Europe: 501 to 1000 CE

Up from a So-Called Dark Age...

Learning, literature and art suffered during the Germanic invasions that destroyed the western half of the Roman Empire. Literature also suffered from many Christians and ecclesiastics seeing books other than their Bible as heathen, pernicious or dangerous works of the devil. The only reading that the Church encouraged was the Bible – in keeping with Augustine’s insistence that only the scriptures contained an authoritative account of the world and its phenomena.

Under Church influence, many books were burned or not copied. The empire's great libraries were ruined. Of the works at the greatest of libraries, at Alexandria, only a small fraction survived. Works by the pagan historian Zosimus did. And so too did the encyclopedic work by Martianus Capella, The Seven Liberal Arts, a work on grammar, rhetoric, oratory, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. But there was little to stimulate a return to the disturbing philosophies of the ancient Greeks or the new thinking that would come centuries later. In Western Europe, Aristotle was gone from the minds of people considering the nature of things. The advances in medicine that had come with Hippocrates and then Galen in the second century waned. Christians still regarded disease as punishment for sin, which demanded prayer and repentance. Christian hospitals remained, but vivisection was forbidden because the Church held the human body as sacred.

Judicial proceedings suffered from superstitions that prevailed among community leaders as well as common people. Trials were often judged by two or three commoners under a nobleman or his representative. Eyewitnesses testified, but attempts to determine a person's innocence or guilt were made through ordeals in which God was thought to assert his powers. This involved combat between two who had come to court as parties in conflict. Some who were on trial were thrown into water in the belief that floating to the surface was a sign of guilt, the purity of water rejecting the guilty, and sinking a sign of innocence. Attempts were made to prove innocence or guilt also by having the accused walk on hot coals or by the accused putting his hand into boiling water, the court believing that if the hand healed properly it was a sign of God's favor and therefore innocence.

The Church let this means to justice be. And the Church held to the geography of a monk from Egypt: Cosmas. His treatise Topographia Christiana drew from scripture and had the earth as flat with Jerusalem at its center and the Garden of Eden nearby, irrigated by the Four Rivers of Paradise.

AngLo-Saxons into England

iN the mid-500s, waves of Germanic people – Jutes and Angles – from what today is Denmark, and Saxons from northern Germany, invaded England again. They came under military leaders and settled on England's eastern shore. They warred their way westward up theThames River, looking for more land to cultivate, taking lowland and leaving less desirable lands in the hills to the Celtic Britons. They moved inland at Britain's narrow neck in the north along the Humber River and its tributaries. In the south of England the Britons counterattacked with cavalry, which was effective against the horseless Anglo-Saxons. Victories against the dreaded Anglo-Saxons made the cavalry commander a hero, and legend turned him into a king – King Arthur.

With humanity's proclivity toward fantasy, in centuries to come poetic tales about Arthur would describe him as an emperor, and then as a god who rode through the sky and slew giants. A British monk, Geoffrey of Manmouth, pretending to write history, would describe Arthur as an emperor from a place called Camelot, and he would write of Arthur defeating the Irish and the Scots, conquering Norway and Denmark, marrying a noble woman named Quinevere and then conquering France.

Victory by the Britons was temporary. Entire communities of Britons were massacred. Britons again fled into the hills. They fled from England into North Wales, to Ireland and across the channel to what is now called Brittany. Some from England were sold into slavery. Pope Gregory found boys from England on the slave market in Rome.[READER COMMENT]

South of Hadrian's Wall on the eastern side of the island, most of the Romanized population disappeared along with Roman institutions. Celtic names for places also disappeared. On the western side of the island the Britons survived in greater number, and the names of rivers there remained in the language of the Britons. Celts survived in West Wales (Cornwall) and in hilly Scotland, where they were able to drive out the few Anglo-Saxons who had invaded there. . And Celtic people survived in Ireland, which had remained safe behind what would be called St. George's Channel. Christianity survived with the Celts, especially in Ireland, where Catholic scholarship continued to flourish.

What had been Roman ruled Britain was divided among Anglo-Saxon kings – warlords surrounded by men who were preoccupied with fighting, valor and loyalty. The Anglo-Saxons were largely illiterate. They viewed the god of the Christian Britons with contempt for having failed his people, and they brought with them from the continent gods that were similar to the gods of other polytheistic societies. There was a god of battles, Tiw, whose name contributed to the word for the third day of the week, Tuesday. They had another war god named Woden, whose name became a part of the wordWednesday. They had a god of thunder called Thunor, which became Thursday. And they had a goddess of fertility named Frig, which was the source of the word Friday. The Anglo-Saxons saw the world as driven by spirits and magic and saw consciousness and spirit in just about everything that moved or existed. They worshiped trees, wells, rivers and mountains. They believed in good spirits and evil spirits, gods and demons. They believed in hideous monster spirits called ogres, malicious ghost-like spirits called goblins, and they believed in mischievous elves. Among their myths was the story of Beowulf, a hero victor over a savage monster named Grendel and Grendel's dragon mother.

Christianity Returns to Britain

An Anglo-Saxon called Ethelbert (Aethelbert or Aethelberht), son of the warlord Eormenric, took power in 560 in a kingdom in southern England called Kent – one of the older if not oldest Anglo-Saxon settlements in England, dating from the mid-400s or a couple of decades earlier. Contacts between the Anglo Saxons and the people on the continent had been maintained. The young Ethelbert married the Catholic daughter of the king of Paris, Charibert, a descendant of Clovis, and Ethelbert allowed his bride, Berta, to bring to Kent a Frankish bishop as her chaplain.

More than thirty years later, Pope Gregory was hoping to make England Christian again, and he sent a group of monks to Kent to evangelize. The aging Ethelbert overcame his fear that the leading monk of the group would do witchcraft against him. That monk was Augustine – not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo who died in 430. Augustine managed to convert Ethelbert, and within a year several thousand of Ethelbert's subjects asked to be baptized as had their king.

Augustine persuaded Ethelbert to create a code of laws based on Roman law. These laws had punishments that differed according to class. Killing a nobleman brought a fine of 300 shillings, a commoner 100 shillings, a freedman from 40 to 80 shillings, and the fine for killing a slave might be 50 shillings. The fine for copulating with a maiden belonging to the king was fifty shillings, with a nobleman's serving woman twenty shillings, with an earl's serving woman six shillings. If a freeman stole from another freeman he paid a fine three times the value of what he stole and a fine to the king. Under Ethelbert, family members were considered responsible for one another, and members of an extended family might be required to help pay the fine of any family member.

