“A Lying Legacy” Revisited: The Abels–Morillo Defense of Discontinuity

Abstract

In their recent “Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History,” Richard Abels and Stephen Morillo suggest that some modern scholars have been seriously misled by the authors of various early medieval narrative texts. These authors, writing in Latin, often use traditional Roman military terminology and even incorporate imperial ideas about warfare into their narratives when describing operations undertaken by medieval commanders. The fundamental thesis presented by Abels and Morillo is that there was little continuity with regard to materia militaria in the West from the later Roman empire into what earlier generations of historians termed the “Dark Ages.” In postulating this thesis, Abels and Morillo ignore what has come to be the dominant pattern of periodization, i.e. the Late Antique, which is supposed to have lasted from c. A.D. 300 or even earlier to c. A.D. 1000 and perhaps even later. As will be seen below, this new construction of Western periodization, at least in regard to the continental mainland of the western half of the Roman empire, is seen by most specialists in this field as a viable replacement for the once dominant but now untenable “Dark Ages,” which often has been dominated by a racialist-motivated notion of Germanentum . The construction of Germanentum itself frequently resulted in the serious misrepresentation of early medieval texts. Not having heeded the Late Antique construct, Abels and Morillo are misled with regard to a broad spectrum of fundamental continuities from the later Roman empire to the early Middle Ages.