After the fall of the last western Roman emperor in 476 CE , Roman imperial power persisted in Greece, the Balkans and Anatolia (Asiatic Turkey) in the form of the Byzantine empire. It steadily lost territory to a variety of invaders until the Ottoman Turks extinguished it in 1453.
But what about the power vacuum left in western Europe? At the start of the 5th century CE , Germanic tribes had overrun much of the area, and in the wake of the fall of Rome they had established a patchwork of kingdoms: Visigoths in Spain, Vandals in North Africa, Ostrogoths in Italy, Franks in Gaul (France) and western Germany, and Angles, Saxons and Jutes in England.
Although the Romans had regarded these peoples as ‘barbarians’, they soon became Christianized, as the Romans had before them. Although there was no central secular power, the western Church was unified under the Pope in Rome. By a process of conquest, towards the end of the 8th century the Frankish king Charlemagne succeeded in uniting France, Italy and much of Germany, and on Christmas Day 800 the Pope crowned him ‘emperor of the west’.
But Charlemagne’s empire was short-lived, and within a few decades of his death it had fragmented, while power passed to a mosaic of regional aristocracies. Western Europe came under pressure from a range of new invaders. In the east, Magyars from the steppes advanced into central Europe, and were only stopped by the German ruler Otto the Great at the decisive battle of Lechfeld in 955. Thereafter, the Magyars established their own kingdom in Hungary.
From the 9th century, various seafaring peoples from Scandinavia, known and feared as Vikings or Norsemen, traded, raided and established kingdoms from Russia in the east to the British Isles in the west. They colonized Iceland and Greenland, and even reached North America. One group settled in Normandy and adopted French culture. The Normans (the name comes from ‘Norsemen’) went on to conquer not only England, but also southern Italy and Sicily.
But the biggest impact on southern Europe came from a different direction: Arabia. In the early 7th century the Arabian prophet Muhammad had founded a new religion, Islam, and by the time of his death in 632 he had unified all of Arabia. He urged his followers to spread Islam further afield, and over the decades that followed Arab armies seized Byzantine territories right across North Africa, Syria and Palestine. By the mid-9th century the Arab empire extended from the borders of India in the east to the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) in the west. The spread of Islam was not just down to the military prowess of its followers. Some of the peoples in the Byzantine and Persian empires were tired of the religious persecution they suffered at the hands of their rulers, whereas many Muslim leaders showed greater toleration. The Islamic world of the Middle Ages also produced a range of philosophers, physicians, mathematicians and scientists, who built on and advanced the achievements of the ancient Greeks.