War and the Hegemony of Northumbria

Augustine died in 604, and Ethelbert, after fifty-six years of rule, died in 616. Many of Ethelbert's subjects who had converted to Christianity relapsed, leaving little gained for Christianity. But Canterbury remained the center of Christianity in England.

Edwin, the Anglo-Saxon king of Northumbria, far to the north of Canterbury and Kent, married a princess from Kent – Aethelberg, the daughter of the late Ethelbert. Edwin promised to respect her faith. She had held to her father's Catholicism, and in 625 she brought with her to Edwin's capital, York, one of the missionaries who had arrived with Augustine from Rome twenty-four years before. Edwin and Aethelberg had a daughter, and Edwin agreed to his daughter being baptized a Christian and promised that if Christianity gave him a victory in a coming war that he too would convert to Christianity. Edwin returned from war triumphant, but he continued to hesitate. Finally in 627 he accepted Christianity for himself and his subjects, who apparently had little say in the matter.

As a result of his victory in various wars, Edwin the Christian became the most powerful king in England. Resenting Edwin's power was the pagan King Penda of Mercia, in the middle of England. King Penda made an alliance with the neighboring kingdom in the Celtic far west, North Wales, a kingdom under a Christian king named Cadwallon. For Cadwallon in this instance power considerations mattered more than religious differences. Together, in 632, the Christian and the pagan defeated the Christian Edwin, and Edwin's head was put on display in York.

Edwin's successor in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria was a Christian named Oswald, under whom Northumbria, in 633, rallied and defeated Cadwallon of North Wales, the last of the great battles between Anglo-Saxons and Celts. Then Oswald warred against King Penda of Mercia, and in 641 Oswald met the same fate as had Edwin: death and decapitation. But a few years later Oswald's younger brother, Oswui, rallied Northumbria again and defeated Penda. The kingdom of Northumbria remained the greatest power in England.

The Church Triumphs and Wars for Hegemony Continue

In the mid-600s Christian missionaries from Ireland began evangelizing across England. Catholicism had won prestige with the victory of Northumbria, and monotheism suited monarchy better than did a religion with many gods and numerous local shrines. The kings in England were inclined to welcome a religion whose scriptures described and supported monarchy. The king of Essex, Sigebert, influenced by Northumbria, converted to Christianity in 653, and Christianity spread into Mercia. Much of England was on its way to learning from the missionaries a sense of organization, and, within the Church, order was enhanced in 669 with the appointment of Theodore of Tarsus as archbishop over the whole of England.

But unity was not achieved. Civilization continued much as before – divided among kingdoms with no solid agreement as to who should rule where. Each of the Anglo-Saxon kings believed that his rule had origins in the god of his ancestors and that he, therefore, should not be subordinate to any another king.

Wars continued through the 700s and into the 800s. The kingdom of Mercia emerged as the dominant power in England. And with more warring, in 825 supremacy passed to the kingdom of Wessex, at Winchester.

The Scholar Bede

Accompanying the successful Christian evangelism in the latter half of the 600s, an Anglo-Saxon in the Kingdom of Northumbria named Bede (pronounced Beda), born in 673, was developing into a scholar. He was educated in monasteries and ordained as a priest in 703. He devoted his life to teaching theology, Hebrew, Greek and Latin and to writing. He wrote forty works: biblical commentaries, homilies, treatises on grammar, math, science and theology. The most important of these was the Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, completed in 731. He specified his sources, sought firsthand evidence, and quoted pertinent and available documents. "I would not," he wrote, "that my children should read a lie."

Concerned with dating, Bede wrote a work titled On The Reckoning of Time, which would be influential throughout the Middle Ages. He described the Earth as a sphere in explaining the change from daylight to night. He explained the changing appearance of the moon and tides in relation to the daily motion of the moon. Bede's influence extended to a new system of dating. It was Bede who started dating from "the year of the Lord" – in medieval Latin Anno Domini (AD), rather than from dates that kings ruled.

Hispania, 530-70. The Cantabrians, in the far north, are a Celtic people. Toledo was the center of Visigoth rule.

King Liuvigild in Madrid

Visigoths had expanded into the Iberian Peninsula in the 400s – called Hispania by the Romans. A Visigothic king ruled all of Hispania, at least nominally, except for small areas in the north populated by Basques and the Suevi kingdom in the west – the Suevi a Germanic people who had invaded Hispania during the previous century. There were Jews in Hispania, many of whom had arrived as far back at least as the first century, following trade routes. It has been claimed that Toledo was founded by Jewish colonists – a claim that historians cannot substantiate.

In the early 500s, the center of Visigothic rule shifted from Barcelona (on the coast in the northeast of Hispania) inland to Toledo. (See map on the right). The king of the Visigoths from 549 was Agila, whose rule was limited to his fellow Visigoths while many others he considered to be his subjects continued to see themselves as belonging to Imperial Rome, represented by Constantinople. In 551 a usurper, Athahagild, invited help from Constantinople's Emperor Justinian I, and in 554 Athanagild was crowned king. He recognized Justinian's rule in the far south of Hispania, a rule that was short lived.

Athangild died peacefully in 567 followed by the usual successor conflict. His brother, Liuvigild, won the contest, and he copied some of the pomp and ceremony of Byzantine rule. Liuvigild conquered the Suevi kingdom, and in the south he took the city of Merida, in Lusitania, away from the Catholic bishop and demanded that his trinity-believing subjects convert to the branch of Christianity to which the Visigoths were adhering: Arianism.

Muslim Invasion

In 589, Liuvigild's successor, Reccared (r. 586-601), sought political unity by renouncing his Arianism and accepting Catholicism, thus assuring an alliance with Constantinople. Most Visigoth nobles and ecclesiastics went along with Reccared, especially those near the king at the city of Toledo. But there was resistance and unrest. Warlords and great landholders assumed wide discretionary powers. Family feuds went unchecked. Jews had been enjoying some freedom under Visigoth rule, but now Christians saw Judaism as an evil contaminant that might spread to fellow Christians. Jews were ordered to become baptized as Christians, and persecutions of Jews began.

In the early 700s, what began as disorganized raids by Muslims turned into an invasion of Hispania by a roughly estimated 7,000 Berbers and 300 Arabs. Conquest was made easy by the political disunity among the Christians and by people, including Jews, welcoming the Muslims as liberators, with some joining the conqueror's armies. By 718, in a conquest of little bloodshed, the Muslims took control of all of Hispania except for the mountain area of Asturia along much of thepeninsula's north, where people fled from Muslim rule.

