An Introduction to the History of Western Europe

by James Harvey Robinson

The 'dark ages.'

It is true that it seemed at first as if the barbarous Goths, Franks, Vandals, and Burgundians were bringing nothing but turmoil and distraction. Even the strong hand of Charlemagne curbed the unruly elements for only a moment; then the discord of his grandsons and the incursions of Northmen, Hungarians, Slavs, and Saracens plunged western Europe once more into the same anarchy and ignorance through which it had passed in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Two hundred years and more elapsed after Charlemagne's death before we can begin once more to note signs of progress. While we know little of the eleventh century, and while even its most distinguished writers are forgotten by all save the student of the period, it was undoubtedly a time of preparation for the brilliant twelfth century—for Abelard and St. Bernard, for the lawyers, poets, architects, and philosophers who seem to come suddenly upon the scene.

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries a period of rapid advance.

The Middle Ages may therefore be divided into two fairly distinct and quite different periods. The centuries prior to the age of Gregory VII and of William the Conqueror may, on account of their disorder and ignorance, be properly called the "dark ages," although they beheld some important stages in the transformation of Europe. The later Middle Ages, on the contrary, were a time of rapid and unmistakable progress in almost every line of human endeavor. Indeed by the end of the thirteenth century a great part of those changes were well under way which serve to make modern Europe so different from the condition of western Europe under the Roman Empire. The most striking of these are the following.

Appearance of national states.

(1) A group of national states in which a distinct feeling of nationality was developing had taken the place of the Roman Empire, which made no allowance in its government for the differences between Italians, Gauls, Germans, and Britons. The makeshift feudal government which had grown up during the dark ages was yielding to the kingly power (except in Germany and Italy) and there was no hope of ever reuniting western Europe into a single empire.

The national states begin to deprive the Church of its governmental powers.

(2) The Church had, in a way, taken the place of the Roman Empire by holding the various peoples of western Europe together under the headship of the pope and by assuming the powers of government during the period when the feudal lords were too weak to secure order and justice. Organized like an absolute monarchy, the Church was in a certain sense far the most powerful state of the Middle Ages. But it attained the zenith of its political influence under Innocent III, at the opening of the thirteenth century; before its close the national states had so grown in strength that it was clear that they would gradually reassume the powers of government temporarily exercised by the Church and confine the pope and clergy more and more to their strictly religious functions.

Appearance of the commons or third estate.