The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000

Summary

The Inheritance of Rome is Chris Wickham's history of Europe and the Mediterranean from the last century of the western Roman empire to the year 1000. First published in 2009 in Britain and the United States (the American edition carried the subtitle Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400–1000), it runs to about 650 pages and is written for general readers by one of the leading specialists in the period. The book is in copyright, so the library holds no text; this entry describes it and offers a study guide. Wickham opens by arguing that early medieval Europe has repeatedly been misread. Some historians have searched it for the origins of modern nations such as France or Spain; others have told it as a story of failure, a long dark age between the fall of Rome and a later recovery. He sets both readings aside and insists that each period must be understood on its own terms, without hindsight. His recurring themes are the accumulation of wealth, how political power was organized into institutions, and the public culture through which rulers and elites sought legitimacy. The book has four parts. The first, on the Roman empire and its breakup from 400 to 550, describes the weight of the late Roman state, its taxation and its army, and the culture and belief of the Christian Roman world, then follows the crisis of the fifth century in the West, in which new Germanic kingdoms took over Roman provinces while preserving much of Roman society. The second part, on the post-Roman West from 550 to 750, treats Merovingian Gaul and Germany, the kingdoms of Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy, and Britain and Ireland, showing how rulers without a Roman tax system came to rely on land and personal loyalty. The third part turns east to the empires that held on or rose between 550 and 1000: Byzantium, which survived the loss of much of its territory, and the Arab caliphate, whose wealth and cities surpassed anything in the Latin West, together with its successor states, including Muslim Spain. The fourth part follows the Carolingian and post-Carolingian West from 750 to 1000: the empire of Charlemagne and his heirs, with its ambitious program of moral and religious reform; the kingdoms that succeeded it; the formation of new Christian polities in Scandinavia and central and eastern Europe; England; and what Wickham calls the caging of the peasantry, as lords in many regions tightened their control over rural communities. A conclusion draws out the long-term trends in European history across these six centuries. Reviewers praised the book's range, from Ireland to Baghdad, and its use of archaeology alongside written sources; some noted that it demands concentration from readers new to the period.

Top Lessons

• Every age on its own terms

  Wickham argues that reading the early Middle Ages only as the origin of later nations, or only as a decline from Rome, distorts it. Students learn to ask what people at the time were trying to do rather than what they 'led to'.

• Taxes, land and loyalty

  A central thread is the shift in the West from a Roman state funded by taxation to kingdoms that rewarded followers with land. This change altered the scale of politics and the relation between rulers, aristocrats and peasants.

• A wider Europe

  By giving full attention to Byzantium and the caliphate, Wickham shows that the Latin West was one region among several heirs of Rome, and not the richest. This comparison helps students see Christendom's history in its real setting.

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Medical Lens

A political, social and economic history; it is not a source for medicine or psychiatry.