Review: East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective, edited by Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen and Laury Sarti

Abstract

Stefan Esders, Yaniv Fox, Yitzhak Hen, and Laury Sarti, eds., East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 374 pp; illustrations; maps. ISBN 9781107187153. $120. Debates over the concepts of continuity and change after the end of the Roman Empire have been central to scholarship on the early medieval west for centuries. The articles in East and West in the Early Middle Ages: The Merovingian Kingdoms in Mediterranean Perspective refocus attention away from whether early medieval kingdoms continued or changed formerly western Roman practices or whether continued connections between western Europe and the Mediterranean were simple importations from the East. Instead, the articles, as the introduction by Yitzhak Hen and Stefan Esders suggests, examine the “complicated and multilayered social, cultural, and political relations” the Merovingian kingdoms had “with their eastern Mediterranean counterparts, that is, the Byzantine Empire and the Umayyad Caliphate” (3). These articles consider the wide variety of relations that connected the Mediterranean as a dynamic process: a give and take between states, communities, and individuals. Moreover, by identifying trans-Mediterranean connections, the volume encourages scholars to ask more specific questions about how these processes functioned on a local level. Delving deeper into these dynamic developments within individual post-Roman kingdoms will help us to identify what precisely changed from the early sixth to the end of the seventh centuries for the people living within them. The volume contains twenty-one articles divided into five sections: Expanding Political Horizons, Patterns of Intensification: the 580s, The Pope as a Mediterranean Player, Religious and Cultural Exchange, and Rethinking the Late Merovingians. The sections follow a rough chronological order with a thematic clustering within each section offering connections between articles. This review will discuss particular articles from each section to highlight these themes. In the first section, Yaniv Fox's “Anxiously Looking East: Burgundian Foreign Policy on the Eve of Reconquest,” examines the alliances that emerged after the …