The
Early Middle Ages, or
Dark Ages, "a fall of European life" is a
period in the
history of Europe
following the fall of the
Western
Roman Empire. It lasted from about
AD 500 to 1000. The period featured raiding,
migration, and conquest by
Huns,
Germanic peoples,
Arabs,
Vikings,
Hungarians and others. There was frequent warfare
and a virtual disappearance of urban life. By the eighth century,
the volume of trade reached its lowest level since the Bronze Age.
Islam, founded by
Mohammed, conquered the Middle East, North Africa,
and Spain. Toward the end of this period, Europe experienced a
return to systematic agriculture in the form of the feudal system,
which included such innovations as three-field planting and the
heavy plow. The Early Middle Ages were followed by the
High Middle Ages.
Collapse of Rome (372-410)
Starting in the second century, various indicators of Roman
civilization began to decline, including urbanization, seaborne
commerce, and population. Only 40 percent as many Mediterranean
shipwrecks have been found for the third century as for the first.
The population of the
Roman Empire
shrank from 65 million in 150 to 50 million in 400, a decline of
more than 20 percent. Some have connected this to the
Migration Period
Pessimum (300-700), when there was a decline in temperature
globally which reduced agricultural harvests.
Migrating south from Scandinavia, the Germanic peoples reached the
Black Sea early in the third century. They created confederations
which proved more formidable opponents than the
Sarmatians, whom the Romans had dealt with
earlier. In Romania and the grassy steppes north of the Black Sea,
the
Goths, a Germanic people, created at least
two kingdoms, one
Therving, the other
Greuthung. The arrival of the
Huns in 372-375 ended the history of these kingdoms.
The Huns were a confederation of central Asian tribes who founded
an empire with a Turkic-speaking aristocracy. They had mastered the
difficult art of shooting composite
recurve bows from horseback. The Gothic people were
forced to seek refuge in Roman territory (376). The Goths agreed to
enter the Empire as unarmed settlers, but many bribed the Danube
border guards into allowing them to bring their weapons with
them.
The discipline and organization of a Roman legion made it a superb
fighting machine. The Romans preferred infantry to cavalry because
infantry could be trained to retain formation in combat, while
cavalry tended to flee when faced with danger. But unlike a
barbarian army, the legions required constant training and salaries
that made them a huge expense for the empire. As agriculture and
economic activity declined, taxes grew harder to collect, and the
system came under strain.
In the
Gothic War , the Goths revolted
and confronted the main Roman army in the Battle of
Adrianople
(378). Not wanting to share the glory,
Eastern Emperor
Valens ordered an attack on
the
Therving infantry under
Fritigern without waiting for Western Emperor
Gratian, who was on the way with
reinforcements. While the Romans were fully engaged, the Greuthung
cavalry arrived. Only one third of the Roman army managed to
escape.
It
was the most shattering defeat that the Romans had suffered since
Cannae
, according
to Roman military writer Ammianus
Marcellinus. The core army of the eastern empire was
destroyed, Valens killed, and the Goths freed to lay waste the
Balkans, including the armories along the Danube. As
Edward Gibbon comments, "The Romans, who so
coolly and so concisely mention the acts of
justice which
were exercised by the legions, reserve their compassion and their
eloquence for their own sufferings, when the provinces were invaded
and desolated by the arms of the successful Barbarians."
The empire lacked the resources, and perhaps the will, to
reconstruct the professional mobile army that had been destroyed at
Adrianople, so it was forced to rely on barbarian armies to fight
on its behalf. The
Eastern Roman
Empire was able to buy off the Goths with tribute. The
Western Roman Empire was less
fortunate.
Stilicho, the western
empire's half-Vandal military commander, stripped the Rhine
frontier of
troops to fend off invasions of Italy by the Visigoths in 402-03
and by other Goths in 406-07.
Fleeing
before the terrifying advance of the Huns, the
Vandals, Suebi, and
Alans launched an attack across the frozen
Rhine near Mainz
; on 31
December, 406, the frontier gave way and these tribes surged into
Gaul. They were soon followed by the
Burgundians and by bands of the
Alamanni. In the fit of anti-barbarian hysteria
which followed, Emperor
Honorius had
Stilicho summarily beheaded (408). Stilicho submitted his neck,
"with a firmness not unworthy of the last of the Roman generals,"
wrote Gibbon. Honorius was left with only worthless courtiers to
advise him. In 410, the Visigoths led by
Alaric
I captured the city of Rome and for three days there was fire
and slaughter as bodies filled the streets, palaces were stripped
of their valuables, and those thought to have hidden wealth were
interrogated and tortured. As newly converted Christians, the Goths
respected church property.
But those who found sanctuary in the Vatican
and in other churches were the fortunate
few.
Migration Period (400-700)
The Goths and Vandals were only the first of many waves of invaders
that flooded Western Europe. Some lived only for war and pillage
and disdained Roman ways. Others admired Rome and wished to become
its heirs. "A poor Roman plays the Goth, a rich Goth the Roman"
said King
Theodoric of the
Ostrogoths.
The subjects of the Roman empire were Catholics, the disciplined
subjects of a long-established bureaucratic empire. The Germanic
peoples knew little of cities, money, or writing. They were recent
converts to
Arian Christianity and were
thus heretics to the churchmen of the empire.
The aera of the migrations or
Völkerwanderung (wandering of the
peoples). The earlier settled population was left intact or only
partially displaced. Whereas the peoples of France, Italy, and
Spain continued to speak the dialects of Latin that today
constitute the
Romance languages,
the language of the smaller Roman-era population of what is now
England disappeared with barely a trace in the territories
conquered by the Anglo-Saxons, although the Brittanic kingdoms of
the west remained
Brythonic speakers. The new
peoples greatly altered established society, including law,
culture, religion, and patterns of property ownership.
The
pax Romana had provided safe
conditions for trade and manufacture, and a unified cultural and
educational milieu of far-ranging connections. As this was lost, it
was replaced by the rule of local potentates, sometimes members of
the established Romanized ruling elite, sometimes new lords of
alien culture. In
Aquitania,
Gallia Narbonensis, southern Italy and
Sicily,
Baetica or southern Spain, and the
Iberian Mediterranean coast, Roman culture lasted until the sixth
or seventh centuries.
