Download The Dark Ages

The Dark Ages
Name: ____________________________
A. Complete the video timeline below by filling in the blanks with names of people or groups of
people from the list below.
Clovis
Alaric
emperors
Visigoths
Abdul Rahman
Charles Martel
Vikings
Constantine
Knights
Mohammed
Charlemagne
Urban II
1. 3rd century (200’s) AD: Rome gradually implodes from within because of selfish, violent
________________ and because of diseases such a small pox and the measles, which reduces Rome’s
population and forces it to depend on mercenary (paid) armies to defend their vast empire.
2. 313 AD: Emperor ___________________ converts to Christianity after seeing a sign and hearing a
voice in the sky before going into battle. He then legalizes Christianity throughout the Roman Empire.
3. 410 AD: The _____________, Gothic warriors from northeastern Europe led by _____________ lay
siege to and conquer the “eternal city”, Rome, bringing an end to Roman Empire, which had begun
almost a thousand years earlier, around 500 BC.
4. 496 AD: On Christmas day, _____________, pagan king of the Franks, converts to Christianity and
makes France a Christian country. This greatly expands the political power of the Catholic Church.
5. 630 AD: __________________ founds the religion of Islam in Arabia. Over the next hundred years,
Muslim armies, the Moors, conquer all of North Africa and much of Spain, and move into France.
6. 732 AD: _______________________, aka “The Hammer”, defeats the Muslim army led by
_____________________ at the Battle of Tours, stopping the advance of the Moors across Europe.
7. 800 AD: Charles Martel’s grandson, ___________________________ is crowned Holy Roman
Emperor.
8. 800-1000 AD (ninth and tenth centuries): The _______________, pirates from Scandinavia,
terrorize the British Isles, northern Europe, and even places as far away as the Middle East, Iceland,
and N. America.
9. 1050 AD: _______________, armed soldiers no longer employed fighting off the Vikings, become
hired thugs paid by local castle owners known as counts, who use these soldiers to force the peasants
around their castles to accept their will.
10. 1095 AD: Pope ____________________ launches the first crusade (holy war) in an attempt to take
back the holy land from the Muslims by declaring “Deus volt” (God wills it.) (People actually believe
this.) A total of three crusades are launched over the next two hundred years.
B. Complete the video summary below by filling in the missing terms from the list provided.
Visigoths
vendettas
violence
security
Dark Ages
small pox
disease
extinguished
sewage systems
military
superstition
cities
On August 24, 410 AD, the _______________, Gothic invaders from northeastern Europe led
by Alaric, sacked Rome and brought an end to the Roman Empire. The Visigoths had laid siege
to the city for two years, meaning that they had surrounded Rome, cutting off its access to
food and allowing its citizens to slowly starve to death. Finally, after two years, the citizens
open the gates of the city and the Visigoths, led by Alaric, stormed in and sacked the city.
Although the sacking of Rome in 410 hastened the demise (end) of the Roman Empire, the
Empire had been terminally ill for quite some time. As early as the third century AD (200-300
AD), the Roman Empire had fallen into the hands of a series of inept emperors who were
obsessed only with their own personal gain.
Diseases, such as _______________ and measles also took a toll on the population of the
Roman Empire. Roman officials also drove the Goths into rebellion with their incompetence
and cruelty. For example, they took Gothic children as slaves and gave their parents only
dogmeat in exchange.
The Roman Empire, once unified and invincible, shattered into a thousand small pieces, each
ruled over by a military strongman. The next 7 centuries (700 years), called by historians the
_________________, would be an age of widespread______________, illiteracy,
_________________, and _________________. Life in the ____________ withered (got
worse). Bridges, ____________________ and aqueducts (water supply systems) built and
maintained by the Romans, broke down. In the city of Rome itself, people broke apart the
great buildings of the Roman Empire to use the stones to build their own homes. Cutting edge
technology, open trade, ready access to education, employment (jobs), and medicine, were
___________________ (disappeared) during chaos of the Dark Ages.
People in the Dark Ages did not have an empire to provide them with even the minimum level
of _____________ (safety) necessary to enjoy even a basic level of existence. Warfare,
feuding, and _____________ (getting revenge) were common, and the common peasant was
usually the one caught in the middle of all this violence. Political problems, rather than being
solved peacefully, quickly became ____________ problems.
barbarian
disease
agriculture
Christianity
Half
warfare
herding
trade
Monasteries
Gaul
seasonal
industry
Because life was so difficult for the average citizen, _________________, which offered the
hope of eternal peace after death, was very attractive. Although the first Christians were a
persecuted and outlawed (illegal) minority, Christianity later became the only allowed religion
in the Roman Empire. This process began in 313 AD when the Roman emperor Constantine,
who saw a Christian symbol in the sky and heard the words “In this sign you shall conquer.”
before going into battle. After winning the battle, Constantine, believing the Christian God had
supported him in battle, converted to Christianity.
Clovis was a violent military man in _________ (later France) who converted to Christianity for
political gain and brutally eliminated his enemies, including his relatives. By doing so he united
the barbarian tribes of Gaul (what would later become France) into the Franks.
