Formation of Medieval Europe

Introduction

When the last Western Roman emperor was deposed in 476, no one in Italy or in the provinces beyond the Alps announced the end of the world. Tax collection, plowing, worship, and warfare continued, and in many regions life looked remarkably similar to the century before. Yet within a few generations, the political map of Europe had been redrawn. In place of a single, Mediterranean-wide imperial system stood a patchwork of kingdoms ruled by peoples once dismissed as barbari: the Merovingian Franks in Gaul, the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the Visigoths in Hispania, the Lombards in much of Italy, and a constellation of the Slavic polities stretching from the Elbe to the Dnieper. By the year 1000, these peoples had absorbed, adapted, or been absorbed by the surviving institutions of Rome, and the outlines of a recognizably medieval Europe were visible from the Atlantic to the steppe.

The story of that transformation is the subject of this article. It is not a story of collapse followed by silence, nor of pure Germanic innovation on a Roman blank slate. It is, rather, a story of entanglement: of Roman legal forms, Christian churches, and post-Roman kingdoms so closely interwoven that historians still debate where one ends and the other begins.

The Post-Roman Political Landscape

The disappearance of central Roman authority in the West was not a single event but a long process, hastened by the Germanic migrations of the fourth and fifth centuries. By 476, several so-called foederati — peoples settled on Roman soil under treaty — had already been ruling substantial regions of the empire in their own names for generations. The Visigoths had held parts of southern Gaul since 418 and much of Spain since the 470s. The Vandals had transferred their kingdom from Spain to North Africa in 429. The Franks, perhaps more numerous than any of their neighbors, controlled much of northern Gaul under a network of chieftains who had served Rome as federate allies.

What changed after 476 was less the fact of Germanic rule than the disappearance of an imperial counterweight. Where once Roman emperors had intervened against ambitious kings, appointed bishops, and re-routed tax revenues, now kings ruled with little external check. The visible structures of the empire — its tax rolls, its professional armies, its roads and aqueducts — frayed and in some places vanished. What did not vanish was the Christian church, which inherited a territorial organization modeled on the Roman provinces and a Latin-speaking clerical elite capable of governing communities long after the tax collectors had gone.

The Franks and the Merovingian Synthesis

The Merovingians are the hinge on which the history of post-Roman western Europe turns. From the early fifth century, the Franks, traditionally traced to a leader named Merowig and a dynasty named after him, accumulated power in the former Roman provinces of Belgica and Germania. Their most consequential ruler, Clovis I, defeated the last Roman governor of Gaul at the Battle of Soissons in 486, then broke the political power of other Frankish groups and, by 510, expelled the Visigoths from most of Aquitaine. The unification of Gaul under a single Frankish king was, in retrospect, a foundational event.

Clovis’s conversion to Catholic Christianity, traditionally dated around 500, was equally consequential. Unlike the Arian Visigoths and Ostrogoths, the Frankish king adhered to the same faith as the Gallo-Roman bishops he now protected. That alignment gave the Merovingians an unmatched resource: the loyalty of a Latin Christian clergy whose networks, education, and tax-collecting memory stretched back centuries. Subsequent Merovingian kings did not always rule wisely — Gregory of Tours famously complained of their cruelty and vice — but they were able to draw on Roman-Christian institutions in ways that Arian-ruled kingdoms could not.

The Merovingian state was, however, a kingdom in slow-motion fragmentation. The Frankish custom of dividing royal lands among sons produced, within three generations, a constellation of sub-kingdoms (Austrasia, Neustria, Burgundy, and Aquitaine) that quarreled with each other and with ambitious noble families. By the late seventh century, real power had slipped into the hands of palace officials known as maiores palatii, the mayors of the palace. In 751, one such mayor, Pepin the Short, was anointed king with papal support, ending the Merovingian line and founding the dynasty that would produce Charlemagne.

Anglo-Saxon England

Across the Channel, the process of state-formation looked very different. The withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain early in the fifth century left a power vacuum into which stepped a variety of Germanic groups: Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and others whose exact identities are still debated. By the sixth century, the lowland zone of Britain had been reorganized into a series of small kingdoms — Kent, Essex, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria among them — separated from the surviving British and Irish-speaking west by a long and bloody frontier.

The Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England was a slow and uneven process. A Romano-British church had existed in the west and survived in Wales and the Irish Sea zone, but the new Germanic kingdoms were largely pagan. The mission of Augustine of Canterbury, sent by Pope Gregory the Great in 597, converted the kingdom of Kent and, over the following century, gradually extended Christianity to the other southern and midland kingdoms. The conversion of Northumbria in the early seventh century drew that kingdom into the orbit of Irish and Iona-based monasticism, producing a rich tradition of synods (notably Whitby in 664) that defined the shape of English Christianity for centuries.

The political unification of England was the work above all of three kings: Offa of Mercia, who in the late eighth century exercised overlordship from the Humber to the Channel; Egbert of Wessex, who in 829 was briefly recognized as Bretwalda of all the English; and especially Alfred the Great, whose victories over the Vikings at Edington (878) and the subsequent Treaty of Wedmore established Wessex as the leading surviving English kingdom. Alfred and his successors — Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and their descendants — used fortified burhs, reformed law codes, and a powerful navy to build the kingdom of the English, a polity that by 950 was the most centralized state in western Europe.

Visigothic Spain

In the Iberian peninsula, the political settlement of the fifth century was dominated by the Visigoths, who had entered the empire in 418 as federates and gradually extended their rule from Gaul into Spain after their defeat by the Franks at Vouillé in 507. By the time of King Leovigild (r. 568–586) and his son Reccared I, the Visigoths had eliminated most of the surviving Roman and Suevic polities and ruled most of the peninsula from Toledo. The kingdom was, in theory, ethnically divided between Gothic and Hispano-Roman populations, with separate bodies of law and a noble caste defined by Gothic descent. In practice, the divisions blurred rapidly: Reccared’s conversion to Catholic Christianity in 587, abandoning the Arianism of his predecessors, brought the Iberian church fully into the kingdom’s structures and undercut the religious grounds for distinguishing Gothic from Roman.

The Visigothic kingdom developed a sophisticated body of law, most famously codified in the Liber Iudicum of Reccaswinth (654), which fused Roman legal tradition with Germanic custom and remained in force long after the kingdom itself had fallen. It also produced a striking series of church councils at Toledo, where bishops and kings together defined the public role of Christianity in a way that had no real parallel elsewhere in the West. The kingdom’s political weakness, however, was chronic. The elective monarchy of Toledo, in which noble factions deposed and elevated kings at will, was unable to mobilize a coherent response when, in 711, a combined Berber-Arab force crossed the straits and within five years had reduced the Visigothic state to a rump in the Asturias. The Christian principalities of the north would spend the next seven centuries slowly reconquering the peninsula, a process of Reconquista that reshaped the political and religious map of medieval Europe. For the history of the Visigoths after 711, see what happened to the Visigoths.

Italy After Rome: Ostrogoths, Byzantines, and Lombards

Italy, the heartland of the old empire, followed a more tortured path. After the ineffectual rule of Odoacer, the peninsula was reconquered in 493 by the Ostrogoths under Theodoric, who ruled from Ravenna as a kind of viceroy for the Eastern emperors while preserving a Roman administrative and legal framework for his predominantly Italian subjects. Theodoric’s kingdom, whose extraordinary buildings and sculptures still stand in places like Ravenna, was, for a generation, the most impressive successor state in the West.

It did not last. Theodoric’s successors proved unable to hold the realm together against internal faction and the intervention of the Emperor Justinian, whose generals Belisarius and Narses fought the long Gothic War of 535–554 and reduced Italy to a beleaguered Byzantine province. The introduction of the Justinianic plague in 542, the renewed wars of the following century, and the gradual transfer of the imperial apparatus to Ravenna left Italy impoverished and exposed.

Into this vacuum came the Lombards, a Germanic people who crossed the Alps in 568 under King Alboin. Within a few years they had overrun much of the peninsula, reducing Byzantine Italy to a thin strip along the coast and a constellation of islands. The Lombards, never as Romanized as the Ostrogoths, organized their conquest into a loose set of duchies, of which the most enduring was the duchy of Spoleto in central Italy and the kingdom of the Lombards centered on Pavia. Their conversion from Arian to Catholic Christianity, completed in the seventh century, and their gradual absorption of Roman law, language, and administrative practice marked their slow incorporation into the Latin Christian world. Their relationship with the papacy, however, was tense for generations: Lombard control of the lands around Rome deprived the popes of much of their territorial base, setting up the conflicts that would later draw the papacy into alliance with the Franks.

