This seems to me like a consequence of striving for "neutrality" rather than honesty.

We should be honest with the facts, and free to make our own value judgements about them.

Another datum to muddy the waters: I have a friend who is an economist who points out that despite the overall economic decline, technological progress continued throughout the Medieval period, and knowledge wasn't really lost.

the scholars who are foremost in pushing for a model of Late Antiquity which emphasizes continuity are northern European and North American

And the leading historian of Late Antiquity, Peter Brown, is Irish - Ireland being one of the few countries for which this period was one of cultural flourish.

Heather makes the point that the main reason that Rome fell was the the Barbarians had over the centuries become stronger - for the lands beyond the Roman Empire these were not bad times.

Recently I read this book by Brown and found little that was controversial. I don't think he has any agenda for promoting cultural relativism.

What I find interesting about the Roman Empire is not so much that it fell, but that it was never put back together again (say, like the Chinese empire was).

What I find interesting about the Roman Empire is not so much that it fell, but that it was never put back together again (say, like the Chinese empire was).

What I find interesting is that the history of the west is one of continually shifting cultural centers (Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, Spain, France, England, Germany, etc.) while in China the Middle Kingdom held for 3000 years (from a cultural point of view).

The Chinese have always been held together by a common and continuous written language, according to Nicholas Ostler. It was the glue that held them together and kept them intact, even when overrun and ruled by invaders.

But then he's a language historian, so I guess he would say that.

There's really two falls: the fall of the Western Empire and then the rise of Islam. In the east, with the imposition of Sharia, pre-Islamic civilization, laws, culture, religion, and language were completely replaced. In the east, a de facto naval blockade on the west (pirate raids, etc) did most of the economic damage.

archaeologists are confident that a given pottery shard found in 6th century Iona, in Scotland, is derived from a site in modern day Tunisia.

Some readers may not know that Iona was a small island off the Western Scottish coast, but also the first overseas venture by Irish monks. From here they would spread spread monasticism and with it literacy, Christianity and classical knowledge to all of Scotland, the rest of Britain, and later all the Germanic lands, even as far as Bobbio in Northern Italy. From these monasteries would spring the first universities in Europe.

This is a fascinating find, as it tallies exactly with what I have said before, namely that Eastern Roman scholars from North Africa - possibly fleeing the marauding Arabs - were taking up residence in Ireland. On the margins of some of the great illuminated manuscripts produced by Irish scribes, is evidence that some of these monks came from Egypt.

The Chinese have always been held together by a common and continuous written language

So why wasn't the west held together by Egyptian or Akkadian? Why didn't the peoples in what is now south China develop their own civilization through contact, the way Greece did? It's as if Sumer gradually expanded to encompass the whole of the west, minus England (Japan), Scandinavia (Korea) and Morocco (Vietnam).

Great review, Razib, and thank you for the recommendation. I'll be on the doorstep at Dutton's when they open. (If anyone here knows Dutton's then you may rightly guess I live in....? :)

I have a friend who is an economist who points out that despite the overall economic decline, technological progress continued throughout the Medieval period, and knowledge wasn't really lost.

sure, the moldboard plow, windmills, stirrups, etc. but please note that the author is focusing on the period between 300 and 800, and especially between 500 and 800 in the successor states. i think most people would admit by the high medieval period the dark ages were a thing of the past, so the problem isn't the 'middle ages' per se, but a deemphasis on a break during a few critical centuries.

Recently I read this book by Brown and found little that was controversial. I don't think he has any agenda for promoting cultural relativism.


brown himself doesn't come in for much criticism. rather, the author quotes a lot of other authors who have come in his wake and seem influenced by pomo/deconstructionist thought (at least judging by the language they use).

while in China the Middle Kingdom held for 3000 years (from a cultural point of view).

yes, but please note that there were periodic shifts within china, which is as large as europe. e.g., from xian to loyang during the han dynasty, from the north to the south during the barbarian interregnum, from nanjing to peking, etc. these were more administrative changes, but they did exist within the framework of different regions of china coming to the fore as older preeminent loci went into decline (often due to conquest).

