THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES

Putting a Label on This Time Period
The "Middle Ages" begins with the final stage of the decline of Roman civilization sometime during the 400s AD. It lasts about 900 to 1000 years--to the beginning of the Renaissance in about 1400 AD.
All of this time gets lumped together because of the intellectual legacy of the late 1600s and early 1700s--the age of the "Enlightenment." Scholars at that time could gladly celebrate the rapid rise of the West's material culture in the two to three centuries since the onset of the Renaissance ("rebirth") in Italy in the 1400s. The grandeur of ancient Rome was clearly being recaptured: the revival of urban culture, the growth of the great learning centers, the revival of ancient science. Even the restoration of pagan philosophy was celebrated.

When these same scholars looked back at the period prior to the 1400s--they saw only darkness: poverty and ignorance. They saw the Church, considered in continental Europe as the main barrier to modern wisdom, in its ascendancy over the thoughts of the people--teaching them to fear life and to look instead to the promises of a better life after death.

In looking at that thousand years or so since the decline of the grandeur that was once Rome's--and the rebirth of a similar material culture in the 1400s, they simply described everything in between as being the "middle age" (Latin: mediaevum, from which we get the word "medieval"). That was when they were being kind. When they spoke of how they really thought about that time of the ascendancy of the Church, they referred to it as the "Dark Ages."

Was It Indeed a Dark Age?
Certainly when the Roman Empire fell apart in Western Europe during the 400s AD, things got incredibly bleak. The Pax Romana or Roman peace simply ceased to function in the West. There were no more Roman magistrates backed up by the Roman legions to stand behind the Roman social order. Whatever social order existed did so at the mercy of local tribal lords in accordance with German tribal customs. Beyond or among these local principalities, there was no any authority to enforce order. Consequently cross-European or even regional commerce and shipping came to a halt as the highways and the sea routes became infested with brigands and pirates. In turn, cities, whose life-blood existed around either commerce or public order, lost their function--and their population. But even the countryside became depopulated.
The German "barbarians" did not produce this cultural vacuum. They merely moved into it once they understood that it was there, that there was no longer any real Roman counter-pressure to hold them back as they scrambled for grazing and farming lands for their own growing populations. When they did move into the Roman domains, they attempted to capture the glory of the Rome that they once envied. But it was no longer there to be grasped. In consequence their own traditional ways took over where they settled.

The Place of the Church in the Breakdown of the Old Roman Order
About the only thing that survived of Rome during this breakdown was the Christian church. The church gave what little bit of cultural unity to the West that it could. Even that was relatively little, at least during the first half of the Middle Ages.
Yes there was a pope in Rome--and little else by way of authority in this once proud center of the great Roman Empire (the Italian political center had been moved to Ravenna in the north). Beyond Rome the pope had little real influence or authority. The power of the church rested--as with all things in those days--with its powers at the local level.

Monks and priests managed to preserve what portion of the church there was that was still intact. Actually, they acquitted themselves fairly honorably, especially once the monastic movement had been reshaped by Benedict (early 500s), whose rule was widely honored throughout the West. Indeed, missionaries sent out by the Irish monasteries (Ireland until the Vikings came along in the late 700s had escaped the worst of the northern migratory disruptions) helped to bring to the German tribesmen to the East of them aspects of the Roman-Latin Christian legacy that otherwise would have been lost entirely to Western Europe.

It was a Dark Age not because of the church and its teachings--as so many during the Enlightenment would imply. It was a Dark Age because Rome could no longer generate the vigor needed to maintain itself. The social order had become top-heavy with military bureaucrats who assumed god-like privileges--at a time when the middle classes on which Rome was originally built simply dwindled away from tax debt, loss of family lands, and simply being no longer consulted in the shaping of the political vision of the Empire.

The church did not cause these developments, but like the Germans, moved into the moral vacuum that these developments created. And it survived when little else of the Roman legacy did, because it was able to touch the hearts of the people the way the imperium no longer could.

To be sure, there were parts of the church that took on the pretensions of the imperial order, notably in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire. Here for a while the imperial order hung on, avoiding most of the onslaught of the Germanic migrations of the 400s (which took place largely in the West)--even undergoing a brief revival under the very capable Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian (mid-500s).

