A slow decline

The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000, by Chris Wickham

This outstanding book covers what used to be called the ‘dark ages’. Publishers rarely speak of the dark ages now. It does not sell copies. But the title still encapsulates the conventional view of the period: a civilised empire destroyed by barbarians and replaced by a world of anarchy and superstition, a universal monarchy superseded by a mosaic of statelets ruled by men with unpronounceable names, long hair and uncouth habits, an age of grim ignorance with few literary or administrative sources and those reflecting the enclosed prejudices of monks and priests. Geoffrey of Monmouth and Edward Burne-Jones are the only people who ever injected a touch of romance into this bleak picture.

Professor Wickham is no romantic. But he has set out to address some of the largest and most compelling questions about Europe’s early history. Did the barbarian invasions really destroy the civilisation of Rome in the west? How far did the old conventions and social bonds, which marked the communities of the ancient world, persist into the new political world of the middle ages? Was Charlemagne really a late Roman ruler grappling with the problems of a poorer and less stable continent? Or was the elegant Latin of his documents and the ambitious classicism of his buildings just a pretentious veneer?

These are old questions. Some of Wickham’s insights are shared with Edward Gibbon, who first asked them more than two centuries ago. But no one else has combined the same chronological and geographical sweep with Wickham’s broad range of source material and unlimited curiosity. Letters, chronicles, poetry, saints’ lives and miracle stories, inscriptions and images are all pressed into service.