In the east, with the imposition of Sharia, pre-Islamic civilization, laws, culture, religion, and language were completely replaced. In the east, a de facto naval blockade on the west (pirate raids, etc) did most of the economic damage.

there is, obviously, a good argument to be made that there is little continuity between assyrian (10th century BCE) and modern day iraq, compared to zhou china (10th century BCE) and modern china. nevertheless, please note a few things:

a) ancient assyria/babylonia spoke semitic languages. forms of arabic were already common around the levantine desert littoral by the roman period. arabic and aramaic, the dominant language during the rise of islam in much of the levant are relatively closely related. a counterpoint might be persia, where the indo-european substrate maintained linguistic continuity, but persian is obviously linguistically far different from arabic (the kurdish uplanders also maintained linguistic continuity, and their language is closely related to persian).

b) religion. during the period of the islamic conquest the levant & mesopatamia was mostly christian, jewish or samaritan. the only major exceptions (that is, culturally salient as opposed to demographically significant) that i know of is haran/carrahae, where a solar cult was protected against byzantine persecution by the persian emperors (who did not rule the region, but were close enough to threaten). some revisionist scholars argue that islam arose during the late 7th century out of a reformulation of the indigenous religious culture. st. john of damascus, who flourished in the early 8th century as an official under the umayyads, and was the last church father, considered islam a heresy, not an alien religion. in other words, religious the point of discontinuity was, i would argue, more between the pagan period and the christian one. note that under the sassanids mesopatamia was mostly christian (of the eastern/nestorian variety) and jewish. there was, obviously, a more clear religious discontinuity in persia (where language though continued), though i would argue that zoroastrianism isn't that different.

c) as for laws and culture, again, one must note that the islamic caliphate was often explicitly built on the foundations of byzantine and sassanid imperial models. e.g., the umayyads even used byzantine denarii as currency before switching to "dinars." the court style was heavily influenced by byzantine and sassanid motifs. finally, in regards to sharia, i don't really think it is that exceptional or different from the local customs and traditions common in the pre-modern world (i.e., different standards for men and women, money in lieu of punishment, non-corporate property rights, etc.).

the overall point i'm trying to make is that though the generalization above is superficially persuasive, we should be careful and look beyond the semantics and see what islam really changed. i think the argument is still good insofar as a great deal did change, but, in some ways the change was like the change of gallo-romans to franks. the french took up the name of the german barbarians, but their culture was still fundamentally derived from rome (language, religion, etc.). some of the same occurred in the middle east, genetically we know that the population has pre-conquest roots on the whole. of course, they use the arabic language (which has fragmented into nearly unintelligible dialects), but note that teh difference between arabic and aramaic is FAR less than between latin and frankish (a germanic dialect). and so on.

Why didn't the peoples in what is now south China develop their own civilization through contact, the way Greece did?

they did, they were just eventually sinicized. e.g., even the explicitly non-chinese nan chao state run by the dais in modern yunnan was manned by chinese mandarins. also, note that south china has the same written language, but the spoken dialects are basically separate languages. the spread of chinese is, i think, pretty analogous to the spread of latin in the west. remember that until the past century educated elites through the western world could converse in latin (e.g., hungarian speaking students who arrived at oxford with no english during the 16th century to study theology could communicate in latin).

Great discussion of the book, many thanks. I'll never read it but I'm feeling marginally less dumb than usual tks to your summary.

As for the po-mo/decon thang ... I often find I agree with the criticisms they make, but I hate the way many of the po-mo-ers turn their thing into a positive political cause. My own attitude, FWIW: why not enjoy both the Grand Narrative and what the po-mo'ers have added to the picture?

Razib,

I think we largely agree. Islam developed from the materials which were around at the time, and after. Indeed, Islam would not be a powerful force without Sharia, which besides being a religious code was also a ruleset that allowed various legal systems (Roman, etc) to be swept aside.

