T
he half millennium between 500 and 1000 was the great formative period of western medieval art,* a
time of great innovation that produced some of the most extraordinary artworks in world history.
Early medieval art in western Europe (MAP16-1) was the result of a unique fusion of the Greco-Roman
heritage of the former northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire, the cultures of the non-Roman peo-
ples north of the Alps, and Christianity. Although the Romans called everyone who lived beyond the clas-
sical world’s frontiers “barbarians,” many northerners had risen to prominent positions within the Roman
army and government during the later Roman Empire. Others established their own areas of rule, some-
times with Rome’s approval, sometimes in opposition to imperial authority. Over the centuries the vari-
ous population groups merged, and a new order gradually replaced what had been the Roman Empire,
resulting eventually in the foundation of today’s European nations.
Art of the Warrior Lords
As Rome’s power waned in Late Antiquity, armed conflicts and competition for political authority be-
came commonplace among the Huns, Vandals, Merovingians, Franks, Goths, and other non-Roman peo-
ples of Europe. As soon as one group established itself in Italy or in one of Rome’s European provinces,
another often pressed in behind and compelled it to move on. The Visigoths, for example, who at one time
controlled part of Italy and formed a kingdom in what is today southern France, were forced southward
into Spain under pressure from the Franks, who had crossed the lower Rhine River and established them-
selves firmly in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and parts of Germany. The Ostrogoths moved from
Pannonia (at the junction of modern Hungary, Austria, and the former Yugoslavia) to Italy. Under
Theodoric, they established their kingdom there, only to have it fall less than a century later to the Lom-
bards, the last of the early Germanic powers to occupy land within the limits of the old Roman Empire
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EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE
*The adjective medievaland the noun Middle Agesare very old terms stemming from an outmoded view of the roughly 1,000
years between the adoption of Christianity as the Roman Empire’s official religion and the rebirth (Renaissance) of interest in
classical antiquity. Earlier historians, following the lead of the humanist scholars of Renaissance Italy, viewed this period as a
long and artistically crude interval between (in the middle of ) two great civilizations. The force of tradition dictates the reten-
tion of both terms to describe this period and its art, although scholars long ago ceased to see medieval art as unsophisticated
or inferior.