Around the year 722 in the mountainous north, a small army led by the Visigothic nobleman, Pelagius, who had rebelled against paying taxes to the Muslims, defeated a Muslim army – the Battle of Covadonga. Pelagius established a Christian principality in Asturia. The small town of León joined the new kingdom. It was a former Roman city with surviving Roman walls and had been a bishopric. It is said to have given a measure of legitimacy to the Asturian monarchs who sought to lead a unified church in Iberia against the Muslims.

What had been called Hispania the Muslims called al-Andalus. Muslim rule brought a new tolerance to Hispania. The Muslim conqueror, Tarik ibn Zeyad, described himself as a man of generosity and clemency and as neither covetous nor cruel. He asked those he conquered to give up their horses and arms and told them they could leave if they preferred or, if they remained, they could follow their own faith and customs and have their own courts. All that would be required of them, he said, would be a small tax. Christianity and Judaism were not viewed as a threat to Islam the way that Christians feared Judaic contamination. Christians and Jews were viewed by Muslims as people like they: "People of the Book" (scripture).

In the coming decades, Muslim cavalry made raids from Hispania into Gaul (France). This was more violence for the sake of booty that was terror for local people in Gaul – nothing that contributed to Muslims winning hearts and minds. The raiding was defeated by forces led by Charles Martel, with some Western scholars in the 1900s to exaggerate by describing Martel as having saved Christian civilization.

Berber Rebellion and the Rahman Dynasty

In the early 740s conflict erupted between Arabs and the Berbers who had invaded from North Africa. The revolt began inTanja (Tangier) in 740 – a revolt that would lead to the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus losing control over much of North Africa and Hispania. It had been encouraged by Kharijite puritan preachers critical of Umayyad rule. Organized Berber rebels defeated armies sent by the Damascus caliphate, and news of success by the Berber armies gave rise to a general Berber uprising in Hispania.

With a following of about 750 Berber horsemen, Abd ar-Rahman, who was an Umayyad prince, part Arab and part Berber, entered Hispania in the year 756 from North Africa. Rahman was able to unite Berbers and Arabs, and he became a warlord -- officially an emir – at the city of Córdoba, and from there in the late 750s he expanded his power. He continued the religious tolerance of the Muslim rulers, and he took advantage of the skills of the local craftsmen among the Jews and Christians, who remained a majority in al-Andalus. Rahman improved roads and had aqueducts constructed or improved. He was inspired by the great Mosque his family, the Umayyads, had built at Damascus, and around the year 786 he had a new mosque constructed on the site that had been the Visigoth cathedral of St Vincent.Conversion to Islam proceeded at a steady pace, including the Visigoth aristocracy, concerned with their status in what was now a Muslim-ruled society. Christians and Muslims mingled more closely. There were intermarriages and a deterioration of the Catholic Church.

But problems remained. For example in 840 a Muslim insisted that his two step children become Muslim, and his children's persistent refusal ended with their beheading (on October 21). In the 900s various Christians were killed, one a bishop who insulted Muhammad the Prophet after expressing the opinion common among bishops that Muhammad was a false prophet, a lying imposter and a dissolute adulterer. And there is a report of 200 monks of Cardena being massacred by Muslim soldiers in 934. But intermarriage, friendly mingling and conversions to Islam continued, with Muslims said to begin to outnumber Christians.

In the 10th century, power in Córdoba stayed within Rahman's family, passing to Abd-ar-Rahman III, who reigned from 912. He expanded his rule, bringing a new united to al-Andalus (Spain). In 929, he joined in defying the caliphate in Baghdad and declared himself Islam's caliph. With a caliph in Cairo and the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad he became the third caliph.

Caliphate of Córdoba in the year 1000. León, Castile, Navarra are ruled by Catholic monarchs. Barcelona is ruled by a feudal lord descended from one of Charlemagne's knights

With a well-disciplined army – perhaps the finest in the world, Rahman III secured peace with the Christian kingdoms in the north of the peninsula. Agriculture was advanced by the construction of irrigation works, and economic development was encouraged by widening streets and building market places. He amassed a library with 400,000 books, sending agents to accumulate books from Muslim areas in the east. Muslims, Christians and Jews were building a unique, integrated culture. Christians adopted Arabic as their language, and Jews mixed in the cities economic and social life.

Cordoba's reputation brought people to the city, more trade and an influx of goods. Córdoba became the largest and most cultural city in Europe and a city that rivaled the two great cities of the Middle East: Baghdad and Cairo. The city of Córdoba became the intellectual center of Europe. Students came from elsewhere in Europe to be taught by Arab, Christian, and Jewish scholars. Manuscripts accumulated in the city's library. Córdoba became famous for its philosophy, with translated works of Greek writers and philosophers. It would be from Córdoba that Christendom would acquire its knowledge of ancient works, including the works of Aristotle and achievements in medicine, mathematics and astronomy.

Rahman III expanded Córdoba's mosque, one of the more splendid of Islam's structures. He died in 1961 around the age 70, and was succeeded by his son, Al-Hakam II.

Al-Hakam secured peace with the Catholic kingdoms in the peninsula's north and made use of this peace by building irrigation works that advance his state agriculturally, and his program of widening streets and building market places improved the economy.

Al-Hakam's army repelled Norman attacks in 966 and 971 and defeated the Fatimids of northern Morocco in 974.

Al-Hakam was decidedly homosexual. He was known to have openly kept a male harem. Wikipedia reports that to produce an heir a concubine was dressed as a boy and given the masculine name of Jafar.

Christian Kingdoms in the North

By the 900s, the Christian princes of Asturias had shifted their capital to the city of León, and a neighboring area held in vassal to León had emerged, to be known as Castile, named because of castles in the region. Castile was divided politically among various people called counts. The In 931 it was unified after one of the counts, Fernán González, rose in rebellion against León, allowing rule to be inherited by his family rather than appointed by León.

Navarre, another kingdom in the mountainous northwest, one that bordered the Kingdom of France, had a beginning, more or less, with a military victory by people called Vascones, believed to be ancestors of the Basques. The battle was against a section of Charlemagne's army in the year 778, the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, high in the Pyrenees mountains. In the oral tradition the French would romanticize and falsify the battle, describing it as a major conflict between Christians and Muslims, the saving of Christian civilization from Islam.

The Slavs

The Slavs had been settled in what today are Belarus, northern Ukraine and eastern Poland. The historian Will Durant writes that "Periodically overrun by nomad hordes, often enslaved, always oppressed and poor, they grew patient and strong through endless hardships, and the fertility of their women overcame the high mortality of famine, disease, and chronic war." ^note13

The Slavs spoke an Indo-European language, suggesting they were Aryan. The Byzantine writer, Procopius (500-65), described them as tall, strong, tanned with reddish-blonde hair, dwelling in huts and mobile. He described them as going into battle on foot, charging straight at their enemy, armed with spears and small shields, but without armor. With speed and surprise they took advantage of their more armored opponents.

