Assesses socioeconomic trends in formerly imperial Roman lands over 400 – 1000 AD, describing the collapse as tectonic but not catastrophic: culture especially displayed continuity and evolution if simplification.

The era’s most important event was the Empire’s breakup at the hands of the Vandals in 439, severing Rome’s food supply (i.e., grain and oil), followed toward century’s end by Gaul’s defection to the barbarian powers. These restricted trade, simplified wealth to land ownership, and restricted government (fisc, justice, administration). By 650 every successor kingdom had its own traditions. Islam’s rise further severed Rome from the Byzantine world (which for a time retained control of the Nile valley), completing the end of the Mediterranean regime and prompting two centuries of ferment. Taxation, shifting from commerce toward land, closed off the possibility of successors to Rome, prompting elites to favor military pursuits over luxury.
Roman culture emphasized great cities, which decayed. Medieval Christianity, by contrast, was not subsumed in Roman values: its structures changed the least, its critique of society and government persisted. Secular education gave way to religious inspiration.

Wickham organizes around the Roman West, the rising Islamic sphere, and Byzantium, and emphasizes archaeology, for example the dispersion of clay pots indicating trade, as free of ‘assumed narrative’ found in manuscripts and such traditional evidence.

In the European Common Era, the period 500-800 marks the greatest local autonomy, the least centralization. Population was sparse but not disorderly. There was little inter-regional trade, Francia being more active than its contemporaries (along the Rhine and the Meuse to the North Sea) and Britain less so: wealth maps accordingly. Most housing reverted to wood (until 1200); elites moved into towers as visually claim to leadership and status, the visual (and the miraculous) being more powerful than written word. Gaul and Germany formed under Merovingian customs over the 6th to 8th centuries, though not too far prior to Charles Martel’s ascendance. Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy elaborated differently, the Spanish retaining greater cohesion until the Islamic conquest and the Italians fracturing entirely. Only the Franks sought empire, only the Spanish Visigoths retained imperial government. All militarized, all lost sophisticated taxation. Court-centered aristocracies persisted, of Roman stock but post-Roman custom. (English and Irish social structures congealed more easily under Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic patterns, the exception being Catholic influence). Though also disrupted, the Church retained its institutional shape – almost one-third of land in France and Italy was church-owned. To varying degrees, bishops (who tended to be aristocrats) held local sway. Literacy declined less than once supposed – government was still based on written instruction – but society’s elites militarized and much land was needed to feed and clothe armies. Europe’s early medieval ages have been seen as Germanic but though societies indeed localized, Wickham holds post-Roman sociocultural practices didn’t change much after 750 and the greater change was militarization. Reduced distribution of wealth (land) determined what the peasantry could and could no longer do. Under the Merovingians, for example, court was most important; some peasants were free, some were serfs, checking broader class solidarity; women were less present publicly than in Rome.

The Byzantine empire separated from Rome over 609-642, being unable to hold back Islamic (Persian) attacks and so losing the productive wealth of Egypt; Constantinople depopulated from 500,000 to ~ 50,000 residents, a much faster decline than Rome two centuries earlier. Byzantines survived by turning to the state.

Development in the Islamic lands is generally presented as contrasting with the West and Byzantium, rather than in terms of theology. From 630, Arabs sought to remain separate from the lands they conquered; to be on the military payroll was a badge of honor. Consequently Persian and Roman society did not blend. Beginning with late 8th-century Umayyads, administration shifted to viziers and the center of Islamic government commenced a continuous line of caliphs running to the early 16th century. In the 9th century, Baghdad became the cultural center of Islam, led by a community of scholars premised on ulama. (But: the 9th century also saw the Sunni-Shia split.). There were four main schools of law ranging from legal reasoning (interpretation) of caliphal legislation to hadith (premised on Mohammed’s statements). By 900 the latter prevailed – the ‘closing of the gate’ – no new laws promulgated by the caliph or anyone else was considered fixed. Land did not equate to power in medieval Islam, only position within the state, which brought tax wealth. Paradoxically, the succeeding Abbasid empire fell because the state grew too large.

Both Muslims and Byzantines were concerned with representation – what is holy, what is idolatrous. Aversion to the visual was a factor in the Roman-Byzantine schism of 843 (the popes long since having identified as Roman). Both Byzantine and Arab commerce were closely tied to the state: private wealth gave access to the state, which led to more complex ways to accumulate and recycle wealth.

The Byzantine city-state, which saw declining trade over the 7-8th centuries, recovered in the 11th-12 centuries notwithstanding the coming Arab conquest. By the 10th century, the second great Mediterranean trade cycle, including in the following century the Italian ports as well as the Crusade-fueled trade, was underway. But intra-regional trade among Europe, Islam, and Byzantium did not recover.

