100 books like Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376-568

And now for something completely different: my other recommendations are dense, scholarly volumes, well written but demanding for a general audience.

It is often hard to imagine the people who appear in their pages, based as they are on the scarce and laconic chronicles of the early Middle Ages, as flesh and blood humans.

In this novel, Puhak breathes life into two of the most remarkable women of the period, the Visigothic princess Brunhild, married off to the Frankish King Sigebert, and her sister-in-law Fredegund, who began as a Frankish slave and rose to become a rival queen to Brunhild.

Their story of rivalry, assassination, murder, seduction, but also of governance and diplomacy as two isolated women wielded unheard-of power across the decades, makes the world of seventh-century Gaul come alive.

The ways that the memory of these two women were twisted and manipulated by both contemporary and subsequent male… show more.

The early history of the Goths is a complicated and controversial subject, with difficult sources and large gaps in our literary and archaeological evidence. Heather provides an excellent guide to those problems and how they might be resolved. His book is particularly valuable for those interested in the only major source actually written by a Goth, the Getica of Jordanes, and in how the Visigoths and Ostrogoths emerged as independent peoples. The dramatic events which Heather narrates include the first entrance of Gothic tribes into the Roman Empire, the Sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, and the creation of the original Visigothic kingdom in southern France, ending with the newly formed Ostrogoths poised to launch their conquest of Italy.

Theoderic the Ostrogoth, arguably the greatest Gothic king, ruled over Italy for more than thirty years (493-526). Moorhead offers an insightful and detailed examination of how Theoderic succeeded in maintaining peace between Goths and Romans and extended his power and prestige, only for the Ostrogothic kingdom to collapse shortly after his death due to political and religious divisions and the Reconquest by the eastern emperor Justinian. Scholars still debate the extent of Theoderic’s own responsibility for the Ostrogothic decline, and as Moorhead observes the very policies which underlay Theoderic’s success also contributed to his kingdom’s vulnerability. I just wish that Moorhead had expanded his very brief comments on Theoderic’s remarkable legacy, which included appearing in the Nibelungenlied and as a symbol of German unification.

The Visigothic kingdom of Spain was long dismissed in older books as a barbaric backwater, the darkest point of the so-called Dark Ages. Yet it was, in truth, a vibrant cultural centre for more than two centuries, until falling to the forces of Islam in 711. Hillgarth’s fascinating book gives an excellent short survey of Visigothic history, and then explores how the legends surrounding the Goths were developed and exploited by later Spanish generations, from the Christian Reconquista and the sixteenth-century Golden Age to modern times. This creation of an idealized Gothic past provided inspiration and a sense of identity in Spain, in sharp contrast to Italy where the Goths were depicted during the Renaissance as the savage destroyers of classical civilization.

The Gothic is a vast subject, ranging from medieval architecture and debates over the origins of English democracy to literature and cinema, music, and fashion. Groom does superbly to introduce all these highly diverse elements in an accessible and engaging manner, opening up a variety of avenues for those who wish to explore further. The relationship between what is now called ‘Gothic’ and the original Goths ranges from tenuous to almost non-existent, which explains the limited attention paid here to the Goths of history—indeed, I wrote my own book on the Goths in part to provide that historical framework, while drawing gratefully on Groom’s work for many of the themes which have shaped how Goths and the Gothic are understood today. 

Rather than following a chronological order or a political narrative, Wickham, the leading British historian of the Early Middle Ages, takes a thematic and regional approach to the transformation of the Roman world across the Mediterranean.

His dense comparisons of the economic and social structures of specific regions, both some like Denmark and Ireland that were never part of the Roman Empire, as well as core regions around the entire Mediterranean, highlight the diversity already existing within the Roman Empire and the differing fates of these regions as they emerged from its disappearance.

For two centuries, Europeans have tried to find in the peoples of the early Middle Ages the ethnic origins of their own nations.

The Franks were the most successful of these peoples, appearing first as a minor group along the lower Rhine but ultimately, under Charlemagne, creating a vast empire that encompassed much of what had been the Roman Empire in the West.

However, in this extraordinary book Reimitz shows how protean Frankish ethnic identity was across this period.

Relying on close readings of historical texts and their manuscript transmission, constantly amended, re-edited, and transformed, he shows how Frankish identity was constantly disputed and renegotiated, ultimately moving far from classical notions of ethnicity to an imperial identity and then to a notion of the Franks as one of a number of Christian peoples chosen by God to rule the West.

Everyone has heard of the Franks, but few have any knowledge of the Avars, mounted warriors originating in Steppes of eastern Asia who created a vast empire between the Frankish and Byzantine worlds that endured longer than either the better-known Hunnic or Mongol empires.

Pohl’s book takes us out of the usual world of Germanic barbarian kingdoms and into a radically different kind of post-Roman world.

Drawing on Latin and Greek sources as well as vast amounts of archaeological research conducted over the past century, he introduces us to this multi-ethnic empire that stretched from the Vienna woods to Belgrade and which formed the crucible out of which emerged the South Slavic peoples and nations whose names persist until today.

This is not a book just about Britain, and that is precisely the point: Britain on its own makes sense as a unit, but it needs to be regarded both as a collection of smaller regions, and as part of a bigger whole. Wickham’s masterly survey does an excellent job of situating Britain with regard to bigger developments across the continent. He highlights very effectively how it does and does not fit in with wider trends, which is critical to knowing what makes Britain distinctive. This book exemplifies why the history of Britain really needs also to be the history of Europe, and indeed beyond.

Another synthesis of the ‘Dark Ages’ Europe, this one from the Penguin History series. An easy, but thorough read, painting a broad canvas from Ireland to Byzantium, and from the last days of Rome to the last days of Anglo-Saxon England, shines the light on the centuries that, while still seen as shrouded in the darkness of violence and barbarism, are in fact the true cradle of the European civilization as we know it today.