Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe

"This is just a delight. In a sense, it’s quite an easy task writing a glittering book about Ravenna, because if you go there, you see these relics of an astonishing culture. But Judith Herrin is absolutely the master of Byzantine and late Roman imperial history. She is someone who knows the whole context—it’s not just a book about a marshland town in Northern Italy. “All of these six books are beautifully produced” It’s the story of the paradox of how this marshy place became the centre of the world for a while and became the hinge between Eastern and Western civilization while they were still connected. It was a bridge place. It gets to how Ravenna as a marshy and not very picturesque place was an essential part of the story. It was a place you could defend and it was a place with water which took you to so many other places. Judith knows the archive, and it’s extremely rich and unusual, with an unusual cache of papyri for a Western European place—the sort of thing you expect in Egypt actually survives in the town archives in Ravenna. You get really intimate glimpses of ordinary domestic life in Ravenna at the same time as you’re looking at the fate of imperial dynasties, and seeing horizons that take you as far as Northern Europe and Western Asia. Power pulled apart from Ravenna, leaving it in the middle. So the eastern, Byzantine Empire shrank so that Ravenna was on the edge, because new powers were arriving in the west. To start with, some of these new rulers made Ravenna their capital, but then they created other capitals far to the west, so the town gradually shrunk away. You could say the story is one of anti-climax, if you like, leaving us with this astonishing legacy of really dramatic buildings stranded in a small, damp Italian town."