Myth-making requires violence to history and from this task the Carolingians did not flinch. They butchered the past with the same lack of mercy shown by Charlemagne to 4,500 Saxons at Verdun. This is a theme to which Williams alludes but perhaps underplays. It is a great strength of the book that he is not afraid to digress at length, taking us repeatedly back to the late Roman period and across the early medieval centuries so as to give the appropriate wide-angle view. Carolingian scribes and scholars were less benevolent in their ransacking of the archive. Thousands of texts were recopied and often reworked in a new script (minuscule — our joined-up handwriting, as opposed to the capital letters used in the ancient world). The older versions were discarded or have since been lost. Where the Latin West is concerned, for all texts prior to 800, it is over three times more likely that we have a ninth-century copy than one from earlier centuries. On those all too rare occasions when we can compare an earlier with a Carolingian copy, the results, in terms of manipulation or suppression of the earlier version, can be frightening. We need to consider the possibility that the Carolingian Renaissance, not the burning of the library at Alexandria, may be the decisive moment for the destruction of the cultural patrimony of the ancient world. 

For all that, it is as well not to over-estimate the Carolingians. As Charlemagne's elephant serves to remind us, the Latin West was "developing" in this period. Global superpower lay elsewhere: Baghdad, whence Abul-Azaz had come, had a population of two million, the same as 19th-century Paris. While politically fragmented, the economic and cultural reach of the Muslim world stretched from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. The rise of Islam in the seventh century has long been seen as a condition for the formation of the Carolingian Empire in the eighth and ninth centuries. With the Mediterranean now a "Muslim lake", as the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne put it (quoted here by Williams with approval), north-west Europe was forced to develop in a different direction. One might go even further. The reach of the dinar extended not only to the Mediterranean, but also to the North Sea and the Baltic. Franks and Vikings alike were slave-dealers, selling their wares down to Baghdad, Cairo or Cordoba. 

The Muslim silver that washed back was to prime the European economy as it began to take off in the tenth century. Dare one say it in these pages — if we seek the father of Europe, we should look not to the Emperor of the West, but East, to the successors to the Prophet.