Some of them had migrated northeastward toward what today is Moscow. And when Germanic people began leaving for the Roman Empire and beyond, Slavs moved westward into the lands they had vacated. Also, they followed rivers, passed through forests and mixed with Finns and Baltic peoples. With the Roman Empire having disintegrated, from the 540s to the 580s they moved south into the partially depopulated Balkans and as far south as central Greece

An emperor in Constantinople, Maurice (r 582-602), who had spent years warring against them, described their tribal existence:

They have abundance of cattle and grain, chiefly millet and rye, but rulers they cannot bear and they live side by side in disunion. ^note14

Maurice, described them as living in villages, herding, farming. They fished, kept bees, made pottery and weaved baskets.

The Christian peoples of Constantinople's empire considered the Slavs to be unsophisticated and backwards. The Slavs were polytheists. But like other polytheists they had a supreme god, an obvious god of power, the god of thunder and lightening, Perun. To him the Slavs sacrificed oxen and other animals, and perhaps occasionally a human.

Emperor Heraclius (r 610-41), did what he could to regain control over the Balkans. He did recover control over Greece, but he felt compelled to grant Slavs settlement rights in the Balkans and hoped they would prevent incursions by others.

The Slavs, in addition to spreading out across Europe, had been assimilating with peoples they came upon. The Slavs have been described as warriors, but they were often interested in settling into farming, giving them a reputation as peaceful, although there were the usual conflicts and hostilities within any tribal grouping.

Despite Byzantine accounts of Slav pillaging and looting, many indigenous peoples voluntarily assimilated with the Slavs. Lack of an organized, central authority made it easier for non-Slavs to assimilate and to become a part of a tribalism based on both descent and invented belonging.

With the passing of centuries since the beginning of their spread across Europe, Slavs were dividing linguistically and ethnically toward those such as Russians, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks and Slovenes. The usual cultural diffusions gave rise to Slavs becoming Christians. Merchants from Constantinople and Thessalonica sold them jewelry, silks and spices and gave them contacts with Byzantine culture, including Christianity. From the 700s to the 900s Roman Catholic missionaries converted the Western Slavs. And Eastern Slavs were becoming heavily influenced by Byzantium and Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The Latin and Greek alphabet and literacy spread with Christianization.

The sociologist Francis Fukuyama describes Slavic tribes as seeing "their kinship structures dissolve within two or three generations of their conversion to Christianity."

The Byzantine Empire, 650 to 726 CE

After the mid-600s, Byzantium's Christian emperor at Constantinople continued to see his position as representing the authority of Rome. He saw himself as the authority over the Church's patriarch in Constantinople and bishops throughout the empire, including the Bishop of Rome, otherwise known as the Pope. With the coming of the Lombard in the late 500s, Constantinople had lost control over much of Italy which was not to be unified again until the 1800s. But Constantinople still saw itself as in control of Rome, and the Popes, during what is called the Byzantine papacy, considered the Byzantine emperor as having authority over them. Rome's bishops needed the approval of Constantinople's emperor before they were confirmed. Religious authority was still tied to political authority, which was tied to military power.

In Constantinople use of Latin of old Rome had been or was being replaced by Greek. Historians were to describe Byzantium as a "Greek civilization." This was a civilization with a lot of eunuchs at the emperor's court – similar to China but unlike the papacy in Rome.

Regarding this "civilization" the historian Will Durant would write:

Like every other civilization, it rested on the backs of serfs or slaves, and the gold and marble of its shrines and places were the transmuted sweat of workers toiling on or in the earth...There was something about it, a veneer of aristocratic refinement covering a mass of popular superstition, fanaticism , and literate ignorance... No science, no philosophy, was allowed to develop in conflict with that ignorance; and for a thousand years no addition was made by a Greek civilization to man's knowledge of the world. No work of Byzantine literature has caught the imagination of mankind, or won the suffrages of time. ^note16

Constantinople had a hero emperor in Constantine IV, whose reign began in 668, the year that the Umayyad Caliph Mu'awiyah sent an army against Constantinople's empire. The Muslims besieged Constantinople for four years, beginning in 674. Constantine inspired his subjects in their war against Islam, and he won an enhanced popularity and prestige.

Constantinople's victory came with its naval power and its use of "Greek fire," an invention with naphtha as its main component and resins probably added as a thickener, creating what was called "sticky fire."

The victory that Constantine led allowed the survival of the Byzantine state. Constantinople was the nerve center of the Byzantine state and had it fallen it is unlikely that the empire's remaining provinces would have held together, making them easier prey.

Having defeated the Arab Muslims, Constantine turned his attention to the Christian Church, which was torn between Monothelitism and Orthodoxy. In 680 he convened the Sixth Ecumenical Council, presiding in person surrounded by his court officials without making any theological pronouncements. The Council declared that Jesus Christ had two wills, one divine and one human. The idea that he had one will – Monthelitism – was made a heresy. Incorrect texts were ordered burned, except for examples to be locked away in the patriarchal library of heresies.

Constantine was succeeded by his son, Emperor Justinian II in 685, who wanted to restore the empire to its former glory. Justinian created a few hundred new laws during his reign. A "Farmer's Law" was created. Historians are not sure when, but it appears to have reduced the power that had belonged to the great landowners. Byzantine society was predominantly agricultural, and peasants were organized into "communities" as a single fiscal unit, with taxes levied on the community rather than on individuals. There were a host of laws concerning individual responsibility regarding property damage, and theft and retribution. For example if someone was responsible for someone else's loss of a crop he had to replace that loss double. The Farmer's Law, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica would have "an impact on legal developments among the south and east Slavs, particularly in Serbia."

Justinian II was determined to leave his mark on ecclesiastical affairs as well. In 691 he summoned an assembly of 165 bishops. Various canons (Church laws) were agreed on.

According to the historian John Norwich, canon 3 stated that "second marriages for the clergy are forbidden, and that no man who, after his baptism, has married a widow, a prostitute, a slave or an actress may enter the priesthood." Canon 11 stated that "no priest might consult a Jewish physician or take a bath in company with a Jew... " ^note17

While trying to preserve the morality of the empire (as had Augustus Caesar), Justinian II was holding on to an exaggerated sense of his power. John Norwich describes Emperor Justinian II as another of those who had inherited power and lacked the qualities of measure useful in political leadership. Norwich describes him as having inherited "a streak of mental imbalance." ^note18 Justinian demanded taxes from villages that were beyond the village's ability to pay. Among the displeased were the Slavs whom he had made a part of his empire. When new hostilities with the Arabs erupted in 691, some of his 20,000 Slav soldiers deserted to the Arab enemy.

