The expansion of the barbarian west (570-632 C.E/52 BH - 12 AH)

Abstract

This study investigates and examines the main selected Germanic Barbarian West tribes, the Visigoths, Franks, Langobards and Anglo-Saxons who settled in Western Europe in the early Medieval Europe. This research applies the life span of Prophet Muhammad (s.a.w) from 52 BH-12 A.H/ 570-632 C.E as a framework although but this is not a comparative study of religions. The significance of these dates being selected as the most important period in Medieval History emphasizes the crucial period in the migration of tribes and the formation of tribal states in the West. The method of study is based on published and edited primary sources written by barbarian bishops and monks as well as reports from published secondary books and archeological sources. The research concludes to refute the hypothesis of Henri Pirenne on the backwardness of medieval Europe, subsequent to the cause of Muslim conquest of post-Roman Mediterranean. The research also validates studies of other historians who confirmed that paganism (the German and Keltic animism and the Greco-Roman idolatry) was still unyielding within the Barbarian West Catholic kingdoms. In our study, we scrutinize published primary sources, mostly annals of Catholic bishops who confabulated truthfully recorded facts with their own biases, beliefs, thoughts and opinions. This study emphasizes the rise and expansion of the Barbarian West in the formative Age of the Revelation of Islam and formulates question of western Christian civilization-building by population considered uncivilized and barbarian by the Romans. The waning Western Roman Empire was replaced by the Christianized “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nations”, a threat to the Eastern Roman Empire (‘Romania’) called by the modern historians as “Byzantine Empire” in the discussed “Dark Ages”.