CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MEDIEVAL LIFE IN EUROPE

To-day the historian is interested in the social
life of the past and not only in the wars and
intrigues of princes. —EILEEN POWER

In the two preceding chapters we saw how Europe—
particularly Western Europe—was struggling to evolve
order out of the chaos brought about by the fall of the Ro-
man Empire. The catastrophe was the outcome of the in-
ternal weaknesses and the external attacks of the barbarians,
Then an attempt was made to restore the Roman order by
the secular agency of the Prankish Charlemagne and the
German Otto and his successors who built up the Holy
Roman Empire, and the spiritual agency of the Pope.
While the success of the former was only temporary and
local, the influence of the latter proved more lasting as
well as widespread. The struggle for supremacy that en-
dued between the Empire and the Papacy only served to
establish the prestige of the Church in a world left still
anarchical by the failure of political authority.

The outstanding features of this period of transition
from the ancient to the modern world are summed up in
the word "Feudalism." There is greater agreement regar-
ding its characteristic features than its chronological li-
mits. But roughly we might consider the millennium from
the fifth century A.D. to the fifteenth century A.D. as com-
prising the Middle Ages, of which the earlier half