Chris Wickham

This is a tremendous piece of scholarship. I won't even try to summarize the content - in a work of over 800 pages of text, this is impossible. Wickham takes the geographic regions which were part of, or heavily influenced by, the Roman Empire and examines how they evolved and developed, in multiple aspects, from the beginning of the 5th to the end of the 8th century. The book is divided into 12 chapters, focusing on four major subject areas; States, Aristocratic power-structures, show more Peasantries, and Networks. For each topic he divides the Post-Roman world into 10 distinct geographic regions and examines each individually. These regions are; North Africa, Egypt, Syria and Palestine, Byzantium, Spain, Central and Southern Gaul, Northern Gaul, Britain, Ireland, and Denmark. In some chapters he will examine regions together when development patterns are similar; most frequently combining Britain, Ireland and Denmark; however for the most part each of these 10 regions receives its own attention.

I was pleasantly surprised to find it able to maintain my interest and more readable than I anticipated. Each topical chapter is 60-100 pages long, which would be tedious, however when 8-15 pages are devoted to a given geographic region for each topic, it's much easier to work through.

There are several ways in which this book is truly outstanding. First is Wickham's use of sources. The book is heavily footnoted and he provides a great deal of evidence for most of his conclusions (I'll return to the exceptions in a moment). The sheer amount of referenced data is stunning and includes archaeology as well as written sources. He offers conjecture and hypothesis in some cases where there is not enough evidence to document a pattern of development. Most frequently this occurs for Britain, particularly in the chapter, "Peasants and Local Societies" where Wickham develops an entire hypothetical society based on how he believes it is most likely that British peasant society was structured. While this is an exception to Wickham's usually strict use of evidentiary sources, he is very careful - explicitly so - to state that this is a hypothesis based on his educated opinion, not something which can be proven through sources. He does this in several parts of the book and he is always careful to state where he's offering something which he believes is not provable.

The second way in which this book excels is in its insistence on avoiding generalizations. Even when examining ten different geographic regions, he further discusses differences which occur within these regions. The overall impression is that in order to truly study medieval history, one must focus on smaller, regional areas and must, at all costs, avoid generalizing for all Post-Roman societies.

As for the information itself, it is an eye-opener. In the broadest sense, Wickham argues that the relative success of Post-Roman societies is strongly tied to how that society was structured within the Empire. Regions which were tied closely to Rome through the state, through taxation and commerce, were those most profoundly depressed in the Early Medieval Period while those which were largely agrarian and land-owning were less affected. In this way he shows that regions such as North Africa and the Spanish Coastal Regions were profoundly impacted while areas such as Gaul, (particularly in the North) and Egypt were less affected and in fact remained relatively wealthy through the Early Medieval Period. He utilizes a variety of topics to illustrate this including exchange networks, aristocratic wealth, societal urbanization and state-building.

I disagree with some of his views. He argues for a much greater level of peasant land-owning and wealth through this period. In and of itself this is supportable however at one point he argues that as aristocracies grew weaker and poorer, peasant society became wealthier because the aristocratic wealth must have been transferred to peasants. I am unconvinced by this. Societies have become poorer at all levels, from the wealthy to the poor, without this type of wealth transfer. During the American Great Depression, all levels of society were poorer than they were in the mid-1920's. The loss of wealth by the elite of that time was not transferred to the poor and middle class. I don't know that this didn't happen in the Medieval period, however I find this argument, in and of itself, unconvincing. While peasant society very likely became stronger in relative terms when compared to aristocracies, I am uncertain if this holds true when discussing absolute wealth.

Another argument he has put forward is that peasant families voluntarily reduced their reproduction rather than following Malthusian principles as a response to a poorer society. Again, this may have happened, as it did in the late Empire, however I am unconvinced. To be fair, in both of these cases he is careful to state these as beliefs which he cannot support based on the evidence. I find conjecture, when given with this caveat, perfectly acceptable.

