At pretty much the same time, the Huns were pushing other tribes westward, eventually into the territory of the Western Roman Empire, where Aleric & the Viscoths sacked Rome itself. The Western Roman Empire was tightly aligned with the Christian church & were not at all tolerant of their neighbors' different religious beliefs. The economy in Rome was weak & the taxes were high. Forty-five years later, after invading Spain & northern Africa, the Vandals sacked Rome in 455.
In 476, the Germanic leader Odoacer staged a revolt & deposed the Emperor Romulus Augustulus, well, not exactly, he fled town & his fellow Romans killed him. War lords took over many of the plundered towns & territories, but the church remained in local communities.
The Western Roman Empire had functioned ad a strong partnership between The Church & The State, but with the fall of Rome, the state or government part of the partnership was over.
In Europe, life increasingly revolved around the remaining local authority, the church & the clergy, & the monastery became the central source of villages & towns. In the early centuries of the Middle Ages, monasteries functioned as local health organizations, which meant that the herb garden was an essential part of the whole community’s well being. When barbarian tribes invaded the collapsing Roman Empire from the north & east beginning in 476 CE, monasteries were the primary organizations that preserved medical knowledge.
Monasteries in those past centuries had to have their own gardens: they needed vegetables for the daily food of their inmates, & fruit was grown in a special area. Flowers & aromatic herbs were raised for decoration of the church. But the smaller herbularies or physic garden was of high importance, too, particularly since the Rule of Benedict of Nursia – who founded the monastery of Monte Cassino, the cradle of the Benedictine Order, in 529 A.D. – stated solemnly: “Before all things, & above all things, especial care must be taken of the sick.”
The Benedictine monasteries libraries & scriptorium or writing-rooms preserved many of the old Greek medical writings from perishing from the face of the earth in the midst of contemporary neglect of the intellectual life during the invasion of the barbarians in the early Middle Ages. Their gardens supplied the herbs which were considered to be so precious for the treatment of the various human ills.
It was incumbent upon the monks to preserve knowledge of medicinal plants & their uses, not only because they had a higher degree of literacy, but also because they served as holy agents. The church preached that God had imbued certain plants with healing powers at the time of creation. The common belief was that sin led to illness, & only through the combined forces of confession & the ingestion of herbs prescribed by the monks could one be healed & the chance was greater that you could also be absolved of whatever sin made you ill.
The Benedictine Monastery at St. Gall, from around 816, reveals much about the physical layout of monastic life. It included a main cloister, a vegetable garden divided into18 separate beds, & an orchard also used as a burial ground. There was a physic garden where plants with healing “virtues” were grown in 16 rectangular beds. The actual choice of plants for each garden was likely based on Emperor Charlemagne’s text from 812, Capitulare deVillis Imperialibus.
At the same time, folk medicine in the home & local village continued uninterrupted, supporting numerous wandering as well as settled herbalists. Among these were the "wise-women", who prescribed plant remedies often along with spells & enchantments.
Some nuns who were knowledgeable about plant medicines became the targets of the witch hysteria. One of the most famous women in the herbal tradition was Hildegard of Bingen. A 12C Benedictine nun, she wrote a medical text called Causes & Cures.
The fall of Rome & the Western Empire did not end the Roman Empire. The Eastern Empire survived for another thousand years. The Eastern Empire, often called the Byzantine Empire, after the capital city of Byzantium, spoke Greek not Latin. And it survived for a 1000 more years.
See: Herbs & Drugs in Monastic Gardens. South African Medical Journal, Vol. 22:1 (1948)
