Europe+in+the+Middle+Ages

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Terms to know:

"Barbarian" invasions Clovis Franks Merovingians Carolingian dynasty Charlemagne Carolingian Renaissance Aix la Chappelle Cluny Viking invasions 100-Years' War The Laws of William the Conqueror King Harold William of Normandy

The Middle Ages is a complex period in European history, and deserves to be broken into several smaller units, as later historians have done, in order to make sense. In a nutshell the story of the middle ages is a story of fragmentation and an inclination toward reunification. We can seen this pattern in the early Middle Ages, as we look at the fragmentation of Europe following the fall of the Western Roman Empire. During this period, what we now call Europe was atomized. So-called **"Barbarian" invasions** of Roman territories exacerbated a decentralizing tendency to build strongholds and villages away from population centers to avoid Roman tax collectors. This was reversed by **Clovis**' unification of the **Franks** and the subsequent move toward centralization under the **Merovingians** which accelerated under the **Carolingian dynasty**, especially **Charlemagne**. The **Carolingian Renaissance**, and military successes culminating in Charlemagne's crowning as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE show us that for all of its atomization and baronial politics, Europe was on its way toward a central regime with centralized legal and property-holding systems based at **Aix la Chappelle**. However, this was interrupted as it began by the raids of Avars, Magyars, and Vikings in the 10th and 11th centuries. These raids caused varying reactions in different parts of Europe (or Christendom, as it was called). These included a new fracturing of the fragile unity wrought by the Carolingians, an attempt by the Church, centered in the Cathedral at **Cluny**, to create a Christian empire with the pope at its center, and a grudging alliance among petty kings and barons in England.

Following the period of **Viking invasions** however, beginning about 1066, Europe began once again to march toward political and social unification - though not on a scale as grand as that of the Romans. The controlled chaos of the decentralized baronial kingdoms was about to give way to a new kind of order, starting with England and France, that we now call national. Of course, this development was slow and uneven, and never inevitable. But the seeds were sewn for two new nations by 1447 -the end of the **100-Years' War**. The seeds of those seeds is what we want to look at in this lecture.

England in 1066 was an Anglo-Saxon domain that had been ruled by the Danish king, Anglo-Saxon Kings, and Roman governors in various different power structures for centuries. In that year, though, **William of Normandy** crossed the English Channel with 5,000 mounted knights and conquered England, destroying **King Harold** and claiming the throne of England for himself. He placed his knights in charge of various territories as feudal lords on the French model, then set about creating a relatively centralized government. [|The Laws of William the Conqueror] give us some idea of what he was trying to accomplish. In the same way, he organized his government by turning the Anglo-Saxon Witten into a king's court with administrators drawn from among his trusted supporters.