Medieval Europe Quotes

“There is a common medieval literary trope, and some actual cases, of enemies being invited to a meal to make peace, and then being killed while eating and drinking; it may have been a sensible strategy, for people’s guards were down, but it was very dishonourable indeed.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Europe was now more economically complex, as we have seen; with that complexity came ambiguities of all kinds. And it is in societies where complexity and ambiguity give space for pragmatic solutions that women have in general found it most possible to negotiate space for their own protagonism.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“The history of Christian Europe has been studded with religious reform movements; they, so to speak, come with the territory of a religion based on an extremely long sacred text, the Bible, some of whose sections advocate moral values opposed to those of any political system or religious structure which has ever existed,”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“The history of Christian Europe has been studded with religious reform movements; they, so to speak, come with the territory of a religion based on an extremely long sacred text, the Bible, some of whose sections advocate moral values opposed to those of any political system or religious structure which has ever existed, and which attentive readers can discover and rediscover at any time.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Christianity spread across northern Europe more or less from west to east, slowly, but with greater speed after 950 or so. Ireland was first, in the fifth and sixth centuries; there followed Pictish Scotland, England and central Germany in the seventh century, Saxony – by force as we have seen – after Charlemagne’s conquests in the eighth, Bulgaria, Croatia and Moravia in the ninth, Bohemia in the tenth, Poland, Rus’ (covering parts of European Russia and Ukraine) and Denmark in the late tenth, Norway, Iceland and Hungary in the years around 1000, Sweden more slowly across the eleventh century.3 Only the far north-east of Europe was left out of this, the Baltic- and Finnish-speaking lands, the former of which would eventually, in the thirteenth century, turn into the only large and powerful pagan polity in medieval Europe, Lithuania, before its grand dukes went Christian as late as 1386–87.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“The veneration of sacred portraits – icons – has been an essential element of Orthodox Christianity ever since, and marked Byzantine religious culture until the empire’s end.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“from the 680s onwards references to a cult of religious images; such images had long existed too, but from now on they were regarded by many in a new way, as windows into the holy presence of the saint (or of Christ) depicted in them.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“This was the context, a moderately optimistic one except in the 810s and 820s, for one of the most interesting Christian conflicts of the middle ages, over the power of religious images.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“did the Arabs actually create Europe itself, by breaking the unity of the Roman and post-Roman Mediterranean and separating out the European coasts from the Asian and African ones (with some fuzziness at the margin, the Arabs in al-Andalus and the Byzantines in Anatolia being the most obvious in this period)?”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Arabic language and Muslim religion which eventually won out, in all the areas of the caliphate except Iran.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“They were certainly well led, however; and, as with the Germanic peoples two centuries before, it is likely that many Arabs had experience in the Roman and Persian armies (even if the main Roman-federated tribe, the Ghassanids, fought on the side of Heraclius).”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Arabs had always been until then a marginal border people, used as mercenaries at best, but no meaningful threat – there was hardly even an armed defence on the largely desert Arabian frontier. They could hope that it would be reversed, but when the first Arab civil war of 656–61 did not lead to the break-up of the coherence of the new caliphate, and Arab raiding into Anatolia increased instead, it became clearer that the new political order was here to stay. The Romans did not understand what Islam was yet – it was initially seen as a simplified form of Christianity, not a new religion – but, either way, given the way east Roman political imagery now worked, this was as much a religious catastrophe as a military one, since the victorious Arabs were certainly not Orthodox Christians.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“the Christian churches of Armenia, Lebanon and Egypt are still Monophysite today.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“homicide levels in English medieval villages matched those of the most violent US cities of the twentieth century.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“the annual presentation of a county’s accounts by its sheriff to the Exchequer, so named because a chequerboard was used as an abacus by the royal treasurer to check the figures while the sheriff watched”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“the appearance of Scandinavian Vikings in Ireland, Britain and Francia.”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“(it was the first time a pope had ever come north of the Alps),”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“called the Council of Hiereia to condemn image veneration. A few such images in churches seem to have been destroyed and replaced by crosses, which were for Constantine fully acceptable, because symbolic, objects of veneration. (Most holy portraits were not destroyed, however, as far as we can tell today.)”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“The ‘Abbasid family would hold the caliphal title for centuries to come, until it was seized from them by the Ottomans in 1517,”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“caliphs (khalifa means ‘deputy’ – that is to say, of God), ruled”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“what early Muslims thought their religion was is likely to have been highly various.16 But what was”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“These were conquests that were never reversed, and they affected the whole geopolitics of Europe and Asia ever after.7”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe

“Данте в своей «Монархии» приводит расхожее проклятие: «Пусть у тебя в доме будет тебе равный»”
― Крис Уикхем, Средневековая Европа: От падения Рима до Реформации (Medieval Europe)

“Peasants carried knives, and used them; homicide levels in English medieval villages matched those of the most violent US cities of the twentieth century.21”
― Chris Wickham, Medieval Europe