issue #52 october 2014 · 2020. 2. 2. · issue #52 october 2014 the european “dark ages” –...

ISSUE #52 OCTOBER 2014

The European “Dark Ages” – roughly the years between 500 AD and 1000 AD – is a much maligned period. Popular “knowledge” of the time is little more than myth that has metastasized into slander.

In this issue and the next, I'll explain the Dark Ages using facts, not fables or fictional images. There now exists enough good information to do so, yet I've never seen the period explained in any depth. (Listings of dates and facts don't help very much.)

Almost all modern history focuses on rulers and hierarchy, which is deeply misleading in most cases. This is especially true for the Dark Ages (better referred to as “Late Antiquity” or “the Early Middle Ages”). The common view of history in this period is misleading and reflects modern biases far more than it does reality.

For example, here are some facts about the Dark Ages that run counter to “received wisdom”:

• The barbarian Goths were not trying to conquer the Roman Empire; they were trying to join it.

IN THIS ISSUE:

Comprehending a Decapitated Culture.....3

The Evaporation of Power.................................4

The Invasion of Will Into Apathy...............................5

Those Who Took Advantage.......................7

Joining to Stronger Neighbors................11

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http://www.freemansperspective.com

THE DARK AGES LIBERATION



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• The pope did not run Christianity; he simply wasn't that important. The pope was appointed by the Eastern emperor and was often made to answer for his actions, overruled, or disregarded. The pope seldom even appointed bishops; locals did.

• Roman Catholic Christianity was not the only Christianity – there were quite a few other forms over quite a few centuries.

• The primary centers of Christianity were not the churches, but the monasteries. And there were an incredible number of monasteries in Europe.

• The monasteries were rarely controlled by Rome or even by the bishops – they were mostly independent.

• The city of Rome remained as it was for almost eighty years after the “fall of Rome,” and was primarily pagan, not Christian.

• The Roman nobility didn't just go away; they retained power long after the end of the Western Empire in 476. Many of them became medieval lords.

• There were no knights until the end of this period.

• There were very few large castles and (eventually) perhaps 100 thousand small ones.

• Europe, during these years, was full of merchants, manufacturers, and tradesmen. Innovation increased.

• Serfs were not the majority of the populace. Furthermore, serfs were not slaves, and had rights, including the right to a secure retirement.

In short, the Dark Ages were almost nothing like we were told they were.

It's tragic that what passes for understanding of this period consists of the actions of petty, small kings and modern biases projected backward. The people of this period were strong-willed individuals who laid the essential groundwork for our modern world.

Most importantly, the people of the Dark Ages ended slavery and created capitalism, with its attendant prosperity. So, the prosperity that we enjoy to this day exists thanks to the people and ideas of the Dark Ages.

The Dark Ages have been considered “dark” for two primary reasons:

1. The academics who study the past are trained to see power and status. The Dark Ages had very little of either, so academics have trouble with the period.

2. Leading voices of the renaissance and enlightenment periods liked to make the previous ages sound very, very bad, to make themselves look heroic.

What was missing from Europe in the “Dark Ages” was centralized power: the rulers that history books thrive on. Centralized power died over the course of the Early Middle Ages. The one serious effort to revive it – the attempted empire of Charlemagne – is the one episode that history books do cover from this time

I'll be frank and tell you that most historians are obsessed with rulership, and archaeologists are badly obsessed with status and state formation. Once they encounter a period without these, they imply



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hierarchy and status, or simply study other periods. For example: I had a hard time finding any book on early castles and fortified private dwellings and have yet to find one on early monasteries. A lot of the material I'm working with are reports from specialist historians who dig through medieval Latin records.

Comprehending a Decapitated Culture

We've been living through a period of peak authority, which has impinged upon our imaginations. In particular, we tend to see authority as ever-present… as “normal.”

The European Dark Ages, however, were a time when authority was decapitated. There were no authorities telling people how to think and how to live. We have no real images of that kind of life, making the Dark Ages hard to understand.