I do have one substantial complaint; when discussing how society began to re-form around a strengthening aristocracy later in the period, he ignores what role the Church may have played. Certainly churches and monasteries became major landholders during the period covered and I have often seen it argued that the Church was one of the main institutions that helped society retain some semblance of structure. This is largely ignored, whether Wickham agrees with it, or has evidence to debunk it.

Even so, this is a monumental, wonderfully informative work. After reading this it is obvious why generalizations such as "society collapsed following the end of the Roman Empire" or, "the end of the Roman World was a transformation which resulted in little loss of wealth or societal structure" cannot be supported. Each of these statements is true - but only for specific regions, not for the entire Post-Roman World.

I highly recommend this book. I believe there is a new trilogy of survey works which anyone studying the Early Medieval Period should try to own; McCormick's "Origins of the European Economy", Heather's "The Fall of the Roman Empire" and Wickham. These three books have made great strides both in providing a great deal of information as well as studying Late Antiquity in such detail as to make shallow generalizations unnecessary. show less

One of the things to say straight away about the book is the author uses the years 500-1500 CE for the medieval period consciously as arbitrary cut off points, rather than end it the medieval period at the Renaissance, or the Reformation. This is so as not to look the medieval period in terms of leading up to these. The authors view is that this would take away from the interest to be had from the internal characteristics and complexities of the medieval period itself.

Another thing about show more the book is it covers all of the medieval European kingdoms, not just the biggest or best known. I found it interesting how kings borrowed organising hacks from other places. To take an example, Hungary:
"Hungary was another kingdom whose history was converging with those of its neighbours. It had settled down after its origins as a raiding nomadic power in the tenth century. Stephen I (997-1038) had adopted Christianity, and it was also he who began to borrow infrastructure from the Frankish world [i.e. from Gaul /Francia, ( France) ] - not just bishoprics, but counties - to turn his dynastic hegemony into something more organised. "(p. 146)

Bishops are an interesting subject. Bishops were an innovation of the Christian late Roman Empire. They'd been important then. But it wasnt until after the fall of the Roman Empire (in the west, in the east it continued as Byzantium), in the early middle ages, that they became big political players: "Cathedral churches became rich in land donated by the faithful, which made any bishop more powerful as soon as he took office. Bishops gained further spiritual authority from the cult of the relics of the saints, which developed in the fifth century and onwards, for they tended to be in charge of the churches which contained them."(p.31)

(Still on Hungary:)" Still more than in England, the king managed to establish himself as the overwhelmingly dominant landowner, which made his patronage crucial for all local powers. There was still the risk that counts would appropriate that land (and they did), but the king kept the strategic edge, despite frequent wars of succession. "

When the Roman Empire fell (again, in the west,), its breakup meant a break from an imperial political system based on tax collection, into smaller kingdoms with with miltarised land-owning aristocracies extracting rent from the peasant (farmer) population who were on it. Kings would parcel out land, in return for loyalty and oaths .
The system was honour-based. The author gives a striking example. In the summer of 1159, Henry II, King of England started rollin' towards Toulouse in France with a massive army to capture it. He'd sworn an oath to the French King, but he had a pretty good claim to it through his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. What the French king, Louis VII (1137-80) did in response was ride down to Toulouse fast with a skeleton crew and hole up there correctly gambling that Henry wouldn't attack with him present :"Henry was stuck. If he attacked his lord who he had sworn to defend, what value were his barons' own oaths to him? And what would he do with a captured king who was his lord? So he did not attack, and after a summer of ravaging simply retreated. Henry, one of the two most powerful monarchs in western Europe, could not risk being seen as an oath-breaker, and preferred to lose prestige - a lot of prestige - as a failed strategist instead. " (p. 9-10).

