BOOKS The Making of Europe

By DAVID KNOWLES

eF all the misnomers with which historians kihave labelled epochs of the past, none is more misleading than the ticket of 'The Dark Ages.' Originally applied to the run of seven centuries between the first successful assaults of the northern invaders upon Italy and Rome, soon

after AD 400, and the remarkable blossoming of literature and architecture from 1050 onwards,

it was later shamefacedly reduced to the three centuries between the conquest of Italy by the Goths around 540 and the convenient date of the coronation of Charlemagne as emperor in 800.

The title was particularly dear to English historians; it may, indeed, have originated with them. It was a compound of the disdain of the classical scholar for anything between the ancient World and his own enlightenment, the contempt of the Englishman for anything that happened before the Reformation„ or at best before the Norman Conquest, and the sheer prejudice that Writes off what is unfamiliar as unknowable or non-existent.

British historians at least had the excuse that in our insular history, and there alone, a belt of darkness certainly existed which even now has not given place to sunlight. The two cen- turks between the withdrawal of the Roman legions soon after AD 400 and the coming of Augustine in 597 are still, for England and Scotland, a twilight age in which the historian must wait for further light from the archeologist

, and the interpreter of place-names. For all other regions of Europe west of the Rhine and south

of the Alps and the Carpathians, and for the Near East in general, the whole period is his- torical; that is to say, literary, artistic and arehmological source-material exists in sufficient quantity to give us a knowledge of the people that existed and of their institutions and accomp- lishments.

All this is, of course, familiar to the group of distinguished scholars who have written this book* and chosen its illustrations, and one can see the convenience of the title for the series to which it belongs, but if anything were still needed to explode the term 'dark ages' once and for all, this book would surely supply it. 'Dark ages, indeed!' every page of plates ex- claims. 'If beauty is light, look around you!' It IS emphatically the beauty created in those un- familiar centuries that stands' out so clearly; it enforces the lesson that prehistory and the caves of France and Spain have taught us; that beauty of line and form, seen and recorded by the eye and hand of genius, is the oldest and most uni- versal of the evidences of a dawning or a vanished civilisation.

Nevertheless, there are probably still many, even among writers and readers of history, who think of the 'dark ages' in their widest extent as a kind of night or winter. The Roman empire collapsed, like an ancient oak, in an autumn gale, and when spring came new growth began to take its place. A glance at this volume will show how false an imagination this is. The empire survived in the east and remained for

* THE DARK AGES. Edited by David Talbot Rice. 'Thames and Hudson, 6 gns. to October 31. then b ans.)

a thousand years a rich, civilised, highly or- ganised power resisting attack --and diffusing its art and its beliefs.

Islam, exploding in the desert with nuclear force, spread over'half the Mediterranean world within a century, superficially destructive, yet fostering in Persia and in Spain philosophy, poetry and the decorative arts at a level un- surpassed by anything in contemporary Chris- tendom. Within that Christendom, Armenia in the east and Ireland in the west had golden centuries of wide and varied achievement and influence. The Church had its catastrophes. The flourishing communities of Syria, Egypt and (for a time) Spain were destroyed, and the rift between east and west became a chasm, but the three great Christian peoples, the Greeks, the Franks and the Germans, beat off the invaders before the walls of Constantinople, near Poitiers and on the Lechfeld.

All this is reflected in this book, not in the violence of action, but in the undying per- manence of art. It is impossible to summarise these riches and every reader must find them for himself. There will be few who are not amazed by the beauty and technical superiority of these masterpieces by unknown hands. We think of the Vikings, and the red ruin they brought to peaceful farms and abbeys. Where did they learn the skills and see the visions that issued in the seventh-century helmet found near Uppsala that decorates the cover_ of this book, or the grace and strength of the Oseberg ship from Oslo fjord? We think of the Irish monks in their stone cells battered by wind and rain, yet able to transmit to the vellum of the gospel book and to their own page of verses all the delicate colours of the green woodland and the changing face of the seas, disciplined in patterns of miraculous complexity.

Above all, we can watch the traffic in art- motifs, almost always moving from east to west.

