Early Middle Ages

• 1. Introduction

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  The Early Middle Ages left Rome, once home to roughly 450,000 people, as a near-empty ruin where only around 20,000 souls still lived. A city that had dominated the Western world for centuries was reduced to scattered clusters of inhabitants picking their way among crumbling monuments and encroaching vegetation. What happened to make an empire collapse so completely, and what grew in its place? The period stretching from the late 5th to the 10th century carries two competing names: the Early Middle Ages, and the once-popular label the Dark Ages. Behind that naming dispute sits a genuine question about whether these centuries were a catastrophe, a transformation, or something harder to categorize. The answers turn out to involve migrating peoples, a new religion spreading out of Arabia, a plague that may have killed 100 million people worldwide, and the slow construction of a feudal world that would shape Europe for centuries.

• 2. Rome's Long Unraveling

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  Archaeologists have counted only 40 percent as many Mediterranean shipwrecks from the 3rd century as from the 1st, a quiet but striking measure of how quickly seaborne commerce contracted. Population estimates suggest the Roman Empire fell from around 65 million people between 150 and 400 AD to 50 million, a drop of more than 20 percent. Some historians have linked part of that loss to the Dark Ages Cold Period, a stretch from roughly 300 to 700 AD when falling global temperatures reduced what farms could produce.

  Into this weakened world came the Goths. They had established at least two kingdoms in what is now Romania and on the steppes north of the Black Sea: the Therving and the Greuthung. The arrival of the Huns in 372-375 destroyed those kingdoms, and the Goths fled into Roman territory in 376, nominally agreeing to enter the empire as unarmed settlers. Many bribed Danube border guards to let them keep their weapons.

  At the Battle of Adrianople in 378, that decision proved fatal for Rome's Eastern emperor. Valens chose to attack the Therving infantry under Fritigern without waiting for his Western counterpart Gratian to arrive with reinforcements. While the Romans were fully committed, Greuthung cavalry appeared on the field. Only one-third of the Roman army escaped. The Roman military writer Ammianus Marcellinus compared it to the disaster at Cannae in 216 BC, calling it the most shattering defeat Romans had suffered since that catastrophe.

  Valens died in the battle, the core army of the Eastern Roman Empire was destroyed, and the Goths were freed to devastate the Balkans. The western half of the empire never recovered its footing. On the 31st of December 406, Vandals, Suebi, and Alans crossed the frozen Rhine near Mainz after Stilicho, the half-Vandal commander of the western armies, had stripped the frontier to defend Italy. Western Emperor Honorius responded to the crisis by having Stilicho beheaded. The historian Edward Gibbon wrote that Stilicho submitted "with a firmness not unworthy of the last of the Roman generals." Four years later, in 410, Alaric I led the Visigoths into Rome itself, and for three days the city burned.

• 3. Peoples on the Move

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  King Theoderic of the Ostrogoths reportedly summed up the cultural confusion of the Migration Period with a single observation: "A poor Roman plays the Goth, a rich Goth the Roman." The centuries of movement that historians call the Volkerwanderung, or wandering of the peoples, scrambled identities, languages, and beliefs across a continent.

  The Germanic peoples migrating through former Roman lands mostly knew little of cities, money, or writing. Many were converting to Arianism, a form of Christianity that held God the Son to have been created by, and therefore inferior to, God the Father. This put them at odds with Chalcedonian Christianity, which taught that the two were co-eternal. The theological split would matter politically for generations.

  Language sorted itself differently depending on where Roman roots had gone deepest. In France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, people kept speaking the dialects of Vulgar Latin that became the Romance languages. But in what is now England, the smaller Roman-era population's language vanished almost entirely in territories the Anglo-Saxons settled, leaving barely a trace. Major industries that had depended on trade collapsed quickly: large-scale pottery manufacture disappeared nearly overnight in places like Britain. Tintagel in Cornwall managed to obtain Mediterranean luxury goods into the 6th century, then lost its trading links entirely.

  The Plague of Justinian, which began in 541 and recurred periodically for 150 years, accelerated the human catastrophe. Some historians estimate it may have killed as many as 100 million people worldwide. Josiah C. Russell, writing in 1958, suggested Europe alone lost between 50 and 60 percent of its population between 541 and 700. The disease smallpox, which would not be eradicated until the late 20th century, seems to have entered Western Europe definitively around 581, when Bishop Gregory of Tours wrote an eyewitness account describing its characteristic symptoms.

  For the formerly Roman west, population had already fallen another 20 percent between 400 and 600, on top of the earlier decline. By the 8th century, the volume of trade reached its lowest point. Shipwrecks dated to that century represent less than 2 percent of the number from the 1st century.

