Ook bronnenboekje leren + bronschrijvers!
H1.
The sources of God’s grace:
The popes saw themselves as the successors of Saint Peter, the first bishop of Rome, and
therefore to hold the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. No one doubted that powers of
imposing penance on and forgiving sinners were in the hands of Christ’s earthly heirs, the
priests and bishops. The mass was the central liturgy of the Church, and here the bread and
wine became Christ’s body and blood, the “Eucharist”. Through the mass the faithful were
joined to each other, the dead and Christ. The Eucharist was one potent source of God’s
grace, just like the Saints. Saints had mainly been martyrs who died for their faith, but after
Constantine, the saints were more like “Athletes of Christ”; giving up their possessions,
fasting, praying, not sleeping and no sex, these holy people offered role models. The Saints
also intercede with God on behalf of others and made peace between people, and
sometimes even healed them. When saints died, their power lived on in their relics. Rich and
influential people got their own monopolies by moving saintly bones home with them. Men
like Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan, wanted clergymen, not laypeople, to be the overseers of
relics. His actions set a precedent for many other churches, but laypeople continued to find
ways to keep bits of saints near to them.
The Barbarians:
The Romans called those people outside their empire (or later, within) and who they did not
consider Roman, Barbarians, though they designated those beyond the Rhine as “Germani”.
Historians today call those people who spoke Germanic languages, “Germanic people”.
These people were not nomads, but accustomed to settled existence. The settlement at
Wijster consisted of over fifty large wooden houses and many smaller ones. The people who
lived here cultivated grains and raised cattle, and bred horses. Some were craftsmen or
-women. The community at Wijster was not egalitarian. The elite seems to have had access
to Roman products and even they are probably not very powerful. It is very likely that here,
as elsewhere in the Germanic world, kings with military retinues lorded it over this and other
communities in their reach, commanding labor services and a percentage of agricultural
production. Barbarians and Romans had ethnic differences. Germanic ethnicities were often
in flux (verandering) as tribes came together and broke apart. Historians have, in the case of
the Goths, been able to trace a long “ethnogenesis”, the many ethnicities that they took on
and shed over time. The second set of Goths in Poland was a splinter of the first set of
Goths, and the Black Sea Goths were thus multi-ethnic. Taking advantage of the crisis of the
third century, the Black Sea Goths invaded and plundered the nearby provinces of the
Roman Empire. At first, the Romans paid them off. Around 250, Gothic and other raiders and
pirates plundered parts of the Balkans and Anatolia. After they were defeated, they
transformed and the Goths now emerged as two different groups: eastern (Ostrogoths, Black
Sea), and western (Visigoths, Romania). By the mid-330s, the Visigoths were allies of Rome
and fought in their armies, sometimes as “federates” for Rome under their own chiefs. This
alliance fell apart in the later fourth century, when the Visigoths requested entry into the
Empire. They were fleeing the Huns. One branch of the Huns invaded the Black Sea region
in 376 and moved into Romania, uprooting the Gothic groups living there. Barbarians had
long been settled within the Empire’s borders, but in this case the numbers were
,unprecedented. The Roman mistreated them and in 378 a group of Visigoths and other
barbarians rebelled, killing emperor Valens at the battle of Adrianople. This defeat weakened
the Roman army. After various failed treaties, the Visigoths under Alaric (410) set out to
avenge their wrongs and to find land and sacked Rome. By 418 they settled in Gaul and by
484 had taken most of Spain as well. Meanwhile, other barbarian groups entered the Empire
by crossing the Rhine. The Vandals crossed into North Africa, the Sueves remained in
Spain. When in 453 Atilla the Hun died, his empire collapsed, and other groups- Ostrogoths,
Rugi, Gepids, moved into the Empire. In
476 Romulus Augustulus was deposed by
Odoacer, who declared himself king of
Italy. Zeno, the eastern emperor,
authorized Theodoric the Great, king of
the Ostrogoths, to attack Odoacer in 489
and he ruled Italy from 493 to 526. Not
much later the Franks conquered Gaul
under Clovis. Around 500, much of North
Africa was under Vandal rule, Spain under
the Visigoths, Gaul by the Franks and
Italy under the Ostrogoths. The Burgundians settled in Switzerland, and immigrants settled
in Britain. Most people, however, still considered themselves Roman, and the barbarian
kings thought they were ruling within, not against, the Empire.
