Strategy is a not a word not often used in connection with early medieval warfare ,which is often seen as mere feud or the gathering of loot. This was strongly reinforced by the widespread attitude that military history was a fit subject only for military academies. Only recently has it been recognised that war in this period was the subject of thought, care and calculation. Moreover, early medieval sources are relatively scarce and often pose difficulties of interpretation. And armies had no continuous institutional life of the kind we associate with the formation of strategic ideas. Nor were kings able to impose a monopoly of violence on their followers, for early medieval states were fragile and highly dependent upon the accidents of individual ability. The armies which were gathered were not unitary, but assemblages of diverse elements whose political relation to the sovereign was problematic. But although writing about strategy poses challenges, it is evident that military commanders in this period were not mere bloodthirsty brutes. An army, even a small one, represented a huge financial and political investment whose raising could only be justified by some substantial purpose. But the nature of medieval strategy was conditioned by the political structures which created it. A world where dynastic continuity and political stability were closely intertwined, and where kings were rulers of peoples rather than territories, gave birth to a very different kind of strategic outlook from our own.

The book is devoted to the relationships between Nicene and Homoian Christianities in the context of broader religious and social changes in post-Roman societies from the end of the fourth to the seventh century. The main analytical and interpretative tools used in this study are religious conversion and ecclesiastical competition. It examines sources discussing Nicene–Homoian encounters in Vandal Africa, Gothic and Lombard Italy, Gaul, and Hispania – regions where the polities of the Goths, Suevi, Burgundians, and Franks emerged. It explores the extent to which these encounters were shaped by various religious policies and political decisions rooted in narratives of conversion and confessional rivalry. Through this analysis, the aim is to offer a nuanced interpretation of how Christians in the successor kingdoms handled religious dissent and how these actions manifested in social practices.

Chapter 7 is focused on conversions in a family context, collecting and comparing evidence from Gaul, Hispania, and Italy. The starting point is an examination of the secular and ecclesiastical rules governing interdenominational marriages and the differences in church loyalty between parents and children. Then the conclusions drawn from the normative sources are connected with what we know about the social reality of ‘mixed’ families. Given the nature of our evidence, the chapter focuses primarily on marriages and conversions in royal contexts. It analyses the examples from the ruling house of Suevi, marriages in the Burgundian family of Gibichungs, and marriages between the Visigothic and Frankish ruling families.

This charter from Æthelbald of Mercia to abbess Eadburg of Thanet in Kent shows the high regard in which the abbess was held. She is granted remission on the tax due for a ship she has bought, perhaps indicating that she was involved in trade with the Frankish regions across the English Channel.

The three subchapters illustrate, how the authors from the Medieval period down to the fifth century have heavily relied on Eusebius of Caesarea’s Church history to writing their own beginnings of Christianity. In addition, they drew heavily on pseudonymous material outside the New Testament canon which they largely ignored. Driven by the challenges of their own times and in answering questions of their own days they developed the beginnings of Christianity from Frankish and late Roman perspectives. In these, vernacular, Greek and Roman cultural elements were deeply inter-related and re-projected into earlier times, while Christianity became regarded as the filter through which to perceive and judge the past.

This chapter introduces the formulas as a source genre and in particular the manuscript and formula collection that occupies the center of this study: Paris, BNF ms. lat. 2123 and the formulas from Flavigny. It also introduces the concepts “early medieval Europe” and “early medieval laity,” in order to frame the questions that shape the book. The chapter briefly describes how the category “lay” even came to exist; that is, how and when a category “clerical” distilled out of late and post-Roman Christian society and came by the Carolingian period to separate clergy and monks from laypeople. From there it moves into what we know about how lay people lived their lives in post-Roman and early medieval Frankish Europe, and what remains unknown that makes it worth writing a new book about. The chapter then sets the Flavigny formulas in the context of the other Carolingian formula collections, presenting it (and them) as a gateway into a different world. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the steps we need to open the gate and to understand what we see on the other side, and the topics we will explore when we get there.

The chapter investigates why the Carolingian conquerors were unable to give their kingdom in Italy a name able to represent its original political identity.

