EARLY MIDDLE AGES 500-1000
HOOFDSTUK 1:
395 Christianity official religion of the Roman state. Under Paul’s leadership new faith was opened,
was first a mystery religion, but it was based on a real person and there was one God.
Sacraments, rituals, writings, saints, hagiography (stories about saints). Clergy and laity, in clergy
ranks. The first pope was Peter. Paganism long survived (countryside) until Theodosius I outlawed it.
Rome and Christianity influenced each other: Greco-Roman thought (Neoplatonism). Debates in
Christianity fixed in councils. Orthodoxy and heretics were outcome.
Also three Christian scholars; St. Ambrose (bishop Milan), St. Jerome (translate Bible: Latin Vulgate
Bible) and St. Augustine (bishop Hippo, Neoplatonism, all Christians should live celibate lives).
While adjusting Christianity, also settlements Barbarians (Germanic). Were illiterate, good for trade,
soldiers, defended Roman territory against other Barbarians, many converted to Arian Christianity.
The inrush was around 370. The Huns came, the Visigoths appealed for sanctuary on Roman side:
rampage. Huns also went to Rome, faced by Pope Leo I. Ostrogoths invaded Italian Peninsula.
Theodoric was first medieval king.
Imperial Rome did not fall, stayed in east: strategic withdrawal to east. But even in the west it
survived, Barbarians, Church build on it.
HOOFDSTUK 2:
The early medieval society had good climate, rich soils, broad rivers that helped the movement of
people, news, goods and ideas. The Gallo-Romans: Gallo part was rural and Celtic. The Celts had
skills, were traders, farmers. Through intermarriage there came a Gallo-Roman aristocracy. During the
invasions of the Barbarians, we see a process of urban collapse during the 600s and early 700s. new
groups of Europeans were emerging.
Local power was most effective during violence, suffering and dispossession. Lord or lady,
countryside aristocratic families, or bishops’ cathedrals.
Bishops economic function: relics. Still kingship but less power. Personal loyalty was needed for a
king.
Italian peninsula: under Theodoric rebuild of roman culture.
Boethius wrote the Consolation of Philosophy, and lay ground for quadrivium and trivium (seven
liberal arts).
Cassiodorus wrote on Divine and Human Readings and encouraged monks to copy texts, he set
standards for it.
Divided by the invasions (Ostrogoths, Lombards, Byzantines) from north and south would remain
shattered for more than a millennium.
Merovingian Gaul, Clovis created Frankish kingdom. He converted to Catholic Christianity. His
successors, the Merovingian dynasty offered little unity or peace, divided kingdoms among all sons:
kingship was localized. Gregory of Tours was their major chronicler.
In 751 Francia went to the Carolingians.
,Visigothic Iberia; Visigothic king Reccared converted from Arianism to Catholicism in 587: mass
conversion, Christian harmony and Christian-Jewish disharmony.
St. Anthony created one of the first communities of Christian ascetics. Pachomius and Basil the Great
created less extreme communities were companionship was striving, cooperative monasticism.
In Ireland, heads of great autonomous monasteries took on the administrative functions of bishops,
Irish monks embraced pilgrimage as mission. Early monasteries were linked to powerful local families,
family monasteries.
St. Benedict of Nursia, father of Western monasticism, life dedicated to God through prayer and
service, also ordinary people. Full with praying, reading and working, and resisting money, sex and
ambition. Benedict monks controlled learning, producing and preserving texts. Missionary activity,
personal poverty, corporate wealth. Gregory the Great, pope, 590-604, loved monastic life, he
dispatched a group of monks to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons (by monk Augustine, St. Augustine
of Canterbury).
Church had less religious sway over the countryside. Monasteries provided some religious services for
ordinary people. Churchmen were wealthy landowners, high birth was the norm.
Next to bishops, monks and nuns importance in intellectual life. In Ireland monks were capable of
writing in perfect Latin. In their schools Latin and Greek were teached, and they had a scriptorium.
Irish and Benedictine monastic traditions produced a cultural awakening known as the Northumbrian
Renaissance. By Bede’s death in 735, Northumbrian culture was fading.
HOOFDSTUK 3:
Eastern Empire: better governed, military strengths, more cities, more commerce, safe, becoming
more Greek than Latin. Byzantium, religion from Christianity, culture from Greece. Byzantium was all
about defense and self-preservation, cautious. Bureaucracy was huge and precedent-bound, the
army was small and highly trained. The king was God’s vice regent, protector of the Holy Church.