After 800 the West saw the introduction of moral political practice, exemplified by the Carolingians: the church and state working together. Yet by the period’s end, Carolingian public structures had failed, replaced by the rise of aristocratic power, the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere (somewhat analogous to the collapse of the caliphate), and the eventual rise of European kingdoms. Charlemagne matches Justinian in advancing basic literacy, religion, socially minded legislation, and participation in assemblies. He patronized scholars but the sociopolitical world of 6-8th centuries pertained into the 9th – a time that matched the French Revolution as a hotbed of education invading politics. Carolingian rulers allowed elites to rise according to intellectual ability, for purposes of promoting Christendom (theology), unlike the Byzantines, who favored tax-funded officials and army commanders. Leaders felt it necessary to moralize their decisions; however, Carolingian initiatives reached local societies via public justice not moral reform measures. The Carolingian era was destroyed by the multiplication of successors; these regional hegemons were more important than the overall rise of aristocrats; its decline undermined the pope’s international stature.

Culturally, Carolingians evidenced the dynamic of kings choosing bishops and bishops correcting kings; Byzantines relied on Roman tradition for assurance; the Abbasids looked to the now-defined ulama. As in Byzantium, in Islam education trained one for statecraft. Solidity came from tax (which was absent in the west), but religion of the elite was not seen to be essential to state survival or that the task of the state to provide for communal salvation. Frankish aristocrats after the Carolingians were less likely to be literate; the church upheld ‘international’ culture.

In the Viking era, southern England suffered no permanent regional breakdown before 1066. Only Dublin and Normandy, plus north Scotland and Ireland, survived as Viking political retains. The rest of Danish settlements were soon culturally absorbed. Aristocratic dominance based on property was more pronounced than the continent; yet the king maintained more political control. Arguably the main political creation was the catalytic of unifying England.
Russia exhibited Byzantine influences, but was too far from Islam, and so developed of internal dynamics. Spain’s government stems from the Visigoths not Francia or Al-Andalus. Sociopolitical systems in ‘ouher Europe’, notwithstanding this diversity, stemmed from solidifying aristocratic power as well as borrowing government mechanisms from neighbors, for example specialized royal officials, top-down judiciary, or military service owed the state. In 400, stable systems stopped at the Rhine-Danube border; by 1000 recognizable polities were evident west of the Volga, albeit in weaker forms than during the Roman era.

Institutional politics were most effective where there was a strong tax (e.g., Rome, Islam, Byzantium), and less secure if dependent on land grants to aristocrats since the metropole was likely to run out of land. The decline of public culture, which was the strongest remaining link to Rome), for example in law, often devolved to private rule (e.g., inside private castles). The land tax which underpinned the Roman fisc continued in simplified form, hurting the peasantry (as well as intraregional trade) since it was not distributed. The 10th century was often like the 9th yet saw substantial changes in public assemblies.

The decline of the peasantry, ‘encaged’ in castles, figures prominently in Wickham’s writing. During the Carolingian and succeeding eras, aristocrats consolidated land ownership though peasants did not. But inheritance became normal only post 1000 (in Francia, post 900), which cramped monarchies. Private castles were a 10th century development, tying aristocrats to regional more than political interests, and leading to division among those who fight, those who work – the so-called feudal revolution. Feudal seignory is not a Carolingian structure writ small but a structural change; but not all aristocrats left court to rule local regions. Peasants in the 9-10th centuries were slowly excluded from the public sphere. Carolingian political economy promoted the demesne, ‘encaging’ the lower classes on the estate: they were dependent on the lords for land to farm and live. By the time they re-emerged after 1000, the Middle Ages were effectively over: villages were spheres of public power, estates of private rule.

The key major trends (shifts) of the era from 400-1000 by chronology are:
1. The breakup of the Roman Empire, which was more economic and fiscal than culture, aided by the rise of Islam severing Rome from the Byzantine world and fueling two centuries of crisis. In this time, governmental changes in the Islamic regions were more dramatic even then Carolingian lands.
2. The introduction of moralistic political practices exemplified by the Carolingian project – the church and state working together.
3. The end of the Carolingian empire’s public structures circa 1000, most obviously demonstrated by the rise of aristocratic power and the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere. A somewhat analogous trend is evident in the breakup of the Caliphate. In northern Europe, modern kingdoms emerged.
4. Wealth was accumulated via land ownership, and land could be effectively taxed. The peasants suffered, regional exchange increased.
5. Institutionalized politics were most effective if there was strong tax revenue, and less so if the government was dependent on land grants to aristocrats.
6. The development of public culture with the strongest links to Rome was law; the decline to private rule on the estates (in French castles) illustrates the point.

Of note: French historiography has predominated the later Medieval ages, but the Frankish experience was not typical of Europe.