Everywhere, the gradual break-down of economic and social linkages
and infrastructure resulted in increasingly localized outlooks.
This breakdown was often fast and dramatic as it became unsafe to
travel or carry goods over any distance; there was a consequent
collapse in trade and manufacture for export. Major industries that
depended on trade, such as large-scale pottery manufacture,
vanished almost overnight in places like Britain.
Tintagel
in Cornwall
, as well as
several other centres, managed to obtain supplies of Mediterranean
luxury goods well into the sixth century, but then lost their
trading links. Administrative, educational and military
infrastructure quickly vanished, and the loss of the established
cursus honorum led to the
collapse of the schools and to a rise of illiteracy even among the
leadership. The careers of
Cassiodorus
(died c. 585) at the beginning of this period and of
Alcuin of York (died 804) at its close were
founded alike on their valued literacy.
For the formerly Roman area, there was another 20 percent decline
in population between 400 and 600, or a one third decline for
150-600. In the eighth century, the volume of trade reached its
lowest level since the Bronze Age. The very small number of
shipwrecks found that dated from the 8th
century supports this (which represents less than 2 percent of the
number of shipwrecks dated from the first century). There was also
reforestation and a retreat of agriculture that centred around 500.
This phenomenon coincided with a period of rapid cooling, according
to tree ring data. The Romans had practised two-field agriculture,
with a crop grown in one field and the other left fallow and
ploughed under to eliminate weeds. With the gradual breakup of the
institutions of the empire, owners were unable to stop their
slaves from running away and the plantation
system broke down. Systematic agriculture largely disappeared and
yields declined to subsistence level.
For almost
a thousand years, Rome
was the most
politically important, richest and largest city in the
world. Around AD 100, it had a population of about 450,000.
Its population declined to a mere 20,000 during the Early Middle
Ages, reducing the sprawling city to groups of inhabited buildings
interspersed among large areas of ruins and vegetation.
Smallpox did not definitively enter
Western Europe until about 581 when
Bishop Gregory of Tours provided an eyewitness account that
describes the characteristic findings of smallpox. Waves of
epidemics wiped out large rural
populations. Most of the details about the epidemics are lost,
probably due to the scarcity of surviving written records.
It is estimated that the
Plague of
Justinian killed as many as 100 million people across the
world."
Scientists Identify Genes Critical to Transmission
of Bubonic Plague", News Release, National Institues of Health,
July 18, 1996.
The History of the Bubonic Plague. Some
historians such as Josiah C. Russell (1958) have suggested a total
European population loss of 50 to 60 percent between 541 and 700.
After 750, major epidemic diseases did not appear again in Europe
until the
Black Death of the 14th
century.
Byzantine Empire
The death of
Theodosius I in 395 was
followed by the division of the empire between his two sons. The
Western Roman Empire
disintegrated into a mosaic of warring Germanic kingdoms in the
fifth century, making the
Eastern
Roman Empire in Constantinople the legal successor to the
classical Roman Empire. After
Greek
replaced
Latin as the official
language of the Empire, historians refer to the empire as
"Byzantine." Westerners would gradually begin to refer to it as
"Greek" rather than "Roman." The inhabitants, however, always
called themselves
Romaioi, or Romans.
The Eastern Roman Empire aimed at retaining control of the trade
routes between Europe and the Orient, which made the Empire the
richest polity in Europe. Making use of their sophisticated warfare
and superior diplomacy, the Byzantines managed to fend off assaults
by the migrating barbarians. Their dreams of subduing the Western
potentates briefly materialized during the reign of
Justinian I in 527-565.
Not only did Justinian
restore some western territories to the Roman Empire, but he also
codified Roman law (with his codification
remaining in force in many areas of Europe until the 19th century)
and built the largest and the most technically advanced edifice of
the Early Middle Ages, the Hagia Sophia
. A
pandemic, the
Plague of Justinian, however,
marred Justinian's reign, infecting the Emperor, killing perhaps
40% of the people in Constantinople, and contributing to Europe's
early medieval population decline.
Justinian's successors
Maurice and
Heraclius had to confront invasions of the
Avar and
Slavic tribes. After the devastations by the
Slavs and the Avars, large areas of the
Balkans became depopulated. In 626 Constantinople,
by far the largest city of early medieval Europe, withstood a
combined siege by Avars and Persians. Within several decades,
Heraclius completed a holy war against the Persians by taking their
capital and having a
Sassanid monarch
assassinated.
Yet Heraclius lived to see his spectacular
success undone by the Arab conquest of Syria
, Palestine, Egypt
, and
North Africa which was considerably
facilitated by religious disunity and the proliferation of
heretical movements (notably Monophysitism and Nestorianism) in the areas converted to
Islam.
Although
Heraclius's successors managed to salvage Constantinople
from two Arab
sieges (in 674-77 and 717), the empire of the 8th and early 9th
century was rocked by the great Iconoclastic Controversy,
punctuated by dynastic struggles between various factions at
court. The Bulgar and
Slavic tribes profited from these
disorders and invaded Illyria, Thrace and even Greece
(which they
called Morea). After the decisive
victory at
Ongala in 680 the armies
of the Bulgars and Slavs advanced to the south of the Balkan
mountains, defeating again the Byzantines who were then forced to
sign a humiliating peace treaty which acknowledged the
establishment of the
First
Bulgarian Empire on the borders of the Empire.
To counter these threats, a new system of administration was
introduced. The regional civil and military administration were
combined in the hands of a general, or strategos. A
theme, which formerly denoted a subdivision of the
Byzantine army, came to refer to a region governed by a strategos.
The reform led to the emergence of great landed families which
controlled the regional military and often pressed their claims to
the throne (see
Bardas Phocas and
Bardas Sklerus for characteristic
examples).