The new order:
The “new order” of the sixth century was less the rise of barbarian kingdoms than it was, in
the West, the decay of the cities balanced by the liveliness of the countryside, the increased
dominance of the rich, and the quiet domestication of Christianity.
The ruralization of the West:
The barbarians settled with only tiny discontent from articulate Roman elites. Maybe they did
not confiscate estates, but simply collected the normal imperial estates taxes. More likely,
the barbarians were settled as ‘guests’ directly on land belonging to Roman property owners.
In either case, the Roman elite and barbarians gradually came to belong to the same
community of free landowners. But before this merging could take place, the barrier to
assimilation -religious beliefs- had to be overcome. Clovis, king of the Franks, may have
been the first Germanic king to choose the Roman version of Christianity. The new rulers
adopted Roman institutions in another important way: they issued law codes that drew on
Roman imperial precedents like the ‘Theodosian Code’, the ‘Visigothic Code’, and under
King Clovis a Frankish law code was compiled, fusing provincial Roman and Germanic
procedures into a single whole. The disappearance of the urban middle class, however, was
strange. This was largely due to the new taxes of the fourth century. The town councilors,
curiales, used to collect the taxes, but in the fourth century, new land and head taxes
impoverished the curiales, while rich landowners simply did not bother to pay. Now the tax
burdens fell on poorer people. Many people escaped to the estates of the rich, giving up
their free status in return for land and protection, and by the seventh century the barbarian
kings no longer collected general taxes. The cities were no longer thriving or populous,
though they remained political and religious centers. The shift from urban to rural
settlements brought with it a new localism. The active long-distance trade of the
Mediterranean slowed down, but did not stop. Inland, however, most people had to make do
,with local handmade wares, as regional networks of exchange eroded long-distance
connections. For some, the disconnection for the rural landscape from the wider world was
far less clear, and archeologists have found numerous artifacts buried with the dead in
Europe, which must have arrived from Byzantium or even further. There appears to have
been a lively international exchange between East and West that continued throughout this
period.
The Western church in the new order:
Among the rich who took advantage of this relatively abundant material culture were
bishops. They often rose to episcopal status in their twilight years, after they had married
and sired children to inherit their estates. Landlords, kings and queens, warriors and
courtiers controlled and monopolized most of the rest of the wealth of the West, largely
based on land. Monasteries too were becoming important landowners. Monks were not quite
laity (since they devoted their life to religion), but also not quite clergy (since they were only
rarely ordained as priests), but very much admired. It is often been said that Saint Antony
was the first monk, and like him, monks practiced a daily martyrdom, giving up their wealth,
family ties and worldly offices. Monks lived in communities and in obedience to a rule. In
Italy, Saint Benedict wrote the most famous monastic rule of all and in the ninth century it
was adopted as the official rule of the Carolingian Empire and became the monastic norm in
the West. The Benedictine Rule insisted on the key citrus of obedience and humility. Dividing
the day into periods of prayer, reading and labor, the chief of its activities was the “liturgy”,
not just the Mass, but also formal worship seven times a day and once at night. Benedict’s
monastery, Monte Cassino, was in the shadow of Rome, far enough to be an escape from
society, but near enough to link it to the popes. Monasteries became partners of the wealthy
and powerful and benefited from their largess. The monks were seen as models of virtue,
and their prayers were thought to reach God’s ear. It was crucial to ally with them. Little by
little the Christian religion was domesticated to meet the needs of the new order.
