Context
Defining the years from 300-1000 CE as "The
Early Middle Ages" indicates, more than anything else, the perspective
of modern historians and Renaissance writers who looked back with
disgust on the disorder and inelegance of preceding years. Writing
in a time of arguably secular societies and unitary states, historians
have tried to understand as "middle" the near millennium of time
in between the demise of the Roman state, valued for its political
centralism, security, technological advances, territorial spread,
and legal systems--all those things that comprised a Pax-Romana--and
the first hints of increased international trade, unitary states,
and cultural-linguistic identities centering on Europe as a whole.
While this "middle" conception is helpful in reminding us of discontinuities between
the post Constantine era in European History and Europe after 1500,
we must remember that the medieval era also manifests continuities
with the Roman times. In other words, the "middle" ages were a transformation of
institutions and dynamics of Rome far more than a complete break
from the past. To cite just a few examples: the great Barbarian
invasions instrumental in Roman demise and Byzantine emergence
were preceded by dynamics reaching back to the time before the
emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180) (arguably, Goths, Franks, and
others entered Gaul to share Roman civilization, and not to destroy
it); Christianity, a defining aspect of Medieval Europe, had begun
to elaborate theology and hierarchy during the Roman period; Law,
to the extent that it emerged from 300- 1000, took as its model
the Justinian, Roman compilation.
In the same way, inasmuch as the Middle Ages were transitional, the
Early Middle Ages presented similar characteristics to those of the
half-millennium succeeding it. The struggle with Islam, and growing
commercial interaction with and cultural imaginings about that
new confessional civilization around the southern shores of the
Mediterranean were well under way by 1000. Defining themselves
in terms of dichotomies of Christendom vs. pagan (including Islam)
or civilized vs. Barbarian, Europeans scored notable successes
against Muslims; though the Crusades are a High Middle Ages phenomenon,
its solid military and ideological foundations were laid in the
tenth century with the Spanish Reconquista, which itself flourished
into the fifteenth century. Similarly, monasticism, of prime importance
to high Medieval society, had seen its first few cycles of efflorescence
by the 940s, just as the papacy had made serious progress in asserting
temporal authority from Northeastern Iberia to Germanic lands.
In the socio-economic realm, feudalism, which defined the character
of societal relations on all levels at least until Machiavelli's
time, crystallized in the ninth century. The Italian city-states
that acted as the motor of international trade in the 11-16th century
had their start in the tenth century. Byzantine civilization epitomizes
the dynamic: emerging fully within the Roman milieu of the 4th
century, its life stretched into the cusp of the early modern period
of the mid-15th century.
The question that presents itself, therefore, is: when
did the Middle Ages begin? A Romanist perspective would dictate
that we put Medieval origins in the generation starting with Diocletian
and ending with Constantine's death, a period when administrative, political,
and ideological bases of the state were so altered as to make it
firmly different from the "classical" Roman Empire. This suggests
a mid-fourth-century origin. Others could put it a little later,
when Theodosius declared Christianity to be the state-supported
religion, thereby eclipsing paganism and ushering in another Medieval
(and modern) concept of European historyoppression of Jews and
other confessional out-groups. Still in the political, Romanist
perspective, one could locate the end of Roman history and the
beginning of medieval history between the first and second sack
of Rome, 410-455, after which the Eastern Roman remainder emerged
as the Byzantine state. A demographic historian would put the
date earlier, with the 2nd-6th century floods of barbarians into
Roman realms. A Church historian would focus on the crystallization
of Christian theology, elaboration of Catholic hierarchy culminating
in the Roman archbishopric (the Papacy), as well as monasticism
and conversion. For that matter, the entry of Islam onto the European
consciousness would seem to some as the defining break with classical
Mediterranean civilization. Once quite a defensible position,
such a view emphasized a disruption in Mediterranean trade patterns
and a shift in political balance to the north. Thus, the safest,
most functionally sound approach appears to be to commence the
narrative from the 450s, bearing in mind that the entire period
presents fluid dynamics, and that Europe's medieval story really
begins with transformations of the Roman Empire under Diocletian.
Having said this, the dominant aspects of the early Middle
Ages are:
1. The establishment of a Christian commonality in self-conscious
continuation of the Roman legacy in spite of socio-political fragmentation.
This is basically a religious world-view uniting all converted
Europeans in the midst of short-lived polities and feudal relations.
2. Antagonistic yet mutually invigorating interaction
between Christendom and the Islamic world.
3. Byzantium as battlefield and standard-bearer in the
East-West conflict,even as it articulated its own cultural, political,
and Christian expression.
4. A contraction of material possibilities in comparison
to the Roman era and the reestablishment of scaled-back inter-regional commercial
interaction.