So, let me give you a fictional scenario that will help:

Imagine that aliens from another solar system came to Earth with a fleet of thousands of powerful ships and hovered over every capital city on the planet. Then in one burst, they fired their energy beam weapons and vaporized every major government building on the planet: the White House, Congress, the British Parliament, the Kremlin, the Forbidden City, and all the rest, including secondary capitals with all their “leaders” and party officials.

Then, leaving behind several thousand smoking holes, the aliens simply fly away, never to be seen again.

Now, think about this:

What would happen the next day? At first, people would be shocked, of course, but what after that? What would they do? There would be no one left to order them around, no one to collect their taxes, and no politicians to blame for their difficulties.

Some would jump to take advantage of a situation where all barriers had been removed. Others would fear the prospect of standing alone, or not feel sufficient to it, and would seek someone to join with. A few would try to set themselves up as new masters. Most people, however, would move slowly and look for new ways of living that seemed safe. But they'd all have to accept that authority was gone and that they were on their own.

This is what the Dark Ages were like… this is what they felt like.

Power evaporated, and people were left to figure things out for themselves. It didn't happen overnight, of course, but this is what happened, and the emotional changes that people would face under our fictional scenario are precisely the ones that the people of the Dark Ages faced.

It's also critical to understand that European life at this time was variable. Ways of life varied from place to place and time to time. There was no central pattern that people followed; they all made it up as they went.

Another crucial thing to understand about this period is that life got simpler, not more complicated. The Empire, with its endless wars, taxes, edicts, and their intricate patronage system, greatly complicated life. Once Rome was gone, complexity was reduced, making people less harried and more willing to take chances.



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A Note on Sources

I'm going to use a lot of quotes in this issue and the next, and I don't want to complicate them with footnotes and citations, so I'm going to do what we did in FMP #37: I'll follow a passage with a small parenthetic note, signifying the source.

(Chreighton) refers to Oliver Chreighton's book, Early European Castles

(Davis) refers to R.H.C. Davis' book, A History of Medieval Europe: From Constantine to Saint Louis

(Guizot) refers to Francois Guizot's lectures, The History of Civilization in Europe

(Kern) refers to Fritz Kern's book, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ages

(Latouche) refers to Robert Latouche's book, The Birth of the Western Economy

(Pernoud) refers to Régine Pernoud's book, Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths

(Wells) refers to Peter S. Wells' book, Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered

(Burns) refers to C. Delisle Burns' book, The First Europe

(Daileader) refers to Philip Daileader's lectures, The Early Middle Ages

(Wickham) refers to Chris Wickham's book, The Inheritance of Rome

The Evaporation of Power

In our alien decapitation strike, all authority would be removed in an instant. In the real Europe, it took a century or so.

Rome had been declining for a long time, of course, but authority remained. In fact, later emperors made such a spectacle of authority that people who entered their imperial courts were forced to prostrate themselves. They also went rather wild taxing landowners. But no matter how good a show authority made, the Empire was simply too far extended and was cannibalizing itself.

These (Roman) cities so delightful to live in… lacked the stimulus of great industries… they were not centers of production, but of expenditure. They constituted for the Empire sources, not of wealth, but of impoverishment. (Latouche)

Furthermore, the Romans had stopped adapting.

The Romans of the Imperial Age, with a few notable exceptions, were rhetoricians and compilers; there were no longer any original thinkers or even technicians. No serious attempt seems to have been made to revive agriculture… to make work easier by inventing more efficient tools, or even, as the Merovingians did later, to take advantage of the water-mill, which was nevertheless known. (Latouche)

Over the last years of the Empire, people simply began running away, much like people today are running into the woods or overseas, to get away from oppressive government.

