day 46

The Germanic Barbarians

• Barbarian warlords and their families who assimilated into Roman culture became the “nobles” or aristocrats of medieval Europe

• Germanic tribes who ruled former Roman lands sought to conquer and assimilate other barbarian peoples who lived beyond the frontiers and were still pagans
• The Angles and the Saxons (from Denmark and northwestern Germany) invaded Britain and assimilated the native Britons
• Most of the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity in the seventh century
• The most powerful Germanic tribe was the Franks
• but the real power lay with the “mayors of the palace” who were royal officials and nobles themselves

From "Eastern Empire"to Byzantium

• The Eastern Roman Empire continued on while the west was now divided up by the barbarian tribes

• When the emperor Justinian came to power in 527, he decided to reunite the entire Roman Empire by re-conquering the western territories

• Justinian succeeded for a time, but the land he re-took was soon conquered by new barbarian tribes and a massive plague depopulated much of the west
• Greek Byzantine emperors saw themselves as Roman emperors and the heads of the Christian Church
• Byzantines preserved Greco-Roman art, architecture, philosophy and writing despite much of it being non-Christian
• Justinian built the massive domed Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom") in Constantinople, considered to be the most glorious church on earth at the time

Third version finished in 537, the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, Justinian’s cathedral, was later a mosque and is now a museum. Using knowledge of the geometry of curves, it has a dome supported by arches high in the air that remained a model for both church-builders and mosque-builders for more than a thousand years.