The birth of Europe as people know it today was hardly an easy and effortless process. The Old World was reshaped by centuries of continuous wars, raids, and the falls and rises of empires. The most turbulent of these events happened at the beginning of the Middle Ages, from the 3rd-7th centuries CE. This was the time when the old slave society gave way to the feudal system that marked the latter Middle Ages, and it was also a period of battles between the Roman Empire and various barbarian peoples. The Roman Emperors waged wars, made and broke alliances, and bribed and negotiated with chieftains of various "barbarian" tribes to preserve the territorial integrity of their Empires, but the razor-edge division between the civilized world of the Romans and that of the "savages" that threatened their borders was dulling with every decade. In fact, the constant need for army recruits swelled the Roman legions with barbarian foederati[1], a phenomenon that forced both the Romans and Byzantines to use a very subtle way of playing the barbarian tribes against each other via diplomatic schemes and bountiful rewards. A new religion was also taking root: Christianity became a reason for both unification and division, as different people adopted different variations of its teachings.

Like the other Germanic tribes, the Lombards originated in Scandinavia before migrating slowly through central Europe, and as the Western Roman Empire collapsed and the Byzantine successor state in Constantinople attempted to reestablish order, the Lombards took advantage of the chaos and planted themselves firmly on Italian soil. From the late 6th century until the arrival of Charlemagne in the late 8th century, the Lombards were the masters of Italy, giving the land many of its modern names and adding a touch of Germanic culture to the overwhelmingly Mediterranean land.

The Berbers established several powerful and prosperous states on the south Mediterranean coast. They ruled Numidia - now part of Algeria - until conquered by the Carthaginians. After the fall of Carthage, the Berber kingdom of Mauretania -not to be confused with the country created by the French - dominated northwestern Africa before it was conquered by Rome in the 1st century BCE. Under Roman rule they made great contributions to civilization and were certainly not the wild, untamed tribesmen of popular imagination. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo regius in Numidia, was a Berber and one of the greatest philosophers and theologians not only of his own time but of all time. The list of religious leaders drawn from the Berbers includes Tertullian, Popes Victor I, Miltiades and Gelasius I and the heresiarch Arius. The playwright Terence was a Berber, as were several noted Roman governors and three emperors.

As the Roman Empire in the West collapsed, the Berbers succumbed to the Vandals, a Germanic tribe from Europe, in the 5th century CE. However, the Eastern Roman Empire, centered in Constantinople rather than Rome, underwent something of a renewal, and the whole of the African coast from the Sinai Peninsula to the Straits of Gibraltar returned to Byzantine rule. With that, the Berbers were once again subject to a foreign power, but soon they would exchange their new masters for another, the Arabs, who would bring a new religion, Islam. Through Islam the Berbers would once again come into their own and influence the course of Mediterranean history as their ancient ancestors had done.