Last episode, we talked about the Charles the Hammer and his son Charlemagne, and the Carolingian renaissance in France and western Europe. After Charley and Charley were gone, though, Europe settled back into a period of relative darkness, without much central control. There wasn’t really one dominant power in any part of Europe, and partly because of this, the Dark Ages was a time when a lot of different groups were moving to new places in Europe, conquering and being conquered.
By the time the Medieval period ends, which is also the beginning of the Renaissance, most of the big tribal migrations were done. But there was a lot of tribes moving from place to place, raiding other places, and then sometimes settling in those places, during the Dark Ages.
In southern Europe, these migrating tribes had been called ‘Barbarians’ by the Romans, and they had mostly migrated in large land migrations. That is, a big tribe basically marched overland from one part of Europe to another.
In Northern Europe however, during the early Middle Ages, a lot of these migrations took place at sea, as tribes from all around the Baltic Sea took to their longboats, and started raiding, then settling, the coastal areas of Western Europe. And instead of being called barbarians, these sea-borne tribes were called – the Vikings.