This book is thus a response to the notion that medieval history is purely ornamental. (viii)

There are three dominant lines of interpretation: one is to see the period essentially in terms of the Fall of the Roman Empire; a second is to see it as the history of barbarian migration (the so-called Völkerwanderung) and the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms; the third is a religious reading. (1)

From the beginning of the nineteenth century the dominant discourse underlying discussion of the period from 300 to 700 has often been the nature of Europe itself.

In the early eighteenth century Henri comte de Boulainvilliers presented the Frankish invasion as justification of the privileges of the French aristocracy. This Michel Foucault saw as the beginning of a new politico-historical discourse.

In the early nineteenth century Augustin Thierry portrayed the conquest overtly in terms of class conflict. Manzoni drew on this interpretation in his depiction of the Lombards, and in his suggestion that the period of Lombard rule presented a model for understanding the political divisions of an Italy still subject to the authority of foreign powers.

Interpretations of the early Middle Ages came to be dominated in the nineteenth century by nationalist discourse, which took the place of the previous political and social readings current in the Ancien Régime and which had originated in the Renaissance and Reformation. As a result, from the middle of the century, the Germanic reading of the period from 300 to 700 tended to overshadow that which stressed the internal history of the empire. The heroic Germans, as revealed by history, philology, and archaeology, were given a role in the creation of a new Germany, and they would be used as a justification for expansion beyond the frontiers of the Reich.

The triad of nationalism, race, and geopolitics that it engendered meant that early medieval studies had a role to play in and were influenced by German aggression in two World Wars. Since then, Late Antiquity and the early medieval kingdoms have been exploited, albeit rather less dangerously, in debates over the nature of Europe.

Henri comte de BoulainvillierIt is not difficult to see that Boulainvilliers’ interpretation essentially reflects his political position, and that it belongs to a strand in the nobiliaire thinking of those aristocrats who felt that their traditional rights had been reduced by the last years of Louis XIV and throughout the reign of Louis XV.

Abbe Jean-Baptiste Du BosAccording to Du Bos, Clovis and the Franks brought little change to the Roman world. In fact, in so far as there was a Frankish invasion, it was the settlement of the laeti , under Constantine and his successors.

And in setting out the ‘Romanist’ reading of the establishment of the Frankish kingdom, in opposition to Boulainvilliers’ ‘Germanist’ case, Du Bos essentially created the second great model for the interpretation of the period from the fourth to the seventh centuries. Between them the two models would dominate subsequent scholarship.

MontesquieuHis interpretation, thus, lay midway between those of Boulainvilliers and Du Bos, and in acknowledging this himself, he stressed their political affiliations: as he saw it, the former created a model that attacked the Tiers État , the latter one that attacked the nobility.

As a result of his reading of Tacitus, he accepted that liberty and democracy were to be associated with the Germanic peoples, and above all with Scandinavia. This he attributed to the climate.

Paul-Henri MalletDespite these caveats , Mallet’s Introduction was read as a major statement that Scandinavia was the womb of nations, as well as the birthplace of democracy, which was supposedly spread by the migrating barbarians throughout Western Europe. To a large extent it was through Mallet that the French in particular discovered the North. The image of the noble savage that he presented was perfectly in tune with the new aesthetic and political ideology of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mably

GibbonThe modern elevation of Gibbon as a historian has tended to ignore the extent to which he was writing within a well-trodden field —and indeed, on the Fall of Rome itself and the immediately succeeding period, he added remarkably little.

Mascov was essentially giving a history to an invented German nation, and he was doing so from the Kingdom of Saxony nearly a century and a half before German unification. Indeed, his history might be seen as belonging to the pre-history of German nationalism.

Mascov’s view that one should look as much at the Germanic law-codes as at the Roman would be echoed in the development of the study of the barbarian laws by the germanische Rechtsschule (scholarship on Germanic law) as it developed in the nineteenth century.

Jean-François Marmontel in his novel Bélisaire , published in 1767

Louis XVI seems to have held Decline and Fall in high regard. He has been identified with M. de Septchênes who was responsible for the opening fifteen or sixteen chapters of the first French translation of Gibbon’s work, the initial volume of which appeared in 1777.

Montlosier’s distinction is not a simple one between two racial groups: it is explicitly class-based.

