Early Medieval Europe

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Early Medieval Europe
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General Concepts

• Medieval or Middle Ages
• Time between Rome and Renaissance
• (2 classical periods)
• 476-1450 AD
• Only applies to European history
• Sometimes called the Age of Faith

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General Comments

• Civilization requires a modicum of material
  prosperity enough to provide a little leisure.
  But, far more, it requires confidence
  confidence in the society in which one lives,
  belief in its philosophy, belief in its laws, and
  confidence in ones own mental powers...Vigor,
  energy, vitality all the great civilizations
  or civilizing epochs have had a weight of
  energy behind them. People sometimes think that
  civilization consists in fine sensibilities and
  good conversation and all that. These can be
  among the agreeable results of civilization, but
  they are not what make a civilization, and a
  society can have these amenities and yet be dead
  and rigid.
• Kenneth Clark, Civilization

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Life in the Middle Ages

• Reversion to tribal society
• Roman infrastructure disintegrated
• Germanic tribes ruled by might
• Goths, Vandals
• Franks
• Anglos and Saxons
• Lombards
• Marauding tribes (lawlessness)
• Agriculture dominated society

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Life in the Middle Ages

• Home made clothing
• Disease was common
• Sports
• Baiting Animals
• Ignorance of time
• Striving for protection
• Rise of Feudal System
• Costs of protection
• Tenant Farmers (Serfs)
• "Life in the Middle Ages"

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• What was really lost when a civilization
  wearies and grows small is confidence, a
  confidence built on the order and balance that
  leisure makes possible.
• Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved
  Civilization, p. 59

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• When you seek to bring the gospel to pagans,
  you must be exceptionally patient. Dont offend
  their beliefs but assimilate them. dont pull
  down their temples or places of prayer, but
  little by little without their even knowing, you
  must Christianize their temples and replace their
  idols with the images of Christianity, their
  amulets with our sacred relics, their festivals
  with our celebrations of the Lord and of the
  blessed saints.
• Pope Gregory I (590-604)

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Religion and the People

• Turned to God rather than emperor
• Paganism retained (Pope Gregory)
• Holidays
• Saints of various things (pantheism)
• Mary worship
• Statues
• Benedictine order

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Church/State Relationships

• Monastic revival
• Abbey of ClunyBurgundy, France
• Responsible to Pope
• Monks rededication
• Cluny represented stability
• Restrictive ordered
• Isolated from society
• No speaking
• 525 new monasteries
• Huntsville, Utah

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• As Roman culture died out and was replaced by
  vibrant new barbarian growths, people forgot many
  things how to read, how to think, how to build
  magnificently but they remembered and they
  mourned the lost peace. Call them the people of
  the Dark Ages if you will, but do not
  underestimate the desire of these early medieval
  men and women for the rule of law. There was,
  moreover, one office that survived intact from
  the classical to the medieval polis society
  the office of Catholic bishop.
• Thomas Cahill, How the Irish Saved
  Civilization, p. 61.

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Religion and the People

• Bishops had power
• Popes were weak
• 1/3 died violently
• Political/family ties
• Pope Gregory
• Strengthened papacy
• Missionary Oriented
• Gregorian Chants
• Hildegard von Bingen
• Promoted monasteries and convents
• Priests could not marry

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Kingdom of the Angles/Saxons

• Saxons immigrated even while Romans were in
  Britain
• Chaos following Roman withdrawl
• Saxons had been mercenaries
• Celts/Romans (Britons) against Saxons
• King Arthur
• Victory of Britons in 496 AD by Ambrosius (man of
  temperance) (Arthur?)
• Died in 542 AD
• Evidences
• Cadbury (Camelot) has Christian burial of king
  and queen
• Bodies facing Glastonberry (Avalon)
• Round table in Somerset church

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Kingdom of the Franks

• Franks settled in Gaul
• ClovisKing of Merovingian dynasty
• Converted to Christianity
• Accepted Catholic Authority
• War between sons of Clovis
• Charles Martel's rise
• Pepin the Short declared royal by Pope

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Carolingian Dynasty

• Named after Charles the Great (Charlemagne)
• Charlemagne
• Son of Pepin the Short
• Became sole king of the Franks, Lombards, Saxons
  (Germany)
• Ruled from Aachen
• Fought over 50 wars
• Crowned as Holy Roman Emperor (800AD)

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Charlemagne's Cathedral in Aachen
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Carolingian Dynasty

• Stable government
• Legal system
• Missi dominiciagents of the lord king
• Chivalry system
• Intellectual revival
• Influenced by Northumbria and Alcuin
• Became Charlemagnes advisor
• Books
• Venerable Bede
• Beowulf
• Scholars copied books (Carolingian script)
• Educational system

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Carolingian Dynasty

• End of the Carolingian period
• Charlemagnes son succeeded him
• Louis Pious was weak a leader
• Louis 3 sons divided the kingdom
• Treaty of Verdun

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Carolingian Dynasty

• Post Carolingian invasions
• Norseman or Vikings
• Magyars from Hungry
• Muslims from N. Africa
• Effects
• Manorial system
• Feudalism
• Castles

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Viking Invasions
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Viking Invasions Creativity

• Shallow draft to invade up rivers
• Enough keel for ocean stability
• Sailors/fighters

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Church/State Relationships

• 9th and 10th Century
• Popes were appointed
• Fulfilled political purposes
• Gave little direction to the church
• Forsook vows of celibacy

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• "The foundation of the Pope's political claims
  was the Donation of Constantine a document by
  which the Emperor Constantine the Great had
  allegedly divided the Roman Empire in two,
  transferred imperial authority over the Western
  Provinces to bishop Sylvester of Rome and his
  successors, and reserved for himself only the
  Eastern empire, governed from his newly-founded
  capital of 'Constantinople'. By the 1430s, the
  authenticity of this document had been accepted
  without question for more than five hundred
  years in mediaeval political thought it had
  occupied a place like that of the Declaration of
  Independence in the American constitution today.
  Scholars now believe that the Donation was
  counterfeited during the eighth-centurypossibly
  at a time when Pope Paul I was anxious to cut his
  ties with the iconoclastic authorities of the
  byzantine Empire."
• Toulmin, Stephen and June Goodfield, The
  Discovery of Time, The University of Chicago
  Press, 1965, p.104-105.

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Creativity

• Why was creativity stifled during the early
  Middle Ages?
• Lawlessness
• No leisure time
• Not urban
• No social intercourse or travel
• No stable organizations
• Lack of incentives
• What were the incentives for the Carolingian
  Renaissance?

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Thank You