Review: Inheritance of Rome

Here’s my epistemological trespassing graffiti: the Dark Ages were dark. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire was not a side quest on the road to modernism. There was no torch carried by the Byzantines and the Arab Caliphates. It was a disastrous detour. Inheritance of Rome desires the reader to not think that, and to not think in terms of grand narratives. Chris Wicham specifically doesn’t want people to attempt to tie contemporary nations to the pre-feudal regimes of post-collapse Rome. His conclusive chapter goes to great lengths to spell out what few trends existed in any real way across the entire continent. The history is jarring, however. A complete shutdown in interregional trade? The caging of the peasantry? A radical simplification of any and all intellectual institutions? The ideal Roman diet- varied and tasteful- eliminated by meat eating…? Local politics wasn’t spared: local elites went from being incentived to participate and donate to their towns and villages, to being required to ruthlessly tax and collect rent. While many of these economic and social facts were not entirely true in the Eastern Empire, it was still poor for a shockingly long time- hundreds of years! And it never achieved the same economic diversification as its united predecessor. Even calling it an Empire seems sort of suspicious after the Caliphate got through with it. The first Orthodox Kingdom led by a King-Pope? That seems more correct. One preconception fought by this book: what did the Caliphate take and from whom? When Westerners consider them now, they are treated as kind of springing up out of nowhere and taking over terra nullius. Maybe they’re taking over some infighting kingdoms? No! The Arabian empires were Roman Empires that latched themselves on and then emulated Roman institutions. Did they evolve in their own way? Absolutely, but only slowly and eventually. Institutional capture (and recapture) were the name of the Eastern Mediterranean game. Inheritance of Rome is (I would learn later) pointillist history. Every page is filled with stories and facts and anecdotes in more or less chronological/regional order. This has two effects: if you listen to it by audiobook while driving for hours at a time between DC and NYC, you get bathed in history and stories. The trends Wicham eventually mentions are subconsciously embedded in your head before he tells you what they are. It also, probably, makes for lousy physical book reading. When Empires fall, it means suffering for all.