PAUL FREEDMAN: It does
seem as if
we are back to invasions
again.
We end the course the way we
began it, except they're
different invaders.
One thing that I'm sure
Professor Frank will want you
to get out of the
Vikings course--
and not all of you are going to
take that, obviously, so I
will mention this-- is they did
not have horned helmets.
The horned helmet idea--
actually, Roberta Frank has
researched where this totally
inaccurate idea comes from and
why it is ineradicable.
But if there's one thing you
should come out of the second
part of this course
knowing, it's that.
So we're discussing people from
Scandinavia, different
parts of Scandinavia, who had
different destinations.
So different parts
of Scandinavia:
Denmark, Norway, Sweden.
Different destinations: the
Frankish Empire of Charlemagne
for which they bear some
responsibility for unraveling,
Russia, the British
Isles, Iceland,
Greenland, the New World.
They certainly got around.
They're not always the
same populations.
And they have different
ambitions in different places.
Basically, those ambitions can
be divided into raiding,
trading, and settling.
These are not mutually
exclusive.
Although usually they began by
raiding almost always if they
were dealing with a place
that had people.
Thus obviously Iceland
when they came didn't
have people at all.
So they came there as explorers
or settlers.
The crucial changeover is in
their attacks on the British
Isles and on the Frankish
Empire.
They begin as raiders, that is
as seaborne warriors who would
plunder opportunistic
targets--
monasteries, for example--
and then leave with
their spoils.
They also, however,
were traders.
And I don't want to make too
much of this as if it were a
timeless statement, but in the
period we're dealing with,
raiding and trading weren't
all that far apart.
When the Vikings in the east,
mostly from Sweden, were
dealing with the Caliphate in
Baghdad or the Byzantine
Empire, they found these targets
too well organized
with too overpowering a
military presence to
intimidate in the way that
they were able to do with
Britain and the Frankish
Empire.
So here they were
more traders.
They brought various products,
particularly slaves and fur,
to the Caliphate and to
the Byzantine Empire.
And they came back with a lot of
coins, among other things.
80,000 coins from the Caliphate
have been found in
Sweden alone.
So here they're traders.
Settlers.
They would eventually settle in
the Frankish Empire and in
the Anglo-Saxon kingdom
of England.
They would settle in Ireland.
Indeed, the city of Dublin was
founded by the Vikings.
They would settle in
Iceland completely.
That is, the people who live
in Iceland now are the
descendants of mostly Norwegian,
some Danish
settlers of the tenth and
eleventh centuries.
They would even try to settle as
far afield as Newfoundland.
There is a place in Newfoundland
that it is
unmistakably, by the
archaeological evidence, a
Viking site.
This doesn't ultimately work.
So it is wrong to think of them
exclusively as savage
warriors, as barbarians, but
then again, we've seen that
it's wrong to think of most of
the invading peoples of the
period we've been discussing
as just
totally savage raiders.
These are extremely skilled
raiders, and as I've just
gotten through saying, they're
raiders with several different
possible agendas.
They're very adaptive.
The question remains, what made
Scandinavia so powerful
in the ninth and tenth
centuries, especially since
Scandinavia tends not
to be a major
actor in European politics.
The two periods in which
it is are this one--
basically the ninth, tenth,
eleventh centuries--
and the seventeenth century
when the armies of Sweden
under Gustavus Adolphus
terrorized Central Europe.
That effort was ultimately ended
not in Central Europe
but in Eastern Europe
by Russia.
And the Russians defeated the
Swedes sufficiently in the
early eighteenth so that they
basically never got themselves
very heavily involved in
European politics again.
Part of the answer of
"Why Scandinavia?
Why now?" is that we're dealing
with another savage or
certainly less civilized
population who erupt from
their homeland and devastate
a weak but
relatively rich society.
There's nothing very
unusual about that.
We have seen it with the Roman
Empire, and you can see it
later with such successful
campaigns as those of the
Mongols in the thirteenth
century.
So the other reason besides
opportunity is tactics.
The Vikings were masters
of the sea.
If you ever do go to Denmark,
Sweden, or Norway, you must go
to the Viking museums there.
They are absolutely
enthralling.
And you see these ships that
seem unbelievably flimsy for
the voyages that
they undertook.
