Medieval Europe

Main Points

• Rise of Religion Christianity becomes the glue that holds Europe together.
• Barbarian Invasions The collapse of Western Europe opens centuries of foreign invasions and raids.
• Economic Growth A slow tedious process of building towns and growing wealth.

The Medieval Era marked a decline in the fortunes of Europe. The disintegration of Ancient Era political institutions under the Roman Emperors represented a fundamental step backward, though with the resources at the disposal of the Romans, they "almost" got away with it. The Medieval barbarian invasions hit Europe earliest and longest, though in hindsight Europe came out luckiest with regard to the invasions that struck each of the major geographic heartlands. The result was profound political fragmentation, a common Medieval occurrence as witnessed in India and the Middle East (even China though not as radically).

There were certainly down sides to the disintegration of the Roman Empire, however, in overall terms, its collapse was directly attributable to its fundamental weakness in the face of the changing culture of Europe. Emperors fed on the cult of divinity, determined to hold onto as much power as they could, while more distributed cooperative political networks among the Germans clearly demonstrated their innate advantages as they emerged from out of Rome's shadow.

Renaissance historians fighting for what they considered to be Ancient Roman values would call these the Dark Ages, a myth which sometimes survived in the work of important modern historians who are blinded by Rome's great battles and mighty conquerors. However, the Low and High Medieval Periods were the time during which Europe grew and opened the path to the Renaissance, and did so more successfully than any other region except China.

Rise of Religion

When Constantine issued the Edict of Milan granting tolerance to Christianity in 313 AD, it transformed Europe. Religion helped Europeans put the disorder and invasions of the world into a context that helped them cope with their lives emotionally. However, it also provided a political backbone which earlier forms of worship couldn't match. Religions personalized and spiritualized the Ancient Era's drive for learning. What each person considered the "important" lessons of the Ancient Era remained integrated into their lives and thus European culture, but it was largely superseded by this new drive to spiritual learning. Secular learning was not encouraged in the ways it had been during the Ancient Era, and things which people did not see value in were lost. However, religion helped support the dominance of the government; it could and was used from the outset by Constantine himself as a way to build a more powerful state.

Once the Democracy of Athens and the Republic of Rome had been swept away, monarchs ruled unchallenged and the unified authority of God mirrored and emphasized the "rightness" of this relationship. Moreover, the bureaucracy of the church gave monarchs a "left arm" through which they could exercise power along with the "right arm" of their political institutions. Where limited government defined the Ancient Era, religion gave monarchs the ability to adhere to a limited government and yet command their subjects: "Do this! ... You don't have to... but you should!" Successful governments found ways to preserve this duality as it gave them two ways to communicate with their subjects. Of course, the power of this dichotomy was lost on a number or rulers (including Constantine) who tried to use their religious position to get away with expanding their authority beyond the appropriate limited scope of government. Even in this situation, religion encouraged people to acquiesce to supreme authority, though it could not completely compensate for the fundamentally Formative Era principles that monarchs were attempting to exercise in contradiction to the lessons of the Ancient Era.

It should be noted that these innovations had a dramatic effect on imperial rule in Western Europe. In the Ancient Era, from the death of Augustus in 14 AD through the Edict of Milan in 313AD, court intrigue, political assassinations, and army politics had defined the structure and rules by which emperors ascended and held on to the throne. Rare was the emperor who died of natural causes and frequent were the civil wars which ripped the empire apart on the deaths of emperors, until Constantine.

However, these were not the only reasons that Medieval Era powers enjoyed great success. There was a group to which the commitment and faith demanded by religion was even more important – the army. Christian warriors fought with more confidence in battle under the banner of God than a similarly equipped and trained counterpart in an Ancient Era army. The Arab knights and Chinese armies enjoyed similar advantages. Religion was certainly a powerful emotional bond that could be transmitted effectively from one person to another in times of peace. However, all of the "great religions" achieved their dominance because for at least some period of their history, conquests have brought them to a larger audience. The most dynamic example of this is perhaps the Umayyad Arabs whose religious zeal took them from the Straits of Gibraltar to the borders of India. However, Constantine himself converted to Christianity because he believed it would give his army the advantage to destroy his rival to the imperial throne. And certainly the dedication demanded of the warriors of the Medieval Era made the training of their Ancient Era counterparts look paltry by comparison.

