BY THE ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES, A NEW CIVILIZATION had emerged in Western Europe. That new civilization was largely a product of the peoples of northern Europe, who had been at the fringes of Roman civilization for many centuries. In the course of a lengthy period of upheaval and transformation, from around 400 to 1000, a new Europe was formed in the West, the product of a fusion of the new, largely Germanic, peoples with the inhabitants of the older Roman civilization.

CENTURIES OF DISSOLUTION: EUROPE AT ITS NADIR

The birth of the new Europe was a lengthy process because Germanic tribes – Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians, Lombards, Franks, and others – from the fourth to the seventh centuries were constantly at war in the northern part of continental Europe, or in process of migration, as imperial Rome weakened and gradually dissolved in Western Europe. Just when it seemed that the Franks under Charlemagne would bring a much greater degree of stability and peace than had hitherto been known in Europe, the death of Charlemagne in 814 brought further disintegration. The tendency toward central government ended, and the trend toward feudal states accelerated as noble families sought to retain whatever power and land they possessed, and to add whatever they could by fair means or foul.