Early Medieval Christianity: The Church from Rome to the Conversion of Europe (c. 500–1000)

Between the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire in the late fifth century and the eve of the year 1000, Christianity transformed itself from the official religion of a Mediterranean imperium into the foundational culture of a new European civilization. In the space of a few generations, the Church inherited the empire’s administrative, cultural, and ideological functions, even as it lost much of the empire’s wealth, urban infrastructure, and political reach. By 1000, virtually every people between the Atlantic and the Slavic world had been baptized in the name of Christ, and Latin Christendom - together with its Greek Orthodox and eventually Islamic neighbors - had become the dominant frame within which early medieval societies understood themselves.

The story of this transformation is the story of the Early Medieval Christianity as a whole. It is also a story told in registers that range from the institutional to the intimate: the slow crystallization of papal authority in Rome, the rise of the Benedictine monasticism as the dominant form of Western religious life, the great missionary movements that carried Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons, the Franks, the Germans, the Slavs, and the Norse, and the iconoclasm controversy that shook the Byzantine Empire to its foundations. None of these processes can be understood in isolation. Each shaped and was shaped by the others, and together they produced a religious world that was at once a continuation of late antiquity and something genuinely new.

The Church on the eve of the early Middle Ages

By the time the last Western Roman emperor was deposed in 476, the Christian Church was already the most widespread and best-organized institution in the Latin world. Christian bishops had inherited the municipal leadership of the Roman cities, the emperor Constantine had convened the great ecumenical councils of the fourth century, and Theodosius I had made orthodox Christianity the official religion of the empire in 380. The Church spoke the imperial language, Latin, used the empire’s road network to summon bishops to councils, and was deeply entangled with the imperial bureaucracy through the system of imperial taxation, episcopal courts, and the episkope of the bishop over his city.

Yet the early Christian Church was not a unified institution. It was a communion of regional churches - the patriarchates of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem - each with its own traditions of liturgy, theology, and discipline. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 had already defined orthodox Christology at the cost of separating the Egyptian and Syrian churches into lasting Miaphysite traditions, and the Nestorian churches of Persia had been politically distinct from the Roman state for nearly two centuries before the fall of the West. The Latin West, centered on Rome, had long been suspicious of theological innovation in the Greek East. The Eastern churches, for their part, regarded the Western Church as crude in theology and slow in administration. The schism that would eventually divide the Church was, in 476, still centuries away, but the cultural and linguistic differences that would feed it were already in place.

The collapse of Roman authority in the West changed the situation profoundly. The Church lost its imperial paymaster, its privileged access to the courts, and much of its urban infrastructure. The bishop of Rome was now the senior Christian prelate of a city that was no longer the capital of an empire, presiding over a population that was rapidly being impoverished, abandoned, or absorbed by incoming Germanic peoples. The great North African and Spanish bishoprics, which had produced some of the most important Latin theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries, were cut off from Roman communion by the Vandal and Visigothic conquests. The Gallic church, while still active, found itself under the rule of the Frankish kings who were not yet Christian. Only the Irish church, on the far edge of the Roman world, retained a measure of independence and growth, and it was precisely there that a distinctive form of monastic Christianity would soon emerge.

The papacy and the search for a new Rome

The most consequential institutional fact of Western Christianity in the early Middle Ages was the emergence of the papacy as an independent center of authority. The bishop of Rome had long claimed a special position by virtue of his association with the apostles Peter and Paul, both of whom were believed to have been martyred in the city. In the fifth century, Popes such as Leo I (440-461) had asserted the bishop of Rome’s authority over the whole Western church, famously meeting Attila the Hun in 452 and helping to persuade him to spare Italy. By the early sixth century, however, the papacy had lost much of its political weight. Theodoric the Ostrogoth ruled Italy, and the popes were effectively his subjects; for most of the century, they were drawn from aristocratic Roman families whose loyalties were divided between the old senatorial order and the new Germanic monarchy.

The situation changed dramatically in the sixth century, when the Eastern Roman Empire under Justinian launched a campaign to reconquer Italy. The Gothic Wars (535-554) devastated the peninsula, but they also restored a degree of imperial protection to the papacy. The Liber Pontificalis, a sequence of papal biographies compiled in the sixth century, presents a striking image of the popes as pastors, builders, and martyrs, often acting independently of imperial authority and sometimes in active opposition to it. The most famous of the early medieval popes, Gregory the Great, served as bishop of Rome from 590 to 604 and laid down many of the patterns that the medieval papacy would follow: the assertion of moral authority over secular rulers, the systematic use of monastic resources for the governance of the Church, and the energetic direction of missionary activity in northern Europe.

