St Francis Magazine Vol 10, No 3 | August 2014

A FAR-REACHING INHERITANCE
Matthew Hoskin, University of Edinburgh

Review of Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Europe from 400 to 1000. (The Penguin History of
Europe, Volume 2) (London: Penguin, 2009) Pp. 651. ISBN 978-0-140-29014-1. £14.99
UK/$26.00 CAN (pb).

Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Europe from 400 to 1000 is a tour-de-force of narrative
history, bringing together scholarship from economic history, political history, military history,
archaeology, literature, material culture, and other available evidence for the late and post-Roman
period not only in Europe, as the title claims, but in the whole Mediterranean world and the Middle
East. Wickham starts us off by demolishing the grand myths of nationalism and modernism— the
first that the states we see forming after Rome are the same thing as modern nation states that
inhabit the same geographic space, the second that this was a ‘Dark Age’. Instead, he seeks to
understand a transformative, influential period of history from the viewpoint of the men and women
who lived it, not from any grand narrative, nor from a sense of inevitability. The story of this period
as Wickham tells it is a good ride.
It’s also an enormous story, beginning with the Roman Empire embracing the Mediterranean
with Britain, France, Belgium, and parts of Germany, ending with all of Europe— East and West,
North and South— having entered the stage of written, recordable history and the ‘Abbasid
Caliphate in the Middle and Near East bordering the Byzantine (or Eastern Roman) Empire. This
enormous story is also a series of small, interlocking stories. For example, we can watch the story of
how Spain was conquered by different groups that crystallised as one Visigothic Kingdom which,
although strong, succumbed to the invading Muslims in 711, although smaller kingdoms persisted in
the North of the Iberian Peninsula and began, in those centuries, their reconquista. The beginning of
this story touches the Fall of the Roman Empire— it is part of a larger story involving similar
invasions of Gaul (France) and North Africa. Visigothic Spain, as it emerges, is an image of the
continuity of economic and, to some degree, political systems that persisted in many parts of the
former Empire in the centuries to follow. The Islamic invasion of Spain is part of a wider narrative
that involved the union of the Arabian Peninsula, the destruction of the Persian Empire, and the
capture of Syria-Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa from the Byzantine Empire. This story also
involves Charles ‘the Hammer’ Martel, who, at Tours in 732, kept the Cordoban emirate out of the
rest of western Europe— he is also the first Carolingian, a series of rulers who would go on to forge
a dynasty that saw the union of what are today France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria,
and Italy and a cultural ‘renaissance’ that still impacts us today.
How does Wickham make this enormous story of smaller, interlocking stories readable? He
carefully chooses not to tell everything at once. Part I, Chapters 2-4, covers the Roman Empire and
its break-up to 550, discussing the politics, culture, and religion at the heart of this story and
showing both the crises and continuities that are there. In Part II, Chapters 5-10, he covers the post-
Roman West, 550-750. Chapters 5-7 deal with different geographical locations and their ensuing
polities, and 8-10 cover cultural attitudes, economics, and architecture and material culture in turn.
Chapter 10 on material culture is not restricted to the West, but discusses Hagia Sophia in
Constantinople, the Great Mosque in Damascus, an Anglo-Saxon court in Northumberland, and
Charlemagne’s palace at Aachen. Part III, Chapters 11-15, is about the empires of the East, 550-
1000. Chapters 11 and 13 deal with the Byzantine Empire; chapters 12 and 14 are about the rise of
the Islamic states, and chapter 15 is about eastern Mediterranean economics. Part IV returns to the
West, taking the story from the aforementioned Carolingians to their tenth-century successors,
tying in the states of ‘Outer Europe’— such as Scandinavia and the Eurasian Steppe. Chapters 21
and 22 are very helpful investigations of the rise of what we think of as ‘medieval’ society:
‘Aristocrats between the Carolingian and the “Feudal” Worlds’ and ‘The Caging of the Peasantry’.
In chapter 23, Wickham ties it all together, looking at the main trends of the period.
As this breakdown shows, the main focus of the book is western Europe; nonetheless, that
Wickham keeps in mind the importance of eastern Europe and the Middle East for the development
of history in this period makes it stand out in relation to other books about the era. Indeed, the
breadth of The Inheritance of Rome is astounding. The story of the rise of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate in
Baghdad unfolds alongside the contemporary narratives of French monks and Viking raiders. In one

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 St Francis Magazine Vol 10, No 3 | August 2014

way or another, all of these polities and places inherited from Rome, although Western Europe and
Byzantium did so most directly and clearly. Yet even peoples who had no contact with the Roman
Empire emulated her style in some respects. One of the more surprising discussions in this book was
in Chapter 10, about architecture and material culture. One of the buildings Wickham highlights is
King Edwin’s villa, or court, in Northumberland. This building has been identified at Yeavering and
was excavated in the 1950s. The striking fact about it is that Edwin built not only more elaborately
than we imagine Anglo-Saxons to have built but also more like the Romans. This royal, prestige
site, this palace complex, is a firm, albeit wooden, parallel of Roman theatres. Yet the Anglo-Saxons
entered a Britain bereft of Romans, a landscape whose features were typically more British than
Mediterranean. Nonetheless, in the 600s, two hundred years after the removal of effective Roman
power, Roman architecture of power still had currency in Britain. That fact alone demonstrates how
much the cultures of Europe and the Middle East inherited from Rome.
As a historian, I am interested in the Later Roman Empire, especially Italy and Gaul (France).
This book helped me see the events that transpired there in their wider context, bringing Spain,
North Africa, and Britain more clearly into the scene as well as the wider Mediterranean world.
Now I can see the coming of those various groups into the West— Vandals, Sueves, Visigoths, Huns,
Franks, Ostrogoths— more clearly, unweaving the various names and strands in their context. And
I can also see the effect of Justinian’s reconquest of the 500s, an event that, in Wickham’s view, made
the decisive economic and cultural break between Roman and medieval Italy. When I was a Master’s
student, I did research on the theology of the Byzantine world; once again, this book helped
contextualise that world, bringing in the grand political schemers as well as the Sclavenian and
Bulgarian invaders on one hand, and then the Persians and Arabs on the other. I have long had a
love of Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, coupled with a curiosity into Carolingians, whose manuscripts are
the subject of much of my current research. Wickham’s book helped me see those three worlds as
they interacted with one another through trade, politics, mission work, and competition. If you have
an interest in any of the places covered by this book or any of the events and characters of this 600-
year period, then I recommend this grand, sweeping story of Rome and her successors most highly.

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