With the exception of the elites in France and Syria, post-Roman aristocrats were poorer than their Imperial predecessors. This had a considerable effect on exchange patterns, with aristocratic demand becoming a scarcely-adequate motor for largely medium-range exchange. In contrast, in the west taxation systems became localized, before often collapsing altogether, and even in the east where they survived in relatively good order, as in Byzantium or Egypt, they became centrally collected to be distributed across regions or sub-regions. Late-Imperial taxation was locally collected, but often redistributed over vast distances to feed Rome and Constantinople or to pay distant armies.

He then looks at taxation in some detail. After considering the historiography from Dopsch and Pirenne onwards, and providing a brief discussion of the source material available, Wickham surveys the political developments and geography of the area from the Baltic to the Red Sea. Something of the scope of this work should now be becoming clear. In analysing the period, Wickham selects four specific issues as crucial: the form of the state (especially its fiscal apparatus) the aristocracy the peasantry and, finally, networks of exchange, in which he includes urban life and the economy. The debate concerning how the late-classical era became the ‘middle ages’ is far from over, but this is a magisterial presentation of the state of play. The author succeeds convincingly in gathering a vast amount of evidence while maintaining an informed critical discussion. This is no less than a comparative study over four centuries of an area stretching from Ireland and Denmark in the north west to Palestine and Egypt in the south east. The rather appealing modesty is misplaced. For an outsider contemplating historiography on the early middle ages, it is a tribute to the subject’s vitality that a book of over nine-hundred pages of text should claim to be less than a definitive statement and aims ‘only to provide the raw material for a better synthesis to do so in the future’.

Medieval europe christopher wickham