Islam
But the church's moving up alongside imperial authority was to cause its collapse in the East--in contrast to its survival in the West. At a time in the Roman East when the imperial order was losing touch with the masses--again, because of taxes, loss of family lands, etc.--this was a poor time for the church to decide to go imperial. And the church paid dearly for this mistake in the 600s when Arabs came into the East the same way the Germans had come into the West two centuries earlier, finding a moral vacuum there among the people, who were quite willing to let these outsiders replace the imperial order that they no longer had affections for. Thus in rejecting the imperial order the Easterners rejected also the Christian order--and Islam easily moved in to fill the moral gap. Once the Arab-Muslim revolution got underway, it quickly rolled back the Roman-Christian Imperial or Byzantine Order to make way for Islam.
Islam rolled across Syria and Palestine, across Egypt, across the long sweep of the African coast all the way to the Atlantic. And then in the early 700s it crossed into Spain, and moved under momentum of its enormous power all the way up into central France. There Islam was turned back by a German-Christian rally that spared the rest of Western Europe from Arab rule. The Muslims had finally come up against a Christian people who were deeply committed to their Christian moral-religious legacy. Consequently, Islam had to content itself with holding only Spain in the West--and even that got chipped away at slowly over the years by a Christian "reconquest" or crusade to restore Western Europe to Christ.

Charlemagne
The Frankish king Charlemagne tried to restore something of the old Roman order in the West when he succeeded in conquering neighboring German tribes and nations and bringing them under his personal sway. The pope crowned him Emperor in 800 in recognition of that hope. But little came of the effort, for his lands were soon divided among his grandsons and disunity reasserted itself in Western Europe. But he had given hope that the old Roman order might yet still be revived.
More Invaders
It's a shame he failed because this merely signaled a new round of invasions by outlying "barbarians" into a relatively defenseless West. From the Scandinavian north came raiders who through the 800s plundered, burned and murdered at will--perhaps a pastime to escape the dreariness of their nordic winters! But eventually they came as settlers (900s) and with this a desire for order rather than mayhem. The Frankish kings decided to use this new mentality to settle a number of these Northmen along the very coast that they liked to raid the rest of France from, where it took on their name, Normandy. From there they redirected their conquering instincts--to the Mediterranean (Sicily and Southern Italy) and in 1066 to England on the coast opposite them.
Meanwhile the Hungarians came in from the East to raid and throw into major distress Central Europe--sort of a vanguard of other conquerors coming in from Central Asia (such as their kinsmen the Turks who would come shortly thereafter).

All of this delayed any hopes of revival to European culture. It acted very much to keep Europe in the "Dark Ages."

The Disintegration of the Roman Empire
The cooptation of Christianity as the moral-ethical underpinning of the Roman Empire did not hold off the disintegration of the Empire. In fact the very religious ardor of imperial Christianity probably hastened its demise. Overall, the reason for the disintegration seems to have been the immense and wasteful cost of maintaining the huge Roman administrative, military and now also religious bureaucracy.
From the earliest times, the strength of Rome had been its independent, prosperous, pious and fiercely patriotic farmers and urban middle classes. These had filled the ranks of the Roman armies--making for a fierce fighting machine, one that succeeded in conquering the Western world.

But over the centuries imperial power lost touch with these humbler social orders. The imperial bureaucracy (as all bureaucracies) grew in size and cost to the Empire, requiring the raising of taxes from those who created the Empire's source of wealth--the humbler social orders. Slowly, wealth gravitated to the bureaucracy (especially the Emperor and his friends) and drained away from the middle classes.

With the establishment of Christianity as the official religion of the Empire in the early 300s--and the confiscation of the wealth of the pagan temples and treasuries--the flow of wealth to the imperial rulers and their bureaucracy (which now included the church) created an inflation which destroyed the real wealth of the middle classes. Taxes were now ruinous and lands were confiscated--or abandoned. Finally things got so bad that it seemed wiser for these humbler classes simply to abandon their farms and shops and go into service to the ever-richer nobility.

Eventually laws had to be passed to keep them from doing this, for the countryside was depopulating and the empire needed their services. Thus they were forbidden to leave their work and homes except with imperial permission. But these laws served only to remove the last of their political rights. Basically, they were now serfs--unwilling captives to the system.

Thus the commoners who once built the Roman empire now were alienated from this same empire. Indeed, they saw themselves increasingly as living within an alien world.

Resentment increased--and revolts broke out--and were cruelly repressed. In the East, revolt tended often to take the form of rallying behind one or another Christian "heresy" which served to galvanize the frustration and anger of the humbler social orders.

