizes the trope that consecrated women are brides of Christ. The history of the veil’s symbolic value in the early Middle Ages can, however, be probed more extensively than it has been. This chapter proposes that prior to the tenth century polyvalent symbolism and intermittent use produced competing understandings of the veil. That competition culminated in efforts in the ninth century to regulate the practice of veiling, and also in discursive shifts in representation of the veil’s significance. By tracing the chronology of the connection of the veil to the concept of the bride of Christ, Firey invites consideration of the possible function of symbolism as a device for parties with opposing views to negotiate contested positions, practices, and meanings.

Charlemagne, the Carolingian Empire, and Its Successors

2021 ◽  
pp. 468-498
Author(s):  
Rosamond McKitterick
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Western World ◽  
Administrative System ◽  
Early Medieval ◽  
Early Middle Ages ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Carolingian Empire ◽  
Political Units

Both the Christian empire of Charlemagne and the subsequently hugely influential imperial ideology of the early Middle Ages were rooted in the Roman past. This chapter addresses the reality of the early medieval empire and the ways in which it was represented by contemporaries for posterity. It examines the career of Pippin III, the first king of the Carolingian dynasty, and the expansion of the Carolingian Empire under his illustrious son Charlemagne, by both design and chance, to embrace most of western Europe. This vast realm was governed by an elaborate and efficient political and administrative system in which both lay and ecclesiastical magnates played a crucial role. This system of governance was maintained even within the smaller political units of the later ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries. The Latin Christian culture initially promoted by Charlemagne, moreover, is the most enduring legacy of the medieval empire to the Western world.

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