Shaping of Western Europe
HISTORY 100
WORLD HISTORY
SPRING 1998
16 FEBRUARY
THE SHAPING OF
WESTERN EUROPE
DICTIONARY TIME-LINES
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
In this assignment, you should learn the meaning and significance of the
following terms:
- Justinian, Holy Roman Empire, Charles the Great, Charlemagne, Renaissance,
Vikings, Magyars, Saracens, Islam, Peasants, Barons, Castles.
You
should also consider the following matters:
- What role did the Church play in the period during and after the fall of
the government of the Roman Empire in the West?
- In what sense and why did Western Europe develop independently of the
other civilizations of the Old World?
- Why was Western Europe not able to restore a government on the model of
the Roman Empire of the West?
- What caused the disintegration of the empire that Charlemagne had
constructed?
- In what ways was the 1000 a turning point in the history of Western
Europe?
- What were the classes and institutions that developed in medieval Europe,
and how did they work together?
TEXT
With the failure of the Eastern Romans to hold onto the reconquests of the
Emperor Justinian (527-565), Western Europe was left relatively isolated at the
far western end of the belt of civilizations. It was not heavily populated; it
lacked any rich sources of raw materials to trade; its artistic standards had
been declining for some time and the Germanic invasions had disrupted
manufacturing to such a degree that the West could offer very little in the way
of trade goods that would appeal to the sophisticated cultures to the East.
Consequently, it was largely ignored and was left to develop without much
foreign and advanced influences.
From 600 to about 900, Europe seemed to have been trying to reconstruct the
old Roman Empire of the West. The Church, which had become a branch of the Roman
imperial government in the course of the 300's, survived the collapse of the
political and military of the Roman Empire in the West. It tried to preserve
Roman imperial institutions and principles to the point where local bishops
often took over the authority and regalia of the old Roman provincial governors.
It was in the cathedrals and monasteries of the West that Roman learning was
preserved to the extent that it was in fact preserved. As influential as the
Church might have been however, it needed power to pursue its apparent goal of
restoring the Roman Empire. It acquired that power in about 750, when it allied
itself with the Franks, one of the most powerful of the Germanic peoples who had
entered the territory of the old Empire. Acting almost as partners, Frankish
kings and their ecclesiastical advisors and administrators began to try to
central authority once again, to repair the ruined western transport system, to
organize the Church more effectively, to conquer the lands that had comprised
the Roman Empire in the West and to convert their pagan inhabitants, to improve
agriculture, and to encourage the development of art, architecture, literature,
and other cultural activities - - always favoring the model and standards of the
Roman Empire, of course.
The efforts were finally successful in the year 800, when the Frankish king,
Charles, was crowned as Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day. The
rulers of Western Europe could at least claim that they had restored an
independent Roman Empire of the West, although the new empire was only
superficially like even the actual Roman Empire. Nevertheless, the reign of
Charles the Great, usually called Charlemagne (768-
814), represented a considerable recovery, and is often regarded as a
renaissance, or "rebirth" of Roman culture, by historians.
This happy situation did not last long. The Franks had the interesting custom
of dividing their estates equally among all of their children. So Frankish kings
would divide their kingdoms among their sons; the sons would soon be embroiled
in a civil war until one of them won out over the others and reunified the king;
and then he would die and the kingdom would be divided among his sons.
Charlemagne had been lucky that his brother had decided to abdicate and enter a
monastery, and all of Charlemagne's sons except Louis, his youngest, died before
their father. Louis (814-840), however, had three sons survive him, and the
civil war that broke out among them permanently divided the empire that
Charlemagne had built.
While Louis' sons were fighting among themselves, Western Europe was attacked
from all sides by a new wave of invaders, although these invaders tended to raid
and plunder more than conquer and settle. From Scandinavia came the
Vikings, sailing up and down the coasts of Europe and up its
rivers deep into its interior. They were pagans, fierce warriors, and quite
bloody- minded. For many years, it was common enough for priests to end their
prayers with the words ... and from the fury of the Northmen, Good Lord,
protect us. Amen. There were also new invaders from central Asia, people
calling themselves Magyars, but called Huns by the
inhabitants of Western Europe. Riding swift ponies, they raided much of German,
France and northern Italy. Finally, the western Mediterranean Sea was dominated
by the Saracens, inhabitants of the North African coast who had
converted to the new (since 622) religion of Islam. The Saracens
had seized the islands of the Western Mediterranean and southern Italy,
controlled the access to Western Europe by sea, and engaged in almost continuous
piratical raids. It is interesting to note that they continued to function as
pirates until the early 1800, when the newly-independent United States attacked
the Barbary Coast and curbed its pirate fleets.
