by ProfDave, ©2022
(Apr. 26, 2022) — Sometimes historical writing tells us more about the times in which it is written than the times it purports to describe. So it is with the historians and essayists of the eighteenth century “Enlightenment” when it comes to the “dark ages.” Edward Gibbon and his contemporaries saw themselves in a great struggle for reason, reform, and revolution against the institutions of the “old regime.” Their great enemies were the aristocratic privilege and the Roman Catholic church, rooted – as they saw it – in the Middle Ages. Those “dark ages” were to be studied only to be despised. They looked, instead, to classical Greek and Roman times for inspiration and to the “Renaissance” as a recovery from a great loss.
Historians since the French Revolution (next term) have gradually revised this view. When we stop looking at it through the eyes of the disgruntled 18th century intelligentsia, the Middle Ages glitter with a glory all their own. For one thing, the Middle Ages is entirely too long a period to be tarred with one brush. For another, you can’t call a gothic cathedral dark! There are altogether too many great achievements of art, literature, economics and politics to be ignored. The European landscape is littered with them. For a third, we keep uncovering renaissances centuries before “the Renaissance” of the 14th century! By the time I came along, “Dark Ages” was a term limited to the early Middle Ages: about 500 – 800 or 1050, depending. I will continue to use the term that way, tongue-in-cheek – very much so. It is not exactly as if someone one morning in 476 got up, looked out the window, and said, “honey, get out the candles, it’s the dark ages!”
Confession time: I have been reading Rodney Stark’s radically revisionist The Victory of Reason. I am not sure of his thesis that Medieval Christianity is the source of all things modern, but he gives a lot of examples of bright lights in the so-called dark times. His examples, if not his thesis, are representative of what recent scholarship has uncovered.
The Dark Ages (450 – 1050)
There is no question that 476 was a dark year for the city of Rome and its ruling class. Real power and prosperity had been slipping from their hands for some time and there was no money to repair what the barbarians destroyed. By the end of the century, the city was pretty much a burned-out hulk with a fraction of its former population. Disorder had swept over Europe and, if anything, urban wealth had become a magnet for trouble. Imperial government was gone, and all government was liable to interruption for at least a century. But then, with all the fighting over the Imperial title during the last three centuries, did it matter that tribes and not legions were struggling now?
If you were a slave or a peasant, however, 476 might have been a very good year for you. One man’s anarchy is another man’s freedom! Pax Romana benefited mostly the idle rich. Most of the traffic on the Roman roads was either troops on the march (often against each other) or luxury trade. Even the grain shipped across the Mediterranean bypassed the local merchants and local growers on its way to the welfare classes of the metropolis. Now the church discouraged slavery, and although the invaders might take captives, they also tended to break up large estates. [Stark 28]. Tax collection was one of the government functions that broke down! The confiscatory burden of supporting extreme Roman wealth, bread and circuses, evaporated and it became profitable to reinvest in business and agricultural improvements. The so-called dark ages were a great time of practical invention: water power (and the machines to use it), windmills (more machines), three-field crop rotation (increased production by 50%), iron plows (more crop increase), horse power (shoes, stirrups, collars – making the horse economically and militarily far more powerful), multi-animal carts that could turn corners (!), and many other practical things that the cultural elites didn’t need because they had slaves and the 18th century historians didn’t think about because they identified with those cultural elites [Stark 38 ff].
Another story begins with a runaway slave in 4th century Ireland. Ireland was outside the Empire, dominated by Druid lore-masters who sacrificed selected men, women, and children to the gods in elaborate rituals. The Druids were highly educated in an oral fashion. Patrick was taken as a captive from Christian Britain in its dying days as a Roman province. In Ireland he recovered the faith of his childhood, escaped, and made his way to the continent where he became a monk. Later, he secured permission to return as a missionary to Ireland [Sunshine, 57]. Patrick traveled incessantly, ingratiating himself with chieftains and confronting Druid priests on their own turf, calling their bluff in the manner of Elijah on Mt. Carmel [Patrick]. He built monasteries on sacred sites to replace the occult lore of the Druids with the study and transcription of the Christian lore of Rome. Local clan leaders became Abbots.
Not being native speakers of Latin and Greek, the Irish copyists saw the need for word spaces, capital letters and punctuation. The ancients had run everything together, leaving it to the reader to guess where one thing started and another ended. Some monks engaged in peregrination – unplanned wanderings far afield. Brendan is said to have visited America. Others founded monasteries and schools that spread to Scotland, Ireland, and France. One of these was at York in northern England. From thence came Alcuin, the architect of the “Carolingian Renaissance,” about 800 [Sunshine 58-59]. The urban schools of Rome had disappeared long before, but Charlemagne’s educational system owed much to the Irish. Unfortunately, his Empire began to disintegrate soon after his death. However, monks and priests spread Christianity far beyond the borders of the old Roman Empire.
The story of the early Middle Ages seems dark to us because we are dazzled by the glory of Rome, because of the sketchiness of the records that survive, the lack of stable large-scale polities and finally because of the undeniable waves of barbarian invasion. Migrations didn’t end with the Goths or the Lombards. In the 8th century there were the Muslims in Spain and Sicily. In the 9th it was the Scandinavians (sea peoples called Norse, Northmen, Normans or Vikings) from Kiev to Ireland and down the coast of France. About the same time were the Magyars (a Turko-Mongolian horse people) penetrating Bavaria and Lombardy. In the 10th century the Magyars sacked Bremen and raided from Saxony to Lorraine before being defeated. Otto I, of Saxony, was crowned Emperor of the Romans, establishing the Holy Roman Empire in Germany and Italy. In the 11th century, Scandinavians had established themselves in the Ukraine, southern Italy, and Normandy – from which William I conquered England. By then, both Scandinavians and Magyars had converted to Christianity and were making homes where they had previously raided. When the Vikings married the local girls instead of raping them, they settled down to become very successful at feudal organization. The foundations, however, of the distinctive traditions of England, France, the Germanies and the Italian principalities had already been laid down.
