The course covers the period when the first true 'Europe' was born. It covers the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the western Mediterranean, and the development of successor states in northwestern Europe, like the 'barbarian' monarchies, and the multiethnic empires of Charlemagne and the Ottonians up to 1000. Main themes are the development of new kinds of community among European people (Christian monasticism, feudalism, ethnic solidarity), new economic systems, and relations with the earliest Islamic states and with the Byzantine empire.