General Summary
As noted in more detail in the SparkNote on the Fall of
the Roman Empire, beginning in the middle of the 3rd
century CE, the Roman Empire faced increasing Germanic tribe infiltration
and internal political chaos. Romans set up generals as emperors,
who were quickly deposed by rival claimants. This pattern continued
until Diocletian (r. 284-305) rose to power in 285. He and Constantine (324-337)
administratively reorganized the empire, engineering an absolute
monarchy. Constantine the Great patronized Christianity, particularly
in his new city Constantinople, founded on the ancient site of
Byzantium. Christianity became the Roman state religion under
Theodosius (r. 379-95). Germanic tribal invasions also proceeded,
as did battles with the Sassanids in the East. From 375, Gothic
invasions, spurred by Hun marauding, began en masse. Entanglement
with imperial armies resulted in increased migration into Roman
heartlands as far as Iberia. The Empire underwent a certain Germanization.
After the death of Theodosius, the Eastern Empire followed its
own course, evolving into Hellenized Byzantium by the seventh century.
Repeated sackings of Latin Rome (410, 455), contraction of food
supplies, and deposition of the last Western emperor by the Odovacar
(476), ended any hope of recoveringPax-Romana in
the Mediterranean basin. Gaul was controlled by a shifting patchwork
of tribes.
Heroic attempts of the Eastern Emperor Justinian (r. 527-565)
to retake once-Roman Italy, North Africa, and parts of Gaul, were only
temporarily successful, as western apathy, the tax burden the campaigns
imposed, and Lombard invasions into Italy prevented any lasting
gains beyond southern Italy. By 600 CE, Byzantium consisted of
a sliver of North Africa, Nilotic Egypt, a few Mediterranean Islands,
the southern Balkans and Thrace, as well as Anatolia and the Levant
littoral. The Avar Khanate was well-established beyond the Danube,
Franks occupied Germany and France, just as the Visigoths controlled
all of Spain but the southern sliver, and the Angles and Saxons
had moved into southern Denmark and western Britain.
The next two centuries (600-800) were instrumental for
the creation of medieval civilization. Politically, Byzantium
faced the explosion of the Avars as far as Thrace. Additionally,
renewed Sassanid Persian offensives deprived Byzantium of the state
of Eastern Anatolia as well as the Levant, the birthplace of Christianity.
Heraclius (r. 610-641) ultimately defeated the Sassanids and restored the
status quo, yet the exhaustion caused by the wars, the precariousness
of reestablished Byzantine control in the Near East, as well as
continuing theological controversies allowed the political and military
arrival of Islam in the 630s to eject the Byzantines from all of
the Middle East, excluding Anatolia. Wedged between Avar domination
in the Balkan and Adriatic regions and Arab occupation of long-time
Roman lands, 'Fortress Byzantium' began to take form as the Orthodox
Christian standard bearer in opposition to Islam, with only nominal,
formal concern for the West.
In the West, while Lombards and other various tribes held
Italy in uneasy alliances, the three-way split of France between
the Burgundians, Visigoths and Franks had been decided in favor
of the latter, in the form of the Merovingian dynasty of Clovis
and his sons (482-560s). Continual partitioning under descendants,
dynastic infighting, and the sheer limits of seventh-century coercive
force, contributed to disintegration of central control, whereby
provincial counts took localized power for themselves, and Palace
deputies usurped much of the power of the consistently young-dying
Merovingian kings. One mayor, Pepin II, subdued his counterparts
in other Merovingian lands and united the realms. His son Charles Martel,
in addition to defeating the Muslims at Tours (732), extended family
control further to the East. His son Pepin III dethroned the last
Merovingian with church support, then was invited into Italy to
curtail Lombard harassment of the Papacy. Given the title 'Protector
of the Romans' by Pope Stephen II (752), the emerging dynasty cultivated
ties with the Church, utilizing its spiritual authority, empowering
its parish priests, and facilitating the institution of tenth-century
papal states. Pepin's son Carlos Magnus (Charlemagne, r. 768-814)
inaugurated the Carolingian dynasty. Based on a territorial core
of modern France, his forces conquered and Catholicized the Saxons
of Northern Germany, as well as the Bavarians, and increased Frankish/Catholic
influence in Bohemia, Poland, and the Slavic/Czech Adriatic regions.