Retrenchment in the East:
After 476, the “new order” in the East was less obvious. There was still an emperor with
authority; the towns continued to thrive and the small-town elite went off to Constantinople,
and taxes were collected more efficiently than ever. For the first time, the emperor issued a
compendium of Roman Laws. The ‘Theodosian Code’ was published in 438. Western
barbarian codes tried to match this, but were overshadowed by the legal initiatives of
Justinian, the ‘Codex Justinianus’ and the ‘Digest’, a compilation of Roman juridical thought
from the pre-imperial period onward. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the Eastern Empire
recalibrated its priorities. No policy could fully meet the challenge of the first recorded
pandemic, caused by the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis. It hit Justinian’s empire in 541
and lasted for 200 years. Coupled with cold climate change, it made things in the East
worse. Justinian still financed efforts to recover North Africa and Italy, in which he
succeeded, but it left the economy crippling and his successors could not hold on to it.
Above all, Justinian took on the image of concentrated power associated with the ceremony
and pomp of the Persian kings, combining it with an exalted role in the Church. In the wake
of fearsome popular tax revolts against his rule, he embarked on an extensive building
program of churches, hospitals and poor houses, and built the Hagia Sophia. After
conquering Italy from the Ostrogoths, Justinian asserted his rule at Ravenna, and he found
allies in the Christians living there who had chafed under the Arian Ostrogoths, and made
his presence in permanent in the main church, San Vitale Ravenna became a center of early
, Christendom, the “Romans” of the East held on to it and its impregnable position and
location near a major port allowed to become a linchpin of East-West connectivity. Yet, the
Eastern Roman Empire focussed mainly on the Sassanid Empire in the East.
H2. The Emergence of sibling cultures (..600-c.750).
The rise of the Islam and its triumph over territories dominated by Rome or Persia is the first
astonishing fact of the seventh and eighth centuries. The second is the persistence of the
Roman Empire, both politically, in the Byzantine Empire, and culturally, in the Islamic world
and Europe. By 750 three distinct and nearly separate civilizations, Byzantine, European and
Islamic crystallized in and around the old Roman Empire.
Saving Byzantium:
The Byzantines called themselves Romans, and their state was Romanìa. War with the
Sasanids and Arabs transformed Byzantium. By 700, Byzantium had lost all its territories in
North Africa and Spain. It did hold on to bits of Italy and Greece, but in the main it had
become a medium-sized state.
Sources of resiliency:
Byzantium survived because of its capital Constantinople. The emperor and his officials
continued to collect traditional land taxes from their provinces, which allowed the state to pay
regular salaries to its soldiers, sailors and officials. Their navy patrolled the Mediterranean
Sea, with its Greek fire. Their armies were pulled back from the frontiers in the face of the
Arab invaders and were set up as large regional defensive units within the Empire. Called
strategai, they were led by strategoi, appointed by the emperors.
Invasion and their consequences:
When Byzantine Emperor Maurice was deposed by Phocas in 602, Persian king Chosroes
took advantage and invaded Byzantine. By 604, he had captured and in 606/607 he
conquered Theodosopiolis in Armenia, in 614 Damascus, Jerusalem in 614 and Alexandria
in 619. Due to the efforts of Emperor Herclius, all territories were back in Byzantine hands by
630, but the cities were depopulated and ruined and both Sasanid and Byzantine troops and
revenues were exhausted. The Slavs moved into the Balkans, and around 670 the Bulgars
too, began moving into Bulgaria, defeating Byzantine armies. By 700 the Balkan Peninsula
was no longer controlled by Byzantium.
Decline of urban centers and retrenchment in the countryside:
The city-based Greco-Roman culture on which the Byzantine Empire was constructed had
long been giving way, which was hastened by invasions, raids and the Plague. Many urban
centers disappeared or reinvented themselves. Some became fortresses; others
abandoned; others remained as skeletal administrative centers. Old civic centers were
turned into churches and cities were no longer the hubs of Byzantine life. Constantinople’s
population did shrink too, and formerly inhabited areas within the walls were abandoned or
turned into farms. Constantinople did however, as capital of Byzantine Church and state,
hold a thriving upper class composed of people attached to both the imperial court and the
clerical elite. Although Byzantium’s economic life became increasingly rural in the seventh
and eighth centuries, institutions vital to urban growth remained at Constantinople, ensuring
a revival of commercial activity once the wars ended. With the decline of the cities came the
rise of the countryside. Agriculture had all along been the backbone of the Byzantine
Ook bronnenboekje leren + bronschrijvers!
