Book Review: The Inheritance of Rome: a History of Europe from 400 to 1000

The Inheritance of Rome: a History of Europe from 400 to 1000 By Chris Wickham Allen Lane, 651pp, £35

THE CENTURIES AFTER THE disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West used to be known as "the Dark Ages". Perhaps we should now speak of "the Twilight Ages".

Many traditional ideas have been revised or discarded as new information has come to light in the last 50 years. The Germanic tribes – "Barbarians" – who moved into the western Empire did not come as destroyers. Many of their chiefs had served in the Roman army. and wanted to make themselves into Romans. Professor Chris Wickham argues that the most important development was the slow move from a tax-based administration to a landowning one: the army, no longer supported by taxation, gradually became what we call feudal – military service being required from landowners instead of a money-rent.

In Italy, Spain and Gaul (which would become France) the Roman or Romanised elites adapted to the new regime, and served it. Continuity was also maintained by the Church, for all the Germanic tribes accepted Christianity. In these three countries, it was the incomers who lost their language, and came to speak a Latin tongue. (Gaulish – one of the group of what we call for convenience "Celtic" languages – had been superseded by Latin in the second century AD.)

In Britain, where The Empire's roots had never gone deep, Roman influence disappeared quickly. Though nobody now believes that the existing British inhabitants of England were either massacred or driven into Wales, nevertheless England was the only part of the Western Empire where a Germanic tongue prevailed, ousting both Latin and the native language. This happened though Wickham suggests that the ratio of Anglo-Saxon invaders to native Britains was no more than 1:10.

If the inheritance of Rome survived only patchily in the west, the Empire itself flourished in the East, with its capital in Constantinople. Not until the Arab invasions of the seventh century did it lose territory – its granary in Egypt, all the north African provinces, and what came to be called the Levant: Syria and Palestine. Increasingly Greek (though its inhabitants continued to call themselves Romans), it would nevertheless enjoy periods of resurgence and even expansion, surviving until the 15th century.

The Arabs too shared in the inheritance of Rome, and not only intellectually. Unlike the Germanic kingdoms of the West, they took over the Roman tax-system and maintained it. As a result, for at least 200 years they were distinct from the native population – an army of occupation indeed. Though Arabic became the common language of the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, the Arab conquerors were as alien there as the Germanic tribes were in the West.

There is a vast quantity of information in this scholarly work. Yet Wickham acknowledges that much remains speculation, much is unknown, and much is perhaps unknowable. Even so, the wealth of detail he deploys is astonishing. This can make tedious reading for non-specialists, yet the general outline of the argument is fascinating. Many hoary myths are dispelled. There is an abundance of good sense as well as fine scholarship. For the general reader this is perhaps a book to dip into rather than to read through, but anyone who does even that will find the so-called Dark Ages illuminated.