The Inheritance of Rome

This work by Chris Wickham covers the six centuries between the late Roman empire and the year 1000. Wickham argues that the early Middle Ages has been misunderstood through two distorting lenses: the narrative of nationalism, which reads the period as the origin story of modern nation states, and the narrative of modernity, which treats it as a dark interlude between Roman greatness and later progress. He insists that each society must be understood on its own terms, without teleology, or reading history as inevitably leading toward a later goal. No common European identity existed around 1000, and the most powerful states were Byzantium (the eastern Roman empire, centered on Constantinople) and al-Andalus (Muslim Spain), not the western polities that later came to dominate.

The book opens with the late Roman empire around 400. Wickham describes a vast political system held together by Mediterranean sea transport, a heavy land tax funding a half-million-strong army, a shared literary culture among civilian elites, and a network of roughly a thousand cities. Taxation was the key mechanism linking provinces: When it failed, the empire would break apart. Christianity, politically dominant by 400, introduced a church hierarchy of patriarchs (senior bishops overseeing major regions) and clerics numbering perhaps 100,000, theological controversies that mobilized entire populations, and new social spaces for ascetics whose spiritual authority existed outside traditional hierarchies.

The break-up of the western Roman empire in the fifth century forms the first major turning point. Wickham traces political miscalculations rather than inevitable decline. The Vandal seizure of the North African grain heartland in 439 broke the fiscal connection linking Carthage to Rome, creating an irreversible resource crisis. Military strongmen controlled increasingly marginalized emperors while "barbarian" groups, deeply Romanized and ethnically flexible, settled as military elites in Roman provinces. The eastern empire, protected by Constantinople's fortifications and Egypt's agricultural wealth, survived with relative ease. The crucial consequence was the shift from taxation to landowning as the basis of state power: Armies living off private estates rather than public salaries were harder for rulers to control.

The post-Roman western kingdoms are treated comparatively. Merovingian Francia, the Frankish kingdom, emerges as the dominant polity with a uniquely stable 250-year dynasty, vast wealth, and a political culture centered on Königsnähe (closeness to the king as a source of political advantage). Visigothic Spain developed elaborate legal traditions and plenary church councils at Toledo that functioned as combined religious and secular assemblies. Lombard Italy, the kingdom the Lombards established after their invasion of 568–69, developed a city-based political system with effective royal judicial oversight, particularly under King Liutprand (712–44). Post-Roman Britain experienced the most extreme economic collapse of any former Roman province, with early Anglo-Saxon settlements covering tiny territories of perhaps 100 square kilometers and material culture far simpler than anything on the Continent. Ireland, never part of the Roman empire, operated through perhaps 150 tiny kingdoms with elaborate legal traditions but almost no governmental infrastructure.

Wickham emphasizes cultural continuities across the post-Roman centuries. The western church maintained its organizational structure and became the major carrier of Roman traditions, while monasticism expanded under aristocratic patronage. Aristocratic values centered on military identity, feasting, gift-exchange, and honor defended through feud. Women's political roles narrowed, though queens-regent like Brunhild and Fredegund wielded power through dynastic association. Economically, Wickham argues that aristocratic wealth drove exchange complexity: Northern Francia had the most active economy, while Britain and Ireland had almost entirely village-level exchange.

The Arab conquests of the 630s and 640s, which permanently divided the eastern Mediterranean, constitute the second great turning point. The Byzantine empire lost two-thirds of its territory and three-quarters of its wealth, forcing reorganization around locally supplied military districts called themes. Social status became dependent on state position, and landed aristocrats virtually disappeared from the sources for two centuries. The Iconoclast controversy (c. 726–843), over whether religious images could be venerated, is analyzed as both a theological debate and a consequence of the emperor's growing centrality.

The Arab caliphate preserved Roman and Persian state structures more completely than any other post-Roman polity by settling Arab armies as paid garrisons in newly founded cities, keeping the conquered empires' tax systems intact. The Umayyad dynasty, the first caliphal line ruling from Syria, established Islam as a public, monumental religion under Caliph 'Abd al-Malik (685–705). The 'Abbasid revolution of 747–50, led by the dynasty that overthrew the Umayyads, moved the caliphal center to newly founded Baghdad, which may have reached 500,000 inhabitants and generated an extraordinary intellectual culture of scholars, jurists, and administrators.

The Carolingian century (751–887) is presented as the most ambitious western political experiment since Rome. Charlemagne, king of the Franks and later emperor, expanded Frankish territory by more than half, absorbing Saxony, Lombard Italy, and Bavaria and destroying the Avar khaganate, a steppe polity in central Europe. Military conquest was matched by moral reform (correctio), with government operating through public assemblies, oath-swearing, law courts, and missi (royal representatives touring territories to hear appeals). Some 40 great aristocratic families from the Carolingian heartland of Austrasia served the king across the empire. Wickham traces the project through the crises of Louis the Pious, Charlemagne's son, in the 830s and the empire's break-up in 887–88, attributing the collapse to the extinction of the Carolingian male line and the growing regionalization of aristocratic interests.

The tenth-century successor states are analyzed comparatively. East Francia, under the Ottonian dynasty from 919, maintained the strongest continuity with Carolingian practice: Otto I, East Frankish king and future emperor, was crowned at Aachen in 936, destroyed the Hungarians at the Lechfeld in 955, and absorbed Italy after 962. West Francia experienced the most dramatic fragmentation, with kings losing control of appointments and royal lands. England became the most successful practitioner of "Carolingian" government despite never having been under Carolingian rule: Alfred, king of Wessex, the only Anglo-Saxon kingdom to survive the Viking invasions of the 860s–870s, and his successors borrowed Frankish models while building on a revolution in land tenure that concentrated wealth in royal hands.

The Byzantine revival of 850–1000, the empire's most successful period, saw military expansion, elaborate court culture, and a landed aristocracy whose identity depended on office-holding. The 'Abbasid caliphate fragmented in the early tenth century into 10 to 15 successor states, each preserving the tax-based model. The Fatimid caliphate, an Isma'ili Shi'a state founded in North Africa and transferred to Egypt in 969, became the richest of these polities. In al-Andalus, the Umayyad caliphate of 'Abd al-Rahman III achieved remarkable power before collapsing into roughly 30 taifa kingdoms (small successor states) after 1009. A separate chapter traces the extension of stable political hierarchies across Scandinavia, the Slav lands, and other peripheral regions.

The book concludes by examining two intertwined processes that define the end of the early Middle Ages. The "caging of the peasantry" describes how five interlocking developments, including the expansion of aristocratic landowning and the imposition of seigneurial justice (local lordly control over courts and dues), reduced peasant autonomy across western Europe, concentrating surplus in elite hands and driving economic expansion. The "feudal revolution" traces the collapse, in parts of West Francia and Italy around 1000, of the public political sphere inherited from Rome, as local lords privatized justice, tolls, and military obligations. Wickham argues that this dissolution marks the end of the Roman inheritance, though the transformation affected only a minority of Europe. In England, Germany, and most of the continent, Carolingian-style public politics survived well past 1000.