From Rome's Ruins to Charlemagne: How Church and Feudalism Rebuilt Europe

The idea

The exam's early medieval questions test two institutions and one man, and the anchor ties them into one story. When the West's political unity ended, two things remained. The first was the Latin Church, which kept the written language, the map of dioceses, and the only road to salvation, the sacraments that only priests could give, and which spread by missionaries who reshaped pagan practice rather than fighting it and by kings who wanted Christian allies. Its bishop of Rome claimed leadership of the whole Church and was rarely obeyed outside Italy, and it grew by relationships: Gregory the Great with the Germanic kings, Pepin with the pope who ratified his coup, Leo III with the king he crowned. The second was clan law turned into feudalism. Germanic kings inherited Roman offices but ruled by honor and reciprocity, and in the absence of any government that could stop raiders, free men pledged fealty to lords for protection and land, lords pledged to greater lords, and peasants paid for all of it. Kings sat at the top of that web and were often weaker than the men below them. The man was Charlemagne. He united Gaul and Germany by forty years of war, took the Lombard crown at the pope's request, was crowned emperor on Christmas Day, eight hundred, governed by counts and inspectors without a bureaucracy, and gathered scholars who saved texts and invented the letters we read. His empire was divided at Verdun in eight forty-three, and the Vikings, Magyars and Saracens fell on the pieces for two centuries, during which feudalism hardened into the order of the High Middle Ages. What survived was the Church, the feudal bargain, the idea of an empire that Otto revived in nine sixty-two, and the kingdoms of England and France that the Normans and Capetians would build.