The First Five Hundred Years

The basic trends

In the dim light of its scanty documentation, the first half of the Middle Ages in the European South looks like a multisecular trough of depression between the crest of the Roman prime and the higher crest of the late medieval Commercial Revolution. It started dismally: by 476, when a handful of Barbarians seized the last remnant of the Roman Empire in the West, the native population had been cut down by epidemics, thinned out by genetic infertility and soil exhaustion, oppressed by fiscal and political depotism, demoralised by military defeats and unnerved by prophecies of imminent doom. Commerce had taken crippling losses. Communications were breaking down, coinage was scarce and debased, fewer and fewer agricultural and industrial products were available for sale, the purchasing power of all but the wealthiest individuals had been eroded. The formerly tight network of laborious cities and well-cultivated fields was changing to a sparse pattern of virtually self-sufficient large estates surrounded by no man's land.

The crisis was not restricted to the European South alone – possibly its remotest roots went back to an unfavourable pulsation of climate affecting the whole temperate area of Eurasia ever since the second century of our era – but it was not everywhere irreversible. The eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, whose cities and merchants had long outshone their western counterparts, had a remarkable come-back after 476, as the settling down of a large proportion of the Barbarians in the West relieved pressure on the East.