Thus, far and wide, they migrate either to the Goths or to the Bagaudae, or to other barbarians everywhere in power; yet they do not repent of having migrated. They prefer to live as freemen under an outward form of captivity, than as captives under the appearance of liberty. Therefore, the name of Roman citizens, at one time not only greatly valued, but dearly bought, is now repudiated and fled from. (Salvian the Presbyter, 440 AD)

And then, as now, the empire spent wildly to keep their poor people calm:



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This lower class existed on free, or nearly free, distributions provided by the state, distributions first of grain, or bread, then of oil and meat, to which were added from the third century onwards distributions of wine and salt and even of tunics and handkerchiefs. (Latouche)

… the Roman Emperors from Aurelian to Majorian applied a series of forceful remedies, so that the late Empire figures in history as a decisive experiment in state socialism. (Latouche)

I could add much more here, but it would deviate from our subject. Suffice it to say that the Empire crashed throughout the 5th century, leaving a wreck behind. The city of Rome (which hadn’t been the capital for centuries) survived intact until the Gothic Wars. But by 550 AD or so, it was in ruins. This graph of Rome’s (approximate) military strength makes the point:

It's also important to note that the population of Europe fell over this period. At the height of the Roman Empire, the population of Europe may have been 70 million. By the formal end of the empire in 476, it was probably no more than 50 million. And by 800, it is thought to have been closer to 30 million. There is no clear answer as to why the population declined so consistently. Plagues (especially in 542) played a role, but other factors were clearly involved.

The Invasion of Will Into Apathy

Regardless of a vacuum of authority, people have to go on living. Most cling to their images, of course, and continue whatever patterns they can.



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By 650… Romans were seen as belonging in the past… but it took that long for people to recognize that the empire had really gone in the West. (Wickham)

The way they constructed buildings is a case of holding on for centuries:

The buildings of the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Lombards, and Franks were built as imitations (though sometimes poor imitations) of the Roman or Byzantine style. But in the period from 900 to 1250 this uniformity ceased completely. (Davis)

The real factor controlling the actions of people in an ungoverned state is the balance between will and passivity. The Roman populace had been trained for a long time in passivity. This is one of the reasons why the pagans didn't put up much resistance when the emperors changed their state religion to Christianity. Historian Hugh McClellan says that the pagans “were taught to be passive, quietly.” And in the words of Professor Kenneth Harl, the pagan leaders were “social conservatives, wary of defying the emperor openly.”

As mentioned in our introduction, the barbarians were not trying to destroy Rome; they were trying to get in on the act. When they entered the empire in 376, it was with permission, and they constituted less than 1% of the overall populace.

Most of the barbarians who penetrated into the Western Empire came not as conquerors, but exactly as in our own day… to look for work. (Latouche)

The sack of the city of Rome in 410 occurred only because the Visigoth leader, Alaric, was repeatedly denied the Roman office he had previously been promised.

In the vacuum left by Rome, the people of the North and East were free to come, looking for a better way of life. The remaining Romans, obedient until the end, had been trained to follow orders and to avoid taking initiative. And so, Europe was the site of an invasion of will and initiative into stasis and passivity.

Scholar Guy Halsall, in The Barbarian Invasions, discusses a “tired, effete, and decadent Mediterranean civilization” being replaced by a “more virile, martial, Nordic one.”

Here's how it looks on a traditional map:



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In 568, for example, the Lombards entered Northern Italy. Several years earlier, the Eastern Emperor Justinian had tried to put the empire back together by driving the Ostrogoths out of Italy. But after he had “won” the Gothic Wars, his forces were badly weakened, allowing the Lombards to enter almost unopposed. The Romans who lived in these areas didn't defend themselves; they simply fled.

It's also important to understand that these Lombards were not an ethnic group from a certain place; they were a group of unrelated families and individuals who had come together, recently and by choice. The same was true of the Vandals, Goths, Ostragoths, Visigoths, Franks, and Saxons.

… one crucial feature of all these tribal communities: they were very changeable. For a start, none of them were united ethnic groups; they all consisted of smaller tribes, each with a separate leader. (Wickham)

These barbarian groups had more than just the exercise of will; they had also learned to cooperate without being coerced. Their individuality and self-reliance would make a crucial contribution to the new European civilization; it was precisely what the passive ex-Romans lacked.

