Medieval Europe 400-1500

✍ Scribed by Helmut Georg Koenigsberger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 420
• Series: Koenigsberger and Briggs History of Europe, 1
• Edition: Reprint
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

First published 1987 by Pearson Education Limited.

"Medieval Europe 400-1500" is the first volume of a major new three-part illustrated history of Europe from the collapse of the Roman Empire to modern times, written for upper school, college and university students, and for the general reader The two authors, H. G. Koenigsberger and Asa Briggs, have collaborated closely on the planning of the sequence, the second of which, "Early Modern Europe 1500-1789", is again by Professor Koenigsberger, and the third, "Modern Europe 1789-1980", by Lord Briggs.

Medieval Europe launches the enterprise in fine style. H. G. Koenigsberger's rich and absorbing account starts with the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, which had been centred on the Mediterranean, and traces across the millennium of the Middle Ages the gradual crystallization of a new and distinctive European identity in the lands to the north of it.

This development is comprehensible only when it is seen in its relation both to Europe's neighbours, and also to the Europeans' perception of their own past as deeply rooted in the earlier civilization of Greece and Rome. Professor Koenigsberger therefore sets his account in the broader context of the Islamic, Byzantine and Central Asian worlds; and he also explores the successive renaissances' by which the Europeans sought to recapture and renew the traditions, values and achievements of their classical inheritance.

It is a crowded, compelling story, and it has a splendidly lucid and readable guide in Professor Koenigsberger. In his pages the early history of modern Europe comes vividly to life in all its social, political, economic and cultural manifestations. He depicts a society divided in its allegiances and attitudes, and often violent and crude, yet also uniquely creative and dynamic. The thousand-year development he surveys here starts in disintegration and disorder; but by its end the Europeans were set to impose their rule, and much of their value system, on the rest of the world. How they did so, and to what effect, is one of the themes of the succeeding volume.

✦ Table of Contents

List of maps viii
List of plates x
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. The End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages, 400-700 9
The Roman Empire in AD 400 9
The resources of the Roman Empire 12
Theories of the fall of the Roman Empire in the west 21
The German barbarians 23
The division of the Roman Empire 24
The first sack of Rome 25
Attila and the empire of the Huns 28
The German kingdoms in the Roman Empire 29
The end of the Roman Empire in the west 30
The Ostrogoths in Italy 31
The Roman Empire in the east: Justinian 31
The reconquest of the western Mediterranean 36
Byzantium and Persia 38
The barbarian successor states 40
The christianization of the Empire 50
The visual arts 60
Conclusions 64
Chapter 2. The Carolingian Empire and the Invasions of Europe, 700-1000 67
The climate 67
Population and settlements 68
Family structure and settlements 69
Agricultural yields and mortality rates 72
Economic structure 73
The kingdom of the Franks 80
Charlemagne (768-814) 82
Britain and England 89
The Vikings 93
The Danish Empire 98
The development of feudalism 98
New principalities in the west 102
Germany 102
Eastern Europe 106
Islam and the Arab conquests 110
Byzantium 117
Ecclesiastical organization and monasticism 124
The Carolingian Renaissance 126
Conclusion 133
Chapter 3. The Recovery of the West, the Crusades and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, 1000-1200 136
The first Christian millennium 136
The European kingdoms in the eleventh century 148
Central and eastern Europe 159
The Church and the papacy in the eleventh century 164
Western Europe in the twelfth century 168
Empire and papacy in the twelfth century 172
Russia 175
The Islamic world 179
Byzantium 180
The western counter-offensive 184
The intellectual Renaissance of the eleventh and twelfth centuries 197
Conclusion: Europe in 1200 210
Chapter 4. The High Middle Ages, 1200-1340 213
The climate 213
Population 213
Agricultural expansion 215
Manufactures: the craft guilds 221
Capitalism and new techniques in trade 225
Royal government 229
The decline of internationalism 230
Conquests 230
Governments: law and community 232
Papacy, empire and state 234
Religious life 243
The fourth crusade and the fall of Byzantium 251
The Mongol invasions 262
Intellectual life, literature and art 269
Conclusion 278
Chapter 5. The Later Middle Ages: Transalpine Europe, 1340-1500 281
The Black Death 1348-50 281
Agriculture: the end of serfdom 284
Towns and trade 291
The European kingdoms 299
Central, eastern and northern Europe 315
The papacy at Avignon 324
New forms of religious life 328
Catholic Europe and the outside world 333
Byzantium and the Ottoman Turks 336
Conclusion 340
Chapter 6. Medieval City Culture: Central Europe, Italy and the Renaissance, 1300-1500 343
The cities of the Later Middle Ages 343
The Renaissance: intellectual life 362
Music from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance 379
Conclusion 385
Index 388