Review : The Making Of The Middle Ages (II)

Welcome back to my review-summary of John Haywood's The Making Of The Middle Ages. Last time we looked at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, as one does. In this concluding part, we need to look at what happened to a fragmented (and sometimes not so fragmented) Europe in the aftermath of its first superstate, especially Britain because it's my blog and I can if I want to. I'll finish with a look at some of the deeper structural changes that were happening, which are directly relevant to an awful lot more than just Dark Age European history.

3) What happened next ?

Haywood has a somewhat pointless comment that the term "Dark Ages" only really applies to Europe; as a European, I would take it for granted that European studies are first and foremost concerned with, well, Europe.

Across the continent, the complexities of the changes are far too complex to attempt a summary here. Broadly though, Haywood notes that the collapse of the Roman free trade area meant a reversion to a simpler existence; there was just no other way people could get by. But change was enormously inhomogeneous. For those at the top it could be a true catastrophe, with their whole lifestyles depending on the resources of an Empire which was, quite suddenly, not there. For those at the bottom it might not have made much difference : instead of farming on the estate of some local governor, they now found themselves... still farming. 

But it wasn't anything like this simple. Peasants were now without the protection of the army against a series of invasions; they could be both at once the most and least affected by the change (and Haywood needs a better lower-level description to explain this better). The elite didn't suffer in the same way everywhere. In a few places, as we've seen in other books, they could sometimes sustain their lifestyles long after Rome had faded into legend. The organs of administration sometimes survived locally, but not always; political change was extremely rapid, but social change – the basic beliefs and ways in which people ran their own lives – could be much slower and more varied. 

Barbarians might, for instance, find themselves living as pagans surrounded by people who had been Christian* for centuries. Different laws were enacted that gave different rights to different groups. On the short term there was a chaotic mixture of beliefs that led to hatred and massacres; on the longer term, toleration of pagans made them more susceptible to conversion. 

* Or rather, monotheistic. Jewish treatment was highly varied : the Khazar Khanate even had Jewish leadership.

And again, not everywhere, and not all in the same way. In Britain a deliberate decision not to destroy the sacred shrines and holy places of the locals allowed priests to rebrand them for a Christian age. In Scandinavia, with tremendous irony, the supposedly more peaceful and moral Christian religion was enforced by methods of such brutality that even HBO would shirk from depicting them, including forcing live venomous snakes inside the unfortunate pagans by means of red hot pokers. Quite how you manage to do this probably doesn't bear thinking about.

Oddly enough, the "let's be nice to everyone" approach actually worked out far more successfully in the end. Funny that.

Whether we should see the end of Rome as the lights going out or an oppressive chain being lifted is not a question that has a single valid answer. In some case it could be either, in others, not really one or the other. The warrior culture that often replaced it was different, but it could sometimes just be a different kind of nasty. While Rome wiped Carthage from the map, you can't really imagine even the nastiest Roman general just heading out at random and declaring, "Let us go against the people with whom God is angry" as one barbarian warlord did. 

Haywood's presentation of the people who filled the vacuum of Empire is nuanced : their art could be as sophisticated as anything Rome ever produced, their technical skills their equal (or superior, as in the case of the composite bow), but their politics... that could be primitive and shite. They had a sophisticated, highly developed society, but their warrior, honour-based culture all but made peace impossible. They were not the monsters of later Christian legend, but they absolutely could be barbaric.

In the south, maps here again help with understanding the stupendous advance of the Arab invasions. Here was a civilisation as aggressive, imperial, and sophisticated as Rome had been, and it faced all the same problems of monumental scale but at a speed of advance unprecedented in Roman history. Haywood essentially presents this as more a conversion than a conquest, with the early Caliphate fragmenting almost immediately because there was simply no way to sustain an empire this large that had arisen this quickly. 

Nonetheless, the map of Europe dominated by the Caliphate, Carolingian Empire, and Byzantium is fascinating : three centuries after the fall of the West, Europe was already dominated once more by vast power blocs. No simple narrative can be told here. As on the smaller scale of Britain, there is no one story to tell. Sometimes provinces fragmented into a multitude of miniature kingdoms, sometimes they were subsumed once again into massive empires. The end of the Pax Romana led eventually to modern Europe, but not at all in a straightforward way.