Napoleonthe imperial coronation of 1804. The master of ceremonies, one might note, was Louis-Philippe, comte de Ségur, who subsequently wrote a history of the later Roman Empire. The setting was the church of Notre Dame in Paris, which boasted statues of Clovis and Charlemagne on its principal pillars. The rite deliberately drew on Carolingian ritual and used Carolingian regalia.From the point of view of a historian of the end of the Migration Period it is the regalia and Napoleon’s robes that are crucial: sewn onto them were hundreds of little gold bees in imitation of the treasure of Childeric that had been found in Tournai in 1653.Napoleon’s interest in the early Middle Ages was not, then, merely confined to the opening chapters of Montlosier’s rejected history, but was publicly displayed in his search for the tombs of Clovis and Clothilde, his resurrection of the cult of Geneviève, and his commission for the decoration of the dome of the Panthéon, as well as in the detailed iconography of his coronation robes.

De Staël’s earliest significant comments on the period of the Fall of the Roman Empire come in De la littérature , published in 1800. Chapter eight of the first book is dedicated to ‘the invasion of the Northern Peoples, the Christian religion, and the Renaissance of Letters’.

SismondiJulia SévéraFall of the Roman Empire

Guizot

However, in the preface to the revised edition of his own translation, published in 1828 he compared Gibbon’s interpretation of the Fall of Rome unfavourably to Montesquieu’s. In all probability, he held a lower opinion of Gibbon in the late 1820s than he had fifteen years earlier.An initial essay ‘On the municipal government of the Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, at the time of the great invasion of the Germans in the West’ presents the very bourgeois argument that the Roman Empire collapsed because of the oppression of the Middle Class —an interpretation that has echoes of Sismondi’s arguments of the same period.

Augustin Thierry

Edwards picked up on the notion of race as expressed by the Thierry brothers. As we have seen, because the model of a race of conquerors and a race of conquered was so widely diffused, the concept of race in French historiography overlapped considerably with that of class.

In placing the creation of the French nation in the Capetian period, Michelet effectively minimized the importance of the end of the Roman Empire and its aftermath, though he did pause to explain that the chief cause of the fall of the Empire was slavery.

Gobineau begins with the Slavs, taking their history way back into the prehistoric past. He then looks at the arrival of the Germanic Aryans. He tries to trace the movement of the Aryan Germans to Scandinavia and that of Kymbri to Gaul. Having reached the Migration period, he describes the Goths, the slightly less ‘pure’ Vandals, and the ‘purer’ Lombards and Burgundians. Of the Aryans who migrated from Scandinavia, it was the Anglo-Saxons in his view who had best preserved their purity. Looking back on the period as a whole he noted that ‘from this deployment of ethnic principles the whole organization of modern history must have resulted’.In the mid-nineteenth century racial ideas were current: Gobineau’s voice was one among many, and initially it was not an influential one. Far more widely read were a number of historians, including Amédée Thierry and, as we shall see, the Englishman Edward Augustus Freeman.

RisorgimentoManzoni’s view was that the Lombards and the Italians did not integrate, and indeed he saw non-integration as being the norm throughout Europe.The intellectual background to the Adelchi and to its accompanying Discorso was, then, French at least as much as it was Italian, and if the emphasis on the existence of a race of conquerors and a race of conquered in the two works smacks of French historiography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that is because their immediate source of inspiration was Thierry and his current projects. But whereas Thierry was concerned with the class system in France, and the oppression of the roturiers, for Manzoni the oppressed were the indigenous Italian population, in much of the North under Austrian control and in the South ruled by a dynasty that traced its origins to Spain, except during a brief period under Napoleon’s brother and brother-in-law.

Yet while Balbo and Troya disagreed, and did so over more than mere details, they were at one on the importance of the Lombard period for an understanding of Italy. Balbo had placed the Lombard conquest in a long line of invasions to which the peninsula was subjected. Troya, with his legal eye, had placed the question of citizenship at the heart of that subjection. Both men, like Manzoni, found in the history of Lombard Italy an echo of their own day, with the peninsula divided and at least in part subject to foreign rule.

OzanamThe emphasis on the role played by the Church in the salvation of civilization, which was at the heart of Ozanam’s historical writing, was not new: it had been a central idea for Chateaubriand in the Génie du christianisme , and had subsequently been expressed by Guizot among others. 39 For Ozanam and Montalembert, however, it was not so much the Church of the Fathers, but that of the Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries, that transformed post-Roman society, and for the two Frenchmen these holy men provided a parallel for the missionaries of their own day, working to revive the Catholicism of the distant past. The Church of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries was to be regarded as a model for evangelicals in the nineteenth.

De Broglie’s argument was simple. The Roman Empire and the Church had been founded on the same day (the idea had been enshrined in tradition by the Church Fathers): with the conversion of Constantine it looked as if their histories would intertwine.

In so far as there was a tradition of studying the history of the early Germans within Germany, this was rooted in the study of local institutions, above all in the supposed organizational system of Markgenossenschaft —that is, the exploitation of common land by a free peasantry, working from independent farmsteads.