The seventh and eighth centuries were more difficult. The Lombards pressed on Rome from the north, the Byzantine exarchs in Ravenna were increasingly unable to defend the city, and the popes were forced to look for new sources of support. The famous Donation of Constantine, an eighth-century forgery that purported to record Constantine the Great’s gift of temporal authority to the pope, was in part a response to this vulnerability: it claimed for the Roman church a temporal dominion that could not in fact be defended. The forgery also served, alongside the Frankish alliance, as a charter for the new political order that was emerging in the Latin West.

The decisive moment came on Christmas Day, 800, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne “great and pacific emperor of the Romans” in St. Peter’s Basilica. The act was complex and contested. Charlemagne had already ruled as king of the Franks and Lombards for nearly a decade; the imperial title gave him a religious and ideological dignity that paralleled that of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, and it implicitly asserted the pope’s right to confer such dignity. From this point onward, the papacy was an active participant in European politics, sometimes the tool of powerful dynasties, sometimes their critic, but always a force to be reckoned with. The papacy in the early Middle Ages is therefore a story of recovery and reconstruction, but also of profound transformation: the bishop of Rome became a prince, a diplomat, and a spiritual sovereign whose authority extended far beyond the walls of the city.

Monasticism and the religious life

Alongside the papacy, the other defining institution of early medieval Christianity was monasticism. The monastic movement had begun in the East in the third and fourth centuries, with figures such as Anthony the Great, Pachomius, and Basil of Caesarea developing a tradition of ascetic withdrawal from the world. In the West, the movement was initially slow to take root. Jerome’s letters to Roman noblewomen in the early fifth century had popularized the ideal of consecrated virginity, but the organized monastic life of the West was largely imported from the East. Augustine of Hippo’s rule, which emphasized common life in a community under a superior, was one of the most influential early Western texts; it shaped the canons applied to canons regular and to cathedral chapters for centuries. The Rule of the Master, attributed to a fifth-century Italian abbot, and the various Irish rules of the sixth and seventh centuries, including the famous Rule of Columbanus, represent further variations on the monastic theme.

The decisive text for Western monasticism, however, was the Rule of St. Benedict, written in the early sixth century for the monastery of Monte Cassino. Benedict’s rule was deliberately moderate. It provided for a balanced life of prayer, work, and study, and it required monks to take vows of stability, obedience, and conversion of life - the famous stabilitas, oboedientia, and conversatio morum that would define Western monasticism for centuries. The rule was not the only one in use, and it was not always the most popular; Irish peregrini, who wandered through Western Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries, often followed the harsher Celtic rules. But by the Carolingian period the Benedictine rule had become the standard, and the monasticism of the early Middle Ages is, in practice, largely Benedictine monasticism.

The Carolingians promoted the Benedictine rule as part of their program of religious reform. Benedict of Aniane, a Visigothic nobleman turned monk, was commissioned by Louis the Pious to enforce a uniform rule across the empire, and the Synod of Aachen in 817 issued the Capitulare monasticum and laid down detailed regulations for monastic life. The result was the so-called “Benedictine” monasticism of the ninth and tenth centuries: a network of great abbeys, often richly endowed, that served as centers of prayer, learning, hospitality, and economic management. Houses such as Corvey, Reichenau, St. Gall, Cluny, and Fleury became the chief instruments of religious and cultural life in the Latin West.

Irish and Scottish monasticism followed a different path. The Irish monastic tradition, shaped by figures such as Columba of Iona and Columbanus, was characterized by itinerant ascetics who founded networks of cells and dependencies rather than the large, stable communities favored on the continent. Irish monks were famous for their asceticism, their learning, and their missionary zeal, and they played a crucial role in the Christianization of northern Britain and of continental Europe. The Synod of Whitby in 664 marked a turning point in the history of English Christianity when the Roman computation of Easter, championed by the Augustine of Canterbury and his successors, was accepted by the Northumbrian church in preference to the older Irish tradition. The decision was symbolic as well as practical: it aligned the English church with Rome, set the stage for further missionary work, and initiated a long process of integration between the Celtic and Roman traditions that would culminate in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germans and the great Benedictine reforms of the tenth century.

