DARK AGES

How Dark Was It? A New History of Medieval Europe

Review of: Barbarians to Angels

By DIARMAID MacCULLOCH


How did a tiny bronze statuette of Buddha find its way to sixth-century Sweden? Why did Napoleon choose bees as his emblem when he became Emperor? These questions take us to the world that arose out of the ruins of the Western Roman Empire, when in 476 C.E. the last emperor, a boy with the big name Romulus Augustulus, was evicted from his throne by a "barbarian" (or non-Roman) general, and Byzantine emperors from the east failed to fill the gap.


Slightly more than three centuries went by before the descendant of one of those barbarians, Charles — later called "Charles the Great" or Charlemagne — had himself crowned as an emperor in Rome by a Christian bishop on Christmas Day, 800. In between lie years which have been misleadingly christened "the Dark Ages." Originally, the name arose from the frustration historians felt at the lack of written information about the period, but in popular cliché the term has come to be a synonym for breakdowns of Roman culture and order, descents into violence and savagery. In "Barbarians to Angels" (W.W. Norton, 227 pages, $24.95), Peter Wells seeks to rescue the Dark Ages by going beyond the written sources to archaeology; in so doing, he introduces us to Buddha and the bees.

Charlemagne's coronation ceremony — a relatively recently invented ritual that no Roman emperor had ever undergone — was not without its problems. The pope who performed it had recovered, supposedly miraculously, from a murderous assault in an attempted coup in Rome the previous year, in which he had been blinded and had his tongue cut out. Both mutilation and recovery are questionable, though much celebrated by Charlemagne's clerical publicists. But they were by no means the most dubious part of Pope Leo's reputation: In fact, the story showed the pope's fragile political position and his urgent need for support from the most powerful man in Western Europe. In return, he could lend legitimacy to Charlemagne's audacious reinvention of himself.

Haunting both pope and emperor was the memory of Rome. Right at the end of his reign, Charlemagne issued a series of coins that must have caused awe and amazement at the time, and still have the power to astonish: As best they could, the imperial moneyers carved coin dies that recreated coins of ancient Rome from half a millennium before. A barbarian Frankish monarch was portrayed laureate and clean-shaven, as once Augustus had been, and bearing little resemblance to Charlemagne's real everyday dress and coiffeur — Frankish cloak, shirt and leggings, and luxuriant beard.

Charlemagne was far from unique. One striking feature of the Dark Ages was that figures as diverse as Theodoric the Ostrogoth in Italy and Offa of Mercia in England were obsessed with recovering the splendor of ancient Rome, often enlisting contemporary Rome and its Christian bishop to do so. Even those parts of Europe that had never actually been Roman took up Christianity, because it put them in touch with that lost world. When English and Celtic Christians were arguing about discrepant methods of calculating Easter at the Synod of Whitby in 664, for example, King Oswy of Bernicia decided in favor of the Roman method over the Celtic, because Peter of Rome was the guardian of the gates of heaven, and Columba of Iona was not. There was a paradox here, since Jesus had been crucified by a Roman provincial governor, and Peter by a Roman emperor, but the cultural alliance stuck.

But, as these leaders well knew, the Roman empire didn't exist only in the past, it also lived on in the contemporary East. There was, throughout the early medieval period, another Rome still surviving in unrivaled splendor: the city of Constantinople, through all these centuries the largest city in the world that Europeans knew (the Islamic world included) and ruled by a real live Roman emperor. He is missing from Mr. Wells's book, which concentrates the efforts to recover imperial glory by the post-Roman West — which is fair enough, but it would help to be told that, between the fifth and the ninth centuries, the West lived off the back of much greater glory in the East. The graves of princelings in far-off England were given a touch of sophistication with a sprinkling of Byzantine coinage or tableware. That little bronze Buddha travelled from Swat in India to a far off trading emporium at Helgö in central Sweden along trade routes kept open by Byzantine power, so archaeologists recovered him from the site of Helgö in 1956. Perhaps it was a souvenir; it is pleasing to think of a Scandinavian tourist reveling in the panorama of the Himalayas sometime in the sixth century.

This is the other side of Mr. Wells's argument that "Dark Age" Europe was its own world, with its own values. He takes us to various European towns with Roman origins and explains how archaeologists have proved that these places never died after the legions left, but simply changed. Monumental stone buildings were taken apart or left to rot, while above or just beyond them, cheerful wooden and wattle huts housed a busy, productive population, who wore clothes fastened with sparkling brooches decorated to suit regional preferences, and who spent their leisure time smashing up a good deal of distinctive brands of pottery so that it could be found and sorted out by modern-day scholars. Mr. Wells contends that it was not that such people did not know how to live like Romans, but that they simply didn't want to. But of course they did: hence Charlemagne, his coronation, and his coins, which impressed not just the powerful but those they ruled.

And how about Napoleon and his bees? Here is a curious parallel with the Charlemagne story: a ruthless politician who took on the trappings of ancient monarchs. But in Napoleon's case, the monarch was a "barbarian" king. Back in 482, King Childeric, father of the first Christian king of what became France, was buried in what is now the city of Tournai, immediately beside a Roman fort. Childeric's richly furnished grave was rediscovered in 1653 and became the subject of Europe's first detailed archaeological report. Among the many precious objects recovered were hundreds of little gold-and-garnet bees — some think they were actually badly drawn eagles — which had probably decorated a rich cloak or horse covering. Most of them have now disappeared, although currently one can admire a few survivors in a wonderfully rich exhibition on "Rome and the Barbarians" in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. The bees caught Napoleon's imagination, and he adopted them as his own emblem to identify himself with a French monarch who predated the monarchy so recently destroyed by the French Revolution. His bees could trump, so to speak, the fleur-de-lys symbol of the old French royal family.

There is a good story in this book. It is a pity that it is not better told. The prose is clunky and repetitive, and it's doubtful whether many people really still think that the Dark Ages were all that Dark. But Mr. Wells has clearly enjoyed tramping the streets of Europe's Roman cities and the archaeological sites of long-forgotten ports around the coasts of Britain, the North Sea, and the Baltic. If his celebration of the Dark Ages encourages others to do the same, then it will have served its purpose.

Mr. MacCulloch is a fellow of St. Cross College and professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. His most recent book is "The Reformation: A History."