In the West, after Rome had fallen,
the Franks rose to fill the void.
Clovis I in the late fifth century
had converted to orthodox Christianity, enjoyed.
His descendants, the Merovingians, ruled
for three centuries, but became weak,
"do-nothing kings" whose power was wielded
by Mayors of the Palace, the real peak.
Charles Martel, the Hammer, as Mayor
of the Palace, defeated the Muslim advance
at Tours in 732, stopping the conquest
of Europe by the Umayyad trance.
His son Pepin the Short asked the Pope
if the one who had the real power
should not have the title of king?
The Pope agreed. Pepin took the crown's tower.
The Merovingians were deposed. The Carolingians
began with Pepin, a dynasty new.
Pepin's son was Charlemagne, Charles the Great,
who would build an empire Europe had not in view.
Charlemagne reigned 768-814. In those years
he conquered the Saxons (converting them by force),
defeated the Lombards in Italy,
pushed the Muslims back from Spain and the course.
He patronized learning, brought Alcuin
from York to head his palace school.
The Carolingian Renaissance revived
classical learning, standardized the scribal tool.
The Carolingian minuscule script, still
readable today, was developed at this time.
Monasteries copied classical manuscripts
that would have otherwise been lost in crime.
On Christmas Day 800, Pope Leo III
crowned Charlemagne Imperator Romanorum,
Emperor of the Romans, in St. Peter's,
reviving the Western Empire, its forum.
This offended Constantinople, where the
Byzantine Empress Irene held the throne.
She claimed to be the only legitimate Roman emperor.
Her title was challenged by the Frank unknown.
The Byzantines never accepted the Frankish claim.
"Holy Roman Empire" as the Franks called it,
was considered in Byzantium a joke,
the barbarians pretending to be the successor of unit.
Byzantium itself was in a period of flux.
Iconoclasm had erupted in the 720s,
when Emperor Leo III had ordered
all religious images destroyed, all icons beauties.
The iconoclasts saw images as idolatry.
The iconodules defended images as windows
to the spiritual, doors to divine presence.
The controversy raged for over a century, endows
In 787, the Second Council of Nicaea
affirmed the veneration (not worship) of icons.
But iconoclasm revived again,
and was only finally ended in 843, that entrances.
The Triumph of Orthodoxy is still celebrated
in Eastern churches on the first Sunday of Lent.
Icons were fully restored. The aesthetic of Byzantine
Christianity was sealed, to their descendant.
Cyril and Methodius were Byzantine missionaries
who evangelized the Slavs in the ninth century.
They created the Glagolitic alphabet (later Cyrillic)
to write Slavic languages, bringing liturgical entry.
Moravia, Bulgaria, and eventually Kievan Rus
would be Christianized in the Byzantine rite
with Slavic liturgy, unique among European Christianities
that insisted on Latin or Greek at the site.
This is the origin of Eastern Orthodoxy's
willingness to translate into local languages,
which shaped the spread of the Slavic Christianity
into Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ukraine's pages.
Charlemagne's empire fragmented after his death.
His grandsons divided it at the Treaty of Verdun in 843:
West Francia (France), East Francia (Germany),
and Middle Francia (which would disintegrate in free).
The Viking raids began in the late eighth century.
The first recorded raid on Lindisfarne in 793
shocked Christian Europe. The monks were slaughtered.
The raiders came from Scandinavia, from the sea.
For the next three centuries, Vikings would raid
from Ireland to Russia, from Spain to Iraq.
They would settle, found kingdoms, convert eventually.
But they would be the scourge of the early Medieval track.
Stand.