The Slavic Polities of Eastern Europe

To the east of the former Roman provinces, the Slavic world was taking shape on a longer timeline and on a less well-documented one. The Slavs, who had lived in the forest zone north of the Black Sea and the Carpathians for centuries, began to expand dramatically from the late fifth century. By 600 they had moved into the Balkans, threatening the Byzantine Balkans and the Lombard territories of Pannonia; by 700 they had reached the Elbe and the Baltic, displacing or absorbing the Germanic peoples who had lived there.

The Slavic world of the seventh through tenth centuries was politically fragmented. Most communities lived in small polities, often under the rule of princes (knez) drawn from a noble caste that may have origins in the movements of the great migration. The early Slavic religion, recorded in a hostile and polemical form by Christian missionaries, was a polytheism centered on a sky god (Svarog or Perun), a chthonic deity (Veles or Volos), and a rich oral tradition; for a fuller account, see what religion did the Slavs follow.

The decisive events in the formation of medieval Slavic Europe were the Christian missions of the ninth century. The evangelization of the Balkans followed Byzantine models and produced the autocephalous Slavic-speaking churches of Bulgaria and Serbia, while the evangelization of the Slavic lands in central Europe — Moravia, Bohemia, and Pannonia — drew the missionary brothers Cyril and Methodius, who devised a Slavic alphabet and translated the liturgy, the bible, and a body of canon law. Their disciples, expelled from Moravia, took the Slavic liturgy to Bulgaria, where it became the foundation of the first Slavic literary culture.

To the east, the conversion of the Rus prince Vladimir of Kiev around 988 aligned the largest of the eastern Slavic polities with Byzantine Christianity, opening the way for a long civilizational relationship between Rus and Constantinople. The Rus state, organized along the great river routes of the Dnieper and the Volga, was closely tied to Scandinavian and steppe trade and would remain a major European power until destroyed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century.

Patterns of State Formation

Stepping back from individual cases, a few patterns emerge from the post-Roman centuries. The first is the durability of Roman infrastructure in some regions and its near-total disappearance in others. In Italy, Gaul, and Spain, the cities, roads, and aqueducts of the empire continued to function in some form, however diminished, well into the seventh century; in Britain, north of the Roman frontier in Germany, and in much of the Slavic world, the imperial legacy was much thinner and state-formation had to start closer to scratch.

The second is the centrality of the Christian church as a continuing institution. In every region that had been part of the empire, the church retained a territorial organization, a learned Latin-speaking elite, and a body of canon law. Bishops could command loyalty and tax revenues, run cities, and mediate between kings and subjects. The conversion of the Arian Germanic kingdoms to Catholic Christianity, completed by the early seventh century in Spain, Italy, and the Frankish realm, integrated these kingdoms more fully into a Mediterranean Christian world that had its cultural capital at Rome.

The third is the persistent role of warfare and conquest in reshaping frontiers. The English defeats of the Vikings in the late ninth century, the Frankish conquests of Saxony and Bavaria under Charlemagne, the slow Christian reconquest of Spain, the creation of the Polish and Hungarian kingdoms in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and the Viking, Norman, and Arab expansions all show that political units in this period were built and rebuilt through armed conflict. The early medieval aristocracy was, accordingly, a warrior aristocracy whose values were deeply martial.

A fourth pattern is economic simplification and slow recovery. The tax-collecting apparatus of the empire shrank dramatically in most regions, and the long-distance trade of the Roman Mediterranean contracted sharply from the seventh to the early tenth century. In its place, smaller and more local economies emerged, organized around the estates of lay and ecclesiastical lords, and long-distance exchange was carried on by specialized merchant groups (Frisian, Lombard, Jewish, Scandinavian, Arab) operating through emporia rather than integrated markets. The economic recovery of Europe, sometimes called the long tenth century, would gather pace only from the late tenth century onward. Coinage, almost entirely lacking in the seventh and eighth centuries outside the surviving Byzantine provinces, gradually returned in the form of silver pennies minted in increasing numbers by kings, bishops, and abbots. Towns shrank to a fraction of their Roman size but survived as ecclesiastical centers, fortress-markets, and the seats of bishops; some, like Venice, Naples, Amalfi, Marseille, London, and Bruges, were growing again as commercial centers well before the year 1000.

