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As the second millennium dawned, Europe emerged from an age of chaos and conflicts which had raged for the better part of two centuries. The division and implosion of the Carolingian Empire, the resulting internal struggles and the invasions of Vikings, Magyars and Saracens had produced a particularly unpleasant environment to live in for kings and commoners alike. However, a process of reconsolidation had begun by the end of the tenth century, opening the era of the High Middle Ages during which the Latin West built many of the foundations of Europe as we know it today, more than a thousand years later.
The death of Louis the Pious in 840 heralded the division of the Carolingian Empire at the Treaty of Verdun in 843: West Francia under Charles the Bald, Middle Francia under Lothair I and East Francia under Louis the German. The empire was never again reunited save for a few years by the efforts and dynastic luck of Charles the Fat in 884. However, he was deposed in 887 and died without a legitimate heir in 888, leaving the eastern and western kingdom as separate blocs dominating the Latin West. The Carolingian dynasty intermittently clung to its near-nominal authority in the west until the election of Hugh Capet as rex Francorum in 987. Thus were established the foundations of the Kingdom of France, which the descendants of the Capetian dynasty ruled uninterruptedly until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1792 during the French Revolution. In the east, the Carolingians turned extinct upon the death of Louis the Child in 911. The election of Henry the Fowler in 919 brought to power the Ottonian dynasty in the new Kingdom of Germany. Henry’s son Otto the Great decisively defeated the Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955 and subsequently conquered much of Italy in support of his wife, queen Adelaide. He was crowned emperor by pope John XII in 962, intertwining the fate of the Kingdom of Germany with that of Italy and the papacy. Here was born the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted until 1806.
However, the new kings and emperors had far less power than their title suggested for they had to tolerate or face up to the feudal lords within their realms. The concept of a country in the modern-day sense of the word was therefore nearly non-existent. The real authority in the fledgling Kingdom of France was not the king, who was little more than a first among equals, but the rulers of the kingdom’s numerous duchies and counties, most of which were both larger and stronger than the royal crown domain. In the north, the strategic position and economic potential of the County of Flanders would end up giving many French monarchs a royal headache, as would the Duchy of Normandy; in the east, the Duchy of Burgundy held on to a proud tradition of de facto independence which would get completely out of hand; in the south and west, the powerful County of Toulouse and the Duchies of Guyenne and Gascony would play a vital role in feudal attempts at maintaining local autonomy, the spread of religious heresy and the dynastic mechanisms which helped to unleash the Hundred Years’ War. The descendants of Hugh Capet had much work ahead of them as the High Middle Ages dawned upon what was supposed to be their kingdom.
Arguably even more work lay ahead of the Holy Roman emperor in the east, who found himself in a position strikingly similar to that of the French king. However, the imperial challenge was greater due to the differences between the empire’s German and Italian bloc, its vast territorial extent which prevented swift imperial interference and the inability of the Holy Roman emperors to establish a stable dynasty. The duchies of the Kingdom of Germany attempted to assert their power against both the emperor and each other while jealously guarding their autonomy, an attitude echoed by the economic powerhouses of the Kingdom of Italy. On top of this, the papacy defied the empire in the debate over whether the pope or the emperor was to be Latin Christendom’s supreme guardian. Italy itself was thus a political snake pit for the emperor, but one which was vital to both his imperial authority and legitimacy. Further complicating the situation were Byzantine claims to Italian territory and imperial dignity, the Muslim incursions and the continued existence of the Lombard principalities of Capua, Benevento and Salerno. The High Middle Ages saw numerous conflicts arising south of the Alps as successive dynasties of emperors attempted to enforce their authority. This in the long run distracted them from the political games back in Germany and gave the German lords a free hand to expand and consolidate their power at the expense of the emperor.
Conflicts aplenty were also the case south of the Pyrenees. The Iberian peninsula had largely fallen to the Muslims in the early eighth century and had become the theatre of a stand-off between the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba and the Christian kingdoms which sought to retake the peninsula in the name of Christendom. This ambition seemed very far away at the turn of the millennium: the military, cultural and economic prowess of Islamic Córdoba was a veritable giant compared to the petty Christian realms on its northern frontier. However, a succession crisis in the Caliphate caused its dissolution into so-called Taifa kingdoms by 1031, giving Christian forces a golden opportunity to gradually further the advance of their Reconquista throughout the High Middle Ages.
Northern Europe meanwhile was dominated by the so-called North Sea Empire of king Canute the Great, who ruled Denmark, Norway, England and parts of Sweden, while his fleets dominated the North Sea and much of the Baltic until his death in 1035. The rise of Edward the Confessor ended Scandinavian rule of England in 1042, a fact confirmed by the Norman invasion of William the Conqueror in 1066, which marked a turning point in the history of the Kingdom of England. Consolidation also took place in the north of the British Isles, where Picts, Scots, Britons and Angles gradually merged their dominions to form the Kingdom of Scotland, traditionally founded in 843 by Kenneth I. The Celtic realms of Ireland meanwhile avoided falling under the Viking yoke throughout the ninth and tenth century, although some degree of Viking settlement could not be prevented, notably in the south-eastern portion of the island, which fell to the Norwegians. Their Swedish counterparts simultaneously fell upon the Baltic coasts and advanced into north-western Russia, establishing strongholds and sailing Russian rivers downstream to the Black Sea and the Byzantine Empire. Thus emerged the empire of Kievan Russia which tied its political and religious fortunes to the Byzantines from 978 when Vladimir the Great married Anna Porphyrogenita, the daughter of Byzantine emperor Romanos II and sister of the emperors Basil II and Constantine VIII. Russia forever after remained within the Greek Orthodox sphere.
Between Kievan Russia and the Holy Roman Empire lay the new kingdoms of Poland and Hungary. Poland proved itself an expansionist rival to the empire for dominance of central and eastern Europe by temporarily taking Bohemia, Moravia and Pomerania and actively resisting the imperial ‘drive to the east’ (German: Drang nach Osten). To the south in the Pannonian Basin, the Magyar people had founded the Principality of Hungary in 895, which emerged as a kingdom in the year 1000 when Grand Prince Stephen zealously converted his realm to Latin Christianity and received the fabled Crown of St. Stephen from Pope Sylvester II. These acts formally integrated Hungary into the Latin West.
Lastly, the Byzantine Empire had survived the Arab and Slavic invasions and successfully reasserted its authority over most of the Balkan peninsula throughout the first half of the eleventh century, most notably by toppling the Bulgarian Empire in 1018. However, Byzantine borders once again came under serious pressure during the second half of the eleventh century, this time from the Pechenegs in the north, the Normans in the west and most of all the migrating Seljuk Turks in the east. The resulting catastrophes ended any hope of a Byzantine revival of the territory and power it had boasted as the Eastern Roman Empire…
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Nice map!