Rome Falls, Islam Rises, Charlemagne

Low on the far left of pp. 94–95 sits a number that closes an empire. The pale stream of the Western Empire runs as far as 476 and simply stops, and the block that takes its place carries a single name: “Odoacer, King.” Adams draws no battle there and no burning city. He writes one plain line above it, “The Middle Ages begin 476 A.D.” Rome has carried the story since Section 11, and here it gives out without a sound.

What comes after is not one stream but many, and that is the first thing to help a class see. Read the spread from top to bottom, one kingdom at a time: France & Germany along the top, then Scandinavia, then Spain, then Italy, and the Eastern Empire at the bottom edge. Count the western peoples who fill the room Rome left, Franks, Burgundians, Visigoths, Suevi, Vandals, Heruli, Ostrogoths, Lombards, and you have eight streams where one ran before. In Section 10 Adams wrote on the feet of Daniel’s image “Rome broken into 10 kingdoms” (p. 75). He gives no list of ten here, so don’t force the count. What he draws is the dividing itself.

Watch what happens to the newcomers. At the top, Clovis, king of the Franks, marries Clotilda, “a Catholic,” and in 496, Adams notes, he is baptized on Christmas Day with three thousand of his subjects. Lower down, Spain gets its “1st Catholic King,” Recaredo. Church life keeps a small calendar of its own beside the wars, with bells in France in 550 and dials in churches about 613. The peoples who broke Rome are being drawn into the church Rome once persecuted.

Then a new faith comes up from the south. Find the camel and its rider, and beside them the words “Mecca to Medina. Thursday night July 15th 622.” Muslims count their years from that flight, as Adams counts ours from Christ. Just below the spread he draws Mahomet with a scroll marked “Koran 610,” and next to him the Eastern Empire’s “provinces lost”: Egypt, Palestine, Syria, the lands of the Bible. In 714 a green arm reaches up past “Gibraltar,” Visigothic Spain ends and “Mahometan Spain” begins. The advance stops only at Tours, in 732, where Charles Martel, says Adams, “saved Europe.”

Move up and to the right, to Charlemagne, “Son of Pepin,” with 46 years in his block. In the year 800 Pope Leo crowns him, and the West has its own emperor once more. In 755 Pepin had given the lands of Ravenna to the pope, “who thus obtained civil power,” and a small stream marked Papal-Rome opens in Italy. The church Rome once hunted now sets a crown on a king’s head. Keep an eye on that little stream; it grows in the sections ahead.

For a Bible reader this is a stretch about what lasts. Streams begin, widen and run out all over these two pages, Rome’s first among them. Daniel had told a king of a kingdom God himself would set up, one that would never be destroyed. At the right edge of p. 95, Charlemagne’s son Louis holds the stream for an “inglorious and turbulent reign,” and past him it splits among his sons. The next spread begins with those pieces.