Dr. Jakobsson, a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Iceland, has provided a detailed history of the fabled Swedish Vikings known as the Rus and Varangians, who, between the 9th and 13th centuries, traveled southeast of the Baltic Sea, founded early Russian trading posts (Novgorod and Kiev), attacked and then traded with the Byzantine Empire, and some of whom became the famous private guard of the emperors at Constantinople.
The author employs contemporary Greek Byzantine and Abbasid Caliphate sources, later Norse sagas, and archaeological and numismatic materials to reconstruct the various medieval portraits that have come down from the past to the present of the early adventurous Rus explorers attacking and trading among the eastern Slavs, and the later fierce Varangian warriors fighting for the Byzantine Empire in eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Ruric the Rus, Princess Olga of Kiev, Harald the Ruthless, and later Icelandic Vikings who had served in the east all make appearances in this most interesting tale about the fabled ancestors of this reviewer.
Dr. Jakobsson untangles the various historical details and later legends about these Swedish Vikings to show how the stories about them were important for the construction of the identity of both Russians and Scandinavians.
This book is the history of the Eastern Vikings, the Rus and the Varangians, from their earliest mentions in the narrative sources to the late medieval period, when the Eastern Vikings had become stock figures in Old Norse Romances. A comparison is made between sources emanating from different cultures, such as the Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate and its successor states, the early kingdoms of the Rus and the high medieval Scandinavian kingdoms. A key element in the history of the Rus and the Varangians is the fashioning of identities and how different cultures define themselves in comparison and contrast…
Dr. Hillner, Professor of Roman Imperial and Late Antiquity Studies at the Reinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat Bonn, has offered an ambitious biography of St. Helena, the mother of Rome’s first Christian Emperor Constantine the Great, who lived in the late 3rd and early 4th centuries.
Unlike the abundant literary and material sources available for her famous son, there are only a few scattered references to Helena in fourth century sources—primarily dealing with her relationship to Constantine’s father Emperor Constantius I, to her son Constantine I, and to her imperial relatives and descendants; and then many unreliable later legends about her life. Using the reliable bits of information along with archaeological remains, epigraphic inscriptions, and coin and mosaic portraits, Professor Hillner constructs a portrait of what Helena’s life might have been like when she was the young wife or concubine of a young soldier and governor in eastern Europe, where she might have been after being put aside by Constantius when he married a more prestigious bride to become an emperor, how she made a comeback from obscurity when her son Constantine became an emperor, and what her imperial life was like in palaces at Trier and Rome, and how she related to her in-laws in Constantine’s greater family.
Constantine’s biographer, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, included an excursus on Helena’s trip to the Holy Land, which allows us to see something of her travels and church building activities in support of her son and grandsons in the last decade of her long 80 year life (ca. 248-328). Unfortunately, the author sides with later and less reliable sources in calling Helena only a concubine of Constantius (while earlier and more reliable sources call her his uxor = wife, or sponsa = spouse); and travel too slowly by a land route from Rome to Jerusalem (rather than a faster sea route ) as this reviewer has chronicled in my magnum opus on Constantine and the Christian Empire (London: Routledge, 2004 & 06; 2010 & 12).
Though I disagree with her on these two points, I very much liked the way she used archaeological sources across the empire to show what Helena’s daily life might have been like; and used coin, mosaic and cameo portraits of her to describe what she might have looked like and how her dress and hair styles portrayed her changing rank. An important part of the book traces her influence on later imperial women though the fourth to sixth centuries. I was the professional reader for the last great book on Helena—Hans Pohlsander’s Helena: Empress and Saint (Chicago: Ares, 1995); and have the biggest biography out on her son Constantine and the Christian Empire (see above), and thus was much interested in reading this new tome in Constantinian studies.
I enjoyed it and can recommend it to devotees of Constantine and late antiquity studies.
In the middle of the third century, a girl was born on the north-eastern frontier of the Roman empire. Eighty years later, she died as Flavia Iulia Helena, Augusta of the Roman world and mother of the first Christian emperor Constantine, without ever having been married to an emperor herself. In Helena Augusta: Mother of the Empire, Julia Hillner traces Helena's story through her life's peaks, which generated beautiful imperial artwork, entertaining legends as well as literary outrage. But Helena Augusta also pays careful attention to the disruptions in Helena's life course and in her commemoration--disruptions that were created by…
Dr. Mario Baghos, a Professor at the University of Notre Dame in Sydney, Australia, herein addresses the extent to which religion functioned in ancient and medieval cities, and how select cities from the ancient Near East to Christian Rome and Constantinople served as imagines et axes mundi (images and centers of the world).
Professor Baghos deals successively with Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and how pagan rulers built their capital cities and placed the temples of their key deities in strategic locations to emphasize their divine connections. He then deals with Hebrew and Christian theology, and how their beliefs differed from paganism; and how the conversion of Constantine to Christianity altered the way rulers related to the divine, and how it changed the way cities were constructed with churches focused upon Christ as the pantocrator and ecosystemic agent and rulers as merely agents of the true God.
The book offers a panoramic sweep through western civilization, and has a fascinating view of apocalyptic ideas and a detailed exegesis of the Book of Revelation as Christianity was infiltrating the Roman world. Some of the language is a little too technical, but it is a good read overall.
This book combines concepts from the history of religions with Byzantine studies in its assessments of kings, symbols, and cities in a diachronic and cross-cultural analysis. The work attests, firstly, that the symbolic art and architecture of ancient cities-commissioned by their monarchs expressing their relationship with their gods-show us that religiosity was inherent to such enterprises. It also demonstrates that what transpired from the first cities in history to Byzantine Christendom is the gradual replacement of the pagan ruler cult-which was inherent to city-building in antiquity-with the ruler becoming subordinate to Christ; exemplified by representations of the latter as the…
A detailed biographical narrative of the life and career of the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire (A.D. 273-337). Covers the crises of the late Roman world, Constantine's conversion to and public patronage of Christianity, his victorious military campaigns, and his building programs in Rome, Jerusalem, and Constantinople which transformed the pagan state of Roman antiquity into the Christian empire of medieval Byzantium.