BeowulfMoreover, the central question shifted from whether the poem was Anglo-Saxon to whether it was German. With this went not only a question about language, but also about whether or not the landscapes in which the events of the poem supposedly occurred were German rather than Danish. The poem, in other words, played into the Schleswig-Holstein question. In the debate over the relevance of Beowulf to the determination of whether the two provinces were German or Danish, the opening salvo was fired by Nicholaus Outzen in his review of Thorkelín entitled The Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf, as the most valuable document about the very great age of our fatherland’.

Grimm, or at least both brothers Grimm, had come rather closer to providing a narrative of the early Middle Ages in their collection of Deutsche Sagen of 1816–18, much of which is essentially a retelling of episodes from historical narratives.

The editing of medieval texts and their philological analysis were two aspects of the study of the early Middle Ages to which German scholars contributed most during the nineteenth century.

Savigny’s great contribution was not to the understanding of the barbarian codes, but to the study of Roman law in the Middle Ages, though this of course included the great compendia of Theodosius and Justinian. In the course of his History of Roman Law he did comment on certain matters of central importance to the history of the early Middle Ages, not least the question of the settlement of the Germanic peoples within the Empire, which he saw as a straightforward act of partition. This line of approach was challenged by the Prussian scholar Ernst Theodor Gaupp in 1844. He proposed instead that the settlement of the barbarians was preceded by an initial period of military quartering. Gaupp’s argument has been seen as the point of departure for all later work on the subject, and played a particularly important role in debates of the late twentieth century, although it scarcely impacted upon the nationalist arguments that dominated the nineteenth.

Despite the importance of the work of Pertz, Grimm, and Savigny, Germany before unification did not produce a major narrative account of the early Middle Ages. The great achievements had been in the study of language and law, rather that in history itself. This would change in the last decades of the century, but not before the study of history had been affected by the crises of 1870 and 1871, much as it had by the Napoleonic wars and the conflicts between Germany and Denmark.

Two of the most significant figures in the study of the late Roman and early medieval periods,

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) and Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89) involved themselves directly in the debates leading up to the Franco-Prussian war.

Foreshadowing what would happen in the late 1930s, there was an outpouring of toponymic studies on Alsace- Lorraine from Strasbourg—the subtext of such studies was no doubt to prove the essential German-ness of the region, and to show that this originated in the Migration Period. On the French side, it is not hard to find a simmering sense of resentment. For both Mommsen and Fustel, however, the use of early medieval history and the impact of the Franco-Prussian war on its interpretation was more complex and less explicit.

Fustel began his study of French institutions in the pre-Roman period, and with the structure of Gaulish society, especially of the clientelae . Like Vico, Niebuhr and Waitz before him, and like Mommsen, he placed the development of patronage at the heart of his discussion.

Just as he began his study of the Gallo-Romans way back in the Gaulish past, so Fustel looked at the evidence for the early Germanic peoples before their migration, stressing the lack of literary evidence produced by the barbarians themselves, and the weakness or irrelevance of Caesar and Tacitus on the one hand and Carolingian and Icelandic material on the other, for understanding the fourth and fifth centuries. In so doing he effectively destroyed the interpretations of the early Germanic peoples given by the likes of Boulainvilliers, Montesquieu, Mably, even Ozanam, and indeed by German scholars of his own day.

Unlike some of his contemporaries and some modern scholars, Fustel accepted that they received land, interpreting the evidence in the light of the imperial practice of hospitalitas: soldiers stationed in a region received lodgings and food. In so far as they held property, it was, in Roman legal terms, as possessio rather than dominium —in other words, they had temporary control of it. The barbarian was therefore not the actual master of the house. There was, inevitably, some conflict, as Fustel noted. It was, however, limited. The barbarians may have been brutal, greedy and capricious, but they were accepted as soldiers of the empire.

The question of popular assemblies returns in Fustel’s discussion of the legal system. He pointed to the argument of German scholars (led by Savigny, Waitz, Sohm, Fahlbeck, and Schulte), that judicial power was invested in the people, and noted the extent to which their arguments coincides with those who had emphasized the role of Germanic liberty in the origins of France. Yet, as he insisted, the mallus, or legal gathering, was never a popular assembly, but was instead a tribunal, which could be ecclesiastical as well as secular.It was in the private sphere, rather than in the public, that he found the origins of feudalism. It is here, also, that the sociological nature of his approach is most apparent: History is not the accumulation of events of every kind, which have been produced in the past. It is the science of human societies . . . Several years ago the word ‘sociology’ was invented. The word ‘history’ had the same meaning and said the same thing, at least for those who understood it properly.Turning to the inhabitants of the villas , Fustel speedily dismissed the idea, derived ultimately from Boulainvilliers, that the servile population was Gallo-Roman and the masters Germanic. Although there were different categories of slaves, there is nothing to show that some categories

were exclusively Roman and some Germanic.

