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

by Chris Wickham

  This positive picture hides flaws, of course. One is that this newly enlarged community of researchers has as yet been reluctant to offer new paradigms for our understanding of the period. I criticized this in a recent book, Framing the Early Middle Ages (Oxford, 2005), in the specific context of socio-economic history, and offered some parameters which might work in that field. In the field of cultural and political history, it is arguable that a new paradigm is emerging, but it remains implicit rather than explicit. That paradigm sees many aspects of late Antiquity (itself substantially revalued: the late Roman empire is now often seen as the Roman high point, not an inferior and totalitarian copy of the second-century pax romana) continuing into the early Middle Ages without a break. More specifically: the violence of the barbarian invaders of the empire is a literary trope; there were few if any aspects of post-Roman society and culture that did not have Roman antecedents; the seventh century in the West, although the low point for medieval evidence, produced more surviving writings than any Roman century except the fourth and sixth, showing that a literate culture had by no means vanished in some regions; in short, one can continue to study the early medieval world, east or west, as if it were late Rome. This position is explicit in much recent work on the fifth-century invasions, but it affects the study of later centuries, into the ninth century and beyond, in much more indirect ways. It is rare to find historians actually writing that Charlemagne, say, was essentially operating in a late Roman political-cultural framework, even when they are implying it by the ways they present him. This is a problem, however; for, whether or not one believes that Charlemagne was actually operating in such a framework, the issue cannot properly be confronted and argued about until it is brought out into the open. And it can be added that historians have, overall, been much more aware that catastrophe is a literary cliché in the early Middle Ages than that continuity - accommodation - is one as well.

  A second problem is that the more attached historians become to continuity (or to ‘transformation’) rather than to sharp change, the further they diverge from archaeologists. Archaeologists see very substantial simplifications in post-Roman material culture in the fifth to seventh centuries (the exact date varies according to the region), which in some cases - Britain is one example, the Balkans another - is drastic; only a handful of Roman provinces, Syria, Palestine and Egypt, did not experience it. Bryan Ward-Perkins has recently published a short and useful riposte to a continuitist cultural history, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization, which stresses the force of these archaeological simplifications. This book will, I hope, prompt debate, and also the establishment of common ground between the two traditions; as I write, it is too early to tell. But we do need to develop historical interpretations that can encompass the diversity of our evidence, both literary and archaeological. Both a highly Romanizing literary text - the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville (d. 636), for example - and an excavation which shows markedly flimsier buildings and fewer inhabitants than in the Roman period, as with many urban sites excavated in recent decades from Tarragona through Milan to Tours, constitute evidence about the past, and neither of them should be ignored. When the two are put together, indeed, the break-up of the Roman empire, particularly in the West, immediately comes into focus as a major shift. As we shall see in later chapters, however much continuity there was in values or political practices into the early medieval period - which there certainly was - the resources for political players lessened considerably, and the structures in which they acted simplified, often radically. The landscape of politics, society and economics looks very different in the early Middle Ages as a result. Seeing the period in its own terms entails recognizing its differences from the Roman past as much as its continuities.

  One result of the implicit nature of recent historical developments is that there are relatively few overviews of the early Middle Ages as a whole. The last survey that covered the entire period up to 1000 in English, by Roger Collins, dates back to 1991, and is largely political in focus. The recent high-quality social histories in French of Régine Le Jan, Jean-Pierre Devroey and Philippe Depreux only go up to 900, and do not include the Byzantine or Arab worlds. Julia Smith’s important cultural synthesis, Europe after Rome, which gets closer than any other book to offering new paradigms for her field, similarly restricts itself to Latin Europe; so does Matthew Innes’s recent Introduction to Early Medieval Western Europe, 300-900. (Of all these, this last is perhaps the most similar to the present book in approach, but it only appeared in the summer of 2007, after my own draft was completed, and I have not incorporated its insights.) There are of course many works that deal with shorter time-spans, and some periods, notably the fifth century (especially in the West) and the Carolingian century, are very extensively studied; there are also many regional and national syntheses, some of which cover the whole of the early Middle Ages. But there is space for a new survey which confronts the socio-political, socio-economic, politico-cultural developments of the period 400-1000 as a whole, the period of the end of Roman unity and the formation of a myriad of smaller polities, across the whole space of Europe and the Mediterranean, the ex-Roman lands and the non-Roman lands to the north of Rome alike. That is the intention of this book.

