history of Europe Carolingian decline and its consequences

After the Carolingian dynasty died out in the male line in East Francia in 911, Conrad I, the first of a series of territorial dukes, was elected king. He was followed by a series of vigorous and ambitious rulers from the Saxon (919–1024) and Salian (1024–1125) dynasties. Otto I (reigned 936–967), the most successful of the Saxon rulers, claimed the crown of the old Lombard kingdom in Italy in 951, defeated an invading Hungarian army at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, and was crowned emperor in Rome in 962. In contrast to the kings of East Francia, the rulers of West Francia, whose last Carolingian ruler was succeeded in 987 by the long-lasting dynasty of Hugh Capet (the Capetian dynasty), had difficulty ruling even their domains in the middle Seine valley, and they were overshadowed by the power of the territorial lords who had established themselves in principalities in the rest of the kingdom.

The end of Carolingian expansion in the early 9th century and the inability of several kings to field sufficiently large armies and reward their followers were two consequences of the division of Charlemagne’s empire. In addition, the empire now shared borders with hostile peoples in the Slavic east and in the Low Countries, Scandinavia, and Iberia. The end of expansion meant that the basis of the economy shifted from mixed forest-agricultural labour and income drawn from plunder and tribute to more-intensive cultivation of lands within the kingdoms. Accordingly, kings were forced to draw on local resources to reward their followers. The consequences of these military and economic changes included a general weakening of royal authority, the transformation of the Carolingian aristocracy into active lords of the land, and a loss of social status for the labourers who worked the land.

In the 9th and early 10th centuries a series of invasions from Scandinavia, the lower Danube valley, and North Africa greatly weakened the Carolingian world. The divisions within the Frankish empire impaired its ability to resist the Viking and Hungarian invasions but did not destroy it. Kings and warlords ultimately either turned back the invaders, as Otto I did in 955, or absorbed them into their territories, as the kings of West Francia did with the Vikings in Normandy. In England the invasions destroyed all of the older kingdoms except Wessex, whose rulers, starting with Alfred, expanded their power until they created a single kingdom of England.

Although two kinds of invaders—the Scandinavians and the Hungarians—became acculturated and Christianized during the next several centuries, creating the Christian kingdoms of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Hungary, the Islamic world remained apart, extending from Iberia and Morocco eastward to the western edges of China and Southeast Asia. In the case of western Europe, the attacks of the 9th and 10th centuries were the last outside invasions until the Allied landings during World War II; indeed, for a period of nearly 1,000 years western Europe was the only part of the world that was not invaded. Western Europe developed internally without outside interference, expanded geographically, increased demographically, improved materially, and engaged in cultural, commercial, and technological exchanges with parallel civilizations.