How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe

References to the fall of Rome often evoke images of wild bands of Germanic invaders and a swift and sudden physical destruction of Roman society. Indeed, popular culture, including films and television, perpetuates this image of the Roman Empire’s demise. Yet historians challenge this view, with most arguing that Rome’s collapse happened slowly.

The Roman Empire’s conclusion did not involve the total destruction of all things Roman; medieval rulers, many of whom were Germanic or Celtic in background, viewed themselves as successors to Rome. The eastern half of the Roman Empire survived well into the Middle Ages as the Byzantine Empire. The first Byzantine Emperor, Justinian I, viewed himself as Roman and is responsible for the codification of surviving Roman law, which was reintroduced into the West during the 12th century. The Frankish king Charlemagne, for example, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in 800 in recognition of his preeminence and acknowledgment that he was like the glorious Roman emperors of bygone days. Some scholars suggest that rather than "falling," the Roman Empire—at least in Western Europe—morphed into something new that blended Germanic, Celtic, and Greco-Roman traditions.

Cahill agrees that elements of Roman knowledge and culture survived in the West, though he perpetuates stereotypes about Rome’s collapse at the hands of marauding “barbarians.” He credits the newly-Christianized Irish monks of the fifth and sixth centuries with “saving” classical Greco-Roman learning because they recopied, and thus preserved, classical manuscripts, ensuring their survival. However, Cahill fails to acknowledge that a similar but more widespread phenomenon occurred across Muslim realms starting in the eighth century. Indeed, this Islamic Golden Age is largely responsible for the preservation of Aristotle’s works, for example. Much of his writing was reintroduced in the West in the 12th century through Arabic-to-Latin translations at the Toledo School of Translators in Muslim Spain, in addition to translations of Ptolemy and numerous classical medical texts.

Clifford Backman writes in The Worlds of Medieval Europe:

The changes that took place from the third to through the sixth centuries were dramatic, but even so did not quite manage to destroy the lingering sense of European or Mediterranean unity. The Germanic kings still looked to Byzantium for legitimization of their monarchies” (Backman, Clifford R. The Worlds of Medieval Europe, 3rd edition. Oxford University Press, 2015.)

Thus, collapse and continuity coexisted. Though Cahill writes that Rome “fell” gradually and acknowledges multiple causes for its collapse, he simultaneously emphasizes the inaccurate perception that masses of unkempt and ignorant “barbarian” hordes played the foremost role in its demise. This view aligns with the historically inaccurate claim that collapse was swift and total, and contradicts Cahill’s goal of showing that some of these invaders preserved remnants of classical knowledge and culture in Western Europe.