The Early Middle Ages
Questions:
1. Identify the time periods of the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. Answer:
2. Maps: visit the map web links on p. 2 and answer the questions in the text.
Answer:
3. Legacy of Charlemagne: visit the web link (p. 2) assess his historical significance.
Answer:
4. Why did it become so difficult to maintain centralized government under a single
king in the last two centuries of the Early Middle Ages? Answer:
5. Interpreting visual evidence: explain the illustration of feudal society on p. 3.
What visual clues identify the people in the illustration? Answer:
6. Visit the Medieval manor web link (p. 3) and answer the questions in the text.
Answer:
7. Visit the Medieval scriptorium web link (p. 4) and answer the question in the text.
Answer:
8. Understand the main idea of each section; note the significance of items in bold
The Middle Ages, roughly from A.D.
500 to 1500, marked a new beginning
for Western history. The Roman Empire
had been undergoing a process of
gradual decline from the end of the Pax
Romana in A.D. 180, and the western
half of the Roman Empire had dissolved
by the fifth century as a result of both
internal and external pressures. Over the
next 500 years during the Early Middle
Ages, Western peoples returned to
simple agricultural villages and turned to
local land-owning lords for protection.
Then, over the next 500 years during the
High and Late Middle Ages, Westerners
slowly learned to rebuild cities,
revitalize trade, and construct larger
political units as nation-states developed,
especially in western Europe. Europe
began to develop economically and
technologically and constructed a
sophisticated culture that set the stage
for Europe dramatic development in the
modern era.
The Early Middle Ages
Traditional histories of the origins of the
Middle Ages used to begin with images
of “barbarian” invaders suddenly
sweeping into western Europe and
destroying the Roman Empire virtually
overnight. These depictions tended to be
interestingly
dramatic
but
very
exaggerated. More recently, historians
have abandoned this simple story line.
Instead of a sudden “fall” of Rome in the
fifth century and an equally sudden
1
beginning of the Middle Ages in 476
(the year Germanic invaders overthrew
the last Roman emperor of the Western
Empire), we now think of a gradual
transition. Rome and its culture did not
disappear overnight. In fact it took
centuries for various Germanic peoples
to migrate into Europe during “Late
Antiquity” (300s-400s) and to change
it. The West underwent a period of
gradual transformation – a slow blending
of Roman civilization, Germanic culture,
and Christianity.
Map-links: These links show the growth
of the Roman Empire and the intrusion
of invaders from the north and the east.
Map-A Question: Who were the
Germanic invaders who were the first to
threaten the Roman Empire from the
north?
http://nersp.nerdc.ufl.edu/~malavet/com
parat/notes/romanmap.gif
Map-B Question: Contrast the Eastern
and Western halves of the Empire: which
was threatened more by invasion?
http://www.zonu.com/images/0X0/200912-09-11393/Barbarian-invasions-ofthe-Roman-Empire-100-to-500.png
Political Organization in the
Early Middle Ages
Political organization during the Early
Middle Ages falls into two phases:
 500-800: attempts to organize
Germanic kingdoms in the old
Roman Empire.
 800-1000: full development of
“feudalism.”
After the gradual decay of the Roman
Empire, medieval people had to organize
new ways to establish power and order.
Germanic invaders began a process of
organizing smaller “kingdoms” in place
of the larger, “centralized government”
of the Roman Empire (government from
a single center of power, a capital city).
These early Germanic kingdoms were
very loosely organized in contrast to the
highly centralized government of the
Roman Empire at its height. The most
successful of these early kingdoms was
established in the old Roman province of
Gaul
(modern-day
France)—the
“kingdom of the Franks,” which
developed after 500 and reached its
height under the Frankish king
Charlemagne around 800.
Charlemagne—Charles the Great—
reigned for nearly fifty years, carving
out an impressive kingdom by conquest
and through close association with the
Church. Peace terms imposed by
Charlemagne often included the
requirement to convert to Christianity.
For these and other services to the
Church, Pope Leo III crowned
Charlemagne “Emperor of the Romans”
on Christmas Day, 800.
Map-C
Question: Charlemagne’s
Kingdom: how does it compare with the
Roman Empire at
its
height?
http://www.laughtergenealogy.com/bin/h
istprof/images/europe_map.gif
Maintaining centralized control of his
kingdom was difficult, and Charlemagne
followed the Germanic custom of
granting regional authority to local lords,
exchanging control of land for soldiers
to serve in the king’s army.
Charlemagne maintained a corps of
royal officials called missi dominici,
who checked up on local lords and
reported back to the king.
