20.3 Europe: a.d. 501 to 600  (Page 3/5)

Czechoslovakia

As the Bavarians moved west out of Bohemia, the Slavs moved in and then also spread to Moravia.

Switzerland

This land was still occupied chiefly by Burgundians under Frankish suzertainty and in this century they were joined by Suevi.

Western europe

Spain and portugal

The regions of both Spain and Portugal were ruled by Visigoths but under Roman supervision. Through the influence of the church, which used Latin in her rituals, the Visigoths, within a century after their Spanish conquest, forgot their Germanic speech and corrupted the Latin of the peninsula into Spanish. This was a gradual language change and Spanish, as we know it now, did not actually mature until the 19th century, at least in written form. (Ref. 168 ) In this Spanish society, great gulfs remained between Christians and Jews and between rich and poor. The early Visigothic aristocracy was in close cultural contact with Rome and Byzantium and lived lives of affluence and taste. (Ref. 180 )

Early in the century the Visigothic kingdom was ruled by a boy king who actually left the power to the Ostrogoth King Theodoric of Italy. The combined Gothic power was great and was such that the Vandals even gave up the western end of Sicily. (Ref. 137 ) An intra-Gothic war occurred in 554, however, allowing Emperor Justinian's General Belisarius to occupy southern Spain. As if to make up for this, the Suevi kingdom in Galacia was absorbed into the Visigothic kingdom in 585. (Ref. 8 ) A series of East Roman-Visigothic wars followed.

For awhile two legal systems existed in Spain, one a written German law and the other Roman law. Although many of the Visigoth nobles were publicly converted from Arianism to Roman Catholicism in 589, religious division persisted and the problem was augmented by the prosecution of Jews by order of Emperor Heraclius, early in the next century.

Architecture was poor, libraries small, common schools non-existent but a hospital under non-clerical administration was established for the first time at Merida in southwestern Spain in this century. (Ref. 196 , 125 )

France&Netherlands and belgium

The army of the Frank King Clovis defeated the Visigoths at Voluille in A.D. 507 and then the remainder of Gaul fell quickly to the Franks as the Goths withdrew to Spain. This conquest of Gaul by the Frankish tribes marks a milestone of German and European history and transcends in importance the other migrations. All other groups were soon absorbed numerically and culturally by the native Roman populations, but the Franks, under Clovis, as founder of the Merovingian Dynasty, and his sons established a military kingdom with strong agricultural underpinnings and it persisted, with a capital at Paris. (Ref. 222 ) Wells (Ref. 229 ) says that those Franks who did not become Latinized became the Flemish and Dutchmen of South Holland but that North Holland is Anglo-Saxon in origin.

The development of various Germanic languages from the original Frankish tongue was discussed under GERMANY above.

Although Clovis became an orthodox (Nicene) Christian, much of the conversion of his people was accomplished by Irish and Anglo-Saxon monks. He made Gaul into France but after him the dynasty degenerated. His sons conquered the Burgundians about 532 but the Burgundian state still remained separate under Merovingian princes throughout the remainder of the century. Provence was acquired from the weakened Ostrogoths in 536. Frank chieftains intermarried with remnants of the Gallo-Roman senatorial class and generated the aristocracy of France. In spite of Christian conversion seldom has an upper class shown such contempt for morality as this one. (Ref. 229 , 49 , 8 , 137 )