A fifth pattern is the gradual fusion of Roman and Germanic law. Roman law did not vanish with the empire; it survived in simplified form in the formularies used by Frankish and Lombard chanceries, in the canon law of the church, and in the law of obligations governing merchants and the church. The Germanic peoples brought with them oral codes of custom — the Salian and Ripuarian laws of the Franks, the Visigothic Forum Iudicum, the Lombard Edictum Rothari (643), the Anglo-Saxon dooms of Æthelberht and Ine — that were increasingly committed to writing in Latin and fused with Roman provisions. By the ninth century, the bishop of Rome could appeal to a body of legal authority that combined elements of Roman law, Germanic custom, and ecclesiastical canon, a synthesis that would shape the medieval West for centuries.

Law, Identity, and Ethnicity

A persistent question of post-Roman history is how to describe the peoples who made the successor kingdoms. Were the Franks, Visigoths, and Lombards coherent ethnic groups, or were they loose military confederations that became kingdoms only by ruling Roman subjects? The older nineteenth-century view, that the Völkerwanderung transplanted whole peoples across the map, has given way to a more nuanced picture. The names by which the Germanic kingdoms are known appear to have been, at least in part, political labels assumed by war-bands and their followers; the populations they ruled were overwhelmingly Roman, and the ethnic boundary between Romani and Germani was permeable. The Visigothic nobleman whose ancestors had entered Gaul in 418 might, by 600, have married into a Roman senatorial family, served as a Catholic bishop, and prided himself on his command of Latin rhetoric.

This is not to say that ethnicity was meaningless. Religious difference between Arian Germanic rulers and Catholic Roman subjects gave the early successor states a structural tension that was resolved in different ways at different times. Clovis’s conversion to Catholic Christianity in the late fifth century, the conversion of Reccared in 587, and the conversion of the Lombard king Aripert II around 700 each removed the religious basis for distinguishing king from subject. The slow disappearance of the Gothic, Frankish, and Lombard languages of administration, replaced by a learned Latin and, in the long run, by emerging vernaculars, marked a similar process of convergence.

A related question concerns the persistence of Roman senatorial culture. In Gaul, Spain, and Italy, the great Roman landowning families did not disappear with the empire. The Balthi, the Anicii, and the Pontii in Gaul, the senatorial families of Rome and Ravenna, the great Hispano-Roman houses of Merida, Tarragona, and Toledo, continued to occupy and even expand their estates, to occupy episcopal sees, and to provide the literate administrators on whom the new kings depended. The successor kingdoms were, in this sense, aristocratic monarchies run by Roman aristocrats and Germanic warriors in uneasy partnership.

The Carolingian Synthesis

The clearest single example of post-Roman state formation, and the moment at which a recognizably medieval Europe begins to emerge, is the Carolingian Empire. Building on the political inheritance of the Merovingians and on a deep ideological alliance with the papacy, the Carolingian kings transformed the Frankish realm into something approaching a universal Christian empire, and in the process drew into a single political orbit most of what we now call western Europe.

The Carolingian achievement rested on four supports. The first was a new theory of kingship, articulated in the court of Charlemagne (r. 768–814) and elaborated by scholars like Alcuin and Einhard, that saw the Christian king as a vicar of God charged with the defense and propagation of the faith. The second was a sophisticated administrative apparatus, organized around itinerant royal courts, royal envoys (missi dominici), and a network of royal estates, that gave the dynasty a degree of reach unmatched by any post-Roman western government. The third was a deliberate program of cultural renewal — the so-called Carolingian Renaissance — that produced standardized texts of scripture, a reformed Latin, the Carolingian minuscule script, and an extraordinary flowering of manuscript art, all of which set cultural norms for centuries. The fourth was a program of military expansion that added Saxony, Bavaria, northern Spain, the Avars of the Danube, and the Lombard kingdom of Italy to a Frankish realm that, in the late ninth century, stretched from the Pyrenees to the Elbe and from the North Sea to central Italy.