I wonder if in ancient days, a common law was more important to a culture than a common language.

This article on the Irish monastic movement seems to suggest that it was the "Cistercian reform" of the 12th century which barred children from studying at monasteries, and restricted study to only those who were intending to become monks, as one of the possible reasons that Latin literacy didn't penetrate further into the post-Roman world of Western Europe. The Irish monasteries by contrast had allowed children as young as 7 to study, and by some accounts as many 40,000 people out of a 6th century Irish population of 250,000 were involved in monastic life.

Re Irish monks

Irish monasticism is intimately tied up with the unique manner in which Christianity was introduced to and developed in Ireland.

Irish warlords had conquered part of western Wales around this time (and Scotland, eventually founding the Kingdom of Scotland - modern Irish like to forget their own little flirtation with Imperialism). These brought slaves and prisoners of war back to Ireland, and historians have established that most of them had Christian names. They were a major factor in the Christianisation of Ireland (eg. St Patrick was carried to Ireland by raiders) These raiders also opened up new trade routes with old parts of the Roman world, and some Roman jewelry has been found in Ireland as a result (despite it never living under the Roman yoke)

Irelands Christianisation was similar to that of the Goths - the Priests in Goth communities around the mid-third century tended to be freed Roman prisoners, likewise the first Christians in Ireland were British prisoners.

A Roman mission under Palladius had arrived some time before Patrick, to the 'Irish believing in Christ,' - evidence that there were enough Christians in Ireland at this stage (430) to warrant a Church expedition. The latest evidence suggests that Palladius was more important than Patrick in Ireland's Christianisation (Prosper wrote 'he made the barbarian land Christian'). This is important. Patrick was a British prisoner who had little contact with the Mediterranean world, Palladius was from Auxerre in Gaul and was a part of the thoroughly Romanized cognitive elite, but he was a distinctive, idiosyncratic type (a former Pelagian)

The Irish Church developed rapidly, along its own lines, but was more influenced by the Roman world than is commonly acknowledged. Eg Irish monastic
houses contained a large number of Roman sources for this time; from Daibhi O Croinin's Early Medieval Ireland:

Alongside the Bible there were 'a wide variety of patristic commentaries by Augustine, Jerome, Cyprian, Origen, Ambrosiaster, and Gregory the Great, as well as other anonymous or pseudonymous works... collections of canon law, ecclesiastical history, and church synodal decress - including ones from the councils of Arles and Nicaea in their original, uncontaminated forms.'

However Irish churches developed a different organizational structure to those on the continent. On the continent bishops ruled dioceses with clearly defined boundaries, in Ireland the most important churches were monastic houses, united under an abbot. Abbots were more powerful than bishops. Iona is the supreme example of this - a whole island ruled by an abbot! Monastaries had become self sufficient, almost stateless institutions earlier than on the continent. St Columbanus spread this monastical form to the continent, eventually dying at Bobbio.

Columbanus is a fascinating character, people should check out the quirky wiki entry on him. Here is a wonderfully Augustinian opening letter by Columbanus to Pope Gregory the Great around AD600 (From O Croinin):

To the Holy Lord and Father in Christ, the fairest Ornament of the Roman Church, as it were a most honoured Flower of all Europe in her decay.'

Columbanus was clearly on a 'purifying' mission to Europe, and his was an absurdly strict doctrine of Christianity. (The Irish always were the most sternly Christian of the European nations - divorce was only legalized in 1995, abortion is still completely illegal) They certainly left their mark on European monasticism and its future development (of course St Benedict was more important in the end, that goes without saying)

The "Proust of the Papuans" issue is a red herring. The Germans had a lot of poetic literature, of which only Beowulf and the Norse literature survives, mostly in thinly-Christianized forms. The German epic tradition (which was not just poetry, but a whole alternative theory of justice, honor, legitimacy, etc.)was a real threat both to the church and to the Christian states. Preservation of the old epics was haphazard; Charlemagne had some Frankish epics written down, but they disappeared later.