The Christianization of Europe

The most visible achievement of early medieval Christianity was the conversion of Europe. By 1000, virtually every people between the Atlantic and the Russian steppes had been baptized in the name of Christ. The process had begun in late antiquity, with the conversion of the Franks under Clovis (c. 496), the Visigoths under Reccared (587), and the Anglo-Saxons under Æthelberht of Kent (c. 597). It continued through the seventh century, with the conversion of the Lombards, the Irish, and the Picts; through the eighth, with the conversion of the Germans, the Frisians, the Saxons, and the Avars; and through the ninth and tenth, with the conversion of the Bulgars, the Serbs, the Moravians, the Bohemians, the Poles, the Rus, the Hungarians, the Danes, the Norwegians, the Swedes, and the Icelanders. By the time of the Christianization of the Norse, the process that had begun with Constantine was essentially complete in Europe.

Conversion was rarely a single event. The Christianization of Europe was a long, uneven process involving royal decisions, monastic missions, political alliances, popular resistance, and the slow work of building Christian institutions. The classic pattern was that of the Anglo-Saxons: a king would accept baptism, often under the influence of a Christian wife or a Frankish or Roman missionary, and would then support the establishment of bishoprics and monasteries in his kingdom. The missionaries were often monks, sent by the pope or by a major monastic house, who traveled with the protection of the king and the support of his court. Augustine’s mission to Kent in 597, sent by Gregory the Great, was the prototype for the Anglo-Saxon missions to the continent in the seventh and eighth centuries: Willibrord’s mission to the Frisians, Boniface’s mission to the Germans, and the later missions of Ansgar to Scandinavia and of Cyril and Methodius to the Slavs.

The mission to the Anglo-Saxons is the best-documented case. Augustine and his companions landed in Kent in 597, and within a generation the new religion had been established in Kent, Essex, East Anglia, and Northumbria. The conversion of England was not complete for nearly a century, and even then it was contested by pagan reaction and political crisis. The Synod of Whitby, the mission of Chad to Mercia, the flowering of Northumbrian monasticism under Bede, and the Viking attacks of the ninth and tenth centuries all shaped the process. By 1000, however, England was a Christian kingdom with a sophisticated ecclesiastical infrastructure, and it was about to send out its own missionaries to Denmark, Norway, and beyond.

The Christianization of continental Europe was similarly varied. The Franks, the first of the Germanic peoples to convert, were followed by the Lombards, the Bavarians, the Saxons, and the Frisians, often under the influence of Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks. The Slavs were evangelized by two main streams: the Roman Catholic mission of Cyril and Methodius to Moravia and Pannonia in the ninth century, and the Byzantine mission to Bulgaria, Serbia, and Rus. The Norse were converted in part through the agency of Christian kings - Harald Bluetooth of Denmark, Olaf Tryggvason and Olaf Haraldsson of Norway - and in part through the slow infiltration of Christian traders and settlers into the Scandinavian world. The mission to the Slavs was particularly significant because it produced the first Slavic literary language, Old Church Slavonic, and the first Slavic alphabets, the Glagolitic and the Cyrillic.

Conversion was not simply a matter of baptism. It involved the building of churches, the establishment of bishoprics, the endowment of monasteries, the creation of Christian law codes, the suppression of pagan practices, and the slow transformation of custom and belief. The work of Christianization was therefore a work of institution-building as much as of evangelism. Monasteries became the chief instruments of religious, cultural, and economic life; bishoprics were the basic units of ecclesiastical administration; and the Christianization of customary law - in the Leges of the Germanic peoples - was one of the most important features of the early medieval legal order.

The iconoclasm controversy

While Western Christianity was consolidating its institutions and expanding its reach, the Eastern Church was convulsed by a profound and lasting crisis. The iconoclasm controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries was, at one level, a dispute about the use of religious images. The iconoclasts argued that the veneration of icons - painted or mosaic images of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints - was a form of idolatry forbidden by the Old Testament. The iconodules, or defenders of the icons, replied that the honor paid to images passed through them to their prototype, and that the denial of the legitimacy of images was itself a form of heresy, since it denied the reality of the Incarnation.

The controversy had deep political roots. The iconoclast emperors of the eighth century, beginning with Leo III in 726, used the campaign against images as a means of centralizing power and confiscating the wealth of the monasteries. The iconodules resisted, and for more than a century the Eastern Church was riven by persecution, exile, and occasional martyrdom. The Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which upheld the veneration of icons, was followed by a second wave of iconoclasm under Leo V in 815, and the controversy was not finally resolved until the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” in 843, when the iconodule empress Theodora restored the veneration of images.

