The Roman aristocracy had been shattered by repeated wars in Italy, ironically mostly resulting from efforts by emperors in Constantinople to restore the old Italy under their own rule. Similar catastrophes crippled the old way of life in North Africa, leaving it weakened before Muslim onslaughts in the seventh century (see pp. 260–61). Perhaps most significantly, in the decades after 550, Latin culture came within a hair’s breadth of extinction: the witness to that is the survival of datable manuscript copies of texts.
