Reduced but rewarding
HAMISH ROBINSON Medieval Europe by Chris Wickham Yale University Press £25
In 2009, Chris Wickham, the Chichele Professor of Medieval History at Oxford, published The Inheritance of Rome, his superbly wide-ranging 600-page survey of European history between 400 and 1000, as the second volume of the Penguin History of Europe. With the Yale University Press, he has now published another book of half the length covering a period twice as long – from 500 to 1500 – called simply
Medieval Europe. How does he get on in this new book, and, given that the two books overlap substantially, how do they compare?
The main thrust of the first book, as the title suggested, was to brush aside the lopsided literary narrative of the fall of Rome and to demonstrate the degree to which the political culture of the empire lived on, not only in the still-dominant Eastern Empire centred on Constantinople but, albeit mutated, in the exceptionally ambitious and energetic state-building of the Carolingians in the west. The core of his argument concerned taxation. The collapse of the Western Empire as a military power was sealed by the severing of its ‘tax spine’ by the Visigothic invasion of the rich, grain-growing North African provinces. Those states that formed in the flux of imperial retreat and ‘barbarian’ invasion to the north in Europe survived and flourished insofar as they managed to replicate or replace the Roman tax system locally in order to field armies and administer justice. In the east, the rapid rise and spread of the Caliphate was spearheaded by armies and consolidated by administrators funded by tax systems that were, if not directly inherited from Rome, essentially Roman in conception. In the west, by the time of Charlemagne, taxation had withered away and been replaced by a system based on revenues from huge royal estates and land grants attached to offices and court appointments. Armies were made up of a dependent aristocratic class and its retainers.
What remained specifically Roman was the Carolingian dedication to public life: the Carolingian aristocrat sought office, or honores; there could be no advancement without attachment to the court in Aachen. This dedication could not survive the fragmentation of the aggressively expansive Carolingian state. Power was no longer centralised, but became increasingly dispersed and local and inward-looking, and offices and land holdings more narrowly hereditary, developments heralding a world that Wickham is prepared, with reservations, to call feudal. A hasty summary, especially one that deals with one state and leaves out the role of the Church, women, the peasant class and ‘the unfree’ hardly does justice to the broad but measured sweep of Wickham’s analysis as he takes in historical and archaeological evidence of all kinds from every corner of Europe and beyond.
Readers of the first book will find the first half of the new book equally rewarding: mastery makes light work of recapitulation. New vignettes and examples are found; fresh nuances and new research are incorporated. Less space is given to Byzantium and the Caliphate, although al-andalus receives considerable attention. If there is a slight dropping off in energy and confidence in the last quarter, dealing with 1350–1500, this should not be ascribed solely to its lying beyond the author’s period. Musing at the end of The Inheritance, he observes that the early Middle Ages provides few figures with whom he would have cared to have dinner: ‘Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Gregory the Great, Einhard, maybe Braulio of Zaragoza – and with less enthusiasm Augustine…’, an index, perhaps, of the fact that the period as a whole remains comparatively dark; analysis is required to fill out the picture and bring a world of human motivation to light. Of those figures he chooses to exemplify the late Middle Ages – Petrarch, Margery Kempe, Catherine of Siena, Christine de Pizan, Jean Gerson – not all are ideal dining companions perhaps (Catherine of Siena made a point of eating pus) but their personalities scream out at us.
Information abounds from an age in which written communication and the use of documentation were increasing exponentially – Petrarch’s letters alone could crack shelves – and the task of happily integrating it all into a comprehensive social history becomes more a matter of frantic reduction than elegant conjecture. Hatchards price: £22.50