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

by Chris Wickham

  There was thus some exchange vitality in western Europe at the end of our period, but not exchange take-off. This also fits the steady but not yet rapid rise in population and in land clearance; the eleventh century and the twelfth show so much more activity that one risks seeing none before 1000, which would be as misleading an interpretation as an upbeat one focused on international routes. What explains the exchange activity that one can see in the ninth and tenth centuries, however? I argued in Chapter 9 that the motor of exchange before 800 was, broadly, aristocratic wealth and buying-power; the richer élites were, the more they were able to sustain large-scale networks of production and distribution. After 800, and even more after 950 or so, one could add to that the increased economic complexity that a rising population would bring on its own; furthermore, even peasants could benefit from the economic expansion brought by clearing land, at least sometimes, and lords, who had rents from more people and places, certainly did. But the main motor was still aristocratic. And in this context the caging of the peasantry was a vital element. All the trends towards the greater subjection of the peasantry described in the first half of this chapter had as an important result the concentration of peasant surplus in the hands of lords, through rents and seigneurial dues. The proportion of global production that ended up in the hands of lords steadily (sometimes, as in England, rapidly) increased. Aristocratic buying-power thus increased too. It was this that fed the expansion of exchange in the ninth and tenth centuries, and would do so for some centuries to come, for it was not until much later in the Middle Ages that capillary exchange anywhere became sufficiently relied on by peasants for it to become self-sustaining. The loss of autonomy of the peasantry and the increase in the complexity of exchange were thus two sides of the same coin. Historians tend to like exchange complexity, and they use value-laden words like prosperity, development, and (as I have done) dynamism to describe it. But complexity has costs, and the cost in this period was a decisive move to restrict the autonomy (and sometimes, indeed, the prosperity) of between 80 and 90 per cent of the population.

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  Conclusion: Trends in European History, 400-1000

  This book has argued that not only the early Middle Ages as a whole, but every large- and small-scale society which existed during it, needs to be analysed in its own terms, and without hindsight. Such a concern makes a conclusion almost unnecessary; for I have tried consistently to stress the difference of local experience. I have compared rather than generalized, throughout the book, in order to respect those differences, and to make sense of them.

  This hostility to hindsight, which too often brings a moralizing condemnation of the early Middle Ages, does not mean, however, that one should feel a need to see the people of the period as ‘just like us’, or, worse still, to infuse the period with any kind of nostalgia. For, of course, the early Middle Ages was very unlike twenty-first-century western Europe, in which I am writing. Current values, such as liberalism, secularism, toleration, a sense of irony, an interest in the viewpoints of others, however skin-deep in our own society, were simply absent then, or at best only vestigially present, as indeed they have been absent from most of the societies of the past. Early medieval people did have a sense of humour, needless to say, but what was funny to them (largely mockery and dreadful puns) by no means makes them seem closer to us; they used irony, but it was usually pretty savage and sarcastic. Nearly all writers of the period, even religious rigorists committed to the egalitarianism of New Testament or Qur’anic theology, took for granted the irreducible nature of social hierarchy, and the innate moral virtue of the aristocratic social strata they mostly themselves came from. Servility to social superiors and the self-righteous coercion of social inferiors were normal and even virtuous; so was the universal (as far as we can see) assumption that men were intrinsically superior to women. The only absentee from our modern litany of awful behaviour was essentialist racism, but a generalized chauvinistic belief that foreigners were inferior and stupid certainly filled the gap here. I have amused myself while writing this book by trying to identify which, if any, late antique or early medieval writers (that is, those whose personality we can recapture, at any rate in part, with least mediation) I could imagine meeting with any real pleasure. It comes down to remarkably few: Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Gregory the Great, Einhard, maybe Braulio of Zaragoza - and, with less enthusiasm, Augustine, for his remarkable intelligence and self-awareness however, not for his tolerance. But, for all its distance from us, and in large part because of it, the early Middle Ages - the many different early medieval realities - are interesting. It is its interest I have tried most to bring out and make apparent in this book, not an overarching structural patterning for the period, a metahistorical narrative, most of the current examples of which, for the reasons outlined at the start of Chapter 1, are inventions.

  All the same, there were indeed trends in the history of early medieval Europe. The task of this final chapter is to bring them out, and make them explicit, although all of them have been alluded to in the course of the book. There seem to me to have been six major shifts (or breaks) in the course of the six centuries covered in this book, three in the West, two in the East, one in the North, which I will characterize in chronological order; and I would also wish to stress a set of underlying structures, underpinning all of the political and social systems of the period, which will be discussed at the end.

