By Peter Heather
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Western world went through a turbulent and dramatic period during which a succession of kingdoms rose, grew, and crumbled in spans of only a few generations. The wars and personalities of the dark ages are the stuff of legend, and all led toward the eventual reunification of Europe under a different kind of Roman rule — this time, that of the Church. Below, historian Peter Heather selects ten moments from the period upon which the fate of Europe hinged.
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March 15, 493 AD: King Odoacer slain by Theoderic
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Theoderic, king of the new Ostrogothic coalition created since the death of Attila the Hun in 453, slices Odoacer in half after dinner in Ravenna to take complete control of Italy and the Adriatic coast of Dalmatia. He subsequently adds to this Sicily, a large part of modern Hungary, southern France and most of Spain to relaunch Empire in the west, consciously styling himself as the head of a fully and legitimately Roman state.
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January 1, 519 AD: Eutharic becomes consul
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Theoderic’s chosen heir and son-in-law, Eutharic, receives the Roman consulship with the full blessing of Constantinople, seeming to guarantee that Theoderic’s Empire will last into the next generation. But Eutharic dies before Theoderic, and, on the latter’s death, Constantinople encourages the centrifugal forces which break the Empire up once more into separate Gothic kingdoms in Italy and Spain.
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January 18, 532 AD: Massacre at the Nika riots
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The Emperor Justinian turns loose his General Belisarius and his trusted soldiery on a crowd in the Hippodrome, which has been baying for his replacement, after a sequence of military defeats against Persia. At the end of the day, thousands are dead and the ceremonial centre of Constantinople a burnt out ruin, but Justinian has clung onto power. (Pictured: the Hippodrome today.)
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September 14, 533 AD: The battle of Ad Decimum
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Desperately seeking renewed legitimacy, Justinian sends Belisarius to North Africa this time to exploit political division in the Vandal kingdom. In the battle, Belisarius wins a stunning victory over the Vandal king Gelimer, and Carthage swiftly falls. This unexpectedly easy victory leads Justinian to adopt a more general policy of conquest in the west which will add Italy, Dalmatia and parts of southern Spain, as well as North Africa, to his Empire by the mid-550s.
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June 8, 632: The prophet Muhammad dies
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Muhammad perishes on the eve of the great Islamic conquests which will engulf the Near East, North Africa, and much of Spain within the next hundred years. They utterly destroy the Persian Empire and deprive Constantinople of between two-thirds and three-quarters of its territories and tax revenues. The old East Roman Empire is reduced from world to regional power, and its domination of the western Mediterranean, reasserted under Justinian, destroyed forever.
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Christmas Day, 800 AD: Charlemagne is crowned emperor by Pope Leo III in St. Peters
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The Islamic destruction of Constantinople’s capacity to influence western events has combined with transalpine economic and demographic development to allow a restoration of Empire in the west based for the first time on a north European powerbase. Contrary to his own propaganda, Charlemagne has been actively seeking the imperial title for at least a decade, and it is no coincidence that, the day before, he had convened a synod which cleared the Pople of some very embarrassing allegations, with no questions asked.
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June 25, 841 AD: The Battle of Fontenoy
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Charlemagne’s grandsons fight a bloody engagement at Fontenoy, kickstarting the process of Carolingian imperial fragmentation. Unlike its Roman predecessor which used large-scale taxation to maintain professional military forces, the capacity of Charlemagne’s state to wage war was based on militarised gentry and aristocratic landowners whose allegiance had to be bought – largely by grants of land - in each generation. This made it extremely difficult to maintain centralised supra-regional power in the long-term, as wealth tended to leech away from monarchs, especially in the context of civil war, where military support was at a premium.
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February 12, 1049 AD: Coronation of Pope Leo IX
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Bruno of Egisheim-Dagsburg is crowned Pope Leo IX, marking the moment when the products of the Christian cultural revolution instigated by Charlemagne took possession of the Roman Papacy to further his ideals of Christian reform. Emperors and Kings had previously provided the Church with the necessary resources and enforcement structures to make reform work, but Latin Christendom (increasing in size as conversion continued) was now divided between too many rulers for any one to be the source of the united leadership that the common culture of Latin Churchmen, the product of Charlemagne’s libraries and reforms, desired.
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December 28, 1210 AD: Approval of the Compilatio tertia, the oldest official compilation of Papal legal decisions, or decretals
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When Leo IX became Pope, the Papacy enjoyed great prestige, but little practical authority. This was transformed by a legal revolution – beginning with Gratian’s Concordance of Discordant Canons in c. 1150 – which used the legal principles and techniques of old Roman imperial law systematically to resolve disagreements in Church teaching on the principle that existing Papal rulings carried greatest authority, while simultaneously requiring that any new or currently unresolved issues be addressed by new Papal decrees.
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November 11, 1215 AD: Fourth Council of the Lateran
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Seventy-one metropolitans, four hundred and twelve bishops, and nine hundred abbots and priors gather in Rome for the opening of Lateran IV, then the largest Christian council ever held. It defines required standards of Catholic lay and clerical piety which last down to the twentieth century. Equally important, it symbolises the transfer of ecclesiastical authority from emperors to Popes. Four hundred years earlier, it was Charlemagne who had called the ecclesiastical shots, but, in the meantime, the legal structure of one Roman Empire had been used to create a new one.