The Carolingian moment was decisive because it gave post-Roman Europe a political and cultural frame within which the successor kingdoms could imagine themselves as a single Latin Christian world. The fragmentation of the empire after the Treaty of Verdun of 843 did not erase that frame; it merely dispersed it. The kings of France, Germany, and (eventually) Italy, the surviving Anglo-Saxon kingdom, the Christian principalities of Spain, and the new Christian kingdoms of central and eastern Europe all claimed, in different ways, to be its heirs.

The Crisis of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries

The Carolingian synthesis, for all its brilliance, did not survive the pressures of the ninth century. The European continent was hit, in the same generation, by a coordinated set of invasions from three directions: Scandinavian, Magyar, and Arab. The Vikings, exploiting the longship and the political fragmentation of the continent, raided and settled across an arc from the Seine to the Volga, founding the Danelaw in England, the duchy of Normandy, and the Kievan Rus along the Dnieper. The Magyars, a Finno-Ugric people moving out of the Pontic steppe, swept across the Danube basin and raided deep into Italy, Germany, and the Frankish heartland. The Saracens, operating from bases in North Africa and the Mediterranean islands, sacked Rome in 846 and raided the coasts of Provence, Liguria, and Tuscany for the better part of a century.

The cumulative effect on the Carolingian world was severe. Local authorities, especially the lay and ecclesiastical magnates of the Frankish lands, had to assume the burden of defense, and in doing so accumulated the private powers of castellan, count-bishop, and hereditary lord that would become the raw material of the feudal order. The Carolingian dynasty survived as a titular dignity in West Francia (France) for another century, but in the German lands it was replaced, in 911, by a new dynasty and, in 962, by the Ottonian imperial revival.

The tenth century was a period in which a new political and ecclesiastical order was improvised out of the wreckage. In England, the kings of Wessex rebuilt the English monarchy on the foundations of fortified burhs and a reformed army. In Germany, the Ottonian dynasty (Henry I, Otto I, and their successors) absorbed the duchies of Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, and Bavaria into a working imperial system, asserted royal supremacy over the papacy, and intervened decisively in Italy. In France, the late Carolingians were replaced, in 987, by the Capetians, whose direct control was at first confined to a small zone around Paris and Orleans. In the Slavic lands, the Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian polities emerged as Christian kingdoms during the same generation.

The new political order rested on tighter relations between crown and church. The Ottonian system in Germany, sometimes called the Reichskirchensystem, used bishops and abbots as royal officials, in part because they could not transmit their offices to heirs. In England, the tenth-century monastic reformation associated with Dunstan, Æthelwold, and Oswald aimed to align the English church more closely with continental Benedictinism and to give the king a reliable clerical bureaucracy. In France, the early Capetians used abbots and bishops to fill the chronic gap in their lay administrative resources. In every case, the tenth century saw an increase in the literacy, the wealth, and the political weight of the church.

The Papacy and the Shaping of Latin Christendom

One of the most consequential developments of the post-Roman centuries was the transformation of the bishop of Rome from a senior metropolitan of the Western church into a kind of universal Christian sovereign. Already in the late antique period, the Roman see had claimed a special authority derived from its association with the tombs of Peter and Paul and its position in the capital of the old empire. The collapse of imperial government in Italy gave the pope a role that no Roman emperor had ever assigned him: that of a territorial ruler of a small state in central Italy, defender of Rome against Lombard and later Saracen attacks, and patron of the Christianization of the Germanic world.

The turning point was the alliance between Pope Stephen II and the Frankish ruler Pepin the Short in the 750s, which legitimated the deposition of the last Merovingian king and gave the new Carolingian dynasty a sacred character in papal eyes. The coronation of the Charlemagne by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 made the pope the visible source of imperial authority in the West. For the rest of the Middle Ages, the papacy would operate as a sovereign of a small Italian state, a religious authority for all of Latin Christendom, and a diplomatic actor whose claims and excommunications could make and unmake kings.

The papacy’s evangelizing role was equally important. Roman missionaries, working from Canterbury and then from the English and Frankish churches, converted the Anglo-Saxons, the Frisians, the Saxons, and eventually the Slavs and the Hungarians. The monastic culture that the Gregorian Reform promoted from the late tenth century onward gave those missions an institutional framework that outlasted the original missionary generation by centuries.