John Norwich describes an enraged Justianian:

He is said to have rounded up all the Slav families in Bithynia – many hundred miles from the scene of the betrayal ... and then to have ordered a general massacre, with men, women and children by the thousand being slain in cold blood and flung into the sea. ^note19

Justinian attempted to break the power of the urban aristocracy through severe taxation and the appointment of "outsiders" to administrative posts. He made enemies of both aristocrats and common people. A popular rising against him in 695 drove him into exile to the Crimea, with his nose cut off and his tongue cut out. Norwich writes:

His rapacious ministers were less fortunate: tied by the feet to the backs of heavy wagons, they were then dragged down the Mese (the main road) from the Augusteum [city center] to the forum – the modern Aksaraay – and there burnt alive. ^note20

Justinian acquired a golden nose patch and someone to talk for him, and in ten years he was able to ride the empire's unstable politics and to stage a comeback coup. But Justinian II was to be the last of the Heraclian dynasty, which had acquired power in 610. Justinian ruled tyrannically and until 711, when his enemies rallied and had him arrested and beheaded, his head sent to the rebellion's leader as a trophy.

That man, a former general, became Emperor Philippicus. He was overthrown in 713 by a man who in turn was overthrown in 715, reminiscent of Rome's rapid turnover of emperors centuries before. The real power in the empire rested on approval from those instituted to overwhelm others through violence – the military. The rule of a former bureaucrat Theodosius III, which began in May 715, ended with a military coup. Theodosius saved himself by consenting to his overthrow, receiving assurances that neither he nor his son would be harmed. He abdicated and became a monk.

The military had been watching the approach of the second assault on Constantinople, under the Umayyad Caliph Sulayman. Constantinople's military leaders wanted a competent ruler running the empire and defense. The new emperor Leo III was one of them, and he wasted no time in preparing the city for the coming siege, including storing food.

The Muslims thought they were taking advantage of Constantinople's discord, and in the summer of 1717 an army of 80,000 Arabs and Persians attacked Constantinople, supported by 1800 ships. Again using "Greek fire," they set the Muslim navy aflame. The Muslim army was held off and in the summer of 718 they withdrew.

Having won against the Muslins, Leo moved to consolidate imperial power and administration, which before his rule had become completely disorganized. In 718 he suppressed a rebellion in Sicily. He secured the empire's frontiers by inviting Slavic settlers into the depopulated districts and by restoring the army to efficiency. Leo launched tax reforms. He turned serfs into free tenants and remodeled criminal law, in some cases substituting mutilation for the death penalty, reforms opposed by some nobles and higher clergy. The reforms were embodied in a new code called the Ecloga (Selection), published in 726.

That same year, Leo's advisors interpreted a volcanic eruption in the Aegean Sea as a sign of a divine warning against idolatry and advised Emperor Leo to ban icons from churches and public places. The military tended to be iconoclastic, believing that it had won God's approval in victories against the Muslims – who had been advertising the images issue with their support of the Judaic commandment against the making of "any graven image."

Leo III, by the way, was from what today is the mountainous province of Kahramanmaraş in southern Turkey, near Syria. He had been known as "the Syrian." He had grown up speaking Arabic. Byzantine emperors were a cultural mix similar to what the old Roman emperors had been. The same for patriarchs. The patriarch from 766 to 780 was to be Nicetas I, of Slavic ancestry and a eunuch.

The Icons and Images Conflict

Leo held to the Roman and Christian traditions of wanting to secure God's favor. Responding to the concerns of military people and their belief that God was offended by icon worship, in 730 Leo forbade representations of Jesus Christ and the Virgin, and Church murals were to be covered with plaster.

Opposed to Leo's move, the Church's patriarch, Germanus, had a propaganda concern: he feared that banning icons would indicate that the Church had been in error for a long time and that this would play into the hands of Jews and Muslims. In Rome, Pope Gregory II praised Germanus for his "zeal and steadfastness." Germanus was dismissed from his position. Gregory II died in 631, and his successor Gregory III appealed to Leo III to moderate his position. Leo had the Pope's representative arrested. Gregory increased his support of icon worship, and Leo sent a warship that was shipwrecked in the Adriatic Sea. Leo then transferred jurisdiction of papal territories in Sicily and Calabria to the patriarch of Constantinople.

The emperor, Leo, died peacefully in 741, at age 56. The inherent instability of the authoritarian dynasty system manifested itself with a two-year war over who was to succeed Leo – a war connected with the icon controversy. Leo's son, Constantine V, emerged as the new emperor, siding with strict enforcement of his father's prohibitions.

Among those opposed to restrictions on icon worship were the low clergy and monks, who didn't connect icon worship with paganism. This was similar in appearance to the Pharisees – commoners – supporting the importation of foreign (Persian) beliefs into Judaism while the aristocrat temple authorities, the Sadducees, were opposed.

On Constantine's side were the soldiers. Constantine had almost constant campaigning against Arabs, Slavs and Bulgars. His successes added to their support for him and his iconoclasm. Success was still seen as favor from God.

Emperor Constantine V is reported to have returned to the old punishments, to have imprisoned and tortured monks who resisted his father's law. Constantine closed monasteries and convents and gave the properties to people he liked. He had a rebellious patriarch paraded around the great stadium called the Hippodrome and then beheaded. According to Will Durant in The Age of Faith, "Again eyes or tongues were torn out, noses were cut off

Emperor Constantine's eldest son, Leo IV, whose reign began in 775, continued to enforce the law against icon worship. He had been married back in 768, when he was 18, to Irene of Athens. She had been selected for him (probably by his father, writes John Norwich) from a lineup of beautiful women in Athens. John Norwich describes Athens as having lost its old distinction. He continues:

The former intellectual capital of the world was now a pious little provincial town; even the Parthenon had been converted into a church. Worse still from the imperial point of view, the people of Athens were known to be fervent supporters of images; and Irene was no exception... Irene made no secret of her sympathy and strove to bring about the defeat of iconoclasm. ^note22

Leo IV pursued a path of conciliation between those for and against Icon worship. He is suspected of having died of tuberculous, just short of his 32nd birthday, five years into his reign. Their 9-year old became emperor with Irene as empress and his regent. Seven years later in the name of her emperor child a Council of Nicaea met at the Church of Hagia Sophia. It affirmed that icons could be venerated but not worshiped, and all iconoclast texts were ordered destroyed.

