Book description
The idea that with the decline of the Roman Empire Europe entered into
some immense 'dark age' has long been viewed as inadequate by many
historians. How could a world still so profoundly shaped by Rome and
which encompassed such remarkable societies as the Byzantine,
Carolingian and Ottonian empires, be anything other than central to the
development of European history? How could a world of so many peoples,
whether expanding, moving or stable, of Goths, Franks, Vandals,
Byzantines, Arabs, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, whose genetic and linguistic
inheritors we all are, not lie at the heart of how we understand
ourselves? The Inheritance of Rome is a work of remarkable scope and
ambition. Drawing on a wealth of new material, it is a book which will
transform its many readers' ideas about the crucible in which Europe
would in the end be created. From the collapse of the Roman imperial
system to the establishment of the new European dynastic states, perhaps
this book's most striking achievement is to make sense of an immensely
long period of time, experienced by many generations of Europeans, and
which, while it certainly included catastrophic invasions and
turbulence, also contained long periods of continuity and achievement.
From Ireland to Constantinople, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean,
this is a genuinely Europe-wide history of a new kind, with something
surprising or arresting on every page. Chris Wickham is Chichele
Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow
of All Souls College. His book
Framing the Middle Ages
, which was published in 2005, has won the Wolfson Prize, the Deutscher
Memorial Prize and the James Henry Breasted Prize of the American
Historical Association. He taught for many years at the University of
Birmingham and is a Fellow of the British Academy.
