Further north, in Scandinavia, the process came much later, near the end of the early medieval period and even into the High Middle Ages (1000-1300). These localized adaptations of the faith slowly shaped collective identities throughout Europe. Germanic tribes, such as the Franks, Burgundians, and Goths adopted some Roman administrative practices, often through the agency of Church leaders who had remained in place during the invasions.Īs missionaries from Rome and Constantinople proselytized north of the Pyrenees, Alps, and Balkans, the so-called “barbarian” cultures of Celts, Germans, and Slavs very gradually fused with Christian customs and traditions to produce disparate variations of Christianity. However, the formation of barbarian kingdoms that featured written laws, royal decrees, and bureaucratic administrators manifested later in areas that had not previously been part of the empire. A similar process happened in the Eastern Empire between the sixth and eighth centuries when Slavic groups wrested control of the Balkans from the Eastern emperors. This fusion laid a foundation for the Western European Germanic and Celtic cultures that have endured for centuries. These barbarian kingdoms covered most of Western Europe by the mid-sixth century. As the invaders of the fifth century settled and melded with the people who had formerly been under Roman Imperial rule, they carved out new boundaries and established political entities of their own. These new political entities established a framework for the medieval fusion between Germanic and Celtic cultures on one hand and the Greco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian influences on the other. Gradually in most cases, more quickly in others, the so-called “barbarian kingdoms” formed.

The populations of cities shrank, commerce dwindled, and intellectual activity became more parochial, less cosmopolitan. The invaders seized land, enslaved people, and weakened the infrastructure of the civilization that the Romans and their subjects had developed. This transformation of western imperial lands was often violent and disruptive. Vandals, Goths, Burgundians, Saxons, Angles, and Franks migrated over the traditional borders of the empire and fundamentally altered the language, customs, and social organization that had characterized these northern provinces. Invasions spread across Gaul and Britannia. This map indicates the routes of these “barbarian” invasions. As the administrative structure of the Western Empire deteriorated in the fifth century, it became increasingly susceptible to invasion from outsiders. Centralized imperial authority in Western Europe gradually diminished during the fifth century. Suffering from incursions of Pictish and Irish raiders, southern Britain succumbed to Germanic invasions during the mid-400s. They revolted in Brittany against Roman rule while Celtic Britons failed to protect previously Roman dominions south of Hadrian’s Wall from a variety of invaders. Meanwhile, different groups of Celts also took advantage of western imperial weakness. Germanic chieftains had already carved out areas of control in parts of modern-day Italy, Germany, France, England, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. The Western half of the Empire had always fewer and smaller cities than the Eastern portion, and this structural difference weakened the Western Emperors’ ability to fend off mounting pressures from invaders.įollowing the catastrophic loss to the Vandals in the naval battle of Cape Bon off the coast of North Africa in 469, the Eastern emperors realized that they could no longer afford to subsidize the military operations necessary to maintain political stability in the Western Empire. This instability along the western frontiers contrasted with the Eastern Empire, which had maintained fairly stable borders until the early seventh century and could draw tax revenues from a larger number of cities to maintain the central imperial administration.

Chapter 14: The Early Middle Ages IntroductionĪs the centralized imperial authority in the Western Empire gradually deteriorated during the fifth century CE, the previously stable boundaries between the Romans and the Germanic tribes, who had mostly remained north of the Danube and east of the Rhine rivers, became increasingly porous.

Feudal kingdoms western europe