On the other hand, by reason
of their small size and
particularly shallow draft--
that is to say they're able to
be stable without being so
deep underneath the ship, having
a keel underneath--
that they can sail up rivers.
They can both, therefore, go in
the Atlantic and be stable
enough to make the journey and
go up rivers that are no more
than five or six feet deep at
points like the Seine in
France or the Loire in France.
And so they could raid far
inland with these ships.
And as masters of seas and
rivers, they could easily
outrun the clumsy, slow
Carolingian armies.
They could raid a monastery,
check out another monastery
the same afternoon.
"Oh, there's an army there.
Well, we'll just get back
in the ship, and
we'll go further down.
And then we'll look for more
tempting targets--
palaces, towns, monasteries."
They were not good
at fortification.
If a place was fortified, they
tended to pass it by.
They were not siege masters.
Their control, therefore, of the
water is not dissimilar to
the Arabs' advantage in the
beginning of the Arab
expansion that we talked about
with regard to the desert.
The desert functions
the same way.
An environment that these people
controlled in the sense
that they could maneuver easily
in it, and their more
civilized opponent with larger
armies could not.
The Persian and the Byzantine
armies couldn't really go very
far into the desert.
They had supply line, water
problems. They actually didn't
know the desert.
It all looked the
same to them.
So this is the same or at least
a similar advantage for
the Vikings.
The Vikings are different from
other raiders partly in their
ability to construct
governments, not only to
settle lands, but to create
governments ranging from the
what advertises itself with some
accuracy as the world's
oldest democracy, Iceland,
where tourists are still
pointed out the place where the
kind of parliament of all
citizens took place as early as
2,000 [correction: 1,000]
years ago.
And they're also the founders of
Russia, probably not to be
advertised as the world's
oldest democracy.
Certainly not a country that's
had a whole lot of experience
with that particular
form of government.
But in fact, the first Christian
rulers of Russia,
the same Vladimir and his
successors, who were baptized
and crowned under Byzantine
auspices were Scandinavian.
And the Scandinavian groups
are called the Rus.
They quickly lose their
Scandinavian language and
identity, but nevertheless that
is the founding dynasty
of the first Russian rulers.
So the Vikings have a
fascinating culture and
literature, amazing sagas mostly
preserved through their
Icelandic versions, very
interesting art, very
interesting forms of decoration,
and then these
magnificent ships.
Their major contribution to the
history of Europe may be
geopolitical in the sense that
they connect parts of the
world that were otherwise
minimally
or not at all connected.
So from Central Asia to
Greenland, they build various
kinds of cultural and
particularly commercial
networks.
They also contribute to the
destroying of the Carolingian
Empire, the destroying
of what we were
discussing before the vacation.
They're not the sole cause.
We talked about weaknesses
within the Carolingian Empire,
but certainly the Viking
invasions have devastated it
during the ninth century
did not at all help.
Where did this drive for
expansion come from besides
opportunity?
And there's not a tremendous
agreement on
this point among scholars.
Overpopulation and land
hunger are possible.
To this day, these are not
densely populated countries.
And in the pre-modern period,
they could not support
anything but a very small
population given the fact that
most of the land is not capable
of being cultivated.
So you can get to a point of
over-population pretty quickly.
Opportunities afforded by
the weakness of others--
I've mentioned this.
Internal feuding and the
creation of exiles.
It's hard to separate legend
from history, but the legends
about the founding of Iceland
and Greenland in particular
involve people who were too
rowdy for the Vikings.
I pause on that, because it's a
little hard to imagine what
such a person would
have been like.
Nevertheless, these sagas tell
us that various people were
just too mean for quiet,
civilized old Norway or even
couldn't get their energies
fulfilled by plundering the
Frankish Empire and went
off to Iceland
and places like that.
The climate conditions may
have been favorable.
It may have been relatively
warm.
There's a lot of debate about
the settlement of Greenland in
this regard in particular.
We know that by the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries,
Greenland was becoming too cold
for the Scandinavians and
not for the Inuit, who were
better adapted to real polar
conditions.
But this is something that is
of crucial importance in
tracing the history of climate
and is hotly debated.
