Home > Work > The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders
1 " History has all too often been guilty of favouring the viewpoint of autocratic rulers in describing their glorious victories, when there is so much else that needs to be said. "
― Peter Heather , The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes and Imperial Pretenders
2 " Having sliced Odovacar in half in early spring 493, Theoderic ruled his Italian kingdom for the next thirty-three years, until his own death on 30 August 526. "
3 " old visions of an illiterate lay elite in the early Middle Ages have been overturned. "
4 " A handsome dowry went to the Vandal king Thrasamund along with his new bride, Theoderic’s sister Amalafrida, "
5 " In the era of nationalism, the state tended to be viewed in Western historiography as broadly – again in the terms of 1066 & All That – a ‘good thing’, and developments were usually judged according to how they affected the prosperity or otherwise of centres of political authority. "
6 " Because it was relatively small and owned so much, the Roman landowning elite was potentially highly vulnerable to attack from the many who were less fortunate. And when all the bullshit about rational, divinely inspire social order is put to one side, Roman law was all about defining and protecting property rights, so that the state-generated and state-supported legal system was the basic prop of the established elite’s social dominance. This indeed was the quid pro quo which made them willing to raise and pay over taxation in return. "
7 " Claiming to be a unique divinely guided state, destined by the Almighty to bring Christian civilization to the entire globe, lost most of its force after two-thirds of the empire had been conquered by the standard-bearers of a different religion. Fortunately, Judaeo-Christian texts offered another, now more apposite model. From divinely ordained world conquerors, emperors were able to use the Old Testament to morph themselves into the leaders of a Chosen People, riding the Constantinopolitan Ark of salvation through besetting tempests towards final Salvation and Triumph, with apocalypse a recurrently popular genre. "
8 " These exchanges are reported without comment by the East Roman historian Theophylact Simocatta (charmingly, his surname means ‘the one-eyed cat’). "
9 " A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet. "
10 " ...when all the bullshit about rational, divinely inspired social order is put to one side, Roman law was all about defining and protecting property rights... "