Heresy was a threat to the state. 8th century conflict about icons, East banned icons and promoted
iconoclasm: aroused intense enmity between Rome and Constantinople.
The mystical element in Greco-Roman culture had grown in Byzantium. For example, physical realism
was de-emphasized. Now shining gold, etc. Hagia Sophia is an example. It evokes imperial majesty as
well as Christ’s divinity. Byzantine civilization developed unique expressions, but remained Greek.
First great period: the age of Justinian 527-565: golden age of Byzantine art and the full development
of an imperial autocracy. His wife was Empress Theodora. They rebuilt Constantinople, he took care
of the body of civil law, Corpus Juris Civilis, the keystone of future Byzantine jurisprudence. He also
tried to reestablish imperial authority in the city of Rome. His final years were with Gothi wars, the
empire bankrupt, a plague and a flood of Slavs and Bulgars.
Second period: retrenchment 570-850. In Europe and Africa, Lombards, Visigoths and Muslims
reconquered land from Byzantium. In Byzantium a struggle against Islamic armies.
Third period: the Macedonian revival, 850-1050 by Basil I, the dynasty ruled over Slavs and Bulgars,
and conversion happened among Slavs and Russians. Byzantine civilization contributed much to the
Medieval West.
In Arabia new religion, Islam. Conquest of Iberia (Islam in Europe). Europe was enriched by Islamic
neighbors. In Mohammad’s time there were Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism. Muhammad
, was political and religious leader. Islam is supported by written texts, Islam spread and so did Arabic
language. After Muhammad the Umayyad dynasty 661-750, victory over Ali, by Arabian aristocracy.
Did not crush Constantinople, they did crush North Africa and Visigothic kingdom in Iberia, defeated
at Tours-Poitiers so no more expansion. Non-Muslims were called Dhimmis, Christians were called
Mozarabs.
In 750, the Abbasids, till 950, moved capital to Baghdad. End of Arabian aristocracy monopoly on
political power in Islam. Under the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid a vigorous intellectual life.
After 950 fragmentation, dynastic wars, religious conflicts, economic woes. The extreme western
provinces were ruled by independent local dynasties and few broke free, became independent. Al-
Andalus began to disintegrate into small princedoms.
HOOFDSTUK 4:
Life in Francia in 700 was difficult. A landscape of isolated villages, hard-working peasants and poor
communication was dominated by landowners. Conquest and war defined aristocratic world. War
was a source of profit. By 700 Merovingians were poverished because of aristocratic families,
Carolingians from Austrasia were more powerful, became rulers of Austrasia.
Charles Martel 714-741 over won Arabic armies at Tours-Poitiers, conquered lands and contained
unity. His land was divided between Carloman and Pepin the Short.
Pepin the Short 741-768 was king in fact but not name, solution: alliance with the papacy, Pope
Zacharius I. The new Pope Stephen II crowned Pepin. They needed a strong ally, so Pepin defeated for
them the Lombards and gave land: ‘Donation of Pepin’. ‘Donation of Constantine’, was fake that gave
the pope the imperial crown. Pepin drove Muslims from Aquitaine and maintained peace within
Francia.
Outside of Francia was the expansion of Western Christendom through missionary activity from
Anglo-Saxon monasteries like St. Boniface, who laid groundwork for both a new church east of the
Rhine and a reformed church in Francia.
Early 8th century emerge of rural institution now called manorialism, it linked the landed elite to the
peasantry in a web of social obligations. Looming over all workers, was the authority of the owner of
the manor, a person or institution who not only profited from their labor bot also governed their
lives, and he of they had to protect.
Einhard was the biographer of Charlemagne. Charlemagne was a devotee of the liberal arts, and
promoted a Christian cultural revival in Francia, he was a warrior-king and expanded (Lombards 774,
king of Franks and Lombards). Made the Spanish march and the Ostmark, so protection next to
expansion. Christmas day 800 imperial coronation by Pope Leo III, Charlemagne became emperor of
the Romans. When his son was crowned, he excluded the pope.
The realm: towns were small and scattered. He encouraged economic growth, he raised intellectual
standards by assembling scholars at Aachen from all over Europe. Charlemagne ordered the
cathedrals and monasteries to operate schools. Alcuin and other scholars sought to build on works of
the Classical-Cristian cultural tradition (Latin Vulgate Bible), also Caroline script developed. They also
sought to continue Boniface’s reform of the Frankish church, so they helped to improve pastoral care
and standardize monastic life.
After Charlemagne, scholars kept on going, monastic reform continued but with a deeper spiritual
element and Neoplatonic ideas became again important.