Thus by the early 400s--the Empire was ripe for treason. In the West this came to fruition during the time of the German invasions. The people of the land simply refused to offer resistance to these alien intruders (who actually came in relatively small numbers)--having little love for the old imperial system.

In the Eastern portion of the Roman Empire, where the imperial arm retained its iron grip--the process of decline would take a couple of centuries longer to come to full fruit. But it would take much the same form. Seething under heavy persecution for their espousal of Christian Nestorianism or Monophysitism (or whatever other Christian heresy seemed to provoke imperial reactions) they were finally "liberated" two centuries later when they were invaded by relatively small warring parties from the Arabian peninsula, the Muslims.

Arianism
In the meantime, and critical for the future of the Western world, Christianity began to be received by many of the German "barbarians." But it was Arian Christianity they received, not orthodox or "Catholic" Christianity.
To Catholic Christianity, Arius was a heretic. His view on Christianity was that Jesus was a profoundly good and wise teacher--whose moral steadfastness was rewarded by God after Jesus's death by his being seated at the right hand of God in heaven.

This immanently "reasonable" view of Jesus (actually held widely in today's church!) basically dismissed the role of divine grace and made Jesus a moral model to the world. For those of the "world," both among the Romans and among their barbarian neighbors to the North, this made Jesus more understandable, more useful personally. Jesus as a moral Lord still left life's choices to the believers, life still under their own power. But as tempting as this view of Jesus was--it missed entirely the whole point of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. The church Fathers understood this well--and resisted the Aryans fiercely.

Arius, in order to escape this opposition within the empire, journeyed to Illyria of the Visigoths--there to make many converts to Christianity (Aryan Christianity, that is). Then in around 325, Ulfilas (also Arian) undertook a mission to the Visigoths, bringing that all-important tribe into Christianity via the Arian route.

The Dwindling Days of Hellenistic Philosophy (400s to 500s)
Despite the fact that the Empire was officially "Christian" in religion in character, this did not prevent on-going non-religious/philosophical inquiry. To be sure any such activity had to do so with the thought of not overstepping any orthodox religious boundaries. Two of the major such philosophers during the dying days of Roman civilization in the West were Proclus and Boethius.
The Germanic Invasions (400s)
As the Roman empire lost its virility, it found itself to be easy prey to land-hungry tribes willing to challenge the armies of the empire. They came in wave after wave beginning in the last quarter of the 4th century.

In 370 Huns poured into Eastern and Central Europe from Asia, pressing the German-speaking Goths who inhabited the area. Emperor Valens permitted the Goths (Visigoths or Western Goths) to settle inside of traditional Roman borders, hoping that they would serve as a buffer to the Huns. But soon both the Visigoths and their close kinsmen the Ostrogoths (Eastern Goths) joined forces to defeat the Eastern Roman armies--establishing Gothic autonomy within the Roman Empire. Eventually many of them were brought into the Roman army in the hope that they would add vigor to the declining Roman military power.

But the Empire was increasingly an easy target for military adventurers. The Visigoth Alaric broke trust with Rome and invaded Italy in 401--and then in 410 Rome itself, crippling it not only physically, but also emotionally. Soon the Roman spirit began to sag all through the West. With the pull-out in 410 of the Roman legions from Britain (to protect the Italian homeland from Alaric) Picts and Scots from the North began to invade Roman Britain in ever growing numbers. Visigoths and Franks began to move into Roman Gaul (France). And Vandals invaded Spain and North Africa.

Then in 448-452 Attila, having reorganized the Huns of Central Europe into a new fighting machine, marched into the very heart of the Roman Empire. He attacked Constantinople in 448 and was bought off with ransom money. In 451 he invaded Gaul. There Roman legions were joined by German Visigoths, Franks and Alemani to fend off Attila. But the next year he invaded Italy--and ravaged the north. Finally he was persuaded by Pope Leo I to return to his home--where he suddenly died. Though the Hunnic threat was to subside as quickly as it rose, it left Rome weakened and exposed. Germans now simply poured into the defenseless Roman lands.

Thus in 455 Vandals crossed from North Africa and sacked a totally defenseless Rome.

