The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - Introduction

  PART I - The Roman Empire and its Break-up, 400-550

  Chapter 2 - The Weight of Empire

  Chapter 3 - Culture and Belief in the Christian Roman World

  Chapter 4 - Crisis and Continuity, 400-550

  PART II - The Post-Roman West, 550-750

  Chapter 5 - Merovingian Gaul and Germany, 500-751

  Chapter 6 - The West Mediterranean Kingdoms: Spain and Italy, 550-750

  Chapter 7 - Kings without States: Britain and Ireland, 400-800

  Chapter 8 - Post-Roman Attitudes: Culture, Belief and Political Etiquette, 550-750

  Chapter 9 - Wealth, Exchange and Peasant Society

  Chapter 10 - The Power of the Visual: Material Culture and Display from ...

  PART III - The Empires of the East, 550-1000

  Chapter 11 - Byzantine Survival, 550-850

  Chapter 12 - The Crystallization of Arab Political Power, 630-750

  Chapter 13 - Byzantine Revival, 850-1000

  Chapter 14 - From ‘Abbasid Baghdad to Umayyad Córdoba, 750-1000

  Chapter 15 - The State and the Economy: Eastern Mediterranean Exchange ...

  PART IV - The Carolingian and Post-Carolingian West, 750-1000

  Chapter 16 - The Carolingian Century, 751-887

  Chapter 17 - Intellectuals and Politics

  Chapter 18 - The Tenth-century Successor States

  Chapter 19 - ‘Carolingian’ England, 800-1000

  Chapter 20 - Outer Europe

  Chapter 21 - Aristocrats between the Carolingian and the ‘Feudal’ Worlds

  Chapter 22 - The Caging of the Peasantry, 800-1000

  Chapter 23 - Conclusion: Trends in European History, 400-1000

  Notes and Bibliographic Guides

  Index of Names and Places

  THE PENGUIN HISTORY OF EUROPE

  General Editor: David Cannadine

  I: SIMON PRICE Classical Europe

  II: CHRIS WICKHAM The Inheritance of Rome: A History

  of Europe from 400 to 1000*

  III: WILLIAM JORDAN Europe in the High Middle Ages*

  IV: ANTHONY GRAFTON Renaissance Europe, 1350-1517

  V: MARK GREENGRASS Reformation Europe, 1515-1648

  VI: TIM BLANNING The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648-1815*

  VII: RICHARD J. EVANS Europe 1815-1914

  VIII: IAN KERSHAW Twentieth-Century Europe

  * already published

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  Copyright © Chris Wickham, 2009 All rights reserved

  Illustration credits appear on pages x-xi.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Wickham, Chris, 1950-

  The inheritance of Rome : illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 / Chris Wickham.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10451-4

  1. Civilization, Medieval. 2. Middle Ages. 3. Rome—Civilization—Influence. I. Title.

  CB351.W49 2009

  940.1’2—dc22

  2009015169

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  For the students of AMH, the Ancient and Medieval History degree of the University of Birmingham, 1976-2005, who have heard and discussed much of this before

  Acknowledgements

  Numerous friends read chapters of this book for me; their criticisms and comments saved me from a wide range of errors. In the order of the chapters they read, they were Leslie Brubaker, Conrad Leyser, Kate Cooper, Walter Pohl, Ian Wood, Julia Smith, Paul Magdalino, Hugh Kennedy, Jinty Nelson, Pat Geary, Pauline Stafford and Wendy Davies. Equally essential, for sharing ideas and unpublished work with me, were Teresa Bernheimer, Leslie Brubaker, Leslie Dossey, Caroline Goodson, John Haldon, Guy Halsall, Sarah Halton, Anne-Marie Helvétius, Mayke de Jong, Christina Pössel, Carine van Rhijn, Petra Sijpesteijn and Mark Whittow. Sue Bowen heroically typed the whole text, and Harry Buglass drew the maps; the index is by Alicia Corrêa. I am very grateful to them all. I have not been able to incorporate publications which came out after May 2007; not systematically, at least.

  Birmingham

  May 2007

  Maps

  1

  Introduction

  Early medieval Europe has, over and over, been misunderstood. It has fallen victim above all to two grand narratives, both highly influential in the history and history-writing of the last two centuries, and both of which have led to a false image of this period: the narrative of nationalism and the narrative of modernity. Before we consider a different sort of approach, we need to look at both of these, briefly but critically, to see what is wrong with each; for most readers of this book who have not already studied the period will have one or both in the front of their minds as a guiding image.

