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.

C.

Culture and Learning

Cultural activity during the early Middle Ages consisted primarily in appropriating and systematizing the knowledge of the past. The works of classical authors were copied and annotated. Encyclopedic works, such as Etymologies (623) by St Isidore of Seville, which attempted to present the collected knowledge of humankind, were compiled. At the heart of all learned activity stood the Bible, and all secular learning became regarded as mere preparation for understanding the holy text.

The early Middle Ages drew to a close in the 10th century with new migrations and invasions—the coming of the Vikings from the north and the Magyars from the Asian steppes—and the weakening of all forces of European unity and expansion. The resulting violence and dislocation caused land to be withdrawn from cultivation and populations to decline, and the monasteries again became outposts of civilization. Nevertheless the cultural work of assimilating the legacy of antiquity had been done, and it was not to be lost.