A conspiracy and uprising against Empress Irene had to be suppressed. In 790, the military recognized Constantine, at the age of 19, as having power independent of his mother's regency. Irene had lost power but was allowed to keep the title of Empress.

The same inter-family conflict and power considerations that had ruined the family of Constantine the Great was working on Irene's family, not terribly unlike political developments in China: similar in dynastic absolutism but different in religious ideology. Emperor Constantine VI's army lost a battle against Arabs and in 792 against Bulgars. A movement developed in favor of his uncle, and Constantine had his eyes put out and the tongues of his father's four other half-brothers cut off. His former Armenian supporters revolted after he blinded their general, Alexios Mosele, and he crushed this revolt in 793.

Irene organized a conspiracy against her son. In 797 Constantine was captured, blinded, and imprisoned by the supporters of his mother, leaving Irene to be crowned as a ruling Empress. When Constantine died is unknown. Irene was overthrown in 802 and forced into exile on the island of Lesbos and forced to support herself by spinning cloth. She died in 803 at an age of around 51.

A new dynasty began its rule. A former finance minister ruled from 802 to 811. His dynasty ended in 813, followed by the reign of Leo V, known as Leo the Armenian. He instituted a second period of Iconoclasm in 815, possibly motivated by military failures seen as indicators of divine displeasure, the Byzantines having suffered a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the Bulgarian Khan Krum. Leo the Armenian reigned seven years. A couple of emperors later was the Emperor Theophilos who reigned to 842. He died leaving his wife Theodora regent for his heir, and like Irene 50 years before her, Theodora presided over the restoration of icon veneration. Judith Herrin writes:

Despite the challenges posed by several military officials and her own male relatives, she succeeded in making a firm alliance with the court hierarchy, led by the chief eunuch Theoktistos, and previously exiled iconophile monks, and again an empress reversed iconoclasm. ^note23

This time it stuck. Historians were not to have documents with the arguments of the iconoclasts. They were destroyed. Byzantine Christianity, writes Herrin, "broke away from the established interpretation of what was a graven image," and Icons became celebrated in displays of Byzantium's public art.

The Bulgars into Europe

The Bulgars have been described as a Turkic people, speaking a language described by Wikipedia as "alongside with Khazar, Hunnic and Chuvash, a member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family." The Bulgars were a herding people who fought their way westward from Asia, raiding for plunder in the Balkans during the rule of Justinian I, and then retreating.

The Bulgars came under Avar domination. A man named Kubrat, Kuvrat or Kurt, meaning "Wolf," rose to prominence among the Avars and Bulgars. He had a Bulgar mother and an Avar father. Kubrat grew up as a hostage in Byzantium. Freed from captivity, between the years 630 and 635, in what today is the Ukraine (north of Constantinople's empire), he organized a federation consisting of Avars and Bulgars

Within a few decades, Onoguria divided and some of the people from there moved southward across the Danube River into the Balkans. According to a Byzantine chronicler this was the year 679. Constantinople was annoyed but busy warring against the Muslims.

The Bulgar invaders were under a military leader, or khan. They were uninterested in farming and made themselves lord and master over Slav farmers they came upon, exploiting peasant labor – a form of plunder with continuity.

With Constantinople's defeat of the Muslim-Arab siege in 678, it felt free to attack the Bulgars, but by now the Bulgars had consolidated their power and were able to withstand its attacks. The warring lasted into the 800s. In 811, the Khan of Bulgaria, Krum the Fearsome, outwitted the Byzantines and trapped them in closed valleys, killing nearly all of them, including the Byzantine emperor, Nicephorus. Krum made a drinking cup of Nicephorus' skull – an object of pride during feasting with his captains.

Krum harassed and laid siege to Constantinople in 813. Constantinople's citizenry climbed their city's walls for a view of those they considered exotic barbarians. A description of the attackers survives.

Krum offered sacrifices after the custom of his nation by slaughtering men and cattle before the Golden Gate [a gate to the city]. He then washed his feet in the sea and performed his ablutions, after which he besprinkled the people crowding around to do him honor. Returning to his camp he passed through the array of his concubines who worshiped and glorified their lord

Krum's appeals to his gods was to no avail. His army was unable to penetrate Constantinople's walls, and he had no fleet of ships to block Constantinople's contacts by sea. He returned to Thrace, whence he had come.

More Cultural Diffusion

As early as the 500s and 600s, Christianity had been spreading slowly and in bits and pieces from Byzantium to the Bulgars, despite their having considered Byzantium decadent. But the Bulgars also recognized Constantinople as advanced in civilization – as having writing, books and learning.

Living more than 200 years side by side with the Slavs, and intermarrying with them, the Bulgar's difference from the Slavs diminished. The Slavs had been more culturally advanced, and it was their alphabet and language that the Bulgars adopted.

Bulgaria became the first Slavic state on the Balkan peninsula worthy of being called a state. Khan Boris (r 852-89) adopted Christianity and opened Bulgaria to influences from Constantinople. And he sent one of his sons, Simeon, to be educated by the Byzantines.

Simeon ruled Bulgaria from 893 to 927. He wanted to help his fellow Bulgars culturally and helped in translating numerous books into the language of the Slavs. He also continued the tradition of his forefathers in opposing Constantinople as a power. Simeon held the title of emperor – tsar in his Slavic language. He wished to destroy Constantinople's power in order to enhance the power and grandeur of his kingdom, and he warred against Constantinople through most of his reign. Four times within eleven years Simeon advanced to Constantinople and attacked its walls, without success.

From the Lombards to Charlemagne, 570 to 814

Much of Italy was under the rule of the Lombards, a Germanic people from northern Europe who had adopted Roman ways, including Latin as their language and Catholicism as their religion. In Western Europe where Roman populations lived under the rule of German warlords, or where Roman populations lived under the rule of Roman nobles, Roman law prevailed. And in Italy this law still forbade marriage with Germans. Cultural diffusion, as always, was underway. But complete assimilation would take ages.

n Gaul, meanwhile, the Germanic King Clovis, a Catholic, divided his kingdom among his four sons – in keeping with Frankish custom. Rather than receive revenues from taxes, the sons of Clovis continued their tradition of plunder. They assaulted their neighbors, extending their control to Marseille and ending what had been the kingdom ofBurgundy. For the Franks, fighting remained the business of good weather, and carousing was the business of bad weather. Each spring the king's warriors set out on hunts for game or raids against some distant lord or king. Then they would go to the shrines of Christian saints, such as St. Martin, and offer their thanks for their victories and newly won treasures. For generations, the kings who were descended from Clovis did little except pursue their pleasures, enrich themselves and their dependents and lead an occasional military expedition. They made little effort to maintain a Roman administrative system. Eventually they began collecting taxes, but taxes were so detested that if a king wished to rid himself of an official that he disliked he could send him out to collect taxes, never to hear from him again.