By the
early eighth century, notwithstanding the shrinking territory of
the empire, Constantinople remained the largest and the wealthiest
city of the entire world, comparable only to Sassanid Ctesiphon
, and later Abassid Baghdad
. The population of the imperial capital
fluctuated between 300,000 and 400,000 as the emperors undertook
measures to restrain its growth.
The only other large Christian cities
were Rome (50,000) and Salonika
(30,000). Even before the eighth century was
out, the Farmer's Law signalled the resurrection of agricultural
technologies in the Greek Empire. As the 2006
Encyclopædia Britannica noted,
"the technological base of Byzantine society was more advanced than
that of contemporary western Europe: iron tools could be found in
the villages; water mills dotted the landscape; and field-sown
beans provided a diet rich in protein".
[59539]
The ascension of the
Macedonian
dynasty in 867 marked the end of the period of political and
religious turmoil and introduced a new golden age of the empire.
While the talented generals such as
Nicephorus Phocas expanded the frontiers,
the Macedonian emperors (such as
Leo the
Wise and
Constantine VII)
presided over the cultural flowering in Constantinople, known as
the Macedonian Renaissance. The enlightened Macedonian rulers
scorned the rulers of Western Europe as illiterate barbarians and
maintained a nominal claim to rule over the West. Although this
fiction had been exploded with the coronation of
Charlemagne in Rome (800), the Byzantine rulers
did not treat their Western counterparts as equals. Generally, they
had little interest in the political and economical developments in
the barbarian (from their point of view) West.
Against
this economic background, the culture and the imperial traditions
of the Eastern Roman Empire attracted its northern neighbours —
Slavs, Bulgars, and Khazars — to Constantinople, in search of either pillage or
enlightenment. The movement of the Germanic tribes to the
south triggered the great migration of the
Slavs, who occupied the vacated territories. In the
seventh century, they moved westward to the
Elbe, southward to the
Danube and
eastward to the
Dnieper. By the 9th century,
the Slavs had expanded into sparsely inhabited territories to the
south and east from these natural frontiers, peacefully
assimilating the indigenous
Illyrian and
Finno-Ugric populations.
Rise of Islam (632-750)
Following the death of the
Islamic
prophet Muhammad,
Abū Bakr (r. 632-34) became the first
khalīfah or
caliph of a newly
unified polity under the
Islamic faith in the
Arabian peninsula. The early
Rashidun caliphs were both head of state
and supreme religious authority while the later caliphs came to be
seen as the political leader of Muslims. The early caliphs were
chosen by a
shūrā, or council, in
the same way that the head of an Arabian tribe or clan would be
chosen. Abū Bakr launched a campaign in the
ridda wars which brought central
Arabia under Muslim control. (633)
'
Umar I (r.634-44), the second caliph,
proclaimed himself "commander of the faithful" (
amīr al-mu
'minīn).
In the 630s, he brought Syria, Jordan
, Palestine,
and Iraq
under Muslim
control. Egypt was taken
from the Byzantines in 645 by 'Uthmān,
the third caliph. Abū Bakr, 'Umar I, 'Uthmān, and his
successor
Alī are remembered as the
"rightly guided caliphs" who presided over a golden age of pure
Islam.
Alī's caliphate started amid political controversy over the murder
of Uthman and sparked a power struggle and the
First Islamic civil war led by
Mu'āwiyah, governor of Syria.
When Alī,
son-in-law of Muhammad, was killed while praying in Kufah, Iraq, Mu'āwiyah established the Ummayyad dynasty of caliphs (661–750) with Damascus
as its capital. Those who supported 'Alī,
his son
Husayn(who led a revolt against the
Ummayyads), and their descendants would eventually became the
Shī'ite sect. Under '
Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705), the Ummayyads
reached their peak, conquering
Central
Asia, coastal
North Africa, and
Spain. Al-Malik also Arabized the state with
Arabs replacing the Greek and Persian civil servants.
The conquest of Iberia commenced
when the Moors (mostly Berbers with some Arabs)
invaded the Christian Visigothic Iberia
in the year 711, under their Berber leader Tariq ibn Ziyad. They landed at
Gibraltar
on 30 April and worked their way northward.
Tariq's forces were joined the next year by those of his superior,
Musa ibn Nusair.
During the eight-year
campaign most of the Iberian Peninsula
was brought under Muslim rule
— save for small areas in the northwest (Asturias
) and largely Basque
regions in the Pyrenees
. This territory, under the Arab name Al-Andalus
, became part of the expanding Umayyad empire.
The unsuccessful second siege of Constantinople (717) weakened the
Umayyads and reduced their prestige. After their success in
overrunning Iberia, the conquerors moved northeast across the
Pyrenees, but were defeated by the
Frank leader
Charles Martel at the
Battle of poitiers in 732. The Umayyads
were overthrown in 750 by the '
Abbāsids and most of the Umayyad clan
massacred.
A surviving Umayyad prince,
Abd-ar-rahman I, escaped to Spain and
founded a new Umayyad dynasty in the
Emirate of Cordoba, (756).
Charles Martel's son,
Pippin the Short retook Narbonne
, and his grandson Charlemagne established the
Marca Hispanica across the Pyrenees
in part of what today is Catalonia
, reconquering Girona
in 785 and
Barcelona
in 801.
The unified Muslim caliphate disintegrated over the course of the
ninth century as the
Idrisids and
Aghlabids of North Africa and the
Samanids of Persia gained independence.
Eventually, the
Shiite Fatimids set up a rival caliphate in
Tunisia
(920). The Umayyids in Spain soon proclaimed
themselves caliphs as well (929). The
Buwayhids (Persian Shiites) gained control of
Baghdad in 934. In 972, the Fatimids conquered Egypt.
Resurgence of the Latin West (700-850)
Conditions in Western Europe began to improve after 700 as Europe
experienced an agricultural boom that would continue until at least
1100. A study of limestone deposited in the Mediterranean seabed
concludes that there was a substantial increase in solar radiation
received between 600 and 900.
The first signs of Europe's recovery on the
battlefield are the defense of Constantinople in 717 and the victory of the Franks over the Arabs
at the Battle of Poitiers in
732.
