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.