TTC Early Middle Ages

Course Lecture Titles


1. Long Shadows and the Dark Ages
2. Diocletian and the Crises of the Third Century
3. Constantine the Great-Christian Emperor
4. Pagans and Christians in the Fourth Century
5. Athletes of God
6. Augustine, Part One
7. Augustine, Part Two
8. Barbarians at the Gate
9. Franks and Goths
10. Arthur’s England
11. Justinian and the Byzantine Empire
12. The House of Islam
13. Rise of the Carolingians
14. Charlemagne
15. Carolingian Christianity
16. The Carolingian Renaissance
17. Fury of the Northmen
18. Collapse of the Carolingian Empire
19. The Birth of France and Germany
20. England in the Age of Alfred
21. Al-Andalus-Islamic Spain
22. Carolingian Europe-Gateway to the Middle Ages
23. Family Life—How Then Became Now
24. Long Shadows and the Dark Ages Revisited

We often call them the "Dark Ages," the era which spanned the decline and fall of Rome’s western empire and lingered for centuries, a time when the Ancient World was ending and Europe had seemingly vanished into ignorance and shadow, its literacy and urban life declining, its isolation from the rest of the world increasing.

It was a time of decline, with the empire fighting to defend itself against an endless onslaught of attacks from all directions: the Vikings from the North, the Huns and other Barbarians from the East, the Muslim empire from the south.

It was a time of death and disease, with outbreaks of plague ripping through populations both urban and rural.

It was a time of fear, when religious persecution ebbed and flowed with the whims of those in power.

And as Rome's power and population diminished, so, too, did its ability to handle the administrative burdens of an overextended empire. Fewer records were kept, leaving an often-empty legacy to historians attempting to understand the age.

But modern archaeology has begun to unearth an increasing number of clues to this once-lost era. And as historians have joined them to sift through those clues—including evidence of a vast arc of Viking trade reaching from Scandinavia to Asia—new light has begun to fall across those once "dark" ages and their fascinating personalities and events.