Chris Wickham
Author of The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000
About the Author
Chris Wickham is Chichele Professor of Medieval History at All Souls College, Oxford
Series
Works by Chris Wickham
Sleepwalking into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century (2015) 49 copies
Medieval Rome: Stability and Crisis of a City, 900-1150 (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History) (2013) 48 copies
Marxist History-writing for the Twenty-first Century (British Academy Occasional Papers) (2007) — Editor — 20 copies
Community and clientele in twelfth-century Tuscany : the origins of the rural commune in the plain of Lucca (1998) 5 copies
Medieval Europe 1 copy
Associated Works
Theory and Practice in Late Antique Archaeology (Late Antiquity Archaeology, 1) (2003) — Contributor — 15 copies
Byzantium in the ninth century : dead or alive? : papers from the thirtieth Spring Symposium of Byzantine studies,… (1998) — Contributor — 7 copies
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society - Sixth Series, Volume 02 (1992) — Contributor, some editions — 5 copies
The Introduction of Christianity into the Early Medieval Insular World: Converting the Isles I (Cultural Encounters in… (2016) — Contributor — 5 copies
Visions of community in the post-Roman world : the West, Byzantium and the Islamic world, 300-1100 (2012) — Contributor — 5 copies
Images of the Byzantine World: Visions, Messages and Meanings. Studies presented to Leslie Brubaker (2011) — Contributor — 4 copies
Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough (Medieval Mediterranean) (2000) — Contributor — 4 copies
Actes: Col•loqui Corona, Municipis I: Fiscalitat a la Baixa Edat Mitjana (1996) — Contributor — 1 copy
Between Text and Territory: Survey and Excavations in the Terra of San Vincenzo al Volturno (Archaeological Monographs) (2007) — Contributor — 1 copy
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Wickham, Christopher John
- Birthdate
- 1950-05-18
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- UK
- Education
- Millfield School, Somerset, England, UK
University of Oxford (Keble College) - Occupations
- historian
university professor - Relationships
- Brubaker, Leslie (spouse)
- Organizations
- University of Birmingham
- Awards and honors
- Fellow, British Academy (1998)
Fellow, Learned Society of Wales
Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford
Members
Reviews
Lists
Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 23
- Also by
- 20
- Members
- 2,088
- Popularity
- #12,317
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 28
- ISBNs
- 89
- Languages
- 9
- Favorited
- 3
Another thing about the book is it covers all of the medieval European kingdoms, not just the biggest or best known. I found it interesting how kings borrowed organising hacks from other places. To take an example, Hungary:
"Hungary was another kingdom whose history was converging with those of its neighbours. It had settled down after its origins as a raiding nomadic power in the tenth century. Stephen I (997-1038) had adopted Christianity, and it was also he who began to borrow infrastructure from the Frankish world [i.e. from Gaul /Francia, ( France) ] - not just bishoprics, but counties - to turn his dynastic hegemony into something more organised. "(p. 146)
Bishops are an interesting subject. Bishops were an innovation of the Christian late Roman Empire. They'd been important then. But it wasnt until after the fall of the Roman Empire (in the west, in the east it continued as Byzantium), in the early middle ages, that they became big political players: "Cathedral churches became rich in land donated by the faithful, which made any bishop more powerful as soon as he took office. Bishops gained further spiritual authority from the cult of the relics of the saints, which developed in the fifth century and onwards, for they tended to be in charge of the churches which contained them."(p.31)
(Still on Hungary:)" Still more than in England, the king managed to establish himself as the overwhelmingly dominant landowner, which made his patronage crucial for all local powers. There was still the risk that counts would appropriate that land (and they did), but the king kept the strategic edge, despite frequent wars of succession. "
When the Roman Empire fell (again, in the west,), its breakup meant a break from an imperial political system based on tax collection, into smaller kingdoms with with miltarised land-owning aristocracies extracting rent from the peasant (farmer) population who were on it. Kings would parcel out land, in return for loyalty and oaths .