  The early Middle Ages stands at the origin, whether authentic or fictional, of so many European nation states that it has taken on mythic significance for historians of all the generations since nationalism became a powerful political image, in the early nineteenth century, and often earlier still. People write books called The Birth of France, or, more generally, The Growth of Europe, looking as they do so for the germs of a future national or European identity, which can be claimed to exist by 1000 in France, Germany, England, Denmark, Poland, Russia and a host of other nations if one looks hard enough. Early medieval history thus becomes part of a teleology: the reading of history in terms of its (possibly inevitable) consequences, towards whatever is supposed to mark ‘why we are best’ - we English, or French, or (western) Europeans - or at least, for less self-satisfied communities, ‘why w
e are different’. The whole of early medieval English history can thus be seen in terms of the origins of the nation state; the whole of early medieval Low Countries history in terms of the origins of the commercial dynamism of the future Belgium or Netherlands. The lack of evidence for our period helps make these nationalist readings common, even today. They are false readings all the same; even when they are empirically accurate (the English did indeed have a unitary state in 1000, production and exchange were indeed unusually active in what would become Belgium), they mislead us in our understanding of the past. This is bad history; history does not have teleologies of this kind.

  Europe was not born in the early Middle Ages. No common identity in 1000 linked Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire (in what is now the Balkans, Greece and Turkey), except the very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together. There was no common European culture, and certainly not any Europe-wide economy. There was no sign whatsoever that Europe would, in a still rather distant future, develop economically and militarily, so as to be able to dominate the world. Anyone in 1000 looking for future industrialization would have put bets on the economy of Egypt, not of the Rhineland and Low Countries, and that of Lancashire would have seemed like a joke. In politico-military terms, the far south-east and south-west of Europe, Byzantium and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), provided the dominant states of the Continent, whereas in western Europe the Carolingian experiment (see below, Chapters 16 and 17) had ended with the break-up of Francia (modern France, Belgium and western Germany), the hegemonic polity for the previous four hundred years. The most coherent western state in 1000, southern England, was tiny. In fact, weak political systems dominated most of the Continent at the end of our period, and the active and aggressive political systems of later on in the Middle Ages were hardly visible.

  National identities, too, were not widely prominent in 1000, even if one rejects the association between nationalism and modernity made in much contemporary scholarship. We must recognize that some such identities did exist. One can make a good case for England in this respect (the dismal years of the Danish conquest in the early eleventh century produced a number of texts invoking a version of it). Italians, too, had a sense of common identity, although it hardly reached south of Rome (of course, that is pretty much still true today), and did not lead to a desire for political unity. Geographical separation, such as that provided by the English Channel and the Alps, helped both of these, as it also did the Irish, who were capable of recognizing a version of an Irish community, however fragmented Ireland really was. In the parallel case of Byzantium, what gave its inhabitants identity was simply the coherence of its political system, which was much greater than any other in Europe at that time; Byzantine ‘national identity’ has not been much considered by historians, for that empire was the ancestor of no modern nation state, but it is arguable that it was the most developed in Europe at the end of our period. By contrast, France, Germany and Spain (either Christian or Muslim) did not have any such imagery. The Danes may have had it, but in Scandinavia as a whole there is good evidence for it only in Iceland. The Slav lands were still too inchoate to have any version of identity not specifically tied to the fate of ruling dynasties. And, as will be stressed often in this book, a common language had very little to do with any form of cultural or political solidarity at all. The image of the ‘birth of Europe’, and the ‘birth’ of the great bulk of the later nations of Europe, is thus in our period not only teleological, but close to fantasy. The fact that there are genealogical links to the future in so many tenth-century polities is an interesting fact, but of no help whatever in understanding the early Middle Ages.

  Even more unhelpful are the other, still older, storylines which situate the early Middle Ages inside the grand narrative of modernity itself, in its many variations. This is the narrative which traditionally relegated the whole of medieval history to simply being ‘in the middle’, between the political and legal solidity of the Roman empire (or else the high summer of classical culture) on the one side, and the supposed rediscov ery of the latter in the Renaissance on the other. It was Renaissance scholars themselves who invented this image; since then, the storyline has undergone two major sorts of change. First, later generations - the scientists of the late seventeenth century, the Enlightenment thinkers and revolutionaries of the eighteenth, the industrialists and socialists of the nineteenth and twentieth - have claimed ‘true’ modernity for themselves, contesting as they did so the claims for the years around 1500 as a cusp. Conversely, in the scientific history of the last century, medievalists have sought to save at least the central and late Middle Ages from the opprobrium of not ‘really’ being history at all, and beginnings for common long-term European historical processes have been sought in papal reform, the ‘twelfth-century Renaissance’, the origins of the universities, and in the early state-formation of kings like Henry II of England and Philip II of France, that is, in the period around 1050-1200.

