Europe

B

3

The Byzantine Empire

A Roman emperor still reigned in the East, however, and his successors would continue to rule for another thousand years. Constantinople was now the ruling city of the Roman provinces of the eastern Mediterranean, even though the empire was so transformed in its character that modern historians have called it Byzantine rather than Roman.

The essential elements of Byzantinism were all present in the reign of the great 6th-century emperor Justinian. The tendency throughout Roman history of the empire to become a military autocracy was decisively broken during his reign. The government became entirely professional and civilian, centered on the palace and, most important, on the emperor himself. Roman law was codified into a systematic digest. Finance and tax collection were centralized. Justinian’s religious policy also contributed to centralization. In an age of intense religious conflict and questioning of doctrine, the Byzantine Roman Empire became the Orthodox empire, and the religion of the emperor became the official state religion.

In the early years of his reign, Justinian embarked on the attempt to reconquer the Arian West. The Vandal kingdom of Africa fell quickly, as did Visigothic Spain and much of Italy. Under continual pressure from Sassanid Persia, however, the empire lost its military hold on Spain, which reemerged as a Visigothic kingdom, now entirely Byzantine in culture and political organization. In Italy, the imperial forces withdrew to the Adriatic stronghold of Ravenna and to Sicily, leaving the rest of the peninsula to the invading Lombards. The Balkans were entirely overrun by Avars and Slavic Peoples.

In effect, Justinian’s western conquests gave medieval Europe its characteristic cultural pattern. The Mediterranean coast and Spain became severed from the economically and culturally underdeveloped north. They were now in effect part of the Middle East, a development consummated in the 7th century, when North Africa, Spain, and parts of southern France fell to Muslim armies.

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B

4

The Rise of the Franks

In the north, European history from the 5th through the 9th century was dominated by a group of western German tribes called collectively the Franks. Unlike the eastern Germans, the Franks were converted from their ancient paganism directly to Catholic Christianity, without an intervening period of Arianism. The conversion began decisively for the Salian Franks after their warrior chief, Clovis, was baptized as a Christian, along with many of his followers, in 496. Clovis, a descendant of Merovech or Merowig (reigned 448-458) and thus part of the sacrosanct ruling family of the Salian Franks, was the first king of the Merovingian dynasty. Through his many military victories against other peoples and the success of a long series of complex family vendettas characteristic of Frankish culture, he became supreme ruler of all the Franks.

At Clovis’s death, under the customary law of the Salian Franks, the lands under his control were divided among his four sons. They would, in turn, leave their lands to whatever male heirs they had, so that the whole era of Merovingian rule was characterized by alternate periods of fragmentation and consolidation, depending on the numbers and abilities of the sons.

The era came to an end in the 8th century. The last Merovingian kings have won from history the name of rois fainéants (“slothful kings”). Power was more and more to be found in the office of palace mayor and not in the hands of the king himself, until in 751, King Childeric III and his only son were imprisoned. Their long hair (symbolic among their people of royalty) was shorn, and the Arnulfing palace mayor, Pepin, son of the great warrior Charles Martel, proclaimed himself king of the Franks, the first of the Carolingians to assume the royal title.

The Carolingian coup d’état would never have occurred without the active intervention of the pope. In a series of letters written in the 740s between Pepin and the pope, in which Pepin inquired about the propriety of his own state, where all power was not in the hands of the monarch, the pope responded by citing the biblical precedent of David, anointed by the prophet Samuel while King Saul was still alive. The pope, moreover, followed the precedent and anointed Pepin, as he would continue to anoint his descendants, in a ritual of royal consecration.

B

5

Charlemagne

The greatest of the Carolingian kings was Charlemagne, even in his own time a figure of myth and legend. His reign marked the culmination of Frankish development. Under his rule the Franks, by a series of military conquests, became masters of the West and guarantors of papal power in Italy. He defeated the Lombards in Italy, the Frisians in the north, the Saxons in the east, annexed the duchy of Bavaria, and pushed the Moors out of southern France. He proceeded to consolidate his power over this vast territory by tying members of the landholding class to one another and to himself by special oaths of loyalty, which at times were rewarded by grants of land from newly conquered territory. This policy—the first major example of the growing ties of personal dependence connected with political power called feudalism—not only gave Charlemagne a ready supply of warriors but also helped make him, as it were, omnipresent in his own territory. The vassals of the king, his closest dependents, and their vassals in turn became surrogates of the king himself.

Inseparable from military and political consolidation was the growth of Charlemagne’s sense of Christian mission. He founded monastic houses in border territories. These served as pioneer establishments, bringing forests and marshlands under cultivation and Christian control. They also provided centers for missionary and educational activity, for the expansion of Christianity required a trained clergy, a standardized rite, and the production of useful books. The key was education, and the practical work of founding and staffing monastic and cathedral schools demanded outside help. Charlemagne found it in Rome and in the Lombard lands of Italy, where the ancient educational traditions had never entirely died. The major contribution to the Carolingian educational reform was Anglo-Irish, however, for the great monastic houses of England and Ireland were rich in books and skill, and Charlemagne’s foremost adviser was English scholar Alcuin.

The kingdom of the Franks, as a result, integrated Europe in territory and culture as it had not been since the Roman Empire. On Christmas day in the year 800, Charlemagne went to mass in Saint Peter’s Cathedral in Rome. As he rose from prayer—so the story goes—the pope placed a crown on his head, adored him, and he was acclaimed as imperator et augustus by the people. Charlemagne was thus crowned emperor not merely of the Franks but of Rome. The power of the new state (which came to be called the Holy Roman Empire), the organization of the church, the ancient traditions of Rome—all had become indistinguishable.

B

6

New Invasions

The last years of Charlemagne’s reign were marked by political tensions that continued into the reigns of his descendants. Europe during the later 9th and 10th centuries was a scene of renewed political disintegration and one more series of cataclysmic invasions, this time from the Scandinavian Vikings out of the north and the Asian Magyars west across the Danube plains. Borderlands were withdrawn from cultivation, trade was disrupted, and travel even over short distances became dangerous.

Throughout this period several important tendencies are discernible. Europe experienced another great wave of political fragmentation, and if the forces of political centralization were weak, the same cannot be said for the power of local landholding families. This was also the time of ascendancy of the Benedictine monastic houses, themselves great landholders embedded in the network of feudal alliances. Finally, the papacy became a secular power in its own right, exercising direct political control of much of central and northern Italy. It gradually elaborated the machinery of central authority over the regional churches and monastic houses, and, by expanded diplomacy and, above all, by the administration of justice, it also accumulated substantial secular and political power throughout Europe.

C

High and Late Middle Ages

By the year 1050, Europe was entering a period of great and rapid transformation. The conditions of material life that produced the transformation are not yet well understood, although the following may be noted with certainty: The long period of Germanic and Asian migrations had come to a definite end, and Europe enjoyed a continuity of settled population; a population expansion of striking proportions had begun and was to continue. Town life, which had never entirely ceased during the previous centuries, experienced remarkable growth and development, thereby breaking the tendency of the medieval farm toward economic self-sufficiency. Trade and commerce, particularly in the Mediterranean lands of Italy and southern France and in the Low Countries, increased in quantity, regularity, and extent.

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