9.5 Germanic peoples
The church apart, the civilization established by the Roman conquest of northwestern Europe was not particularly robust. The Romans certainly left traces wherever they went. The main roads of Anglo-Saxon England, such as they were, originated as Roman roads. But Rome was a Mediterranean power, and in northwestern Europe the Roman presence, for all its linguistic impact, did not have the same cultural density as it did in the south. And in any case, it embraced only a limited territory; it did not extend to Germany, let alone Scandinavia or eastern Europe.
It was this thinly civilised and severely circumscribed territory that was overrun, together with the western half of the Mediterranean world, by a variety of Germanic peoples in the fifth century A.D. In Italy, Spain, and North Africa, Germanic conquerors established kingdoms that lasted a couple of centuries, more or less.  They left the language, ethnic identity, and cultural traditions of the subject Roman populations somewhat the worse for wear, but otherwise pretty much unchanged. In Britain, by contrast, the impact was drastic, even though the sea might have been expected to provide some protection against heavy Germanic settlement. Outside the western fringes of the island Germanic replaced Latin or Celtic, and Germanic ethnic identities prevailed.   South of Scotland and east of Wales the land was divided among half a dozen petty kingdoms, not to be united into the country we know as England till the ninth century. In the course of this transformation, Roman culture and Christianity had been effectively erased, and both had to be reintroduced by Christian missionaries from the Continent at the end of the sixth century.
Gaul-or as it now became, France- presents an interestingly intermediate case. Latin prevailed over the Germanic language of the conquerors, though in the process of becoming French it was heavily influenced by Germanic. In ethnic terms, however, it was the Frankish conquerors who prevailed: the inhabitants of France eventually came to be known as Franks or, as we now say, French-not as Romans, still less Gauls. Once the Frankish king and his people had converted to Christianity in 493, the place of what remained of Roman culture in its Christianized form was reasonably secure.  Northern France held out, where the center of Frankish power was located.
For nearly three centuries the Frankish kingdom was ruled in some fashion by the Merovingian dynasty.  But in 751 this dynasty was replaced by a family that already held effective power in the kingdom, the Carolingians. The long reign of the most successful Carolingian ruler, Charlemagne (768-814), is one of unmistakable significance in the history of northwestern Europe. For the first time since the fall of the western Roman Empire, we sense the emergence of a new order in the region. The Frankish kingdom, already a sizable state, was now further enlarged to the east and south. Great efforts and considerable patronage were expended on the revival of Latin culture. And in a fine symbolic moment in 800, Charlemagne on a visit to Rome was crowned Roman emperor by the pope. Yet there was no attempt to restore any geopolitical semblance of a Roman Empire around the Mediterranean, a sea that was now largely dominated by the Muslims. Instead, Charlemagne ruled from Aachen, a town so far to the north that it forms part of the latitudinal band we compared to Labrador and the Kamchatka. This is perhaps the first intimation that it was even possible for such a region to be at the center of a civilization, and not just on its remote northern periphery.
Charlemagne's new order was, however, of short duration. The unity of the Frankish state did not long survive his death, and political conditions in northwestern Europe became increasingly chaotic in the course of the ninth and tenth centuries. In addition to internal disarray the region was subject to several external threats, and proved signally ineffective in parrying them. To the south were the Muslims. They had already conquered the bulk of Spain in the early eighth century, and went on to help themselves to most of the islands of the western Mediterranean. They did not threaten large-scale territorial conquest of Frankish lands, but for the best part of a century a group of Arab marauders with a base in the south of France wrought havoc in the surrounding territory. To the north were the Scandinavians-the Vikings, or Norsemen-whose maritime raiding terrorized the coasts of the mainland and the British Isles. In some regions they settled in significant numbers; in France they gave their name to Normandy, where they contributed to the formation of a particularly effective Frankish- style military aristocracy. To the east were the Hungarians, nomadic invaders from the steppes who arrived in the territory that was to become Hungary in the later ninth century, and raided widely for some time thereafter. Under these conditions the grand cultural pretensions of Charlemagne's reign were unsustainable.
This takes us more or less to A.D. 1000.  By this time, like Southeast Asia, northwestern Europe had not developed a civilization of its own, and instead had acquired one from elsewhere-except that while the Southeast Asians voluntarily adopted theirs, the Northwestern Europeans had it imposed on them. Just as in the case of early Southeast Asia, there is nothing in the history of northwestern Europe up to this time to suggest that it was destined to play a major role in world history.