Reviewed by: Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe by Judith Herrin Kevin Uhalde Judith Herrin Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020 Pp. xxxvii + 537. $29.95. Praise for Judith Herrin’s Ravenna has been widespread and fully deserved. The author is a prominent historian of Byzantium whose scholarly work engages a wide variety of topics. This is not the first time she has used her lucid prose style to render a sensible narrative out of the interconnected political, economic, and religious events of the early medieval Mediterranean. The Formation of Christendom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) remains one of the best introductions to the intertwined histories of empires and kingdoms in the fifth through tenth centuries and garnered the same sort of praise Ravenna has received. A collection of her essays entitled Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013) shared the same broad, comparative approach to Byzantine history, in which Germanic and to a lesser extent Islamic actors are as integral as their counterparts in Constantinople. Among other recent publications is Ravenna: Its Role in Earlier Medieval Change and Exchange (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2016), co-edited with Jinty Nelson. This collection featured essays by scholars whose work constitutes some of the cutting-edge research informing the book under review. Accessibly written, lavishly illustrated, and available as an audiobook read by the excellent Phyllida Nash, Ravenna also includes ample endnotes and a good index. Ravenna in a sense turns Formation of Christendom inside out, making a single city both the focus and vantage point for events unfolding around the Mediterranean. Rather than the end of antiquity or beginning of the Middle Ages, the author identifies this half-millennium as a discrete and novel period in its own right: “early Christendom.” Readers of this journal should not look here expecting deep analyses of theological, doctrinal, or spiritual issues. Instead, what Herrin argues and her book successfully demonstrates is that Christianity was “a defining force in the exercise of authority as well as the organized means of transmitting community and integrating the economy” (xxxiv). In a nutshell, what this force defined was a “new social, military and legal order” (395) that was as regal, imperial, and ecumenical as it was religious. For several centuries, it was widespread and resilient enough for newcomers such as Theoderic, king of the Ostrogoths, to adapt and become proponents in their own right. As an imperial, royal, and ecclesiastical capital between 402 and 751, Ravenna was [End Page 451] enmeshed in this new order. With surrounding marshes discouraging attack, the Via Flaminia leading to Rome, and nearby Classis providing sea access to Dalmatia, Constantinople, and beyond, it was both protected and connected. Within the city, Herrin finds evidence of linguistic, religious, and ethnic diversity throughout the period, along with relative tolerance compared to elsewhere. Although its political and economic importance waned decisively in the latter half of the eighth century, Charlemagne bore his impressions of the city northward as he forged a new empire, enabling Herrin to claim Ravenna to have been the “first European city” (399). The book is divided into nine parts and further into many short, fast-paced chapters. Most of them use historical figures, both famous and less well known, as titles and to help anchor the narrative. The ninth-century historian Agnellus of Ravenna is inevitably the most important literary source, especially for ecclesiastical affairs, but the author makes use of all the other histories, chronicles, council proceedings, letters, and other literary sources when they are available. Much of the story is dominated by the familiar names who dominated early Christendom. Herrin portrays them skillfully, especially the effective empress but “terrible mother” Galla Placidia (51), and Theoderic, with his “determination to create a little Constantinople in the West” (110). Along with emperors, kings, patriarchs, and popes, Herrin’s subjects also include consorts, regents, and mothers wielding real power, traveling artisans and multilingual scholars, councillors implicated in epic struggles as well as municipal administration, and the townspeople whose affairs they recorded in the papyrus documents preserved in Ravenna’s municipal archives. Here the book is especially rich, as a number...
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Dec 5, 2024
Dr Pierre Edmond Mbengue 
Open Access