I was slogging through the Dark Ages (sometimes known as the Early Middle Ages) with God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 to 1215 by David Levering Lewis when I got sidetracked by Helen of Troy, but before I get sidetracked again (a random reader’s affliction) I want to consider some aspects about the period between the end of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages. As an aside, let me say that Lewis brings a movie director’s lively sensibility to staging his narrative; at one point he almost makes you hear a celebratory Te Deum ringing through a cathedral full of nobles and high religious figures in all their holy-day finery.
Since I was taught that Rome conquered most of the “known world,” I thought of the empire as a kind of island, so the revelation that, prior to the rise of Islam, the Roman and Persian empires engaged in 700 years of confrontation came as a surprise. Not only were there two empires of comparable weight, their borders were quite porous, allowing a continual exchange of goods and ideas. In particular, refugees avoiding the consequences of heresy fled from one side to the other. This cross pollination would continue even after the western empire shifted to Constantinople and Islam conquered Persia.
Curiously, it seems that “Europe” probably owes its name to an Eastern vantage point; a number of Semitic languages including Phoenician have words suggesting “sunset,” or “west,” or “going down” that are similar. Even if the name is actually derived from the Greek legend of Europa, who was carried off by Zeus, Europa was a Phoenician princess.
I was looking for more insight into common life in Europe during the so-called Dark Ages because several books ago, I was given Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici and it was so full new information that I wanted to get a broader base before going on with Federici’s specifics. Trying to find traces of daily life in the Early Middle Ages is like wandering through thick fog with only the constant clash of warfare for guidance; you long to stumble into some clearing with a humble cottage. Most historians tend to dismiss the cottage as a hovel and the common Dark Age folk as living short, brutish, hungry, frightened, ignorant lives. I doubt this. Someone had to provide the basics so all those noisy battles could be fought by men with expensive arms and armor riding big horses.
Don’t get me wrong. I love stories with horses and swords, and while I was reading David Levering Lewis I was reminded of a favorite branch of SF that creates fictional worlds of kings and knightly sagas like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. The actual post-Roman continental history strikes me as even more exotic than made up worlds. What reader of such wouldn’t be thrilled to discover Lady Plectrude, Liutprand the Lombard, Chindaswinth, or Princess Swanachild from Toxandria or the Fens of Drenthe? Nor does it seem that Dark Agians were much concerned with supporting self esteem since they gave each other names like “the Short,” “the Bald,” and “the Adopted”; Charlemagne’s mother was known as Bertha Goosefoot.
Roger Osborne’s Civilization: A New History of the Western World suggested more information about what’s behind those arrows used to describe the Barbarian Invasions - you remember, the arrows labeled “Angles Saxons and Jutes” and “Visigoths” and “Vandals” and the texts that explain these were the routes taken by waves of barbarian hordes. Osborne is more like a plane ride than a slog as he takes you through three to four thousand years with a nod to the previous six, and keeps the trip interesting with unusual perspectives. He caught my attention early by explaining that a surprising amount of “customary” or folk culture may go back to the earliest times because, contrary to the usual narrative, there probably weren’t huge population shifts: “Archaeologists now believe that the people of southern Britain retained the structure of their society through the Roman occupation and, from the fifth century onwards, adopted the culture of a relatively small number of Germanic incomers and migrants. The result was a combination of British and Germanic cultures - the resulting language, for instance, was Germanic in vocabulary, but Celtic in construction. The same process may have happened in the area of the low countries and northern France where the Franks, an originally west Germanic people, spread across the old Celtic lands of Gaul.” (p.41)
So I suspect that the “short, brutish, hungry, frightened, ignorant lives” of the common people was not so much. Another reason from Osborne is his description of life after Rome. The towns that disappeared after Roman withdrawal “were not natural settlements springing out of a need for trading, access to crafts, meetings and communal defense; they were elements in an organizing framework, there to defend an occupation and administer an empire. When the troops and the officials went, their purpose dissolved.” (p.111) And later: “This decline of urban life has been taken as a sign of the collapse of civilization. But cultural, economic and social activity had not disappeared, it simply moved elsewhere; into hamlets, villages, monasteries, estates and country houses.” (p.166) Daily life became local and something like what it had been before Rome.
I don’t suppose many people wake up wondering if the Dark Ages were really dark and what difference the answer might make, but I find it interesting to pursue just how what I once thought was true is actually an origin myth. Origin myths don’t exist to fill in blank spaces but to support and justify some belief. Terming the ethnic cleansing of Spain of its Jews and Moors as a Reconquista, a Catholic European Reconquering, some six centuries after the last Arian Visigothic king had lost power there, is to insist on an inevitable rebirth, just as the American Thanksgiving holiday celebrates how the Native Americans happily handed over their blessings and treasure - and land - to Europeans. I’m not through pursuing new theories of the early Medieval era, but I’m keeping in mind the notion that most of what I was taught was an academic construct. Nor does it hurt to take another look at the class part of classic.
Gem: Amethyst