• 4. Byzantium's Parallel World

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  Constantinople in the early 8th century remained the largest and wealthiest city west of China, with a population fluctuating between 300,000 and 400,000. The only other large Christian cities at the time were Rome, with around 50,000 people, and Thessalonica, with around 30,000.

  The Eastern Roman Empire, which historians would come to call Byzantine after the original name of Constantinople, Byzantium, survived the collapse of the west by combining superior diplomacy with sophisticated warfare. Its inhabitants continued calling themselves Romans, a practice that lasted until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453.

  Justinian I, who reigned from 527 to 565, produced the period's most enduring legal achievement: the Corpus Juris Civilis, a massive compilation of Roman law whose principles could be applied to new situations. His codification remained in force across many parts of Europe until the 19th century. He also commissioned the Hagia Sophia, described as the largest and most architecturally advanced building of the Early Middle Ages. But his reign also brought catastrophe. Within less than a year of the Plague of Justinian's outbreak, an estimated 200,000 residents of Constantinople had died, roughly two of every five people in the city.

  Later emperors faced sieges from multiple directions. In 626, Constantinople withstood a combined assault by Avars and Persians. Arab forces laid siege twice, in 674-677 and again in 717. The empire absorbed these blows, but the Iconoclastic Controversy of the 8th and early 9th centuries created internal turmoil that allowed Bulgar and Slavic tribes to invade Illyria, Thrace, and even Greece.

  The ascension of the Macedonian dynasty in 867 ended that turmoil and opened what contemporaries and later historians recognized as a golden age. Under rulers like Leo the Wise and Constantine VII, Constantinople saw a cultural flowering known as the Macedonian Renaissance. The Encyclopaedia Britannica noted in 2006 that Byzantine agricultural technology was more advanced than contemporary western Europe, with iron tools available in villages, water mills across the landscape, and field-sown beans providing protein-rich diets.

• 5. Islam's Rapid Expansion

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  On the 30th of April 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Gibraltar with a Moorish force, beginning a campaign that would bring most of the Iberian Peninsula under Muslim rule within eight years. The following year his forces were joined by those of his superior, Musa ibn Nusair. Only small areas in the northwest, including Asturias, and the largely Basque regions of the Pyrenees remained outside Muslim control.

  The speed of Islamic expansion across the 7th and 8th centuries was extraordinary. Muslim forces under the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, had entered Roman Syria and Mesopotamia. Under the second Caliph, Umar, the conquests encompassed Syria, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Egypt, parts of Asia Minor, and North Africa, while the Sasanid Persian Empire was entirely toppled. The Rashidun Caliphate that accomplished this eventually extended over the whole Sasanid Persian Empire and more than two-thirds of the Eastern Roman Empire.

  The westward push into Europe ended at the Battle of Poitiers in 732, where the Frankish leader Charles Martel defeated the advancing forces. The Umayyad dynasty that had driven the expansion was overthrown in 750 by the Abbasids, and most of the Umayyad clan were massacred. A surviving prince, Abd-ar-rahman I, escaped to Spain and founded a new Umayyad dynasty in the Emirate of Cordoba in 756. By 929, the Umayyads in Hispania had proclaimed themselves caliphs.

  In the east, the Khazar people had already been blocking Islam's northward advance before Charles Martel's more celebrated victory. The Khazars, a nomadic Turkic people, built a multiethnic commercial state that controlled much of the waterway trade between Europe and Central Asia. Through a network of Jewish itinerant merchants called Radhanites, they maintained contact with trade centers as far as India and Spain. When Arab expansionism reached them, the Khazars allied with Constantinople and eventually penetrated as far south as Caucasian Iberia, Caucasian Albania, and Armenia. By 1000, Cordoba, in Islamic Spain, had become the world's largest city with 450,000 inhabitants, while Rome held only 35,000 and Paris only 20,000.

• 6. The Carolingian Reconstruction

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  On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne "Roman Emperor" in Rome, reviving a title that had been vacant in the west for more than three centuries. The ceremony was the culmination of a dynasty that had begun not with a king but with a palace official.

  Charles Martel had served as Mayor of the Palace, effectively the most powerful man in the Frankish kingdom without holding the kingship. His son Pepin the Short wanted the throne but faced a cultural obstacle: Frankish tradition held hereditary kingship so sacred that few would support a simple overthrow. Pepin found a way around this by approaching Pope Zachary, who needed support after a falling out with the Byzantine emperor over the Iconoclastic Controversy. The two men made a deal: Pepin would protect the pope and donate land that became the Papal States; the pope would consecrate Pepin as the new Frankish king. Because Pepin's claim now rested on an authority higher than Frankish custom, no resistance materialized. The Merovingian line ended, and the Carolingian line began.

