ABSTRACT
The attempts at reconstruction were due, in part, to the new governments, but mainly to the action of the Church and of the various classes of Western society. The idea of the state, which had been almost lost at the time of the invasions, came to light once again in the countries of the West. The Germanic kingdoms, after having unwittingly allowed the organization of the Roman Empire to perish, set themselves to study the imperial tradition, which was preserved by the Church and by a fraction of the aristocracy, in order to establish a stable framework in which, step by step, the new society might be reconstituted. The invincible tendency of the peoples of the early Middle Ages to division and localism was thus corrected by a minimum of authority and of unity. The Western states amalgamated as best they could Germanic institutions with the Roman principles of hierarchy and administration, in order to bestow upon their subjects the kind of organization necessary to reconstitute the forces of production. The effort was incoherent and intermittent, and interrupted by periods of anarchy, but it was sufficiently efficacious to bring about a partial reorganization of Western Christendom between the seventh and the middle of the ninth century. This work, which the most intelligent of the barbarian kings sought to accomplish, and which has saved their names from oblivion, was begun by the Visigoth Euric in Aquitaine, by Gundobad in Burgundy in the fifth century, by Clovis, Brunhild, and
Dagobert in the sixth and seventh centuries, and, above all, by Theodoric the Great and the Ostrogoths in Italy at the beginning of the sixth century. The newly converted Lombard kings, Authari, Rothari, and Luitprand, took it up again with greater success in the seventh and eighth centuries, and the Visigothic kings of Spain essayed it after their conversion at the end of the sixth century. It was the chief claim to glory of the Carolingian dynasty, and, above all, of Charlemagne, who spread its effects throughout the West. Finally, in England, it won for some of the successors of the first Christian kings, such as Egbert, and, above all, Alfred the Great (ninth century), a well-deserved renown. Alone among the Christian lands of the West, Ireland was powerless to advance from the political regime of clans and tribal federations to the conception of the state, a weakness of organization which contributed to bring about the eclipse of her brilliant civilization. Everywhere else hereditary monarchies were being organized, with centralizing tendencies which attempted to restore that peaceful and ordered state of society, in which alone work could be effectively carried on. This need for authority led in the year 800 to the restoration of the Western Empire, to the profit of Charlemagne and the Carolingians, the leading promoters of the idea of the state. It was, in a sense, the consecration of the work accomplished during two centuries by the princes of the West on behalf of public stability.
