AD 400-800 Early medieval

In northern Europe, the boundaries of the western Roman Empire were formed by the Rhine and Danube rivers. Beyond lay Scandinavia, the German forests and the eastern steppes, home to pagan Germanic and Slavic tribes. In AD 406, Germanic tribes pushed south and west into the Empire, driven by the need for land and fear of the nomadic Huns invading from the east. These forces helped to bring about the fall of the western Empire in 476.

By the 6th century, the tribes – most of them already converted to Arian Christianity – had established kingdoms in western and central Europe. Eastern Germanic tribes occupied the fertile Hungarian plains. The powerful Franks gradually came to dominate a collection of small, semi-independent states in the area covered by modern western Germany, France and the Low Countries. Under Charlemagne (reigned 771-814) the Franks conquered the Lombard kingdom of Italy (773-4) and in 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne ‘Holy Roman Emperor’. Power in western Europe had shifted from Rome and the Mediterranean to the north.

In the east, Slavic tribes settled in Poland, Czech and Slovak regions, the Ukraine, Belarus and south-eastern Russia. Christianity only reached the Slavs late in the 9th century. In Scandinavia, pagan tribal societies remained isolated from the rest of Europe until the late 8th century when the Vikings began raiding out of Scandinavia eventually settling in Britain, Ireland and north-west France.