  The result of these two developments is that an entire millennium, from the late eleventh century onwards in European history, can be seen as a continuous succession of tides, advancing ever further up the beach of Progress; but, in this imagery, the period before it is still left unrecon structed. The achievements of the ancient world are still seen by many in a shimmering light beyond the dark sea of barbarism which supposedly marks the early Middle Ages; and the fall of ‘the’ Roman empire in the fifth century (ignoring its long survival in the East) is seen as a primordial failure, the reversal of which was a long and painstaking process, although a necessary foundation for whichever aspect of the modern world the observer most wishes to stress: rationalism, productivity, a global market, knowledge, democracy, equality, world peace or the freedom from exploitation.

  I am in favour of most of these final ends myself; but to me as a historian the storyline still seems ridiculous, for every period in history has its own identity and legitimacy, which must be seen without hindsight. The long stretch of time between 400 and 1000 has its own validity as a field of study, which is in no way determined by what went before or came after. To attribute values to it (or to parts of it, as with those who, with the image of the ‘Carolingian Renaissance’, want to attach the ninth and perhaps tenth centuries to the grand narrative of ‘real’ history, at the expense, presumably, of the sixth to eighth) is a pointless operation. And to me as a historian of the early Middle Ages, the ‘othering’ of the period simply seems meaningless. The wealth of recent scholarship on the period gives the lie to this whole approach to seeing history; and this book will have failed if it appears to support it in any way.

  This is because it is now possible to write a very different sort of early medieval history. Until the 1970s its lack of evidence put researchers off; and a moralizing historiography dependent on the storyline of failure saw the centuries between 400/500 and 1000 as inferior. Whatever people’s explanations for the fall of the western Roman empire in the fifth century (internal weakness, external attack, or a bit of both), it seemed obvious that it was a Bad Thing, and that European and Mediterranean societies took centuries to recover from it; maybe by the time of Charlemagne (768-814), maybe not until the economic expansion and religious reformism of the eleventh century. The eastern empire’s survival as Byzantium was hardly stressed at all. The nationalist origin-myths were almost all the period had going for it; they survived longer than the image of the early Middle Ages as a failure, in fact.

  Most of this is now, fortunately, changed; the early Middle Ages is not the Cinderella period any more. For a start, researchers into the period have become more numerous. In Britain around 1970 the presence of Peter Brown and Michael Wallace-Hadrill in Oxford, and Walter Ullmann in Cambridge, allowed the formation of a critical mass of graduate students in early medieval (and also late antique) history who then got jobs in the rest of the country (just before recruitment to universities clamped down with the government cuts of 1980); they have had their own gradua
tes everywhere, as research training in history has ceased to be dominated by Oxbridge, and a further generation is coming on stream. Byzantine studies developed rapidly as well. Early medieval archaeology, over the same period, freed itself from a preoccupation with cemeteries and metalwork, and opened itself out to the ‘new archaeology’ of spatial relationships and economic or material cultural systems, which had much wider implications and allowed for a richer dialectic with documentary history, if, at least, the participants were willing. Outside Britain, similar groups of historians were trying to get rid of past obsessions with political or cultural ‘decline’ and the history of legal institutions or of the church; only in some countries, notably the United States, has the number of early medievalists increased as much as in Britain (in Germany and Italy there had always been more), but in all countries the sophistication of historical approach has increased dramatically in the last three decades. In much of continental Europe, indeed, early medieval archaeology has also been virtually invented over the same time-span; it hardly existed outside a few countries in 1970 (Britain, East and West Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland), but now a complex and up-to-date archaeology of this period characterizes nearly every country in the European Union.

  Research has also become more internationalized. The project of the European Science Foundation (ESF) on the Transformation of the Roman World in 1993-8 took dozens of researchers from nearly every European country (and beyond) and put them in hotels from Stockholm to Istanbul for a week at a time to brainstorm common approaches. This did not create a ‘common European’ historiography, for both good and bad reasons (national assumptions and prejudices were often too ingrained; conversely, too international an approach to the subj ect would risk blandness); but it did mean that participants came to understand each other better, and personal friendships became internationalized. Post-ESF projects have continued to flourish over the subsequent decade, and international work on common themes is now normal, and more organic when it happens. Broadly, the most innovative recent work among historians has often been in cultural history, particularly of high politics and political and social elites; but the more economic approach intrinsic to most archaeology, although not always taken on board by documentary historians, nonetheless allows major developments in socio-economic history too. Early medievalists were also among the first to take seriously some of the implications of the linguistic turn, the realization that all our written accounts from the past are bound by narrative conventions, which have to be understood properly before the accounts can be used by historians at all; as a result, in the last two decades nearly every early medieval source has been critically re-evaluated for its narrative strategies. The landscape of early medieval studies is thus more international, more critical, and much more wide-ranging than it used to be.