Beowulf is an amazing, fantastic poem. The real point is that poetry and imaginative literature really are somewhat out of place in the modern scientific world. I really don't think that there's been an English poem on a par with Beowulf since 1750 or 1800.

I don't think that the revisionist view was ever dominant, except perhaps in some undergraduate courses.

In China, the South became increasingly important economically and culturally as time went on. The capital was in Beijing mostly because that military threat was from the North. This was partly so the government could respond quickly to threats, but also so that a Northern general couldn't put himself in a position to conquer the South.

Something rather similiar happened in the late Roman Empire (see Heather). At one point Rome had four capitals, keyed to four different military threats. Toward the end Ravenna in the North had superseded Rome.

I have a friend who is an economist who points out that despite the overall economic decline, technological progress continued throughout the Medieval period, and knowledge wasn't really lost.

Indeed. But a Dark Age (note absence of ironic quotes) needn't be caused by an actual loss of knowledge: All you need is a loss of mass usageof knowledge.

And what Ward-Perkins points out again and again is the decline of social complexity: less division of labor, less trade, less investment in practical expertise. In short, less usage of knowledge.

So in theory (some) Dark Ages people knew how to make high-quality thrown pottery, but in practice, it became tough to convince one guy to specialize in throwing, another in painting, another in firing. What if one of the experts runs off? Then your high-quality pottery factory has to shut down.

Better to be a jack of all trades than risk that.

Stability, trust, a thick market of skilled replacement workers---those are some of the raw materials of a high-productivity society, raw materials that the Empire provided. Books--they're just one requirement on a very, very long list.

We economists all teach about the value of specialization and exchange in our freshman courses---it's a way of showing the benefits of free trade, of immigration, of paying someone to mow your lawn. I can't imagine a more trenchant case study than the economic collapse of Western Europe that Ward-Perkins documents.

there was, obviously, a more clear religious discontinuity in persia (where language though continued), though i would argue that zoroastrianism isn't that different.

The situation in Persia was relatively complex. At the time of the Islamic conquest there was a sharp distinction in religion between the west (which had a relatively strong Zoroastrian hierarchy) and the east (which was a stew of many different religions, including Mazdaists not strongly connected to the Sassanid religious establishment). However, this situation reversed as Islam found it much easier to make converts in the relatively free market of the east. In the west, a whole spectrum of Islamo-Zoroastrian syncretisms emerged. Even as late as the Abbasids there were recurrent outbreaks across western Persia of social and religious revolts fueled by dualistic, Mazdaist-influenced Islamic heresies.

What I find interesting about the Roman Empire is not so much that it fell, but that it was never put back together again (say, like the Chinese empire was).

I think a case could be made that it fell and was put back together in the third century. Roman civilisation continued but the Roman state was shattered and then later reforged by the likes of Aurelian and Diocletian. The Roman Dominate was a very different place to the Roman Principate, just as the Principate was very different to the Republic.

Also, I think that Justinian's reconquest of parts of the former western provinces could have reassembled the Empire if luck and epidemic disease hadn't been against him.

Columbanus was clearly on a 'purifying' mission to Europe, and his was an absurdly strict doctrine of Christianity. (The Irish always were the most sternly Christian of the European nations - divorce was only legalized in 1995, abortion is still completely illegal) They certainly left their mark on European monasticism and its future development (of course St Benedict was more important in the end, that goes without saying)

omar, good comments, but i might quibble with this insofar as my reading suggests that the sternness of irish catholicism is a product of early modern dynamics having to do with english domination and scotish/borderer settlement of ireland after the reformation, as well as a jansensist influenced revival during the 19th century in the church hierarchy.


Beowulf is an amazing, fantastic poem. The real point is that poetry and imaginative literature really are somewhat out of place in the modern scientific world. I really don't think that there's been an English poem on a par with Beowulf since 1750 or 1800.

in regards to the context of this book, i think one could say that beowulf was on a par with the illiad and the odyssey, both reflections of dark age greece after the fall of the citadels, or the indian epic poems during the pre-literate period. yes, they're great works of culture, but a different sort of culture than that which produced the second sophistic.

