By the 9^th and 10^th centurys the church had gradually become more and more controlled by the laity, who were the common non ordained people. Dukes and Lords often appointed bishops and abbots of monasteries, and if they built a monastery they considered it their property. Aristocratic families in Rome jockeyed for control over the papacy, which lead to some despicable popes such as pope John the 12^th who toasted to the devil. After this the Holy Roman Emperor king of what is now Germany appointed the popes to avoid this. When pope St Leo the 9^th began his papacy he began what is called moderate reform. He did away with heresy such as simony and clerical marriage but he did not go to the root of the problem which was laity appointing church officials. Instead he just thought that the laity should make sure to appoint good officials. But he did set up the system in which a college of cardinals appoints the pope which is still used to this day.

When pope St Gregory the 7^th was appointed pope he realized the reason that none of his reform bills were working was because he could not appoint his own officials to carry them out. He abolished laity investiture which is where the king would invest a bishop when they were ordained with the symbols of temporal authority but they would also invest them with the symbols of spiritual authority which should not come from a king. This was bad for the church since a non ordained figure was investing the bishops with spiritual authority. But Henry the 4^th king and Holy Roman Emperor of Germany persisted in doing this stating that it was a tradition even though it was an immoral one. This lead to pope Gregory excommunicating the king. Since this meant that all of his nobles would not listen to and rebel against him, he traveled to Canossa ,where the pope was staying, and waited three days in the snow to see the pope. Only after this the pope saw him and after the meeting the pope lifted Henry’s excommunication. Unfortunately directly after this Henry continued to invest bishops. The pope excommunicated him again but Henry this time exiled the pope from Rome where Gregory died in exile saying,” I have loved justice and hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.” But soon after in 1122 the concordat of worms was signed mostly in the churchs favor and making laity investiture illegal.

The 9^th and 10^th centurys brought many different invasions to Europe. They were from three main different people groups, the vikings from Denmark, the Magyars which was an Asiatic group that we do not have very much information about and the muslims from Arabia. The Viking invasions were most detrimental to what we would now call France. They were so destructive that they added a prayer to Catholic mass asking God to, “Deliver us from the Norsemen.” The vikings preformed lightning fast raids on villages coming from the sea. They laid waste to the villages and monasteries they raided. The Magyars were primarily a problem for what we would call Germany and continued to lay waste to it until in 955 Otto the great defeated them at the battle of Lechfeld. The muslims were a terror for all of Europe. They first conquered North Africa and Spain, then proceeded to fight battles in the rest of Europe. This had the affect of creating a constant fear of invaders in the people of Europe.

In response to this the people looked to local strongmen for protection. This created the system of Feudalism and Manorialism. The local strongman, such as a duke or lord, would watch out for invaders but because his time was occupied doing this the people would have to work on his land for three days in the week. The rest of the week they would work on land that belonged to the lord, but they would be able to keep and sell the things they grew on the land. Manorialism is the process in which a knight swears to obey the lord and the lord would give him land called a fief. In this way the invasions changed the way the land was run.

The Carolingian renaissance started from about the time that Charlemagne took power. The main purpose of the Carolingian renaissance was more to preserve the art that the Romans created rather than to create new art. They had the attitude that they were just barbarians and that they could not understand the complex art that the Romans created. Even Charlemagne’s own chapel at Aachen was something that could have been seen in a Roman city. They also focused on making sure that the bible was an accurate translation, and Charlemagne opened a school at his court for the children of nobles taught by Alcuin of York. Many monasteries also opened schools for the public at this time as well. The Frankish monasteries made copies of Greek and Roman literature, which is how most of them are preserved for us today.

