The Inheritance of Rome

Chris Wickham offers a straightforward thesis in The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000. His aim is to side-step grand narratives by looking at the years 400-1000 and all sub-periods inside, without considering too much their relationship with what came before or after. His tome is helpfully divided into four sections, beginning with the Roman empire and its “fall” in the West, the immediate post-Roman polities in Gaul, Spain, Italy, Britain, and Ireland, the history of Byzantium after the seventh century crisis of the Eastern Roman empire, Arab caliphate, and Muslim Spain, and finally, the Carolingian empire, its successor states and principal imitator, England, and at the array of Northern polities. Wickham is able to encompass the theses of two notable books on the topic of European History, including, The Making of Europe, and The Rise of Western Christendom. The Inheritance of Rome transforms previously held notions about the rebuilding of Europe. 

In The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000, by Peter Brown, the author advocates that the most striking feature of conventional narratives concerning the end of the Roman empire and the early Middle Ages has been the contention that the history of western Europe has always been characterized by a natural unity. The illusion of the Empire, before the fifth century, was a safe conglomeration of cities while outside the empire, on the frontiers, “roared the wild chaos of barbarism.” The barbarian invasions effectively destroyed the first unity of Europe. Brown is not satisfied by this recollection of European history. He claims that the Catholic Church had created insubstantial but tenacious bonds to recreate a spiritual unity of Europe. Although this spiritual unity would be dominated by the medieval papacy, Brown asserts that there would not be a single, civilized, political community. 

Wickham’s ‘problem’ is similar, but different from Brown’s. Wickham gives us two grand narratives to avoid: nationalism and modernity. On nationalism, Wickham agrees with Brown that we will not find one history uniting all of Europe. There is “no common identity linking Spain to Russia, Ireland to the Byzantine empire, except a very weak sense of community that linked Christian polities together.” According to Wickham, there is no common European culture and no European-wide economy. Even national identities were not widely prominent.Wickham argues that a common language had very little to do with any form of cultural or political solidarity. Using the early Middle Ages as the ‘birth of Europe’ is close to fantasy for Wickham. Medieval history has previously been viewed as in the middle between the political and the legal solidity of the Roman empire, and the rediscovery of the latter Renaissance. Both Brown and Wickham agree that there was no total European unity in the early Middle Ages.

In The Making of Europe, Christopher Dawson places great emphasis on the East’s contributions to the birth of Europe. From the East, Dawson points out, came the Greek achievements that proved to be so important to the founding of Western civilization: Christianity, monasticism, military technologies, and the influence of Islam. “Western culture grew up under the shadow of the more advanced civilization of Islam, and it was from the latter rather than from the Byzantine world that Medieval Christendom recovered its share in the inheritance of Greek science and philosophy.” 

For Wickham, the West played the part of the lineal heir to the eastern ‘Byzantine empire,’ as he calls it, although the two empires would have different histories after 400. The reason for this break, according to Wickham, would be the downsizing and reorganization of the empire.  

In The Rise of Western Christendom, Peter Brown is able to denote that Western Christianity developed in the East by a confrontation with Persia and East Rome. The East is usually associated with Islam, but Brown delves deep into the Christian past of the East. Stretching even into China, “The Church of the East” could still be found in the thirteenth century. Brown contends that to the Muslims, the empire of Rome was always central to their strategy. However, the West was a distant place.

Henri Pirenne depicts the papacy as closely related to the Western empire and thus, having a major role in events during the early Middle Ages. Pirenne notes that kings relied upon the support of the Church in exchange for protection kings could provide the Church. 

Reverting back to Brown’s The Rise of Western Christendom, with regards to the papacy, he places major emphasis on the papacy and its connection to the West. He outlines how monasticism spread throughout western Europe to leave monasteries with the moniker “powerhouses of prayer.” Brown dedicates an entire chapter to a monastic “culture of wisdom” and sapientes. “As Christianity progressed in the British Isles, these “men of wisdom” were called upon to regulate large Christian communities.”

As the twentieth century’s leading historian of the Catholic Church, Christopher Dawson placed much emphasis on the papacy’s role in the formation of Europe. According to Dawson, the Roman empire, the Church, and classical tradition would combine to form the glue that would hold the people, cultures, and nations of Europe together. He pushed the idea of the role of monasteries in maintaining classical studies, and had much respect and admiration for the Western Church’s organization and resilience. 

Compared to Dawson’s The Making of Europe, Chris Wickham in The Inheritance of Rome places marginal emphasis on the patriarch of Rome, or the pope. Wickham’s popes are generally seen as the rulers of Rome, supreme judges in the West, and not much more, especially concerning the East. “The popes began to see themselves as a part of a Lombard and Frankish world, not a Byzantine one, from the mid-eighth century onwards.”

The title, The Inheritance of Rome, brings to mind the left-over remnants of the crumbling Roman empire. I like Wickham’s use of ‘inheritance’ in this instance, and I believe he has adeptly demonstrated how much of Western civilization in the years 400-1000encapsulated certain aspects of the fallen Roman empire. Also, his subtitle “Break-up” proficiently encompasses what the period from about 400-600 was for the Roman empire: a break-up. Western Europe and its inhabitants went through an incredible amount of social and religious change during this time period. In the East, a new world religion was developed. Romans in the fourth century would hardly recognize the empire as they had known it in the sixth century. As for the subtitle “Post-Roman,” I also agree that it is appropriate. As changes took place, Western Europe, especially, developed into its own empire, separate and clearly distinct from the past Roman empire. 

Wickham begins each chapter with a vignette, and this simple step greatly adds to reader interest and context. Wickham’s comparison between Latin and Greek Rome (ex.: curialis in Latin, bouleutes in Greek, both meaning court) enhances understanding of the two empires by showing their differences but also similarities. His hopes of prompting debate and establishing a common ground between nationalism and modernity are reached in this detailed analysis.Wickham offers a spectacularly researched and interesting account of the early Middle Ages in The Inheritance of Rome.