Peter Heather is Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London. He is the bestselling author of The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders, The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians, Empires and Barbarians: The Fall of Rome and the Birth of Europe, and numerous other works on late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
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Image credits: 1. Coin with profile of Odoacer. Permission via Creative Commons by Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. Via Wikimedia Commons. 2. 16th century statue of Theoderic. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 3. The Hippodrome of Constantinople today. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 4. Mosaic depicting Justinian. Permission via GNU license. Via Wikimedia Commons. 5. 18th century Turkish depiction of Muhammad ascending to Heaven. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 6. “Coronation of Charlemagne” by Jean Fouquet, c. 1460. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 7. “Battle of Fontenoy” by Pierre Lenfant, c. 1747. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 8. Statue of Pope Leo IX in Altorf, France. Permission via GNU license. Via Wikimedia Commons. 9. Pope Innocent III, whose decretals comprised the Compilatio Tertia, depicted in a fresco c. 1219. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. 10. “Lateran Palace” by Giuseppe Vasi, c. 1752. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
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This Day in World History - October 10 marks a signal date in Islamic history. On that day, Hussein ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was defeated and killed at Karbala, in modern Iraq. His death cemented deep and lasting division among Muslims that persist to this day. In Iran, where the population is overwhelmingly Shia, the death of Hussein—“leader of the martyrs”—is regularly commemorated in passion plays.
This past Tuesday, October 5th, Tariq Ramadan and Christopher Hitchens met at the 92nd Street Y to address the question: Is Islam a religion of peace? The footage below is from the latter, Q&A portion of the event, reposted with permission from 92Y Blog.
Click here to view the embedded video.
With the Obama administration in its nascent years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict proving as intractable as ever, relations with Iran reaching a boiling point and the political landscape changing rapidly both in the United States and the Middle East, wrestling with the issue of Islam is more crucial than ever and will be a defining feature of the 21st century. In the video clip above, famous atheist and prolific author Christopher Hitchens and the accomplished and controversial scholar Tariq Ramadan debate one of the most pertinent questions of our modern age. Conversation was moderated by Laurie Goodstein, national religion correspondent for The New York Times.
For more comprehensive view points from those in attendance, Danny Groner, Online Assistant Editor at TheWeek.com filed a report for The Huffington Post as did Marc Tracy at Tablet Magazine.
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Prior to the Q&A, both gentlemen engaged in a proper debate. Here, I have done my best to present a sample of what was said.
Hitchens
- “I want to maintain that there is no such thing as a religion of peace, by definition.”
- I find it problematic, “the idea of the perfect human being – the prophet Muhammad, and the idea of the perfect book – the Qur’an.”
- On literal interpretations of the Qur’an: “Demands that you believe the impossible do not lead to peaceful outcomes.”
Ramadan
- “I do not like this question, ‘Is Islam a religion of peace?’ Islam is a religion for human beings, and if you deal with human beings, you deal with violence…You must ask, ‘Is my religion helping us towards peace?’”
- “Islam is as complex [as any other religion]…the problem is not the book, the problem is the reader.”
- “Peace is what you achieve after self-education.”
- “What is the will of God? Diversity. But the risk of diversity is lots of knowledge and lots of wars.”
- On Islam being a young religion: “Respect the Christians, respect the Jews, respect the religions before you.”
- “I will never deny that some Muslims, some theologians are using the verses in a way which is – for me – unacceptable.”
Hitchens
- “You’re right – and I’m surprised to find my self saying this, Professor – that the problem is not the book, but the reader.”
- “I don’t like the idea that there is the promise of paradise for martyrs.”
- “Where is the authoritative statement in the Sunni world
I don't know about anyone else, but BIC* has been hard to do the last couple weeks. But there's a good reason for it! Honest!
The weather has been absolutely gorgeous . . . ![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
anom3, cynthialord and carriejones will all vouch for me. Just because we live in Maine, doesn't mean we're always freezing you know! Temps in the 70's, with warm breezes on your face and the musty smell of leaves as you kick through them on your walk . . .
Who can sit at their desk?
And even when I convinced myself I couldn't, wouldn't walk until I'd worked on X-amount of pages, Cookie would intervene. Since we've taken her off the leash, she now has this bad habit of sitting by the door (which is right next to my desk) and ringing her I-want-to-go-out-bell.
I tell her I her I have X amount of pages to go.
She snuffles. She moans. She rings the bell again.
I tell her to lie down . . .
She groans and lays her head on the window sill, staring sadly outside.
I get my sneakers.
And if none of the above convinces you, here are some shots of the campground in all its fall splendor:
The above photo is of the house across the lake from our dock area.
And here is a shot of the heron, who was still hanging around as of Friday.
And here is a view from the picnic area down by the lake. As I took it, the eagle flew over my head! I wasn't quick enough to catch him.
So . . . can you blame me? I mean, who can sit when the sun is shining, the redish-orangish leaves are swirling in the breezes right outside my window and I can hear the geese calling?
Today though, I'm going to BIC. I'm really, really, going to BIC. For hours at a time. It won't be too hard because it's gray outside . . . and a little cooler . . .
Um . . . is that . . . bells I hear?
*For my non-writing friends and family, BIC is a writers best friend. Butt In Chair. Which can be very, very hard to do when you work from home . . .
