Middle Ages

I

Introduction

Middle Ages, term used to refer to the period in the history of Europe dating from the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West, around the 5th century, to the dawn of the Renaissance in the 15th century. However, the above dates should not be taken as fixed: at neither time was there any sharp break in the cultural development of the continent. The term seems to have been first used by Flavio Biondo of Forlí, a historian and apostolic secretary in Rome, in his Historiarum ab Inclinatione Romanorum Imperii Decades (Decades of History from the Deterioration of the Roman Empire), which was first published in 1483, although written some 30 years earlier. The term traditionally implied a suspension of time and, especially, a suspension of progress—a period of cultural stagnation, between the glory of classical antiquity and the rebirth of that glory in the beginnings of the modern world. Modern scholarship generally divides the Middle Ages into three stages and is much more concerned with cultural vitality and with diversity even within the subdivisions.

II

Early Middle Ages

No one definitive event marks the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Neither the sack of Rome by the Goths under Alaric I in 410 nor the deposition in 476 of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West, impressed their contemporaries as epoch-making catastrophes. Rather, by the end of the 5th century the culmination of several long-term trends, including a severe economic dislocation and the invasions and settlement of Germanic peoples within the borders of the Western Empire, had changed the face of Europe. For the next 300 years western Europe remained essentially a collection of primitive cultures, albeit uniquely superimposed on the complex, elaborate culture of the Roman Empire, which was never entirely lost or forgotten.

A

Fragmentation of Authority

Although during this period the loose confederation of tribes began to coalesce into kingdoms, virtually no machinery of government existed, and political and economic development was local in nature. Regular commerce had ceased almost entirely, although—as modern scholars maintain—the money economy never entirely vanished. In the culmination of a process begun during the Roman Empire, peasants became bound to the land and dependent on landlords for protection and the rudimentary administration of justice (see Seignorialism). Among the warrior aristocracy the most important social bonds were ties of kinship, but feudal connections (see Feudalism) were also emerging. These ties, which traded land for military and other services, may have been rooted in the old Roman patron-client relationship or in the Germanic comitatus, the group of fighting companions. All such connections impeded any tendency towards political consolidation.

B

The Church

The only universal European institution was the Christian Church, and even there a fragmentation of authority was the rule; all power within the Church hierarchy was in the hands of local bishops. The bishop of Rome, the pope, had a certain fatherly pre-eminence based on his holding of the so-called chair of St Peter, to whom it was supposed Christ had granted governing power. However, neither the elaborate machinery of ecclesiastical government nor the idea of a monarchical Church headed by the pope was to be developed for another 500 years. The Church saw itself as the spiritual community of Christian believers, in exile from God's kingdom, waiting in a hostile world for the day of deliverance. The most important members of this community were found outside the hierarchy of Church government, in the monasteries that dotted Europe.

Opposed to the forces of fragmentation and local development were the tendencies within the Church towards standardizing the rite, the calendar, and the monastic rule. Besides such administrative measures, the cultural memory of the control of the Roman Empire persisted. (The Byzantine Empire, the remnant of the old Eastern Empire, pursued its own separate development.) By the 9th century, with the rise to power of the Carolingians, the beginnings of a new European unity based on the Roman legacy may be found, for the political power of the emperor Charlemagne depended on educational reforms that used materials, methods, and aims from the Roman past.