But it certainly looks as
if it gets colder in the
thirteenth, fourteenth
century--
fourteenth century
particularly--
throughout Europe and the
Atlantic and probably warmer
in the tenth and eleventh
centuries when this expansion
is taking place.
And then finally, there's a cult
of personal valor that is
even stronger than that of
early medieval Europe.
A male cult of violent military
bravery and the
opportunity to demonstrate
that was a kind
of competitive sport.
The Viking raids in England
and the Continent
begin around 800.
One of the first stunning events
is the sack of the
island monastery of Lindisfarne
on the eastern
coast of northern England.
The monastery of Lindisfarne
was sacked by
the Vikings in 797.
Charlemagne was able to repulse
these raids and the
English as well.
But the civil wars that we were
talking about among the
sons of Louis the Pious started
to encourage the
Vikings indirectly by the
disunity of the Frankish
Empire, the wasting of military
resources on what
was, in effect, a kind
of civil war.
But also the Vikings just got
stronger and more ambitious,
because their raids on
relatively well organized
Britain start to reach their
height in the 830s.
So you start having the
abandonment of monasteries,
for example, the abandonment of
Lindisfarne and the moving
of its relics.
So the relics of Saint
Cuthbert of York
move around a lot.
Monks on the western coast
of France abandon their
monasteries and move their
communities and
relics further inland.
The Vikings seem to jockey
between emphasizing raids on
the Frankish Empire and on
England, but basically they're
doing both.
They start to spend the
winter, what's called
over-wintering in the late
830s, early 840s.
And that's a sinister sign from
the point of view of the
English, Irish, and Franks,
because that means that
they're going from raiding
to some form of settling.
If they can spend the winter
and not just the classic
raiding season, why not
just stay permanently?
So they start coming
up the rivers.
They start plundering
cities that are not
sufficiently fortified.
A monk in the 860s writes, "the
number of ships grows
every year..." The feeling of
just this complete takeover.
Now, that's the monastic
point of view.
The monasteries were ideal
targets, because they are
rich, isolated, and minimally
fortified.
But nevertheless, the
Carolingians have no fleet to
match the Viking ships.
The way to stop the Vikings--
and it was only really
implemented in
the 870s and 880s.
The way to stop the Vikings was
with fortified bridges.
If you built a bridge that the
Vikings could not go past
without fighting and fortified
it sufficiently and had
sufficient numbers of troops,
you would stymie them.
And this is eventually
what happens.
In the late ninth century, the
Vikings are defeated at the
gates of Paris in 888--
885, 886, rather.
And they start accommodating
with the European rulers.
That is to say they are given
lands to settle and then made
to promise to stop raiding.
And in effect, they start to
settle down towards the end of
the ninth century, beginning of
the tenth century so that,
for example, a treaty in 911
with the West Frankish ruler,
the ruler we can start to call
the King of France, allows
them to settle in northwestern
France in a territory that
henceforth was called
Normandy.
Same in French.
Normandie.
The territory of the "Northmen"
is what they're
usually referred to in the
sources rather than "Vikings."
The territory of the Northmen.
So Normandy in 911 was a
province settled by Vikings
nominally loyal to the
King of France.
The Vikings very quickly
lose their language.
By the time of the Duke of
Normandy, William the
Conqueror 150 or so years
later, they are Norman.
They speak French.
They are more French
than anything else,
although a bit different.
Their ships still look a
bit like Viking ships.
If you know the Bayeux Tapestry,
which is this
embroidery that shows the
history of the Norman conquest
of England, their ships look
very much like our image of
Viking ships.
In England, the 860s are the
zenith of their destruction.
They actually in effect
partition England between an
eastern and a western part.
The eastern part becomes a
territory called the Dane law,
the place where the Danes
have settled.
And their indirect effect on
England is to force the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to unify.
So rather than the multiple
kingdoms that we looked at at
Bede's time--
Mercia, East Anglia,
Northumbria--
we have the western kingdom
formerly called Wessex, which
under King Alfred in the 860s
to 880s becomes really the
sole Anglo-Saxon kingdom of
England and gradually defeats
the Vikings, eventually kicking
them out of the
British Isles altogether
by about 930 or so.
So the conquests in the Frankish
and English realms
are not permanent in the sense
that there's minimal
Scandinavian impact
of a permanent
sort on these places.