The nature of these hit-and-run attacks was such that no central government
could respond effectively, even if the rulers of the central governments had not
been engrossed in fighting each other. Local strong men built fortresses that
offered protection to the peasants in their locality, and these
local "bosses" took military and political power into their own hands. The
Kingdom of Germany disintegrated into a half dozen small states, while France
collapsed into something close to anarchy, with literally hundreds of local
barons each controlling the territory and the people around their
castles.
From about 900 to about 1000, Europe was fighting for its very existence and,
in the course of that struggle, developed new institutions and values that owed
relatively little to the old Roman Empire. The local rulers of the time were too
busy to engage in dreams of centralizing authority in a revived Roman Empire and
were generally content to adopt whatever seemed to work. Europe emerged from
that period with a society based upon three basic institutions. One was the
local ruler who exercised governmental powers, protected his people with a
castle in which they could take refuge in time of need, and defended them clad
in armor and riding to battle mounted on a war-horse. The second was the
churchman, either priest or monk, who represented a Church that was no longer
interested in functioning as a branch of an imperial government, but sought to
be independent of secular authority and to set the moral and ethical standards
for Europe. The third was the peasant, organized into village communities that
functioned as agricultural cooperatives, sharing the tasks of plowing and
regarding the surrounding meadows and forests as a common possession. Each of
these supported the other in important and even essential ways and, together,
they were able to produce a sufficient surplus of food to support a great number
of warriors.
The year 1000 marked an amazing change in the fortunes of Western Europe. The
Vikings were converted to Christianity as were the Magyars, and their raids
ceased. The merchants ships of the city-states of northern Italy fought the
Saracen pirates and took control of the Western Mediterranean, and the trade
between the lands of the region of the Baltic Sea and the Byzantine Empire,
which had been moving along the rivers of Russia, now began to shift to Western
Europe and to stimulate the development of the economy of the region. Almost
unnoticed, several innovations in agricultural technology (the deep plow, the
use of horses as draft animals, crop rotation) led to an increase in peasant
production and productivity. This led to an increased population as well as a
higher standard of living and workers who could be diverted from agriculture to
manufacture. All this, in turn, led to an increase of wealth and -- at least
potentially -- a decrease in expenditures for defense. Western Europe began
investing more of its capital in education, research, technological development,
and the arts.
Western Europe had, by now, more than recovered the wealth and population it
had lost with the Germanic invasions and the collapse of the Roman Empire in the
West, and it had done so largely with its own resources. Inventions (such
gunpowder, the compass, the astrolabe, the making of paper) eventually filtered
in from the East, but these were not essential to what happened. Europe was
reaching the status of an advanced civilization, and was doing so without
relying on the labor of masses of slaves, without the direction and coordination
of a central government, and without infusions of foreign capital either through
trade or conquest. The Europeans were developing a civilization that was largely
independent of, and, in many ways, basically different from, the other
civilizations of the Old World.
ASSIGNMENTS
REQUIRED ASSIGNMENTS
You might wish to visit some site that will offer a view of the ways of life
of the three classes of Medieval Europe. Castles on the Web will
offer you a wide choice of the most imposing castles of Western Europe to visit.
Members of the Church feel into two major groups. The first were the
secular clergy, whose life centered on the cathedral. The site called Gothic Dreams will give you
a good introduction to cathedrals. The second group were the monks, whose life
centered on monasteries. Maulbronn
Monastery, a UNESCO World Heritage monument in Germany will show you one of
the great monasteries of the Middle Ages, one that has survived to the present
day. Finally, we should consider the peasants, although there is much less on
the web about them than about the nobles and clerics. Laxton, however,
is a medieval English manor that, somehow or another, escaped
modernization.
RECOMMENDED ASSIGNMENTS
There is a great deal of browsing that one might do. The Age of King Charles V
is a sprawling site that provides a panorama of France in the
fourteenth-century, as well as an illustrated contemporary history of the
kingdom. A Tour of
Amiens Cathedral was one of the earliest big sites on the web, and it has
continued to incorporate new technology as it becomes available. It is well
worth seeing, if only to get an idea of what can be done within the present
state of the art. There are numerous opportunities for American students to join
archaeological excavations in Europe during the summer. If you are interested in
such things, Wharram
Village, in England is an example of a small site excavated in this fashion,
while York, a
city in northern England has been extensively excavated, with most of the
digging done by college students like yourself.
This text was produced by Lynn H. Nelson, Department of
History, University of Kansas.
14 February 1998
Lawrence KS
.
