The Fall of the Carolingian Empire

Rise of feudalism

Since everyone was involved in fighting one another, perhaps they didn't notice the new and even greater problems that were arising.

A noble class dependent for its power and position upon the possession of land - or, to be more accurate, it's right to collect taxes and services from the residents of the land - had emerged over the previous century, and the population of that hereditary class was growing. As long as the Frankish monarchs had continued conquering new lands, there were always new districts to distribute to the nobility. Now that expansion had ceased, however, the nobles began to suffer from "land-hunger" and began to evolve into something different from what the had originally been. They took complete control of the lands they had been appointed to govern in the offices of count, duke, and margrave and to treat them as personal possessions. They began to demand payment in land for helping one or the other side in the incessant civil wars. When the Carolingian monarchs no longer had royal lands to give in exchange for support, the fighting nobles took over the lands of the churches and the monasteries that the central government - such as it was - could no longer protect. Even so, they could not continue dividing their lands into smaller and smaller pieces. During the course of the ninth and early tenth centuries, in a process that can be discerned only dimly, the aristocracy of western Europe abandoned the deeply-rooted custom of gavelkind and replaced it with primogeniture ("first-born"), a system in which the core of a family's lands was kept intact and passed automatically to the eldest son. In this fashion, the empire was shattered into hundreds of practically independent districts, each owned and ruled by a local strong man in command of a small body of fighting men and a castle.

Such a state cannot maintain a navy, so the remnants of the Carolingian empire were easy pickings for sea-borne raiders from Scandinavia (the Vikings) and from North Africa (the Saracens), as well as mounted raiders from central Asia (the Magyars, or Hungarians). The rulers descended from Charlemagne were unable to defend Europe from these raiders, and it fell to local strong men, such as Count Robert of Paris and the dukes of the lands of Germany, to do so. Meanwhile, the nobles began to establish networks of personal alliances to cut down on fighting among themselves and to coordinate their efforts against the raiders. This was the beginning of the political and military system traditionally called feudalism and was also the end of any real hope that people of the West might have had of reestablishing a centralized government and unified state such as the Romans had managed to achieve.

Europe was more or less on its own, no longer trying to bring back some golden age, but searching for whatever means would help it to survive.