Barbarian Invasions

Stoicism and now the Christian doctrines which absorbed it, did not encourage independent thought, independent action, or independent learning. Rome had flourished in large measure under the Greek culture and spirit of curiosity which it imported, certainly the most important spoils of war which Rome brought back from any military campaign. Combined with the Roman preoccupation with personal responsibility and a shrewd, practical streak, these talents had taken the Roman Empire across the entire Mediterranean, the only power of any era to accomplish that feat.

However, the downfall of the Republic undercut these successes and changed the structure of Roman power. The vaunted Roman armies gradually became less and less effective suffering their first massive defeat in 9 AD against the Germans. As the Ancient Era drew to a close it became customary for Rome to supplement its strength with Germanic armies to guard large sections of the empire. There was another reason, however that the Romans found it necessary to augment their military strength – barbarian invasion.

In 9 AD, the Germans had been brutal barbarians. By 300 AD, they had founded kingdoms and developed politically and culturally under Roman influence. However, they were under pressure from other barbarians invading from Asia. All this had been set in motion by the wars of the Chinese Han Dynasty against the Xiongnu barbarians, and when the Xiongnu were chased out in 100 AD, they started a rolling tidal wave of barbarians aimed directly at Europe. Barbarian refugees who'd been chased from their homes by more powerful tribes routinely petitioned Rome for sanctuary within the Empire in exchange for their military service. Rome, which was under pressure from the same barbarian invasions made a virtue of necessity; thus its army was largely built on the backs of these "federeated" Germanic tribes. Then, in 372 AD, the Xiongnu themselves invaded Europe, now known to history by their Roman name, the Huns.

Attila the Hun ravaged much of Europe and was the single most dangerous threat to the Roman Empire, but the real problem faced by the Romans was all the competition the Huns faced from other barbarian tribes. The sheer volume finally overwhelmed the Romans and after their defeat at the Battle of Adrianople in 378 AD, their German allies began to understand it. Thus the end of the Roman Empire did not come in a great battle or a deadly assassination, but in the decision of Rome's allied tribes to ignore it and rule the Roman Empire for themselves. Beginning in 406 AD, the tribes began carving up the Roman Empire and in 410 AD, Alaric, King of the Visigoths, sacked Rome itself. It was the first time the city had fallen since the sack by the Gauls in 387 BC. The Roman Empire's disintegration spelled the end of political unity on the continent for the rest of the Medieval Era.

On the one hand this seemed counter intuitive, and certainly to Renaissance historians it was almost inexplicable that the mighty centralized Romans would collapse while the divided, decidedly less sophisticated Germans would survive. A typical explanation was to inaccurately ignore the many Roman allies and lay the blame on all the barbarians whose invasions destroyed Rome by sheer numbers. Clearly this does not jive with the reality on the ground. Many Germans ruled simultaneously on the very foundation of Roman authority - at least until they realized that foundation was no longer important to their continued success.

Roman political institutions had slid backward, and could not survive under the mounting pressure. It's true that the Germans lacked the type of bureaucracies which were so successful during the Ancient Era. They depended on feudalism, a form of cooperative rule where each ruler created a type of contract with a group of subordinates that ruled for him. These subordinates chose their own subordinates, etc. creating a government that gained many of the practical advantages of limited and local rule. At the same time, unlike the Ancient bureaucracies, feudalism still theoretically placed the monarch in total control, a pattern that meshed beautifully with the type of influence a ruler could exert through the intelligent use of religion.

For the next century, German armies raged back and forth across Europe until some stable borders began to emerge around 507 AD. Contrary to Renaissance historians, every major kingdom was not established by barbarian invaders but by the federated tribes on whom Rome's survival had depended. Then, in 607 AD, the heirs of the Roman Empire faced their first major challenge, the Juan Juan Confederation which was driven out of China about 50 years earlier. Known to Europe as the Avars, they were the most vicious central Asian barbarians since the Huns and they founded a brutal central Asian style Khanate in the middle of Europe (roughly centered on Southern Germany). For the next 200 years, they would raid Europe ruthlessly. They had competition from the Arab corsairs, pirates who pillaged and slaved along the Mediterranean coast and using rivers as highways, penetrated deep into the heart of Europe from 650 AD on.