There are not a lot of people
speaking Old Norse in either
place in 1100.
But their impact is tremendous
in terms of organizing these
places, creating networks,
founding cities like Dublin,
reorganizing kingdoms like
Ireland, creating Normandy,
and really kind of throwing the
puzzle on the floor and
reforming it.
In the East and in
the Atlantic.
Here you have to imagine or sort
of visualize Scandinavia
sitting on the top of Europe.
The same effect that encourages
airlines to use
polar routes as a shorter way to
cross the globe also allows
the Scandinavians in effect
to choose their targets.
Some of this is logical.
Norway is much easier, much
closer to the British Isles
than you might think.
It sort of sits on
top of them.
And Sweden is much closer to
the East via the North than
one would think.
But even Norway, for example,
the modern kingdom of Norway,
has a border with Russia.
It goes so far north, and then
it has this very little,
narrow piece of land that is
only about thirty miles from
the important Russian
port of Murmansk.
And all of these places are
relatively warm given how far
north they are because
of the Gulf Stream.
So just as London is
surprisingly warm considering
that it's on the same latitude
as Newfoundland, so these
northern parts of Scandinavia
are the equivalent of polar
wastes of northern Canada.
And yet they are--
they're cold enough.
The problem with them is
they're really dark.
So they're dark for months
at a time, but they're
not all that cold.
From this vantage point then,
the East would be a tempting
source of enterprise for
Vikings, particularly but not
exclusively from Scandinavia,
especially
in the tenth century.
They would go via the Baltic
Sea and the Gulf of Finland
down the Russian rivers
like the Dnieper--
Dnieper with a D--
to the Black Sea and the Volga
to the Caspian Sea.
They used to these rivers as
ways of reaching territories
of Byzantine and of Caliphal
influence.
They traded, raided
when possible.
A lot of our descriptions of the
Vikings by outsiders, our
most accurate descriptions, are
from Muslim travelers who
describe who these people are,
what their products are even
though very little remains
in this region to
attest to the Vikings.
The main evidence, as we said,
are really coins taken back to
Scandinavia.
Their base--
that is the Viking base
in this eastern area--
was what would become Kiev
in modern Ukraine.
And Kiev would be the first
Russian Scandinavian kingdom
ruled by a tsar.
They had ambitions to take over
Constantinople, a city
they called in sort of
Tolkien-esque fashion
"Mickelgard"--
"Gard" meaning city, "mickel"
meaning powerful.
"Mickel" still in Middle
English, in Chaucer's English,
means "impressive,"
"powerful."
Their attacks on Mickelgard
didn't work.
They attacked in 860 and 941,
and we've seen that
Constantinople was able to
fight off more impressive
enemies than this.
They therefore were dealing with
wealthy and established
states, well-organized states,
better organized than the
Carolingian Empire or the
Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and so
states that were capable
of defeating them.
They therefore came to these
areas controlled by Baghdad
and Constantinople more as
traders than as raiders.
What did they bring
to trade with?
They have certain classic
products, things from the
North Sea, like walrus ivory,
very highly prized, amber from
the Baltic Sea--
amber used in jewelry and
medicine, a stone that's not
really a stone, a thing that's
much lighter than it looks
like credited with various
kinds of mysterious or at
least medicinal properties
throughout the formerly Roman
and Islamic world.
Arrows and swords.
The West was very good
at metalworking.
Honey, hunting falcons, wax.
But as I said, their two
great commodities
were slaves and furs.
Slaves--
these societies of the Byzantine
Empire and the
Caliphate always wanted
more slaves.
They had plenty of unpleasant
labor as well as domestic
service shortages.
And so many of these slaves
were Slavs, that is Slavic
populations rounded up by the
Vikings and then sold in
Constantinople or Baghdad.
Furs.
On the one hand, furs like
sable, marten, mink that
bounded in the eastern Baltic
regions and in what's now
northern Russia were
tremendously prized in a world
in which central heating
was nonexistent.
And although we may not think
of modern Istanbul as
particularly cold, it's
quite cold and damp.
One can certainly understand the
practical desire for furs
for well-off people in
the Byzantine Empire.
