The Early Middle Ages | Long Shadows and the Dark Ages Revisited (Lecture 24)

Lecture 24: During the 20th century, historical research has modified considerably the ideas of Edward Gibbon and Henri Pirenne concerning the transition from the ancient to the medieval world. Historians today are less willing than Gibbon was to identify Christianity as the cause and barbarians as the instrument of the Roman Empire’s fall. Historians now pay more attention to regional variations in the empire’s collapse and take the implications of regional variations into greater account. A good number of present-day historians see demographic and, like Pirenne, economic changes at the root of the empire’s problems. However, Pirenne overstated the strength of the later Roman economy, which was in decline well before the Arab expansion of the 7th century. The Carolingian economy, rather than sinking to a low point, now appears to have been recovering, at least during the late 8th and early 9th centuries. However, the fields of late antique and early medieval history continue to see further discoveries and refinements of interpretation.

Suggested Readings:
A. H. M. Jones. The Later Roman Empire, 284–602. Two volumes. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.
Michael McCormick. Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, 300–900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.