I don't know Mr. Rosen, the author of this book. If he in person is anything like the persona of the narrator of his book, it's a pity that I don't. Spending time with this book is like having a talk with someone immensely insightful and equally learned (and articulate and witty) - kind of what we all hoped our college professors would turn out to be. My main disappointment in this book was that it ended. I wanted to be able to continue reading it for a lot longer.
The Amazon note and the other reviews lay out the scope of the book fairly well. Let me step back a little from there. I think that Rosen's point is that history is not only written by winners, but that it often written to play out a discussion on terms that were established by people who were either too immersed in the events of that history or too devoted to a particular interpretation of those events to be able to see them clearly.
And so, patient, clever, and thoughtful person that he is, Rosen has decided to dig a little deeper into the pivot in Western history called the Sixth Century.
At the beginning of that century, the Western European territories of the Roman Empire, and Rome itself, had been overrun by "barbarians", although the gap in civilization between the Romans and the people who destroyed their Western empire was not as large as what those terms suggest. Peter Heather's "The Fall of the Roman Empire" discusses that process quite well. The former Roman territories in what we know now as Great Britain, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, had become a land of settlements of various tribes or bands of peoples, who were warlike, ambitious, and mobile. Northern Africa, the granary of the West, was in barbarian hands.
The Empire continued in the East, ruled from Constantinople and faced with continuing threats from hostile outsiders and internal weakness.
At the end of that century, a lot of the Western and African territory had been won back to Roman rule and some important changes had been made in the administration of the Empire. The Empire's major foe to the East, the Persian empire, had been fought to a standstill and appeared to be less of a threat than it had been for a long time. Things seemed to be turning around. But they weren't - at least not in the way a contemporary observer might have thought.
Rosen's main point is that human society from Persia to the Atlantic was reshaped in profound ways by the devastating effects of Bubonic Plague. It depopulated both the Persian and the Roman empires enormously and weakened both with a series of consequences, including a loss of the ability to resist the explosion of the conquering Arab forces spreading Islam, an inability of the Roman empire to hold its reconquered territories, with a resulting shift of its attention eastward, causing a power vacuum in the West that the church and the emerging nation states had to fill, and a change in economic power allocation brought about by the increasing value of labor in a population with fewer people. Out of all of this came the roots of what would turn into the modern world.
Rosen is, as I have stated above, a sharp-eyed and thoughtful guide through these events. He also doesn't give himself enough space to look deeply enough into them.
For instance, he is right that the plague's devastations weakened both the Roman and the Persian empires' ability to withstand the onslaught of Islam, although that is (rightly) a small part of his focus, since the Islamic explosion began in a big way in the next century. I wish he had set the stage for the understanding of Islam's success a little more clearly.
On the one hand, there is no doubt that the Arab armies were numerous and enthusiastic and (as Rosen notes in a way that will sound familiar to people in our time) trained in proxy wars by the nations they would soon turn against in the most advanced combat techniques of their time. On the other hand, both the Persians and the Romans had been fighting against this type of enemy for centuries and they knew the ins and outs of combat with and against mounted archers about as well as it could be known.
On the other hand, it's also clear that the Arabs brought more with them than horses and arrows and sharp swords. They also brought a promise of a better life for those who accepted their rule. Islam offered a degree of tolerance of Christian and Jewish belief that was unusual at the time and, even more attractively, it offered a kind of social equality among believers (at least to some extent) that was long-gone from Christianity, after it and Rome became entwined and that was probably never the case with the Persian empire's religions and much more social mobility than either empire could have offered at the time. The sheer cost of supporting the administrative structure of the two empires must have been enormous, and as the size of the population onto which this cost was imposed shrank from the plague, the individual burden must have become greater and less easily evaded. The invaders, by contrast, were affluent and anxious to turn their newly won riches into adornments and tools. The combination of greater freedom, increased wealth, and the chance to advance socially, must have been at least as great a weapon for Islam as the Arab armies. I wish that Rosen had addressed that point.
Also, there's a fine irony - of the kind that he usually catches - that missed his gaze. One of his points is that the introduction of the compound plow and the sudden availability of a lot of land in Europe made horses necessary and larger-scale agriculture possible. It also let to the rise of the European heavy cavalry and a warrior class made up of these soldiers (we call them knights). The part of the circle that he doesn't close is that it is these fighters, who were nearly invincible at the time, who brought about the destruction of the Roman Empire in the Fourth Crusade, when Constantinople was attacked and sacked in 1202. This was the effective end of the Empire as a great power, though it hung on as a remainder of its former self for another 250 years.
It's also odd to me that a book by someone with experience as an editor is not more carefully proofed, but I guess that in a world in which financial people run everything the financial savings of looser tolerances in accuracy are considered worth it. So we have a clearly wrong date for Augustine's great work, as pointed out in a previous review, and the year of the fall of Constantinople is changed from 1453 to 1458, probably a mistranscription of a handwritten number. No big deal, but it's a sorry thing to have to advise caution and double checks on dates in a book so erudite and so pleasant to read.
There are another 14 centuries left between the end of it and the present and it would please me to hear that Rosen has decided to work his way forward through as many as he can.
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