Summing up his views on landholding from the fourth to the ninth century Fustel concluded that the Germanic invasions brought no major change. The Franks introduced neither the allod nor the villa —and all land was allodial. Nor could one describe the set-up as feudal. Feudalism developed on top of what was a pattern of land-holding that stretched back to Late Antiquity.

Having considered and dismissed suggested Roman and Germanic origins for feudalism, he turned to the situation after the barbarian invasions. He restated his view that the arrival of the Franks did not lead to the dispossession of Romans. Landholding continued to be hereditary, and that there was no evidence for the existence of benefices before the eighth century. From all this he concluded that feudalism was not born of a political system, but that the new régime emerged from a set of customs and practices (usages and pratiques).

The Roman vocabulary of subordination continued into the Merovingian period, alongside Germanic equivalents. It is these ideas of subordination that, in Fustel’s view, lead to feudalism. Yet, he continued to insist that this had nothing to do with military service until later. For him it was in the civil structures of dependence that one could find the origins of feudalism, for military organization was based on the structures of civil society.

Felix Dahn —the author of a multi-volume study of the history, more precisely the constitutional history, of the early Germanic peoples, and of a work of fiction, Ein Kampf um Rom , based on Procopius’ account of the Gothic Wars, which would prove to be a long-running best-seller, and would provide generations of readers with their main point of entry into the early Middle Ages.Unfortunately, future generations took from Dahn not the image of moderation presented by his Totila, nor indeed Totila’s ideal of intermarriage—which the book presents as doomed to failure—but rather the sense of the Gothic and more generally of the German Volk.

Meanwhile, new scientific ideas were transforming concepts of race, so that the Teutons who overthrew Roman civilization came to be presented not just through the prism of eighteenth- and early nineteeth-century notions of liberty, or indeed of Providence, but also through an increasingly ‘scientific’ understanding of racial difference, the origins of which we have already seen in the writings of Amédée Thierry, Edwards, and Gobineau. This racial reading of the barbarians, coupled with the changing view of Empire, led to a new discourse that fed directly into British imperial ideology.

Not surprisingly, the reappraisal of Empire also led to a greater appreciation of Gibbon, not least in the great edition of Decline and Fall edited by John Bagnell Bury and in Thomas Hodgkin’s Italy and her invaders . Not that the works of Bury or Hodgkin can be fitted simply into the new imperial orthodoxy. For Bury science pointed in a rather more sceptical direction. Hodgkin and Bury belong to the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth: to understand the intellectual world from which they emerged we need to turn back to the periodbefore the fall of Napoleon III.

Thomas Arnold and Charles Kingsley: This was a rephrasing of the theory of barbarian liberty, which paid rather more attention to the notion of their supposed moral superiority, which it linked to Providence.

Edward Augustus Freeman:Here his central point was that the Teutonic settlement in Britain must have been different in kind from that on the continent, because of the extent to which the Celtic or Latin language was wiped out. For him the Britons in the eastern part of the country were exterminated—though as he went on to explain, this did not mean that all the Britons were annihilated, and he objected vigorously to any who had attributed such an interpretation to him. What he believed was that there was an initial pagan period, when the Saxons killed, drove out, or enslaved all those in the territory they settled: but that this was followed, after their conversion, by a rather milder expansion. It is possible to find an element of internal contradiction in the argument.Freeman, in presenting a supposedly scientific concept of race in his interpretation of the early Middle Ages, was picking up on a line of thought that had developed steadily since Pinkerton’s Dissertation on the Origin and Progress of the Scythians or Goths of 1787, which had not only clarified the distinction between Teuton and Celt, but also argued for the superiority of the former. The notion that this explained the victory of the Saxons over the Britons had been firmly set out by Thomas Carlyle in his lectures On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History , where, like many contemporary Germans, he drew heavily on the ideas of Herder and Fichte.

Despite Müller’s argument that one should only talk of Aryan languages and not of Aryan races, Freeman, while sometimes paying lipservice to the distinction, essentially placed the notion of Aryanism at the centre of his understanding of race.

While natural or biological kinship was the norm, adoption could be equally strong. This meant that skull shapes were no reliable guide to a man’s race —and here (and elsewhere) Freeman wasreacting against the current claims of physiological and genetic research.