So also in 449 the Saxon leaders Hengest and Horsa--brought originally to Britain to help protect Britain from the Picts and Scots who were invading Celtic Britain from the North--discovered how defenseless Roman-Celtic Britain was. Thus these Saxons began bringing their own German tribesmen over from the continent to take possession of the Eastern lands. They were joined by their ethnic kinsmen, the Angles (to the north of them in Germany) and the Jutes (to the north of the Angles). Together these Germanic tribesmen pushed the Celtic Britons ever deeper into the western lands of Britain, ultimately causing some of them even to cross the channel to settle in the peninsula known today as "Brittany."

In 476 the Visigothic king Odoacer deposed the last nominal Roman Emperor--and even the fiction of a continuing Empire in the West was abruptly terminated.

Ten years after that Clovis, a king of the Salian Franks, conquered the whole of northern Gaul (northern France)--marking the change of the land from Celtic Gaul to Frankish France.

Two years later (488) Theodoric deposed Odoacer in Italy and established a firm Ostrogothic rule over Italy.

Sometime around the year 500 the semi-legendary king Arthur began his effort to rally Celtic forces to hold the West of Britain against the Saxons. In this venture he was only mildly successful--with intrigue and treachery the political norm of the time. It was a wild, uncivilized time.

Monastics and Evangelists
The Eastern Example. At about the same time as all this terrible turmoil started to hit the Empire, Christian hermits began to escape to the Egyptian and Syrian deserts--to cultivate a personal spiritual relationship with God. They attempted to purify or mortify the flesh in order to surrender themselves totally to God. At first the bishops were hostile to this movement. But Jerome dignified this life by his own dedication as a hermit. Augustine approved of his work highly.
Closely connected with this was the monastic movement which also began about the same time--all through the Roman Empire. At the time of the fall of Rome in the early 400s, the movement was widespread.

The Western Version. The monasteries (found significantly in unconquered Celtic Christian lands in Ireland and Britain) became very important pockets of learning in this dark Germanic world--sending out missionaries to the German tribes, converting them to Catholic Christianity, planting new monasteries in their midst and keeping the hope of a better world alive. Perhaps the most well-known of these was Patrick (lived around 389-461) who journeyed from Britain to Ireland to convert the inhabitants there to Christianity--Catholic Christianity

The most influential of these monastic havens within this darkened Germanic world--perhaps because they were furthest removed from the impact of the Germanic invasions--were the Irish monasteries. They not only kept the flame alive, but sent out missionaries in the 500s and 600s to establish monasteries in the Netherlands, France, Burgundy, Saxony, and Italy. For instance, Columba (521-597) journeyed from Ireland to Scotland, and established a very important monastery at Iona: Columban (c. 540-615) travelled to Burgundy (southeastern France), then to Switzerland and finally to Italy to establish new monasteries or spiritual centers; Aidan (?-651) established a monastery at Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumbria, which then sent out misionaries to evangelize the English.

These monasteries were not under papal control--nor was there any real "order" to them--but they provided a refuge for people who wanted to devote themselves to God and serve their fellow man in charity (something utterly lacking in the Roman Empire).

Then in the early 500s Benedict of Nursia (480-547) established his Benedictine "Rule"--which proved successful and popular and widely copied among the abbeys. This served to give form and strength to the monastic movement. Indeed, over time, these monasteries themselves grew very rich.

In the Roman West, under Leo I (the Great) (440-461), the Roman bishops ("popes") became predominant. The other bishops, especially the North African bishops, simply disappeared from view as the German hordes collapsed their power bases. (In the East, the patriarchs in Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria vied with each other for the remaining authority.)

The Conversion of Clovis
It is important to note that most all of these German tribes that came invading in the 400s were nominally Christian. Actually they were Aryan Christian--and were quite determined to establish their Aryan faith as the true faith by putting to an end Trinitarian or Catholic Christianity.
However when in 496 Clovis, the Salian Frank ruling Gaul--and the most powerful German prince of the time--converted from paganism to Christianity, he did so as a Catholic (not as an Aryan). This was an all-important boost to Catholic Christianity in the West.

The Survival of Roman (Catholic) Christianity in the West
So although Roman politics and economics collapsed under the German conquests in the Western portions of the Empire--the Roman religion, Catholic Christianity, did not. Indeed, Christianity became the all-important carrier in the West of what was left of Roman civilization: in the social organization of the church, its bishops and popes, and in its use of Latin in worship and study.
But overall, in the West it was a very hard time: there was no order in the land and road and sea travel became very dangerous. Trade and industry ground to a halt. Urban life withered away to nothing. Even the population dwindled rapidly in size. People became dependent on a local tribal leader for protection--whose fortified domain offered some small amount of protection against wandering bands of trouble-makers.