One particular instance exemplifies this. I was aware that the Magyar people moved into Hungary sometime during this period, but I had absolutely no idea that they essentially invaded all of Europe. Virtually the entirety of the continent, except Britain, and this is the first I've heard of it ! It's like someone had conspired to hide the existence of the Vikings from me... I find it properly bizarre that we've forgotten this*. Granted, they were raids rather than an invasion proper, and short-lived. It just goes to show the power of simplifying the narrative, I guess.

* Its's not just me, right ?

4) What about Britain ?

There's a second outstanding point where I feel like a owe Haywood a beer. It's incredibly well-known in British popular history that Rome abandoned us due to a lack of resources; the famous letter sent by the Emperor in 410 AD instructing the British to "look to your own defences" is widely touted as categorical proof for this version of events.

So I was very much caught off-guard by Haywood's repeated assertions that it was Britain who left Rome, not the other way around. I felt sure this must be another of his more dubious throwaway claims, because why would so many popular historians insist so strongly, and so clearly, that this is undoubtedly what happened ?

But apparently... it isn't so straightforward as that. The text of the famous letter hasn't survived, only a reference to it in another document which in context doesn't even refer to Britain at all. I consulted ChatGPT about this and (checking the citation links) got somewhat mixed messages. Haywood's blunt assertion that we decided to leave and even expel the Romans looks to be heavily overstating the case, but it's by no means a unique view among historians. It still feels to me more plausible that Roman rule collapsed in Britain rather than being the result of local dissatisfaction; I find this earliest possible Brexit hard to swallow. Even so, learning how unreliable the letter is as evidence is very much like having the rug pulled from under one's feet.

More securely, all these maps of the enormous scale of mass migration and conquest across Europe do help – in another case of "show, don't tell" – why scholars of previous eras were so keen to believe the scant historical records of genocide in Britain by the Anglo-Saxons. Vast migrations really were a thing on the mainland, and when you chart this, when you see all those arrows drawn across the land (other books lack this context), it becomes much more difficult to believe that Britain alone could be such an outlier. Previous scholars might have been biased and had their own agendas, but we do them a disservice to attribute their beliefs solely to their prejudices. They weren't stupid.

Haywood nonetheless favours a mixed model, which I think is by far the most likely set of events. In some cases there may have been local massacres, in others a purely cultural change (essentially ideas spreading as a social contagion), in others an "elite transfer" where only the rulers were replaced. Thomas Williams presents much the most convincing argument for this, with the evolution and development of subsequent British minor kingdoms being so varied that the simplistic "the Saxons killed everybody" or "the Saxons never even showed up" interpretations both now look faintly preposterous.

Here Haywood feels in much better agreement with my other recent reads on Dark Age British history. He favours a somewhat later Christian conversion than others, pushing the final end of native paganism more towards 700 AD than Ronald Hutton thinks likely but still well within error bars. He also treats Ambrosius Aurelianus as a perfectly credible figure behind the myth of Arthur, something that Max Adams mentions but rejects without explanation despite their obvious similarities.

Conclusions : Networks and Hierarchies

Haywood does an excellent job of considering how the multitude of different polities in Dark Age Europe functioned as organisational systems. He considers both the economic forces governing them but also their religious and political ideals : the deliberate choices their leaders made, for good and ill, in a conscious effort to shape their own realities. Nobody here is purely a victim of circumstance nor wholly immune to forces beyond their control. Rulers shape their world just as much as they are shaped by it.

But one important system-level process which emerges repeatedly here is whether a state is a network or a hierarchy. Niall Ferguson considered this in his dedicated but somewhat hit-and-miss book The Square And The Tower, but I think Haywood helps clarify things. Broadly, a centralised state can marshall immense, well-coordinated resources : its military force can be highly destructive and highly targeted. This presumes, of course, that the state is well run (such that it really is a hierarchy, not just the semblance of one) and its ruler(s) intelligent. Depending on the details it can be slow to assemble its forces. A centralised administration can also be vulnerable to decapitation : kill the leader and you get to claim the whole empire.

