Update Fifteen

II: The Dark Ages

i: Introduction

As a prelude to the medieval ages, the dark ages stands as the worst period in European history. Precipitated by the decline of the Roman Empire, the dark ages is usually considered to have begun in 476 when the Germanic general Odoacer deposed the young Romulus Augustulus and sent the Imperial vestments back to Constantinople. The culture of the west was gone. The learning of the great men in the classical period was lost. Plague after plague ravaged a land already ravaged by war. This was indeed a dark age.

ii: Fall of the west

While the empire of the west was in decline since Constantine realized his future lay in the east and built Constantinople, with fall of the last western emperor the empire was officially gone. No more was a civil structure at all in place to support the country. This was a period of barbarity and strife for all of Europe. The Germanic tribes of the North had taken over all of the Western empire and yet lacked the structure to run the continent. These Germanic tribes existed everywhere. Saxons ruled the northern isles, the Goths, Visigoths, and Ostrogoths ruled all of the Iberian Peninsula and Germania as well as all the traditional lands of Rome in Italy and the surrounding lands. The Franks ruled all of Gaul while the Vandals held in their possession all of Northern Africa, the breadbasket of the Empire. Barbarians lived at the very door of the eastern empire. The west was in a turmoil and confusion with only one light in its midst, the Church. Far to the north Irish monks did the work of preserving the ancients in their monasteries and library. On the continent, however, education was lost for two centuries. The Church was able to hold some structure together but a specter from the past would come back to haunt and hinder them. The bishop of Nicomedia, Eusebius, before the defeat of Arianism had spent considerable resources in missions to the Goths. Now that the Empire was laid low, these Arian Goths came out of the north to attack the Church and its allies. Taught a variety of Arian Christianity emphasizing the Kingship of the Father and the Son as His mighty warrior, the Arians would lead attacks with ferocity not realizing that their religion had been branded a heresy. Eventually, in 553, the Eastern Emperor Justinian would launch an attack to retake the west. Initially successful, the lands would again be taken by Arians, the Lombards, in 568. Due to the wars and the Germanic way of life, the cities of Europe were quickly depopulated. Civilization was being crushed.

iii: A German Church

The Church’s salvation came in the form of the Franks, the people of Gaul. These barbarians had been successfully proselytized by the Church over the centuries. True to their religion, the Franks, led by their kings, stood up to defend the Church. Within a few short years the whole of Europe would be forced together. Slowly the Arian tribes were reached and brought into the Great Church, just in time for the rise of a new religion in the East was threatening the world. Far away in the lands of the Middle East, the followers of a former caravan trader, Muhammad, had engulfed all of the Middle East and were advancing on all fronts. Beginning in the year 633, the expansion of Islam had taken the three historic cities of Christendom, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria, by the year 700. The Vandal states of North Africa were defeated and Islam took control of all the German holdings of Africa. Soon Islam would be on the shores of Italy and would drive the Goths from Iberia. With such enormous pressure the Germanic tribes had a desperate need to band together. Finding a focal point in the Church, the Germanic tribes were able to organize under its banner. The Church was a German Church. No pure Latin, Greeks, or Jews remained. The northern tribes had taken over. And they had been converted.