Page:Western Europe in the Middle Ages.djvu/90

74 united and therefore less of a factor in European politics in the twelfth century than it had been earlier.

The political failure of the Carolingian Empire, and of the German Roman Empire which was its successor, did not mean that Western Europe sank back into complete barbarism almost as soon as it became a distinct and separate cultural entity. It suffered severely from internal wars and external raids; many districts were misgoverned or ungoverned as rulers cracked under the strain and became mere predatory animals. Yet there were always islands of relative security in the sea of disorder. The great century of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom coincided with the worst period of feudal warfare in France; the German Empire was at the height of its power when Italy was split into quarreling fragments. Learning survived, and with learning the memories of a happier and more prosperous society. The people of Europe did not have to discover, for the first time, the benefits of a better social organization. They knew, at least by tradition, what those benefits were; they wanted to regain them; the problem was how to secure the degree of co-operation and organization which would make possible a better life.

Somehow, during the hard years of the tenth and eleventh centuries, they learned again the secret of working together effectively for the common welfare. There is no entirely satisfactory way to explain how they regained this ability, any more than there is a completely satisfactory explanation of why they lost it in the period of the Late Roman Empire. But the reversal is plain to see. From the Late Empire, through the barbarian kingdoms and the Carolingian Empire into early feudalism, every attempt to integrate large numbers of people had failed. The effective units of co-operation were pitifully small—the agricultural community of a few hundred inhabitants, the military community of the lord and