Germanic Kingdoms of Western Europe

    Today in class we talked about the Germanic Kingdoms. My notes are below:


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 
More on Germanic Tribes
  • The Angles and Saxon's (from Denmark and northwestern Germany) invaded Britain and assimilated the native Britons 
  • Most of the Anglo-Saxon's were converted to Christianity in the seventh century
  • The most powerful Germanic tribe was the Franks 
  • the real power lay with the "mayors of the palace" who were royal officials and nobles themselves 
The Germanic Barbarians 
  • From "Eastern Empire" to "Byzantium" 
  • The Eastern Roman Empire continued on while the west was now divided up by 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 
It's a Christian Empire now
  • 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
Hagia Sophia 
  • 3rd version finished in 537 
  • later a mosque, now a museum 
  • using knowledge of geometry and curves
  • lasted more than a thousand years

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