Judith Herrin’s Ravenna sparkles like the city’s world-heritage mosaics and decisively challenges such necromancy. Her Ravenna stands not at the end of one world looking back but at the dawn of a new age. It is confident, globally connected, nourished by Rome and the Eastern political, religious, intellectual, and legal traditions of Byzantium. It is shaped by interactions between varieties of Christianity and the military power, political ambition, and cultural energy of newcomers to the Roman world. Through a detailed investigation of one key city and its transregional networks, Herrin develops the thesis that the period after Roman emperors left Rome was not marked merely by decline or even characterised by continued creative but nostalgic and ultimately faltering engagement with the classical tradition (as the common designation ‘late antiquity’ might suggest). Rather, the period gave momentum to an emerging European world order. As the fifth-century bishop Neon (‘New’) had inscribed on Ravenna’s resplendent orthodox baptistery, partly in self-aggrandisement, partly expressing the confident innovations of the age: ‘yield, old name, yield to newness’. Ravenna played a profound if often unacknowledged role in these religious, political, and institutional transformations.

In the early fifth century, the Roman capital in the west moved from Milan to Ravenna. It was easier to defend and better connected to Adriatic trade and the Eastern capital. Until 751 ce, when it was captured by the Lombards, it was at the heart of Constantinople’s western hegemony, first led by western emperors allied to the east, then home to Gothic kings formally subordinate to Constantinople, and then, after Justinian reconquered the West in the sixth century, as the base of Byzantine exarchs charged with military and civic oversight of Italy. These centuries of Ravenna’s influence saw the production of a cornucopia of early Christian art. Invasions by Goths, Huns, Vandals, Persians, Arabs, Lombards, and Franks reshaped regional political alliances. The codification of Roman law influenced civil law jurisdictions up to today and shaped institutions and social order across large geographic regions. Internal doctrinal controversies, together with the rise of Islam, affected Christianity – its communal identity, worship, Christology, and politics across different ethnic groups.

Ravenna’s buildings, Christian and imperial imagery, mosaics, and statuary inspired Charlemagne. His octagonal Palatine Chapel owes its design (and assorted columns and marble) to churches like Ravenna’s glorious San Vitale. Charlemagne also moved a magnificent statue of Theodoric, the fifth-century Gothic-Roman king, to pride of place in front of his palace, in imitation of its position in Ravenna. Theodoric, who had received the imperial regalia from the emperor Anastasios, was a fitting model for the new foreign emperor. If Charlemagne partly founded his new empire with authority negotiated with and so partly dependent on the pope in Rome, he also looked to Ravenna to ground his power.

Ravenna is a monumental story told lightly. The sweeping social and cultural history is presented in easily digestible sections and augmented by lavish illustrations. Herrin contextualises the city’s exquisite early Christian art and illumines networks of trade and craftsmanship across the Mediterranean. She draws on civic records preserved on papyrus to paint lively vignettes of the everyday lives of traders, influential women, soldiers, leading families, and administrators. She examines the negotiation and exercise of power by rulers, bishops, and generals, and charts the changing influence of major institutions like the Senate, city councils, and the church. We meet intellectuals: the poet Sidonius, the doctor Agnellus, and the theologian–philosopher–statesmen Boethius and Cassiodorus. And there’s an Anonymous Cosmographer, who, at the turn of the eighth century, could access classical and Christian, Greek and Latin, Gothic and Persian works of computation, history, and geography to chart terrain from the Roman world to fabled Thule. Classical learning was kept alive and integrated with other cultural, religious, and legal traditions through imperial patronage and connections to Constantinople and Rome, and was put to good effect in international relations. Herrin also deftly shows how such learning reveals and shapes the self-understanding of the city both as the inheritor of the classical tradition and as an agent in lively intellectual developments.

Elsewhere, Herrin has forged a path for gender history in late antiquity and Byzantium. In this book, her rich treatment of Empress Galla Placidia’s influence – first on the Goths (who held her hostage, married her to their king, and learned from her much about Roman law and imperial customs), and then on Ravenna as its ruler – is a study in how feminine power could operate. (Significantly, experience as a high-ranking hostage, this time in Constantinople, also shaped Theodoric’s intercultural understanding of Roman power, and helped him develop Gothic-Roman rule in Ravenna.) Galla Placidia’s dazzling ‘mausoleum’ (originally part of the church of the Holy Cross, which she founded), with its stunning mosaics overflowing with flowers, stars, crosses, and images of saints in deep blues and glittering gold, stands as a remarkable witness to her piety, patronage, and power. Her display of her imperial relatives in the mosaic decorations of another church (destroyed by Allied bombs in World War II) was a daring innovation that influenced later rulers, including Theodoric and Justinian, in their own self-representation. Herrin puts the fear of God into parents everywhere by blaming Galla Placidia for her disappointing children: her daughter was involved in at least one scandalous affair and treasonously sued Attila the Hun for protection, while Galla Placidia’s son’s incompetence and unreliability led to his assassination soon after her death in 450 CE. But Herrin’s portrait of the empress is alert to intersections of gender, power, ethnicity, and Christian belief.

Ravenna brings the city’s rich history vibrantly to life and makes sense of its extraordinary monuments. It also revises narratives of decline and nostalgia in the late-antique West and illuminates the varied cultural influences, clashes, and political interdependencies from which early Europe was forged. It may therefore unsettle easy binaries between East and West and stimulate thinking about how to conceptualise Europe today.