Early Middle Ages

When Did the Early Middle Ages Begin?

The conventional start date of the Early Middle Ages, why historians chose it, and the case for earlier or later beginnings.

Question & answer

The Early Middle Ages is conventionally said to begin around 500 CE, with a date in the late fifth century - often 476, when the Germanic general Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor - taken as the symbolic threshold. In practice, no single year marks the transition. The dissolution of the Western Roman Empire was a long process that began in the third century and was not complete until the late fifth or even the sixth. Historians who emphasize the long late antique background often push the start of the Early Middle Ages forward to 600 or 700, while those who emphasize the collapse of Roman institutions in the West prefer 476 or 500. The choice of date is therefore partly a matter of convention and partly a statement about the period as a whole.

The traditional answer: 476

For most of the modern period, the answer to “when did the Early Middle Ages begin?” has been 476, the year in which the Germanic chieftain Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus. This was the interpretation popularized by the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and it became the standard answer in schoolbooks and popular histories for two centuries. The advantage of 476 is its symbolic clarity: the last Western emperor is deposed, and the thousand-year period between him and the last Byzantine emperor in 1453 is conventionally divided into Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. The disadvantage is that the deposition of Romulus Augustulus was an event of limited contemporary significance, and it is in many ways a poor marker for the long transition that produced the early medieval world.

In reality, the imperial government had lost control of the western provinces generations before 476. Britain had been abandoned in the early fifth century, much of Gaul and Spain had been overrun by Germanic peoples in the same period, and Africa had been lost to the Vandals in 439. The collapse of the Western Empire was the result of a long process of military, economic, and demographic decline, not a single dramatic event. The Fall of the Western Roman Empire goes into the subject in greater depth.

The late antique alternative: 200-600

The most influential modern alternative to the 476 date is the late antique framework developed by Peter Brown and others. In this framework, the period between roughly 200 and 600 is treated as a single long transition, in which the Roman world was gradually transformed by the rise of Christianity, the development of new forms of monarchy, the growth of the Church, and the migration of Germanic peoples into the Empire. The Early Middle Ages, in this view, begins only when the late antique world has fully dissolved - in some interpretations around 600, in others around 700.

The advantage of the late antique framing is that it captures the long, slow, and creative transformation of the Roman world. The disadvantage is that it makes the Early Middle Ages itself a very short period, more or less identical to what older historians called the “Dark Ages” of the seventh and eighth centuries. For more on this debate, see the Defining the Early Middle Ages.

The “long” fifth century

A third approach is to treat the early Middle Ages as beginning in the “long” fifth century - a period stretching from the early 400s, when the Visigoths first sacked Rome (410) and the Vandals crossed into Africa (429), to the late 500s, when the Lombard invasion of Italy (568) and the death of Gregory the Great (604) marked the consolidation of the post-Roman order. In this view, the Early Middle Ages begins when the western Roman Empire was clearly no longer functioning as an integrated political and economic system, and ends around 1000. The conventional 500 date is a useful midpoint of this “long” fifth century.

What was happening at 500

A look at the year 500 itself is instructive. By that date:

  • The Western Roman Empire had ceased to exist as a political entity, but the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire was thriving under the emperor Anastasius I.
  • Italy was ruled by Odoacer and then by Theodoric’s Ostrogoths, who governed in the name of the emperor in Constantinople and preserved Roman administrative practices.
  • Gaul was divided between Frankish kingdoms, the Visigothic kingdom in Aquitaine, and the Burgundian kingdom in the southeast.
  • Spain was held by the Visigoths, who had moved from Gaul in the early sixth century and would rule the peninsula for two more centuries.
  • Britain was divided between Brittonic kingdoms in the west and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in the east; the Gregorian mission that would convert the Anglo-Saxons was still almost a century away.
  • The prophet Muhammad would not be born for another century, and the Arab conquests that would transform the Mediterranean were still in the future.

The year 500 is therefore a useful conventional marker, but the world of 500 was in many ways still recognizably late Roman. The decisive transformations - the consolidation of the Germanic kingdoms, the Christianization of Western Europe, the rise of Islam, the Carolingian Empire - would all happen in the centuries that followed.

Why the date matters

The choice of a starting date for the Early Middle Ages is not just a technical question. It shapes what the period is taken to include, what comes before it, and what it leads to. A 476 date emphasizes the political collapse of the Western Empire and the transition to Germanic rule. A 200 date emphasizes the long late antique transformation of the Roman world. A 600 date emphasizes the originality of the post-Roman kingdoms and the rise of medieval institutions. A 700 date emphasizes the early medieval achievement in its own right, separated from late antiquity by a long transitional century.

Most modern historians treat the period as running from roughly 500 to roughly 1000, with a flexible boundary on both ends. The articles on this site use this conventional framing, while remaining attentive to the debates about periodization described in the Defining the Early Middle Ages and the chronology laid out in the Timeline and Key Dates.