The painting is by Jules Laure (1806-1861). It shows Charlemagne receiving manuscripts from his tutor, the monk Alcuin, around 781.

Charlemagne is a good choice for the cover of the History of the Medieval World; he represents one of the main themes of the book, the growing tendency of kings to claim divine Right instead of mere Might as a justification for conquest and domination. Here’s a brief excerpt from my chapter on Charlemagne:

Charlemagne had gathered around him a royal circle of scholars and clerics who were filling in the early gaps in his education (he had received much more military training than book-learning from his father, and had never learned to write); they not only discussed with him the finer points of theology, philosophy, and grammar, but they called him “King David,” after the Old Testament monarch who was hand-picked by God to lead the chosen people. Under the guidance of his personal tutor Alcuin, a British churchman whom Charlemagne had recruited to teach his sons, the king of the Franks developed a stronger and stronger sense of mission. His conquests were, in his own eyes, forceful evangelism: bringing the Gospel to stubborn unbelievers who needed to be saved not just from their sins but from their own unwillingness to hear.

Earlier in the decade, he had concluded a campaign against the Saxons with exactly this sort of persuasion. The Saxon resistance to his rule and the Saxon toll on his army had so angered him that, in 782, he had ordered 4500 Saxon prisoners to be massacred. Their leader Widukind had escaped, but after three years on the run he had finally been forced to surrender. As part of his surrender, Widukind had to agree to Christian baptism; and afterward Charlemagne decreed that any “unbaptized Saxon who conceals himself among his people and refuses to seek baptism, but rather chooses to remain a pagan shall die.” A Saxon who stole from a church, or did violence to a priest, or indulged himself in the old Saxon rites instead of Christian worship, would be put to death. And any Saxon who did not observe Lent properly would be executed.

To his credit, Alcuin objected. “Abate a little of your threatening,” he told the king, “and do not force them by public compulsion until faith has thoroughly grown in their hearts.” Charlemagne considered the argument and agreed, revoking the death penalty; but this did not change his sense of duty. He was not bringing merely salvation, but right doctrine and practice, to the western world.

Incidentally, my alert colleague Justin points out that the painting is reversed on the cover of the book. I’m not sure why the graphic designer at Norton flipped it; I’m sending a note to find out whether it was intentional.

Anyway, I’m not feeling very prolific this week. After family vacation and back-to-back education conferences, my kind husband suggested that I go away for a few days and try to reconnect with the unfinished part of my medieval history manuscript….which is 1) far too much of the TOTAL medieval history manuscript so far, and 2) at the point where I have to concentrate on it and nothing else for a little while so that I can see my way through the details to the story.

So I’m in Manhattan, working at the Columbia library. Which is a phenomenal place to work and (honesty compels me to add) much more useful than my local university library. Need Charles IV’s autobiography because it has the first version of the Good King Wenceslaus legend in it? Got it. Need an English translation of Constantine Porphyrogenitus’s notes on running the Byzantine empire? Got it. Need all forty volumes of al-Tabari’s history of the Islamic empire? Got all forty, plus an index. Need the Chronicle of John of Worcester, just to check exactly what Rollo the Viking was doing in 909? Got it.

I have all the books I need, no domestic duties for a few days, no schedule to keep, and a dozen great restaurants within walking distance. (Think I’ll try this one around 10 PM tonight, when my eyes give out.) And I’m writing…it’s just SLOOOOW. Not prolific. Far from prolific. Four hours or so to dig out details on a particular people group which then ends up with a single sentence in the final version…except that I didn’t know that it would only be a single sentence when I spent the four hours digging out details.

I mentioned this to my editor. “That,” he said, “does not sound like good calculus.” You think?

Anyway. Back to detail digging. Just for your entertainment, here’s some juicy ninth-century royal gossip for you. (At least PG-13–fair warning before you read.)

MICHAEL III, EMPEROR IN CONSTANTINOPLE, 842-867

Michael III’s troubles were almost entirely self-inflicted. Since the age of fifteen, he had been sleeping with the same woman, his favorite mistress Eudokia Ingerina. However, his mother announced that Ingerina was not an acceptable wife, and instead ordered him to marry a woman she had hand-picked for him, Eudokia Dekapolitissa. Michael seems to have had trouble defying his mother; he agreed to marry Dekapolitissa, and then after the wedding ignored her and went right on sleeping with Ingerina.

The patriarch disapproved of this crowded marriage, and to preserve appearances, Michael married his mistress Ingerina off to his best friend, a horse-trainer from Macedonia named Basil. He continued sleeping with her, however, and so that Basil would not be deprived, he brought one of his sisters back out her nunnery and installed her at court as Basil’s mistress.