H1.
The sources of God’s grace:
The popes saw themselves as the successors of Saint Peter, the first bishop of Rome, and
therefore to hold the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. No one doubted that powers of
imposing penance on and forgiving sinners were in the hands of Christ’s earthly heirs, the
priests and bishops. The mass was the central liturgy of the Church, and here the bread and
wine became Christ’s body and blood, the “Eucharist”. Through the mass the faithful were
joined to each other, the dead and Christ. The Eucharist was one potent source of God’s
grace, just like the Saints. Saints had mainly been martyrs who died for their faith, but after
Constantine, the saints were more like “Athletes of Christ”; giving up their possessions,
fasting, praying, not sleeping and no sex, these holy people offered role models. The Saints
also intercede with God on behalf of others and made peace between people, and
sometimes even healed them. When saints died, their power lived on in their relics. Rich and
influential people got their own monopolies by moving saintly bones home with them. Men
like Saint Ambrose, bishop of Milan, wanted clergymen, not laypeople, to be the overseers of
relics. His actions set a precedent for many other churches, but laypeople continued to find
ways to keep bits of saints near to them.
The Barbarians:
The Romans called those people outside their empire (or later, within) and who they did not
consider Roman, Barbarians, though they designated those beyond the Rhine as “Germani”.
Historians today call those people who spoke Germanic languages, “Germanic people”.
These people were not nomads, but accustomed to settled existence. The settlement at
Wijster consisted of over fifty large wooden houses and many smaller ones. The people who
lived here cultivated grains and raised cattle, and bred horses. Some were craftsmen or
-women. The community at Wijster was not egalitarian. The elite seems to have had access
to Roman products and even they are probably not very powerful. It is very likely that here,
as elsewhere in the Germanic world, kings with military retinues lorded it over this and other
communities in their reach, commanding labor services and a percentage of agricultural
production. Barbarians and Romans had ethnic differences. Germanic ethnicities were often
in flux (verandering) as tribes came together and broke apart. Historians have, in the case of
the Goths, been able to trace a long “ethnogenesis”, the many ethnicities that they took on
and shed over time. The second set of Goths in Poland was a splinter of the first set of
Goths, and the Black Sea Goths were thus multi-ethnic. Taking advantage of the crisis of the
third century, the Black Sea Goths invaded and plundered the nearby provinces of the
Roman Empire. At first, the Romans paid them off. Around 250, Gothic and other raiders and
pirates plundered parts of the Balkans and Anatolia. After they were defeated, they
transformed and the Goths now emerged as two different groups: eastern (Ostrogoths, Black
Sea), and western (Visigoths, Romania). By the mid-330s, the Visigoths were allies of Rome
and fought in their armies, sometimes as “federates” for Rome under their own chiefs. This
alliance fell apart in the later fourth century, when the Visigoths requested entry into the
Empire. They were fleeing the Huns. One branch of the Huns invaded the Black Sea region
in 376 and moved into Romania, uprooting the Gothic groups living there. Barbarians had
long been settled within the Empire’s borders, but in this case the numbers were
,unprecedented. The Roman mistreated them and in 378 a group of Visigoths and other
barbarians rebelled, killing emperor Valens at the battle of Adrianople. This defeat weakened
the Roman army. After various failed treaties, the Visigoths under Alaric (410) set out to
avenge their wrongs and to find land and sacked Rome. By 418 they settled in Gaul and by
484 had taken most of Spain as well. Meanwhile, other barbarian groups entered the Empire
by crossing the Rhine. The Vandals crossed into North Africa, the Sueves remained in
Spain. When in 453 Atilla the Hun died, his empire collapsed, and other groups- Ostrogoths,
Rugi, Gepids, moved into the Empire. In
476 Romulus Augustulus was deposed by
Odoacer, who declared himself king of
Italy. Zeno, the eastern emperor,
authorized Theodoric the Great, king of
the Ostrogoths, to attack Odoacer in 489
and he ruled Italy from 493 to 526. Not
much later the Franks conquered Gaul
under Clovis. Around 500, much of North
Africa was under Vandal rule, Spain under
the Visigoths, Gaul by the Franks and
Italy under the Ostrogoths. The Burgundians settled in Switzerland, and immigrants settled
in Britain. Most people, however, still considered themselves Roman, and the barbarian
kings thought they were ruling within, not against, the Empire.
