Medieval Ages

4. Wickham, Inheritance of Rome (14 Apr 2019)

by kurto

Assesses socioeconomic trends in formerly imperial Roman lands over 400 – 1000 AD, describing the collapse as tectonic but not catastrophic: culture especially displayed continuity and evolution if simplification.

The era’s most important event was the Empire’s breakup at the hands of the Vandals in 439, severing Rome’s food supply (i.e., grain and oil), followed toward century’s end by Gaul’s defection to the barbarian powers. These restricted trade, simplified wealth to land ownership, and restricted government (fisc, justice, administration). By 650 every successor kingdom had its own traditions. Islam’s rise further severed Rome from the Byzantine world (which for a time retained control of the Nile valley), completing the end of the Mediterranean regime and prompting two centuries of ferment. Taxation, shifting from commerce toward land, closed off the possibility of successors to Rome, prompting elites to favor military pursuits over luxury.
Roman culture emphasized great cities, which decayed. Medieval Christianity, by contrast, was not subsumed in Roman values: its structures changed the least, its critique of society and government persisted. Secular education gave way to religious inspiration.

Wickham organizes around the Roman West, the rising Islamic sphere, and Byzantium, and emphasizes archaeology, for example the dispersion of clay pots indicating trade, as free of ‘assumed narrative’ found in manuscripts and such traditional evidence.

In the European Common Era, the period 500-800 marks the greatest local autonomy, the least centralization. Population was sparse but not disorderly. There was little inter-regional trade, Francia being more active than its contemporaries (along the Rhine and the Meuse to the North Sea) and Britain less so: wealth maps accordingly. Most housing reverted to wood (until 1200); elites moved into towers as visually claim to leadership and status, the visual (and the miraculous) being more powerful than written word. Gaul and Germany formed under Merovingian customs over the 6th to 8th centuries, though not too far prior to Charles Martel’s ascendance. Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy elaborated differently, the Spanish retaining greater cohesion until the Islamic conquest and the Italians fracturing entirely. Only the Franks sought empire, only the Spanish Visigoths retained imperial government. All militarized, all lost sophisticated taxation. Court-centered aristocracies persisted, of Roman stock but post-Roman custom. (English and Irish social structures congealed more easily under Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic patterns, the exception being Catholic influence). Though also disrupted, the Church retained its institutional shape – almost one-third of land in France and Italy was church-owned. To varying degrees, bishops (who tended to be aristocrats) held local sway. Literacy declined less than once supposed – government was still based on written instruction – but society’s elites militarized and much land was needed to feed and clothe armies. Europe’s early medieval ages have been seen as Germanic but though societies indeed localized, Wickham holds post-Roman sociocultural practices didn’t change much after 750 and the greater change was militarization. Reduced distribution of wealth (land) determined what the peasantry could and could no longer do. Under the Merovingians, for example, court was most important; some peasants were free, some were serfs, checking broader class solidarity; women were less present publicly than in Rome.

The Byzantine empire separated from Rome over 609-642, being unable to hold back Islamic (Persian) attacks and so losing the productive wealth of Egypt; Constantinople depopulated from 500,000 to ~ 50,000 residents, a much faster decline than Rome two centuries earlier. Byzantines survived by turning to the state.

Development in the Islamic lands is generally presented as contrasting with the West and Byzantium, rather than in terms of theology. From 630, Arabs sought to remain separate from the lands they conquered; to be on the military payroll was a badge of honor. Consequently Persian and Roman society did not blend. Beginning with late 8th-century Umayyads, administration shifted to viziers and the center of Islamic government commenced a continuous line of caliphs running to the early 16th century. In the 9th century, Baghdad became the cultural center of Islam, led by a community of scholars premised on ulama. (But: the 9th century also saw the Sunni-Shia split.). There were four main schools of law ranging from legal reasoning (interpretation) of caliphal legislation to hadith (premised on Mohammed’s statements). By 900 the latter prevailed – the ‘closing of the gate’ – no new laws promulgated by the caliph or anyone else was considered fixed. Land did not equate to power in medieval Islam, only position within the state, which brought tax wealth. Paradoxically, the succeeding Abbasid empire fell because the state grew too large.

Both Muslims and Byzantines were concerned with representation – what is holy, what is idolatrous. Aversion to the visual was a factor in the Roman-Byzantine schism of 843 (the popes long since having identified as Roman). Both Byzantine and Arab commerce were closely tied to the state: private wealth gave access to the state, which led to more complex ways to accumulate and recycle wealth.

The Byzantine city-state, which saw declining trade over the 7-8th centuries, recovered in the 11th-12 centuries notwithstanding the coming Arab conquest. By the 10th century, the second great Mediterranean trade cycle, including in the following century the Italian ports as well as the Crusade-fueled trade, was underway. But intra-regional trade among Europe, Islam, and Byzantium did not recover.

