The Inheritance of Rome: A history of Europe from 400 to 1000
The Inheritance of Rome
A history of Europe from 400 to 1000
Chris Wickham
Penguin 622pp £35
ISBN 978 0713 994292
Was the Europe of AD 400 – 1000 a world still wholly overshadowed by the legacy of the former Roman empire? Much has been written in recent years suggesting that it was. In fact, the concept of ‘Late Antiquity’ was invented precisely to draw attention to long-term cultural continuities, at one extreme presenting, implicitly or explicitly, the entire post-Roman world as a continuation of the empire by other means. In this book, however, Chris Wickham reassesses this fundamental question and draws very different conclusions.
With impeccable scholarship, Wickham brings a great depth of comparison to bear, considering all three ‘heirs of Rome’, namely the Latin west, the Byzantine empire, and, insofar as it influenced European history, the Islamic caliphate. It soon becomes clear that an interpretation of the period as a kind of ‘late late Rome’ is not one for which Wickham has much sympathy. The fall of the Roman empire in the west in the fifth century and in the east in the seventh was reflected in a number of hugely significant cultural developments. Everywhere, social elites became militarised, in marked contrast to the civilian aristocracy of the former empire. It was increasingly horsemanship and the practised wielding of the sword, not mastery of Virgil or Homer, which marked out post-Roman leaders. As Wickham shows, there were substantial shifts in other areas too, from gender relations to ideals of urban topography, and from ethnicity to concepts of the supernatural.
Admittedly, even as these developments transcended the former frontiers of the Roman empire, spreading to Scandinavia and the lands north of the Danube, there still remained something vaguely Roman about them. Most can be shown to have had some form of Roman antecedent. Post-Roman societies were influenced by a tenacious ‘culture of the public’, Rome’s most enduring legacy, though this too was adapted in new ways (such as the public assembly). But Wickham suggests that even this began to fade away by around ad 1000 as processes of localisation accelerated, events labelled in shorthand as the ‘feudal revolution’ which finally dispelled Rome’s most lingering shadows.
Those familiar with Wickham’s monumental Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005) will not be surprised to find that he does not leave it there. In spite of his sensitivity to the cultural, with excellent chapters devoted to architecture and intellectuals in politics, economics occupies a far more important place than usual in surveys of this kind. In fact, Wickham argues that it was changes in the distribution of wealth, rather than the barbarian invasions, for instance, which underpinned the key developments of the period.
Wickham reminds us that the Roman empire was not just a cultural system, it was a fiscal one too, taxing and redistributing on a grand scale. The collapse of this system had dramatic consequences. The gradual disappearance of taxation led to economic ‘simplification’, a neutral word for decline: demand dried up, and so then did supply, leading to a centuries-long depression. One result was that the peasantry became simultaneously more autonomous, as structures for the extraction of surplus produce loosened, but also more impoverished, with less access to manufactured goods. Another was that political organisation, bereft of tax money, was thrown back on the ‘politics of land’, rewarding state service with landed property, an inherently unstable arrangement that promoted the fragmentation of power.
All this applies far more to western than to eastern (Byzantine) Europe, as Wickham points out, since taxation survived rather better in the latter, stimulating demand and providing the state with the means to reward its officials. Differences in fiscal organisation thereby account for a great deal of the diverging experiences of west and east.
The Inheritance of Rome can therefore be read as a defence of ‘early medieval’ history against ‘late antique’ history, ways of viewing the same period marked by very different emphases. Its attention to economics reveals the limits of those culture-historical approaches that risk overstressing continuity after Rome.
Perhaps a few issues remain underexposed: for example, religious conversion, whether
to Islam or Christianity, is dealt with rather cursorily, given the period’s pivotal importance
in European religious history. Nevertheless, the book succeeds brilliantly in communicating the most recent scholarship of a fast-changing historiography. Original and exciting, it will surely inspire its readers to dig a little deeper into what used to be libelled as Europe’s Dark Ages.
- Charles West is lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Sheffield.