  Framing the Early Middle Ages offered some quite sharply characterized interpretations of how social and economic change could be understood comparatively, region by region, England with respect to Denmark or Francia, Francia with respect to Italy or Egypt, Italy with respect to Spain or Syria. Obviously, these interpretations will be reprised in certain chapters of this book, notably Chapters 9 and 15, and they underpin much of the rest. But here the aims are different. First, a political narrative of the period is given, which is informed, as fully as possible, by recent advances in cultural history. The social and cultural (including religious) environment inside which men and women made political choices has been an important focus in each of the chapters of the book. This book intends to be comprehensible to people who know nothing about the period, a period that has few household names for a wider public, and it takes little for granted. I have wanted, however, not only to introduce Charlemagne - or Æthelred II in England, or Chindasuinth in Spain, or Brunhild in Austrasian Francia, or the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas, or the caliph al-Ma’mun - but to explain the political-cultural world inside which each of them operated. This interest reflects recent historiography, of course. It also means that there is less about the peasant majority than there might have been, although peasants are far from absent. Conversely, and this is the second aim, these analyses are intended to be understood inside an economic context, derived from both archaeology and the history of documents as well. It is crucial for any understanding of political choices that some rulers were richer than others, and that some aristocracies were richer than others; more complex political systems were made possible as a result. Some traditional political histories put the actions of kings of Ireland, England and Francia, Byzantine emperors, caliphs and Roman emperors on the same level: they were not. This was a hierarchy of wealth, with the last-named at an opposite extreme to the first-named in resources and in the complexity of the state structures in which they operated. These differences lie behind even the most resolutely cultural-political issues, the Visigothic persecution of Jews, the Iconoclast controversy, or the role of intellectuals in ninth-century Francia.

  The third aim has been to look at the period 400-1000, and all the sub-periods inside that long stretch of time, in their own terms, without considering too much their relationship with what came before or after, so as to sidestep the grand narratives criticized above. We begin with a still-thriving Roman empire, but only to set out the building-blocks with which post-Roman polities inevitably had to construct their environments: certainly not to lament failure, or to present a model which successor states failed to live up to. Here, as for every other society discussed, I have tried to look at political choices without hindsight. Some political figures di
d, indeed, make terrible choices (as when Aetius let the Vandals take Carthage in 439, or when al-Mansur’s successors in Spain set off the civil war in the 1010s, or perhaps when Louis the Pious fell out with his sons in 830 in Francia: see Chapters 4, 14, 16), which had bad consequences for the political strategies they were trying to further. But in each case they did it in a socio-cultural framework which made sense to them, and it is this that I have sought to recapture, at least fleetingly, in the space at my disposal.

  Above all, I have tried to avoid teleology. Any reading of the Roman empire in the fifth century only in terms of the factors which led to its break-up, of Merovingian Francia only in terms of what led to Charlemagne’s power and ambitions, of tenth-century papal activity only in terms of what led to ‘Gregorian reform’, of the economic dynamism of the Arab world only in terms of its (supposed) supersession by Italian and then north European merchants and producers, is a false reading of the past. Only an attempt to look squarely at each past in terms of its own social reality can get us out of this trap.

  On the basis of these principles, I look in turn at the Roman empire and its fall in the West (Part I); at the immediately post-Roman polities in Gaul, Spain, Italy, Britain and Ireland (Part II); at the history of Byzantium after the seventh-century crisis of the eastern Roman empire, the Arab caliphate, and the latter’s tenth-century successor states, including al-Andalus, Muslim Spain (Part III); and then, returning to the Latin West, at the Carolingian empire, its successor states and its principal imitator, England, and at the array of northern polities, from Russia to Scotland, which crystallized in the last century of our period, including a look at their aristocracies and peasantries (Part IV). Each is analysed comparatively, in the light of what other societies did with the same or similar resources, but above all in terms of its own reality, which must be the starting point of all our work. There is far less evidence for the early Middle Ages than for later, sometimes so little that we can hardly reconstruct a society at all (Scotland is an example); the reasons for this are an interesting issue in themselves, but careful source criticism can all the same allow us to say quite a lot in most cases, of which what follows is only a fairly summary account.

  Early medieval history-writing is a permanent struggle with the few sources available, as historians try, often over and over again, to extract nuanced historical accounts from them. For this reason not much (and certainly not much of any interest) is generally accepted without any dispute. More than in some other periods, this period is very visibly the re-creation of its historians; and in the notes at the end of the text I have paid respect to that collective re-creation, as much as space allows. (There are no numbered footnotes in the book, so as not to interrupt the text, but the references at the end are organized page by page.) Editorial policy has meant that these references are mostly in English, however; non-English authorities have only been cited where they are absolutely indispensable. Similarly, all sources are cited in translation, where one exists. English-language historiography is more prominent in this field than it was in 1970, but it is not at all dominant; all the same, authorities in other languages can be found in profusion in the bibliographies to the works listed.