Between
the fifth and eighth centuries a political and social
infrastructure developed across the lands of the former empire,
based upon powerful regional noble families, and the newly
established kingdoms of the Ostrogoths in
Italy, Visigoths in Spain and Portugal
, Franks and Burgundians in Gaul and
western Germany. These lands remained Christian, and their
Arian conquerors were converted (Visigoths
and Lombards) or conquered (Ostrogoths and Vandals). The Franks
converted directly from paganism to Catholic Christianity under
Clovis I. The interaction between the
culture of the newcomers, their warband loyalties, the remnants of
classical culture, and Christian influences, produced a new model
for society, based in part on
feudal
obligations. The centralized administrative systems of the
Romans did not withstand the changes, and the institutional support
for chattel slavery largely disappeared. The
Anglo-Saxons in England also started to convert
from
heathenism with the
arrival of Christian missionaries around the year 600. Unlike that
of the France, two major forms of Christianity existed in England,
Roman Catholicism in the south and Celtic Christianity in the
north. This came to a head at the
Synod
of Whitby in 664 after which Roman practices proved to be
dominant.
Italy
The
Lombards, who first entered Italy in 568
under Alboin, carved out a state in the
north, with its capital at Pavia
.
At first,
they were unable to conquer the Exarchate of Ravenna, the Ducatus Romanus, and Calabria and Apulia
. The
next two hundred years were occupied in trying to conquer these
territories from the Byzantine Empire.
The Lombard state was truly barbarian in custom compared with the
earlier Germanic states of Western Europe. It was highly
decentralized at first, with the territorial dukes having practical
sovereignty in their duchies, especially in the southern duchies of
Spoleto and
Benevento. For a decade following the
death of
Cleph in 575, the Lombards did not
elect a king and the period is called the
Rule of the Dukes. The first written legal
code was composed in poor Latin in 643: the
Edictum Rothari. It was primarily the
codification of the oral legal tradition of the people.
The Lombard state was well-organized and stabilized by the end of
the long reign of
Liutprand (717–744), but its
collapse was sudden. Unsupported by the dukes, King
Desiderius was defeated and forced to surrender
his kingdom to Charlemagne in 774. The Lombard kingdom came to an
end and a period of Frankish rule was initiated.
The Frankish king
Pepin the Short had, by the Donation of Pepin, given the pope the
"Papal
States
" and the territory north of that swath of
papally-governed land was ruled primarily by Lombard and Frankish
vassals of the Holy Roman Emperor
until the rise of the city-states in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries.
In the south, a period of anarchy began. The duchy of Benevento
maintained its sovereignty in the face of the pretensions of both
the Western and Eastern Empires. In the ninth century, the
Saracens conquered
Sicily and
began settling in the peninsula.
The coastal cities on the Tyrrhenian
Sea
departed from Byzantine allegiance. Various
states owing various nominal allegiances fought constantly over
territory until events came to a head in the early eleventh century
with the coming of the
Normans, who
conquered the whole of the south by the end of the century.
England
In the mid-5th century several tribes from modern Germany, Holland,
and Denmark began sporadic and marginally successful invasions of
Britain, at that point a neglected Roman province. Traditionally,
two Jutish chieftains named
Hengest and
Horsa were promised land by the powerful
British king
Vortigern in exchange for
routing the warlike
Pict tribe. According to
the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle, after they defeated the Picts, "They sent to
Angeln and called on them to send more forces, and to tell people
about the worthlessness of the Britons and the merits of their
land." This marked the beginning of decades of invasion and
conquest of southern and central Britain, by such Germanic peoples
as the
Jutes,
Angles,
and
Saxons. At least 50 percent of England's
original Celtic inhabitants were killed off in the process. The
Anglo-Saxons eventually established several kingdoms of differing
longevity and significance.
King Alfred the
Great (871-899) of Wessex
led
Anglo-Saxon resistance to the invading Danish forces.
The
unification of England was completed in 926 when Northumbria
was annexed by King Athelstan, a grandson of
Alfred.
Frankish Empire
The
Merovingians established themselves in
the power vacuum of the former Roman provinces in Gaul, and
Chlodwig I following his victory over the
Alemanni at the Battle of
Tolbiac
(496) converted to Christianity, laying the
foundation of the Frankish Empire,
the dominant state of medieval Western Christendom.
Starting with the
Frankish realms at
the beginning of the ninth century,
Charlemagne united much of modern day France,
western Germany and northern Italy into the
Carolingian Empire. Scholarship and
Classical learning flourished under Charlemagne leading to what
twentieth-century historians called the "
Carolingian Renaissance".
The 840s saw renewed disorder, with the breakup of the Frankish
Empire and the beginning of a new cycle of barbarian raids, at
first by the
Vikings and later by the
Magyars.
Manoralism
Around 800, there was a return to systematic agriculture in the
form of the
open field, or strip,
system. A
manor would have several
fields each subdivided into one-acre strips of land. This was
considered to be the amount of land an ox could plough before
taking a rest, according to one theory. Another possibility is that
the holdings were originally rectangular and were split into strips
because of the way land was inherited . In the idealized form of
the system, each family got thirty such strips of land. The
three-field system of
crop rotation
was first developed in the ninth century: wheat or rye was planted
in one field, the second field had a nitrogen-fixing crop (barley,
oats, peas, or beans), and third was fallow. Compared to the
earlier two-field system, a three-field system allows for
significantly more land to be put under cultivation. Even more
important, the system allows for two harvests a year, reducing the
risk that a single crop failure will lead to famine. Three-field
agriculture creates a surplus of oats that can be used to feed
horses. Because the system required a major rearrangement of real
estate and the social order, it took until the 11th century before
it came into general use. The heavy wheeled plough was introduced
in the late 10th century. It required greater animal power and
promoted the use of teams of oxen. Illuminated manuscripts depict
two-wheeled ploughs with both a mouldboard, or curved metal
ploughshare, and a coulter, a vertical blade in front of the
ploughshare. The Romans had used light, wheelless ploughs with flat
iron shares that often proved unequal to the heavy soils of
northern Europe.
