Chapter 10 Test Flashcards
What is the traditional date marking the collapse of the Roman empire?
476, when the German general Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor in the West.
What reduced Western Europe’s population by more than 25 percent?
Disease and warfare
Land under cultivation contracted with the fall of Rome while what expanded?
Forests, marshland, and wasteland expanded
Rome at its height was a city of 1 million people, but by the tenth century, it numbered perhaps ____?
10,000
What Germanic peoples, who the Romans had viewed as barbarians now emerged as the dominant peoples of Western Europe?
Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Lombards, Angles, Saxons
What regional kingdoms arose to replace Roman authority?
led by Visigoths in Spain, Franks in France, Lombards in Italy, and Angles and Saxons in England
Who was Woden?
their god of war
What did the funeral monument of a person who was Germanic but deeply influenced by the Romans inscribes?
“I am a Frank by nationality, but a Roman soldier under arms.”
What Visigoth ruler married a Roman noblewoman, and gave voice to the continuing attraction of Roman culture and its empire?
Athaulf
What was the name of the ruler of the Carolingian Empire who erected an embryonic imperial bureaucracy, standardized weights and measures, and began to act like an imperial ruler?
Charlemagne
On Christmas Day of the year 800, who was crowned as a new Roman emperor by the pope, although his realm splintered shortly after his death?
Charlemagne
Who gathered much of Germany under his control, saw himself as renewing Roman rule, and was likewise invested with the title of the emperor by the pope?
Otto I of Saxony
What was Otto I’s realm subsequently known as?
known as the Holy Roman Empire, which was largely limited to Germany and soon proved little more than a collection of quarreling principalities. Blended Roman and Germanic elements.
With the new kingdoms, a highly fragmented and decentralized society known as what?
feudalism emerged with great local variation
In thousands of independent, self-sufficient, and largely isolated landed estates or manors, power - political, economic, and social - was exercised by whom?
by a warrior elite of landowning lords
Lesser lords and knights swore allegiance to greater lords or kings and became their what?
their vassals, frequently receiving lands and plunder in return for military service
Roman-style slavery gradually gave way to what?
serfdom
Unlike slaves, serfs were not the what?
personal property of their masters, could not be arbitrarily thrown off their land, and were allowed to live in families
What did one family on a manor near Paris in the ninth century owe?
four silver coins, wine, wood, three hens, and fifteen eggs per year
What filled the vacuum left by the collapse of empire?
Church, later known as Roman Catholic, yet another link to the now-defunct Roman world
How was the Roman Catholic hierarchically organized?
of popes, bishops, priests, and monasteries and were modeled on that of the Roman Empire and took over some of its political, administrative, educational, and welfare functions.
What language was that of the Church and even gave way to various vernacular languages in common speech?
Latin
What type of strategy did numerous missionaries pursue?
a “top-down” strategy
Amulets and charms to ward of evil became medals with what image?
image of Jesus or the Virgin Mary