By 500 CE, the Roman Empire had declined and fallen. In the centuries that preceded, pandemics roared, massive populations immigrated into the empire driven by the Huns, and the Little Ice Age was at the door.
The period between 500 and 1500 AD is generally known as “Post-Classical History”.
In India, this was the period of the Middle Kingdoms, encompassing Medieval India and the era of Classical Hinduism. Up until about 1,000 AD, India’s economy was likely the largest in the world.
In China, the Six Dynasties period heralded the start of large bureaucratic systems that enabled vast imperial control.
The Byzantine Empire, or Eastern Roman Empire, survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire and continued through its capital in Constantinople, exemplifying Eastern Orthodox Christianity. It continued for a millennium until it fell to the Ottomans in 1453.
In the Middle East, the Islamic Golden Age rose between the 8th and 14th centuries, marking a period in which culture, science, and the economy flourished. Central to this ‘lift off’ was the establishing of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the world’s largest city at the time. Brilliantly, polymaths and scholars from different backgrounds around the world gathered at the House of Wisdom to translate the entire body of classical knowledge into Arabic and Syriac. The House of Wisdom was originally led by a Christian physician, and included many Christian scholars. The merging and Synthesis of diverse bodies of knowledge across cultural divides from diverse places such as India, Persia, and Greece was of critical importance to the furtherance of the development of science and knowledge. The introduction of the use of paper from China also greatly democratized information and allowed it to propagate far more widely during this period.
In 1258, during the Mongol invasion by the grandson of Genghis Khan, the hospitals, libraries, and mosques were destroyed, citizens slaughtered, and the painstakingly compiled collection of books, records, and manuscripts thrown into the Tigris. It is said that for days the river ran red with the blood of scholars, and black with the ink of books.
In 800, the Pope crowded Chralemagne, the Frankish king as Emperor, reviving the title and bringing increased unity to a resurgent Holy Roman Empire composed of Catholic Monarchs throughout Europe. The power and legitimacy of the Pope was claimed to be derived from spiritual lineage to the apostle Peter. The power and legitimacy of the Emperor was claimed to be derived from inheritance from the ancient emperors of Rome via the concept of translatio imperii.
According to the Roman Catholic Church, the “empire” was the only legal successor to the original Roman Empire, however it failed to truly ascend, and as it has been said, was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire.
In 1054, the Roman Catholic Church split in the great East-West Schism. From that time the Western / Latin / Roman Catholic Church was divided from the Eastern Orthodox Church.
This would later be identified in propaganda as the “First Reich”, the German Empire as the “Second Reich”, with Nazi Germany in the 1900s calling itself the “Third Reich”.
Between 1095 and lasting for centuries, the Roman Catholic Church initiated and supported a series of Crusades to recover Jerusalem and the surrounding area from Islamic control, and to vanquish different groups including Moors, West Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic peoples, and Christian heretics and Protestants.
This period also contained the time of the Mongol Empire, the Carolinian and Capetian Dynasties of France, and the Viking Age of Scandinavia.
Forward to 8.53 Crisis And Transformation In The Middle Ages
Back to 8.51 The Ideal
Back to table of contents The Book of Lionsberg