The return to systemic agriculture coincided with the introduction
of a new social system called
feudalism.
This system featured a hierarchy of reciprocal obligations. Each
man was bound to serve his superior in return for the latter's
protection. This made for confusion of territorial sovereignty
since allegiances were subject to change over time, and were
sometimes mutually contradictory. Feudalism allowed the state to
provide a degree of public safety despite the continued absence of
bureaucracy and written records. Even land ownership disputes were
decided based solely on oral testimony. Territoriality was reduced
to a network of personal allegiances.
Viking Age (793-1066)
The
Viking Age spans the period between AD 793 and 1066 in Scandinavia and Britain
, following the Germanic Iron Age (and the Vendel Age in Sweden). During this period,
the Vikings, Scandinavian warriors and
traders, raided and explored most parts of Europe, south-western
Asia, northern Africa and north-eastern North America
. Apart from exploring Europe by way of its
oceans and rivers with the aid of their advanced navigational
skills and extending their trading routes across vast parts of the
continent, they also engaged in warfare and looted and enslaved
numerous Christian communities of Medieval Europe for centuries,
contributing to the development of feudal systems in Europe.
Eastern Europe 600-1000
Kievan Rus'
Prior to the rise of the Kievan Rus, the eastern frontier of Europe
had been dominated by the
Khazars, a Turkic
people who had gained independence from the
Turkic Khaganate by the seventh century.
Khazaria was a multiethnic commercial state which derived its
well-being from control of river trade between Europe and the
Orient.
They also exacted tribute from the Alani, Magyars, various
Slavic tribes, the Goths and Greeks of Crimea
.
Through a network of Jewish itinerant merchants, or
Radhanites, they were in contact with the trade
emporiums of India and Spain.
Once they found themselves confronted by
Arab expansionism, the Khazars
pragmatically allied themselves with Constantinople and clashed
with the
Califate.
Despite initial
setbacks, they managed to recover Derbent
and eventually penetrated as far south as Caucasian Iberia, Caucasian Albania and Armenia
. In doing so, they effectively blocked the
northward expansion of
Islam into
Eastern Europe several decades before
Charles Martel achieved the same in
Western Europe.
In the
7th century, the northern littoral of
the Black
Sea
was hit with a fresh wave of nomadic attacks, led by the Bulgars, who established a powerful khanate of
Great Bulgaria under the leadership
of Kubrat. The Khazars managed to oust
the Bulgars from Southern Ukraine into the middle reaches of the
Volga (
Volga
Bulgaria) and into the lower reaches of the
Danube (Danube Bulgaria, or the
First Bulgarian Empire). The Danube
Bulgars were quickly Slavicized and, despite constant campaigning
against Constantinople, accepted the Greek form of Christianity.
Through the efforts of two local missionaries,
Saint Cyril and
Saint Methodius, the first Slavic alphabet
came into being and a vernacular dialect, now known as
Old Church Slavonic, was established as
a language of books and liturgy.
To the north from the Byzantine periphery, the first attested
Slavic polity was
Great Moravia, which emerged under the aegis
of the Frankish Empire in the early 9th century. Moravia was a
stage for confrontation between the Christian missionaries from
Constantinople and from Rome. Although the
West Slavs eventually acknowledged the Roman
ecclesiastical authority, the clergy of Constantinople succeeded in
converting into the Greek faith the largest state of contemporary
Europe,
Kievan Rus, towards 990. Led by a
Varangian dynasty, the Kievan Rus
controlled the
routes connecting
Northern Europe to Byzantium and the Orient. Great Moravia was
ultimately overrun by the
Magyars, who
invaded the
Pannonian Basin around
896.
Both before and after the Christianization, the Rus staged
predatory raids against Constantinople, some of which resulted in
the mutually beneficial trade treaties. The importance of
Russo-Byzantine relations is highlighted by the fact that
Vladimir I of Kiev was the only foreigner
who married a Byzantine princess of the Macedonian dynasty, a
singular honour which many rulers of Western Europe sought in vain.
The military campaigns of Vladimir's father,
Svyatoslav I, had crushed the statehood of two
strongest powers of Eastern Europe, namely the Bulgars and the
Khazars.
Bulgarian Empire
In 681 the
Bulgars founded a powerful state
which played a major role in Europe and specifically in
South Eastern Europe until its fall
under Turkish rule in 1396.
In 718 the Bulgars decisively defeated the
Arabs near Constantinople, and their ruler Khan
Tervel became known as "The Saviour of
Europe" . Bulgaria effectively stopped the barbarian tribes
(
Pechenegs,
Khazars) from migrating further to the west and in
806 destroyed the
Avar Khanate. Under
Simeon I (893-927), the state was the
largest in Europe, threatening the existence of
Byzantium.
After the adoption of
Christianity in
864, Bulgaria became the cultural and spiritual centre of the
Eastern Orthodox Slavic world. The
Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the
Bulgarian scholar
Clement of Ohrid
in 885.
Literature, art and architecture were
thriving with the establishment of the Preslav and Ohrid
Literary Schools
,and the Preslav
Ceramics School. In 927 the
Bulgarian Orthodox Church was the
first European national Church to gain independence with its own
Patriarch.
Transmission of learning
With the end of the Western Roman Empire and urban centres in
decline, literacy and learning decreased in the West. Education
became the preserve of monasteries and cathedrals. A "Renaissance"
of classical education would appear in Carolingian Empire in the
8th century. In the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), learning (in
the sense of formal education involving literature) was maintained
at a higher level than in the West. Further to the east, Islam
conquered many of the Eastern Patriarchates, and it outstripped
Christian lands in science, philosophy, and other intellectual
endeavors in a "golden age" of learning.
Classical education
The classical education system, which would persist for hundreds of
years, emphasized grammar, Latin, Greek, and rhetoric. Pupils read
and reread classic works and wrote essays imitating their style. By
the fourth century, this education system was Christianized. In
De Doctrina Christiana (started 396, completed 426),
Augustine explained how classical
education fits into the Christian worldview. Christianity was a
religion of the book, so Christians must be literate. Preaching
required learning the classical principles of
rhetoric.