The High Middle Ages (1050 – 1300)
With the Norman conquests of England and Sicily, the map of Medieval Europe stabilized somewhat. We will examined the three big ideas of Medieval Europe in our previous lecture. Britain, France, Poland and Hungary were roughly where they belong – although dynasties were more important than boundaries. Central Europe was geographically unstable, but the major dynastic families were consistent. Learning took a great step forward in the establishment of the international university system. Scholasticism brought together all knowledge in a great synthesis under the dominion of theology. Thanks to Aristotelian logic, what was known was more certainly known then than ever before or since. The great Gothic cathedrals were being built – soaring offerings of worship to God in stone. The Franciscan and Dominican orders of friars were established to preach the gospel to the poor by the poor. The crusading movement was launched, with all its religious idealism, shady or non-existent arrangements, and blood- thirsty execution. The textile industry underwent a wave of mechanization and capitalism flourished. The city states of Italy, the ports of the low countries, and the Hanseatic League of the Baltic gained unprecedented wealth by trade and finance. More than one historian has called the 13th the greatest of all centuries.
The “Waning of the Middle Ages” (1300 – 1500)
Jean de Venette, a priest at the turn of the 14th century, had a prophetic dream. “In the year of the Lord 1315, shall begin a great famine on earth Also the Church shall totter and the line of Saint Peter shall be execrated. Also the blood of man shall be poured out on the ground.” [Cited in Sherman & Salisbury, 275] It all happened.
The 13th century had been one of great prosperity, cultural achievement, and population growth, bringing marginal lands under cultivation. Medieval agricultural techniques were stretched to the limit. Then the climate changed. Beginning in 1310, chroniclers all over Europe reported too much rain, thunder and lightning, high winds, floods, and unseasonably cold damp weather. Crops were washed away, rotted in the fields, or failed to ripen before frost. There was one year “without a summer.” Famine began in 1315 and lasted in some areas into 1322.
Then there was plague. A population weakened by hunger succumbed easily to disease, culminating in the “black death,” taking between one third and one half of the population. The social and psychological impact can hardly be imagined as every family lost members, the dead were often left unburied and survivors fled from town to town spreading the contagion as they went.
The Papacy had moved to Avignon in southern France a decade before. Although it was a much nicer and more peaceful town than Rome, the move gravely weakened the spiritual legitimacy of the Pope, who, after all, was the Bishop of Rome, ruling in the name of St. Peter. Was it a coincidence that the French clergy were now exempt from Papal taxation while the rest of Europe was subjected to new efficiency of exactions? Some called it “the Babylonian captivity of the Church.” When efforts to redress the situation resulted in two Popes – one in Rome and one in Avignon – things really got out of hand. The faithful were subjected a spectacle of disunion, with competing bishops for the same sees, while the pontiffs competed for secular support and attempted to raise funds for two curial courts. At one point there were three! The church indeed tottered and the line of St. Peter was execrated. Ironically, this happened against a background of intellectual and spiritual revival!
The fourteenth century was also a time of unprecedented bloodshed. Desperate times led to a loss of social restraint and confidence in the social order. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in cities and towns throughout Europe, as people blamed them for poisoning the water and causing the plague. Peasant revolts broke out all over Europe. John Bull and Wat Tyler in England and the Jacquerie in France, are examples [Sherman & Salisbury 276ff]. The Hundred Years’ War broke out in France in 1337.
It is a testimony to the power of the Medieval order that it did not finally disintegrate until the end of the 18th century. But change was afoot. The calamities of the 14th century opened the way for new ideas, new doubts, and a renegotiation of old relationships. Economic innovations of the 13th century took root as Europe recovered, resulting in a more capitalist – less traditional – cash economy. Manorial and feudal obligations were commuted into money payments. The service of mounted knights, rendered obsolete at Crecy, was commuted into cash to hire mercenaries companies (who sold themselves to the highest bidder). Administration of the manor was put in the hands of a low-born agent (a lawyer or accountant) whose commission depended on exacting the last centime, rather than the old mutual obligations. Bureaucrats replaced warrior Peers. The old order remained, but its meaning was eroding.
[This is not to say I endorse prognosticators such as Nostradamus. Was de Venette tipped off by God or was he just an astute observer of his times? War, famine, scandal and plague are a pretty good bet for any century and (just between you and me) there is enough wickedness in any generation to be deserving of incineration by the Just and Holy One. But that’s beyond the scope of historical judgment.]
Works Consulted:
Patrick, “Confessio,” and “Letter to Coroticus,” History of the Celtic Church, IrishChristian.Net (1997, 2007) retrieved 6/1/11, from http://www.irishchristian.net/history/index.html
Dennis Sherman and Joyce Salisbury, The West in the World, 3rd edn, New York: McGraw Hill, 2009
Rodney Stark, The Victory of Reason, New York: Random House, 2005.
Glenn R. Sunshine, Why you think the way you do, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009).