The mother of the four sons, Clotilda, to be declared a saint, endured family feudings and killings – not unlike that which happened in family of Constantine the Great after his death. She is said to have encouraged the bloodletting in 523, having incited her sons against her cousin Sigismund to avenge the death of her parents. Others deny this and support the legend that she withdrew in sadness to Tours, close to the tomb of St. Martin, to whom she had great devotion, and spent the remainder of her life in prayer and good works. A source for all this is the writing of the bishop of Tours, Gregory of Tours, a historian who described events with his Christian perspective.

Warlords and Life in Gaul

What had been Gaul was divided into a number of petty kingdoms, with local aristocrats assuming as much control as they could. These aristocrats accumulated wealth and left little for the kings, and Gaul's kings became mere figureheads. The aristocratic landowners, like some of the kings, were crude, violent and unprincipled men, removed from the old tribal culture that had helped control individuals. They exercised authority as suited their passions, taking and discarding wives and concubines as they pleased and believing that they had the right to deflower a commoner's bride before he was allowed to consummate his marriage.

Self-sufficient estates that had survived Roman times dominated agriculture. These estates were populated by servile workers – ninety percent of Gaul's population – and a few craftsmen. These people wore clothing of hides and rough cloth and lived in huts, rising at dawn and bedding down with the setting of the sun. They heated their homes with gathered wood or grass and cow's dung. And rarely did they have candles to light their home.

Charlemagne

Among the Franks in Gaul a new dynasty of kings arose, the Carolingians, begun by Charles Martel (born 688, died 741). Martel's grandson became known as Charlemagne (French for Charles the Great). It was a dynasty dependent on the support of warlords called nobles, with whose help the Carolingians were able to fight wars and suppress peasant rebellions. These nobles recognized the Carolingian king as their overlord and the Carolingian king recognized the nobles as local rulers and rewarded them with land and booty for their services.

Much of Charlemagne's rule involved continuous warfare, and his power with the sword gave him influence with the Church. In the year 800, Pope Leo III crowned him emperor, hailing him as "Augustus, crowned of God … emperor of the Romans." The emperor in Constantinople also claimed to be the Roman Emperor, but Charles played down his title. It was the Empress Irene who ruled in Constantinople and her rule was tarnished by conflict. The papacy had been shifting away from Byzantium. Pope Leo was looking torward to a rival imperial power associated with Rome and referring to Costantinople as the ruler of Greeks, while Constantinople saw itself as having inherited the authority over all of what had been the Roman Empire. With Constantinople distracted by conflict and war, the Byzantine papacy was being replaced by what historians call the Frankish papacy.

Charlemagne's empire (map) was more rural and thinly populated than either the civilizations ruled by Constantinople or Islam – a result of low prosperity, which Charlemagne tried to raise. He encouraged more trade by giving guarantees to Jewish merchants. And under Charlemagne's rule agriculture improved.

Literacy in Gaul had all but disappeared since the invasions by the Germans, and Charlemagne invited scholars from England and Ireland to teach. He founded a school for the nobles of his court, and he tried to learn to read.

But, economic progress was taking place. People had begun taking advantage of river water to power their mills. Northern Europe was blessed with the low mountains and slow-moving rivers appropriate for such power. The three-field system had been introduced, allowing a field to lay fallow a year here and there, which increased per-acre harvests. The invention of the horse collar permitted a horse to pull a load three or four times as great as it had with a simple thong of leather around its neck. A tandem harness allowed numerous oxen to work as a team. A wheeled plow had been introduced that could knife deeply into the heavy, richer, wetter and often sticky soil of northern Europe. Rather than scratch the surface as other plows did, the new plow turned the soil over. Cross plowing was no longer needed. It took as many as eight oxen to pull such a plow, and peasants pooled their oxen and their labor. A great agriculture was beginning that would give advantage to northern Europeans and change the world.

Charlemagne encouraged learning, which was a rise above the attitudes in Stone Age societies, when no one believed in change or progress. Literacy in Gaul had all but disappeared since the invasions by the Germans, and Charlemagne moved to correct this. He invited scholars from England and Ireland to teach. He founded a school for the nobles of his court, and he tried to learn to read.

One of the scholars he invited to his court was Alcuin, an Englishman from York. His scholarship included ponderings on theology and adherence to dogma. He was also interested in grammar. His one contribution was the invention of lower case letters.

Charlemagne had other challenges to which he applied himself. Exercising his belief in change, he standardized weights, measures, and coinage. He replaced amateurs representing their community in local courts with itinerant professional judges who had a better understanding of law. And Charlemagne reformed the clergy. To be ordained a priest one had to take an examination.

But Charlemagne was also stuck in some old thinking. If anyone "by his magic" caused the death of anyone, he had to do penance for seven years. Or if anyone "took away the mind" of someone "by the invocation of demons," he had to do penance for five years.

At the end of Charlemagne's life his empire's roads were still primitive, making travel slow. There was little surplus wealth with which to make effective centralized governance. But it was the custom of dividing property among one's sons that played the biggest role in breaking down the centralized governance of Charlemagne – a custom that still existed among the Franks. Charlemagne's son and successor, Louis the Pious, divided the empire among three of his grandsons, one receiving western Gaul to the Pyrenees, another Charlemagne's realm roughly between the Rhine and Elbe rivers, and the eldest, Lothair, receiving the title of emperor and territory between the two others, from what is now Belgium and south in Italy just beyond Rome. The division was to last into modern times, between what would be France and Germany, with fragments of Lothair's kingdom to become Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

After Charlemagne, wandering minstrels sang of him and exercised humanity's proclivity to fantasize and exaggerate. They glorified his deeds and his ability as a conqueror. They described Charlemagne as having performed superhuman feats and as having dispensed perfect justice.

Vikings, Magyars, Warlords and Feudalism

their low draft boats, Scandinavians who were to be called Vikings ventured out with swords and battle axes on quick raids along Europe's shorelines or up rivers. They were back to sea before help could arrive, and with little or no resistance to their assaults they were encouraged to launch more and bigger assaults.

The Vikings had been described as highly skilled navigators and traders. The Vikings were responding to economic growth in their own country accompanied by an increase in population, and they were aware of the wealth that existed elsewhere and were inspired to go out and grab some of it. They were aware that treasury was being stored at monasteries and churches, and these were their usual targets, conveniently located on rivers and near the coast. They returned home happy with the prestige that their loot inspired, and their success inspired an increase in raiding. They reported that land was available abroad, and with the growth in population having eliminated the availability of land at home, more Scandinavians were willing to venture to distant areas for the purpose of settling down.

