What Came After the Roman Empire?

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Europe did not collapse into chaos. The Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, Empire continued unbroken. In the West, the Roman imperial order was replaced by a patchwork of Germanic successor kingdoms - Visigothic, Frankish, Vandal, Ostrogothic, Anglo-Saxon, and Lombard - that blended Roman and Germanic institutions in new ways. Over the next several centuries, these kingdoms consolidated, converted to Christianity, gave rise to new political and cultural forms, and laid the foundations of the medieval world. The “post-Roman” period is therefore not a gap or a fall but a long, creative transformation that produced, by the year 1000, the Christian, feudal, and monarchical civilization of the High Middle Ages.

The survival of the Eastern Empire

The most important fact about the post-Roman world is that the Roman Empire did not end. The eastern half of the empire, ruled from Constantinople, continued as a major Mediterranean power. Modern historians call it the Byzantine Empire, but its inhabitants always called themselves Rhomaioi, Romans. Under the emperor Justinian in the sixth century, the Byzantines briefly reconquered Italy, North Africa, and parts of Spain, restoring imperial authority across much of the western Mediterranean. Even after the Arab conquests of the seventh century stripped the empire of its southern and eastern provinces, Byzantium remained a major power, projecting influence into the Balkans, Italy, and the Slavic world. For more, see the The Survival of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Germanic successor states

In the West, the Roman Empire was gradually replaced by a series of kingdoms established by Germanic peoples who had settled within the empire’s borders during the fourth and fifth centuries. The most important were:

The Visigoths, who ruled southern Gaul and most of the Iberian Peninsula from the early fifth to the early eighth century. They preserved Roman administrative practices and were eventually converted from Arianism to Catholicism. Their kingdom fell to the Arab conquest of 711.
The Vandals, who established a powerful kingdom in North Africa in the fifth century. They were defeated by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 534 and the region fell to the Arabs in the late seventh century.
The Ostrogoths, who ruled Italy from 493 to 553 under the leadership of Theodoric the Great. They preserved much of the Roman administrative system, but their kingdom was destroyed in the Gothic Wars and reconquered by Byzantium.
The Franks, who established a network of kingdoms in northern Gaul and gradually expanded to control most of the region. The Frankish kingdom, first Merovingian and then Carolingian, would be the dominant power in post-Roman Western Europe.
The Anglo-Saxons, who settled in lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries and established a network of small kingdoms that eventually consolidated into the kingdom of England.
The Lombards, who invaded Italy in 568 and established a network of duchies and principalities that would rule much of the peninsula for two centuries.

These kingdoms were not simply replacements for Rome. Each was a hybrid political form that blended Roman, Christian, and Germanic elements in distinctive ways. The Visigothic Code, for instance, was a sophisticated law code that drew on Roman, ecclesiastical, and Germanic sources. The Frankish kings preserved the Lex Salica and many Roman administrative practices, and the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms developed distinctive legal and ecclesiastical institutions of their own.

The Christianization of the West

One of the most important transformations of the post-Roman period was the conversion of the Germanic kingdoms to Christianity. The Visigoths, Vandals, and Ostrogoths had originally been converted to Arian Christianity, which was a form of the religion that emphasized the subordination of the Son to the Father and which was held to be heretical by the Catholic bishops of the Roman Empire. The Catholic hierarchy worked to convert these Arian kings to orthodoxy, and by the end of the seventh century the great majority of Western Christians were Catholic, with the Visigothic conversion of 589 and the Lombard conversion of the late sixth and seventh centuries as the most important turning points.

The Christianization of the Anglo-Saxons began with the mission of Augustine of Canterbury in 597, sent by Pope Gregory the Great. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were converted over the course of the seventh century, and the English church in turn became a major missionary force, sending Boniface and others to convert the pagan Germans of the continent. By the year 1000, virtually all of Western Europe was Christian, and the Latin church was the dominant cultural institution of the Latin West.

The rise of Islam

The seventh century brought a transformation of the Mediterranean that was as important as the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire. The rise of Islam, beginning with the life of Muhammad in the early seventh century, led within a hundred years to the Arab conquest of the Sassanid Persian Empire, the Byzantine provinces of the Levant and North Africa, and most of Spain. The Caliphate became the largest and most prosperous state in the Mediterranean, and Islamic civilization made major contributions to science, philosophy, medicine, and the arts. See The Rise of Islam for a lengthier discussion.

The Carolingian transformation

The late eighth and ninth centuries brought a new kind of imperial order to the West. The Carolingian dynasty, beginning with Charles Martel and continuing with Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, built a vast Frankish empire that at its height included most of modern France, Germany, the Low Countries, northern Italy, and parts of Spain. Charlemagne was crowned emperor by the pope in 800, an event that revived the idea of a Christian Roman Empire in the West. The Carolingian Renaissance, the spread of monasticism, the codification of the liturgy, and the development of new forms of writing and manuscript production transformed the cultural and intellectual life of the West. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 divided the empire among Charlemagne’s grandsons, producing the three Frankish kingdoms that would eventually become the kernel of France, Germany, and the Middle Kingdom.

The Viking Age

The late eighth through tenth centuries saw the dramatic expansion of the Scandinavian peoples, who sailed, raided, traded, and settled across an enormous arc from North America to the Caspian Sea. The Viking Age is conventionally said to have begun with the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 and to have ended with the defeat of Harald Hardrada at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066. Norse kingdoms were established in England, Ireland, Normandy, Sicily, Iceland, Greenland, and Russia. The Viking expansion was one of the most significant events of the early Middle Ages, and it reshaped the political and cultural map of Europe.

The Slavic and Magyar worlds

At the same time, the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe were emerging into history, founding the nuclei of what would become the Czech, Polish, Serbian, Bulgarian, and Russian states. The Christianization of the Slavic world - Orthodox in the case of the Bulgarians, Serbs, and Russians, Catholic in the case of the Poles, Bohemians, and Hungarians - was a major event of the ninth and tenth centuries. The mission of Cyril and Methodius to Moravia in the ninth century produced the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets, which would become the foundation of the written cultures of the Orthodox Slavic world.

The Magyars, a Finno-Ugric people from the steppe, settled in the Carpathian Basin in the late ninth century, founding the kingdom of Hungary. The Hungarians were pagan raiders at first, but they were converted to Christianity under their king Stephen I (St. Stephen) at the turn of the millennium.

The Europe of 1000

By the year 1000, the world that emerged after the Roman Empire was, in many ways, a recognizable Europe. The Byzantine Empire, though diminished, remained a major power. The Latin Christian kingdoms of France, Germany, England, and Italy were developing into more centralized states. The Islamic caliphate, though politically fragmented, remained a major cultural force. The Scandinavian kingdoms had been Christianized. The Slavic states were being consolidated. The foundations of feudal, manorial, and ecclesiastical institutions were in place, and the great medieval projects of the High Middle Ages - the universities, the cathedrals, the Crusades - were visibly on the horizon.

The “fall” of the Roman Empire, in other words, was not a fall at all. It was a long, painful, and creative transformation that produced, out of the wreckage of classical civilization, the medieval world. For more on this process, see the The Early Middle Ages: A Complete Overview, Defining the Early Middle Ages, and Post-Roman Geography of Europe.

The Early Middle Ages: A Complete Overview
Defining the Early Middle Ages
Post-Roman Geography of Europe
The Germanic Migrations
The Survival of the Eastern Roman Empire
The Rise of Islam
The Viking Age