A. D.

Charlemagne’s empire destroyed and dissolved in the ninth century, but the idea of “Europe” survived. By the late tenth century, the eastern and western parts of the Frankish kingdom had coalesced into the dim outlines of the future kingdoms of France and Germany. The Spanish March had disintegrated and been succeeded by the Basque kingdom of Navarre and the county of Barcelona. Italy, broken into a series of ineffectual kingdoms in the peninsula, owed a nominal allegiance to the Emperor (now the King of the east Franks) that was to become gradually less meaningful as the Middle Ages progressed. Louis …

Charlemagne crowned, at a solemn moment during the celebration of Mass in Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Day of the year 800. Pope Leo III stopped and turned toward the large man kneeling in front of the altar. Then, in a dramatic gesture that has been the topic of countless historical arguments since, Leo crowned Charles, King of the Franks, as the new Emperor of the Romans. The coronation apparently took even Charles by surprise; and it probably displeased him as well, since it seemed to imply that he received his power from the Pope. Indeed, this may have …

Frankish hordes crush the Romans at Soissons and the disintegration of Europe begins. Japan during the Heian period For some three and a half centuries after the founding of Kyoto, Japan had an imperial court and administration devoted to a refined culture, that has shaped the character of the people down to this century. Power was in the hands of the Fujiwara family who intermarried with the imperial house and provided “regents” for a line of boy-emperors, most of whom abdicated voluntarily when they reached adulthood. The Emperor became an idealized figure, protected from the corrupting effects of actual political …

Japanese renaissance was not until 794 A.D., when the Japanese capital was transferred from Nara to Heian (modern Kyoto), that Japan started to develop a national culture of its own. Since the sixth century, Japan has been ruled by a hereditary imperial famiiy. At first, the Japanese court modelled itself on the Chinese, in its principles of politics, ethics and religion, in its writing system and in its entire culture. About the year 1000, the Lady Murasaki Shikibu wrote the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji, a masterpiece of literary invention, that mirrored the life of the brilliant Heian …

T’ang Empire – first of the great Chinese dynasties – unifies the nation. The siege of Byzantium During the seventh and eighth centuries, while Europe was in the turmoil of the conflicting dynasties that had succeeded the first generations of barbarian invaders, events of immense importance were taking place on the southern shores of the Mediterranean. Within a hundred years, the armies of Islam had taken the legendary city of Samarkand in the East, while in the West they touched for a moment the banks of the Loire. The successor of the Prophet Mohammed was not to sit on the …

The flight to Medina, was made by the prophet Mohammed, when he fled from his native Mecca, in hopes of finding a more receptive audience for his message. This event of 622, the Hegira, marks the beginning of the new Moslem religion and the beginning of a dynamic new civilization in the Middle East. Mohammed himself, proved to be both an inspired religious leader and an astute politician, creating a theocracy and presiding over it, as Allah’s Messenger. He also was a military leader. Mecca was soon brought into the Moslem orbit and at Mohammed’s death in 632 the entire …

Justinian Corpus, the Juris Civilis, is the ancestor of all European legal systems. The sixth century – in the West, a period in which the seeds of a new type of monastic and Church-orinented culture and a fragmented political system were being planted. This century, was for the Eastern Roman Empire and its Persian rival, an age of great splendour. Despite the closing of Plato’s academy at Athens by Justinian in 529, the tradition of lay classical learning was never broken. Moreover, the Arab civilization emerging in Egypt, Syria and Persia continued and even developed that tradition. The case with …

St. Benedict’s monks tried to poison him, on one occasion it is said – and they often disregarded his instructions, but monasticism in the West, was created by St. Benedict. Before he founded Monte Cassino in 520, there were numerous other groups of monks in Europe, all with their own monastic rules, but Benedict’s Rule for his followers was the first to achieve general acceptance. It provided an ideal for monasticism that was at once disciplined and possible to achieve and maintain. With its emphasis on the individual monastery, Benedict’s Rule was ideally suited to a world degenerating into chaos …

Old Europe crumbles as barbarian waves batter civilizations. Ironically, the victory on the Mauriac Plain sealed the fate both of victor and vanquished. After his death in 453, Attila’s empire broke up not only as a result of the feuds among his heirs, but also because of a successful rebellion among his German subjects. For the victorious Roman general, Actius, the outcome of the battle was still more directly catastrophic. He fell victim to a palace conspiracy of enemies who feared his immense prestige. The Emperor Valentinian III, is said to have boasted of the disposal of this powerful and …

Attila, the “Scourge of God” was the legendary force that — curiously enough — helped to hold the tottering Roman Empire together for a few more years. Halfway through the fifth century, the Empire was defended by an array of feuding barbarian tribes enlisted as mercenaries. These tribes were united by a common fear of the Huns, who had left Central Asia to invade India, Persia, Central and Eastern Europe and were now threatening the West. Aetius, commander-in-chief of the Roman army, knew the Huns well and their leader, Attila, in particular — the Roman general had once been a …