Sailing from Byzantium
A HISTORY OF EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE, 476-911. By Margaret Deanesly. (Methuen, 30s.) TODAY, when so many of the assumptions of European civilisa- tion are under fire, it is certainly no idle luxury to re-examine its origins. But the mixture as before is no longer good enough; and it is not unfair to ask of any new book on this well-worn topic, how far it breaks new ground. If this standard is applied to Miss Deanesly's volume, the answer will be that, in spite of con- siderable modifications of emphasis, reflecting the recent revulsion of academic research against political history, the structural framework is still that erected by French and German historians in the nineteenth century. Miss Deanesly's central theme is how 'the civilising influence of Roman law and administration reached the Franks,' and culminated in the Carolingian empire in 800. A series of preliminary chapters dispose quickly of Ostrogoths, Vandals, Visigoths and Lombards, in order to leave the stage free for the Frankish barbarians. Out of 577 pages of text, 283 (just under 50 per cent.) go to the Franks. Byzantium receives 57 (less than 10 per cent.), Islam 29 (5 per cent.), the Slays 20 (under 3.5 per cent.).
Two things may be said about this distribution of emphasis. The first is that it is remote from the preoccupations of a genera- tion confronted by a resurgent Arab world, and by a Slavonic east which, as heir of Byzantium, has achieved parity of status with the west. The second (since it will be argued that we must not apply modern standards to the past) is that it is equally remote from the distribution either of power or of culture in the early middle ages. Of this Miss Deanesly is evidently aware, for she says herself that Byzantine history was 'the central strand.' Why, then, do the proportions of her book not correspond to this reality? The answer, almost certainly, is that Miss Deanesly is following a tradition; but if so, it is an exploded tradition. In the nineteenth century French and German historians fought over the bones of Charlemagne, because it seemed as though the heirs of the Franks were to be the lords of creation. But the great European civil wars unleashed by France and Germany blew this illusion sky high, and European hegemony is a thing of the past. The same is true of the historiography composed, consciously or
unconsciously, to bolster it up. „ There is, of course, always interest in seeing how any people climbed painfully out of barbarism; but that does not give the story a transcendental importance. The historian's first duty is to keep the proportions right. Does the so-called Carolingian Renaissance, for example, deserve—in relation to all else—the loving care Miss Deanesly lavishes on it? Alcuin and Rhabanus Maurus were dreary pedants. Their achievement, on one side, was to debase to the level of barbarian understanding the genius, for example, of an Augustine. On the other, they saddled us with a stilted literary tradition of derivative book-learning, which hangs today, in an age of technology, like a millstone around the neck of our educational system. The Arabs, on the contrary, showed a remarkable capacity to assimilate Greek science; and in the end it was from them that salvation came.
Miss Deanesly thinks it is 'natural' for us `to study first the history of the west.' The question, however, is not whether it is natural, but whether it is desirable. Even if we admit (what is not self-evident) that the period of which she writes was the seed- bed of western civilisation, it was also the seed-bed of many other things—some of them just as relevant to the world in which we live. How shall we teach a new generation to understand this world, unless we discard our western bias, and set out, with all the resolution in our power, to see and describe things as they
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