Early Middle Ages

Post-Roman Geography of Europe: A Regional Survey, c. 500–1000

A region-by-region survey of post-Roman Europe, c. 500-1000, covering the British Isles, Frankia, Iberia, Italy, Byzantium, Scandinavia, and the Slavic world.

In-depth article

The geography of Europe in 1000 was profoundly different from the geography of Europe in 500. The map of the Roman Empire in the early fifth century - a continuous Mediterranean coastline from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, crossed by a network of roads, dotted with cities, and united by a single currency, a single legal system, and (eventually) a single imperial cult - had been replaced by a far more fragmented political, cultural, and linguistic landscape. New kingdoms had formed in the West, new peoples had migrated into the continent’s interior, new religious and political systems had arisen in the Islamic world, and a single Christian civilization had emerged in Latin Western Europe. The purpose of this article is to describe that transformation region by region, drawing on the articles elsewhere on this site for the detailed history of each.

The British Isles

In 500, the Roman province of Britannia had been abandoned by the empire for almost a century. The lowland zone that had been Romanized was now divided among a patchwork of Brittonic kingdoms in the west and a growing number of Anglo-Saxon settlements in the east. By the early seventh century, the principal Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex, with smaller kingdoms in between. The Brittonic kingdoms, increasingly confined to Wales, Cornwall, and (briefly) the lowlands of Scotland, retained their own languages, their own church, and their own legal traditions.

The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons began with the Gregorian mission of 597 and accelerated in the seventh century, with the foundation of great monasteries such as Whitby, Jarrow, and Lindisfarne. The Synod of Whitby (664) resolved the conflict between Roman and Irish Christian practices in favor of Rome, with profound consequences for the English church. The eighth and ninth centuries brought the Viking invasions, which destroyed three of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and reduced Wessex to a single hard-pressed realm under Alfred the Great. By the treaty of Wedmore (878) and the subsequent political reconstruction, the foundations of a unified English kingdom were laid.

North of the Humber, the Anglo-Danish kingdom of York, the kingdom of Scotland (a fusion of Pictish and Scottish elements), and the British kingdom of Strathclyde formed a complex political zone that would eventually consolidate into the medieval kingdom of Scotland. Ireland, by contrast, was a patchwork of some 150 small kingdoms organized around tribal tuatha and ruled by local rí. The Christianization of Ireland had been completed by the sixth century, and the Irish church was a major force in the conversion and education of Britain and the continent. From the late eighth century, Ireland suffered badly from Viking raids and settlement: Dublin, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick all became Viking towns, and the island was only gradually re-united under high-kings in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

For more on this period, see the Anglo-Saxon England and What Was Anglo-Saxon England Like?.

Frankia and the Rhineland

In 500, the Frankish kingdoms - Neustria, Austrasia, Burgundy, and Aquitaine - were beginning to consolidate under the Merovingian dynasty. The Franks were a Germanic people who had been settled in northern Gaul for over a century, gradually absorbing Roman institutions and customs. By the death of Clovis in 511, the Franks ruled much of Gaul, and the subsequent centuries saw the slow expansion of Frankish power south and east. The Merovingian kings were long-lived but eventually gave way to the Carolingian mayors of the palace, who in 751 deposed the last Merovingian king and took the throne in their own right.

Under Charlemagne and his successors, the Frankish kingdom expanded to encompass much of Western and Central Europe. Charlemagne conquered the Lombard kingdom in Italy, subjugated the Saxons in a generation of brutal warfare, established marcher lordships in northern Spain, and was crowned emperor by the pope in 800. The Carolingian Empire was the largest single political unit in the West since the Roman Empire, and it was the institutional and cultural matrix of much of what we now think of as medieval Europe.

The Treaty of Verdun (843) divided the empire among the three sons of Louis the Pious, producing the three Frankish kingdoms that would eventually become France, Germany, and a Middle Kingdom stretching from the Low Countries to Italy. By the late ninth century, the Carolingian dynasty was exhausted, and the imperial title was being fought over by local rulers. The German kingdom would revive under the Ottonian dynasty in the tenth century, while the West Frankish kingdom gradually turned into the kingdom of France. For the rest of the story, see the The Carolingian Empire and The Merovingian Franks.

Iberia and the Pyrenees

In 500, Iberia was divided between the Visigothic kingdom - the most Romanized of the Germanic successor states - and the small Suevic kingdom in the northwest, with Byzantine enclaves in the south. The Visigoths, who had moved from Gaul in the early sixth century, ruled the peninsula from Toledo, governed through a Roman-style bureaucracy, and eventually codified their law in the Visigothic Code of Recceswinth (654). The conversion of the Visigothic kings from Arianism to Catholicism at the Third Council of Toledo (589) was a turning point in the history of the peninsula.