Even as late as the Abbasids there were recurrent outbreaks across western Persia of social and religious revolts fueled by dualistic, Mazdaist-influenced Islamic heresies.

*nod* my understanding is that islam spread far faster in the borderlands of transoxiana than iran proper, which wasn't majority muslim until the 10th century (if that). an analogy here might be with the indian subcontinent, where the regions that brahmanical hinduism were weakest, the punjab and bengal (where buddhist religious presence was strong on the eve of the muslim invasions) were the areas where islam became a majority religion.

Thanks for the intelligent and thorough review. I read Ward-Perkins book last fall and thoroughly enjoyed it. He was masterful in his use of archaeological data to demonstrate technological design. I also liked his interpretation of how the Eastern Empire was able to survive the disintegration of the Western Empire in the 5th and 6th centuries: Most of the economically productive area of the Eastern Empire was across the Bosporus and on the south side of the Mediterranean. The invading tribes could plunder most of the Western Empire at will, whereas the Byzantine navy kept the primitive barbarian navies from crossing the Bosporus or the Med, keeping a safe productive area in the worst of times. At least until the rise of Islam when this area was gradually taken from the East.

If you use art and culture as indexes of something else (development, civilization, whatever) then the "Papuan Proust" argument is empty and circular. Of course there was no P.P., because Proust is merely being used as a marker of something which we already knew that the Papuans didn't have -- civilization.

However, the "Papuan Proust" argument is that Papuan civilization is inferior because it produced no great literature (no Proust). This assumes that literary value is a thing in itself and can be used as evidence for the level of the civilization that produced it (or didn't). This is what I am arguing against.

Literature is one of the areas where lesser, poorer, smaller peoples sometimes produce works of great merit. It's completely fortuitous whether or not anyone outside these small cultures ever knows anything about their poems, and their poems, etc., difficult to communicate outside their own culture, but people who have made the effort to find out say that these people do produce great works. So I would bet that there is a Papuan literary work of great merit, even though no one knows or cares or ever will.

If you doubt that there really are valid ways of saying for sure whether a given work is of great merit, then you are saying that the "Papuan Proust" argument is no good. From that point of view, we already know Papuan literature can't be much good, because it was produced by a lesser civilization.

Literature and poetry used to be much more important in people's lives (and in the world of power) than they are now. Modernization, science, secularity, etc. have tended to marginalize literature.

Where do you stop the Papuan Proust argument?
The USA hasn't produced a physicist to equal Newton, a mathematician Gauss, an economist Smith, a philosopher Hume, a biologist Darwin, a writer Shakespeare, a composer Mozart, a general Napoleon, a painter Rembrandt, et-bloody-cetera. Rather silly, isn't it?

john,

i'm not making any such specific argument. roughly, my allusion to the proust of the papuans was to highlight that many scholars and thinkers seem to make a transition between accepting the equal normative worth of the cultural products of disparate cultures toward eliding away any differences in complexity or affinity to their own normative station.

Where do you stop the Papuan Proust argument?

you're a genius with your slippery slope.

I wouldn't go anywhere near that far. You can make distinctions between Papua and civilized nations, but literature is a poor place to start. The point isn't whether a given people has produced an all time world champion, but whether that country is contributing at a high level to the discipline in question. In all cases you mentioned the US is, and by and large your arguments against the US contributions (and I can't tell how serious they're meant to be) seem highly overstated.

OK. I think Hannah Arendt started the Papuan Proust argument, or someone in that NYC circle (maybe even Allan Bloom or Saul Bellow), and the intention was about what I said, I think. I don't think that "the Papuan Proust" is helpful to your argument. By and large people here don't have the high-culture bent of the New York intelligentsia.

