Although the Visigothic kingdom fell to Arab and Berber armies in 711, the small Christian principalities in the north of the Iberian Peninsula held out. They too produced remarkable scholars, some of whom were eventually judged to hold heretical beliefs. The Christological theology of adoptionism, which held that Christ in his humanity is the adopted son of God, greatly troubled the Carolingian court and generated a substantial literature on both sides before the belief was declared heterodox. But Iberia also produced scholars for Charlemagne’s service, particularly Theodulf of Orleans, one of the emperor’s most influential advisers.
The kingdom of the Lombards, established in northern and central Italy in the later 6th century, was originally Arian but converted to Catholic Christianity in the 7th century. Nevertheless, Lombard opposition to Byzantine forces in northern Italy and Lombard pressure on the bishops of Rome led a number of 8th-century popes to call on the assistance of the Carolingians. Pippin invaded Italy twice in the 750s, and in 774 Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom and assumed its crown. Among the Lombards who migrated for a time to Charlemagne’s court were the grammarian Peter of Pisa and the historian Paul the Deacon.
From 778 to 803 Charlemagne not only stabilized his rule in Frankland and Italy but also conquered and converted the Saxons and established frontier commands, or marches, at the most vulnerable edges of his territories. He built a residence for himself and his court at Aachen, which was called “a second Rome.” He remained on excellent terms with the bishops of Rome, Adrian I (reigned 772–795) and Leo III (reigned 795–816). Scholars began to call Charlemagne “the father of Europe” and “the lighthouse of Europe.” Although the lands under his rule were often referred to as “the kingdom of Europe,” contemporaries recognized them as forming an empire, much of which extended well beyond the imperial frontiers of Rome. Because of its use in reference to the empire, the old geographical term Europe came to be invested with a political and cultural meaning that it did not have in Greco-Roman antiquity.
In 800 Charlemagne extracted Leo III from severe political difficulties in Rome (Leo had been violently attacked by relatives of the former pope and accused of various crimes). On Christmas Day of that year Leo crowned Charlemagne emperor of the Romans, a title that Charlemagne’s successors also adopted. Although the title gave Charlemagne no resources that he did not already possess, it did not please all his subjects, and it greatly displeased the Byzantines. But it survived the Frankish monarchy and remained the most respected title of a lay ruler in Europe until the Holy Roman Empire, as it was known from the mid-12th century, was abolished by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806, a little more than 1,000 years after Charlemagne was crowned. Historians still debate whether the coronation of 800 indicated a backward-looking last manifestation of the older world of late antiquity or a new organization of the elements of what later became Europe.
Charlemagne’s kingdoms, but not the imperial title, were divided after the death of his son Louis I (the Pious) in 840 into the regions of West Francia, the Middle Kingdom, and East Francia. The last of these regions gradually assumed control over the Middle Kingdom north of the Alps. In addition, an independent kingdom of Italy survived into the late 10th century. The imperial title went to one of the rulers of these kingdoms, usually the one who could best protect Rome, until it briefly ceased to be used in the early 10th century. Carolingian decline and its consequences
After the Carolingian dynasty died out in the male line in East Francia in 911, Conrad I, the first of a series of territorial dukes, was elected king. He was followed by a series of vigorous and ambitious rulers from the Saxon (919–1024) and Salian (1024–1125) dynasties. Otto I (reigned 936–967), the most successful of the Saxon rulers, claimed the crown of the old Lombard kingdom in Italy in 951, defeated an invading Hungarian army at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, and was crowned emperor in Rome in 962. In contrast to the kings of East Francia, the rulers of West Francia, whose last Carolingian ruler was succeeded in 987 by the long-lasting dynasty of Hugh Capet (the Capetian dynasty), had difficulty ruling even their domains in the middle Seine valley, and they were overshadowed by the power of the territorial lords who had established themselves in principalities in the rest of the kingdom.
The end of Carolingian expansion in the early 9th century and the inability of several kings to field sufficiently large armies and reward their followers were two consequences of the division of Charlemagne’s empire. In addition, the empire now shared borders with hostile peoples in the Slavic east and in the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Iberia. The end of expansion meant that the basis of the economy shifted from mixed forest-agricultural labour and income drawn from plunder and tribute to more-intensive cultivation of lands within the kingdoms. Accordingly, kings were forced to draw on local resources to reward their followers. The consequences of these military and economic changes included a general weakening of royal authority, the transformation of the Carolingian aristocracy into active lords of the land, and a loss of social status for the labourers who worked the land.
In the 9th and early 10th centuries a series of invasions from Scandinavia, the lower Danube valley, and North Africa greatly weakened the Carolingian world. The divisions within the Frankish empire impaired its ability to resist the Viking and Hungarian invasions but did not destroy it. Kings and warlords ultimately either turned back the invaders, as Otto I did in 955, or absorbed them into their territories, as the kings of West Francia did with the Vikings in Normandy. In England the invasions destroyed all of the older kingdoms except Wessex, whose rulers, starting with Alfred, expanded their power until they created a single kingdom of England.
Exhumed Viking ship; in the Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway.age fotostock/SuperStock
Although two kinds of invaders—the Scandinavians and the Hungarians—became acculturated and Christianized during the next several centuries, creating the Christian kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, the Islamic world remained apart, extending from Iberia and Morocco eastward to the western edges of China and Southeast Asia. In the case of western Europe, the attacks of the 9th and 10th centuries were the last outside invasions until the Allied landings during World War II; indeed, for a period of nearly 1,000 years western Europe was the only part of the world that was not invaded. Western Europe developed internally without outside interference, expanded geographically, increased demographically, improved materially, and engaged in cultural, commercial, and technological exchanges with parallel civilizations. Growth and innovation
Although historians disagree about the extent of the social and material damage caused by the 9th- and 10th-century invasions, they agree that demographic growth began during the 10th century and perhaps earlier. They have also identified signs of the reorganization of lordship and agricultural labour, a process in which members of an order of experienced and determined warriors concentrated control of land in their own hands and coerced a largely free peasantry into subjection. Thus did the idea of the three orders of society—those who fight, those who pray, and those who labour—come into use to describe the results of the ascendancy of the landholding aristocracy and its clerical partners. In cooperation with bishops and ecclesiastical establishments, particularly great monastic foundations such as Cluny (established 910), the nobility of the late 11th and 12th centuries reorganized the agrarian landscape and rural society of western Europe and made it the base of urbanization, which was also well under way in the 11th century.
Peasants sowing and cultivating fields outside a walled town in the Middle Ages.North Wind Picture Archives
Demographic and agricultural growth