Answer:
Step-by-step explanation:
Dissolution and instability
Seen against the background of the millennia, the fall of the Roman Empire was so commonplace an event that it is almost surprising that so much ink has been spilled in the attempt to explain it. The Visigoths were merely one among the peoples who had been dislodged from the steppe in the usual fashion. They and others, unable to crack the defenses of Sāsānian Persia or of the Roman Empire in the East (though it was a near thing), probed farther west and at length found the point of weakness they were seeking on the Alps and the Rhine.
What really needs explaining is the fact that the Western Empire was never restored. Elsewhere imperial thrones were never vacant for long. Thus in China, after every time of troubles, a new dynasty received “the mandate of heaven,” and a new emperor, or “son of heaven,” rebuilt order. For instance, in 304 CE the nomadic Huns invaded China, and a long period of disruption followed, but at the beginning of the 7th century the Tang dynasty took charge and began 300 years of rule. Similar patterns mark the history of India and Japan.
Charlemagne and Leo III
Charlemagne and Leo III
The Europeans failed to emulate that story. Justinian I, the greatest of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) emperors, reconquered large portions of the West in the 6th century, though the destruction wreaked by his soldiers made things worse rather than better. In 800 Charlemagne, king of the Franks, was actually crowned emperor of the Romans by the pope. In later centuries the Hohenstaufen and Habsburg dynasties tried to restore the empire, and as late as the 19th century so did Napoleon I. None of those attempts succeeded. Probably the chance was only real in the earliest period, before western Europe had become used to doing without an overlord. But at that time there was never enough breathing space for society to regain its stability and strength. Most of the barbarian kingdoms, successor states to Rome, succumbed to later assailants. Britain fell away from the empire in the 5th century; the little kingdoms of the Angles and Saxons were just coming together as one kingdom, England, when the Viking invasions began. In the 7th century the Arabs conquered North Africa; in the 8th they took Spain and invaded Gaul. Lombards, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, and Magyars poured into Europe from the east. Not until German king Otto I’s victory over the Magyars at Lechfeld in 955 did those incursions cease, and not until the late 11th century was Latin Christendom more or less secure within its borders, and by then it had been without an effective emperor for more than 600 years.
Feudalism
Various institutions had emerged to fill the gap. The Christian church, against enormous odds, had kept the light of religion and learning alive and spread what was left of Roman civilization into Ireland, England, central Europe, and Scandinavia. It also provided a reservoir of literacy against the day when professional government should again be possible. The kings of the barbarians, of whom Charlemagne was the greatest, had provided military leadership and tried to acquire some of the prestige and governmental machinery of the Roman emperors. But the troublous times, during which trade and urban life were minimal, meant that effective power lay with those who controlled the land and its products: a military aristocracy of great estates and fiefs (Latin feodum, hence “feudal system”). The aristocrats called themselves nobiles in the Roman fashion and appropriated various late imperial titles, such as comes (count) and dux (duke). But those titles were mere decoration. The new kings, lacking the machinery for imperial taxation, could not pay for standing armies. Besides, this was the age in which the heavily armoured cavalryman (chevalier in French, knight in English) dominated war. He was an autonomous force and thus a much less-dependable instrument than a Roman legionary had been. Legally, the new masters of the soil were liegemen of the various kings and princes (it was a maxim that every man had a lord), but in practice they could usually ignore royal claims if they chose. Europe thus fell under the rule of armoured knights, and the course of the next few hundred years gives reason to think that the democrats of Greece were right to distrust the very idea of oligarchy, for the keynote of noble rule seemed to be almost incessant warfare.