By contrast, more egalitarian networks tend to be less coordinated. They can respond to local problems extremely rapidly, but find it difficult to assemble organised, large-scale invasion forces. They can be easy for a centralised state to raid but extremely hard to fully conquer, since each individual town and village is essentially an independent unit : there's no single person you can replace as ruler. You have to take them all one at a time.

These are only ever rough guidelines though. Centralised Lombardy, says Haywood, was much easier for Charlemagne to conquer than the more egalitarian Saxony, and similarly decentralised Ireland was a much tougher nut to crack for the Vikings than the poorly-run but centralised kingdoms of England. Conversely, the Viking decentralised network was extraordinarily effective during its invasion phase, but it lost all unity after England was (mostly) conquered. This made it disproportionately vulnerable to the disciplined, centralised, resurgent Wessex.

All this points to Ferguson's claim that networks tend to beat hierarchies as needing a lot of qualification. A group of disconnected villages is not a true network, any more than a centralised state where nobody actually cares what the ruler thinks is really a hierarchy. You don't necessarily need a ruler to be successful, but you do need coordination and communication. Once this is lost, once the network loses common purpose, it collapses into tiny, vulnerable fragments. Restoring unity may be much more difficult than replacing a failed leader in a hierarchy.

What eventually emerged from the wreck of Rome was a compromise : feudalism. This is essentially a decentralised hierarchy, or a sort of coordinated series of hierarchies. Yes, the king supposedly has the last say, but the power of medieval monarchs was very far from absolute. His immediate underlings often had wealth and armies of comparable power to his own, with a power base residing at significant distances from the royal court. And similarly for the dukes and earls and suchlike : centrally concentrated power with a clear sense of who the ruler was, but with their own agents – barons and counts and other lesser nobles – widely dispersed within their own provinces, and each having their own forces.

Which underscores two things. First, it's important to understand the actual structure of a network in practise, as opposed to its theoretical organisation. Second, that the network/hierarchy distinction is subtle, perhaps more subtle than centralised = hierarchy or decentralised = network.  

Max Adams also considered if kingdoms raised their kings or it was kings who raised kingdoms. That is, did a feudal structure emerge by itself, eventually resulting in centralised rulers, or did powerful warlords clobber their opponents and eventually enact feudalism ? This probably can't be satisfactorily answered, though a theoretical, sociological approach to understanding the currents of history sounds like a thoroughly good idea to me.

Two final practical points. There's an interesting parallel between the Merovingian kings, the later stages of the Roman Empire, and the early medieval Welsh. How so ? Well, just as the Romans sought to break into several self-governing units but maintain a single polity, so the Merovingian kings actually managed this for a time. You could point to a map of France and say this ruler controls this part, this one that, but all are Merovingian : again, a sort of decentralised hierarchy. And they in turn had inheritance laws which distributed their wealth somewhat equally among their children, a far more egalitarian approach than most European kings and strikingly similar to that of the Welsh. Understanding how this worked in detail, I think, is another area which requires a thoroughly holistic approach, and probably a purely network-based analysis is doomed to fail.

And this "consider ALL the things !" approach goes further. Last time I mentioned that you really have to consider systems in their entirety before reaching general conclusions. Selecting a single important aspect to say "look, this happened before, so if it repeats, this other thing is likely to happen as well" is a valid starting point, but it can't be the end of the analysis. Factors which can seem extraneous can be anything but, and one of the strangest examples of this is the nature of medieval scholarship. The interesting thing here is that medieval scholars were concerned with cultivating different ways of thought, teaching how to think more than what to think... but paradoxically, this didn't result in many novel ideas. Other authors certainly disagree with this, but still it's worth considering : in progressive circles, we so often take it for granted that teaching how is more important than what, but if we really want more creativity, perhaps there's more to it than that.

Finally, if rulers were both shaped by but also shaped their own environment, then the importance of long-term thinking becomes apparent. The institutional reforms of Heraclius (especially in terms of who could own what) didn't work in the short term, albeit because of the Arabian storm that would sweep away much of the battered Empire in a few short years. But they did save the foundations. His reforms led the way for a comeback : if not to anything like the old Roman state, then to a nation that would be in the top rank of European powers for centuries to come. 

