All You Ever Wanted to Know About Arnulf of Carinthia

I took a flyer on Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome, prompted by a warm endorsement from Tyler Cowen. He's right: it is a very good book, also an extraordinary book (not quite the same thing). It is also, not least, the kind of book you want as companion on a long plane trip--dense but accessible and rich in anecdote. It is also a sprawling mass of a book, not always as coherent and well-framed as it wants to be.

Start with the title: The Inheritance of Rome. The early chapters do indeed provide a splendid account of the long, slow decline of the Empire-in-the-West, witha lapidary appreciation of the persistence of Roman ways, together with a keen eye for pivotal changes (hint: strategy of taxation). But then he moves on to the long, slow emeregence of European societies (up through the 10th century). Once again this is a well-told and instructive narrative--indeed on the whole, I'd say they are the best part of the book. But the real point (although Wickham does not express it this way) is the extent to which the new Europe struggling to be born is a creature of its own devising, owing less to Rome than perhaps even its own protagonists would have supposed.

But move on to the subtitle: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000. This fits the text as so far described, but Wickham goes further, in two ways. First, he offers several chapters on the Byzantine Empire--not so much, I think, on any premise that Byzantium is part of Europe, but rather more on what you might call the "Gibbonian error" of supposing that the Byzantines are part of the Roman Empire because they thought themselves so.

Okay, if Gibbon can do it, then I suppose Wickham gets a bye here. But even stranger is his decision to include a chapter or two on the early Muslim empire. He does have one interesting high-salience thought to offer here--that the Muslims may have mirrored their Roman predecessors as much as or more than the Europeans did. It's an interesting argument, though not entirely persuasive on its own evidence.Still, I suspect that anyone who is really serious about understanding the early Muslims would do better to turn to Hugh Kennedy's The Great Arab Conquests, in many ways the standard to measure the kind of book that Wickham undertakes to write here.

Necessarily in evaluating Wickham, we have to consider an issue central to so much of modern (post-Braudel) history: the question whether the author gets his topic drowned in a bathtub of sheer detail. Grant that history is first of all getting your facts right; grant also that there are a lot of them (facts), and that they can be refractory. Still, the reluctance of modern historians to put anything like a pattern on them can sometimes seem more like a phobia than a mere matter of restraint in judgment. Wickham seems to recognize both the difficulty and the need to surmount it: he offers up a final chapter in which he undertakes, half-apologetically, to draw some conclusions. "I have tried consistently," he says (and does one sense a defensive note?)

to stress the difference of local experience. I have compared rather than generalized ... in order to respect those differences and make to make sense of them."

Well, yes of course, and happily Wickham is still able, in a tentative way, to rise above his own diffidence and offer some takeaway soundbytes. By way of example, one of his most interesting here may be his suggestion of a "cultural shift" which we (he) can date from the time of the Carolingians--specifically "the development of an explicitly moralized political practice." He elaborates:

There was a tradition of moralized Christian politics going back to late Rome, of course ..., but it did not have a direct relationship to secular political programmes. Visigothic Spain ... was arguably the first polity to develop this, but it was Charlemagne and his successors ... who first created, in an integrsted way, a political programme aimed at bringing a whole people over a large segment of Europe, closer to salvation.

It's a provocative point and I'd say it is amply supported by Wickham's evidence. It isn't unique; he does offer other such generalizations, albeit not as often as one might wish. Still, it is perhaps the very richness of the fabric that makes one so eager for a bit more of a pattern.

Afterthought: After you've absorbed Wickham, the natural successor might be Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century, offering an account of the next and perhaps pivotal chapter in the creation of modern Europe.