Tertullian was
more sceptical of the value of classical learning, asking "What has
Athens to do with Jerusalem?" But even he did not object to
Christian enrollment in classical schools.
Decline in the West
De-urbanization reduced the scope of education and by the sixth
century teaching and learning moved to monastic and cathedral
schools, with the center of education being the study of the Bible.
Education of the laity survived modestly in Italy, Spain, and the
southern part of Gaul, where Roman influences were most
long-lasting. However, in the seventh century, learning began to
emerge in Ireland and the Celtic lands, where Latin was a foreign
language and Latin texts were eagerly studied and taught.
Science
In the ancient world, Greek was the primary language of science.
Advanced scientific research and teaching was mainly carried on in
the
Hellenistic side of the Roman
empire, in Greek. Late Roman attempts to translate Greek writings
into Latin had limited success. As the knowledge of Greek declined,
the Latin West found itself cut off from its Greek philosophical
and scientific roots. For a time, Latin-speakers who wanted to
learn about science had access to only a couple of books by
Boethius (c. 470-524) that summarized Greek
handbooks by
Nicomachus of
Gerasa.
Saint Isidore of
Seville produced an Latin encyclopedia in 630.
The leading scholars of the early centuries were
clergyman for whom the study of
nature was but a small part of their interest. The
study of nature was pursued more for practical reasons than as an
abstract inquiry: the need to care for the sick led to the study of
medicine and of ancient texts on drugs, the need for monks to
determine the proper time to pray led them to study the motion of
the stars, the need to compute the date of Easter led them to study
and teach rudimentary mathematics and the motions of the Sun and
Moon. Modern readers may find it disconcerting that sometimes the
same works discuss both the technical details of natural phenomena
and their symbolic significance.
Carolingian Renaissance
Around 800, there was renewed interest in
Classical Antiquity as part of the
Carolingian Renaissance.
Charles the Great carried out a reform
in
education. The English monk
Alcuin of York elaborated a project of scholarly
development aimed at resuscitating classical knowledge by
establishing programmes of study based upon the seven
liberal arts: the
trivium, or literary
education (
grammar,
rhetoric and
dialectic)
and the
quadrivium, or scientific education (
arithmetic,
geometry,
astronomy and
music).
From the year 787 on,
decrees began to
circulate recommending, in the whole empire, the restoration of old
schools and the founding of new ones. Institutionally, these new
schools were either under the responsibility of a
monastery, a
cathedral or
a
noble court. The real significance of
these measures would only be felt centuries later. The teaching of
dialectic (a discipline that corresponds to today's
logic) was responsible for the rebirth of the interest
in speculative inquiry; from this interest would follow the rise of
the
Scholastic tradition of
Christian philosophy. In the 12th and
13th century, many of those schools founded under the auspices of
Charles the Great, especially
cathedral schools, would
become
universities.
Byzantium and its golden age
Byzantium's great intellectual achievement was the
Corpus Juris Civilis ("Body of Civil
Law"), a massive compilation of
Roman law
made under
Justinian (r. 528-65). The work
includes a section called the
Digesta which abstracts the principles of
Roman law in such a way that they can be applied to any situation.
The level of literacy was considerably higher in the Byzantine
Empire than in the Latin West. Elementary education was much more
widely available, sometimes even in the countryside. Secondary
schools still taught the
Iliad and
other classics.
As for higher education, the Neoplatonic Academy in Athens
was closed
in 526 for paganism. There was also a school in Alexandria
which remained open until the Arab conquest (640). The
University of Constantinople,
originally founded by Emperor
Theodosius
II (425), may have dissolved around this time. It was refounded
by Emperor
Michael III in 849. Higher
education in this period focused on rhetoric, although
Aristotle's logic was covered in simple outline.
Under the Macedonian dynasty (867–1025), Byzantium enjoyed a golden
age and a revival of classical learning. There was little original
research, but many lexicons, anthologies, encyclopaedias, and
commentaries.
Christianity West and East
From the
early Christians, early
medieval Christians inherited a church united by major creeds, a
stable Biblical canon, and a well-developed philosophical
tradition.
During the early Middle Ages, the divide between Eastern and
Western Christianity widened, paving the way for the
East-West Schism in the 11th century. In
the West, the power of the
Bishop of
Rome expanded. In 607,
Boniface III
became the first Bishop of Rome to use the title
Pope. Pope
Gregory the
Great used his office as a temporal power, expanded Rome's
missionary efforts to the British Isles, and laid the foundations
for the expansion of monastic orders.
In the East, the conquests of Islam reduced the power of the
Greek-speaking
patriarchates.
Celtic Christianity comprised a
separate Christian tradition in the British Isles.
Christianization of the West
The
Roman Catholic Church, the
only centralized institution to survive the
fall of the Western Roman Empire
intact, was the sole unifying cultural influence in the West,
selectively preserving some Latin learning, maintaining the art of
writing, and preserving a centralized administration through its
network of
bishops ordained in succession.
The Early Middle Ages are characterized by the urban control of
bishops and the territorial control exercised by dukes and counts.
The rise of
urban communes marked
the beginning of the
High Middle
Ages.
The
Christianization of Germanic
tribes began in the fourth century with the Goths, and
continued throughout the Early Middle Ages, in the sixth to seventh
centuries led by the
Hiberno-Scottish mission, replaced
in the eighth to ninth centuries by the
Anglo-Saxon mission, with Anglo-Saxons
like
Alcuin playing an important role in the
Carolingian renaissance.
By AD
1000, even Iceland
became Christian, leaving only more remote parts of
Europe (Scandinavia, the Baltic and Finno-Ugric lands) to be Christianized during
the High Middle Ages.
Urbanization
- See also: Historical urban community
sizes.
Urban planner
Tertius Chandler has
made a survey of city sizes through history.