When barriers of language and religion and racial enmity prevented the transmission of ideas and institutions, a pattern on a silken fabric, on a silver ornament, or on a piece of pottery could pass from Persia to Spain, or from Constanti- nople to France, In the Celtic and Northumbrian illuminations of the seventh and eighth centuries, motifs from Persia. from the ancient Roman world, and from Scandinavia are combined to make something entirely new; on the contem- porary crosses of Bewcastle and Ruthwell classical and eastern influence sets off the words from the Old English poem of The Rood.

Equally remarkable are the lines of influence from Byzantium through the Germany of Otto II and his Greek wife to Lorraine and even to Eng- land. Those for whom the tenth century is a dark age should study the ivories of south Germany and the magnificent bronze doors and column of Bernward of Hildesheim. Ivory had long been a favourite medium in the east, and carvings in elephant and walrus tusk, and in whalebone. re- mained in fashion for four centuries in an age when the artists were mainly monks of the cloister to whom small-scale arts alone were pracjicable.

In another region and an earlier cen- tury, Rheims in the days of the great arch- bishop Hincmar had been a centre of artistic genius. Hincmar will scarcely be even a name to many 'readers of this book, though he

dominated the Gallic church in his day as Bossuet dominated it eight centuries later, but three great and separate schools of art produced masterpieces in his epoch. The gospel book of Ebbo, the rock crystal of Lothair II, now in the British Museum, and the so-called Utrecht psalter, cannot fail to thrill the beholder from the modern world. The psalter, though perhaps owing some of its technique to late classical drawing, is one of the supreme creative works in the history of art, inspiring imitations for four centuries, and standing as a part-ancestor of English draftsmanship.

Another line of influence, this time in archi- tecture, has been drawn horizontally from Armenia through Constantinople, Dalmatia and Lombardy to Provence and central France. An Armenian architect rebuilt the dome of Hagia Sophia, and Strzygowski, fifty years ago, thought to find in Armenia the origins of the ribbed vault and the pointed arch of the earliest Gothic, appearing first in Lombardy and then in England and France. It is a far cry, and it may be that a single problem met with two or more inde- pendent solutions, but photographs of churches in Asia Minor often give a shock of surprise. A tympanum from Georgia, here illustrated, could be labelled Rochester or Kilpeck and pass muster.

The colour plates, as always, vary in worth. The best are superb. Armenia takes well, and there is a wonderful triad of two churches sur- mounted by a striking view of Mount Ararat (without a sign of the Ark). In wholly different fields, the Norse helmet and the Oseberg ship, already mentioned, a group of Merovingian illuminations, the Byzantine reliquaries and shrouds, and jewellery in general strike imme- diately home, On the whole, blue and green of all shades come across best, with unforget- table views of Mount Sinai and Mount Athos, while gold and orange tend sometimes to flood out a good subject. The half-tone plates are almost uniformly good.

The reviewer, as well as the purchaser, of a book of this kind inevitably tends to ignore the letterpress, printed as it is on greyish paper with black crossheads. The eminent scholars who pro- vide this backcloth have doubtless received their reward and are content, but the reader who over- comes his impatience to look at the next picture will often be richly repaid. Thus, to take a single example, the two sections on Byzantium by Joan Hussey followed by that on Bulgaria and Russia by Tamara Talbot Rice reinforce the well-chosen plates with a clear account of the evolution of New Rome into a new cultural unit which sud- denly broke its bounds to carry its faith and its arts into Slav lands.

This publication coincides with a reissue of Sir Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades.f The fascination of the crusades for English readers has outlived romantic and realist revolu- tions into our own age which, both in its ecumenical ideals and its fears of warfare, might seem alien to crusading fervour. Certainly Runciman's volumes, of which the first is surely his masterpiece, make up one of the few large- scale works of serious history in our generation that have entered into the consciousness of the general reader. These volumes rightly appear as replicas of the original edition, complete with illustrations, footnotes, appendices and- index.

t A HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES. By Steven Runci- man. (Penguin Books, three volumes, 14s. each.)