Dawn of the Middle Ages, A.D. 476-814

by Michael Grant

Years from 476 A.D. to 876 A. D., Sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages. Profusely Illustrated.

Genres: History

224 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1981

About the author

Michael Grant was an English classisist, numismatist, and author of numerous popular books on ancient history. His 1956 translation of Tacitus’s Annals of Imperial Rome remains a standard of the work. He once described himself as "one of the very few freelances in the field of ancient history: a rare phenomenon". As a popularizer, his hallmarks were his prolific output and his unwillingness to oversimplify or talk down to his readership.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

By and large, I have become familiar with Michael Grant through his writings relating to ancient and early medieval history [1], especially as they relate to art and culture, and for the most part, this book falls along those lines.  I would not consider this book to be something I greatly appreciate, because the author clearly lacks something of the biblical viewpoint when it comes to icons and idolatry and related subject, and because his sympathies are far more with the polytheistic pagan world than with the ethical and moral demands of Christendom.  Even so, this book does at least offer some classical scholarship in an accessible way and plenty of beautiful pictures of art and material culture for a wide swath of cultures over the period of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages up to the death of Charlemagne in 814.  And if you are looking for a better understanding of this period from a cross-cultural point of view that focuses on art and that provides a great deal of understanding of political and religious history as well, this book is certainly of worth on its breadth alone.

In a bit more than 200 very large pages, this particular book provides a comprehensive look at the history of the early Middle Ages over a wide span of the world.  The author begins with a discussion of the dark ages and why he considers this view to be inappropriate.  After that the author spends some time looking at the Byzantine Empire during this period, including the reign and achievements of Justinian, the crisis of the seventh century, and the iconoclasm controversy as well as the early stages of the Isaurian and Macedonian recovery (1).  This is followed by a discussion of the rise and fall of Sassannan Persia and the birth and early expansion of Islam through the beginning of the Abassid period (2).  After that comes a discussion of the German kingdoms (3) including the Ostrogoths, Lombards, Visigoths, and the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties of the Franks.  The author then discusses the life of the Jews as a minority people in Asia and Europe under Christian and Muslim rulers (4).  After this the author discusses various peoples of the North (5), including the Anglo-Saxons and the eventual unification of England under their rule, the Irish, and the Scandinavian peoples of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.  Finally, the author closes with a discussion of the rest of Eurasia from Eastern Europe to East Asia (6), starting with the demographic expansion of the Slavs, then moving on to the Avars and Bulgars, Khazars, White Huns and Turks, T'ang China, and medieval India.

Although the book is very good, it is not perfect.  For example, some readers will fault the neglect of Japan, Southeast Asia, Africa (with a slight mention of North Africa and Axum), as well as the Americas.  Other readers will think that the author is a bit too kind to Islam when it comes to their moral behavior as well as their treatment of non-Arabs and non-Muslim peoples.  In addition to that, the author has a clear bias towards philosophical paganism as opposed to Christianity, and that is the sort of bias that I view as problematic at best when it comes to someone who takes it upon himself to talk about the early Middle Ages.  Be that as it may, this book is at least written with the desire of speaking widely and with some insight on a period of history that is not well understood especially in context as it relates to others.  This book is at least a good start in understanding the Middle Ages, and that is worth something.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

[Michael Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

The late Michael Grant had a long and widely varied academic career and was a noted author of popular histories of the ancient and medieval world. This one, unfortunately, is not one of his more successful efforts. But much of the blame for that must go to the unknown designer of the book. His narrative is a good, nontechnical survey of the period from the deposition of Romulus Augustulus, last emperor in the West, in 476 to the death of Charles the Great in 814. That’s as good as definition of “early medieval Europe” as any, but the author goes farther afield, including sections on the rise and expansion of Islam, the Jews in Europe and Asia, a special section on Britain, and the Slavs, Turks, Huns, and even China during those same years. For those latter cultures, which have little if any connection with Europe, the time division makes no sense, but I can’t fault Grant’s desire to broaden his readers’ awareness of the global context.

However, reading this book is a good deal more difficult than it ought to be. There are multiple illustrations on nearly every page, but they’re scattered about. A caption may be split by the image itself, or it may be isolated on the other side of the page, or several of them may be lumped together -- there’s no consistency and locating the caption that goes with a particular illustration takes far longer than it should. Also, the continuing narrative may be split into several chunks on the page, separated by oddly placed illustrations, so there’s a lot of starting and stopping and casting about if you’re trying to read a chapter straight through. The text is pretty good, and the many illustrations are informative, but the organization of the whole is abysmal.