Illumination

In my experience, for those who retain even a passing memory of high school history lessons, the Middle Ages are a vacuum of knowledge. For most of us, historical consciousness drops off with the Gothic sack of Rome in AD 476 and picks up again with Leonardo da Vinci's invention of the helicopter. The millennium in between is, at best, an echo of the Monty Pythonic declaration that "there's some lovely filth over here," and, at worst, simply dark. Hence this era has acquired the moniker "Dark Ages."

Except among us geeks. And so it came to pass that, after a lively discussion with a favorite fellow geek of mine, I found myself gifted with a copy of Chris Wickam's The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000.

The Inheritance of Rome is a textbook, one of the Penguin History of Europe series, and thus it lacks the plot in a novel and the agenda of a book like Are We Rome? That is to say, the one-and-three-quarter-inch tome (in paperback) is not for the hobbyist historian, nor are Wickam's long sentences, packed as they are with the equivocation and hesitation common to serious students of history. Still, in spite of the fact that the pages don't turn like a John Grisham novel, I quite enjoyed the read.

I appreciated Wickam's intent (and execution of that intent) to shed the traditional tendencies either to romanticize the early Middle Ages or to dismiss it out of hand. He set out to review the archaeological and manuscript evidence, then to let those voices speak for themselves without the interpretive lens of twenty-first century hindsight. Inasmuch as the task may be accomplished, I think Wickam may have done it.

In his final chapter he makes several observations ("drawing conclusions" would be too strong a term for Wickam's work) that are supported by the previous 551 pages. I found them valuable, so I recount them here. (Reader beware: the remainder of this post may be dull to those without a taste for historical analysis.)

1. In a passing statement meant to introduce his main observations, Wickam commented that the Middle Ages lacked "liberalism, secularism, toleration, a sense of irony, an interest in the viewpoints of others." I could meditate for a year on that sweeping description alone.

2. One main "break" or "shift" in history occurred with the break-up (emphatically not the fall) of the Roman Empire. The world did not end in any sense with this break-up; but it was marked especially by the loss of the land tax as a means of gaining revenue to support a unified military--at least in the western Mediterranean.

3. Another main break in history came with the Arab conquest from Persia to Spain in the seventh century. Though most of our history books focus on the "fall" of the Roman Empire, the Arab empires from 600-900 actually did a good job of maintaining the economic structures of Rome, more so than Byzantium and much more so than western Europe. In the years 400-1000, the Arab caliphate maintained the greatest concentrated power and unification of any other political entity. Why do we leave that out of our texts?

4. Until Charlemagne, it did not occur to rulers that a central purpose of governments (kings) was to bring people to religious salvation. But the Carolingians blossomed what Wickam calls "moralized political practice." Among other attributes, for the first time kings believed they ought to be "policed" for their morality by the heads of the Church.

5. At the end of the Carolingian era in western Europe, "structures of public power" broke down, which helped bring about what we now often call "feudalism," or the sharp division between peasant and aristocratic classes.

6. Byzantium (the Roman Empire's inheritance centered in Constantinople) flourished in the mid-900s in large part because the Arab empire broke up. If the latter had remained solid, would Byzantium have survived?

7. While the Roman Empire broke up and shook down, the "barbarian" territories from Roman history--especially northern and eastern Europe--underwent a "stabilization of political and social hierarchies." This stabilization established the seeds for many of the main players in Europe today (Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Denmark, England).

Wickam describes not only historical moments, but underlying structures of significance from that period:

1. In the West, wealth and power came to be based on land, rather than on prestige and money as in the Roman Empire. As local aristocracies became more powerful, this meant that those who worked the land (peasants) came to be under the control of the landowners.

2. Power also derived more and more from permanent political structures. (This point was more obscure to me--I'm less sure of how this differed from any other time in history.)

3. The "culture of the public" was a strong holdover from Rome, in which the most powerful people were civilians of influence (rather than military). These holdovers of public life took the form of tax-raising leadership in the Arab states, and the form of assemblies of free men in the West. In both cases, individuals could contribute to the policies and politics of at least their localities. As the middle ages progressed, the people's power in the public sphere waned in the face of waxing aristocratic power (who owned the land and the military) until what Wickam terms "the caging of the peasantry" came to pass.

I wrote most of the above to get it lodged in my mind (or at least on record) because information from a textbook does not stick the way a novel or op-ed piece does. As I read along, questions or insights would dawn on me then pass away. I hope that if any of them was important, it will return at the right time.

It has occurred to me while reading Wickam that I would like to know how the "rule of law" arose in Western Europe. It seems to me that in our society and religious culture this philosophical principle underpins so much of how we think and what we do. Yet as Wickam describes the cultures of the early Middle Ages, I see little evidence of this principle. So a 600-page book has left me with just one memorable question at present: when did the "rule of law" develop in society, and how was it absorbed into political and religious practice?

That should send me into another book right quick . . . as if I need any more books on my list!

Many thanks to Megan for an illuminating read.

~ emrys