By the turn of the 7th century (600 AD), northwestern Europe had become a land shrouded in
darkness. The continent was divided among ______________ warlords who were consumed
with (only interested in) conquest at all cost. As _______________ and ________________
claimed thousands of lives, _________________ and ______________ shrank to a standstill
(almost stopped) and Europe’s economy was once again dependent on ________________
and _________________ as it had been before the Roman Empire, one thousand years before.
In the Dark Ages, people did not work by the clock as we do today. Instead people worked
according to _______________ patterns. There were long periods when one did nothing and
other times of frantic activity, such as harvest and planting, when everyone who could worked
to produce the food needed to survive. ___________ of the children in the Dark Ages died
before the reached adolescence (teen years).
_______________ (homes for monks) became some of the most important institutions in
Europe during the Dark Ages. They were centers of wealth, commerce (trade) and political
authority. During this time, kings and clerics (officials of the Catholic Church) condemned and
burnt books that contradicted (went against) Catholicism. But the monks became the
guardians of the classical (Greek and Roman) knowledge, which may have died out completely
had the monks not painstakingly copied the Greek and Roman classics by hand. These
manuscripts would be later discovered and brought back to life during the Renaissance.
trade
Moors
education
unarmed
Saint Benedict
transportation
protection money
engineering
Battle of Tours
The rule of ______________________was a strict code that Benedictine monks had to follow.
The purpose of the rule was to allow individual monks to obliterate (completely get rid of)
their will (what they wanted for themselves, their own personal desires). The will was
considered the cause of sinfulness.
Mohammed founded Islam in Arabia around 630 AD. Within a hundred years, Muslim armies,
known as the ____________, had conquered all of North Africa and Spain, and had moved into
Gaul, the region we now know as France. They were finally stopped by a Frankish army led by
Charles “the Hammer” Martel at the ____________________________.
Charles Martel’s grandson, Charlemagne, was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire on
Christmas day, 800 AD and became the greatest king of the middle Ages. Not since the fall of
Rome had so much of Europe been under the command of one man. But Charlemagne’s
empire was still an empire of the Dark Ages: the urban areas had fallen, ______________ was
nonexistent, the economic, _____________________, and ___________________ structures
had all faltered (fallen into disrepair). Charlemagne tried to pull Europe out of the trenches of
darkness by building up ______________________ in the empire, which had been destroyed.
Charlemagne thought he could save people’s souls by making them Christian, even if he had to
do so at the point of a sword. At the bloody Verdict of Verdun, Charlemagne’s men massacred
4500 Saxon tribally leaders when they were caught worshiping their “false” pagan gods.
Towards the end of Charlemagne’s reign, the Vikings began to raid targets along the northern
coast of Europe. Monasteries were favorite targets of these Scandinavian pirates because they
had a lot of gold and treasure and because the monks were ____________ (had no weapons).
The Vikings were so successful in terrorizing Europe that people started paying them
__________________________, which meant paying the Vikings so they wouldn’t attach you.
The Vikings became bolder and began attacking and holding territory rather than just attacking
and quickly retreating back to sea. In the ninth century (800’s AD) the Vikings controlled large
parts of the British Isles. It took a hundred years but finally the people of Britain, led by King
Alfred the Great, kicked the Vikings out of Britain.
skulls
knights
medicine
crusade
knowledge
lords
counts
architecture
relics
Unemployed _________________, returning from their battles with the Vikings, became
themselves a threat to peace and order in Europe. Local castle owners, the ____________ or
_____________ paid these knights to protect their castles and force their will on the peasant
farmers by having their knights, now more mafia thugs than soldiers, to beat them up.
The Catholic Church tried to get control of these violent private armies by showing them the
_____________ and other ____________(belonging) of dead saints, telling the knights that if
they did not swear to obey the commands of the Church they would be attacked and punished
by these dead saints.
The Church also channeled the energy of all these armed knights in a new direction. Pope
Urban II declared a _____________, or holy war on the Muslims to take back the holy land
(Palestine). Over the next two hundred years (1095-1291) three crusades failed to reclaim the
holy land for Christendom but did open up a flow of lost _____________from the Middle East.
These “new” ideas in the areas of _____________, surgery, Aristotelian philosophy and
science, and architecture helped Europe begin to come out of the Dark Ages.
C. Questions
1. How did Alaric and his Visigoth warriors conquer Rome, even though they could not break
through its walls? (Hint: “The city died from within.”)
2. Name three ways life got worse for people in during the so called Dark Ages after the fall of
the Roman Empire.
3. Why did the people of Rome rip the great buildings of the Roman Empire apart?
4. The video asserts that “to the people of the Dark Ages the new emperor was Jesus Christ”.
What does this mean?
5. Why might Christianity’s promise of a release from suffering in heaven been an attractive
idea to people in the Dark Ages?
6. Give three reasons Charlemagne is considered the greatest emperor of the Dark Ages?
7. How did the Catholic Church solve the problem of knights around Europe terrorizing the
population on behalf of the rich counts?
8. How might have a gradual rise in temperature around 1000 AD have helped Europe begin to
rise out of the Dark Ages.
9. How did the Crusades help bring Europe out of the Dark Ages?
10. The “new” knowledge coming into Europe from the Middle East after around 1100 BC was
not really new. Explain.
11. Name three ways the Dark Ages were “dark” compared to both what had come before
(The Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome) and what came after (the Renaissance).