In Scandinavia, free men were obliged to possess weapons, and they were drafted for warfare, including raiding and plunder. According to the PBS presentation "Secrets of the Viking Sword" these were people who "worshipped their weapons" and believed that dying in battle was a way to get to paradise – Valhalla. Animistically, they believed that naming their sword after a person or creature of strength gave their sword added power. Not everyone could afford a good sword – the Ulfberht – and most men fought with axes and spears. Combat was not so much blade to blade contact as portrayed in old Hollywood films. According to the PBS documentary Secrets of the Viking Sword, "in the arms race of the day, blades rarely touched each other directly. Instead, they pounded against armor and shields as fighters tried to go for the kill." The higher quality Ulfberht, with less slag left in the sword in its creation, was less brittle and less inclined to embarrass its owner by breaking during battle. And the sword was strong enough steel to be thrust through and break chain mail.

The Vikings raided Paris, and they settled in Normandy. These were years of good weather and good sailing, and the Vikings ventured beyond Western Europe, and beyond England, Scotland and Ireland. They ventured as far as Iceland, Greenland and North America. The Vikings and their animals became Iceland's inhabitants, and between their use of wood and their animals wandering about, all the trees in Iceland would disappear.

How far the Vikings could spread was limited by their number, and in North America, where they were greatly outnumbered, their settlements failed and they were forced to withdraw to Greenland.

The Vikings had greater success closer by. They crossed the Baltic Sea and in waves passed down the Dnieper and Volga rivers. They were intent on looting treasure in Arabia but did not make it that far. Instead they conquered Slavs and set up a kingdom at Novgorod and at Kiev.

England was close by, and Vikings arriving there turned to conquests. A great army of Vikings in 865 overthrew the kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and East Anglia. Alfred the Great of Wessex (871-899) rallied England against the Vikings, but in East Anglia and Northumbria the Vikings settled, while remnants of the Viking "great army" sailed away to the continent. In the next two centuries Vikings would continue to make their way to England, and the English would send them away with a bribe.

Magyars

From the Hungarian Plain, fierce Magyar tribesmen terrorized Europe. They raided isolated villages and monasteries, and in 899 they routed an Italian army at Brenta in the far northeast of Italy.

Today, the Institute of Hungarian Studies defends the Magyars. László Botos and Susan Tomory write:

In the life of every nation, there is a period that modern historians judge through the eyes of the present and find actions that by modern standards are unacceptable. In Hungarian history such a period was the ninth century. The campaigns of the Magyars against the West might possibly be compared only to the campaign of Hannibal. However, even Hannibal's campaign does not measure up to the campaigns of Bulcsu Horka, Lehel, Botond and Szabolcs, which were all victorious campaigns except for the Battle of Lechfeld, which took place in the heart of the German territory.

The West calls these campaigns "wild, robbing campaigns," forgetting that the Magyar "robbing campaigns" were preceded by the robbing campaigns of Charlemagne and Pepin, centuries earlier, who boasted proudly about the amount of treasures that they acquired.

Beginning in 917, Constantinople supported the Magyars against their enemy the Bulgarians. Constantinople gave the Magyars gold and precious robes to encourage them to attack the Bulgars from the rear. For several years the Magyars raided Bulgaria in force. The Bulgars drove the Magyars from the Black Sea westward. In the 930s the Magyars swept through Germanic lands to Paris and down the Italian peninsula past Rome. They took prisoners and sold them to the slave markets of the East.

In 955 the king of Germany, Otto I, devastated the Magyars in battle, the Magyars unable to stand up to frontal assaults from heavy cavalry. The Magyars returned to the Hungarian Plain, and there they settled down. They ruled over Serb farmers, and they defended themselves against the aggressions of nobles dominating the Holy Roman Empire.

Feudalism

In what had been Charlemagne's empire, feudalism grew in response to Muslim, Viking and Magyar raiding. Into the 900s, raiding disrupted tenuous lines of trade and communication, and agricultural production fell. Money was not yet the dominant means of exchange. Instead of buying military services with cash, great landholders gave land (a fief) to a someone called a vassal, also to be called a knight, who was expected to supply those under him as fighting men. In other words, feudalism was a military system, and like all military systems loyalty was a valued ingredient. There was the vassal's vow to his lord that he would love what the lord loved, hate what the lord hated and be bound to serve and respect the lord. "Thy friends," the vassal promised to his lord "will be my friends, and thy enemies my enemies."

It was military matters that decided who ruled where, and Charlemagne's sibling successors had been losing power to the leaders of the military machines: the big landowners, called lords.

The fighting men had the best means of transport on land: horses. Saddles with stirrups had arrived from Asia, and with these someone with armor on horseback had more stability and the ability to stand when wielding a sword or lance and carrying a shield. And the horses had iron horseshoes, which allowed them to carry more weight across rough ground.

The new system of defense was at times effective in chasing away marauders. But the little armies were at times also used against hostile neighbors and to settle territorial disputes. A new kind of warfare was coming into being, often involving sieges against neighboring lords holding out behind castle walls.

Otherwise the knights might be hunting on horseback, both as recreation and military exercise. The knights were a new form of aristocrat. In this new era of danger, common farmers joined the system by surrendering their land to a local lord for the protection offered by him and his knights. The lords were applying their power to what they saw as their advantage. Farmers (peasants) were going from freeholders of land to a subject of the lord. The lord benefited from the peasant's harvests and sometimes dictated personal matters such as to whom one could marry. A new serfdom was developing.

The Capetian Dynasty

What today is France was in the 900s a patch work of feudal lords also to be referred to (in the Oxford dictionary) as "robber barons." There were alliances and marriages, and a new dynasty was begun by Hugh Capet, a member on his father's side of a powerful landowning family, the Robertians. He was also the fifth great-grandson of Charlemagne. He made alliances and won recognition as a king, his reign said to begin in 987, when he was 46. He lived to 55 and was succeeded by his son, Robert II, the beginning of a dynasty that would last into the early 300s. Titles were much appreciated and they wore the title "King of the Franks." Capet and his successors ruled from behind the walls of Paris, in drafty, smelly and poorly sanitized castles only a few miles from robber barons. Castles were the defense strategy of the day – barriers against the weapons of the day: swords, knives, pikes, crossbows, spears and the Viking's battle axe.

No warlord elsewhere in France had the military power or will to overthrow Hugh Capet. They were too independent-minded and fearful of one another to unite as a force against him.

6tht15thCenturies

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

6 Europe: 501 to 1000 CE