The Muslim conquest of 711 transformed Iberia. Within a few years, the Visigothic kingdom had been overthrown, and only the mountains of Asturias in the north remained under Christian rule. The Islamic state, known as al-Andalus, developed a rich and complex civilization, with its capital at Córdoba. The Christian kingdoms of the north - Asturias, León, Navarre, Aragon, and (eventually) Castile - began the long process that would become the Reconquista, but the political and cultural center of the peninsula remained Muslim for centuries. For a survey of the period, see the Visigothic Spain and When Did Spain Become Christian?.

The Pyrenees were a zone of contact and conflict between Christian and Muslim Iberia, and the small county of Barcelona and the realm of Aragon would emerge in the ninth and tenth centuries as the principal Christian powers in the region.

Italy and the Mediterranean

Italy in 500 was a battleground. Theodoric’s Ostrogothic kingdom had collapsed in the Gothic Wars, and Italy had been devastated by the Byzantine reconquest under Justinian. The arrival of the Lombards in 568 had fragmented the peninsula into a complex set of duchies and principalities, of which only the southern part of the peninsula and the islands remained under Byzantine control. The Lombard kingdom was eventually converted from Arianism to Catholicism, and its great monasteries - Monte Cassino, Nonantola, San Vincenzo al Volturno - became centers of religious and cultural life.

The city of Rome, formerly the center of a Mediterranean empire, survived as the seat of the papacy and as a religious and cultural capital, but its population shrank dramatically. The Papal States, formed in the eighth century out of the Donation of Pepin, gave the pope a temporal authority that would shape Italian politics for centuries. The northern Italian cities that would later be the centers of the medieval communes - Milan, Pavia, Verona, Venice - were small, fortified settlements, often under the authority of local bishops. Venice, founded by refugees from the Lombard invasions, gradually developed into a major maritime power.

In the south, the Lombard duchy of Benevento, the Byzantine catepanate of southern Italy, and the emirate of Sicily (from 827 onward) formed a complex political zone. The Norman conquest of southern Italy and Sicily in the eleventh century would create the kingdom of Sicily, one of the most cosmopolitan states of the High Middle Ages, but in the Early Middle Ages the region was a contested frontier between Latin Christendom, Byzantium, and Islam.

The Byzantine Empire

The Eastern Roman Empire - what modern historians call the Byzantine Empire - survived the fifth-century crises and went on to a long history that would last, in some form, until 1453. Under Justinian, it briefly reconquered much of the western Mediterranean, but the more durable achievement was the consolidation of the eastern provinces, the codification of Roman law, and the construction of the great church of Hagia Sophia.

By the seventh century, the empire had been transformed by the loss of its eastern and southern provinces to the Caliphate, by the establishment of a new system of provincial government (the themes), and by the crisis of iconoclasm. The eighth and ninth centuries saw the empire stabilize its position in Anatolia and Greece, push back against the Arab fleets, and develop the missionary and political expansion that brought the Slavic peoples into the orbit of Orthodox Christianity. By the tenth century, the empire under the Macedonian dynasty was a major Mediterranean power, with territories in Italy, the Balkans, and the eastern Mediterranean. For a survey, see the The Byzantine Empire.

Scandinavia and the North Sea

In 500, Scandinavia was still largely outside the Roman and post-Roman world. The great migrations had brought peoples of Scandinavian origin - the Goths, the Vandals, the Lombards - to the continent, but the Scandinavian homeland remained a region of small, scattered farming and fishing communities. By the eighth century, this had begun to change. The development of the sailing ship, the consolidation of chieftaincies, and the integration of Scandinavia into the long-distance trade routes of the North Sea and the Baltic launched the Viking Age.

The Viking expansion of the eighth through tenth centuries is one of the most dramatic transformations of the period. Norse raiders, traders, and settlers reached Iceland, Greenland, and North America in the west, the rivers of Russia and the Byzantine Empire in the east, the British Isles and Frankia in the south, and the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa in the southwest. Norse kingdoms were established in England (the Danelaw), in Ireland (Dublin), in Frankia (Normandy), in Sicily, in Russia (Kievan Rus), and in the islands of the North Atlantic. By the end of the tenth century, however, the Viking expansion was waning, and the Scandinavian kingdoms were being incorporated into the Christian cultural sphere. For more, see the The Viking Age.