Races and nations are, thus, artificial, but at the same time they are real. How then are they differentiated? There is no absolute coincidence between a nation and a government: the main badge, rather, is language.

“We are as pure as the High-Germans; we are far purer than the French. We are not a Mischvolk , drawing its blood mainly from one source, while it draws its language from another source, and its national name from a third.” The Mischvolk , of course, are the French: Gauls by blood, Latin by language, and Frank by name.

Bury preferred to talk of a Darwinian notion of development: the Darwinian theory made it tempting to explain the development of civilisation in terms of “adaptation to environment”, “struggle for existence”, “natural selection”“survival of the fittest”, etc.Bury looked once again at the Fall of Rome, with greater emphasis on the barbarians, in his Invasion of Europe . Here he began with the Germanic peoples and their long-established relations with the Empire, which meant that they had been influenced by Rome well before they

settled within the Empire’s borders.

Matters changed dramatically with the arrival of the Huns. The failure of the Empire to deal with the Visigoths as they fled southwards, was to prove fatal. Stilicho’s position, a German leading a Germanized army against other Germanic peoples, and at the same time in conflict with rivals in both parts of the Empire, was impossible.

Hodgkin’s account of the ‘Causes of the fall of the western Empire’ is, in fact, notable for its emphasis on social and economic issues, rather than on the weaknesses of individual emperors. Having, as a deeply committed Christian, noted that the Roman Empire fell ‘because the Lord God willed it so’, he went on to analyse a series of socio-economic factors, among them the decline of the army and depopulation. His main emphasis falls on slavery, the pauperization of the proletariat, the oppression of the Middle Class, and on the weaknesses of the Roman taxation system, which he views specifically from the viewpoint of a ‘modern scientific financier’—and one who was critical of the British land tax in India. One might also note that Sismondi had advanced similar views.

a revival of interest in Gibbon, the centenary of whose death fell in 1894, an anniversary which itself provided the cause for reconsideration of his work. Changing religious attitudes over the previous decades meant that his observations on the decline of the Empire in the West could be read more calmly than had once been the case. Two years later Bury published the first volume of his edition of Decline and Fall , providing an up-to-date scholarly apparatus that superceded that of 1872 and Milman’s of 1838–9.

By 1900 Rome and its Fall fitted very neatly into a British discourse about Empire and its dangers. By the second decade of the twentieth century another Empire was challenging for preeminence in the world. Like the British, the Germans also looked back to the end of Rome when considering the present. For them, however, it was not empire, civilization and decadence that were central issues, but rather land and race. A rather different discourse would dominate studies of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries for the first half of the twentieth.

All this was to have an impact on the interpretation of Merovingian history: perhaps more important, at least in the medium term, was Kurth’s concern with Belgian history, and particularly with the linguistic frontier which divided the Flemish from the Walloon parts of the country. It was an issue about which he was deeply concerned, and it would indeed come to be of immense importance in the 1930s and 1940s.

Lamprecht’s lecture may not appear to be anything more than a piece of propaganda, but the argument undoubtedly emerged out of his own approach to cultural history, which had previously impressed Pirenne. To Lamprecht, Flemish Belgium (and indeed French Flanders) was culturally Germanic, and the origins of the culture lay in the Frankish settlement of the early Middle Ages—and again we are dealing with Lamprecht’s all-embracing concept of Kultur. This was little different from Grimm’s argument for the incorporation of Schleswig-Holstein into Germany, although it was couched in cultural rather than linguistic terms.

Despite this sense of decline, Lot also took on board Pirenne’s view that the Mediterranean economy continued after the arrival of the Germanic peoples—a point that Baynes contested, putting a good deal more emphasis on the impact of the Vandal conquest of Africa. Yet, while accepting Pirenne’s reading of the Mediterranean, at the same time Lot saw the barbarian arrival in Gaul as an unmitigated disaster.

Dopsch perhaps had Kultur as defined by Lamprecht in mind. The Germanic incomers of the fourth and fifth centuries had already been Romanized, and they changed relatively little. This reading of the insignificance of the end of the Roman Empire was thus more or less compatible with that of Pirenne, though Dopsch also saw the barbarians as purveyors of their own brand of civilization, which was something that Pirenne was less inclined to concede. Dopsch’s final comment was that the fifth and sixth centuries constituted a vital link between theRoman and Carolingian periods, and that this meant that there was a need to re-evaluate the Carolingian Renaissance. Dopsch’s case is deliberately set up as a reply to the German notion of Markgenossenschaft, and indeed to the tradition of German scholarship that championed the notion of the barbarians as democrats living in the wilderness.