Among the barbarians, it was between individuals that the social bond was formed… The love of independence is a moral and noble sentiment, which draws its power from the moral nature of man; it is the pleasure of feeling oneself a man, the sentiment of personality, of human spontaneity in its free development… It was through the German barbarians that this sentiment was introduced into European civilization; it was unknown in the Roman world. (Guizot)

The Germanic invaders brought a type of custom law that some later thinkers have credited with the idea of individual freedom.… no rule was held valid if not approved by those it affected. (Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence)

It's also important to understand that there weren't that many barbarians. It was the invasion of their ideas that mattered, not their numbers. There were barbarian leaders who entered Europe and set themselves up as local bosses, but there were not (as was once thought) huge groups of people invading, or migrating to, Europe.

The archaeological evidence indicates that the majority of people did not migrate… Stable isotope analysis on teeth of individuals buried in typical “Anglo-Saxon” cemeteries in the north and south of England shows consistently that the individuals, whom earlier investigators would have interpreted as immigrants from the continent, were in fact local people. (Wells)

Scandinavian place names are dense in many areas, particularly Danish Mercia and Yorkshire, but this seems mostly to indicate the renaming of estates by new owners, not a mass peasant migration. (Wickham)

Those Who Took Advantage

As people would following our alien strike model, some Europeans, following the evaporation of Roman authority, moved to take advantage of the situation.

I hesitate to begin this section with the people who became lords, since historians have a horrible habit of giving first place to anything that smells of status. Nonetheless, I will, just to get them out of the way. And the truth is that the elite Roman families were capable of exercising will, and did act to maintain their advantages.



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A centralized power in the extreme, that of the Roman Empire, collapsed in the course of the fifth century. In the disarray that followed, local powers arose; this was sometimes the head of a band of fellow adventurers grouped around him; sometimes, too, the master of an estate trying to assure for those around him as well as for himself a security no longer guaranteed by the state. (Pernoud)

These “potentates”… possessed much beyond vast estates; they also held great fortunes in personal property, ingots of precious metal, many of which probably came from dismantled pagan temples, and hoards of gold coins… entrenched behind their riches they survived the crisis of the Great Invasions to re-emerge under the Merovingians as the senatorial nobility. (Latouche)

The barbarians respected them and left them alone. In the sixth century, those men whom Gregory of Tours calls the senators were still continuing to hold the highest rank, and in the Frankish kingdom, the barbarian feudal vassals counted it an honor to amalgamate with them. (Latouche)

In A History of the Franks, Gregory of Tours (538-594) reports that Chilperic I, a Frankish king, showed him several gold medallions bearing the effigy of the emperor, which he was carefully preserving. Such medallions were gifts that a Roman emperor would give to his most important officials during religious feasts.

The former Roman elite didn't do quite as well in all cases (under the Lombards, some were killed and the rest were demoted to “tributary” status), but in general, they seem to have held their own fairly well.

Historian Walter Pohl says that these people lived in circumstances of “ethnic ambiguity,” meaning that they maneuvered to fit in to the present circumstances, playing Roman, Goth, or Frank as circumstances warranted. He goes on to say, “Seen in this light, ‘ethnic' identity among barbarians was extraordinarily fluid, as new groups emerged and old ones disappeared.”

The second group of people who took advantage of the situation were small farmers: primarily individual farmers and small farming families. There was a tremendous amount of empty land in Europe at the time, and many of them simply moved to a good piece and started farming it.

But since they were almost entirely on their own, most of these people fortified their houses to protect themselves from raiders. In so doing, they were creating a new kind of order in Europe.

The emergence of castles was not so much a symptom of social disorder, but… a usurpation of public order by private individuals. (Chreighton)

Public power… did not have the personnel to dominate daily life in any detail. (Wickham)

… the multiplicity of defended homesteads that dotted the early medieval landscape; these included raths/ringed forts (enclosed with earthen ramparts and ditches), cashels (protected by stone walls), and crannogs (in marshes and lakes). (Chreighton)

While conflict saw considerable investment in and experimentation with defense works… they did not witness the construction sites we can easily identify as castles. Rather, the weakening of centralized authority created an environment in which fortifications built by noble families flourished. (Chreighton)



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This drawing shows how a small fortified residence was turned into a small “castle” ten years later:

Source: Early European Castles

And this is what the majority of castles looked like… minus the flag, perhaps:



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The best current estimates are that between 75,000 and 100,000 castles existed in Europe. Italy alone had at least 26,000. Consider this map of castles in Catalonia, a province of modern Spain:

Source: Early European Castles

In the center of this area, castles were so thick that each controlled an area of only 23 square kilometers (about nine square miles). Also bear in mind that the designation “Lord” shown on this map is used broadly. Many castles (not to mention fortified houses) are lost to history.

