Wickham Chris - Stability and Crisis of a City, 900-1150

I am, as usual, very grateful for the help of friends while writing this book. Sandro Carocci and Marco Vendittelli, the real experts, gave me advice from the start, and read the whole book for me; I could not have finished it without their detailed critiques. Alessandra Molinari read and critiqued ; for critiques of parts of chapters I am also indebted to Caroline Goodson, Alessia Rovelli, Emanuela Montelli, Lila Yawn, and Emanuele Conte; the discussions I had with all these framed my understanding of the city. I had further help, in the form of advice and information, offprints, bibliography, or all three, from Frances Andrews, Ermanno Arslan, Giulia Barone, Antonio Berardozzi, Federico Cantini, Cristina Carbonetti Vendittelli, Michael Clanchy, Robert Coates-Stephens, Marios Costambeys, Paolo Delogu, Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, John Doran, Lisa and James Fentress, Sergio Fontana, Patrick Healy, Hagen Keller, Mauro Lenzi, Conrad Leyser, Isa Lori Sanfilippo, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur, Federico Marazzi, Maria Laura Marchiori, Oren Margolis, Jean-Marie Martin, Roberto Meneghini, Giuliano Milani, Emanuela Montelli, Laura Moscati, Cecilia Palombelli, Susanna Passigli (who opened up for me the Jean Coste archive at a critical moment), Anna Rapetti, Serena Romano, Riccardo Santangeli, Julia Smith, Lucrezia Spera, and Laura Vendittelli. I am indebted also to Sue Bowen and Philippa Byrne for the typing, Emily Winkler for the index, and to Harry Buglass for the maps. In Rome, I was helped constructively by the guardians of all the archives I visited, not excluding those several, not cited here, which turned out to have nothing unpublished in them; and by the librarians of a dozen libraries. I am particularly grateful here to the library of the cole Franaise de Rome, which was my primary research library from start to finish and which is a wonderful place to work in. It must finally be noted here that the text of the book is essentially the same as that of Roma medievale. Crisi e stabilit di una citt, 9001150, published in 2013 by Viella editrice of Rome; only a few small changes and additions have been made to it for the English version.

I wrote this book while being Chair of the History Faculty Board (Head of Department) in Oxford, in 200912. It was fascinating to be doing two such very different, but equally stimulating, things at once. I do not think it was that experience which explains the rather greater stress on political action in this book than in most of my prior writing, as that was part of my project from the start; but I do think it at least partly explains the favourable write-up in the book of Innocent II, one of the most hard-nosed, cynical, and devious popes of my entire period of study.

Birmingham

July 2014