Resurgence of the Latin West (700-850)

Frankish Empire

Starting with the Frankish realms at the beginning of the ninth century, Charlemagne united much of modern day France, western Germany and northern Italy into the Carolingian Empire. Scholarship and Classical learning flourished under Charlemagne leading to what twentieth-century historians called the "Carolingian Renaissance".

The 840s saw renewed disorder, with the breakup of the Frankish Empire and the beginning of a new cycle of barbarian raids, at first by the Vikings and later by the Magyars.

Until his death in 814, Charlemagne ruled an empire which included modern Catalonia, France, western Germany, the Low Countries, and northern Italy.Conditions in Western Europe began to improve after 700 as Europe experienced an agricultural boom that would continue until at least 1100.

A study of limestone deposited in the Mediterranean seabed concludes that there was a substantial increase in solar radiation received between 600 and 900. The first signs of Europe's recovery on the battlefield are the defense of Constantinople in 717 and the victory of the Franks over the Arabs at the Battle of Tours in 732.

Between the fifth and eighth centuries a political and social infrastructure developed across the lands of the former empire, based upon powerful regional noble families, and the newly established kingdoms of the Ostrogoths in Italy, Visigoths in Spain and Portugal, Franks and Burgundians in Gaul and western Germany, and Saxons in England. These lands remained Christian, and their Arian conquerors were converted (Visigoths and Lombards) or conquered (Ostrogoths and Vandals). The Franks converted directly from paganism to Catholic Christianity under Clovis I. The interaction between the culture of the newcomers, their warband loyalties, the remnants of classical culture, and Christian influences, produced a new model for society, based in part on feudal obligations. The centralized administrative systems of the Romans did not withstand the changes, and the institutional support for chattel slavery largely disappeared.

Lombards and King of Italy

The Lombards, who first entered Italy in 568 under Alboin, carved out a state in the north, with its capital at Pavia. At first, they were unable to conquer the Exarchate of Ravenna, the Ducatus Romanus, and Calabria and Apulia. The next two hundred years were occupied in trying to conquer these territories from the Byzantine Empire.

The Lombard state was truly barbarian in custom compared with the earlier Germanic states of Western Europe. It was highly decentralized at first, with the territorial dukes having practical sovereignty in their duchies, especially in the southern duchies of Spoleto and Benevento. For a decade following the death of Cleph in 575, the Lombards did not elect a king and the period is called the Rule of the Dukes. The first written legal code was composed in poor Latin in 643: the Edictum Rothari. It was primarily the codification of the oral legal tradition of the people.

The Lombard state was well-organized and stabilized by the end of the long reign of Liutprand (717–744), but its collapse was sudden. Unsupported by the dukes, King Desiderius was defeated and forced to surrender his kingdom to Charlemagne in 774. The Lombard kingdom came to an end and a period of Frankish rule was initiated. The Frankish king Pepin the Short had, by the Donation of Pepin, given the pope the "Papal States" and the territory north of that swath of papally-governed land was ruled primarily by Lombard and Frankish vassals of the Holy Roman Emperor until the rise of the city-states in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

In the south, a period of anarchy began. The duchy of Benevento maintained its sovereignty in the face of the pretensions of both the Western and Eastern Empires. In the ninth century, the Saracens conquered Sicily and began settling in the peninsula. The coastal cities on the Tyrrhenian Sea departed from Byzantine allegiance. Various states owing various nominal allegiances fought constantly over territory until events came to a head in the early eleventh century with the coming of the Normans, who conquered the whole of the south by the end of the century.

The Bavarian Dynasty is the name given to those kings of the Lombards who were descended from Garibald I, duke of Bavaria. There were really two branches to the dynasty: the branch descended in the female line through Garibald's eldest child and daughter, Theodelinda, and the branch descended from Garibald's eldest son Gundoald. Of the first branch, only Theodelinda's son by Agilulf, Adaloald, reigned, though her son-in-law Arioald (married to her daughter Gundiberga) also ruled. Through Gundoald, six kings reigned in succession, broken only by the usurper Grimuald, who married Gundoald's granddaughter:

Aripert I (653 - 661), son of Gundoald
Godepert (661 - 662), eldest son of previous, jointly with
Berthari (661 - 662, 672 - 688), second son of Aripert I, jointly with above until 662
Cunincpert (688 - 700), son of previous
Liutpert (700 - 701), son of previous
Raginpert (701), son of Godepert
Aripert II (701 - 712), son of previous

Anglo-Saxon England

In the mid-5th century several tribes from modern Germany, Holland, and Denmark began sporadic and marginally successful invasions of Britain, at that point a neglected Roman province. Traditionally, two Jutish chieftains named Hengest and Horsa were promised land by the powerful British king Vortigern in exchange for routing the warlike Pict tribe. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, after they defeated the Picts, "They sent to Angeln and called on them to send more forces, and to tell people about the worthlessness of the Britons and the merits of their land." This marked the beginning of decades of invasion and conquest of southern and central Britain from the Celts by such Germanic peoples as the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. At least 50 percent of England's original Celtic inhabitants were killed off in the process. The Anglo-Saxons eventually established several kingdoms of differing longevity and significance. King Alfred the Great (871-899) of Wessex led Anglo-Saxon resistance to the invading Danish forces. The unification of England was completed in 926 when Northumbria was annexed by King Athelstan, a grandson of Alfred.

