Roger Collins

The new Constantine

It is doubtful if any of the participants in the dramatic imperial coronation in St Peter’s on Christmas Day in the year 800 knew for certain what they were doing or precisely where it was intended to lead.1 This is true even in the literal sense, since there had been no imperial ordination in the West since the fifth century and the liturgical procedures followed were new and neither traditional nor borrowed from the Byzantine Empire. The use of a crown was unprecedented and was not to be a feature of imperial investitures in Constantinople before the tenth century. Thus the Roman Church invented its own rites for the occasion.2

The Last Crusade in the West: Castile and the Conquest of Granada

Like its two predecessors in this trilogy of books on Crusade and Reconquista in medieval Spain this is a work that could be described as the historiographical equivalent of a swan on a pond. Above...

Rome, Canterbury And Wearmouth-Jarrow: Three Viewpoints On Augustine’s Mission

The mission sent from Rome to Kent by Gregory the Great in 596 is one of the best-documented episodes in the history of conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Bede?s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum , completed by around 731, compiles a narrative account, based in part on materials obtained from the papal archives and from the traditions of the see founded by Augustine at Canterbury. Additionally, archaeology has in recent years revealed quite a lot about late sixth-century Rome, something of late and post-Roman Canterbury, and rather more of the joint monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow in which Bede lived. Bede?s narrative of the Synod of Augustine?s Oak describes the unsuccessful attempt by Augustine to impose the metropolitan authority over the seven British bishops with which the pope had invested him. Keywords: Augustine; Bede; Canterbury; Gregory; Rome; Wearmouth-Jarrow

Continuity and Loss in Medieval Spanish Culture: the Evidence of MS Silos, Archivo Monástico 4

While the theme of Convivencia is normally conceived of in terms of the relationships between the different ethnic and cultural communities that co-existed in the Iberian peninsula for much of the Middle Ages, it would not be inappropriate also to consider it in the light of how far each community could tolerate the existence of variety within itself. In particular, to what extent, if at all, could alternative forms of Christianity coexist within the same society? This question relates not least to the survival of long-established indigenous traditions of religious thought and practice in Spain, stretching back to Late Antiquity, whose continuance was threatened in the later eleventh and twelfth centuries, and whose ensuing elimination has rightly been seen as marking the most significant rupture in the development of medieval Spanish Christian culture.1 Such a theme, concerning itself with the conflicts over and the eventual demise of the so-called Visigothic or Mozarabic script, art, liturgy, and intellectual tradition, can hardly be treated as a whole here. However, an approach through one particular codex may at least serve to illustrate both long term continuities and their demise.

Decadent and do-nothing kings

The unpalatable fact that in any given battle one side or the other tends to win or at least gain the advantage was not fully understood by those who used to wish to characterise the final stages of the Visigothic kingdom in Spain as decadent, and who saw the proof of this in the rapidity of its overthrow. This was a view that was once common amongst historians of Visigothic Spain, and has only relatively recently been finally put to rest. If anything, quite the contrary conclusion can be drawn from the ‘battle in the Transductine Promontories’ between the Visigothic royal army and the Arab invaders in 711 and the collapse of central authority in the kingdom which resulted from it.1 It was the extraordinary achievement of the Visigothic kings and their advisers, above all a series of outstanding bishops, that in land as geographically and culturally diverse and presenting such problems of movement and communication as the Iberian peninsula, they had been able not only to impose their own central authority but had created structures and institutions that maintained it for well over a century.2

Frontier societies: Christian Spain, 711–1037

The Arab and Berber conquest of the Iberian peninsula that had commenced in 711 had been extremely rapid. By 714 the conquerors had reached the Ebro valley, sacking Zaragoza, its principal city, and in 720 they crossed the Pyrenees, and eliminated a vestigial Visigothic kingdom centred on Narbonne. In part the lack of sustained resistance that they encountered prior to their first attacks on Aquitaine in 721 was a reflection of the previously peaceful and also relatively centralised nature of the Spanish Visigothic kingdom. There had not been the kind of external threats to the integrity of the realm in the seventh century that had been faced in the sixth, and unlike that of Francia, the society of Visigothic Spain had not needed to be one that was primarily organised for war. The Iberian peninsula also benefited from naturally defensible land frontiers, which were far removed from the principal court centre of Toledo.

The re-creating of Britain

Britain is often treated as being very different to other regions of the former western Empire in respect of its history in the centuries following the end of Roman rule. In part this is a reflection of the insularity of the English historiographical tradition, but it is also a reaction to genuine dissimilarities in the development of Britain and other parts of Western Europe. However, these may be fewer and less significant than is usually believed. It is only when British conditions are seen in comparison with those of the rest of Western Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries that a proper perspective on British history at this time can be achieved.

The Ottonian Age

Although the threat of a major Arab incursion into Western Europe never resurrected itself after the early eighth century, seaborne raids, not least linked to slave trading, presented a serious problem in the Mediterranean regions. Spanish Arab and Berber raids on the Balearic Islands in 798 led to their putting themselves under Frankish protection in 799, but by the middle of the ninth century at the latest they were under Arab rule.1 Charlemagne is reported to have had to take precautions against Arab raids along the southern coast of France in the latter part of his reign. By the middle of the ninth century, just as Viking raids were intensifying in the north, so in the south Arab pirates were employing similar tactics. In 840, 850 and 869 they conducted large-scale raids up the RhOne, in search of slaves or those, such as the Bishop of Arles, whom they could hold to ransom.2 Similar problems had already been encountered in Italy. In 806 raids were launched against Corsica, then part of the Italian kingdom ruled by Charles’s son Pippin, and these were soon extended to Sardinia and the Italian mainland. These raids, unlike those on the Balearics, came from Africa.

The Arab Conquest

The rise of Islam and the creation during the seventh and early eighth centuries of an Arab empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Punjab, transformed the political and cultural geography of the Mediterranean and the Near East. Arguably, these events represent the most important developments in Europe and western Asia during the whole of the first millennium AD.1 However, for changes of such magnitude, they have left all too little record of themselves in terms of surviving contemporary evidence. Early society in the Arabian peninsula was pre-literate, though enjoying a well developed tradition of complex and formal oral poetic composition.2 With the exception of the Qu’rān, the record of successive divine revelations to the Prophet Muhammad in the years c.610 to 632, and traditionally held to have been compiled in written form c.650, there is no extant Arabic literature securely dateable to earlier than the late eighth century. Moreover, the accounts of even these, the first available Arabic histories of the origins and spread of Islam have recently been subjected to harsh criticism, which has fractured whatever degree of academic consensus there once existed in the field of modern Islamic studies.3

The Arab Conquest of Spain, 710-797.

List of Abbreviations. Preface. 1. A Developing Kingdom. The Visigoth Twilight? Visigothic Hispania and its Neighbours. 2. Adjusting to Conquest. Problems of Evidence and Interpretation. Military Occupation and the Restoration of Order. 3. The Tenacity of a Tradition. Christian Chroniclers and Arab Rulers. Toledo and the Spanish Church. 4. The Conquerors Divided. A Peaceful Decade in the Peninsula. Wars with the Franks. Arab versus Berber Arab versus Arab. 5. The Rise of an Adventurer. The Making of a Dynastic Legend. The Umayyad Coup da etat. 6. A Dynasty of Opportunities. Pelagius and the Asturian Revolt. The Kingdoma s Opponents: Muslims and Christians. 7. The Maturing of a Regime. The March to the Ebro. The a Arab Loevigilda . Administration and Control. 8. Some Winners and Some Losers. The Struggle for the Succession. The Return of the Franks. Adoptionism and the Decline of Toledo. Index.