What with climbing in and out of each others’ beds, Michael III and Basil became closer, and Basil began to get a glimpse of what real power could be like. He began to suggest to Michael III that Michael’s uncle and heir had a little too much influence around the court, and finally convinced Michael to give him permission to murder the unfortunate man. In his uncle’s place, Michael made Basil his co-emperor and heir. In 867, he also legally adopted Basil as his son; he was twenty-seven, Basil was fifty-six.

This weird adoption made a twisted kind of sense. The year before, Ingerina had given birth to a son. Technically, the child was Basil’s. In all likelihood, he was actually Michael’s. So by adopting Basil, Michael became his illegitimate son’s legitimate grandfather, and the little boy, Leo, had a path to legitimately claim the throne.

Unfortunately, the path led through Basil. Now that he was adopted, co-emperor, and heir, Basil had no more use for Michael. After a drunken banquet one night later in 867, Michael III staggered off to bed; Basil’s men murdered the emperor in his sleep, and Basil claimed the crown for himself as Basil I, founder of the new Macedonian Dynasty.

Dan and Emily built a beautiful block city.

Christopher discovered that Emily fits inside my giant library bag.

Everyone is enjoying nature on this beautiful spring morning.

Well, OK, not quite. But I’m going to chase them all outside in a minute to do their chores.

It’s the last week of April, which means that I start travelling again at the end of the week. Off to New York for a conference, and then into Manhattan for a couple of days to have lunch with my agent and do a bit of research at the NYPL.

I scheduled my summer speaking engagements back in the days when I thought that I might actually have the History of the Medieval World finished by the deadline of May 1. Now my deadline is the end of August, and to meet THAT I’m going to have to work about three times as hard as I’ve ever worked before. (Which is scary.) While still travelling. And without destroying the rest of my life: I refuse to give up home schooling, or cooking fancy dinners for fun, or horseback riding, or working on the farm. So I’ve got to manage to be more efficient within my current working hours.

I reached this conclusion yesterday, after working out a detailed plan for finishing the book. Then I launched my new rigorous plan by sleeping right through my alarm this morning (I was going to do my 4 AM wakeup call…). And I was going to get to work on the Plague of Justinian, too. Here’s where I finished up work on Saturday…

*
The fighting had not gone well for the Byzantine army, but a blacker enemy hovered. In 542, just as Khosru was crossing over the Euphrates for yet another assault on the Byzantine frontier, a ship docked at the Golden Horn. It brought much-needed grain from the mouth of the Nile; the cold dark summers of the previous years had already reduced food supplies, and the population of the eastern Empire was already hungrier and weaker than normal. But not long after the ship threw down its anchor, a sickness began to spread along the waterfront. It was an illness known to the ancients, but new to the people of Constantinople: sudden fever, swellings in the groin and armpit, black pustules and bloody vomit, delirium and coma.
Physicians, dissecting the bodies of the dead in an effort to find the cause, found strange abscesses filled with pus and dead tissue at the center of the swellings. They were at a loss: nothing seemed to stop the spread of the disease. At first, the deaths from the illness were no worse than from any other epidemic making its way through the crowded suburbs of Constantinople. But within days the mortalities had doubled and then doubled again.
This was no mere epidemic. It had become a catastrophe without parallel: a pestilence, writes Procopius, “by which the whole human race came near to being annihilated.”
*

Cool, huh? I love disasters. Well, I’ll get back to it tomorrow. Assuming I can roll out of bed when the alarm goes off.

Pictures from the NY conference coming at the end of the week…

So, in no particular order, here’s what’s occupying the brain of THIS working writer on the first day of December…

1. I’m waiting on the contract from Princeton University Press to be issued, at which point I’ll sign it, return it, and commit myself to delivering the manuscript along with the permissions for all images and quotes by February. (Would be nice for a book on political confessions to come out in the election year, wouldn’t it? When I find out a pub date I’ll let you know.) This means that my assistant Nancy and I are pestering rights departments at a time of year when NOBODY is particularly anxious to provide a quick answer. So far, Nancy is doing wonders at getting folks to call her back. The only completely uncooperative response has been from Jimmy Swaggart’s Family Worship Center, which answered her request for permission to reprint Swaggart’s apology sermon with a flat “No.”

Which I suppose is understandable. However, the sermon was delivered in public and has already been reproduced multiple times, so I don’t actually think they can forbid us to publish a transcript. I was only asking to be polite.