(Hungary:)" Twelfth-century kings fought aggressive external wars, in Croatia and Russia, and that momentum, plus the wealth from silver mines, allowed Béla III (1172-96) to reorganise government, borrowing from German and probably Byzantine examples; a chance surviving document shows him with very considerable wealth by twelfth-century standards, probably greater than that of the Kings of England or France, from Land, silver, and tolls on exchange. "(p. 146)

The German example is described a couple of pages later: " the revived power of Frederick Barbarossa, who could intervene throughout Germany, including in 1180 bringing down his greatest aristocrat, Henry 'the Lion', duke of both Bavaria and Saxony. "(p. 149)

(Hungary :) "It is true that Andrew (1205-35) chose a different political path, ceding substantial lands to flavoured aristocrats; a failed crusade and revolts against his landed policies forced him to agree the Golden Bull of 1222, which protected (as in England, but still more so), the rights of different strata of the aristocracy from the king. " (p. 146)

England is a reference to Magna Carta (1215), which King John (1199-1216), “an able administrator but a terrible politician in almost all fields" had to agree to, after he screwed up the reconquering of his French lands, and half his aristocracy staged an uprising.

(Hungary:) "His son Béla IV (1235-70) tried to reverse this, but the Mongol invasion of 1241-42, which nearly destroyed the kingdom until the attackers withdrew, showed all Hungarians that defence in depth was crucial, and the resultant new system of castles was above all aristocrat controlled. " (p. 147)

One point to note at this point is that, as the author writes in the first chapter," Peasants do not appear on every page of this book, by any means ;but almost everything which does was paid for by the surplus which they handed over, more or less unwillingly, in rent..." (p. 16)
And "We have plenty of accounts of the often repellent things lords were capable of doing to recalcitrant peasants - destruction and expropriation of goods, beating, cutting off of limbs, torture - which in the case of torture was generally recounted in tones of disgust by our sources, but about which in the case of beating and mutilation the accounts are more matter-of-fact. (The sources were largely written by clerics, who did not like aristocratic bad behaviour; but they tended to like assertive peasants still less.)... Violence was... implicit throughout medieval agrarian society. Peasants did sometimes resist all the same, and sometimes even succeed in resisting ; but for the most part they were and remained subjected to lords. "(p. 14-15.)

The Church was concerned with heresy. Even a future saint came under suspicion: Catherine of Sienna, Christian mystic given to extreme asceticism, drinking pus and going without food or sleep. Died in 1380 at the age of thirty-three. Advisor to Pope Gregory XI, and formally attached to the Dominican order, she nevertheless was "tested by panels of ecclesiastics more than once." (p. 187)
The author gives an example of another mystic, Margery Kempe, (d.after 1439) of King's Lynn in Norfolk, whose practice was based on "public weeping and crying out, especially in religious contexts, on self-humiliation, and on intense visions of Christ, with whom she went through a visionary marriage when on pilgrimage in Rome." (p. 188) Against the background of worry about the heretical " Lollard" movement she was hauled in front of bishops several times.
Most famously, Joan of Arc, peasant girl whose access to saintly voices was used by Charles VII of France to inspire his troops, was burnt at the stake by the English in 1431, an earlier forerunner of mid - fifteenth-century witchcraft panic victims. show less

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 show more 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. show less

I LOVED the emphasis on tracing the socioeconomics of the region and era before one can look at anything else, most especially the Church. The treatment of women and gender could have used a bit more of a focus on how the patriarchy was structured and what it gained by the systemic subjugation of the female 51% of the population, but maybe other medievalists have tackled that? IDK. I'm also curious about how colonialism/empire worked, but that's probably in another book too.

The overuse of show more the word "underpin" would make a super toxic drinking game, and also makes me think of women's foundation garments every single time, but his argument is valid and speaks to my structuralist heart of hearts. You can't understand a culture or an era or a continent without first studying how its most basic needs were framed and met.

Docking stars for some truly oblique prose, the attempt to cover far too much material in too few pages (bad publisher, give more pages), and for my wanting more on Eastern and non-Italian Southern Europe. show less