  The first break, and the most momentous, remains the break-up of the western Roman empire. As we have seen, reactions to the old moralistic reading of the ‘end of ancient civilization’ have often in recent decades sought to stress continuities across the fifth century, particularly in cultural and religious practices, and partly in political aspiration too; these continuities were real. The old image of the sweeping away of Roman culture by vital Germanic barbarism (succeeded by Roman-German ‘fusion’ under the aegis of Catholic churchmen) is irretrievably outdated as a result. But this does not mean that the fifth century in the West was not a major period of change (see above all Chapter 4). The fiscal basis of the Roman state, the land tax, was steadily removed from centrality in the post-Roman kingdoms, if not in the fifth century, then in the sixth. None of the post-Roman kingdoms except possibly Ostrogothic Italy even attempted to reproduce the Roman state on a smaller scale, as post-‘Abbasid states did in the Islamic world (see Chapter 14); local realities in the West favoured simpler political systems, and practices steadily diverged, with the exception of a militarization of political culture, which was generalized across Latin Europe (see Chapters 5 and 6). The economic unity of the western Mediterranean was broken, too; aristocracies became more localized and usually poorer, and material culture in most places became much simpler (see Chapter 9). The bricolage that marks much early medieval political and cultural (and, even more, architectural) practice was a natural result of the fragmentation of Roman models and resources (see for example Chapters 8 and 10), even though the fragments remained operative for a long time; hence my concern in Chapters 2 and 3 to explain how late Rome worked, as an essential foundation to what followed. That bricolage was both very creative, and necessary because of Roman fragmentation. It was an integral part of early medieval political and social activity for many centuries.

  The eastern parallel to the fifth-century break, and indeed the major moment of change in the East, was the high point of Arab conquest in 636-51 (see Chapters 11 and 12). This threw the east Roman/Byzantine world into two centuries of crisis, and indeed permanently pushed Byzantium into a different political trajectory, more centralized and more militarized. The Arab caliphate was of course entirely new, even though its structural roots were arguably quite as Roman as were those of the Byzantines. The wealth of the caliphate and the weakness of the seventh-century Byzantine state (not to speak of the western kingdoms) pushed the epicentres of politics further eastwards than they had been for nearly a millennium, first to Syria and then, after 750, to Iraq. When medium-distance commerce began to r
evive in the Mediterranean after 800 or so, its focus was an Egypt which (unlike in the Roman empire) looked quite as much to the east as to the north and west (see Chapter 15). The continuities in state structures in the seventh-century East, and later, make the changes of the 640s less total than were those of the fifth century in the West; but they were more dramatic, indeed more terrifying (for victors and defeated alike), than any others in this book. Caliphs ‘Umar I and ‘Uthman have no real rivals in our period as architects of huge, unreversed, political and (eventually) cultural shifts; even Charlemagne does not match them there, and fifth-century conquerors like Geiseric and Clovis do not run them close.

  The second major shift in the West was cultural: it was the development of an explicitly moralized political practice, above all in the century 780-880. There was a tradition of moralized Christian politics going back to late Rome, of course (see Chapter 3), but it did not have a direct relationship to secular political programmes. Visigothic Spain (see Chapter 6) was arguably the first polity to develop this, but it was Charlemagne and his successors (see Chapters 16 and 17) who first created, in an integrated way, a political programme aimed at bringing a whole people, over a large segment of Europe, closer to salvation. The Carolingians linked the state and a semi-autonomous church together in a tight partnership, which became the norm in the Latin West for over two centuries, until popes from Gregory VII (1073-85) onwards sought to separate them again, which they only managed in part - and even this was reversed again in northern Europe in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Perhaps more important, the Carolingians created the presumption that kings and their acts could and should be policed by churchmen for their morality, which created problems for rulers such as Louis the Pious and Lothar II already in the ninth century, and would continue to cause problems for many of their successors in Europe (including, from the tenth century, England: see Chapter 19) for a long time to come. This package of changes was a genuine Carolingian innovation, with only ad-hoc precedents before, and marked out western political practice as different from then on. The Byzantine empire and the caliphate certainly matched the Carolingians in their religious confidence, but, as explored at the end of Chapter 17, neither of the great eastern empires matched the urgency of the Carolingian programme. Salvationist movements marked Muslim politics throughout the seventh century, and again in 747-50 and (in North Africa) in the tenth century, but they were focused on who was to be caliph, more than on precise programmes. This was a specifically western shift.

  The third western break was the end of the Carolingian world: not so much the failure of the unity of the Frankish political system in the mid-to late ninth century, which no one even at the time expected to last, but rather the failure of the structures of public power themselves in some parts of that system, notably West Francia and (to an extent) Italy, in and around the year 1000 (see Chapters 18, 21, 22). That failure marks the end of this book, and made the eleventh century in much of Europe a very different period in its basic paradigms. I will come back to some of the implications of that in a moment; for this, like the fifth-century break, is a change that has been both overstated by moral izers and other catastrophists, and over-contested by continuitists. One has to recognize the reality of the change, without becoming overwhelmed by it.

