By giving her book on Ravenna the subtitle “Crucible of Europe,” Judith Herrin makes a clear statement, which she follows through with consistently: this is a book not just about the city of Ravenna, but about the origins, birth, foundations--yes, the crucible--of a culture that many have seen and continue to see as some sort of starting point for much of modern western Europe. It is not about an ending, but about beginnings; it is about what Herrin calls “early Christendom,” a counterpart and counterpoint to Peter Brown’s Late Antiquity. There is much, to be sure, about Ravenna that justifies such a position. From Ravenna the last of the Roman forces were mustered to fight against various barbarians, since the imperial capital in the west had effectively moved there from Rome well before the “fall” of Rome; from Ravenna Theoderic the Ostrogoth reigned over a polity that some plausibly view as the most successful and thorough (if also short-lived) synthesis of barbarian and Roman forms of government, religion, and even art; from Ravenna the influence of the Roman empire (more commonly, but to some extent erroneously, known as Byzantium for this period), which continued to rule Ravenna until the middle of the eighth century, extruded into the west; from Ravenna, Charlemagne--the first emperor in the west since 476--drew inspiration for his famous chapel at Aachen, and took the equestrian statue of Theoderic as...what exactly, we cannot be sure of, but as something nevertheless.

That’s a problem I’ll come back to in a moment; but it’s clear, at any rate, that Herrin’s argument has a lot going for it. Ravenna was, to say the least, a very interesting place in the early middle ages, and its fascinating story, embedded within the complex muddle of religion, politics, warfare, and much else between the end of the fourth and the beginning of the ninth century, is briskly and engagingly told in this book. Twenty years ago, I heard Herrin lecture on Julian the Apostate, and while I don’t remember much in terms of detail of what she said, what stays in mind vividly is her love of her subject, fuelled by a love Julian and Herrin shared for, in her telling (in my memory anyway), all that was good about pagan Roman culture. She brought alive the vitality, charm, beauty, and wisdom that Julian saw in a world he was losing his grip on, in a manner that I have rarely encountered in any academic setting, which has stayed with me till now; and in this book (as in her previous wonderful book on Byzantium), she is as successful at bringing her love for her subject onto the page and impressing it in her reader’s mind.

Her narrative is built around relatively short chunks of chapters, beginning with Part One, centred on Galla Placidia: daughter of Theodosius, born in Constantinople, raised in Milan in the household of the (barbarian) general Stilicho, kidnapped by Alaric when he sacked Rome in 410, married in Roman fashion to the Goth Athaulf, married again to Constantius III, widowed and more or less exiled from Italy to Constantinople, and then regent over the west from Ravenna for 25 years. (She deserves a blockbuster movie for sure.) Under Galla Placidia, Ravenna really became established not just as a place relatively easy to defend from enemies--boggy, swampy ground on one side plus fortifications, and the sea on the other, made it difficult to approach--but also as the city where Roman traditions of government, patronage, and art and letters could continue to flourish, even as Rome itself began to go further into decline.

After a brief three chapters on Ravenna under the rule of Bishops between 450 and 493, Part Three covers the rule of Theoderic and the chaos that followed. For Herrin, Theoderic’s reign really was a synthesis of east and west, Roman and barbarian, Arian and Catholic; he was just, tolerant, energetic, one might almost say enlightened; and his daughter Amalasuintha tried her best to carry on his legacy. But as we all know, things got rather hairy here (pun very much intended); Ravenna made it through the turmoil reasonably well, not least because it was stably under the control of Byzantium under Narses and the archbishops Maximian and Agnellus, who also engaged in a little bit of ethnic cleansing and made Ravenna more or less fully Catholic. From this point, Ravenna remained under the governance of Constantinople, but the big man in the city was the archbishop for most of the following two centuries. Rather a lot of the second half of this book isn’t directly to do with Ravenna, but with ecclesiastical and political history more generally, including the back and forth between the eastern and western churches regarding theological intricacies that, despite Herrin’s engaging style, I find myself unable to get very excited about.

The story ends with Charlemagne, who took the statue of Theoderic away on his third visit to the city, in 801, not long after he had been crowned emperor at Rome. Herrin seems to want to follow Einhard regarding Charlemagne’s reluctance to be crowned emperor, which is certainly a legitimate interpretation of events, though it would have been helpful if Herrin made her readers aware of how controversial such a reading has been. According to her, when he came to Ravenna, he “clearly intended to absorb the fame of Theoderic,” and “sensed and appreciated the pride Theoderic had taken in depicting his walled city and its fortified port at Classis” (378-9). Theoderic both “embodied an adaption of the most important elements of Roman imperial culture that Charles wished to impose in his renovatio imperii” (378), and had been “an invader reshaping the legacy of Rome, with whom Charles could identify” (392).

