62 The New York Review
no more than ropes for burglars: they
serve only to help robbers carry away
the loot.
Altogether, this is a provocative book.
Not only is it a singularly dry-eyed
farewell to Rome; it also faces a grisly
irony. By the nineteenth century, Eu-
rope was on the “path toward contem-
porary levels of prosperity, knowledge,
and human flourishing.” Scheidel fully
identifies with those achievements. But
he is well aware that they happened be-
cause Europeans had been so utterly
beastly to one another for so many
centuries. There was hardly a single
advance in technology, finance, or po-
litical organization that had not been
the result of intra-European conflict.
The most notable of these expedients
was the development of representative
assemblies, such as the English Parlia-
ment and the Corts of Catalonia, that
were created so as to gain consent for
the taxes necessary to meet the rising
cost of war.
The exceptional technical, financial,
and political development of Europe
rested on “the wasteful and blood-
soaked nexus of ceaseless war.” For
example, in the early modern period,
Europeans were at war with one an-
other one and a half times a year. It was
only when that state of perpetual war
was engulfed by a truly off-scale con-
flict, World War I, that Europe lost the
lead that had been based, ultimately,
on technological and institutional gains
honed by the constant practice of inter-
state violence.
Not everyone looks this snake in the
eyes. But Scheidel does so because he
also believes strongly in the virtues
set loose—though at a “staggering
price”—by the persistent polycentrism
made possible by the disappearance
of Rome. By the time of the Reforma-
tion, the “competitive fragmentation of
power” ensured that Europe was stud-
ded with safety zones that protected
beleaguered dissidents. One need only
think of the Protestant countries, each
with its printing presses, that ranged
from Amsterdam to Geneva on the
very edge of the spreading, baleful tree
of the Catholic autocracy of Louis XIV
of France. In the 1770s it was in large
part from the printing presses of the
Protestant Enlightenment that Gibbon
gained the erudition and acuity that he
needed to write his monumental De-
cline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
He knew he was lucky. The subjects of
Rome had no Lausanne to which to re-
tire. As Gibbon wrote, “The empire of
the Romans filled the world, and when
that empire fell into the hands of a sin-
gle person, the world became a safe
and dreary prison for his enemies.”
The Chinese literati were not as for-
tunate. In the 1770s in China, a state-
sponsored proscription led to a loss
of four fifths of 2,665 targeted books.
In the light of such a loss of freedom,
Scheidel stands firm. The best thing
that Rome ever did for Europe was to
die and not return.
So what happened next? Janet Nel-
son’s King and Emperor brings alive
the age of Charlemagne (748–814), the
ruler usually associated with the first
effort after the fall of Rome to unite
Europe under a single rule. This “new
life” is a bold book. Nelson admits that
to write a biography of Charles “takes
some nerve.” Indeed, it has become al-
most a mantra among scholars that bi-
ographies of medieval persons cannot
be written: they are too distant from us,
and the texts in which they appear are
too much the creation of ideology and
authorial cunning to give access to the
“real” person. Nelson will have none of
this: “Difficult is not impossible.” She
succeeds in a manner calculated to in-
struct and hearten us all.
In the first place, Nelson is reso-
lute in her emphasis on the essential
strangeness of Charles and his world.
“Strangeness,” she writes, “is often
precisely what draws people nowa-
days to remote periods of the past.”
In the case of Charles, it is a peculiar
sort of strangeness. While the emper-
ors of Rome are usually present to us
as bright and weight-free figures from
the distant past of Europe, Charles has
often been brought too close to us. He
is “family.” For centuries he has been
claimed as the ancestor of opposing
nation-states (France and Germany),
and, since 1950, of the European Com-
munity. He is seen as a father-figure
pointing toward a glorious future, but
from the shadows of a darker age.
In fact, we know far more about him
than any Roman emperor. We know,
for instance, that he was over six feet
three inches tall, for his skeleton is still
there, in his tomb in Aachen, Germany.
His first wife, Himiltrud, was nearly
six feet (as befitted a Frankish noble-
woman); her body can be seen in the
crypt of the convent of Nivelles, Bel-
gium. Seven thousand charters enable
Nelson to trace, with rare adroitness,
Charle magne’s movements and the
flow of gifts and favorable judgments
with which he rewarded his support-
ers. We can even catch his own words,
recorded in shorthand in the margins
of a treatise on the worship of icons:
after many grunts of royal approval
(bene, good; valde bene, jolly good),
the phrase “God is to His creation as
a lord is to his servants” elicits an op-
time—“excellent idea.” Roman his-
torians rarely have so much and such
diverse evidence to go on. In the days
of Charles, at least, the so-called Dark
Ages are as lit up as a Christmas tree.
Nelson handles this material with
great skill. Each chapter is a master-
class in tracing specific bodies of evi-
dence back to the persons or incidents
from which they arose. Many of these
memories were preserved by women:
stray sentences in chronicles reflect
the recollections of sisters, wives, and
pious aunts who acted as the memory
banks of an entire dynasty. In King and
Emperor, the female relatives and suc-
cessive wives of Charles emerge as te-
nacious presences. Nelson explains the
mechanisms of their power. In a world
of dynastic marriages, queens and their
entourages functioned as centers of in-
formation and discreet influence, much
like the embassies of great powers in
modern countries. A queen was “a
boundary-crosser and...a consensus-
builder at court,” linking the diverse
regions of Charles’s ever- expanding
hegemony. Whatever the terrible cost
to themselves—Charles’s third wife,
Hildegard, had nine babies in eleven
years and then died—women held the
future of the dynasty. When Charles
visited Rome in 781, special mention
was made of the cortège of wet nurses,
nannies, and even the royal strollers.
