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A review by mburnamfink
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000 by Chris Wickham
4.0
The Inheritance of Rome is one of those magisterial books that I almost regret reading. Wickham is a senior historian, and he covers 600 years across Europe and the Near East with deliberative detail. His goal is to cast aside the standard view of the period, that they were a Dark Ages where hairy barbarians destroyed the great culture of Rome, and a combination of brutish strongmen and close-minded priests ruled over impoverished dirt farmers for millenia. Contrary to all that, there was a lot going on in this period. The Eastern Roman Empire out of Constantinople survived for centuries. The Umayyad Caliphate maintained a military aristocracy on top of a complex multi-faith society across North Africa and the Near East. The Carolingians embarked on a massive moral-political reform that set the pattern for future developments in Europe.
Yet, there are the ugly facts of the period. The population of major cities declined drastically, especially Rome and Constantinople, which as ex-imperial capitals lost their public grain subsidies from agricultural provinces. Other cities suffered similar declines in population. And it's not like the countryside was doing better, as land fell out of cultivation. Material culture fell back almost everywhere to relatively crude local production, with the fine craft centuries of antiquity forgotten. 476 and the replacement of the last Western Roman Emperor with an Ostrogothic rex Odoacer is as a good as date as any for the end, but the classically educated civilian elite of the Roman Empire continued to write to each other in sophisticated Latin for decades. But by 600 or so, this was all gone in the West, as economies devolved into little regional self-sufficiencies.
Wickham's thesis about the inheritance of Rome is one of the public square, a line from the processions and games at Imperial height, the continuation of these traditions in the East, the Islamic public gathering of faith, and the Western idea of the juridical assembly, but it strikes me that these connections are somewhat ad hoc, aside from the idea that a public space exists. Rather, a better measure that Wickham uses is one of political protagonism. A few exceptional states and individuals had the ability to make sweeping conquests and reforms. But mostly, it seems like struggles became ever smaller, over specific locals, the loyalties of a few hundred warriors, wooden huts rather than marble cities.
Yet, there are the ugly facts of the period. The population of major cities declined drastically, especially Rome and Constantinople, which as ex-imperial capitals lost their public grain subsidies from agricultural provinces. Other cities suffered similar declines in population. And it's not like the countryside was doing better, as land fell out of cultivation. Material culture fell back almost everywhere to relatively crude local production, with the fine craft centuries of antiquity forgotten. 476 and the replacement of the last Western Roman Emperor with an Ostrogothic rex Odoacer is as a good as date as any for the end, but the classically educated civilian elite of the Roman Empire continued to write to each other in sophisticated Latin for decades. But by 600 or so, this was all gone in the West, as economies devolved into little regional self-sufficiencies.
Wickham's thesis about the inheritance of Rome is one of the public square, a line from the processions and games at Imperial height, the continuation of these traditions in the East, the Islamic public gathering of faith, and the Western idea of the juridical assembly, but it strikes me that these connections are somewhat ad hoc, aside from the idea that a public space exists. Rather, a better measure that Wickham uses is one of political protagonism. A few exceptional states and individuals had the ability to make sweeping conquests and reforms. But mostly, it seems like struggles became ever smaller, over specific locals, the loyalties of a few hundred warriors, wooden huts rather than marble cities.