Papuan political, legal, technical, scientific, philosophical and economic iinstitutions and expressions certainly are of only scientific interest, and don't bear comparison to those of any developed nation.

it was saul bellow. and sure, i shouldn't have included that in if only so you wouldn't have had to waste time with that point and engage the rest of the post ;-)

Omar,

Yes, I agree that early Irish Christians had much in common with the Salafists or the early Protestants, they were reformers. They sought to introduce a purer form of Christianity, with a number of newer innovations - Celtic Christianity - to continental Europe, in an effort to rid it of the corruption of the late Roman period.

They succeeded in the most part, and reshaped a whole continent in doing so.

I know a lot of readers and commenters on this blog can't stomach the fact that a lot of what they consider to be Germanic influence on civilization is actually Irish - so be it.

pconroy, be assured that I yield to no-one in my admiration for the accomplishments of those West Brits in the Dark Ages. I don't believe that they sailed to America though.

Of course they did - where do you think all the New York policemen came from?

(maybe even Allan Bloom or Saul Bellow)

Bellow, in a 1988 interview w/The NYer.

"Where is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? Show me the Proust of the Papuans and I will read him."

A bit obnoxious but I think he was serious - he did love literature. And I think, like Larry Summers, he was sincerely baffled at the brouhaha.

As for me, I believe the quotation on this Amazon page from Iris Murdoch is apt.

Razib, Herrick,

I agree with you both. I didn't think anything I said implied otherwise.

I had a friend who was a clay mineralogist who did some archeological work in Israel and then studied pottery glazes in Papua New Guinea, and he seemed fairly impressed.

I suspect if Bellow had asked about glazes instead of literature, the Papuans might have come out of it reasonably well.

Fascinating stuff about the ice cores - that paints quite a vivid historical picture.

Is the production of coins really a marker of the health of civilisation? Inflation is usually seen as an indicator of trouble, the state struggling to finance itself through its usual taxation system (note: I'm not as monetarist as that sounds, but my doubtless ignorant caricature of classicists' heuristics on economics assumes this). I'd have thought that more coining might be correlated with war in particular.

Given that these economies were strongly metallic-standard, I would suggest that analysing the content of the coins could be very useful.

my reading suggests that the sternness of irish catholicism is a product of early modern dynamics having to do with english domination and scotish/borderer settlement of ireland after the reformation, as well as a jansensist influenced revival during the 19th century in the church hierarchy

Correct. That was a tenuous link at best.

Majority Christianity in Ireland during this period was notoriously lax, still influenced as it was by the pagan religion. Like with many cultures Christianity was grafted onto the preexisting culture and they influenced one another accordingly. Although I am generally skeptical of new ageish attempts to portray pagan faiths as all peace & love & nature-loving, the Barbarian-Irish legal ‘system’ was surprisingly open. Eg Women could inherit property, divorce men (one of the reasons could be ‘not sexually satisified’, I kid you not) and crimes were paid for with an exchange of goods rather than punishment.

Irish catholicism developed in a very unusual way over the centuries. Eg. although Ireland was almost entirely Christian by the 12th century, for political reasons the Pope gave his blessing to the Anglo-Norman conquest, ostensibly to Christianise the country! Irish bishops and abbots submitted to King Henry II without hesitation, here is a letter from Pope Alexander to the Irish bishops:

Your letters have informed us how great are the enormities of vice with which the Irish people is contaminated and how they have put aside the fear of God and the faith of the Christian religion to put their salvation in jeopardy... Henry noble king of the English, prompted by God, has, with his assembled forces, subjected to his rule that barbarous and uncivilised people… we are overjoyed…

Apparently Ireland had lax marriage practices, ate meat during Lent, were not paying enough Church tithes and didn’t show respect for church property. Heavens the barbarism! A lot of this was otherization on the part of the Anglo-Norman lords stemmed from a strange antipathy to Irish farming practices (elites always have a tendency to confuse nomadic pastoralism with paganism, the ‘wild Irish’) and the informal Brehon legal system (commit a crime then pay a fine, rather than the English ‘do the time or your limb is mine’)