It's quite telling to run the numbers on this:

Assuming 60,000 castles and a population of 30 million, there was one castle for every 20 families. (Assuming an extended family of 30.) And this calculation doesn't include fortified dwellings that wouldn't be classified as castles, of which there were very many, as the second Creighton quote in this section indicates.

So, individuals and families in this era had a nearly wide-open opportunity to go out and create their own homestead, probably without having to go very far. And it is very clear that a large number of them did so. If you were willing to work, you could probably create your own private, defended domain. As long as you stayed away from the old cities, there was no one to forbid you.

Lordship could be claimed by people who had never met a king; the title of count could be assumed in some areas by anyone who was powerful enough, and passed on to his heirs. (Wickham)

Early private fortifications are notable for their segregation from populations and for their avoidance of established urban centers, although in numerous cases new castles became hubs for markets and… points for commercial growth. (Chreighton)



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No one knows how many kings Ireland had at any one time, but 100 to 150 is a widely canvassed estimate… the small ones may have had only a few family groups each. (Wickham)

The local powers that castle lords managed to enforce… became a new legality: in France, in particular, for a century in some regions, this is all there was. (Wickham)

The greatest multiplication of castles seems to have been in the tenth and eleventh centuries (at the far end of the period we're covering), but that fact can be a bit misleading. By 864, the most powerful king in Europe, Charles the Bald, was trying to get rid of castles that he hadn't authorized. It was apparently a problem to the Frankish kings a century before him as well.

The origin and widespread use of fortified sites… is still under debate. Fortifications were already common in the sixth century in some parts of Europe (such as Italy, geographically divided as it was). (Wickham)

Joining to Stronger Neighbors

In addition to the more willful groups, most people, after the collapse of Rome, continued as small farmers and either attached themselves to people controlling good land or remained attached to the Roman estates they had already been associated with.

This can help us understand what happened at that time: some little farmer, powerless by himself to assure his security and that of his family, applied to a powerful neighbor who had the possibility of maintaining armed men; the latter consented to protect the farmer in exchange for which the farmer would give him a part of his harvest. (Pernoud)

But aside from the case of slaves (which we'll cover next month), these people made this association rather voluntarily and without giving up their standing as self-owned individuals.

All in fact lived on the land they farmed, and without actually owning it, thought of it as their land, and handed it down to their children. (Latouche)

The Merovingian age saw an increase in the number of small farms and small holdings, and that these fulfilled, though still imperfectly it is true, the secret longing of every peasant – to have a plot of land big enough to support a family and which can be handed down to his descendants. (Latouche)

The relationship between monarch and subject in all Germanic communities was expressed by the idea of mutual fealty, not by that of unilateral obedience. (Kern)

When the possessor of a fief… presented himself in an assembly… he saw there only men who were invested with the same rights as himself, who were in the same situation, and, like him, acted in the name of their personal will. Nothing… conveyed to him, or forced him to recognize this character of superiority and generality, which is inherent to the idea that we form to ourselves of public powers. (Guizot)

While considering fortified homes, it's worth noting that while there certainly was some violence during this period (yes, there were villages that were burned), it never came remotely close to the levels seen in Europe over recent centuries. Violence became worse as it became more organized… after the Early Middle Ages.



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More to Come…

As impossible as it may seem to modern readers, the truth is that the Dark Ages were a time of general and increasing liberation and opportunity.

In this issue, we explained how this era began and how people adapted to it. Next month, we'll explain the culture that came out of it.

See you then.

PR


issue #52 october 2014 · 2020. 2. 2. · issue #52 october 2014 the european “dark ages” –...

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