There are many times and places in history one might like to visit, or even live: Rome under Augustus, Paris in the belle epoque, London in the ’60s. But surely no one would want to live anywhere in Europe in the 900s, including probably most of those who did live then.
Paul Collins’ very readable The Birth of the West, written for a general reader with little background in the era, shows Europe, three generations after the death of Charlemagne in 814, fallen into disorder, with no central government and all autonomy local.
It was a time of great suffering. From the north, Vikings raided the coastlines of Britain and France, plundering and raping, enslaving and murdering whole cities. They invaded as far west as Constantinople, and penetrated the coastal rivers to besiege Paris, then only an island in the Seine. Sometimes they could be bribed to spare a city or region. But the next year or the next, they’d return. For decades they spread terror and disorder all across Europe.
From the south came the Saracens, as Islamists were called in those days, again plundering and enslaving. What is now the Riviera was then a Saracen pirate enclave. From the east came the Magyars, fierce nomadic warriors who lived off plunder and rampage. Eventually they would settle in Hungary, after laying waste to most of central Europe.
Rome, seat of Christianity and the one unifying element in European society, had fallen under control of the city’s warring families, predecessors of today’s mafias.
“Power in medieval society was noncentralized, consensual, and consultative,” Collins writes, “even if the consent was limited to the more powerful.”
The 900s are a fascinating time in history, and many lessons might be derived from the era’s amazing and usually violent changes in reigns and rulers — despite the endless and often bewildering successions of Ottos, Leos, Pippins and Benedicts.
Collins focuses instead on the emergence of the central state, and what would become, for better and worse, modern Europe.
One element that defeated Charlemagne’s successors was the Frankish custom of dividing land among sons, rather than passing it along to the eldest — the consequence being a “brothers’ war” among his grandsons.
Language divisions reflected — and speeded — geographic and cultural changes, as everyday vulgar Latin evolved into early Germanic and Romance languages.
Collins follows the lead of other recent historians in seeing this period not just as brutish and stagnant, but also rich in its cultural and spiritual life, and his best chapters focus on everyday people and experiences.
The Birth of the West is not an extravagant title. Collins closes, appropriately, with “the fears” that preceded the year 1000 and led to history’s first judicial burning for heresy. The Reich was established in Germany. And Paris, celebrated for its stubborn defense against the Vikings, was now an important point on the European map.
David Walton writes and teaches in Pittsburgh.
The Birth of the West
Rome, Germany, France,and the Creation of Europein the Tenth Century
(Public Affairs, $29.99)