On a side note this period in European history is gathering increased attention from historians – it is now dubbed the 'Medieval Expansion of Europe'; a kind of preamble to the world conquest after 1492. Germanic peoples agressively settled Eastern Europe & the Baltic, creating little enclaves here and there* The Normans and Vikings were conquering different parts of Europe and the Mediterranean (Sicily, Cyprus, the Holy Land), and the Spanish were reconquering Iberia, and the Normans were also conquering the British Isles. For an in depth look at the expansionary period also check Robert Bartletts ‘The Making of Europe’

Re Beowolf - Seamus Heaney's recent translation of it is remarkable, seriously. I don't want to go over the top, but we're talking John Dryden (Aeneid trans) territory here.

* This Germanic expansion, called the Ostsiedlung or 'settlement of the East' had a profound impact upon subsequent European history. The presence of all those German enclaves in Eastern Europe would be a major factor in the rise of pan-Germanism and Hitler's idea of Lebensraum. Check out the Wikipedia map.

Actually scratch that Beowolf comment, that was over the top.

Speaking of over the top, I just scratched a whole post to David Boxenhorn on the grounds that trying to describe the whole history of the whole of China in a few sentences was probably a bit beyond me.

Sandgroper - Come on, give us what you have. We'll flesh out the entire history of the universe right here on this thread.

"Your letters have informed us how great are the enormities of vice with which the Irish people is contaminated and how they have put aside the fear of God and the faith of the Christian religion to put their salvation in jeopardy... Henry noble king of the English, prompted by God, has, with his assembled forces, subjected to his rule that barbarous and uncivilised people… we are overjoyed…"

Effectively Ireland was subjected to a crusade. This one stuck.

Oh OK then - they never had to put China back together again because it never came apart. How about that?

I wouldn't call it a crusade. Religion was not the primary motivation - Henry would have invaded with or without Rome's blessing. The Pope was just hedging his bets.

I wonder why the destruction brought about Atilla and the Huns is unmentioned. A similar attack on Baghdad caused similar effects - political fragmentation and a sharp lowering of the cultural and technical level. Is there a mental block to compare the Roman Empire before and after the Huns?

I wonder why the destruction brought about Atilla and the Huns is unmentioned.

did you read the addendum?
The Fall of Rome makes a few attempts to explain how and why Rome fell (and how and why Byzantium did not), but the book is mostly about the aftermath, not the process itself. For that, I highly recommend Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians.

that would answer your question.

Omar, Eoin,

You also should be aware that it wasn't Henry II who invaded Ireland, but rather a number of Welsh-Norman freebooters, who with the help of Flemish mercenaries and other auxiliaries - some Irish - managed to capture the whole Eastern part of the country, including Dublin. Henry II only got involved when it seemed like they might be able to setup their own Norman Kingdom in Ireland.

bioIgnoramus said:
I don't believe that they sailed to America though.

Well Irish monks sailed to and settled Iceland, and introduced sheep to the Faroes and other Atlantic islands.

St Brendan the Navigator was a pioneer of many of these trips and Dicuil another Irish monks, wrote the definitive geographical text of the time - De mensura orbis terrae in 825 AD.

It's also notable was that they also marked another land to the SouthWest of Europe called Hy-Brasil, which some have speculated was actually Terceira island in the Azores, which was formerly called "Brazil", and later the NorthEast coast of South America would be called Brazil - aka Brasil.

By the second century CE--the age of the Antonines--Rome had become a more or less "modern" economy characterized be well-developed inter-regional trade an extensive specialization of labor. Urban concentrations throughout the empire tended toward processing activities, depending on relatively distant sources, not only of raw materials but also of foodstuff staples.

But trade within the empire was never "free"; it was always hampered by law (in accord with popular sentiment) regarding the concept of "fair" or "just" pricing, particularly for the most common items of consumption, especially in the case of cereal grain, in which the urban trade had developed into vitually a function of municipal authority.