  Charlemagne's reign brought not only military consolidation but a cultural program. The English monk Alcuin of York designed a scholarly revival based on the seven liberal arts, dividing knowledge into the trivium, covering grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, and the quadrivium, covering arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. From 787 onward, decrees circulated across the empire recommending the restoration of old schools and the founding of new ones. The teaching of dialectic sparked an interest in speculative reasoning that would eventually produce the Scholastic tradition of Christian philosophy, and many of the schools founded under Charlemagne's patronage would become universities in the 12th and 13th centuries.

  Charlemagne died leaving an empire that covered much of modern France, western Germany, and northern Italy. Frankish inheritance custom then required dividing the empire equally among his male heirs, which produced instability that continued until the last king of a united empire, Charles the Fat, died in 887. The split that followed created the outlines of what would become France and Germany.

• 7. Agriculture and Feudal Order

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  Around 800, the open field or strip system reorganized how land was farmed across much of Western Europe. A manor held several fields, each divided into strips measuring one acre, itself defined as one furlong of 220 yards by one chain of 22 yards, a shape determined by how far an ox could plough before resting and by the difficulty of turning a heavy plough.

  The three-field rotation system, developed in the 9th century, transformed what those strips could produce. One field grew wheat or rye, a second held a nitrogen-fixing crop, and a third lay fallow. Compared to the Roman two-field system, this arrangement put significantly more land into cultivation and allowed two harvests per year, reducing the risk that a single crop failure would cause famine. A surplus of oats followed, eventually supporting horses as draft animals after the padded horse collar arrived in the 12th century. The heavy wheeled plough, introduced in the late 10th century, required more animal power and pushed farmers toward teams of oxen, but it could handle the dense northern European soils that lighter Roman ploughs had often failed to turn.

  The feudal system that developed alongside these agricultural innovations rested on reciprocal obligation. Each person was bound to serve a superior in exchange for protection. Allegiances shifted and sometimes contradicted each other, which made territorial sovereignty genuinely confused. But feudalism allowed the state to provide a degree of public safety in the continued absence of bureaucracy and written records. Manors became largely self-sufficient. Roman roads decayed, and long-distance trade depended increasingly on water transport, though it never ceased entirely.

  Monasteries occupied a unique position in this world. Targeted by Viking raiders precisely because they stored both books and precious objects, monasteries had by the 6th century made libraries an essential part of their life. The Benedictines assigned books to a librarian who supervised their use. Some reading rooms chained valuable volumes to shelves; others maintained lending sections. The monastery of Bobbio in Italy, founded by the Irish abbot Columbanus in 614, by the 9th century held a catalogue of 666 manuscripts covering religious works, classical texts, histories, and mathematical treatises.

• 8. The World at 1000

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  By the year 1000, the Italian cities had doubled in population over the previous century. London, which had been largely abandoned for many centuries, functioned again as England's main economic centre. Bruges and Ghent held regular trade fairs behind castle walls, a cautious but real return of commercial life to western Europe.

  Christianization had reshaped the political geography of the north. The Visigoths, Anglo-Saxons, Lombards, Frisians, Thuringians, and Bavarians had all converted to Catholicism between 550 and 750. By 1000, even Iceland had become Christian. Denmark had converted in the 10th century, Norway in the 11th, and Sweden, the country with the least raiding activity, in the 12th. On Christmas Day of 1000, Stephen I was crowned the first king of Hungary, stabilizing a country that had previously been governed by grand princes and that the emperor regarded as both a promising political partner and a federati, or ally.

  In Eastern Europe, the Kievan Rus' had converted to Orthodox Christianity in a conversion conventionally dated to 988 under Vladimir I, known as Vladimir the Great. Vladimir became the only foreigner to marry a princess of the Macedonian dynasty, an honour many rulers had sought without success. The event took place in 989, cementing relations between the Rus' state and Constantinople. Kievan Rus' was by 1000 the largest state in Europe.

  The same year 1000 also marked the close of what the source identifies as a transition. The medieval communes were rising, city life was returning, a burgher class was appearing, the first universities were being founded, Roman law was being rediscovered, and vernacular literature was beginning. Alcuin of York, who had designed the educational program of the Carolingian Renaissance and died in 804, had helped lay the intellectual groundwork for these shifts, and the cathedral schools he had helped establish were on their way to becoming the universities that would define the High Middle Ages.