The Great Divide (Descent from Antiquity)

History has long been divided up into periods and it is no wonder! Up until the time of Bede in the 700s, there was no standard way of dating historical events. In 525, Dionysius Exiguus devised a proper way of dating Easter based on the birth date of Christ. Before then, dates were based on the consuls of Rome since Diocletian, which was rather strange since that Roman Emperor happened to be the last great persecutor of Christians. Dionysius' system, though, didn't gather popularity until the Venerable Bede used it to date his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the first great chronicle of English history. After that, periods were no longer necessary...

Oh wait, we still use them... huh? That's very odd. Alright, back on topic. Periodization is the inevitable simplification of history into completely nonsensical periods of time. Everyone learns them in high school and no one is really explained why. The most odd thing is that periods are actually two-fold: they are divided into broad periods and more specific periods. Just to cut to the chase, and since at least some of you participated in my question this week, here are the major and important periods of European history using vague but generally accepted dates:

Antiquity – before 500 CE
Classical – 500 BCE to 480 CE
Late Antiquity –300 to 800
Early Middle Ages / "The Dark Ages" –480 to 1066
High Middle Ages – 1066 to1350
Late Middle Ages –1350 to 1500
The Renaissance –1350 to 1650
Early Modern Era – 1500 to 1800
The Enlightenment –1650 to 1800
Modern Era –1800 to Present
Post-Modern Era –1945 to Present

This is a very rough list indeed and it probably doesn't include every period everyone wants, but it works all the same. If you notice, every single period overlaps another period. That is because no period is insular but dependent on its preceding and succeeding periods. The best way to remember the major ones is: Antiquity –Middle Ages –Modern. The periods between them are the "transitions" and usually have less formal titles: Classical –Dark Ages – Renaissance –Enlightenment. The major periods link together at the ends while the transitions do not necessarily touch the previous transition.

Why is this important to dynastology? Because some of these periods have an effect on dynastology. One of them, especially, has an effect that I like to call the "Great Divide". The Great Divide occurs in that annoying dynastic transition called "The Dark Ages". While the historical content of the Dark Ages is slowly being discovered, the genealogical information is still largely absent. You see, during Antiquity, genealogy was important. Sure, a lot of it was made up, but a lot of it was also not. To the Greeks and Romans, even in the later years, establishing your legitimate and legal descent was very important for governmental tasks, just as it was in Medieval times. There is a very dense an complex web of genealogy in Antiquity that, in many cases, goes back in possible lines as far as the Persians and Babylonians and ancient Egyptians and beyond. Then, suddenly and without warning, everything came to a screeching halt around 400 CE.

Historians call it the "Migration Period" of Europe, where millions of people such as the Franks, Saxons, Goths, Magyars, etc., moved into Europe from the Asian Steppe and displaced, married into, and destroyed the Western Roman Empire. Within 200 years from Constantine until the death of Julius Nepos, the organized and orderly society of the Romans came under the rule of barbarians. These barbarians didn't keep great records and it took hundreds of years in many cases before history remembered them. This is the Great Divide of dynastology: these barbarians didn't marry into the Romans, but the other barbarians. So the earliest genealogies of the medieval Europeans start with a so-called barbarian.

The eternal search for connections between the Dark Age barbarian ancestors of today's royal dynasties and the late nobility of the Roman era is called the Descent from Antiquity (DFA) project. It has been ongoing for centuries, but the proper analytical research has been a more recent phenomena. So many problems exist that few can research it for long. A free-lance French genealogist named Christian Settipani is the most renown of the DFA historians, but even he has had little verifiable success.

Just to quench your thirst, there are a couple plausible lines of descent from ancient times to today. The problem is, they have to go through Byzantine space before returning to Western Europe. You see, unlike Western Europe, the Eastern Roman Empire didn't fall until 1453, so it never had a "Dark Ages" like the west had. Unfortunately, they still had a lot of political upheaval ending with the destruction of important documents, the burning of libraries by the Muslims and themselves, and their conquest once or twelve times. In the end, they couldn't maintain the paperwork the genealogists need to document the dynasties. Luckily, the small kingdom of Armenia to the east was more successful. Even today, the Georgian royal family (in exile since the early 1800s) use the name Bagratoni, which is a derivative of Bagratuni, the classical Armenian royal dynasty. Through a few different channels, genealogists have been able to establish possible links to ancient times through Armenian and Georgian genealogies. But those families married into western families only sporadically, so their importance is still only marginal. Other routes including one through Charlemagne's ancestors have also been unproven.

Since dynastology focuses on a family through its entire history, the DFA is very important because it shows continuity from an earlier time. Asia has multiple DFAs that are virtually proven, but the west is still struggling to work its way through the Dark Ages of the Migration Period. Will the quest ever be solved? Probably not. So many factors are involved that it is unlikely that any 100% proven descent will be found through the morass of Late Antiquity. But the search is still important as it shows where exactly dynasties came from and why their founders came to power while other people did not. The reasons why certain dynasties developed in early medieval Europe has never been entirely discovered, so the Descent from Antiquity project will continue to search for those mystical roots of dynasticism.