From "Late Antiquity" to "Early Medieval"

Pretty good series of vids from Yale open courseware:
"The Early Middle Ages, 284--1000 with Paul Freedman"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC8JcWVRFp8&list=PL77A337915A76F660

>>The brief shaft of sunlight that was the Carolingian Renaissance: Now you see it, now you don't.

It was brief but it was shit compared to what followed, so it's hardly a "brief shaft of sunlight".

>>2997855

Who were the last people in the former Western Roman Empire to consider themselves Romans and in roughly what timeframe? What about the last native Romance speakers in Britain?

Aren't the Dutch basically the descendants o the group of Franks that managed to hold on to their language?

Have the Vandals left any trace of their presence in North Africa?

I dont know much about this topic, but I always wanted to know more how europe "evolved" from the fall of rome to the medieval age.
Did people live in like "post-apocalypse" first or what?

>>2997855
First i'll say i thing the term Dark Ages is apropos and should remain in use

>>When exactly did the Greco-Roman religion breathe its last?

Really Hellenism as a religious tradition died with the emperor Julian in the 6th century, it survived to some extent in the philosophical tradition of neo-Platonism. However as far as ritual praxis and popular appeal is was more or less ground out before the turn of the 7th century. Even cults like Manichean ism and Nestorian Christianity managed to hold on longer. This is likely due to a concerted effort by christians, when they weren't attacking each other, to discourage the worship of the ancient Gods.

>>2997855
>>When exactly did the Greco-Roman religion breathe its last? (Don't say "never": That's a greasy cop-out).
The last Greek Pagan who had access to "authentic" knowledge was Gemistus Pletho. He died in 1454. Coincidentally he is also the one who re-introduced Plato to the West. He was a Byzantine scholar, and one of his students would go on to be a devote Orthodox Christian who started the proud Orthodox Christian tradition of crowning a Muslim Emperor of Rome and Defender of Christendom (Gennadius Scholarius). He was an ardent advocate of Byzantium reconverting to Hellenismos. No one took him seriously but people loved him so he couldn't be bumped off. He was exiled, but then the Emperor took him with him when he went to the West to engage in an ecumenical council. Why? Who the fuck knows. Pletho didn't attend the council and instead hung around Florence until he went to the Medicis and gave them Plato.

In the West, the last reference to the Etruscans is during an attempted invasion of Rome. The Barbarians were at the gates and the people were getting anxious. At popular outcry an Etruscan Priest was found and urged to use the power of the old gods to ward off the Barbarians, much to the chagrin of the church. He performed a ritual, invoked Zeus, and the barbarian leader was promptly struck dead by lightning. What happened afterwards is lost to history.

>>2998052
Depends where and when. Things were bad in the 3rd century but then pulled together again. Then things fell apart again. The Western Roman Empire went to shit but the Eastern continued...It would be like if the entire East Coast of the US fell into darkness but California continued as-is (or vice-versa). And so on. Things waxed and waned.

The historical date for the "fall of Rome" (Western Empire) has traditionally been 476 AD but historians bicker endlessly about this. I think a slow fade into the 500s can be argued. By 600 or so you can't really argue that the Western Empire exists, although certain aspects of it (like people studying latin as a language, etc.) of course kept going.

>>2998123
>bringing a Pagan whose answer to "how should we revive Byzantium" is "RECONVERT BACK TO OUR ANCESTRAL RELIGION!" to an ecumenical council for the purposes of helping mend the East-West Schism
I'm legitimately curious as to what they expected him to even fucking do there.

>>2997983
>What about the last native Romance speakers in Britain?

Was reading David Hume's history of england a while ago which deals reasonably well with this period. Essentially between the fall of Rome and the formation of the Saxon Heptarchy in the later 5th century the native ethnically Celtic Britons were more or less wiped out. Some fled to Cornwall, Wales, or Brittany but the vast majority were simply killed. Hume bases this off the loss in settled land from the Roman era, the change in place names(which usually survive conquest), as well as the scanty historical record.

>Who were the last people in the former Western Roman Empire to consider themselves Romans and in roughly what timeframe?

This is what I've always wanted to know. AFAIK the identity should have continued up until the Byzantine lost the last of their holdings in Italy but I have no evidence of that

>>2998169
603 AD: Last mention of the Roman Senate in Gregorian Register. It mentions that the senate acclaimed the statues of emperor Phocas and empress Leontia.

The last Western Emperor was the child monarch Romulus Augustulus, so with his end in 476 you have the end of any recognized continuity of Emperors. The Senate did not have any teeth, but "old senatorial familes" continued to sputter and wheeze along as a kind of informal self-congradulatory phenomenon. The last time anyone appeared to take the Senate seriously as an actual political body seems to be 603. But even by then it had long been a guttering flame that only had vague, on-again-off-again meaning in small pockets of the former Empire.

After the Senate is gone, you have no formal state mechanisms: only vague cultural phenomena like "Latin writers" who were a handful of monks. The system of Bishops and Monestaries continued from the old empire, but that was not the same as "Rome proper."

Of course, then in the early 9th century you have Charlemagne, who was crowned "Roman Emperor" by the Pope, but ultimately this was a glorified LARP, as there was no continuity, Beyond this of course you have even further removed LARPs like the Holy Roman Emperors and even Napoleon, but nobody can claim with a straight face that this sort of thing represents continuity with the ancient Western Empire in any meaningful sense.

>>2998213
right, but what about the common people? there's still a clear difference between them and the Goths during theoderic's time when he ruled, so did the identity disappear during belisarius' invasion? or afterwards when the franks and lombards came in? etc

>>2998245
That's a pretty good question, and I'd be interested in hearing an answer from anybody too. If I had to hazard a guess, I think it would differ in different times and places. Probably people's identities as "Christians" slowly grew stronger while their sense of themselves as "Romans" faded out uneavenly over time, like water seeping out of a sponge.

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>>2997855
I'd like to know more about the cultural differences between migration era Frisians and Saxons. Judging by artifacts, writing and language the two were closely linked. So much so foreign writers used the term interchangeably.

>>2997855
You know that "the dark ages" were made up by the pope?

>>2998052
Things went to shit long before the empire actually collapsed. You just woke up one day to find out that the taxes now went to a germanic king in your area.

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>>2998052
>Did people live in like "post-apocalypse" first or what?

While the city of Rome fell in 476 AD, there was a long process of contraction within the empire, with more and more authority devolving to local authorities with each generation.

It's not like Western Europeans suddenly had the rug pulled out from under them, with a fully functional empire one day and some kinda a medieval zombiepocalypse the next morning.