In the first years of the 5th century, the Germanic peoples , pushed by the Hungarian horsemen, crossed the Roman borders and entered the Roman Empire of the West.
At the beginning of the 6th century, these villages were installed in the ruins of a Rome that had been unable to maintain control in its vast territory.
The date of 476 marks in the traditional history the break between existence of the Roman Empire and the beginning of a new order arbitrarily called the " Middle Ages ", however, that new order was not built overnight and, Changes in everyday life did not have the rhythm of the hectic political sphere.
During this period of slow social transformation, there was a coexistence throughout the European territory between two types of and different cultures, the Roman and the germanica.
It took long years for communities to associate to the point of mixing their traditions and forming a true nation.The obstacles to this merger were certainly numerous, to begin with, each community had its own language, it was almost impossible to communicate.
The Germans focused their education children in war, while the Romans were accustomed to working the land, in the countryside, or engaged in commercial, artisanal or state labor in the cities.
But the most powerful gap, perhaps, between the two cultures was the religion , that characteristic that, under the motto of evangelization, marked the Late Antiquity and transformed Europe entirely.
The Roman Empire and the (Catholic) Church had been identified with each other to the point of involving each other.When the Germans were pagans, like the Franks or the Saxons, they listened more permissively to the Roman missionaries.
But much of the Germanic peoples had already become a form of the Christian faith that the Church had declared heretic: Arianism , which He offered a strong resistance to Catholic preaching.
In some places, one culture prevailed over another.For example in the south-east of England and in the confines of Germania, where the Roman presence was already weak, the culture of the Saxons, I completely dominate the new customs of the communities.
In other regions, on the contrary, the Germans only represented a minority.The Cartagena vandalos or the Ostrogoths in Italy posed strong but temporary threats to the Roman order, which was well rooted ado in the community.
During these first periods there was juxtaposition and segregation between the two cultures.For example, in the region near Paris, the Germanic community founded the town of Clignancourt, which was installed next to the Roman town of Clichy.
Some kilometers separated the two settlements , between them a barrier was raised: each community obeyed the law that its culture imposed.In the same territory the same crime was not punished in the same way.
The Romans followed governed under the Roman lex .The Germans retained their laws, which they then wrote in Latin.
But time worked in favor of the fusion: they passed generations and erase the memory of the different origin of each community, the individuals approached.
Which of the two cultures predominated? At one point, it should be said that the Germans were romanized, but this was more noticeable in the upper classes.The bosses adopted the language spoken by most of their subjects, Latin.But this Latin, so difficult to learn, it was modified, simplified, and filled with Germanic terms.This is how the Romance languages were born.
In the lower and middle sectors of society, which were the majority and In short, the main engine of change would be more appropriate to talk about a preponderance Germanica .
Over time, European culture began to orbit more and more around the war , a markedly Germanic that would last throughout the medieval period.
Comments
Post a Comment