In the Caliphate, it may
seem a little stranger.
Baghdad is more noted for
unbearable heat than cold.
On the other hand, the Caliphate
includes territories
like Afghanistan,
eastern Iran.
And also, keep in mind, as is
the case with Palm Beach and
Miami Beach even as we speak now
in late November, that for
certain people, the prestige
of the furs transcends any
need for practical warmth.
So these are the two
great products.
So they're plunderers and
extortionists, but they're
fairly creative plunderers
and extortionists.
They create a number of trading
cities, not only Kiev
further south, but the great
city of Novgorod sort of
between the Baltic and the more
modern city of Moscow.
These cities are fortified,
leading one to assume that
they weren't just free-trade
zones, that other people
raided them or that the Vikings
expected other people
to try to revenge themselves
on their kind
of raiding and trading.
So anyway, as we've said before,
trading and plundering
are not necessarily
totally distinct.
So finally, the West. The
Vikings begin to explore the
Atlantic mostly from Norway
and beginning after the
maximum period of raiding
of England starts to
tail off in the 860s.
These lands were uninhabited,
Iceland, or minimally
inhabited, Greenland.
They were very attractive for
hunting and for pasturing.
Where the Vikings found a fair
density of people, they tended
not to stay.
This is their problem
with Newfoundland.
They have a settlement in
Newfoundland at a place whose
modern name is somewhat
confusing way called L'Anse
aux Meadows.
So you have a French and
English compound.
L'Anse aux Meadows in
Newfoundland, one of a number
of certainly the most best-known
Viking sites.
But there were Native Americans
who drove them out,
not necessarily because they
were superior in armament, but
it just wasn't really worth
it to the Vikings to stay.
So their staying
in Newfoundland
is relatively brief.
In order to go from Norway to
Iceland, it's about 800 miles,
and it took anywhere between
one week and one month.
The island is not as cold
as its name suggests.
It has glaciers, but in the
parts that don't have
glaciers, it's not
all that cold.
Again, the Gulf Stream.
Most of it is uninhabitable,
but that's
because of volcanic rock.
I don't know how many of you
have been to Iceland, but even
the drive from the airport to
Reykjavik is intimidating,
because it goes through the
stuff called "tufa".
And there are no trees, and
there's sort of no prospect of
anything growing there.
But on the other hand, there
are plenty of nice coastal
strips, mild climate,
great pasture.
There are almost no trees now.
And there's a lot of debate
about whether there were
trees, whether they just cut
them down, and they couldn't
be re-cultivated.
But in fact, this is a very
hospitable place: rich
pastures, sea mammals
everywhere.
Until Iceland completely lost
its mind in the speculative
atmosphere of the decade
preceding 2008, their main
industry was cod fishing.
They then went into banking in
a way that just staggers the
mind and have gotten back
into cod fishing, my
understanding is.
But they had lots and lots
of other things.
Lots of seals which they killed
for fur, walrus skin
used for cable for ropes for
ships, walrus ivory, another
little creature called an
narwhal that has a tusk that
looks like a--
well, it was taken for
being a unicorn tusk.
There's one in the Cloisters,
for example, that some of you
are going to see on the
seventh of December.
So the colonization of Iceland
begins in 870, and by 930, the
island is basically full.
It's habitable land, again.
A very, very small percentage
of the land
area was fully settled.
We know a lot more about Iceland
than any other part of
Scandinavia because of the
extraordinary quality and
quantity of poetic stories,
sagas in which honor,
treasure, and love of
mayhem dominate.
These are very violent and until
a certain point were
taken to be realistic portrayals
of life in Iceland
just as if, say, 1950s and 1960s
TV westerns were assumed
to be a totally accurate
portrayal of life everywhere
in the United States in the
nineteenth century.
So these are, like Westerns,
wonderful stories of male
violence with a certain amount
of exaggeration, but
nevertheless the reflection of
customs, ways of speaking, and
social values.
Towards the end of the tenth
century, Greenland was
explored under the leadership of
Erik the Red, one of these
renegades so difficult and
violent that he was exiled
from both Norway and Iceland.
He is the one who seems to have
dubbed this new territory
Greenland, a pioneer of
deceptive advertising, I think
it's fair to say.