After 800 the West saw the introduction of moral political practice, exemplified by the Carolingians: the church and state working together. Yet by the period’s end, Carolingian public structures had failed, replaced by the rise of aristocratic power, the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere (somewhat analogous to the collapse of the caliphate), and the eventual rise of European kingdoms. Charlemagne matches Justinian in advancing basic literacy, religion, socially minded legislation, and participation in assemblies. He patronized scholars but the sociopolitical world of 6-8th centuries pertained into the 9th – a time that matched the French Revolution as a hotbed of education invading politics. Carolingian rulers allowed elites to rise according to intellectual ability, for purposes of promoting Christendom (theology), unlike the Byzantines, who favored tax-funded officials and army commanders. Leaders felt it necessary to moralize their decisions; however, Carolingian initiatives reached local societies via public justice not moral reform measures. The Carolingian era was destroyed by the multiplication of successors; these regional hegemons were more important than the overall rise of aristocrats; its decline undermined the pope’s international stature.

Culturally, Carolingians evidenced the dynamic of kings choosing bishops and bishops correcting kings; Byzantines relied on Roman tradition for assurance; the Abbasids looked to the now-defined ulama. As in Byzantium, in Islam education trained one for statecraft. Solidity came from tax (which was absent in the west), but religion of the elite was not seen to be essential to state survival or that the task of the state to provide for communal salvation. Frankish aristocrats after the Carolingians were less likely to be literate; the church upheld ‘international’ culture.

In the Viking era, southern England suffered no permanent regional breakdown before 1066. Only Dublin and Normandy, plus north Scotland and Ireland, survived as Viking political retains. The rest of Danish settlements were soon culturally absorbed. Aristocratic dominance based on property was more pronounced than the continent; yet the king maintained more political control. Arguably the main political creation was the catalytic of unifying England.
Russia exhibited Byzantine influences, but was too far from Islam, and so developed of internal dynamics. Spain’s government stems from the Visigoths not Francia or Al-Andalus. Sociopolitical systems in ‘ouher Europe’, notwithstanding this diversity, stemmed from solidifying aristocratic power as well as borrowing government mechanisms from neighbors, for example specialized royal officials, top-down judiciary, or military service owed the state. In 400, stable systems stopped at the Rhine-Danube border; by 1000 recognizable polities were evident west of the Volga, albeit in weaker forms than during the Roman era.

Institutional politics were most effective where there was a strong tax (e.g., Rome, Islam, Byzantium), and less secure if dependent on land grants to aristocrats since the metropole was likely to run out of land. The decline of public culture, which was the strongest remaining link to Rome), for example in law, often devolved to private rule (e.g., inside private castles). The land tax which underpinned the Roman fisc continued in simplified form, hurting the peasantry (as well as intraregional trade) since it was not distributed. The 10th century was often like the 9th yet saw substantial changes in public assemblies.

The decline of the peasantry, ‘encaged’ in castles, figures prominently in Wickham’s writing. During the Carolingian and succeeding eras, aristocrats consolidated land ownership though peasants did not. But inheritance became normal only post 1000 (in Francia, post 900), which cramped monarchies. Private castles were a 10th century development, tying aristocrats to regional more than political interests, and leading to division among those who fight, those who work – the so-called feudal revolution. Feudal seignory is not a Carolingian structure writ small but a structural change; but not all aristocrats left court to rule local regions. Peasants in the 9-10th centuries were slowly excluded from the public sphere. Carolingian political economy promoted the demesne, ‘encaging’ the lower classes on the estate: they were dependent on the lords for land to farm and live. By the time they re-emerged after 1000, the Middle Ages were effectively over: villages were spheres of public power, estates of private rule.

The key major trends (shifts) of the era from 400-1000 by chronology are:
1. The breakup of the Roman Empire, which was more economic and fiscal than culture, aided by the rise of Islam severing Rome from the Byzantine world and fueling two centuries of crisis. In this time, governmental changes in the Islamic regions were more dramatic even then Carolingian lands.
2. The introduction of moralistic political practices exemplified by the Carolingian project – the church and state working together.
3. The end of the Carolingian empire’s public structures circa 1000, most obviously demonstrated by the rise of aristocratic power and the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere. A somewhat analogous trend is evident in the breakup of the Caliphate. In northern Europe, modern kingdoms emerged.
4. Wealth was accumulated via land ownership, and land could be effectively taxed. The peasants suffered, regional exchange increased.
5. Institutionalized politics were most effective if there was strong tax revenue, and less so if the government was dependent on land grants to aristocrats.
6. The development of public culture with the strongest links to Rome was law; the decline to private rule on the estates (in French castles) illustrates the point.

Of note: French historiography has predominated the later Medieval ages, but the Frankish experience was not typical of Europe.

1. Chenu, Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century (24 Jan 2019)

by kurto

Studies currents of 12th-century Christian theology, a period of ferment and reform and also a bridge to the gains made by Thomas Aquinas and contemporaries in the following century. Contemporary theology encompassed practically all of intellectual life: science, philosophy, historiography, literary criticism (and particularly Biblical exegesis). But the conventional sequence of monastic patrism to scholasticism to Renaissance is simplistic. Institutional (i.e., Catholic) history and intellectual history are interdependent; positivism is poorly suited for understanding medieval theology because values drive the era’s fundamental sociopolitical constructs.

