Quotes from Chris Wickham

he sacked Rome in 410, an event which shocked the Roman world much as 11 September 2001 shocked the United States, a huge, upsetting, symbolic blow to its self-confidence; but it was without other repercussions,

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.

To survive, Byzantine society and politics folded itself around the state.

By around 480, as he put it, 'now that the old degrees of official rank are swept away . . . the only token of nobility will henceforth be a knowledge of letters'; the official hierarchy had gone, only traditional Roman culture survived.

Roman envoys to Attila's court in 449 greatly offended the Huns when they said that, although Attila was a man, Theodosius II was a god; this was a self-evident statement in Roman eyes, even though the envoys were doubtless overwhelmingly Christian.

The gods were gone, but imperial status remained unchanged –divinus remained a technical term meaning 'imperial'. The emperor's position was all the more central in that the Roman empire was regarded as, by definition, always victorious, a belief that survived even the disasters of the fifth century.

Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, which was the largest roofed building to be built in Europe until the thirteenth century.

the Christian churches of Armenia, Lebanon and Egypt are still Monophysite today.

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.

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,

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.

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

These were conquests that were never reversed, and they affected the whole geopolitics of Europe and Asia ever after.7

homicide levels in English medieval villages matched those of the most violent US cities of the twentieth century.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

it was the first time a pope had ever come north of the Alps),

caliphs (khalifa means 'deputy' – that is to say, of God), ruled

The 'Abbasid family would hold the caliphal title for centuries to come, until it was seized from them by the Ottomans in 1517,

the appearance of Scandinavian Vikings in Ireland, Britain and Francia.

Archaeological and material evidence is at least free from the constraints of narrative. Archaeologists have indeed sometimes been dismissive of written sources (this was a trend of the 1980s in particular), which only preserve attitudes of literate and thus restricted élites, whereas archaeological excavations and surveys uncover real life, often of the peasantry, who are badly served by texts.

Admittedly, sometimes they were right, as in the gothic events of Christmas 896, when the corpse of Pope Formosus (891–6) was dug up by his enemy and successor Stephen VI and put on trial; but that horrified the Romans, too–Stephen did not survive another year. Normally, Roman violence to losers had its own stately logic.)