Because warm as it may have
been in the tenth century,
this is like calling some
housing development Warbling
Acres when in fact you've just
bulldozed all the trees in
order to create the
development.
So the western coast of
Greenland had rich pasture.
The West is warmer than the
East. Settlers came
beginning in 986.
There was even a bishopric
established at a place called
Gardar, another sort of
Tolkien-esque name.
We don't know very
many bishops who
actually went to Gardar.
Most of them ruled from Denmark
and sort of basically
told their flock to get in touch
with them if they needed
them, gave them their office
hours and had a phone that
took messages.
But this settlement did not
last. Greenland was more or
less abandoned by 1400 and then
would later be, in modern
times, resettled, but this
time by Denmark.
And then finally, Norwegians
from Greenland settled what's
now Labrador in Newfoundland,
late tenth,
early eleventh centuries.
They even wrote a saga called
the Vinland Saga.
The Vinland Map that's in the
Beinecke Library that purports
to show both the Chinese
Mongol Empire and the
territories of Vinland
in the New World is
unfortunately a fake.
But as I said, these
archaeological finds in
Markland, as the Vikings called
Labrador, or Vinland,
as they referred to
Newfoundland, are real.
They were settled about
the year 1000 and
abandoned in 1020.
So here we are, 1020
or the year 1000.
And I know that you will
be asking what has been
accomplished since we
began with 284.
And this is a fair question,
because at first glance, it
would seem as if we're still
in a world of declining
population, a rural society with
very few urban centers, a
society of relatively little
literacy, relatively small
amounts of commerce, lots of
violence, lack of governmental
order, militarized society, all
developments that we have
been tracing since
the beginning.
The optimistic take on this
is that beginning with the
material covered in the next
course, there's a very rapid
ascent from 1000 to about 1300,
a tremendous growth of
the European economy and a
tremendous expansion of both
population, artistic, political,
and intellectual
creativity that is the central
period of the Middle Ages.
The real mystery behind this,
the sort of historical
problem, is what explains the
domination of Europe in the
second millennium AD?
The first millennium, most of
which we've covered in this
course, the dominant areas are
the Mediterranean at the
beginning, which includes
Europe, but also includes
North Africa, Egypt, the Middle
East, and modern Turkey.
And indeed, those latter regions
would outpace Europe,
properly speaking.
The first millennium is
something of a catastrophe for
Europe, at least by measurable
statistics of a per capita
GNP, population, population
density, urbanization, nature.
What then explains
the domination of
Europe after 1000?
In some ways, it's
a slow process.
The first European colonies
don't really get established
until the aftermath of Columbus'
voyage in 1492.
And then they get established
incredibly rapidly and with
surprisingly little
effort, right?
Mexico and Peru, these huge
empires of the Aztecs, Mayans,
and Incas fall to a few hundred
Spanish troops.
And the Spanish and Portuguese
between 1492 and 1520 are all
over the world, from Malacca in
modern Malaysia to India to
the Persian Gulf to
Mexico and Peru.
Well, we don't have
to explain that.
That's for another time.
But suffice it to say that
already in 1095, the European
Christian population is capable
of putting together an
army to conquer Jerusalem from
Islam, a seemingly impossible
job, and certainly one that
required more than logistics
and resources but also a
certain kind of if not
fanaticism at least a real
motivation, religious
motivation.
But nevertheless, it is a sign
of a certain kind of European
power that one would not
have thought in the
year 1000 was possible.
In the year 1000, the smart
money, the Brookings
Institute, think tank, kind
of RAND Corporation, Bain
Consulting, all the smart people
would have said, "Don't
put any money into Europe.
You've got to be kidding.
The coming regions are the same
as over the last couple
hundred years.
Maybe Byzantium,
a cautious buy.
Definitely the Islamic
kingdoms, even if the
Caliphate is having some
problems, qua Caliphate, their
successor states,
Fatimid Egypt--
awesome, awesome.
This is going to dominate
for the next millennium.
Our algorithms agree on this."
And all sorts of promising signs
in Eastern Europe with
the creation of Russia to your
more prescient younger,
hot-shottier consultants would
have identified that.
But Germany, Italy, France, the
British Isles certainly
would have seemed
discouraging.
Yet there are some
promising signs.