For the period
considered here, the largest cities in the world were:
Constantinople (340-570), Ctesiphon of the Sassanids (570-637),
Changan
in China (637-775), Baghdad (775-935), and Cordoba
(935-1013).[59540]
These are Chandler's estimates for the largest cities in the Europe
and Middle East (in units of one thousand inhabitants):
- AD 361 Constantinople (300), Ctesiphon (250), Rome (150),
Antioch (150), Alexandria (125).
- AD 500 Constantinople (400), Ctesiphon (400), Antioch (150),
Carthage (100), Rome (100).
- AD
622 Ctesiphon (500), Constantinople (350), Alexandria (94),
Aleppo
(72),
Rayy
(68).
- AD
800 Baghdad (700), Constantinople (250), Cordoba (160), Basra
(100),
Fostat
(100) —
cf. Rome (50), Paris (25).
- AD 900 Baghdad (900), Constantinople (300), Cordoba (200),
Alexandria (175), Fostat (150) — cf. Rome (40).
- AD
1000 Cordoba (450), Constantinople (300), Cairo
(135),
Baghdad (125), Nishapur
(125) — cf. Rome (35), Paris (20).
Chandler’s default assumption is 10,000 inhabitants/km². Muslim
cities are thought to have had higher population densities. A city
is defined as a continuously inhabited area.
Foundation of the Holy Roman Empire (10th century)
Listless and often ill, Carolingian Emperor
Charles the Fat provoked an uprising led by
his nephew
Arnulf of Carinthia
which resulted in the division of the empire into the kingdoms of
France, Germany, and (northern) Italy (887). Taking advantage of
the weakness of the German government, the Magyars had established
themselves in the
Alföld, or Hungarian
grasslands, and began raiding across Germany, Italy, and even
France. The German nobles elected
Henry
the Fowler, duke of Saxony, their king at a Reichstag, or
national assembly, in Fritzlar in 919. Henry's power was only
marginally greater than that of the other leaders of the stem
duchies, which were the feudal expression of the former German
tribes. Henry's son King
Otto
I (r. 936-973) was able to defeat a revolt of the dukes
supported by French King
Louis IV
(939). In 951, Otto marched into Italy and married the widowed
Queen
Adelaide, named himself king
of the Lombards, and received homage from
Berengar of Ivrea, king of Italy (r.
950-52). Otto named his relatives the new leaders of the stem
duchies, but this approach didn't completely solve the problem of
disloyalty. His son Liudolf, duke of Swabia, revolted and welcomed
the Magyars into Germany (953). At
Lechfeld, near Augsburg in Bavaria, Otto caught up
the Magyars while they were enjoying a razzia and achieved a signal
victory (955). After this, the Magyars ceased to be a nation that
lived on plunder and their leaders created a Christian kingdom
called Hungary (1000). Otto, his prestige greatly enhanced, marched
into Italy again and was crowned emperor (
imperator
augustus) by
Pope John XII in
Rome (962). Historians count this event as the founding of the
Holy Roman Empire, although the
term was not used until much later. The Ottonian state is also
considered the first
Reich, or German Empire. Otto used
the imperial title without attaching it to any territory. He and
later emperors thought of themselves as part of a continuous line
of emperors that begins with
Charlemagne. (Several of these "emperors" were
simply local Italian magnates who bullied the pope into crowning
them.) Otto deposed John XII for conspiring with Berengar against
him and named
Pope Leo VIII to replace
him (963). Berengar was captured and taken to Germany. John was
able to reverse the deposition after Otto left, but died in the
arms of his mistress soon afterwards.
Aside from founding the German Empire, Otto's achievements include
the creation of the "Ottonian church system," in which the clergy
(the only literate section of the population) assumed the duties of
an imperial civil service. He raised the papacy out of the muck of
Rome's local gangster politics, assured that the position was
competently filled, and gave it a dignity that allowed it to assume
leadership of an international church.
Europe in AD 1000
Speculation that the world would end in the year 1000 was confined
to a few uneasy French monks. Ordinary clerks used
regnal years, i.e. the 4th year of the reign of
Robert II (the Pious) of France. The use of the modern "anno
domini" system of dating was confined to the
Venerable Bede and other chroniclers of
universal history.
Europe remained a backwater compared to Islam, with its vast
network of caravan trade, or China, at this time the world's most
populous empire under the
Song Dynasty.
Constantinople had a population of about
300,000, but Rome had a mere 35,000 and Paris 20,000.[59541][59542]
In contrast, Islam had over a dozen major cities stretching from
Córdoba, Spain, at this time the world's largest city with
450,000 inhabitants, to central Asia. The
Vikings had a trade network in northern Europe,
including a
route connecting
the Baltic to Constantinople through Russia.
But it was modest
affair compared to the caravan routes that connected the great
Muslim cities of Cordoba, Alexandria, Cairo, Baghdad,
Basra, and Mecca
.
With nearly the entire nation freshly ravaged by the Vikings,
England was in a desperate state. The long-suffering English later
responded with a massacre of Danish settlers in 1002, leading to a
round of reprisals and finally to Danish rule (1013). But
Christianization made rapid progress and proved itself the
long-term solution to the problem of barbarian raiding.
Scandinavia had been recently Christianized
and the kingdoms of Norway
, Sweden
, and
Denmark
established. Kievan
Rus, recently converted to Orthodox Christianity, flourished as
the largest state in Europe.
Iceland and Hungary
were both declared Christian about AD 1000.
In Europe, a more formalised institution of marriage was
established among the nobility. North of Italy, where masonry
construction was never extinguished, stone construction was
replacing timber in important structures. Deforestation of the
densely wooded continent was under way. The tenth century marked a
return of urban life, with the Italian cities doubling in
population.
London
, abandoned
for many centuries, was by 1000 once again England's main economic
centre. By 1000, Bruges
and
Ghent
held regular trade fairs behind castle walls, a
tentative return of economic life to western Europe.