The consequences of the controversy were immense. The iconoclasts destroyed vast quantities of religious art, and the surviving works of the early Byzantine period are those that were either hidden, exported, or made in regions beyond imperial control. The controversy sharpened the distinction between Eastern and Western Christianity: the papacy had firmly supported the iconodules, and the iconoclast emperors’ attacks on papal authority contributed to the growing estrangement between Rome and Constantinople. The controversy also defined the role of images in Eastern Christian devotion, giving the icon a sacramental status that it retains to this day. For the West, the destruction of Byzantine icons had the paradoxical effect of preserving a distinctive tradition of early Byzantine art in Italy, where icons and mosaics from this period still survive in churches such as Santa Maria in Cosmedin in Rome and the cathedral of Torcello in the Veneto.

The Church and secular power

The relationship between the Church and secular rulers was one of the most important themes of early medieval Christianity. In the East, the Byzantine emperor had long claimed authority over the Church, and the iconoclasm controversy was only the most dramatic example of imperial intervention in religious affairs. The Byzantine state had inherited the late Roman ideology of sacral monarchy, and the emperor was understood to be both the political sovereign and the protector of the orthodox faith. The patriarch of Constantinople, while holding an honored position, was a subject of the emperor and could be deposed at his will.

In the West, the situation was more complex. The bishop of Rome, the bishops of the great metropolitan sees, and the pope himself all claimed a spiritual authority that was independent of secular power. Yet the practical balance between the two was constantly negotiated. The Merovingian kings had a great deal of influence over the Frankish church, appointing bishops and controlling church property. The Carolingians went further: they used the church as an instrument of government, reforming the liturgy, standardizing the Bible, and supporting the missionary movement. Charlemagne’s alliance with the papacy was a defining moment in this process, and the coronation of 800 gave the Frankish monarchy a sacred character that it retained until the end of the Middle Ages.

The relationship between the Church and the new kingdoms of the Viking Age, Slavic Europe, and the British Isles was also complex. The Christianization of these regions required the active cooperation of secular rulers, and the new Christian kings often used the church to consolidate their power, build administrative infrastructure, and legitimize their rule. The Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex, the Christian kingdom of Poland under Mieszko I, and the Russian principality of Vladimir in Kiev are all examples of this process. In each case, the church received royal support and royal protection, and in return it provided a religious and ideological framework for the new political order.

The Church’s relationship with secular power was not always harmonious. The seventh-century struggle over images in Byzantium, the eighth-century alliance between the papacy and the Carolingians, the tenth-century monastic reforms of Cluny, and the eleventh-century struggle over investiture are all part of a long history of negotiation and conflict. The “investiture controversy” of the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries - in which popes and emperors disputed the right to appoint church officials - is conventionally treated as a High Medieval event, but its roots lie in the early medieval period, when the boundaries between spiritual and temporal authority were first being drawn.

Culture, learning, and the written word

The Church was the chief vehicle of literacy in the early medieval West. The Latin language of the liturgy and the Bible was also the language of the great corpus of patristic literature, and the reading, copying, and interpretation of this literature was a central activity of monastic life. The scriptoria of the great monasteries produced thousands of manuscripts, and the typological and allegorical methods of biblical interpretation shaped the medieval understanding of scripture. The famous illuminated manuscripts of the period - the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, the Carolingian Bibles, the Ottonian gospel books - are the most spectacular witnesses to this culture, but they are only the most visible part of a vast and largely lost tradition of monastic writing.

The Carolingian Renaissance of the late eighth and ninth centuries was a conscious attempt to revive classical Latin culture and to apply it to the needs of the Christian empire. Charlemagne gathered scholars from England, Ireland, Spain, and Italy to his court, including Alcuin of York, Paul the Deacon, and Theodulf of Orléans. These scholars produced new editions of the Bible and the liturgy, established schools and scriptoria, and developed the Carolingian minuscule script that would become the basis of virtually every Western typeface for a thousand years. The Carolingian Renaissance was, in a real sense, the founding moment of medieval Latin culture.

The Eastern Church had an even richer literary inheritance. Greek remained a living literary language, and the theologians of the early Byzantine period - the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, the two Gregories, Maximus the Confessor, and John of Damascus - produced a corpus of theological writing that was to define Eastern Christianity. The iconoclasm controversy produced a flood of polemical literature, and the resolution of the controversy in 843 was accompanied by a renewed commitment to patristic scholarship. The work of Photius, patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century, in editing and transmitting classical Greek texts was of decisive importance for the survival of ancient learning.

