perfidy

I downloaded this the other day, and I've just been enthralled.  It's really surprising - even when we no better, having read our Gibbon, we still imagine that Europe went from full-on Roman Empire glory straight into deepest Dark Age, without going through any sort of awkward in-between phase.  Pirenne's Mohammed et Charlegmagne is a perfect corrective for this - straightforward prose, well balanced scope, telling details and a good narrative organization.

The Germans, pushed into the Empire by the arrival of Attila of Hun fame, did not want to destroy the empire.  They wanted to use it for their own benefit.  The successor kingdoms set up - the Vandals in North Africa, the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy, a grab bag of smaller tribes in Gaul - were all integrated into a post-Roman system that was still largely Roman.  What's remarkable is how Roman, and how prosperous, these states remained.  Urban culture survived the Barbarian invasions, remained tied to the Emperors in Constantinople, and trade - in the form of Syrian and Jewish merchants - was still being conducted in volume.

We know - though I haven't gotten to that part in the book yet - that in the dark ages, the money economy collapsed utterly, western Europe was largely isolated from the rest of the world, and literacy took a powder.  But it certainly wasn't the Vandals and Goths that did it.

The version I downloaded is just images of the pages - not OCR'd - but I'll put up some quotes over the next few days.  Fascinating stuff, and relevant as well to the ongoing discussions here, and in Aretae and Foseti-land.

[wik] Link to book.  Free download, though you should consider flying to Belgium and giving money to his heirs.