2. After a stupefyingly long time, I have emerged from slogging through the details of the tenth century and am on to chronicling the eleventh. Now I’m getting into some REALLY extraordinary behavior…such as that of the Empress Zoe, who in 1034, at the age of 56, was widowed when her husband, the Byzantine emperor Romanos III, conveniently drowned in his bathtub. Zoe was less than crushed; she had only married him on her father’s orders anyway (her father had forced Romanos to divorce his own wife and marry Zoe instead). On the same day that Romanos III died, Zoe married her lover, the twenty-four-year-old palace chamberlain Michael. He then became Emperor Michael IV.

(Zoe, in a doodle on a Byzantine manuscript)

However, Zoe hadn’t been long married when she developed a crush on another young man, a court official named Constantine Monomachos, twelve years younger than she.

Michael IV was annoyed enough by this to exile Constantine to a distant island.

As Zoe was past producing an heir, Michael IV adopted his nephew (also named Michael, and only five years his junior) as his son and appointed him to be the next Emperor. The nephew-son didn’t have to wait long. Michael IV, although apparently quite good-looking, was also a bit of a weakling; he died at the age of thirty-one from a long-standing illness, after only seven years on the throne. Almost at once, Zoe had the nephew-son arrested, blinded, and castrated. He died, unsurprisingly, and she became senior ruler of the Byzantine Empire.

At this point, Zoe (who was now in her sixties), became reigning empress of Byzantium. At once, she called Constantine (aged 41) back from his exile and married him.

Entertaining, but not very edifying. Happy Advent.

3. And speaking of Advent, I am highly pleased with myself because I remembered to buy Advent candles for the church wreath BEFORE the first Sunday in Advent. So I won’t have to make frantic calls on Sunday morning to find someone with five unused candles in their closet. Getting the Advent candles set up is one of those Lord High Everything Else jobs that the minister’s wife gets to do. This has nothing to do with my writing, except that it’s one of the things that clutters my mind like a mental dust-bunny until I get it done.

4. And speaking of things that have nothing to do with writing, but are occupying the parts of my brain that might be better used, take a look at THIS…

a sixteen-year-old with a BRAND NEW DRIVER’S LICENSE. Possums and cats of southeastern Virginia, beware.

I’ll let you know how the eleventh century is progressing; my ridiculously ambitious plan is to finish up a rough draft of the events in the entire book by Christmas, so that I can go back and start producing some decent prose instead of the excruciatingly boring stuff I’m currently putting on paper.

Once upon a time, a king named Offa ruled in the English kingdom of Mercia. Offa, who reigned c. 757-796, had a (relatively) huge empire, big enough so that Charlemagne treated him as an honored colleague. (Not as an equal, but then Charlemagne didn’t treat anyone as an equal. Their friendship endured until Offa suggested that his son and heir marry one of Charlemagne’s daughters, at which point Charlemagne was highly offended and broke off contact. But that’s another story).

Here’s Offa’s empire.

And here’s Offa (he was rich and powerful enough to mint his own coins, some of which have survived with his portrait on them).

Late in Offa’s reign, one of his money-makers designed him a new coin. On one side, it says “Offa Rex.” And on the other, it says, “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”

How did this happen?

Well, the Muslim empire at this point was ruled by the Abbasids, a family of caliphs which controlled roughly this much land.

A few decades before Offa’s coin, the caliph managed to make a semi-peace with his enemies to the north, the Khazars, who controlled the land just west of the Caspian Sea.

This meant that it suddenly became safer for Arab merchants to travel up north, through the Caspian Gates (that’s the pass just west of the Caspian Sea, where you can get through the mountains from the Middle East up into southeastern Europe–right around the city of Derbent, on the map above), up the Volga River.

The merchants took with them, of course, their coins, which had “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet” written on them in Arabic.

One of these merchants, with one of these coins, got up far to the north–as far as the settlements of Scandinavian traders, who had crossed the Baltic sea and built little trading posts along the coast and southward along the rivers that reach down into Europe. (On the map below, those settlements lay mostly in the purple and dark orange areas.)

One of these traders took the Arab merchant’s coin. And then, some time later, he paid the coin to a British merchant, who took it home. Here it fell into the hands of Offa’s silversmith, who liked the pretty tracings on the back and copied them onto the reverse of the next coin he designed.

(now in the British Museum)

He had, of course, no idea what the pretty tracings meant. We know this because, while the words “Offa Rex” are right side up, the Arabic lettering is upside down.

Unless you do world history, it never occurs to you that the king of Mercia and the caliph of the Abbasid even existed in the same universe. But their coins reveal that they most certainly did.