The Early Middle Ages — Rosamond McKitterick

books and books review, history
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cover of The Early Middle Ages


The Early Middle Ages
Rosamond McKitterick
308 pages including index
published in 2001

I spotted this book at the local library and got it out because it contained a contribution by Chris Wickham, whose Framing the Early Middle Ages and The Inheritance of Rome impressed me quite a lot when I read them earlier this year. The Early Middle Ages is one of the entries in The Short Oxford History of Europe and intended as an introduction to this particular period, what the editor Rosamond McKitterick called “the Boeing 767 view of early medieval Europe”, quite a different sort of book from the two Wickham books. I therefore didn’t expect to learn much news from this, but rather wanted to read it as an introduction to the other historians involved, none of whom I’d read before.

The Early Middle Ages attempts to give a broad overview of the evolution of Medieval Europe between 400 CE and 1000 CE and tries to evaluate this period on its own terms, rather than as a transition period between the Roman Empire and the “real” Middle Ages. Doing this in less than 250 pages, or some 80,000 words is a real challenge and of course means that a lot of history is elided. Ironically, if you are already familiar with the period, it helps a lot to understand some of the developments that are sketched out here, at least to put them into a chronological context. I’m not sure how much I would’ve understood of some the chapters had I come to this book as a complete novice. This feeling was the strongest in Chris Wickham’s chapter, which felt as an extract of his two books mentioned above…

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Hopefully this won’t jinx it again

posts interesting only to me
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but S. has been home from hospital since Tuesday and hopefully she will be able to stay home a bit longer than at the previous attempts. It has been a rough couple of months for us, but things happened very quickly last week. First she had an operation the doctors had been dithering about for some time, then she heard she could go home almost immediately afterwards. And she did recover incredibly well, much better than we’re used to. So now she’s been home for a few days, things are going reasonably well and we hope to keep it up.

One small thing that cheered her up quite a lot was recieving a Half Man Half Biscuit cd in the mail from a well wisher; you know who you are, thank you.

Dutch government is responsible for the death of Muslim men at Srebrenica

Dutch politics
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Ever since the Srebrenica Massacre happened, the Dutch government has always denied any legal (or moral for that matter) responsibility for the murders as the Dutch troops were operating under UN mandate and hence the UN was ultimately responsible — but unindictable under international law. There have been various lawsuits against the Dutch state started by victims and their family, all of which were rejected: until now.

The Dutch court in Den Haag decided today that the Dutch troops had been wrong to force three Muslim men to leave the Dutchbat compound to be killed by Bosnian Serb troops and therefore the Dutch state was culpable in their deaths. From the report about the case at Radio Netherlands:

Hasan Nuhanovic – an interpreter for the Dutch battalion of UN peacekeepers (Dutchbat) which was responsible for protecting the Muslim enclave of Srebrenica in Bosnia – and the next of kin of Rizo Mustafic, a Dutchbat electrician, filed a lawsuit against the Dutch state alleging that Dutchbat knowingly handed over their relatives to the Bosnian Serbs.

The Dutch were in charge of Srebrenica when, under the command of then-general Ratko Mladic, Bosnian Serb forces overran it and killed 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The two men had sought refuge at the Dutchbat headquarters with their families. Mustafic was forced to leave and separated from his wife just outside the compound fence. She was taken away and never heard from again; he was killed by Bosnian Serb forces. Nuhanovic was allowed to stay, but his relatives were forced to leave. The remains of his father and brother were recovered in 2007 and 2010.

The court ruled that Dutchbat, which abandoned the enclave in the face of a superior Bosnian-Serb force, should have foreseen that Mladic’s soldiers would kill the men, noting that Dutchbat had witnessed the abuse and execution of Muslim men at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces. The three were the last of a group of 5,000 men who had sought refuge in the Dutch compound.

Guessing from previous experience, I’m sure the Dutch government will do everything it can to minimise the impact of this ruling, though it would do better to accept it wholeheartedly. The Srebrenica Massacre is the logical outcome of socalled humanitarian interventions, but we haven’t internalised this message yet in the Netherlands. Hopefully this ruling will show that we cannot ignore the consequences when we do attempt to throw our weight around again…

Comic strips on strike

Comix, Dutch politics, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies
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Blast, the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics

As I posted about a week ago, the current rightwing supported by racists Dutch government is putting through radical cuts on the arts. Though these measures have already gone through parliament, resistance against them hasn’t ended. And although comics in general barely get any government support anyway, that doesn’t mean cartoonists aren’t engaged with this struggle. Which is why today a dozen or so odd comic strips in as many daily newspapers had the same message.

Shit! The spending cuts on arts are also hitting us! Ehh... I see no difference

Each participating comic drew its regular cast as stick figures, with some variant on the slogan “the spending cuts on arts are also hitting comics”. Participants include Peter de Wit’s incredibly popular sarky psychiatrist Sigmund (top), as well as Fokke & Sukke (bottom), Mark Retera’s Dirkjan and many others. It’s of course unrealistic to expect this protest to change many people’s minds, but it is a good way to show the disastrous consequences of the slashing of art funding even to people with little use for art. Everybody reads the funnies after all.