The new order:
The “new order” of the sixth century was less the rise of barbarian kingdoms than it was, in
the West, the decay of the cities balanced by the liveliness of the countryside, the increased
dominance of the rich, and the quiet domestication of Christianity.
The ruralization of the West:
The barbarians settled with only tiny discontent from articulate Roman elites. Maybe they did
not confiscate estates, but simply collected the normal imperial estates taxes. More likely,
the barbarians were settled as ‘guests’ directly on land belonging to Roman property owners.
In either case, the Roman elite and barbarians gradually came to belong to the same
community of free landowners. But before this merging could take place, the barrier to
assimilation -religious beliefs- had to be overcome. Clovis, king of the Franks, may have
been the first Germanic king to choose the Roman version of Christianity. The new rulers
adopted Roman institutions in another important way: they issued law codes that drew on
Roman imperial precedents like the ‘Theodosian Code’, the ‘Visigothic Code’, and under
King Clovis a Frankish law code was compiled, fusing provincial Roman and Germanic
procedures into a single whole. The disappearance of the urban middle class, however, was
strange. This was largely due to the new taxes of the fourth century. The town councilors,
curiales, used to collect the taxes, but in the fourth century, new land and head taxes
impoverished the curiales, while rich landowners simply did not bother to pay. Now the tax
burdens fell on poorer people. Many people escaped to the estates of the rich, giving up
their free status in return for land and protection, and by the seventh century the barbarian
kings no longer collected general taxes. The cities were no longer thriving or populous,
though they remained political and religious centers. The shift from urban to rural
settlements brought with it a new localism. The active long-distance trade of the
Mediterranean slowed down, but did not stop. Inland, however, most people had to make do
,with local handmade wares, as regional networks of exchange eroded long-distance
connections. For some, the disconnection for the rural landscape from the wider world was
far less clear, and archeologists have found numerous artifacts buried with the dead in
Europe, which must have arrived from Byzantium or even further. There appears to have
been a lively international exchange between East and West that continued throughout this
period.
The Western church in the new order:
Among the rich who took advantage of this relatively abundant material culture were
bishops. They often rose to episcopal status in their twilight years, after they had married
and sired children to inherit their estates. Landlords, kings and queens, warriors and
courtiers controlled and monopolized most of the rest of the wealth of the West, largely
based on land. Monasteries too were becoming important landowners. Monks were not quite
laity (since they devoted their life to religion), but also not quite clergy (since they were only
rarely ordained as priests), but very much admired. It is often been said that Saint Antony
was the first monk, and like him, monks practiced a daily martyrdom, giving up their wealth,
family ties and worldly offices. Monks lived in communities and in obedience to a rule. In
Italy, Saint Benedict wrote the most famous monastic rule of all and in the ninth century it
was adopted as the official rule of the Carolingian Empire and became the monastic norm in
the West. The Benedictine Rule insisted on the key citrus of obedience and humility. Dividing
the day into periods of prayer, reading and labor, the chief of its activities was the “liturgy”,
not just the Mass, but also formal worship seven times a day and once at night. Benedict’s
monastery, Monte Cassino, was in the shadow of Rome, far enough to be an escape from
society, but near enough to link it to the popes. Monasteries became partners of the wealthy
and powerful and benefited from their largess. The monks were seen as models of virtue,
and their prayers were thought to reach God’s ear. It was crucial to ally with them. Little by
little the Christian religion was domesticated to meet the needs of the new order.