Much as German and English scholars had debated the outbreak of War in 1914, in 1919 the archaeologist Gustaf Kossinna put forward an archaeological case which he hoped would influence the Versailles conference in its drawing of Germany’s post-War boundaries, arguing in Die deutsche Ostmark that lands in the East had been German since time immemorial, and therefore that they should not be handed over to Poland.His basic contention was that if one wished to discover the homeland of the Germanic peoples, one could first turn to the written sources that describe their whereabouts in the early medieval and classical periods. One could then compare that picture with a map of archaeological finds. In Kossinna’s view, this allowed one to identify individual archaeological cultures and to associate them with tribes named in the Latin sources. Once an archaeological culture had been identified in the historic period, it was possible to trace its antecedents in the prehistoric period, identifying which cultures had remained in the same region, and which had migrated. Here Kossinna’s own work in developing the notion of typologies for classifying objects, and indeed for placing them within chronological sequences, was crucial. This allowed him to conclude that the Indogermanen originated in North Germany, and that they expanded from there to Scandinavia. Moreover, since he thought that one could trace Indogermanic culture back through the Bronze to the Stone Age, he believed that the origins of that culture could be dated to the period from 8000–7000 BC .

The Amt Rosenberg , however, would be overshadowed by another foundation, with which it was sometimes in fierce competition, the Studien Gesellschaft für Geistesurgeschichte, Deutsches Ahnenerbe (‘Study Society for History of Primordial Ancient Ideas, German Ancestral Heritage’) created in 1935 by Heinrich Himmler. The Ahnenerbe was concerned largely with prehistory and with anthropology, and essentially with that of the Aryans. As such it was charged with pursuing some of the wilder and (because of the genetic implications of its research) more lethal flights of Himmler’s fancies in its racial studies. Search for the origins of the Aryans would lead beyond the

boundaries of Germany to Sweden, to look at the early rock carvings: it led to Finnland to study the Kalevala, the collection of Finnish and Karelian legends first gathered together by Elias Lönnroth in the nineteenth century, in an attempt to discover something of Aryan religion: to the Crimea, as the supposed centre of a Gothic Empire before its destruction by the Huns, and even to Tibet, because of its importance in the history of Sanskrit and of the Indo-Germans.

The Monumenta Germaniae Historica with its built-in concern for German origins inevitably had a contribution to make, above all in the study of early law codes. These could be used to demonstrate the traditional virtues of the Germanic peoples, and the democratic nature of their justice. Law provided a major insight into the Germanic Volk . It is not, therefore, surprising to find committed Nazis editing law codes. The most significant of these editors was Karl August Eckhardt (1901–79), whose post-War editions of the various versions of Lex Salica are usually regarded as the most successful attempts so far to edit what is an extremely complex set of recensions of the main Frankish lawbook.

Franz Steinbach (1895–1964). To some extent he was a scholar in the Lamprecht-mould: his concern was cultural history, and above all the Romano-Germanic Mischkultur of the Merovingian kingdom, which he studied principally through the evidence of archaeology and place names.Rather less emollient, at the same conference, was Franz Petri, who went out of his way to attack the work of Fustel de Coulanges and of Camille Jullian for being too negative about Germanic settlement in France.

Here the two of them spelt out the importance of what they identified as Germanic settlement, using archaeology and linguistics, alongside rather vaguer cultural and legal indicators. Steinbach, like Petri, presented the land between the Rhine and the Loire as the cultural heart of Europe—the kerneuropäische Block (‘core-European Block’)—while arguing that Germanic settlement was a key feature of the region.

Taken together, toponyms and cemetery archaeology revealed, for Petri, the existence of cultural Kerngebiete , core areas, of the Germanic peoples. Lex Salica , meanwhile, with its concern for the territory between the Silva Carbonnaria and the Loire, clearly indicated the centrality of that that part of Francia for the Merovingians.

Rather ominously, in describing the territory of the Maas, Mosel and Rhine Petri adds the proverb: ‘Was du ererbt von Deinem Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen’, with the rider ‘das gilt in der Volksgeschichte so gut wie sonst im Leben.’ (‘What you have inherited from your fathers, appropriate it to make it your own’: ‘this applies to Volksgeschichte as it applies elsewhere in life.’) West of the Rhine was a region that, when Petri was writing his Habilitation , was largely in Belgian and French hands, but clearly he wished it otherwise.Petri was just one of a number of specialists in the early Middle Ages whose work on settlement played a role in the development of Nazi plans. They provided ammunition to justify and refine policies that had already been decided on.

Lot criticized as too romantic the nineteenth-century notion that the barbarians had been a force for regeneration, stressing instead their brutality. Much depended on the quality of the individual leader, for Lot saw the royal courts as playing a central role in assimilation.