In the 6^th century pope Gregory the 1^st more commonly known as Gregory the great sent a group of monks to Britain to try and convert the peoples there. The people in England were the Angles and the Saxons, who were Germanic peoples, who had invaded Britain when the Roman army left. There were also some Roman Britons there, who had retreated into wales after the Roman army left. These were Christians but they did not want to convert the Anglo-Saxons because they were so angry at being driven out that they wanted them to rot in hell. Missionaries from Ireland had also begun to spread Christianity in England. The monks converted king Aethelberht of Kent who most influential king in Ireland. The Irish way of Christianity, which involved a different dating of Easter and different ways of church organization, spread as well. At last the Roman monks and the Irish monks met in Northumbria where the king decided that Britain would follow the Roman Catholic way of doing things. After this Britain would be very loyal to the pope for a long time.

The Franks were the most important barbarian group in because they were Catholic. All of the other barbarian groups such as the Visigoths and Vandals converted to the Arian heresy. This heresy teaches that Jesus was subordinate to God the father. This meant that the Catholic church and pope did not trust the Arian rulers and therefore the native Romans and barbarian Arians did not trust each other. But by the 8^th century most barbarians had been converted to Catholicism. But the Franks converted directly to Catholicism which made the pope trust the Franks more. The way a people would be converted in this time was that the king would convert and then the people would follow. Rome was facing threats from the Lombard barbarians that lived to the south and north of Rome. The Byzantine empire was the traditional protector of the pope but they were often off fighting the Persians and the pope was subject to the whims of the emperor. Pope Martin had been banished by Constans the second and pope Severinus had not been recognized as pope by the Byzantine emperor because he refused to accept Monothelitism. But in the 8^th century The Frankish king Charlemagne became the official protector of the pope. After Charlemagne had defeated the Lombards he gave them as a gift to the pope which became the papal states. The Vatican city is still a papal state today.

The Franks had been ruled by an old prestigious family called the Merovingians for a long time. The most well known Merovingian king is probably King Clovis. But as time went on more and more Merovingian kings ended up being children or having mental defects. The power over time ended up all going to the mayor of the palace which is similar to a prime minister. By the time Pepin was Mayor of the Palace the king had no power at all and just had the title. Pepin wanted to displace the king so that he could become ruler. But if he did that the Franks would consider him illegitimate. So Pepin appealed to the pope to dispose of the old king and to make him become ruler. The pope agreed so the Merovingian king was sent to a monastery and Pepin became king. This was the beginning of the Frankish Carolingian dynasty.

Rome had a profound impact on shaping western civilization and one of the biggest things it contributed was Roman law. Laws such as a trial with a jury and that the emperor was subject to the law as well may seem modern to us but compared to some of the barbarian groups surrounding was a drastic improvement. Another thing Rome continued to the world was its roads and the swiftness with which news could be spread. Christianity could not have spread so rapidly if it wasn’t for the Roman roads and travel systems. Many Roman works of literature are still commonly read today such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Livy’s writings on Roman history. Roman architecture can still be seen on buildings today. But probably most important of all was Roman law and ideas, some of which still persist today. Western Civilization most likely would not look the same without the Roman empire.

St. Augustine was one of the most influential people in the early church. He was born in 354 in the city of Hippo by the time he was a teenager he had become a Manichean against the wishes of his Christian mother. Mechanism originated in Persia where it was a common religion consisting of two gods, who embodied good and evil. He was a Manichean until he traveled to Carthage where he met a Manichean bishop who could not answer the questions he had about Mechanism. After this he became a skeptic for a brief time which is a school of philosophy in which you believe that nothing is true. After this he traveled to Milan to become a professor of rhetoric. In Milan he became friends with bishop Ambrose who was also a great speaker. One day when Augustine was visiting Ambrose he said he heard a child say, “Take up and read.” He picked up a bible and read at random part of one of Pauls letters Romans 13: 13 – 14, “Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof.” This convinced him to convert to Christianity, and was baptized by saint Ambrose in 387. Augustine wrote many books and was an important theologian in the early church. He worked on writings that proved the invalidity of some of the things that even he had previously believed.