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I'm coming to this late, but it seems that most early middle names, when they occurred, would've been patronymic (father's) names or maybe clan or family names, like in China, separate from the surnames.

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The only direct research I've done that bears on this is in Scotland, where middle names were uncommon among the working classes until mid/late Victorian times, except as ways to honor beloved (or rich) relatives or flatter the local laird with a baby who bore his name tucked in the middle.

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Someone mentioned that middle names arose to distinguish persons who otherwise bore the same name. True, but when people still lived in the same villages for centuries (say, to 1860) and the whole family was known to most, the solution was "by-names", which were informal descriptive nicknames. Middle names for this purpose were probably only necessary when people migrated to cities where the family was less well-known and where formal registration of various sorts was required.