In 791 AD, the Frankish king, Charlemagne, crushed the Avars ending the threat they posed to Europe and laying siege to the Muslim cities of Northeastern Spain. He died too soon to save Europe from its newest threats. In 793 AD, the Vikings made their first appearance in history, raiding and pillaging in England and Ireland. For the next two centuries Vikings would not only raid Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, they would settle states in Northern France, seize England for several generations, conquer Sicily, and found Kievan Rus, the seed of what would become Russia. They were so feared, that the Emperors of Constantinople created a new elite unit, the Varangian Guard, which was charged with personally protecting the Emperor, and membership was limited to Viking warriors only. Finally, in 899 AD, the Magyars invaded and terrorized Eastern Europe. By 1000 AD, Europe had suffered through almost 800 years of uninterrupted invasions from Asian barbarians and the Islamic powers of the Middle East.

Economic Growth

This was the turning point, however. There was no secret why European civilization suddenly flowered in the High Medieval Period, sometimes called the High Middle Ages. The Avars had been crushed, the Magyars and Vikings settled down founding their own nations, and the Muslims had been conquered by the Seljuk Turks in 1038 AD – while Muslim pirates still controlled most of the Mediterranean, the less sophisticated Turks were generally too busy fighting each other to pester Europe beyond the occasional war with the East Romans. European nations would continue to fight wars against each other, for territory and cities, but they did not destroy and depopulate regions wholesale. This allowed the continent to grow and develop.

Centuries of agricultural development were also important. For thousands of years the limitations of farming implements had left oxen as the best available source of animal labor. However, farmers grew to understand their animals better and joined with more skilled artisans to create the tools needed to unleash horse power on their farms. Farming lore had also built up allowing more sophisticated crop rotation techniques. And more advanced systems of cooperative farming emerged. With these new advantages, even small villages were able to achieve the grain yields necessary to support trade specialization, something once possible only in the greatest river valleys of the world.

With more people available to pursue specialized careers, a more vibrant and more monetized economy became possible. Merchants enjoyed a slowly expanding customer base and the result was a rising, urban-based middle class that swelled the size of cities. This urbanization across the continent strengthened European culture in the same ways that Alexander the Great had used cities to realize his control over the far flung provinces of his empire in the Ancient Era. Cities continued to be a driving source of cultural and economic power and vital communities of human intelligence and cooperation.

An important side note should go to the Mongols at this point in our story. In 1241 AD, two Eastern European armies challenged an invading horde of Mongols. Both were crushed in battles that lasted less than a day; Eastern Europe was at the mercy of the most brutal barbarian tribe ever to emerge from Asia. It can be argued that it was the most important single event in European history; it was the invasion that never happened.

On the doorstep of the conquest of Europe, news reached the Mongol Khans that the Great Khan Ogodei, son of Genghis Khan, had died. Less than impressed with Europe and its suitability for feeding Mongol horses and with no challengers left alive to Mongol pride, they turned around to contest the succession and never came back. The Middle East in contrast was completely decimated; all the brightest cities of Islam were razed to the ground and their populations turned into pyramids of skulls as a warning to any who would challenge the might of the Mongols. The Renaissance Era Chinese of the Song Dynasty, the most advanced civilization on the planet - centuries ahead of the Europeans - was conquered in 1279 AD; the rape of the Mongols - literally and figuratively - destroyed important elements of Chinese culture. Even though the Ming Dynasty would return China to the Renaissance Era almost a century before it's first emergence in Italy, lingering Mongol traditions would limit Chinese development and give Europeans the opportunity to emerge as the first global power in the centuries to come.

The End of an Era

With cities powering dynamic growth and lacking annual barbarian invasions that destroyed everything a king might try to build, the nations of Europe stabilized despite their own wars against each other. Borders moved back and forth but central cores emerged for England, France, and other states in Europe. These proto-nations embraced new institutions that were critical to further development. Nations were no longer being torn apart on the death of a king to provide an inheritance for each son. The Ancient Era tradition of passing the state intact to the next ruler was resurrected, greatly diminishing political fragmentation.

Moreover, these nations became "self-aware". Just as Constantine appreciated religion's power to strengthen the Roman Empire, intelligent leaders across the continent patronized art and literature which aggrandized themselves, their ancestors, and the new nations. This was a tremendously narcissistic and self-serving tradition, but its consequences were profound. While it certainly did not replace religion, nationalism served as a secondary method of achieving the same kinds of support that monarchs used to be dependent upon religion to provide. Moreover, nationalism embraced learning more easily than religion and when Johannes Gutenberg developed his printing press in 1455 AD, he lit the match that fired the European Renaissance into full flame.