The system was honour-based. The author gives a striking example. In the summer of 1159, Henry II, King of England started rollin' towards Toulouse in France with a massive army to capture it. He'd sworn an oath to the French King, but he had a pretty good claim to it through his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. What the French king, Louis VII (1137-80) did in response was ride down to Toulouse fast with a skeleton crew and hole up there correctly gambling that Henry wouldn't attack with him present :"Henry was stuck. If he attacked his lord who he had sworn to defend, what value were his barons' own oaths to him? And what would he do with a captured king who was his lord? So he did not attack, and after a summer of ravaging simply retreated. Henry, one of the two most powerful monarchs in western Europe, could not risk being seen as an oath-breaker, and preferred to lose prestige - a lot of prestige - as a failed strategist instead. " (p. 9-10).
(Hungary:)" Twelfth-century kings fought aggressive external wars, in Croatia and Russia, and that momentum, plus the wealth from silver mines, allowed Béla III (1172-96) to reorganise government, borrowing from German and probably Byzantine examples; a chance surviving document shows him with very considerable wealth by twelfth-century standards, probably greater than that of the Kings of England or France, from Land, silver, and tolls on exchange. "(p. 146)
The German example is described a couple of pages later: " the revived power of Frederick Barbarossa, who could intervene throughout Germany, including in 1180 bringing down his greatest aristocrat, Henry 'the Lion', duke of both Bavaria and Saxony. "(p. 149)
(Hungary :) "It is true that Andrew (1205-35) chose a different political path, ceding substantial lands to flavoured aristocrats; a failed crusade and revolts against his landed policies forced him to agree the Golden Bull of 1222, which protected (as in England, but still more so), the rights of different strata of the aristocracy from the king. " (p. 146)
England is a reference to Magna Carta (1215), which King John (1199-1216), “an able administrator but a terrible politician in almost all fields" had to agree to, after he screwed up the reconquering of his French lands, and half his aristocracy staged an uprising.
(Hungary:) "His son Béla IV (1235-70) tried to reverse this, but the Mongol invasion of 1241-42, which nearly destroyed the kingdom until the attackers withdrew, showed all Hungarians that defence in depth was crucial, and the resultant new system of castles was above all aristocrat controlled. " (p. 147)
One point to note at this point is that, as the author writes in the first chapter," Peasants do not appear on every page of this book, by any means ;but almost everything which does was paid for by the surplus which they handed over, more or less unwillingly, in rent..." (p. 16)
And "We have plenty of accounts of the often repellent things lords were capable of doing to recalcitrant peasants - destruction and expropriation of goods, beating, cutting off of limbs, torture - which in the case of torture was generally recounted in tones of disgust by our sources, but about which in the case of beating and mutilation the accounts are more matter-of-fact. (The sources were largely written by clerics, who did not like aristocratic bad behaviour; but they tended to like assertive peasants still less.)... Violence was... implicit throughout medieval agrarian society. Peasants did sometimes resist all the same, and sometimes even succeed in resisting ; but for the most part they were and remained subjected to lords. "(p. 14-15.)
The Church was concerned with heresy. Even a future saint came under suspicion: Catherine of Sienna, Christian mystic given to extreme asceticism, drinking pus and going without food or sleep. Died in 1380 at the age of thirty-three. Advisor to Pope Gregory XI, and formally attached to the Dominican order, she nevertheless was "tested by panels of ecclesiastics more than once." (p. 187)
The author gives an example of another mystic, Margery Kempe, (d.after 1439) of King's Lynn in Norfolk, whose practice was based on "public weeping and crying out, especially in religious contexts, on self-humiliation, and on intense visions of Christ, with whom she went through a visionary marriage when on pilgrimage in Rome." (p. 188) Against the background of worry about the heretical " Lollard" movement she was hauled in front of bishops several times.
Most famously, Joan of Arc, peasant girl whose access to saintly voices was used by Charles VII of France to inspire his troops, was burnt at the stake by the English in 1431, an earlier forerunner of mid - fifteenth-century witchcraft panic victims.… (more)