Travelogue 1148 – 17 October
The Dark Ages
This is the season that I forget bike lights. Spring lights have been lost. The new ones I purchase, I forget at home because the routine is still new. I don’t attach lights to my bike because the frequent rains short them out. So I find myself out without lights in the dark. Everybody else has lights. I have to watch for police, who stop cyclists and fine them.
It’s more complicated because I have bikes in two locations. My life is west; my life is east. Home and work are on opposite sides of town. I stow a bike in a free garage at Kralingse Zoom Metro Station, dry and safe. My daily bike is sturdy and rusting and carries a heavy child seat on the back. Neither have a light.
The autumn dark creeps in, and, even home and dry and safe, the night seems to become deeper. The fall brought me a long series of nightmares a few nights ago. I had eaten late, and whatever was for dinner hadn’t agreed with me. The dreams were of the sort that repeated in sickening detail, branching endlessly. At some point, my dreaming mind began to believe in hell, the visions were so convincing and so persistent. I’m sure there was never another moment in my life I took the idea seriously. The idea of hell.
In one moment of isolation in dark semi-consciousness, I could be convinced that hell was as real as, say, Mar-a-Lago, and every bit as grotesque. It’s odd to think that such a bizarre concept could find an opportunity to become real. And, yes, I am speaking here about Mar-a-Lago.
It’s astonishing that one could be so easily convinced, even in a vulnerable moment of darkness and distress, that one could be damned. Not to claim that I’m no sinner, but, really, damned forever? Suffering pain forever? As it is, twenty minutes in a dentist’s chair is enough to push me to the edge of apathy or of swooning. What is eternity?
People believed in hell for centuries. When was the first time the concept of eternal punishment appeared in a human mind? One can just about imagine it. There was no moon to make shadows. There were no clouds to obscure the vastness of the night sky, the oppressing nullity enforced upon us by the Milky Way; no psychological safety nets in place: no science, no icons of the Virgin Mary, no karaoke. Add to that intestinal distress. I should think there were many opportunities for that in prehistory. The agonies would have been as relentless as the nights. The dreams engendered would have been tortuous. The notion of hell could have risen there as organically as salmonella.
Critically, the pain somehow became wed to an idea: “I deserve this.”
In this sense, night contrasts nicely with hell. It is impersonal, and it descends without an eye for the state of my soul. The very colour of the sky changes, and we are spectators, the sinful and the pure. The blue vibrancy of the day congeals and darkens, is shot through with red, while shadows creep forward. It is quite a show. One sees it better without bike lights.
Thursday, October 17, 2024
Monday, October 07, 2024
Travelogue 1147 – 7 October
The Donation of Pepin
Until 751 CE, Rome had more or less always been Roman. Rome had belonged to Rome. For a thousand years after its founding, it had been autonomous and the centre of the early Roman Kingdom, then the Roman Republic, and then the Empire. Since the late days of the Roman Empire and then under the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, Rome had still been “Roman”. Suddenly, Rome being Roman was in question. The Lombards were at the gates; the Byzantines had been ejected from Italy.
In 754, the pope was in residence with the Frankish king. Pepin the Short was sending embassies to the stubborn king of the Lombards, who had conquered the Byzantine lands in Italy and was threatening Rome. Pepin was cajoling his own lords, convincing them that the pope’s interests were their own.
Finally, the Franks invaded in 755. They invaded again in 756. Apparently, one sound defeat each year was enough to convince Aistulf of the Lombards that the Franks were going to dictate their own terms. A treaty was signed in 756 that would become one of the foundational documents of the Middle Ages. It came to be known as the Donation of Pepin – a document that didn’t survive physically. The treaty awarded to the papacy the lands that were formally Byzantine in northern and central Italy. This was the beginning of the independent Papal States. Rome would be Roman again, this time until the nineteenth century.
Fascinating to me is the power of the Franks to make all this happen. There was no Caesar writing about the army’s crossing of the Alps. But we know that that was no mean feat; we learn that from classical authors before Pepin. The Frankish era is relatively silent; there are no epic poems or memoirs or verbose monuments. But clearly Francia was a martial power, restless and aggressive. Clearly, they had a reputation. They were intimidating. Aistulf did not need much convincing. And in another generation, Charles would simply put an end to the independent Lombard kingdom (taking the crown for himself). The Byzantines wanted to claim back the land that Pepin had rewon, but had no power to do it. They offered Pepin a fortune to return their lands, and he refused. That was that. The Franks were the new power in the West. And they would be the protector of the papacy.
The Donation of Pepin
Until 751 CE, Rome had more or less always been Roman. Rome had belonged to Rome. For a thousand years after its founding, it had been autonomous and the centre of the early Roman Kingdom, then the Roman Republic, and then the Empire. Since the late days of the Roman Empire and then under the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, Rome had still been “Roman”. Suddenly, Rome being Roman was in question. The Lombards were at the gates; the Byzantines had been ejected from Italy.
In 754, the pope was in residence with the Frankish king. Pepin the Short was sending embassies to the stubborn king of the Lombards, who had conquered the Byzantine lands in Italy and was threatening Rome. Pepin was cajoling his own lords, convincing them that the pope’s interests were their own.
Finally, the Franks invaded in 755. They invaded again in 756. Apparently, one sound defeat each year was enough to convince Aistulf of the Lombards that the Franks were going to dictate their own terms. A treaty was signed in 756 that would become one of the foundational documents of the Middle Ages. It came to be known as the Donation of Pepin – a document that didn’t survive physically. The treaty awarded to the papacy the lands that were formally Byzantine in northern and central Italy. This was the beginning of the independent Papal States. Rome would be Roman again, this time until the nineteenth century.
Fascinating to me is the power of the Franks to make all this happen. There was no Caesar writing about the army’s crossing of the Alps. But we know that that was no mean feat; we learn that from classical authors before Pepin. The Frankish era is relatively silent; there are no epic poems or memoirs or verbose monuments. But clearly Francia was a martial power, restless and aggressive. Clearly, they had a reputation. They were intimidating. Aistulf did not need much convincing. And in another generation, Charles would simply put an end to the independent Lombard kingdom (taking the crown for himself). The Byzantines wanted to claim back the land that Pepin had rewon, but had no power to do it. They offered Pepin a fortune to return their lands, and he refused. That was that. The Franks were the new power in the West. And they would be the protector of the papacy.
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