  The second eastern change was, similarly, the break-up of the caliphate in the early tenth century (see Chapter 14). As already noted, most of the post-‘Abbasid polities did indeed preserve the state structures of the caliphate, which could more easily be reproduced on the regional level than those of the western Roman empire. The Arab world was thus less dramatically altered by disunity than one might have expected. All the same, it ceased to be politically dominant, for it was of course too divided. This allowed a newly stable Byzantine empire to come into its century of military glory in the mid-tenth century, and to dominate its neighbours (see Chapter 13); once al-Andalus disintegrated in civil war after 1009, Basil II was by far the strongest ruler in Europe, and probably outmatched the Fatimids in the southern Mediterranean too. Only new Muslim conquerors from the east, the Seljuk Turks, would undermine that power in the late eleventh century. And Muslim unity in the Mediterranean lands would have to wait until the Ottoman conquests of the sixteenth century to be re-established. The Ottomans indeed, in a sense, restored the empire of Justinian, with a Mediterranean newly centred on Constantinople/Istanbul, and made it last rather longer, too. But the thousand-year gap between the two makes that re-creation no more than an interesting historical parallel; the genealogical links between the two were of far less importance than the huge structural differences, which had begun with the seventh century and were pushed along in the tenth.

  The major change in the North came above all in the tenth century: it was the steady extension of stable political and social hierarchies across the whole wide area between the Frankish and Byzantine empires in the South and the hunter-gatherers of the far northern forests. First to make use of their opportunities here were Anglo-Saxon kings in the eighth century (see Chapters 7 and 19); in the tenth they were followed by many more, Danes, Poles, Bohemians, Hungarians and Rus, although more falteringly as yet in the rest of Scandinavia, or in Wales and Ireland (see Chapter 20). I attributed this to the stability and expansionism of the Franks and Byzantines (and, by extension, the English, and, later, the Danes), which made them both models to emulate, and threats if the northern polities could not reorganize to oppose them. The crystallization of kingship and hierarchy in the North was in most places permanent; this fact in itself demonstrates the solidity of the political systems created by Charles Martel, Pippin III and Charlemagne to the west, the Iconoclast and Macedonian emperors to the east, in the second half of our period. In the West, this solidity outlasted even the Carolingian eclipse, for the Ottonians and their successors in East Francia had as much hegemony in the Slav and Scandinavian lands as Charlemagne, if not more. Francia and Byzantium together bestrode early medieval Europe after about 750 as much as the Roman empire itself had, three hundred years earlier. They were not as powerful, and they faced a far more powerful rival to the south-east, the ‘Abbasid caliphate (for a century the strongest power in the world), but they had more impact on their northern neighbours than the Romans ever did.

  The political patterns of Europe and the Mediterranean across the period 400 to 1000 thus resolve themselves into three blocks, roughly separable chronologically. In the first, the Roman empire dominated western and southern Europe and the Mediterranean, without rivals to the north at all. This ended in the fifth century in the West, of course, although Justinian partly reversed that in the western Mediterranean; it continued until the early seventh in the East. The second period was one of polycentric power; by 700 the major western polities were three - Merovingian Francia, Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy - fairly evenly matched and each more powerful than any other neighbour, set against the expanding Umayyad caliphate and a Byzantine empire hanging on by its teeth. The third period was one of three major powers, the Franks, the Byzantines and the ‘Abbasids, which by 950 was reduced to the first two of these, the Franks weakening, the Byzantines strengthening; these two were hegemonic in Europe by the late eighth century, and helped the polities of the North to develop as well, by 1000 or shortly after. I have earlier compared the striking self-confidence of all three of the powers in this third block of time; they all knew they were stronger than their immediate predecessors, and than everywhere else west of China, and they each regarded this as a proof of their moral superiority and a justification for further expansion. The notably self-aware protagonism of not just the Carolingians, but, in different ways, their Byzantine and Arab contemporaries as well, is a direct consequence of this; and all three left traces long into the future. But it would be an error to allow this to eclipse the smaller-scale innovations which were made in the second block of time, too, such as the establishment by the Merovingians of the Paris-Rhine region as a political epicentre (an innovation which ha
s lasted ever since), or the episcopal politics of seventh-century Spain, or Byzantine Iconoclasm, or, above all, the Umayyad political settlement. No one can study any one of these, never mind all of them, and conclude that the early Middle Ages lay outside the narratives of ‘real’ history; and, by now, no one does.