Judith Herrin has given us in this substantial but very readable book a superb survey of the period in which the conditions for the emergence of mediaeval Europe came together—roughly the four centuries from 450 to 850 a.d.footnote1 In one sense the book is also a contribution to the genealogy of what we think of as the distinctively European ideologies, left and right, of our own day, though these wider issues are only hinted at. Herrin underlines the specifically Western phenomena that set European ‘Christendom’ over against the Byzantine world and early Islam alike—the lack of a single well-defined locus of sovereign power other than the ‘para-state’ of the Church, territorial division, limited and contractual models of authority—and shows with consummate skill how these emerge in the interaction of the new Germanic kingdoms, the papacy and the empire, and how the empire’s structure is itself modified in its confrontation with Islam in such a way that space is left for the former western provinces to find new patterns of power relations and a highly distinctive ideology, fuelled by tensions absent from both Byzantium and Islam.
The collapse of the Roman imperium in the Western provinces meant that a vacuum appeared in secular political power: civic authorities either dissolved themselves or retreated from their responsibilities. Public works and charities, the administration of justice, and sometimes control of markets in the towns became the charge of the only surviving group to combine basic organizational skills with a powerfully reinforced sense of responsibility—the Christian clergy. Their increasingly central role in urban life guaranteed the survival of towns and their markets as a competitive element within the overall patterns of feudal production in the Middle Ages (p. 73). The eastern empire presents a sharp contrast: there too there is a weakening of traditional civic administration, and in some remoter districts bishops play a role similar to the one they have in the West. But the empire retains a coherent civil service and a large army; so the long-term solution to the problems of decaying or vulnerable administration is a militarizing of local government, so that towns become essentially ‘garrisons and
That strength is both expressed and nourished by the ideology of the emperor as focus and manifestation of cosmic order, as the visible image or participant of divine power—an ideology classically formulated by the historian Eusebius in the fourth century, and surviving with unabated force for over a millennium. Imperial authority is directly delegated from God, and there is therefore no possibility of pluralism in sovereignty or in ideology within the imperium. In principle, the monarch is the sole focus of political meanings—indeed of human meanings—in the inhabited world: he is the channel through which the divine pattern of the universe reproduces itself among human beings. As has often been observed, monotheism is brought into the service of a unitary account of the derivation of political authority (one god, one basileus). And the correlate of the centralizing and militarizing of government in the sixth and seventh centuries is a succession of imperial attempts to enforce doctrinal conformity. This is both a necessary demonstration of the emperor’s authority as inspired teacher and (to a degree perhaps rather underrated by Herrin, at least in respect of Justinian’s theological programme) a struggle to conciliate dissidents, especially in volatile frontier areas, by reworking earlier doctrinal declarations. The unwillingness of successive popes to co-operate uncritically in these enterprises shows how far the papacy—never in the forefront of ‘Eusebian’ ideology—had moved from the endorsement of a single sacralized imperium.