The 1920s and 1930s had marked the final development of a position that had its origins in the ideas of Arndt and Grimm, which had been set out in the context of German aspirations for national unity. The patriotic and linguistic arguments of the nineteenth century had been bolstered with more detailed philology, with archaeology, anthropology, and with a sharper, and supposedly more scientific, sense of race.

Augustine often emerges as a central figure, as if he, in his own soul-searching during a time of crisis, had especial resonance. Thus, both Charles Cochrane and Marrou presented him as being pivotal in the development of Europe.

Yet there are perhaps closer parallels with Ozanam’s emphasis on the centrality of Christianity in the emergence of Europe. Kurth’s overall argument in Les Origines de la civilisation moderne, that European culture was the result of the combination of Christianity and the ‘German spirit’, could certainly have been taken from Ozanam as much as from the Germans themselves, although it was the historical methodology of the German universities that Kurth most respected.

Christopher Dawson he had already decided before the outbreak of the First World War to write The Life of Civilizations , a projected sequence of five volumes, of which the third was to cover the Fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages up to the year 1000. In the event only two of the volumes would be completed, The Making of Europe , which covered the centuries from the Roman to the Ottonian Empire.

As reconstructed by Dawson, the West Roman Empire was already in decline before it was destroyed by the barbarians. The Church, however, was not caught up in the disaster. It, and particularly the monasteries, ensured the survival of learning.

Rome, the Classical Tradition, the Christian Church, and the barbarians constituted the four elements that contributed to the foundation of European unity. It would be a long time, however, before western Europe saw a reversal of the forces of disintegration: in the sixth century cultural leadership passed first to Byzantium and then to Islam. Dawson associated the first stages of the development of an independent cultural unity in western Europe with the Christianization of the barbarians, and here he stressed the role of missionaries from the British Isles, and above all of the Anglo-Saxons. This led directly to the formation of the Carolingian Empire, which in Dawson’s eyes was a theocratic power, to be contrasted with the secular state of the Merovingians.

Along with other historians of the early twentieth century, including the Russian Mikhail Rostovtzeff , Cochrane saw the Roman Empire as a peculiarly oppressive institution. His view of the classical world in general was negative: it depended on ‘submission to the “virtue and fortune” of a political leader.’ The Roman Republic saw the establishment of what Cochrane called a ‘class-state’, dominated by a caste structure. This was the social basis of the Empire, and

it was in no way changed with the conversion of Constantine.Cochrane’s vision of Rome as a totalitarian state surely suggests that he had the problems of 1930s totalitarianism firmly in mind, just as Rostovtzeff ’s vision of the Later Roman Empire seems to echo the rigidity of the Russian State.His overall message, however, is a religious one, and he takes a much more evangelical stance in the closing paragraph of the book, where he speaks of the need for ‘a united effort of hand and heart and head, in order to expose the fictitious character of secular valuations and to vindicate the reality of Christian claims.’

Thus, the history of the End of the Ancient World was, for Marrou, a history of cultural change in which the deadening traditions of Classical culture only gradually broke down before the new Christian culture of the Middle Ages emerged. The reading of Augustine himself is surprisingly down-beat: whilst Dawson concentrated on the positive aspects of fifth- and sixth-century Christianity, and Cochrane saw in Augustine the discovery of personality, Marrou mapped a history of the breakdown of décadence . Extraordinarily, he had a much greater sense of discontinuity than did Cochrane, Dawson, or indeed the Christian historiographical tradition to which they all belonged.

Much has been made of the Retractatio which Marrou appended to the reprint of Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique . It has been described as ‘one of the landmarks of twentieth-century scholarship on Christianity in the late Roman Empire’, and ‘as even more signifi cant than the original book’.

There was, moreover, a stream of editions of patristic and early medieval texts, published by Sources Chrétiennes. The series had been founded in Lyons in 1942 by, among others, Jean Daniélou. Marrou was an enthusiastic supporter of the enterprise from soon after its inception.

Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity , published in 1971, provided a new focus around which much of the discussion of the shift from Antiquity to the Middle Ages came to revolve.

Hector Monro Chadwick’s The Nationalities of Europe and the Growth of National IdeologiesIn short, he thought that linguistic and cultural distinctions between the various tribes of western and central Europe were of minor importance in the early Middle Ages.

Piganiol moves methodically though arguments that the catastrophe which ended the Roman World had been caused by climate or demographic change, by political failure and alienation, by financial, economic, social, moral, religious, or intellectual crisis—in each case evaluating the views of earlier scholars. So too, the barbarians had played a rather less destructive role in Piganiol’s own views as expressed in the Histoire de Rome, written immediately before the war and published in 1939. There he emphasized the points that monotheism had created an internationalist world that knew no frontiers, and that trade had shifted north from the Mediterranean.