Retrenchment in the East:
After 476, the “new order” in the East was less obvious. There was still an emperor with
authority; the towns continued to thrive and the small-town elite went off to Constantinople,
and taxes were collected more efficiently than ever. For the first time, the emperor issued a
compendium of Roman Laws. The ‘Theodosian Code’ was published in 438. Western
barbarian codes tried to match this, but were overshadowed by the legal initiatives of
Justinian, the ‘Codex Justinianus’ and the ‘Digest’, a compilation of Roman juridical thought
from the pre-imperial period onward. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the Eastern Empire
recalibrated its priorities. No policy could fully meet the challenge of the first recorded
pandemic, caused by the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis. It hit Justinian’s empire in 541
and lasted for 200 years. Coupled with cold climate change, it made things in the East
worse. Justinian still financed efforts to recover North Africa and Italy, in which he
succeeded, but it left the economy crippling and his successors could not hold on to it.
Above all, Justinian took on the image of concentrated power associated with the ceremony
and pomp of the Persian kings, combining it with an exalted role in the Church. In the wake
of fearsome popular tax revolts against his rule, he embarked on an extensive building
program of churches, hospitals and poor houses, and built the Hagia Sophia. After
conquering Italy from the Ostrogoths, Justinian asserted his rule at Ravenna, and he found
allies in the Christians living there who had chafed under the Arian Ostrogoths, and made
his presence in permanent in the main church, San Vitale Ravenna became a center of early
, Christendom, the “Romans” of the East held on to it and its impregnable position and
location near a major port allowed to become a linchpin of East-West connectivity. Yet, the
Eastern Roman Empire focussed mainly on the Sassanid Empire in the East.
H2. The Emergence of sibling cultures (..600-c.750).
The rise of the Islam and its triumph over territories dominated by Rome or Persia is the first
astonishing fact of the seventh and eighth centuries. The second is the persistence of the
Roman Empire, both politically, in the Byzantine Empire, and culturally, in the Islamic world
and Europe. By 750 three distinct and nearly separate civilizations, Byzantine, European and
Islamic crystallized in and around the old Roman Empire.
Saving Byzantium:
The Byzantines called themselves Romans, and their state was Romanìa. War with the
Sasanids and Arabs transformed Byzantium. By 700, Byzantium had lost all its territories in
North Africa and Spain. It did hold on to bits of Italy and Greece, but in the main it had
become a medium-sized state.
Sources of resiliency:
Byzantium survived because of its capital Constantinople. The emperor and his officials
continued to collect traditional land taxes from their provinces, which allowed the state to pay
regular salaries to its soldiers, sailors and officials. Their navy patrolled the Mediterranean
Sea, with its Greek fire. Their armies were pulled back from the frontiers in the face of the
Arab invaders and were set up as large regional defensive units within the Empire. Called
strategai, they were led by strategoi, appointed by the emperors.
Invasion and their consequences:
When Byzantine Emperor Maurice was deposed by Phocas in 602, Persian king Chosroes
took advantage and invaded Byzantine. By 604, he had captured and in 606/607 he
conquered Theodosopiolis in Armenia, in 614 Damascus, Jerusalem in 614 and Alexandria
in 619. Due to the efforts of Emperor Herclius, all territories were back in Byzantine hands by
630, but the cities were depopulated and ruined and both Sasanid and Byzantine troops and
revenues were exhausted. The Slavs moved into the Balkans, and around 670 the Bulgars
too, began moving into Bulgaria, defeating Byzantine armies. By 700 the Balkan Peninsula
was no longer controlled by Byzantium.
Decline of urban centers and retrenchment in the countryside:
The city-based Greco-Roman culture on which the Byzantine Empire was constructed had
long been giving way, which was hastened by invasions, raids and the Plague. Many urban
centers disappeared or reinvented themselves. Some became fortresses; others
abandoned; others remained as skeletal administrative centers. Old civic centers were
turned into churches and cities were no longer the hubs of Byzantine life. Constantinople’s
population did shrink too, and formerly inhabited areas within the walls were abandoned or
turned into farms. Constantinople did however, as capital of Byzantine Church and state,
hold a thriving upper class composed of people attached to both the imperial court and the
clerical elite. Although Byzantium’s economic life became increasingly rural in the seventh
and eighth centuries, institutions vital to urban growth remained at Constantinople, ensuring
a revival of commercial activity once the wars ended. With the decline of the cities came the
rise of the countryside. Agriculture had all along been the backbone of the Byzantine