Failure is indeed not fatal... but success is equally not final. Perhaps a greater understanding of the structures of our own age would better help us make sense of the confusing omnishambles in which we find ourselves, but mere data alone is not enough to convey understanding. And in the end, nothing lasts forever.

Review : The Making the Middle Ages (I)

I picked up John Haywood's The Making Of The Middle Ages : An Atlas of Europe as a treat to myself for no particular reason at all. I'm pleased to say that once again, Thames & Hudson do not disappoint. Physically, this is an exceptional product of thick paper, outstanding print quality, more than enough maps that the "Atlas" subtitle is fully earned, and accompanied by insightful, analytical text that attempts to draw out the large-scale trends driving Europe in the period c.400 – 1000 A.D.

I have two small complaints about the text. First, there are a few throwaway comments that appear to be pure bunk. Nothing very substantial*, but it does distract somewhat. Second, the balance is a little off, concentrating a bit more on the Fall of the Roman Empire than in the actual birth of European nations : an extra fifty pages here would have solved this nicely.

* One is that Marcus Aurelius inexplicably broke a tradition of emperors appointing successors meritocratically rather than dynastically, which simply isn't true at all. Another is that Britain in the Dark Ages was indeed a grim, dark place, which is massive oversimplification at best. A third, more serious accusation is that the Vikings were purely piratical, but for that one, wait for the post(s) on Neil Price's PhD thesis.

Against this, the maps are outstanding. They are not just there for eye candy, but significantly enhance the text itself : at a glance, the points that Haywood describes become clear, and trends that are complex to present in text become obvious in map form. A further compensation is that Haywood takes a much more economic, materialistic approach to history than most popular historians. He looks for the reasons driving the shifting demographics and political boundaries beyond the personal choices made by the great and good, without neglecting the importance of individuals during pivotal moments.

The only logistical issue I can raise is that it would have been extremely helpful to have a more detailed contents with a full list of maps. A better epilogue with a more thorough synthesis of the broad narrative and conclusions would also have boosted this from the "excellent" to "truly outstanding" category. As it stands, I'd probably give it... 8.5/10. Not too shabby, that.

I doubt every piece of analysis here will survive the judgement of history, and nor should it. These kinds of theories are offerings, suggestions to be made for examination, not pronouncements about what really happened. Plenty of them, though, seem very good indeed. So let's dive into what makes this such an interesting read.

1) The Non-Decline Of The Roman Empire

Haywood's interpretation of the late stages of the Roman Empire is very different from the classical, "collapsing morality and deplorable loss of manly virtues" of Gibbon and other antiquarians. The Roman state, by the start of the fifth century, would not have been much recognisable to Julius Caesar, but only in the same way that modern Britain wouldn't be familiar to Henry VIII. The original J.C., had he found himself thrown forwards into the worlds of Stilicho and Aetius, would have had a lot of radical unfamiliarity and a monstrous dose of culture shock to deal with... but if he'd persevered, he'd have been able to understand the lineage. He's have been able to say, "yep, this isn't the Empire of my day, but it's still definitely the Roman Empire".

The crucial point here is that, as in earlier times, the organisations and systems of the later Empire fundamentally worked. The structural changes which had occurred were basically sensible, necessary, and beneficial, and the Empire remained an unquestionable superpower; Haywood is excellent at stressing all this in a way that's sometimes obscured in other histories. But this is not to say that things were optimal... far from it. 

The Empire had reached the innate limits of its maximum extent. For one thing, communication delays alone made further expansion hugely impractical, but worse was that the grandeur of the imperial throne – the allure of pretensions to world rule – made it chronically unstable. It might well have been possible to devise a better system of government and succession, but whether one could have actually been implemented is another matter entirely.  

So things were functioning, and showing no obvious signs of collapse : the underlying problems the Empire faced were real but subtle. Past historians were too unkind to say it was all corruption, incompetence and cowardice, but there really was something rotten in the state of Roman Europe. To understand what was going on will take a bit of explaining, so bear with me for a little while.