  Reading the sources in this period (as in all others) is, however, for the reasons outlined above, not at all a straightforward or automatic process. Each chapter in this book begins with a vignette, as an introduction to the feel of the society or societies to be discussed there, and these will also introduce the reader to some of the issues posed by the sources. But overall it must be recognized from the outset that it is unwise to take any source, of any kind, too literally. This is perhaps easiest to see with narratives of events, in histories, letters, saints’ lives or testimony in court cases, which are all the work of single authors with clear agendas, and a host of moralizing prejudices which they tend to make very clear to the reader. The most copious of all early medieval chroniclers, Gregory, bishop of Tours (d. 594), who wrote a long history, mostly of his own century in Frankish Gaul, and also numerous saints’ lives, was an active political player in his lifetime with clear likes and dislikes among his royal contemporaries (below, Chapter 5). He was also a high-level aristocrat with huge reserves of snobbery, as well as being - as a bishop - a professional moralist, with the responsibility to encourage, cajole or frighten his contemporaries into avoiding sin. We have to read everything Gregory says with these elements in mind - elements which he does not hide from us - and most historians do indeed do so. Recent work, however, has also stressed Gregory’s literary crafting of his writing, which imposes hidden patterns on his superficially artless anecdotes, and in addition this work has analysed the less consciously felt limits that the genres he wrote in imposed on what he was able to write about, or how he was able to describe things. Also, of course, most of what Gregory tells us he did not witness himself, so we have to guess at the narrative strategies and at the reliability of his informants as well. Every ‘fact’ that we can extract from Gregory has to be seen in this set of contexts.

  One might conclude, on the basis of these comments, that one could not believe anything Gregory says at all. And indeed it would be impossible to disprove such a conclusion: not least, in this case, because the absence of evidence from his period means that Gregory is the only source for the huge majority of statements he makes about sixth-century Gaul. All the same, one has to recognize that even if all Gregory’s statements were fictions - and crafted fictions, for moralizing purposes, at that - he was still writing in a realist vein. Put another way, the more he sought to moralize about his society, for an audience which had to be persuaded that his moralism spoke to them (even if it was a future audience, for Gregory’s main work, his Histories, did not circulate in his lifetime), the more he had to anchor it in recognizable experience. So, this king or queen may or may not have executed his or her opponent in this inventive way, this bishop may or may not have bought his office and terrorized his clergy, but this is the kind of thing that people thought rulers or bishops might well have done in his society. Gregory’s narratives, and those of all similar sources from Ireland to Iraq, are used here in this way: as guides to the sort of thing that could happen - at least in their authors’ vision of the world. Often in the chapters that follow, the details of this reasoning will be skipped over; it is impossible, without writing unreadably, to introduce ifs and buts every time a source is used. But it should be understood as underlying every narrative that is cited in this book. It can be added that this also means that openly fictional sources, such as epic poems about heroes, can be used by us as well, for example, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, one of our best sources for aristocratic values in England. The problems of using such sources are not different in type from those involved in using Gregory of Tours, and indeed historians who use them have often found it easier to keep them in mind.

  Legislation presents a similar problem. It might seem obvious that a law does not describe how people behave (think of the laws about speeding), but early medievalists have had to face an entrenched historiography which presumes exactly this. Modern history-writing came out of a legal-history tradition, and well into the twentieth century people wrote social history, in particular, under the assumption that if a law enacted something, the population at large followed it. If, however, this is not true in contemporary society, with all the coercive power available to the legal system, how much less could we think it was true in the early Middle Ages, when states were weaker (often very weak indeed), and the populace even knowing what legislation a ruler had enacted was unlikely in most places. Even if a legislator only wanted to describe current custom, which could sometimes be argued to be the case in the West in the sixth and seventh centuries (though less in later periods, and still less in the Byzantine and Arab worlds), the problem would be that custom was very locally diverse, and a king in Toledo or Pavia, the then capitals of Spain and northern Italy, would not know more than those of the area he lived in, and only a restricted part of
them at that. Legislation is in fact best seen as a guide to the minds of legislators, just as the writings of Gregory of Tours tell us first about what Gregory thought. Laws interact with, feed off, reality, just as Gregory’s narratives do; it is not that we cannot use them, but that they are not disinterested guides to actual social behaviour.

  Most of the other categories of early medieval text can be analysed and criticized in the same way, but we should pause on one important category, legal documents - for gifts or sales or leases of land for the most part, or for the registration of formal disputes, which were normally about land as well. Most or all of these were contracts, with validity in law, on which surviving court cases put considerable weight, if there were any documents available at all. If these documents are accepted as authentic (and not all are; they often only survive in later collections, not as originals, and many were forged), they could be taken, perhaps more than any other source, to be describing real events. This description is not unproblematic; even an authentic document is a highly stylized text, structured by an artificial language, as legal documents still are today, which limits what one can say in it. Even if the principals wanted to describe accurately what they were doing (which not all did; some ‘sales’ were in reality hidden loans of money, with the land as collateral, for example), they were restricted by the legalese their notary was accustomed to use, and this might bear little relation to the complexities of local social practices. But at least one could assume - later law courts would assume - that this piece of land, situated in village A, with these boundaries, with a tenant cultivator named B who worked it, was sold by C to D for a price of E silver denarii.