This time also marks the disintegration of the Muslim Caliphate, an
imposing and united rival only a century before. Muslim unity was
hobbled by the divisions between
Shiite and
Sunni conflicts as well as
Arab Persian ones. At this time, there were three
caliphs, an Umayyid caliph in Spain, an Abbasid caliph in Baghdad,
and a Shiite (Fatimid) caliph in Egypt. The population of Baghdad,
the Abbasid capital, had shrunk to 125,000 (compared to 900,000 in
AD 900). The Umayyids were still strong and assertive in 1000, but
declined rapidly after 1002 and disappeared entirely by 1031.
In the culture of Europe, several features surfaced soon after 1000
that mark the end of the Early Middle Ages: the rise of the
medieval communes, the reawakening
of city life, and the appearance of the
burgher
class, the founding of the first
universities, the rediscovery of
Roman law, and the beginnings of
vernacular literature.
In 1000, the papacy was firmly under the control of German Emperor
Otto III, or "emperor of the world" as he
styled himself.
But later church reforms enhanced its
independence and prestige: the Cluniac movement
, the building of the first great Transalpine stone
cathedrals and the collation of the mass of accumulated decretals into a formulated canon law.
Timeline
Notes
- Events used to mark the period's beginning include the sack of
Rome by the Goths (410) and the deposition of the
last western Roman Emperor (476). Particular events taken
to mark its end include the founding of the Holy Roman Empire
by Otto I
the Great (962), the Great Schism (1054) and the Norman conquest of
England (1066).
- "Dark Ages." Encyclopædia Britannica. Ultimate Reference Suite.
Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2009.
- Hopkins, Keith Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200
B.C.-A.D. 400)
- Heather, Peter, 1998, The Goths, pp. 51-93
- Gibbon, Edward, A History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire, 1776.
- Excerpta Valesiana
- McEvedy 1992, op. cit.
- Berglund, ibid.
- Roman Empire Population
- Storey, Glenn R., " The
population of ancient Rome", Antiquity, December 1,
1997.
- Originally published as Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in
History (1983), ISBN 0-226-35177-7
- How Smallpox Changed the World, By Heather
Whipps, LiveScience, June 23, 2008
- An Empire's Epidemic.
- City populations from Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An
Historical Census (1987, Edwin Mellon Press) by Tertius
Chandler
- Berglund, ibid.
- Cini Castagnoli, G.C., Bonino, G., Taricco, C. and Bernasconi,
S.M. 2002. radiation variability in the last 1400 years
recorded in the carbon isotope ratio of a Mediterranean sea
core", Advances in Space Research 29: 1989-1994.
- "English and Welsh are races apart", BBC.
- The Maygars of Hungary
- " No. 1318: Three-Field Rotation"
- This surplus would allow the replacement of the ox by the horse
after the introduction of the padded horse collar in the 12th century.
- Islam eventually penetrated into Eastern Europe in the 920s
when Volga
Bulgaria exploited the decline of Khazar power in the region to
adopt Islam from the Baghdad missionaries. The state religion of
Khazaria, Judaism,
disappeared as a political force with the fall of Khazaria, while
Islam of Volga Bulgaria has survived in the region up to the
present.
- Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West:
From the Sixth through the Eighth Century, (Columbia: Univ. of
South Carolina Pr., 1976), pp. 100-129).
- Pierre Riché, Education and Culture in the Barbarian West:
From the Sixth through the Eighth Century, (Columbia: Univ. of
South Carolina Pr., 1976), pp. 307-323).
- William
Stahl, Roman Science, (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin
Pr.) 1962, see esp. pp. 120-133.
- Linda E. Voigts, "Anglo-Saxon Plant Remedies and the
Anglo-Saxons," Isis, 70(1979):250-268; reprinted in M. H.
Shank, ed., The Scientific Enterprise in Antiquity and the
Middle Ages, (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Pr., 2000).
- Stephen C. McCluskey, "Gregory of Tours, Monastic Timekeeping,
and Early Christian Attitudes to Astronomy," Isis,
81(1990):9-22; reprinted in M. H. Shank, ed., The Scientific
Enterprise in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, (Chicago: Univ.
of Chicago Pr., 2000).
- Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early
Medieval Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr., 1998), pp.
149-57.
- Faith Wallis, "'Number Mystique' in Early Medieval Computus
Texts," pp. 179-99 in T. Koetsier and L. Bergmans, eds.
Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study,
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2005).
- Chandler, Tertius, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth: An
Historical Census (1987, Edwin Mellon Press)
- Cantor, 1993 Europe in 1050 p 235.
- The proscribed degree was the seventh degree of consanguinity,
which made virtually all marriages annullable by application to the
Pope.
- Chandler, Tertius, ibid.
Further reading
- Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. I 1966.
Michael M. Postan, et al., editors.
- Norman F. Cantor, The Medieval World 300 to
1300
- Georges Duby, 1974. The Early
Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the
Seventh to the Twelfth Centuries (New York: Cornell University
Press) Howard B. Clark, translator.
- Georges Duby, editor, 1988. A History of Private Life II:
Revelations of the Medieval World (Harvard University
Press)
- Heinrich Fichtenau, (1957)
1978. The Carolingian Empire (University of Toronto) Peter
Munz, translator.
- Richard Hodges, 1982. Dark
Age Economics: The Origins of Towns and Trade AD 600-1000 (New
York: St Martin's Press)
- David Knowles, (1962) 1988.
The Evolution of Medieval Thought
- Richard Krautheimer, 1980.
Rome: Profile of a City 312-1308 (Princeton University
Press)
- Robin Lane Fox, 1986. Pagans
and Christians (New York: Knopf)
- John Marenbon (1983) 1988.Early Medieval Philosophy
(480-1150): An Introduction ((London: Routledge)
- Rosamond McKittrick, 1983 The Frankish Church Under the
Carolingians (London: Longmans, Green)
- Karl Frederick Morrison, 1969. Tradition and Authority in
the Western Church, 300-1140 (Princeton University Press)
- Pierre Riché, (1978) 1988. Daily Life in the Age of
Charlemagne
- Richard Southern, 1953. The
Making of the Middle Ages (Yale University Press)
- Early Medieval History page, Clio History
Journal, Dickson College, Australian Capital Territory.
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