The modern origins of the early Middle Ages

Abstract

Modern Europe has been seen as having its origins in the Fall of the Roman Empire and the Barbarian Invasions of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. As a result, the period has been drawn into a series of discourses that are more concerned with the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries than with the distant past. During the Ancien Regime the Franks were discussed as providing a key to the social structure of the Age. During the Risorgimento the Lombards were thought to present a model of the oppression of Italy by occupying forces. The early Germanic peoples were also drawn in to debates about the frontiers of Germany at the time of Unification and of the First and Second World Wars. The early Church has been an inspiration for Christian revival. The historical writing about the Fall of Rome and the early Middle Ages has thus been influenced by social, political and religious debate concerned with modern European problems, but at the same time the history of the end of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages has had considerable influence on notions of class, race, religion, nation, and on Europe.