As it turns out, the Vikings
are the last invaders.
The Vikings coincide with
invasions from the Magyars.
Magyars, that's what they call
themselves to this day.
They're known as the Hungarians
to the outside
world out of a confusion between
them and the Huns.
They actually have nothing
to do with the Huns.
But they were quite frightening
land-based raiders
of the tenth century.
And there were also attacks by
ships from Muslim North Africa
against Europe, what
the sources refer
to as Saracen pirates.
And they plunder Rome
in 843, for example.
So Europe is certainly in the
tenth century faced with yet
another wave of invasions.
And I think I warned you at the
beginning of this course
that it was basically about
invasions and heresies and
that you'd do well if you just
concentrated on those things.
So we're heresy-free at the
moment, but in the tenth
century, we certainly have
these invasions.
As it happens, they're the last
that Western Europe would
experience.
Not Eastern Europe, because
Eastern Europe would be
subject to the Mongols who
would, for example, score a
tremendous victory over the
armies of Poland, armies of
the Christian king of
Hungary as well in
the thirteenth century.
But this seems to be the end of
invasions, the beginning of
a period of population increase,
better nutrition,
better harvests, perhaps
explicable to more settled
conditions, perhaps explainable
by improved
climate, perhaps just
explainable by human
determination and enterprise.
The Christianization of Europe
is one of the tremendous
phenomena that characterizes
our period.
And while as a religious
movement I have no investment
in saying that Christianity
is either an advantage or
disadvantage, in terms of
creating settled, organized
polities, the Christianization
of places like Scandinavia,
Iceland, or Bohemia--
the modern Czech Republic
more or less--
or Hungary or Russia, all of
which take place in the tenth
or early eleventh centuries,
all of these
Christianizations, conversions
bring these polities into a
kind of European cultural area,
political alliances,
trade networks.
So Christianization is as much
a sign of civilization or at
least of a kind of economic
development
as a thing in itself.
So between 200 and 1000, what
are the big differences?
Whether these are
accomplishments or not is
debatable.
Certainly the population
has declined.
Over an 800-year period, the
population of Europe is
considerably less, not only in
towns like Rome, which has
gone from something on the order
of over 500,000, perhaps
as much as a million,
to 30,000, maximum.
It is a much less
Mediterranean-centered world.
The sort of geopolitics
have changed.
The Mediterranean has broken
apart into Islamic, Byzantine,
and Latin regions.
It is Christian, most of it.
Most of Europe apart from
Spain is Christian.
And this entails all sorts
of cultural as well
as religious changes.
It is also less learned.
And the learning that there is
is a monopoly of the Church.
There is less lay, or secular,
learning than there was.
There are some continuities,
however.
The dominant language of
learning and administration
remains in 1000, as it
was in 200, Latin.
Roman culture is still the ideal
and still, in effect,
the practice, even though
it may be adapted
to things like churches.
But what has been called
Romanesque or simply Roman
architecture particularly that
of the eleventh and early
twelfth centuries will indeed be
based on Roman principles.
And as we saw with Charlemagne,
the idea of Rome,
the idea of the Empire
is extremely durable.
And although Charlemagne's
empire is dissolved in the
course of the late ninth
century, it is at least
partially revived in the tenth
century under a new dynasty
whose first ruler is Otto
I, Otto the Great.
In 962, he's crowned Roman
emperor in Rome by the pope.
His empire does not include the
West. So it's not France.
It's more Germany than
anything else.
But this empire would endure
until Napoleon, until 1804.
In other words for something
on the order of 850 years.
So to some extent, what we have
accomplished is we have
arrived at the point of the
emergence of something that
can be called Europe other
than a geographical term,
something that can be called
Christendom, not using that in
its triumphalist sense but
simply as a kind of cultural
description of a certain
part of the world.
And we've reached the point
where we can start to talk
about the West, this very
funny term still used,
particularly in popular
geopolitical tracts like The
West and the Rest, these kinds
of statements of the West or
the decline of the West. We're
at the point of the rise of
the West.
And that's where I am
going to leave you.
Thanks for your participation
in this course.
Thanks for making this a
wonderful semester for me.
I hope a lot of fun
for you as well.
Thanks a lot.
