part0015

Very often it has come to my mind what men of learning there were formerly throughout England, both in religious and secular orders; and how there were happy times then throughout England… and how nowadays, if we wished to acquire these things, we would have to seek them outside.

(King Alfred of Wessex, preface to Pope Gregory’s Pastoral Care )

As Rome’s soldiers, builders, politicians, teachers, craftsmen, and merchants slowly made their exit from the western reaches of the empire as the Western Roman Empire fell, whole nations of people were left uncertain of their futures. The previously laid infrastructures of Britannia, Brittany, and other western lands fell into disrepair without imported materials flooding the region. The architects and city leaders left behind had the knowledge of roadbuilding, fortification, maintenance, and overseas trade, but due to a population crash, there was little time for anything except farming, animal husbandry, gardening, and food preparation. The great pursuits of the Roman Empire, such as education, literature, and the arts, were abandoned for more pressing activities. As the decades and centuries marched on, Roman culture became a distant memory.

There was a deeply divided group of people left in Britannia: People who considered themselves blooded members of Roman families and those who felt more kinship to the Celtic and Druid traditions of the past. Those who had been part of Roman families or worked alongside the aristocrats of Rome believed that they must do whatever possible to maintain the culture of their late administrators and masters. On the other side of the divide were the people whose lands had been stolen, whose villages had been burned, and whose families had starved to serve the excesses of the Roman Empire. The native tribes of Britannia celebrated their freedom from distant Rome and made haste to reintroduce their own cultures to lands that had been without them for centuries.

Throughout Western Europe, it was much the same. Gaul, whose territory began at the far western edge of the mainland, was divided up among the Visigoths, the Burgundians, and the Franks when Rome’s soldiers retreated to Italy. When the Franks successfully routed the remaining governors of the empire in 486 CE, they established their own monarchal rule under the leadership of Clovis. [58] It was the culmination of unifying all of the Germanic Franks. During the next two decades, under Clovis I, all of Gaul was united at the tip of the sword into the Kingdom of the Franks. Theirs was the Merovingian Dynasty, and it grew to encompass not only Gaul but also much of Alemannia (modern Germany).

The Frankish kingdom inherited a sense of superiority not only from its military prowess but from the fact that it had annexed part of the former Roman seat of power. The Merovingians felt they had earned the right and responsibility to establish a new age in which they, the French, dictated the rest of the continent. To this end, Clovis I found it both logical and tactically necessary to become a Christian. [59] His conversion was recorded in The Grand Chronicle of France , which explains how he called upon the Christian God as a last resort in beating the Alemani people in the Battle of Tolbiac and gaining their lands for his own:

At this time the King was yet in the errors of his idolatry and went to war with the Alemanni, since he wished to render them tributary. Long was the battle, many were slain on one side or the other, for the Franks fought to win glory and renown, the Alemanni to save life and freedom. When the King at length saw the slaughter of his people and the boldness of his foes, he had greater expectation of disaster than of victory. He looked up to heaven humbly, and spoke thus: "Most mighty God, whom my queen Clothilde worships and adores with heart and soul, I pledge you perpetual service unto your faith, if only you give me now the victory over my enemies."

Instantly when he had said this, his men were filled with burning valor, and a great fear smote his enemies, so that they turned their backs and fled the battle; and victory remained with the King and with the Franks. The king of the Alemanni were slain; and as for the Alemanni, seeing themselves discomfited, and that their king had fallen, they yielded themselves to Chlodovocar and his Franks and became his tributaries.

Queen Clotilde’s influence on this decision—or rather, this outburst—is clear. She was already a devout Christian, one of the few such people in Western Europe at the time. It was possibly a sense of reverence for the importance of the old Roman Empire, which had embraced Christianity in the latter centuries of its rule, that enticed the royal couple to consider adopting the relatively new religion for their empire. Thenceforth, the official religion of the Franks was Roman Catholicism. King Clovis I was baptized on Christmas Day of 508 CE.

The Frankish kingdom was not the only one to establish itself firmly in the absence of the Western Roman Empire. The Iberian Peninsula was ruled by the Visigoths; the northern countries by the Danes, Jutes, Saxons, and Frisians; and the remnants of the Roman Empire still held its own throughout Greece, Egypt, and Turkey. Mostly unconcerned with the goings-on of Europe, however, the Asian-facing Eastern Roman Empire soon came under a rebranded moniker: The Byzantine Empire. The Kingdom of Odoacer filled the political vacuum in Italy, thereby preserving the realm in its original physical state if not in its original administrative structure. At the far eastern stretches of Europe lay the Kingdoms of the Rugii, the Ostrogoths, and Julius Nepos’ rump Roman state in Dalmatia.

Many philosophers and historians of the Middle Ages would refer to this crucial period as the Dark Ages as a metaphor for the lost light of the highly educated, modern Roman Empire. Despite the moniker, the years 500-1000 BCE were not characteristic of a decline in intelligence, nor were they a time of crisis for the people of post-Roman Europe. [60] Certainly, there were difficulties given the collapse of such a vast economic network, but for many of the oppressed and suppressed cultures of Europe, the collapse of Classical Rome signaled the beginning of an era of local authority. The traditions of the Celts, Druids, Visigoths, Alemanni, and others had the chance to practice again and establish their own terms with neighboring European realms.

While Europe found its feet and explored its own potential, Rome struggled to do the same. Back in the Italian Peninsula, the surviving section of the Roman Empire was busy rebranding itself into a new, Middle-Age-friendly version of its old colonial self. The transformation’s key player was a Frankish king known as Charles the Great. King Charles, or Charles le Magne in his own tongue, united the Frankish realm with that of Northern Italy and Germany. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne—as he is now known to history—Emperor of the Romans on Christmas Day of the year 800 CE. [61] Since Irene of Athens had named herself the Roman emperor in place of her son, Constantine VI, there were henceforth two Emperors of Rome. Charlemagne ruled the western portion, and Irene and her successors the east. Soon, the divided empire became known as the Holy Roman Empire in the west and the Byzantine Empire in the east.

While the Byzantines centered their realm in Constantinople and used the Greek language, Charlemagne ruled his Latin empire from Aachen in modern-day Germany. Both were established as Christian entities, but it was the western empire that would become permanently fixed as the world’s capital of Catholicism.