One of the best cases of "show, don't tell" in the book is the series of maps showing the Third Century Crisis and the Tetrarchy. Something that comes across very quickly in any reading of Roman history is just how unstable the Empire really was : in its ~500 years of development, the heartlands were truly secure for perhaps one century out of that. The rest of the time it was constantly being split apart and reformed by rebellious governors, seceding provinces, and the occasional invader. But what the maps here show is just how similar the temporary fragmentation was in both the Crisis and the Tetrarchy; quite possibly, as though one directly inspired the other. The four political blocs the Empire broke into are not quite the same in each case, but they're of such similar size and number that it's impossible to believe they're unconnected.

On paper, then, the Tetrarchy was a decent plan, aiming to maintain the Empire as a very real polity without making the thing an ungovernable, bloated monster; more a federation of mini-Empires than one gigantic behemoth. It would also, I suppose allow aspiring Emperors a career trajectory which would satisfy their ambitions without burdening them with the superhuman demands of running the whole thing. It might have worked (after all, the Empire had already naturally split along such lines of its own accord), had the system had enough time to make this a cultural norm rather than being immediately undone by the phenomenally energetic and ambitious Constantine.

But there were more basic economic problems which the Empire had to grapple with beyond political management. What Rome was essentially trying to do, post-Hadrian, was essentially a Utopian dream : a stable, self-sufficient system, relying primarily (though not entirely) on its own internal resources. This meant abandoning the idea not only of imperial expansion – it simply couldn't expand any further – but also of economic growth. Indeed, limiting expansion now put the Empire, if anything, on a reduced budget rather than merely on a fixed income. The only real way to increase growth with first millennium technology, says Haywood, was to increase population : without conquest, population growth ceased, and windfalls from ravaging the barbarians dried up completely.

But to give Rome its due, it actually managed to adapt to this remarkably well. Its reorganised army – substantially larger than during its expansionist phase – consisting of border garrisons and mobile field armies behind the lines was able to handle barbarian raids very effectively, for the most part. The larger army demanded higher taxes, but most of these were paid in kind (not cash) so the effect on the economy was significant but not crippling. Even incorporating the migrating barbarians into its own military was generally successful.

There were two other major factors which proved much more difficult to address. One was that the reorganised Empire become essentially a theocracy with extremely strong state control. Your taxes might not be unbearable but you absolutely had to pay them. This was a profoundly illiberal and hierarchical society which was definitely Not A Nice Place To Live. Survival without economic growth meant iron fiscal and social self-discipline. During economic growth, the Empire could reward its citizens; when it flatlined, it became more oppressive, demanding more of its citizens than it gave back in return. For the ordinary person, there was far less of the glory that was Rome and far more of the grudgingly-paid taxes that was Rome. Consequently, they weren't especially likely to rise up in support should some invader come knocking at the gates.

Worse, and related, it was stagnant*. Of technological development, which could have given economic growth, there was naught, nor were there any fiscal innovations beyond "adjust taxes". If the Empire's moral corruption and slide into decay probably owes more to Gibbonish rhetoric than reality, then it seems that it certainly didn't do anything for its own self-improvement either. It may not have been declining, but it certainly wasn't progressing.

* Haywood says several times, without any justification or explanation whatsoever, that it was a period of chronic population decline. This is something of an annoyance because he leans on this quite heavily, but on the face of it it seems unlikely.

My reading of Haywood on this point is that this is a significantly more nuanced version than that of Gibbon. In Gibbon's thundering yet ponderous rhetoric, the Empire became corrupt and decadent because its rule was given over to people who were just worse than their illustrious forebears, out of some tired cliché that everything just entropically decays over time. Haywood's version does away with the stupid fallacy that the rulers were "just worse people", explaining that yes, there was corruption, but the systems were reformed for very good reasons. The rot in the state of Rome was not so much morally decadent leadership as it was economic pressure and a lack of ability to innovate. It was politically and technologically stagnant, and economically on a slow but irresistible decline.

2) The Fall Of Rome

Stagnation played a real role in the Empire's eventual collapse, and in this sense, internal problems were not entirely an invention of Gibbon's fertile imagination. The wealthiest, says Haywood, could indeed escape taxation through bribery and corruption, while the poorest had no choice but to pay up. The economic basis of the empire was attacked to sustain its elite; it was, in a very real sense, eating itself. The topical nature of this particular bit of commentary would seem to be self-evident.