Byzantine (Orthodox) Christianity Hangs on in the East
In the meantime, the Eastern Roman or "Byzantine" Empire was no longer in touch with the Western portion of the Roman Empire (except in the Byzantine parts of Italy and Sicily). The West's problems seemed far away from life in the East (the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt). Roman culture (actually Greek in character) seemingly continued as usual. Indeed, under the emperor Justinian (Emperor 527-565), Roman/Byzantine power was considerably revitalized in the East.
However, on-going wars with the Parthians (further East in Persia), which continued after Justinian, began to drain the energies (and tax sources) of the Byzantine Empire. The common people were very restless under this heavy tax burden. Further, their restlessness was made only worse by the tendency of distant Byzantine capital in Constantinople to feel the need to continuously stamp out the various Christian non-conforming or "heretical" Christian sects that were widespread among these commoners. In the view of the imperial authorities in Constantinople, the unorthodoxy of these sects threatened not only the unity of the faith but also the good order of the Empire.

Islam
In the early 600s, an explosion of a new religious movement collapsed Roman (Greek Orthodox) rule in most of the East. Muhammad's Muslim religion, started up in the desert wastes of Arabia, quickly, under the generalship of Umar and the fighting fervor of his Arab armies, spewed out into Palestine, Syria, and Egypt (and also into Persia). The Byzantine commoners seemed to greet the Arabs more as liberators than as enemies. Soon the Muslim armies rolled right up to the gates of Constantinople itself before they were pushed back out of Asia Minor. But most of the Byzantine East was lost to Islam within ten years of its first encounter with this new phenomenon. Indeed, by the mid 600s, only the Greek heartland of Asia minor, the Balkans and Southern Italy remained in the hands of imperial authorities.
By the 700s Islam had crossed North Africa, carrying away Christianity there, before it leaped into Western Europe by crossing into Spain and sweeping much of Christian Spain away before it. It was stopped in the West only by the efforts of Charles Martel whose army of Christian Franks stopped the Muslim armies in 737 in central France. Islam retreated back into Spain, leaving France alone.

Descent into Deeper Darkness
The West got no reprieve from waves of barbaric invaders bent on plundering and killing off the remnants of civilized life there. Germans and Muslims came in wave after wave over the next few centuries--plunging the West into a deep cultural darkness.
Only some monasteries here and there were able to keep the fires of civilized learning alive--and then only barely so.

Further, the Church itself aided in the process of dampening these fires by discouraging the holding of "pagan" Greek and Roman literature. Thus much of the Western intellectual legacy was lost during those Dark Ages.

A Brief Revival under Charlemagne (800)
Nonetheless, there is one interesting interlude in the dark picture: the time of Charles the Great ("Charlemagne"), grandson of Charles Martel. With the gift of this period of peace brought on by the repulsing of the Muslims from France in the mid-700s, by the year 800 Charlemagne had succeeded in developing Frankish power throughout much of Western and Central Europe. Thus at Christmas of that year he journeyed to Rome--to become crowned by the pope as the new "Roman Emperor."
For a while it looked as if ancient Roman culture was going to revive in the West. Commerce stirred on the roads. Charlemagne attracted Latin scholars around him, notably Alcuin (735-804). For a while it looked as if Latin culture might revive.

Return to the Darkness
But Charlemagne's legacy hardly outlasted him. In accordance with German custom, his lands were divided up among Charlemagne's heirs (eventually becoming basically France, Italy and Germany). None of them possessed his skills at leadership. Consequently the momentum for revival was soon lost in the West. Thus from the mid 800s and through the 900s Western Europe sunk back into its dark ages again.
Either as a further cause of this weakening or as a result of it, new invaders found the opportunity during this time to descend upon Western Europe in wave upon wave. From Norway and Denmark came Northmen or Vikings sacking and pillaging the British Isles and Northern France--sailing even as far as the Mediterranean in their raids; from Sweden came Northmen down into Russia. And from the East came the Asian Magyars to Hungary.

Eventually these groups settled into the areas they attacked--bringing some degree of relief from the on-going destruction.

Nonetheless, European life remained warlike and uncertain as lords and kings battled with each other constantly. Not even monastic life was strong or secure during this period.