The image of the early Middle Ages must be turned upside down, says Frans Theuws. It is still thought that Europe became fragmented after the Roman Empire and fell apart into all kinds of ethnic kingdoms. The emeritus professor of medieval archeology at Leiden University thinks differently about this: in the period from the fifth to the eighth century, ordinary people in Europe were still connected and in contact with each other in all kinds of ways. So there also existed a Europe in which the masses were still united in a certain way. Admittedly, for now it is officially only a hypothesis that still needs to be proven. If all goes well, this will happen over the next six years during a major research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC), of which he is the ‘corresponding principal investigator’.
Frans Theuws, professor of medieval archaeology.
Photo from private archive
Such EU research projects always have a catchy acronym as their name. Theuws’ project is called COCO, which stands for Connected Communities in early medieval Europe. He and three other principal researchers from abroad have raised more than 11 million euros from the ERC Synergy Grant. Not bad for a man who has been retired for about six years. “I will even be employed again,” he says, beaming with the Brabant-Kempense drawl that he has never lost. He now receives visitors in the canteen of the archeology faculty, because since his retirement he has shared a study room with three other (almost) retired archaeologists. “But I will soon move again and have more of my own space again.”
Theuws once again sketches the current cliché image. There has also been a change in historical scholarship in recent years, but the old image still prevails widely. Early medieval societies in Europe were said to have been created by the heroic deeds of kings, aristocrats, bishops and saints. They were the leading classes, they were the rich of their time, everything else was small-scale and poor.
School posters
In his office, he adds, there are three school posters by JH Isings. And you can clearly see that image on those famous records. For example, one of them (drawn around 1940) depicts Willibrord as he leaves Utrecht in 690 to Christianize the Frisians. “Prominent on his horse.” In the background is the building built by Willibrord Salvator Churcha sturdy stone building. You can also vaguely see what you could call the ‘ordinary’ population.
Isings did not make an image of the Frisians to be Christianized. Theuws has an idea of what such a school poster might have looked like. “They would have been depicted small and passive. As people who mainly produce food, do not have culture themselves, but receive culture. I also suspect that they would have been depicted living in huts. These huts are of course made of wood, in stark contrast to the stone churches that stand for eternity and durability. Wood, on the other hand, rotten, just like the human body. That reflects the ideology of the church.”
The existing image is based on written sources from Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. “Remember the History by Gregory of Toursor charters.” Don’t say anything bad about historians, Theuws continues, but for a long time they ignored the fact that the authors of that time had an agenda. “For example, Gregory considered the role of the church more important than that of the kingdoms in his Europe. He saw the Church as the superior protector of the well-being of ordinary people. The other written sources also showed a Europe that was created from above and organized completely hierarchically.”
Historical legitimation
According to Theuws, this historical image did not arise by chance in the nineteenth century. It was the time of nation building in Europe. Germany and Italy took shape, and a small country like the Netherlands also underlined its status as an independent state by introducing a constitution. All these states started looking for historical legitimacy. “The historians provided this by pointing to all those loose ethnic formations in the early Middle Ages.”
He admits it: this became the prevailing view in archaeology too, and in his own mind. “That is why archaeologists began to distinguish all kinds of material cultures, from the Franks, the Alemanni, the Saxons, the Lombards, the Slavs, the Goths, and so on.”
The fact that, in addition to the patchwork of hierarchically organized empires, there was another, much more connected Europe at the bottom, it became clear to Theuws during an earlier research project also funded by the ERC, which he led between 2017 and 2023. Graveyards in the Benelux, Northern France and West Germany were full of gold, silver and precious jewelry, especially in the ‘poor’ northern parts of the research area, where, according to written sources, the aristocracy was rarely seen and had few possessions. “The farmers there had a much wider social horizon than we thought.” That led to the question of how they got all that stuff.
An impression of the variety of beads found in graves from the early Middle Ages. For example, amber from the Baltic Sea region (back) and so-called millefiori bead from Egypt (front left).
Photo Mette Langbroek
Theuws gives the example of a bead necklace from a sixth-century cemetery near Lent, near Nijmegen. The necklace consisted of 121 beads and was placed around the neck of a girl of five or six years old. Scientific research made it clear that the beads were made from glass, amber and faience using different techniques. The girl had the whole world around her neck, because the beads turned out to come from Europe, the Baltic states, the Near East, Egypt, the Middle East and India.
The researchers came across similar chains in so many other places that their spread could not have been controlled by the elite. Chemical analysis further revealed that the composition of beads of the same material was so similar that they must have come from the same batch. “This means that the beads did not come to Lent as separate parts, but that the chain was made somewhere else and passed on as a chain,” says Theuws.
Contrary to what they expected, the chain was probably not passed on from one generation to the next. “Only half of those buried in Lent had a strong genetic relationship with each other. DNA research shows that all kinds of relatives, cousins and second cousins lived spread across Europe, including in England, Italy and Central Europe. I think they knew that about each other, and that they met at regular times and in certain places. And then they exchanged objects, such as necklaces, and ideas. That is why you see a kind of uniformity in the early Middle Ages: in For example, in Northern France they used the same species fibulae [mantelspelden] as in southern Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Ukraine.” With his bottom-up approach, which for the early Middle Ages is only possible with archaeological research, Theuws makes it clear that the masses also contributed to the formation of early medieval society.
Perhaps Willibrord did not go to the Netherlands to Christianize the people, but to correct them
When it comes to the dissemination of ideas, Theuws still wants to go to his office to show something on his computer. The previous project produced a database with information on 8,373 sites. “We are also going to build that for the new project, and it will be open accessso that everyone can do their own research with it.” With a few clicks he shows a distribution map of stemless glasses. “These were probably not drinking glasses, but lamps that were placed in a frame. We did experiments with them: put water, oil and a wick in it, and then light it. We got beautiful effects. Somehow light was important in the grave, to drive away darkness and evil. Think of our use of lights in cemeteries.”
With just a few more clicks, all known Christian worship places will also be visible. It is then noticed that the lamps were found in the areas in between. “Imagine that someone has gone from a place with a church and a bishop to a place without. Then they switch to what a colleague in Oxford do-it-yourself christianity calls it a movement from below. Perhaps Willibrord did not go to the Netherlands to Christianize the people, but to correct them.”
The new project, in which a lot of scientific research will again be conducted, covers almost all of Europe as a research area. This should also lead to more exchange of archaeological data from Central Europe. That has not happened in the past. “Now it seems as if there was only mobility between north and south. It cannot be true that there was no mobility between east and west. The whole of Europe was connected from the bottom up.”
With his research, Theuws also wants to emphatically demonstrate that scientific research into the past can contribute to political discussions in the present. “I think we are going to show that migration can make an extremely interesting contribution to societies. And that is a more optimistic picture than what is currently being painted, I think.”
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