The Slavic world

The Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe emerged into history during the sixth and seventh centuries. Their language family is the largest in Europe, and by 1000 Slavic speakers lived from the Baltic to the Balkans and from the Elbe to the Volga. The early history of the Slavs is poorly documented, but archaeological evidence suggests that they were a complex of tribal and clan-based societies that had been gradually expanding into lands depopulated by the collapse of Roman and Germanic border defenses.

By the ninth century, several large Slavic polities had emerged. The first was Great Moravia, a state centered on the middle Danube, which was destroyed by the Magyar invasions in the early tenth century. The second was Bulgaria, originally a Turkic state that had become Slavicized and Christianized in the ninth century, which would eventually become one of the most important Balkan powers. The third was Bohemia and Poland, the nuclei of the future Czech and Polish states. The fourth was Rus, a federation of Slavic and Norse peoples centered on Kiev, which linked the Baltic and the Black Sea through the great river routes of the Dnieper and the Volga.

The Christianization of the Slavic world was a complex process. The Bulgars and Serbs adopted Orthodox Christianity, drawing on the Byzantine and South Slavic traditions. The Poles, Bohemians, Moravians, and Hungarians converted to Catholic Christianity under the influence of the German and Frankish churches. The conversion of the Great Moravian mission of the Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century produced the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, which would later be used for the literatures of Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, and the other Orthodox Slavic peoples. For more on this period, see the The Slavic Peoples of Eastern Europe and What Religion Did the Slavs Follow?.

The Balkans and the Aegean

The Balkans in the early Middle Ages were a complex zone of contact and conflict between the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarian state, the Slavic populations, and (from the late ninth century) the Magyars. The Byzantine frontier in the Balkans was repeatedly breached, and the establishment of a Bulgar state in 681 produced a powerful rival to the empire. The conversion of the Bulgars to Christianity in the ninth century was a major event, and the development of the Old Church Slavonic liturgy and literature under the influence of Cyril and Methodius and their disciples gave the Slavs a written culture that would outlast the medieval period.

The Aegean remained a Byzantine lake, with the great islands of Crete, Cyprus, and the Aegean archipelago gradually being lost to Arab seafarers. The conversion of the southern Slavs to Orthodox Christianity, the rise of the First Bulgarian Empire, and the political ascendancy of the Macedonian dynasty transformed the Balkans in the tenth century. The defeat of the Bulgars by the Byzantine emperor Basil II in 1018 (just after the conventional end of the Early Middle Ages) was the culmination of this long process.

The British and Irish Sea Zone

The Irish Sea zone - Ireland, the Scottish highlands, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Wales, and the western English peninsula - was a region of intense cultural exchange in the Early Middle Ages. Irish missionaries carried Christianity to Scotland, Northumbria, and the Frankish and German lands. The great Insular monastic centers - Iona, Bangor, Clonmacnoise, Armagh, and the Northumbrian houses of Lindisfarne, Jarrow, and Wearmouth - produced a distinctive tradition of Latin and vernacular literature, manuscript illumination, and pastoral theology. The raids of Vikings from the late eighth century onward had a devastating effect on this world, but the Irish and Scottish churches survived, and the conversion of the Norse in the tenth and eleventh centuries brought new vitality to the region.

The Mediterranean Center

The central Mediterranean - the islands of Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Balearics, and the coast of North Africa - was transformed by the Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries. North Africa, the most Romanized part of the western Mediterranean in 500, was fully absorbed into the Islamic world by the early eighth century. Sicily fell to the Aghlabids in 827, beginning a long process of Islamic settlement and acculturation. The Mediterranean, once the unifying sea of the Roman Empire, became a contested frontier between Christian and Muslim powers, and the great Italian maritime republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa would eventually be born out of the struggle to control it.

The European center, c. 1000

By the year 1000, the geography of Europe had been transformed. The Roman Empire was gone, replaced by a Latin Christian West, a Greek Orthodox East, and an Islamic Mediterranean. The great migration period was over, but the peoples of Europe were still on the move: the Norse were settling the North Atlantic; the Magyars had settled the Carpathian Basin; the Poles, Bohemians, and Hungarians were forming new states; the Rus had established a vast trading network from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The feudal, manorial, and monastic institutions that would characterize the High Middle Ages were visibly emerging. The Europe of the year 1000 was, in many ways, the Europe that would persist, with modifications, until the great transformations of the modern era.

Further reading

  • N. J. G. Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe, 1500 BC–AD 1000 (Cambridge University Press, 1973).
  • Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800 (Oxford University Press, 2005).
  • Richard Hodges, Dark Age Economics (Duckworth, 2nd ed., 1989).