How does Herrin know what was going on in Charlemagne’s mind, what he “clearly intended,” what he “sensed and appreciated,” with whom he identified? Perhaps I’m being needlessly grumpy with a wonderful book written also for a more non-scholarly audience (it’s published also by Allen Lane), in which rather a lot of scholarly debate--itself mostly inconclusive, it must be admitted, and also often based on rather thin evidence--is skated over sometimes alarmingly for this possibly overly ossified-by-scholarship reader. But it is a problem, and one not restricted to this part of the book: we are also told, for example, that Theoderic, during the 470s and 480s “developed a double ambition: to unite more of the Gothic tribes under his command, and to negotiate a permanent settlement for his people within the empire” (93–4). There are no sources to support such statements; neither Einhard nor Jordanes is reliable enough. Telling a class of first- and second-year undergraduates what Julian the Apostate felt and thought is one thing; ventriloquising rulers in this way in a published work of scholarship is in my mind less acceptable. Certainly, Theoderic did negotiate a settlement for the Goths; equally certainly, Charlemagne took away the statue of Theoderic from Ravenna. These actions can’t tell us what Theoderic’s ambitions were in the 470s and 480s, or what Theoderic meant for Charlemagne. Herrin refers to Walahfrid Strabo’s rather negative portrayal of Theoderic in a poem from 829 briefly, but doesn’t consider its implications: this poem (and a host of other sources) show that Theoderic was by no means viewed in entirely positive terms. While Charlemagne is unlikely to have pinched some marble just for the fun of it while feeling that the figure it depicted was negative, we need to be a little careful about our assumptions of what precisely this figure meant for him. In a rather similar vein, Herrin’s treatment of the concept of the barbarian in various forms (including, most importantly, the Gothic barbarian) is perhaps a little bit too much of a simplification, though I must admit I can’t think of any better solution for such a context: all the footnote wars (that have unhappily also ended up in blogs and Twitter) have been tiresome in the extreme.

I admit that as someone who has made a career arguing that we need to acknowledge our ignorance and the necessary limits to our knowledge, I’m coming at these problems from a perspective many more hopeful historians might not share; but I can’t get beyond the fact that there is simply too much of this sort of thing for my comfort. Paul the Deacon is cited as a reliable source for Alboin’s conquest of Italy; there’s not a vast amount to choose from, it is true, but he was writing two hundred years later. Cassiodorus’s Variae are in some instances cited as though we can take what Cassiodorus wrote as actual words of a Gothic person; but the Variae are a carefully constructed Latin text, and it is unlikely that anything anyone is reported to have said was really said the way it is reported--and it might not even have been said at all. I could multiply instances of such uncritical use of sources; but these examples should suffice to ground my hesitation in heaping as much praise on this book as I would have liked to.

There’s also a bigger problem here, of a different order. Ravenna, the crucible of Europe, “in which the alloy of Europe was formed” (115): this is an attractive idea. But where’s the proof? As Herrin well knows, Ravenna wasn’t the only show in town: elsewhere too, there were efforts, more or less intentional (it’s mostly impossible to know) at coming to some sort of integration of various inheritances, Roman and otherwise. Herrin doesn’t present any convincing evidence that the Europe that was eventually formed was more influenced by Theoderic’s efforts from Ravenna than by anything else from anywhere else. Indeed, it would be hard to do so: the church at Aachen inspired by San Vitale in Ravenna is a bit of an outlier in the history of early medieval western architecture, and Charlemagne had rather a lot of precedent among Franks and Lombards, at the very least, in terms of integrating things--and it is far from clear that either of their ways of forging their cultures came out of the crucible of Ravenna.

Something happened in this period; and by the time we get to the ninth century, elements ofromanitas had combined with other influences in many parts of western Europe, and continued to do so for centuries to come. There is no dispute about this. It’s far less easy to determine what happened. My whole academic career, from my first year as an undergraduate to the present, has been punctuated by (mostly) big books written by prominent historians on the period covered by Herrin’s book: from Michael McCormick in 2001 through Chris Wickham and Bryan Ward-Perkins in 2005, to Julia Smith, Guy Halsall, Peter Heather, and a number of others in English and other languages. This scholarship tends to fall into two fairly clearly delineated positions: the “end of civilisation” one, perhaps most forcefully (and at the very least most provocatively) articulated by Ward-Perkins; and the “transition” one. Herrin’s work clearly falls into the latter camp. As a sometime barbarianologist myself, I suppose I ought to have a view on this; but I do not. Perhaps I’m just too jaded in general, or too cynical: I find it a bit of an otiose pursuit to be definitive about what sort of synthesis there was and how it took place, let alone in which crucible it was forged. The evidence is too thin for certainty on this point, and I have read too many more or less definitive but contradictory arguments to be much swayed by another one.

Herrin’s book, however, has the virtue of being rather more engaging than most of the others with claims to make about the origins of Europe; and while I doubt that it will be anything approaching the last word on whence Europe came, it will certainly be a standard place to go for ideas on the subject for some time to come, both for the perspective from which it is written--most of the other books have been more barbarian-focussed and haven’t much thought about Ravenna and Byzantium--and because it is simply a lot more readable than its competition. When I was not wearing my weary, scholarly hat--and when I was not being appalled by the shoddy production: e.g. a bizarre note to self to check an epigram (417, n. 4), another similar note about “Alex Sarantis paper to Adriatic conference” (434, n. 21), a mis-identification of the author of The Humblest Sparrow: The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (443, n. 26; it should be M. Roberts, not M. Herren): really, Princeton, you’re getting to be as bad as Cambridge!--I enjoyed the read very much.