Epic of the West.(The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, 200-1000 AD, 2nd ed.)(Book Review)

The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, 200-1000 AD, 2nd ed.

by Peter Brown

(Blackwell, 640 pp., $29.95)

In this, his most mature book, Peter Brown, the author of the acclaimed biography of Augustine of Hippo, invites his readers to imagine things very big and to meditate on things very small. The largeness is found in the vast scope of the narrative, from the early years of Christian history up to the conversion of Iceland at the end of the first millennium; the smallness is evident in his uncanny eye for surprising and arresting details.

The conventional narrative of the rise of Western civilization runs something along these lines: For centuries Rome was the center of a civilization that reached from Britain in the north to North Africa and Egypt in the south to Syria in the east. In the 5th century the frontiers of the Empire collapsed and barbarians from the north invaded the territories once ruled by Rome. So began an age of chaos and ignorance, once depicted in history books as the "dark ages." Into this world came missionaries, often monks dispatched from Rome like Augustine of Canterbury, who was sent to convert the Saxons of Britain. With the conversion of the Franks to Catholic Christianity and the rise of a Carolingian kingdom straddling the Rhine, the ground was prepared for the building of European civilization. It was a story about the West told from the perspective of the West, with little attention paid to Byzantium, Christians of the East, or Islam.

One of the most commanding and readable exponents of this vision was the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson. In his account of the "making of Europe," the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome on Christmas Day 800 marked the "acceptance by the Western barbarians of the idea of unity for which the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church alike stood."

A quite different interpretation is associated with the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, whose Mohammed and Charlemagne appeared in English in 1939. Pirenne argued that unity was found not in Rome but in the Mediterranean itself: The great water basin over which Rome had cast its net of political authority was the nourishing mother that sustained ancient cultural and economic life. Even after the decline of the Western Empire the commercial life of the cities of the Mediterranean--with Constantinople at the center--irrigated the lands to the north. For Pirenne, too, the barbarians had little cultural or historical significance. But in his view what destroyed the cohesion of the ancient world was the rise of Islam, whose armies swiftly conquered the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, marched across North Africa, and crossed the Straits of Gibraltar to subdue Christian Spain. With the conquest of Islam the Mediterranean was no longer a Roman sea and the balance of power shifted irrevocably to the north. Without Mohammed there would have been no Charlemagne.