How the News was brought from Byzantium to Angoulême;or, The Pursuit of a Hare in an Ox Cart

Abstract

Ademar of Chabannes (988-1034) of noble family, a monk in the monastery of St. Cybard (Eparchus) at Angouleme, compiled a Chronicon in three books. The first begins with the origins of the Franks and ends with the death of Pepin the Short in 768; the second deals with the reign of Charlemagne; the third covers the years 814 to 1030. The first two books and the first fifteen chapters of the third (down to the year 877) are wholly derivative from identifiable sources. But from chapter sixteen onward the third book provides valuable information chiefly on the period 8 7 7-1030 in Aquitaine, presumably drawn from local written sources and from the memories of Ademar's associates. These included notably his two uncles, who were attached to the monastery of St. Martial at Limoges, as was Ademar himself in his youth. It was at St. Martial that on a stormy night in 1010 Ademar had a vision in the heavens of a fiery Cross with Christ upon it weeping a great river of tears: an experience that rendered him so thunderstruck (attonitus) that he kept it secret in his heart until many years later when he was nearing the end of his Chronicon. Then he wrote it down. From St. Martial he returned at the age of twenty-two to St. Cybard, took orders, and spent his life in writing. The 'original' chapters of his Chronicon only occasionally evince any interest in or knowledge of events in France north of Loire.

The year 1009: St Bruno of Querfurt between Poland and Rus'

“…86 He may even have had access to information unknown to other western sources, possibly passed on by travellers from the east, or by those with eastern connections (be they with Byzantium or Rus'). There would appear to have been more long-distance travelling in the early medieval Mediterranean than has previously been supposed, judging by a variety of Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, Hebrew and Arabic sources, 87 and although contacts between east and west were more casual than regular, they were by no means negligible in the tenth and eleventh centuries.…”