Moreover, he explicitly rejected the interpretations of Fustel and of Chrétien Courtois, as well as the views of those German scholars who did not see the period as one of catastrophe. The literary descriptions of the invasions of the fourth and fifth centuries and of the destruction they entailed were depressing enough, and Courcelle was content to present them more or less as they stood.

In fact, it was in Italy more than anywhere else in Europe that study of the Germanic peoples flourished in the immediately post-War period. The most obvious monument to this is the foundation of the Centro Italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo in 1952: its annual Settimane (weeklong conference) has ever since been a highpoint in the early medievalist’s calendar.

Wenskus: Central to his reading of the early medieval Volk was the notion of ethnogenesis, tribal formation, which he saw in cultural rather than biological terms. He argued that a tribe was formed around a small nucleus, the Traditionskern , and that tribal groups could easily dissolve; indeed, his model allowed for a good deal of fluidity. This cultural model flew in the face of Nazi concepts of ethnicity, which had been based largely on the question of bloodlines—though Wenskus did draw on views of lordship ( Herrschaft ) that German scholars were developing in the 1930s.Yet, while Wenskus’ ideas can be shown to have developed out of pre-existing scholarship, in the post-War context they marked a new departure. They contributed significantly to the de-Nazification of the concept of the Volk, and they would steadily come to be accepted as a standard model for thinking about early medieval tribal groupings.

As early as 1952 he wrote a short introduction to the early Middle Ages, The Barbarian West , commissioned by Sir Maurice Powicke to provide an introduction to the period for ‘the man in the train’. Unlike Dawson’s The Making of Europe , which had presented a picture of the continent destroyed by the barbarians and recreated by the Church, Wallace-Hadrill was rather less inclined to see the barbarians as a purely destructive force, looking instead at what survived from the Roman past, and how it was combined with and transformed by contact with Germanic tradition.

A. H. M. Jones set out his image of a Roman state still functioning through the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, based on a meticulous heaping-up of detail. The result was a firm rejection of the gloomy reading of a top-heavy empire, collapsing under its own weight, which had been propagated by the emigré Russian historian Mikhail Rostovtzeff in his Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire , published in 1926.

Peter Brown:His account of Late Antiquity combined that French tradition with the Anglophone secular interpretation of the Later Roman Empire as exemplified by Rostovtzeff and Jones.

Brown himself noted elsewhere there was a long-standing German concept of Spätantike —one to which he may have been introduced by Geoffrey Barraclough, who commissioned The World of Late Antiquity . The notion that there was a distinct era between Antiquity and the Middle

Ages had also been familiar to French scholars. Indeed, Ferdinand Lot discussed the matter of periodization in the introduction to La Fin du monde antique, noting that the idea of an intermediate period had been adumbrated in the seventeenth century, but that it was not until recently that the idea had been elaborated. In other words the idea of Late Antiquity, whether or not the descriptive phrase was used, was not new, though Brown did somewhat expand its dates. Yet in combining political, cultural, and religious history, by concentrating on the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, and indeed by drawing Sassanian Persia and Umayyad Islam into the equation, he presented it in a new light.

Among the Shakers Halsall singled out the French scholar Jean Durliat, who had argued for remarkable continuity in public fi nances from the period of Diocletian to the Carolingians, and the young American Patrick Amory, whose study of Ostrogothic society in Italy questioned the very nature of a barbarian people, replacing the notion of ethnicity with that of constructed identity. The Movers, as represented in Halsall’s discussion, are largely represented by Neil Christie and Peter Heather, both of whom had written books on individual peoples.

Walter Goffart, has, however, done more than anyone to draw attention to the virtues of some nineteenth-century scholars (above all Gaupp). In so doing he has reopened questions about Germanic invasion and settlement, off ering challenging assessments of the scale of any migration and of the process by which incomers were settled. A Canadian, perhaps significantly of Belgian extraction, he has, like Pirenne in the 1920s and 30s, gone a long way towards denying any great significance to Germanic incomers to the Roman world—he is, indeed, a ‘Shaker’ par excellence—and indeed among the ‘Shakers’ he is very much inclined to stress continuity with the Roman past.

What dominated the nature of the discussion of the late and post-Roman periods from the late 1980s onwards was not, in fact, a set of questions, but rather the existence of a project on ‘! e Transformation of the Roman World’ funded by the European Science Foundation.An idea of the numbers involved may be gleaned from the fact that ninety-two scholars from eighteen countries participated in the second of three plenary conferences.