Feudalism

Around 800, there was a return to systematic agriculture in the form of the open field, or strip, system. A manor would have several fields each subdivided into one-acre strips of land. This was considered to be the amount of land an ox could plough before taking a rest, according to one theory.
Another possibility is that the holdings were originally rectangular and were split into strips because of the way land was inherited. In the idealized form of the system, each family got thirty such strips of land.
The three-field system of crop rotation was first developed in the ninth century: wheat or rye was planted in one field, the second field had a nitrogen-fixing crop (barley, oats, peas, or beans), and third was fallow. Compared to the earlier two-field system, a three-field system allows for significantly more land to be put under cultivation.
Even more important, the system allows for two harvests a year, reducing the risk that a single crop failure will lead to famine. Three-field agriculture creates a surplus of oats that can be used to feed horses. Because the system required a major rearrangement of real estate and the social order, it took until the 11th century before it came into general use.
The heavy wheeled plough was introduced in the late 10th century. It required greater animal power and promoted the use of teams of oxen. Illuminated manuscripts depict two-wheeled ploughs with both a mouldboard, or curved metal ploughshare, and a coulter, a vertical blade in front of the ploughshare. The Romans had used, light, wheelless ploughs with flat iron shares that often proved unequal to the heavy soils of northern Europe.

The return to systemic agriculture coincided with the introduction of a new social system called feudalism. This system featured a hierarchy of reciprocal obligations. Each man was bound to serve his superior in return for the latter's protection. This made for confusion of territorial sovereignty since allegiances were subject to change over time, and were sometimes mutually contradictory. Feudalism allowed the state to provide a degree of public safety despite the continued absence of bureaucracy and written records. Even land ownership disputes were decided based solely on oral testimony. Territoriality was reduced to a network of personal allegiances.

Viking Age (793-1066)

The Viking Age spans the period between AD 793 and 1066 in Scandinavia and Britain, following the Germanic Iron Age (and the Vendel Age in Sweden). During this period, the Vikings, Scandinavian warriors and traders, raided and explored most parts of Europe, south-western Asia, northern Africa and north-eastern North America. Apart from exploring Europe by way of its oceans and rivers with the aid of their advanced navigational skills and extending their trading routes across vast parts of the continent, they also engaged in warfare and looted and enslaved numerous Christian communities of Medieval Europe for centuries, contributing to the development of feudal systems in Europe.

Eastern Europe 600-1000

Prior to the rise of the Kievan Rus, the eastern frontier of Europe had been dominated by the Khazars, a Turkic people who had gained independence from the Turkic Empire by the seventh century. Khazaria was a multiethnic commercial state which derived its well-being from control of river trade between Europe and the Orient. They also exacted tribute from the Alani, Magyars, various Slavic tribes, the Goths and Greeks of Crimea. Through a network of Jewish itinerant merchants, or Radhanites, they were in contact with the trade emporiums of India and Spain.

Once they found themselves confronted by Arab expansionism, the Khazars pragmatically allied themselves with Constantinople and clashed with the Califate. Despite initial setbacks, they managed to recover Derbent and eventually penetrated as far south as Caucasian Iberia, Caucasian Albania and Armenia. In doing so, they effectively blocked the northward expansion of Islam into Eastern Europe several decades before Charles Martel achieved the same in Western Europe.

In the seventh century, the northern littoral of the Black Sea was hit with a fresh wave of nomadic attacks, led by the Bulgars, who established a powerful khanate of Great Bulgaria under the leadership of Kubrat. The Khazars managed to oust the Bulgars from Southern Ukraine into the middle reaches of the Volga (Volga Bulgaria) and into the lower reaches of the Danube (Danube Bulgaria, or the First Bulgarian Empire). The Danube Bulgars were quickly Slavicized and, despite constant campaigning against Constantinople, accepted the Greek form of Christianity. Through the efforts of two local missionaries, Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius, the first Slavic alphabet came into being and a vernacular dialect, now known as Old Church Slavonic, was established as a language of books and liturgy.

To the north from the Byzantine periphery, the first attested Slavic polity was Great Moravia, which emerged under the aegis of the Frankish Empire in the early 9th century. Until its defragmentation in consequence of the conflicts with the East Franks a century later, Moravia was a stage for confrontation between the Christian missionaries from Constantinople and from Rome. Although the West Slavs eventually acknowledged the Roman ecclesiastical authority, the clergy of Constantinople succeeded in converting into the Greek faith the largest state of contemporary Europe, Kievan Rus, towards 990. Led by a Varangian dynasty, the Kievan Rus controlled the routes connecting Northern Europe to Byzantium and the Orient.

Both before and after the Christianization, the Rus staged predatory raids against Constantinople, some of which resulted in the mutually beneficial trade treaties. The importance of Russo-Byzantine relations is highlighted by the fact that Vladimir I of Kiev was the only foreigner who married a Byzantine princess of the Macedonian dynasty, a singular honour which many rulers of Western Europe sought in vain. The military campaigns of Vladimir's father, Svyatoslav I, had crushed the statehood of two strongest powers of Eastern Europe, namely the Bulgars and the Khazars.

Bulgarian Empire

Ceramic icon of St Theodore from around 900, found in PreslavIn 681 the Bulgarians founded a powerful state which played a major role in Europe and specifically in South Eastern Europe until its fall under Turkish rule in 1396. In 718 the Bulgarians decisively defeated the Arabs near Constantinople, and their ruler Khan Tervel became known as "The Saviour of Europe". Bulgaria effectively stopped the barbarian tribes (Pechenegs, Khazars) from migrating further to the west and in 806 destroyed the Avar Khanate. Under the first Emperor Simeon I (893-927), the state was the largest in Europe, threatening the existence of Byzantium.

After the adoption of Christianity in 864, Bulgaria became the cultural and spiritual centre of the Eastern Orthodox Slavic world. The Cyrillic alphabet was invented by the Bulgarian scholar Clement of Ohrid in 885. Literature, art and architecture were thriving with the establishment of the Preslav and Ohrid Literary Schools,and the Preslav Ceramics School. In 927 the Bulgarian Orthodox Church was the first European national Church to gain independence with its own Patriarch.

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