As of course is the stuff on immigration, with Haywood describing here a very interesting feedback loop. The Empire never achieved true self-sufficiency and economic independence, and its reliance on external economies was nowhere more apparent than along its vast borders. The highly developed artisans and workshops of Rome produced luxury goods that were a magnet to external barbarians (even when they weren't being pushed onwards by warring tribes behind them), who in turn supplied the Empire with food. The problem was that this meant the barbarians were increasingly Romanised without being incorporated : the wealth of the border regions encouraged migration there and thus, without allowing them citizenship, the result was inevitably raiding and incursions. Rome was experiencing a serious crisis of short-term thinking, its own economic gains coming at the cost of strengthening its enemies.

Ultimately, Haywood basically agrees with Peter Heather. The final Fall wasn't due to a systemic problem, even if that system was flawed and did need overhaul. It was more a case of being simply overwhelmed : Rome just did not have the resources to deal with the scale of the threats it now faced. Where I think he does need to strengthen his argument, however, is in the statistics... Haywood presents the barbarian forces as so outnumbered by the Romans that it becomes a wonder they ever achieved anything. A fuller, even more economic analysis of where the tax revenues of Rome actually went might not be as enthralling as the the last, desperate victories against the Huns, but it might be more illuminating.

Still, Haywood's maps charting the collapse are an outstanding resource. At a stroke, the scale of the problem becomes obvious. Roughly speaking, the end took about a generation. There isn't really a clear moment you can say "this was the day the western Empire fell", but the classical date of 476 AD isn't a bad one. 

What isn't evident from the maps alone – and perhaps what led to complacency – is why this time things were different. The initial territorial losses are clearly substantial and problematic, but not on a scale the Empire hadn't experienced before. The accompanying data and interpretation help explain what had changed. Rome's vassal kingdoms might not have seemed all that much of a deal in terms of pure territory, but they were kept subservient out of fear and respect. Once that was gone, once they realised that Rome was now a paper tiger, the final institutional collapse came very quickly. It was by no means a total breakdown of society, with some local institutions surviving longer after the central administration was lost, but the idea of Rome as a polity was ended.

Nor could it be revived. Justinian's reconquests were as economically unsustainable as the western Empire itself had become – in fact the situation was very much worse. The damage done to Italy meant that it was held by the east* as a fife by sheer military end economic force. For any armchair generals wondering if Rome could have been restored to its full glory through, say, better support of Belisarius, the answer must be a firm "no". The resources needed for this did not exist, nor could the conquest have become a self-sustaining process.

* Haywood has a nice comment that we probably can point to a clear moment when the eastern Roman Empire truly became the Byzantine Empire : the reign of Heraclius. At this point, sweeping institutional reforms, though much needed, were so radical that it became a genuinely different entity. Up until then, the east survived as very much a direct, natural evolution of its predecessor; it was indeed still the Roman Empire despite the loss of Rome. After this point it was something new, more an heir to Rome rather than its literal continuation.

There's important, much more general lessons in cherry-picking here. Sometimes people decry claims that "this time it'll be different" as a sort of fallacy. And indeed, looked at in some narrow ways, such as purely through maps, situations can appear remarkably similar, such that claiming any real differences can seem foolish. Haywood shows how this is dangerous, that while some data can be a useful guide, you have to consider the situation in its entirety. So if you want to claim that, say technological advancements won't put people out of work (or indeed the opposite), you might be right, but you can't limit your study to how previous changes enfolded – no matter how similar they might appear. You can't draw a correlation without looking at all the extraneous circumstances, examining all of the context in which previous changes happened.

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Phew ! So Rome did decline, albeit more slowly than sometimes described, and the decline by itself wasn't inevitably leading to collapse. It could have been arrested, but lacked the innovation and boldness needed to do so. The east managed it, reverting from a near-total collapse into a powerful European state that kept going (albeit with varying degrees of success) for another thousand years. In the concluding part, we'll look a bit more into this, as well as how the rest of Europe fared (especially Britain), as well as considering the underlying systems at work in more detail