The Tenth Century and After

By 1000, the political map of Europe looked very different from the political map of 500. The Roman successor states of the West had been replaced by a new configuration of kingdoms, principalities, and duchies, most of them Christian, many of them ruled by dynasties claiming Roman or Trojan descent. The Holy Roman Empire, in some sense a continuation of Charlemagne’s empire, was emerging in the German lands under the Ottonian dynasty. The kingdom of France, no longer Frankish in any meaningful sense, was beginning to take shape under the late Carolingian and early Capetian rulers. England, recently unified under Wessex-derived kings, was on the eve of its second great crisis, the Norman Conquest. The Christian kingdoms of Asturias, León, Navarre, Aragon, and Castile were absorbing the upper third of the Iberian peninsula. Scandinavia had produced the great kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and was sending waves of colonists across the North Atlantic. The Polish, Bohemian, and Hungarian kingdoms, newly Christian and newly organized, were being drawn into the orbit of the Latin Christian West.

None of these polities was a direct continuation of the Roman Empire. All of them, however, were in some sense Roman in their Christianity, in their use of Latin as the language of church and law, in their continuing use of Roman legal concepts, and in their persistent claim to a civilizing inheritance that distinguished them from the peoples beyond the frontier. When the pope crowned Otto I emperor in 962, the symbolism was unmistakable: the medieval Latin Christian world, with all its warlike, monastic, and commercial complexity, was defining itself against the rest.

The century that followed 1000 would see that Latin Christian world begin to expand aggressively at its margins. The Norman conquest of England (1066), the Reconquista’s capture of Toledo (1085) and later Lisbon (1147), the German colonization of Slavic lands east of the Elbe, the Crusades into the eastern Mediterranean, and the slow conversion of the Baltic and Finno-Ugric peoples all extended the political and cultural frontiers of medieval Europe. The great abbeys of Cluny, the cathedrals of Speyer and Canterbury, the palaces of Goslar and Aachen, the incipient universities of Bologna and Paris, the merchant houses of Genoa, Pisa, and the Champagne fairs: all of these, properly understood, are products of the post-Roman centuries surveyed in this article. The Latin Christian west that the eleventh century inherited was not the same west that the fifth century had inherited, and the difference between them is the formation of medieval Europe.

A Note on Periodization

Historians have not always agreed on what to call the period between the Roman world and the medieval one. Renaissance writers, looking back to a classical past, invented the term Middle Ages and treated the centuries between themselves and that past as an undifferentiated dark age. Nineteenth-century historians, struck by the importance of the Germanic migrations, preferred to see the period as a transition in which new peoples gave Europe a new shape. More recent scholarship has emphasized continuity — of Christian institutions, of the Latin language, of Roman law — and the inadequacy of any single model. What can be said with confidence is that the post-Roman centuries were not static. The Europe of 500 was neither the Europe of 800 nor the Europe of 1000, and the political and cultural configurations that we now call “medieval” were the result of a long process of formation, contestation, and reinvention.

The five centuries covered in this article are sometimes called late antiquity, sometimes the early Middle Ages, sometimes the Dark Ages (a term now generally avoided by historians), and sometimes the formative or barbarian period. Each label highlights a different feature of the evidence. The first emphasizes the survival of Roman administrative and cultural forms; the second looks forward to the medieval millennium; the third focuses on the social and political disruption of the fourth and fifth centuries; the fourth emphasizes the role of the new Germanic ruling classes; and the fifth foregrounds the political creativity of peoples who, in older historiography, were treated as destroyers of a vanished civilization. None of these is wrong; each captures something real. Readers of this article should feel free to use whichever term they find most useful, but should be aware that the period in question is one of the most argued-over in European history, and that the debates themselves are part of its history.

What to Read Next

This article has surveyed the formation of medieval Europe at a high level. The articles that follow it treat each major region in greater depth, examining the political institutions, social structures, and cultural achievements of the Merovingian Franks, Anglo-Saxon England, Visigothic Spain, the Lombard kingdom of Italy, and the Slavic polities of Eastern Europe. Readers interested in the surrounding context can consult the articles on the Germanic migrations, the Carolingian Empire, the Christianization of Europe, and the papacy in the early Middle Ages.