FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO MODERNITY

“There was once a time when all people believed in God and the Church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.” — RICHARD LEDERER

PREAMBLE

A historical overview of medieval Europe is presented to provide some understanding of the pressures which lent animus to the European, and Arabian, the onslaught on Africa.

The chapter digs deeply into medieval history — invasions of kingdoms and empires, and the transformation of Arabian and European societies -to show that the colonization of Africa was a harvest of the seeds of imperialism that were sowed during the Renaissance in Europe.

The medieval period is subdivided into the Early, High, and Late Middle Ages. During the High Middle Ages, which began after 1000, the population of Europe increased greatly. Technological and agricultural innovations had enabled trade to flourish, and the Medieval Warm Period climate change allowed crop yields to increase.

Through the Crusades, first preached in 1095, Western European Christians had made military attempts to regain control of the Holy Land from Muslims. Kings became the heads of centralized nation-states, reducing crime and violence but making the ideal of a unified Christendom more distant.

Scholasticism, a philosophy that emphasized joining faith to reason, held supreme. Universities had been established. The theology of Thomas Aquinas, the paintings of Giotto, the poetry of Dante and Chancer, the travels of Marco Polo, and the Gothic architecture of cathedrals such as Chartres were among the outstanding achievements toward the end of this period and into the Late Middle Ages.

In the Late Middle Ages, Europe was marked by difficulties and calamities including famine, plague, and war, which significantly diminished its population, between 1347 and 1350. The Black Death killed about a third of Europeans. Controversy, heresy, and the Western Schism within the Catholic Church paralleled the interstate conflict, civil strife, and peasant revolts that occurred in the kingdoms.

EUROPE IN TURMOIL

According to Wikipedia, the Roman Empire reached its greatest territorial extent during the 2nd century AD, with the following two centuries witnessing the slow decline of Roman control over its outlying territories.

Economic issues, including inflation, and external pressure on the frontiers combined to create the Crisis of the Third Century, with emperors coming to the throne only to be rapidly replaced by new ones.

For much of the 4th century, Roman society gained stability through Christianization, or conversion of the empire to Christianity, a gradual process that lasted from the 2nd to the 5th centuries.

Fleeing the Huns in 376, the Goths had been permitted to settle in the Roman province of Thracia in the Balkans. An inquiry into the propriety of the settlement had ignited a revolt by the Goths in 378, leading to the Battle of Adrianople.

In 400, the Visigoths invaded the Western Roman Empire, but were briefly forced back from Italy; in 410, they scaled the city of Rome. In 406, the Alans, Vandals, and Suevi crossed into Gaul (a region comprising modern-day France and parts of Belgium, western Germany, and northern Italy).

Over the next three years, they spread across Gaul and in 409 crossed the Pyrenees Mountains into modern-day Spain.

The Migration Period began when various peoples, initially largely Germanic peoples, moved across Europe. The Franks, Alemannia, and the Burgundians all ended up in northern Gaul, while the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes settled in Britain.

The Vandals –who first inhabited current southern Poland — went on to cross the strait of Gibraltar after which they conquered the province of Africa. The Vandals were a ‘barbarian’ Germanic people who sacked Rome, battled the Huns and the Goths, and founded a kingdom that flourished in North Africa until it succumbed to an invasion force from the Byzantine Empire in AD 534.

In the 430s the Huns began invading the empire; their king Attila (r. 434–453) led invasions into the Balkans in 442 and 447, Gaul in 451, and Italy in 452. The Hunnic threat remained until Attila’s death in 453, when the Hunnic confederation he led fell apart.

These invasions by the tribes completely changed the political and demographic nature of what had been the Western Roman Empire.

By 493 the Italian peninsula was conquered by the Ostrogoths (a Roman-era Germanic people).

The Eastern Roman Empire, often referred to as the Byzantine Empire, after the fall of its western counterpart, had little ability to assert control over the lost western territories.

The political structure of Western Europe changed with the end of the united Roman Empire.

Although the movements of peoples during this period are usually described as “invasions,” they were not just military expeditions but migrations of entire peoples into the empire.

Such movements were aided by the refusal of the Western Roman elites to support the army or pay the taxes that would have allowed the military to suppress the migration.

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