Within their projects of religious beliefs and practices’ standardization, Carolingian rulers looked to Rome as an area providing authoritative traditions, norms and objects. Roman saints and their relics perfectly matched the Carolingian politics on sanctity and its exploitation. Yet Roman relics were not the only ones circulating in the empire. For instance, relics of different origins were assignedimportant roles in the social and political integration of Italian local elites within the landscape of Carolingian power. This chapter focusses on north-eastern Italy, underlining how its Carolingian bishops and counts used and promoted saints and relics by the means of hagiographical texts in order to raise consensus for themselves and the authority they represented. First I consider the use of local saints by the bishops of Verona as tools for self-legitimation and for pursuing personal aims. Then I turn to the role of hagiography in the dispute for primacy between Aquileia and Grado, a case of contrasting re-elaborations of previous texts and traditions in order to support claims in the present. Finally, attention is paid to the transfer of a Roman holy body to Cysoing by marquis Eberhard of Friuli, and to the strategies of memorial reshaping connected to it.

The history of war in the Scandinavian world is inseparable from the history of the Vikings. The stereotype of Norse violence, still prevalent today, was fostered by contemporary writers such as Alcuin, who lamented the strike on Lindisfarne in his native Northumbria (793 ce) as a pagan contamination of Christian society. ‘The heathens’, he wrote to the monks there, ‘have stained the sanctuaries of God, poured forth the blood of the saints all around the altar, laid waste to the house of our hope, and trodden upon the bodies of the saints in the temple of God as if they were dung in the street. What can I say except to lament in spirit with you before the altar of Christ and say “spare your people, Lord, spare your people, and do not give your inheritance to the pagans lest they might say where is the God of the Christians”?’ A century later, a horrified Abbo of St Germain-des-Près recounted how so many Viking longships went down the Seine to Paris that the river itself seemed to have disappeared. According to the view presented in medieval sources from the British Isles and France and replicated in modern textbooks and popular histories, Scandinavians were decidedly ‘other’ to the Europe they plundered.

Before c.600, Western European military forces were recognisably descended from the last western Roman armies, as can quickly be demonstrated. Late Roman troops had sometimes been paid via the delegation of fiscal revenues and, as earlier, received allotments of land on retirement.1 Their hereditary service,2 furthermore, exempted them from certain taxes. In the fourth and fifth centuries a series of military identities evolved, based around oppositions to traditional civic Roman ideals. These turned on ideas of barbarism, enhanced by possibly increased recruitment beyond the frontiers and greater opportunities for non-Roman soldiers to rise to higher command.3 As the territory effectively governed from Ravenna, the imperial capital, shrank during the fifth century, and with it the available taxation and recruiting bases, the enlistment, and political pre-eminence, of warriors from outside the empire grew further.4

The Crusades have always been a focus of historical attention. William of Tyre (c.1130–86) wrote a great history of the crusades in Latin which was so well received that in the early thirteenth century it was translated into French and extended in many versions to cover the period after 1186. The French version was so popular that the Renaissance scholar, Francesco Pipino, unaware of the original, translated it back into Latin, while Caxton produced an English version in the fifteenth century.1 Many of the earlier crusader chronicles, notably Robert the Monk’s account of the First Crusade, were also very popular in the Middle Ages and were edited very early in the age of print, notably in the great collection by Jacques Bongars in 1611.2 In modern times the crusades have always been a contentious subject, as President George Bush discovered when he referred to a ‘crusade against terrorism’ shortly after 9/11.

Surveys political events in the second half of the eighth century as Rome, in the face of continued Lombard attacks, shifts its political ties from the emperor in Constantinople to the Franks, culminating with the coronation of the Frankish king Charlemagne as Roman ‘emperor’ in December 800

This chapter presents a number of contact zones in the spectrum of violence, zones around which the fears, anxieties, concerns and aspirations provoked by instances of violence and their representation were concentrated. I discuss the following scenes of violence: The War Against Time; Apocalypse; The Anxiety of Remembrance; Abomination; The Nonhuman World; Spectacle. These zones do not constitute categories of violence but, like violence itself, are porous and mimetic. The temporal focus of the survey covers some six centuries, from the pre-Islamic sixth century to the twelfth century and the Crusades.

The early Middle Ages is often portrayed as a time when families, not political structures, ruled. In contrast, I demonstrate that noble kinship groups and networks were integrated into institutions and ideas of a common political order. Dependence worked both ways. Kings were dependent upon major noble networks and nobles were legitimated by their roles as public actors and public warriors. Towards the end of this period, we also see the growth of a sense of responsibility for the common polity, the realm, even in the absence of kings. The chapter concludes that there was no principled opposition between kinship groups and the polity, between the aristocracy and the king – rather they were mutually dependent. However, since kinship groups were so informal, political institutions were also very informal and elusive. This teaches us that formalization of families was a key to the formalization of political structures.