Interconnectedness of supply and demand (and the role of profit in adjusting one to the other) were completely unrecognized. Farmers were disincentivized from pursuing abundance: when crops were poor, the ceiling limited their returns; when crops were good, market competition did the same. Moreover,in shortages, the authority subsidized imports from abroad with which to allay the urban shortages.

The impotence of authority to deal with this cause of urban dissatisfaction (and concomitant political unrest)--again and again-- led them into desperate resort--currency debasement--whose effects, though imperceptible at first, grow by compounding incrementalism with reiteration. This practice became prevalent in the third and fourth centuries and, when coupled with the price control regime of common foodstuffs, had the entirely predictable (in light of present economic understanding) result of disintegrating not only the basic trade relations but the entire social organization based on those relations. The result of frequent and severe legal action against producers and sellers not only caused the shortage and panic it was intended to alleviate but made the very existence of city-dwellers precarious.

Citizens in urban areas everywhere (not just in Rome itself) deserted the city for the countryside in an effort to produce their own means of survival. The process affected especially the large landowners whose properties (the latifundia) were already marginal (due not only to less-than-remunerative prices obtainable and the depreciating currency but also to the relative inefficiency of slave labor--a phenomenon virtually unknown at the time and hardly better-understood in the present day.) The slaves and the escaping urban-dwellers became, essentially, sharecroppers of the type known variously as serfs, helots, or peons--with some becoming attached to the household itself as servants or artisans assigned to turning out the various physical requirements of the self-sufficient (autarkic) estate. The empire had already become manorial.

Contrary to what has been expressed by other commentors (or authors), Rome's civilization did not simply change or evolve into another form except under a most strained interpretation of the term. Rather, the process of disintegration was caused directly (and predictably) by "failure to adjust their moral and legal codes to the requirements of a market economy." The rulers were no foot-draggers in exercising their authority: laws penalized desertion of the urban areas, required obligatory contributions and services of wealthy elites, and virtually nationalized the property of shipowners. None of these had their intended effect but, indeed, had their (economically) predictable effect: the intensification of reduction of the once-prosperous commonwealth to "easy pickings" for the opponents they'd handled with some relative ease in former times.

The above is a synopsis of pages 767-9 in HUMAN ACTION, by Ludwig von Mises. I've referred to the passage before, suggesting that many might want to pay some attention to it but don't know how many (if any) had taken my suggestion.

Great review, Razib. This tendency of historians influenced by postmodernism to deny the Dark Ages ever existed is profoundly annoying. I have read both Brown and Heather myself. I was a bit disappointed though that neither really discussed in any detail the role of Christianity in the decline of classical civilization. A.H.M Jones' The Later Roman Empire sheds much more light on this and is still in my view the best resource available on the subject. The Catholic Church became the wealthiest institution and largest landowner in Europe during this period. The Church was exempt from taxes and sucked wealth out of the productive economy. Most of the Roman schools survived the barbarian invasions and continued to exist into the post-Roman era (see Pierre Riché's Education and Culture in the Barbarian West) only to fall into neglect because of the hostility of rigorists in the Church to "profane learning." After the sixth century, the Church had little use for men of letters as it shifted its efforts toward the conversion of the illiterate countryside. Even in the Byzantine East, schools of philosophy and grammar were closed under Justinian for no other reason than religious bigotry. As you noted, his predecessor Justin was the first illiterate emperor, so this trend towards anti-intellectualism was hardly unique to the barbarian West. The Germanic barbarians never came anywhere near Egypt, but Alexandria was a desolate shadow of its former self by the time it was destroyed by the Muslims in the seventh century. It was not an uncommon for unorthodox books in the "Christian Empire" to be burned in gigantic public bonfires (see MacMullen, Paganism and Christianity). The writings of Porphyry, Nestorius, and Arius were destroyed in just such a fashion. An imperial decree ordered "Burn all books hostile to Christianity lest they cause God anger and scandalize the pious." Heather acknowledges that the pagan temples were destroyed by Christian mobs, but is mute on the fact that the libraries of the ancient world were usually attached to them.