Charlemagne sponsored an impressive
cultural revival often referred to as the
“Carolingian Renaissance,” attracting
scholars to his capital at Aachen,
2
encouraging reforms to the teaching of
Churchmen, and establishing a Palace
School to educate royal officials.
Scholars copied and preserved ancient
manuscripts, ensuring their survival.
Web Link Question: Legacy of
Charlemagne: What is his long-term
historical significance?
http://www.themiddleages.net/people/ch
arlemagne.html
After Charlemagne’s death, his kingdom
dissolved under the pressure of a second
wave of invasions in the ninth century.
From the north, the Vikings or
Northmen
swept
down
from
Scandinavia. From the south Muslim
invaders known as the Moors had
invaded Spain and the islands of the
Western Mediterranean and continued
their attacks on the West.
As a consequence of this new chaos,
political power fell into the hands of
local land-controlling lords who had
only a limited personal allegiance to
more powerful nobles or to distant
“kings” who were kings in name only.
The political system of feudalism
developed in this setting.
Feudal society
Feudal Social Structure
The social structure of early medieval
society was organized around three
groups of people who provided society’s
basic services and functions: lords—
those who fought and controlled the
land; religious—those who prayed;
serfs—those who worked. Serfs were
peasant farm workers legally tied to the
lands of their lords. Small numbers of
freemen did exist and provided essential
craft services, but this group was small
in the early medieval period. Society
was relatively static: social position was
fixed as part of God’s divine plan for the
universe.
Economic Reorganization
The early medieval period—once
referred to as the “Dark Ages”—was a
time of slow growth, when the West was
a
relatively
unhttp://www.laughtergenealogy.com/bi
n/histprof/images/europe_map.gifderdev
eloped part of the globe. For the most
part, Western Europe was cut of from
trade with other parts of the world. In a
world without trade, people had to
provide for themselves. An economic
system called manorialism developed in
this economic context.
The goal of the manorial economic
system was to provide virtual selfsufficiency in a world in which very
little was coming in from the outside. It
is important to remember that
manorialism did succeed in meeting the
basic economic needs of society and
represented a process of cultural
adaptation to changing times and
problems.
Web Link Questions:
Medieval
manor: How self-sufficient was the
3
manor? What was the purpose of a
fallow field?
http://go.hrw.com/hrw.nd/gohrw_rls1/p
KeywordResults?keyword=st9%20medi
eval%20manor
Cultural Life
These political, social, and economic
arrangements seem rather primitive
when compared with the sophisticated
culture of the classical world of Greece
and Rome. It is important to remember
that Western Europe was in “survival
mode,” trying to hang on in the face of
not one but two periods of chaotic
invasion. Pervasive, but gradual cultural
decline characterized Western Europe in
the early medieval period. Urban life,
formal schooling, literacy (all the
markers of “high” civilization) had—not
quite, but almost—vanished for most
people.
A Medieval Scriptorium
During the early medieval period great
lords—even
kings—were
mostly
illiterate. Even the great Charlemagne
could read but never mastered the ability
to write. Only the clergy retained the
ability to read and write, and the only
schools were located in monasteries and
were dedicated to teaching religious not
ordinary people. Because monks had to
be literate to read the Holy Scripture,
monasteries became centers of learning:
manuscripts were preserved and copied
there.
Web Link Question: a medieval
scriptorium: How long would it take to
hand-copy the bible?
http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/p
ermanent/gutenberg/html/2.html
Literate monks such as St. Bede in
England (author of The Church History
of the English Nation) and Gregory of
Tours (author of the History of the
Franks) wrote some of the few
surviving histories of the early Middle
Ages.
It would be wrong to think of this world
as culture-less. Recent historians have
emphasized the efforts to preserve
civilization and the emergence of a new
medieval synthesis—a culture that
combined Roman, Germanic, and
Christian elements. An illiterate German
warrior class replaced an educated
Roman aristocracy, and a vigorous oral
literature, now largely lost, was sung or
chanted in the halls of Europe’s new
Germanic rulers. Little of this was
written down in a society where few
could read.
From Britain, however, came one great
epic story: Anglo-Saxon tale of Beowulf
dating from the seventh or eighth
century. Almost everything about the
poem is debated by scholars, but the
story itself, of the hero Beowulf’s
killing, first, of the monster Grendel and
then of Grendel’s even more ferocious
mother, suggests something of the
primitive violence of early medieval
society.
4
The Middle Ages, then, is not just about
decline and decay and “darkness.” In
the disintegration of the older Roman
Empire a distinctive, new “medieval”
society—a blend of late Roman culture,
Germanic traditions, and Christianity—
grew.
CLASS NOTES:
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