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The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade QUOTES

The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade QUOTES

1 " Pippin ordered Childeric III tonsured and sent to a monastery, where he died five years later, the last of the Merovingians. "

― Susan Wise Bauer , The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

2 " Pippin was crowned the first king of the Carolingian dynasty in the city of Soissons, in a brand-new sacred ceremony that involved anointing with holy oil in the manner of an Old Testament theocratic king.* "

― Susan Wise Bauer , The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

3 " The Huns had arrived at the distant edges of the western world. To the Romans, who had never seen them, they were as frightening as earthquake and tsunami, an evil force that could barely be resisted. Historians of the time had no idea exactly where these frightening newcomers came from, but they were sure it was somewhere awful. The Roman historian Procopius insists that they were descended from witches who had sexual congress with demons, producing Huns: a “stunted, foul and puny tribe, scarcely human and having no language save one which bore but slight resemblance of human speech. "

― Susan Wise Bauer , The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

4 " the twelfth-century Song of Roland, which turns the bloody incident into a major conspiracy between the Arabs of Zaragoza and a traitor within Charlemagne’s own camp. "

― Susan Wise Bauer , The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

5 " To be female and on the throne during the collapse of a Medieval Kingdom generally elicited accusations of lust, corruption, and general visciousness., The queen's sex life becomes a convenient explanation for the end of an era. "

― Susan Wise Bauer , The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

6 " He was forty years old, and for six years he had been struggling to claim the crown of the imperator. Less than twenty-four hours before, he had finally beaten the sitting emperor of Rome, twenty-nine-year-old Maxentius, at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Constantine’s men had fought their way forward across the bridge, toward the city of Rome, until the defenders broke and ran. Maxentius drowned, pulled down into the mud of the riverbed by the weight of his armor. The Christian historian Lactantius tells us that Constantine’s men marched into Rome with the sign of Christ marked on each shield; the Roman* writer Zosimus adds that they also carried Maxentius’s waterlogged head on the tip of a spear. Constantine had dredged the body up and decapitated it.1 "

― Susan Wise Bauer , The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade

7 " The founding of the military orders was the closing act of the drama begun by Constantine at the Milvian Bridge. Marching into Rome under the banner of the cross, he had taken a powerful and mysterious theology and bent it to his own purposes. It had promised unity; he needed unification. It had promised ultimate victory; he needed earthly victory at once. It had promised an identity that transcended nationality and language; he had needed to overcome nationalism. Most of all, he needed to convince his soldiers, the people of Rome, and the enemies who threatened him that he was driven by something higher and more noble than simple ambition. Probably he needed to convince himself as well.

Christianity gave Constantine freedom from guilt over his conquests at the same time that it lent him the zeal he needed to pursue them. Seven hundred years later, the military orders did exactly the same thing for the men who joined them and gave them a rule to spell out precisely what they would gain. That marriage of spiritual gain and political power would shape the next five centuries and the painful and protracted divorce between the two the centuries after that. "

― Susan Wise Bauer , The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade