THIS IS EUROPE'S DARK AGE:

LIGHTING UP THE DARK AGES: a review of The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 By Chris Wickham (Christopher Kelly, Literary Review))

The Inheritance of Rome begins in the West with the establishment of new, post-Roman states in France, Spain, Italy, Britain and Ireland. It then turns eastwards. Here the surviving half of the Roman Empire, with its capital at Byzantium, continued to defend its hold on the eastern Mediterranean, with less success from the eighth century when it faced an aggressive and dynamic Arab state. The history of the 'Abbasid Caliphate is hardly ever included in conventional histories of Europe. It is one of the most rewarding pay-offs of this comparative project that Wickham places cultural and political developments in the Islamic world from AD 750 against the better known histories of Charlemagne in Francia (768-814) and Alfred the Great in England (871-899).

To understand the history of Europe it is necessary to maintain a Mediterranean-wide perspective (that expansive idea might be thought of as Wickham's own particular inheritance from Rome). Such a breadth of vision exposes important similarities: land remained the basis of aristocratic wealth, the extraction of income depended on the systematic exploitation of peasants, and the stability of medieval states was founded on the maintenance of a political community focused on a royal court. Within this framework there was substantial variation. Religion played a much greater role in the less deeply rooted kingdoms of western Europe than the wealthier and more confident Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Unlike Charlemagne, neither emperors nor caliphs sought legitimacy for their political programmes by seeking the explicit moral approval of clerics. The close coalition of church and state - so much part of the conventional image of the Middle Ages - turns out to have been more limited in its scope and impact. The East offers a striking contrast to the West.

Wickham's comparative project also challenges cherished national histories. The medieval world was remarkably international in its outlook. Alfred the Great's reformation of the English state owed much to his conscious adoption of policies successfully pursued by Charlemagne and his successors. Developments in an arc of kingdoms from Asturias-Léon in northern Spain through Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, the Slavic lands and into Rus reveal attempts by rulers to establish more elaborate political and military structures to underpin their rule. Again the variations are important. The establishment of centralised kingdoms was less successful in Wales and Ireland than in Rus, Bulgaria, Denmark and Asturias-Léon. But there is also a definite pattern: by AD 1000, Europe north of the Rhine-Danube (the old Roman imperial frontier) had crystallised into a set of recognisable states formed on the model of Francia or Byzantium. This is perhaps the most important political inheritance of Rome.