This was no scene of cozy domesticity.
It was a display of the determinationand resources of a “holy family” to sur-
vive the blast of warfare and disease.
Charles had brought his children to
Rome in order to seek the blessing of
Saint Peter. This would have involved
no distant gesture of esteem. The fam-
ily would have been led down into the
candlelit crypt to make direct, hands-on
contact with the tomb of the apostle,
soaking in supernatural protection as
if, Nelson writes, from “a battery on
permanent charge.” Precious docu-
ments—treaties, donations, and major
papal letters—would be left overnight
on the tomb as if to be cooked in “a nu-
minous oven.” It was above this tomb
that Charles was acclaimed emperor on
Christmas Day, 800.
The sheer materiality of these ritu-
als and their central role in the politics
of the age point to a profound change
in the centuries between the years
500 and 800. It was a religious change
quite as profound as the unraveling of
the Western Empire. This was not a
change of creed: Christianity had been
the official religion of the empire since
the days of Constantine. Rather, it
was a mutation within Christianity it-
self, which echoed the restructuring of
Western society after the fall of Rome.
By 800, the triumphant but somewhat
distant Christianity of the later em-
pire—the Christianity of great writers
and preachers in spacious basilicas as
large as any imperial judgment hall—
had worked its way into the very fabric
of society as a whole, like ivy into an
old wall. This meant that the sacred and
the profane lived cheek by jowl—inti-
mately connected and yet incommen-
surable with each other. Heaven and
earth were brought together through
rituals that covered everything from
the anointing of rulers to the blessing
of spoons at the table.At the same time, throughout the
West, what has been called, by the
historian Walter Goffart, the great
“process of simplification” took place:
upper-class society came to be starkly
divided between warriors and clergy
(monks included)—men of the sword
and men of prayer.^2 Between the two
lay the cliff face of the sacred. It is
hardly necessary to point out that this
was a notional and not a real divide
between two groups: the clergy did not
come from outer space, and not even all
of them lived in monasteries. Most were
the brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts,
and cousins of the men of the sword.
The chasm between the sacred and
the profane could be bridged only by
gifts, for gifts have the quality of con-
necting antithetical groups while main-
taining a distance between them. Men
of war—often men with real blood on
their hands—would not give them-
selves wholly to the rigors of a clerical
life; one thinks of the exuberant sex
life of Charles himself, with his serial
marriages and many mistresses, and of
the dogged bloodshed of his wars. But
men of war could, nonetheless, give to-
kens of themselves in the form of gifts
to monasteries and churches. These
gifts had come to include not only
jewelry and gold and silver coins, but
also land—often soaked with ances-tral memories—given to monasteries
and churches in exchange for the invis-
ible protection of God and the saints.
By the time of Charles, it seems that
one third of the land of Europe was in
the hands of the Church. In a ground-
breaking recent study, Ian Wood has
shown that, by that time, large tracts
of modern France, Italy, and Germany
had been “entrusted to God.” Complex
temple-economies, like those of Tamil
Nadu and Angkor Wat, had grown up
around great churches and monasteries.
Wood shows that this long-term devel-
opment, and not the ignominious state
failure of the fifth century, marked the
real and irreversible transformation of
the Roman West.^3 Western society had
become polarized between the sacred
and the profane in a manner that would
not change until modern times.
This was what made the world in
which Charlemagne moved so very
different from that of 500 CE. It was
a world of high rituals in which the sa-
cred struck sparks on contact with the
profane. Nelson understands these mo-
ments extremely well. She also knows
that the profane often went its own
way, undeterred by its looming neigh-
bor. One of the most vivid and homely
anecdotes in her book is the story of
how Charles, at the age of seven, lost
a tooth on a great ritual occasion—the
installation of the splendid new tomb
of Saint Germanus of Paris (in what is
now the church of Saint-Germain-des-
Prés). Inside the church, there was a
deep trench into which the marble sar-
cophagus containing the relics of Ger-
manus was to be lowered. At one end,
clergy and laity alike edged forward
carrying the great block of stone with
reverent heaving so intense, and with
such reverent slow motion, that it was
believed that angels moved it. At the
opposite end of the trench, however,
Charles and the other young princes
were playing around, unaffected by the
ritual. Charles fell into the trench and
dislodged his front milk-tooth.
But it was also a world in constant
need of protection. In more danger-
ous regions, it was good to have the
saints to hand. In 720 the pope had
sent to Prince Eudo of Aquitaine three
sponges from his own table. Follow-
ing Byzantine patterns of refined eat-
ing, these sponges were the equivalent
of finger bowls, to be used at solemn
banquets. But for Eudo and his men
they were something else—they were
charged isotopes of the sacred, brought
straight from the shrine of Saint Peter.
When news came that Muslim raiders
had once again crossed the Pyrenees,
the prince gave the sponges to his armed
band “to consume in small amounts,”
and it was noted triumphantly that “of
those who had shared in them not one
had been injured or killed.”
Nelson rightly concludes, “I have
made a journey towards the Other.”
She catches the essential strangeness
of Charles and his age. She has made
an almost too well known figure in the
history of Europe unfamiliar again,
and, for that reason, much more real to
us. King and Emperor is a masterpiece
of historical writing and a robust step
toward filling the gap in our histori-
cal imagination left by the passing of
Rome. Q(^2) Wa lter Gof fa r t, Barbarian Tides: The
Migration Age and the Later Roman
Empire (University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2006), p. 136.
(^3) Ian Wood, The Transformation of the
Roman West (Arc Humanities Press,
2018), pp. 79–123.