From Empire to Kingdom: Europe, 400-1000
Fall 2008
Class Website
This class examines the social, political and cultural history of Western Europe from the collapse of Roman authority to the turn of the first millennium. Over the course of the semester we will look at the emergence of the earliest post-Roman kingdoms, some successful (Francia, Anglo-Saxon England) others failures, destined to fail (Vandal Africa, Burgundy, and Ostrogothic Italy). How did new kingdoms and new kings actually emerge from the rubble of the late Roman West? What survived from the late Roman world? What was new? Why did some polities and peoples survive whilst others fell by the wayside? How and why did the world change in Western Europe across these six centuries? Subjects to be addressed in this class will also include: religious life: piety and the cult of the saints; historical writing; ethnic self-perception; intellectual culture; the character of everyday life; manuscript production; social organization; feud, violence and warfare: law and dispute settlement; travel and the changing nature of the post-Roman economy.
It must be stressed that the period 400 to 1000 AD is no homogeneous period of time. At the very least it ought to be divided into a sequence of discrete and very different periods:
The fifth and sixth centuries, when we see early polities emerge in the West and repeated attempts by the eastern Byzantine Empire to take back control of large tracts of the former western provinces.
The seventh and early eighth centuries, a time that saw both the redrawing of the political and religious map of the Mediterranean in the wake of the rise of Islam, the formation of a number of core kingdoms in Western Europe and the weakening of Byzantine ties and claims to western territories.
The later eighth and ninth centuries, the period of initial Carolingian ascendance and subsequent decline in western Europe, Viking attacks and rapid cultural developments, the so-called ‘Carolingian Renaissance’.
The tenth century, a divided ‘post-Carolingian’ world characterized by the weakening of power in West Francia (‘France’), the emergence in East Francia (‘Germany’) of the Ottonian dynasty, a second wave of Viking attack issuing from increasingly centralized Scandinavian kingdoms and, towards the year 1000, stirrings of apocalyptic anxiety.
Students will be expected to engage with archaeological and literary sources, and to undertake 150-190 pages of reading per week, a mix of primary texts (in English translation) and secondary studies. This course fulfills the second writing requirement, demanding that students write two medium-length papers (2000 words), and take both a mid-term and a final exam.