Hard Quiz + Notes

After Rome - 500 - 700

Germanic Kingdoms of Western Europe
- Barbarian warlords and their families who assimilated into Roman culture became the "nobles" or aristocrats of medieval Europe
- Germanic tribes who ruled former Roman lands sought to conquer and assimilate other barbarian peoples who lived beyond the frontiers and were still pagans.

More
-The Angles and Saxons (from Denmark and northwestern Germany) invaded Britain and assimilated the native Britons
- Most of the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity in the 600s
- Most powerful Germanic tribe was the Franks
- Real power lays with the "mayors of the palace" who were royal officials and nobles themselves

Meanwhile, back in the Eastern Empire
From Eastern Empire to Byzantium
- The Eastern Roman Empire continued while the west was now divided up by the barbarian tribes
- When the emperor Justinian came to power in 527, he decided to reunite the entire Roman Empire by reconquering the western territories
- Justinian succeeded for a time, but the land he retook got taken by new barbarian tribes and a massive plague depopulated much of the west (boo)

It's a Christian empire now
- Greek byzantine emperors saw themselves as Roman emperors and the heads of the Christian Church
- Byzantines preserved Greco-Roman art, architecture, philosophy, and writing despite much of it being non-Christian
- Justinian built the massive domed Hagia Sophia ("Holy Wisdom") in Constantinople, considered to be most glorious church on earth at the time
- Third version finished in 537, the Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, Justinian's cathedral, was later a mosque and is now a museum.
- Using knowledge of the geometry of curves, it has a dome supported by arches high in the air that remained a model for both church builders and mosque builders for more than a thousand years.
- Became a museum in like 1930.
-