Heresy, schism, and the boundaries of orthodoxy

The early Middle Ages was not a uniformly orthodox age. Heresies and schisms abounded, and the boundaries of orthodoxy were constantly contested. The Arian controversy, which had divided the Church in the fourth century, continued to shape the relations between Germanic peoples and the Roman church well into the seventh. The Visigoths, the Ostrogoths, the Vandals, and the Lombards had all originally been Arian Christians, and their Catholic subjects often suffered discrimination and persecution. The conversion of these peoples to Catholic Christianity, in the sixth and seventh centuries, was one of the most important consequences of the missionary movement.

The Nestorian and Miaphysite churches of the East, separated from the Roman and Byzantine communions by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, continued to thrive in Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Armenia. The rise of Islam in the seventh century placed these churches in a new political context, in which they often enjoyed a degree of religious freedom under Muslim rule that they had not known under Byzantine orthodoxy. The Armenian church, in particular, developed a distinctive tradition of theology, liturgy, and art that has survived to the present day.

The iconoclasm controversy was only the most spectacular of several disputes that divided Eastern Christianity in the early Middle Ages. The Monothelite controversy of the seventh century, which attempted to resolve the Christological disputes of the fifth by affirming that Christ had one will rather than two, was condemned by the Lateran Council of 649 and the Third Council of Constantinople in 681, but it left a lasting mark on Eastern Christianity. The Paulician heresy, a dualist movement that originated in seventh-century Armenia, was a precursor of the later Bogomil heresy, and Bogomilism in turn influenced the Cathar heresy of the High Middle Ages. The great schism between the Roman and Byzantine churches, traditionally dated to 1054, had its roots in the early medieval period: in the disputes over the filioque clause, the use of leavened or unleavened bread, the authority of the pope, and the jurisdiction of the patriarchs.

The legacy of early medieval Christianity

By the year 1000, the framework of medieval Christendom was essentially in place. The papacy, the metropolitan church, the monastic order, the missionary movement, the cult of the saints, the liturgical calendar, the canon law, and the theological tradition - all of these had been forged, or fundamentally reshaped, during the early medieval centuries. The Christianization of Europe was essentially complete. The iconoclasm controversy had been resolved. The Greek and Latin churches were estranged but not yet formally divided. The new kingdoms of Western Europe had been integrated into a Latin Christian cultural sphere that would dominate the continent for centuries.

The legacy of this period was complex. The Church had inherited much of the Roman administrative tradition, and it had preserved classical learning through the long centuries of barbarian settlement. Yet it had also absorbed the customs and institutions of the new Germanic and Slavic peoples, and it had adapted Christian teaching to the needs of a new, increasingly rural, increasingly feudal Europe. The result was not the classical Mediterranean Christianity of the patristic age, nor the scholastic Christianity of the High Middle Ages, but a distinctive synthesis that would shape European civilization for centuries.

For the Eastern Church, the early Middle Ages was a period of consolidation and crisis. The iconoclasm controversy had defined the role of images in Christian devotion. The Monothelite and other Christological disputes had sharpened the boundaries of orthodoxy. The rise of Islam had removed the southern and eastern provinces from the orbit of the Byzantine state. Yet the Eastern Church had also preserved the classical Greek inheritance, developed a sophisticated tradition of theology and liturgy, and laid the foundations of a Slavic Orthodox Christian civilization that would extend from the Balkans to the Russian steppes.

The path ahead

The history of early medieval Christianity is, in the end, a history of how a Mediterranean religion became a European civilization. The five centuries covered by this survey saw the transformation of the Roman church into the Latin church, the Greek church, and the Slavic church; the rise of monasticism as the dominant form of religious life; the conversion of virtually all of Europe to Christianity; the resolution of the iconoclasm controversy; and the emergence of the new political and ideological order that would be known as Christendom. The four topics covered in the rest of this section - the papacy in the early middle ages, monasticism and the Benedictine rule, the Christianization of Europe, and the iconoclasm controversy - each explore one of these transformations in detail.

Related articles

• The Papacy in the Early Middle Ages
• Monasticism and the Benedictine Rule
• The Christianization of Europe
• The Iconoclasm Controversy
• The Byzantine Empire
• The Carolingian Empire
• The Viking Age
• Survival of the Eastern Roman Empire