In 597 a Roman monk named Augustine landed on the Kent coast to win over a pagan king, and by 600 the work was still under way. At the other end of the continent, Avar horsemen and Slavic settlers were pushing the Byzantine frontier back along the Danube.
In 600 AD, Europe was split between a West of successor kingdoms and a Byzantine East under pressure from Avars and Slavs. Augustine’s mission had reached Kent only three years earlier, so Christianity in England had a foothold rather than a hold. The languages were moving too, with Old English settling in Britain and Latin breaking into early Romance tongues on the continent.
The East was not in decline at the start of the century. A recent study built on large datasets found no drop in the 6th-century eastern empire, with the downturn starting in the 7th century. The pressure came from the north. In 567 the Lombards beat the Gepids and the Avars occupied their land, and the Lombards left for Italy in 568. Slavic raids reached a first peak in Thrace in 578, and in 593 the general Priscus fought Slavic groups north of the Danube. Emperor Maurice was overthrown by rebels in 602.
Byzantine missionaries did carry writing to the Slavs, but much later than this map. Cyril devised the Glagolitic alphabet around 863, and Cyrillic followed in the 890s at Preslav in Bulgaria, nearly three centuries after 600 AD.
How far had Christianity spread in England by 600 AD?
Augustine and his party reached Kent in 597 and met King Æthelberht, whose Frankish wife Bertha was already a Christian. Historians place the king’s baptism anywhere from 597 to as late as 601, and the mission’s early success was limited to the see of Canterbury. In 600, then, the conversion of England was still mostly a Kentish affair.
What languages did people speak in Europe in 600 AD?
The map above comes from Reddit user languageseu, who notes that it is not fully accurate. Old English was taking root in Britain, where Anglo-Saxon settlement traditionally began in 449. On the continent, Vulgar Latin was splitting into the early Romance languages as the western empire broke into successor states. In the Balkans, Byzantine control of the interior gave way to large-scale Slavic settlement.
Here are three Europe map posters for map fans (the links go to Amazon).
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