Repeatedly on the Pope's request, his forces went south, finally
subduing the Lombards and establishing political control there.
Though coronated Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 800, Charlemagne's descendants
fell to infighting, even after three kingdoms were established
in the Carolingian domains in 843.
In the ninth century the Carolingian empire continued
its disintegration, and Viking and Norman raids extended to inland
regions of Spain, France, and Italy on a nearly yearly basis, while
rising Muslim naval activity in the central Mediterranean further
imperiled trade and Italian polities. Eventually, the Normans
established statelets in Northwestern France, Apulia, and Sicily.
In the latter two instances the Normans displaced Muslims: the
first hints of Reconquista/Crusading fervor. These processes brought
about a severe localization of European power, evidenced by the
emergence of feudalism, based upon personal bonds of vassalage,
and a manor system organizing agricultural production and rural
security. Bishoprics also became prominent in providing administration,
justice, and moral guidance. From the 600s onward, the Papacy
expanded hierarchically, demonstrating an increased independence
from Constantinople manifested in doctrinal differences and near schisms
in the ninth century. Monasticism arose, energizing the Church
and papacy. Beginning in the Middle East and given a European
foundation by the Benedictine Code (529), successive Monastic reform
movements in the ninth century and then in the tenth-eleventh century
(Cluny) gave greater vigor to Church attempts to a) preserve the
remnants of classical learning; b) elaborate theology; c) lessen
fighting in Europe while encouraging Reconquista. In addition,
as monastics became popes, the Church became able to assert increased
claims to a spiritual papacy with worldly powers.
The political complexion of Europe simplifies in the second
quarter of the 10th century, as post-Carolingian notable elites
elevated the dukes of Franconia (Conrad and Henry I, r. 918-36)
to kingship. These new rulers subjugated duchies that would not
relinquish power. Otto I (936-73) was able to continue subjugation
of eastern kingdom duchies, hold back and defeat the Magyars of
Hungary (955), attack and further Christianize Slavs, tentatively
enforce authority over north-central Italy, and be crowned emperor.
His grandson Otto III was likewise crowned in 996, after causing
his cousin to be crowned as Pope Gregory V. Ecclesiastical expansion continued.
Still, the western Carolingian realms (France) remained wallowed
in the localized chaos of feudal duchies, consenting in 987 to
the election of Hugh Capet as nominal king, who ruled over a drastically
curtailed realm.
Meanwhile, after enduring sieges of Constantinople by
Arab Muslims (674, 680, 717), Byzantium soldiered on, evolving
a tenuous means of coexistence with its neighbors to the east that
entailed land tenure and a militarization of Asia Minor's civil
administration. Byzantium followed an approach to Christianity,
called Orthodoxy, completely independent from that sanctioned by
the Papacy. The state itself managed all church matters, appointing patriarchs,
and often determining 'right' doctrine, as in the Iconoclastic
controversies (mid-800s). Fallen on hard times in the ninth century,
Byzantium underwent a resurgence in the tenth, owing to political
disunity within Abbasid Islamic world and the evolution of a more
viable Byzantine system. Along with marked successes against the
Bulgars under Basil II (r. 963-1025), a short-lived Byzantine advance
in southern Italy accompanied the recovery of Crete and Cyprus from
the Muslims (965) and progress in northeastern and southeastern
Anatolia. The 1054 schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches
finalized the cultural, political, and religious split between
Byzantine and Latin Europe. Left no time to find rapprochement
with the western Church, by 1054 Byzantium, whose defenses had
decayed from renewed neglect, faced the onslaught of Turkic tribes
against its eastern borders.