Symbolism was the first of two keystones of 12th-century epistemology. It conflated scientific explanation with signification. Monkish academics and the general populace alike believed all real things (i.e., natural objects, as well as historical events) could be portrayed in ways that revealed both their essence and broader meanings (‘signification’). It was metaphor dependent on fixed, transcendent realities, matching examples with Platonic concepts. If math shows the visible form of visible things and physics the invisible causes of visible things, symbolism manifests visible forms of invisible things. Thus history was man’s visible form of god’s will. Augustine’s symbols required pre-acceptance of faith, whereas Pseudo Dionysius’ symbols were autonomous.

The second was the predominance of hierarchy, which was akin to belief in evolution in the 20th. Hierarchy stood athwart Aristotelian concepts of science because the higher body subsumed the lower. In a hierarchical conception of the universe, wherein man predominated, causality and meaning were linked and each being was a ‘theophany’, a revelation of god.

Enter William of Conches, who identified three sources of causation: God, nature, man. The discovery of autonomous nature meant breaking with Augustinian doctrine, albeit God remained at the center. Theology benefited from a new rationality and Christianity (re)discovered nature and man’s place in the whole of the natural universe; of course there was disagreement over ‘natural determinism’ versus divine forces. Alain of Lille’s dictionary assigned 11 meanings to ‘nature’, a broad cast rather than systematic thought, and the distinction between science and nature came into sharper focus in the 13th century (with the help of reacquired Aristotle). Desacralizing the natural produced intellectual crisis for those who thought it was not important to know why, only that things were perfect, as divinely intended.

Yet the rediscovery of nature did not undermine but strengthened belief in value of symbols. Neoplatonic scholars downplayed the causality of man; however, Platonism was conducive to moral values and religion. Plato’s view of the soul as part of the cosmic order and so part of the functioning of order, in contrast to Aristotle who focused on the mind, aligned with Christianity. But there were problems (such as in the Timaeus) which clashed with creation or the trinity.      Avicenna was the preeminent source of Islamic Neoplatonism, Plotonius the premier Latin. The texts were partial and the translations average, so the results imperfect. Neoplatonism was not so influential as Aquinas building on Aristotle. Plato’s religious character attracted contemporary theology. Neos used their new understanding of reason to build up faith in mystery of God. The return to primitive apostolic life (see below) entailed rejecting the feudal cloister and finding God among the people, a neo-Platonist concept.

Over the century, piecemeal explanation (i.e., Aristotelian science) began to replace the generally irreducible meanings of symbolism. Simultaneously, allegory became more important, especially in literary forms. During the religious awakening of the last third of the century, exaggerated allegories were a kind of Judaic leavening of the Christian mysteries. The Roman Catholic church thought of itself as separate and closed, liked the Old Israelites, rather than the encompassing body of Christ. (What Moses concealed, Jesus revealed.) Christian theology drew heavily on Old prototypes. The Old Testament was used to illustrate (refine) the New. For example, the bishop was characterized as an Old Testament pastor, stressing moral governance, rather than in the role of teacher or prophet. Although the past was not left behind, the New came to transfigure the Old in institutional, behavior, temperament. (Only John of Salisbury introduced a new political analysis based on secular concerns.) The Old Testament provided examples of types to follow; but the types were not completely binding on the present.) Further, personification was used to ascribe value to pagan texts (poets) without straying into heresy.

The 12th century discovered history, initially the history of Christ and the church, but later more general affairs. It was to be learned according to a prescribed method, through chronology, not ideology, theology, or another dialectical process. Abelard made the past concrete and understandable, no longer the stuff of allegory or legend. Universal humanity had been an original feature of Christianity: now it added the universalism of time: ‘history was the narrator of events by which these things done in the past were sorted’. It was agreed the Roman Empire was the last of the ancients; the discovery of the Eastern empires in the 13th century pointed to new epistemological problems. John of Salisbury portended the 13th century’s discovery of Aristotle’s autonomy of nature (while also founding the practice of government administration based on function, not allegorical ‘mansion of princes’ from the Bible). Platonic influences (the ideas) tended to minimize events. Again pace John of Salisbury, for the first time secular events were to be evaluated for their own value. The discovery of history worked to strengthen what Chenu frequently calls the ‘economy of salvation’, the powerful role of Christianity in everyday life, as theologians became aware that not all events fit into allegory, symbolism, or church history. ‘Charlemagne was not Constantine’: they became aware of Western society, distinct from the Byzantine empire or Islam. Christendom became aware of its trajectory.

In the 12th century, Christians sought to return to apostolic life as compared to monkish work: the return to evangelism as a source of authenticity. The monasteries were by now responsible for tithing, hospitals, food distribution, travelers’ aid plus administration (such as tax collection). This was inconsistent with evangelism. Its procedures were endowed with sacred functions, but the glamor of ceremony undermined the vow of the mendicant. The monastery was the realization of St. Augustine’s city of God, but sacrificed elements of Christianity’s rejecting the world: it was a theocracy. At the same time, the cloister omitted the confrontation with the world that apostolic life demanded. Whereas the monastic view was Manichean (symbolism or allegorical), the evangelical outlook encouraged the discovery of laws of nature, application of reason, and so on as ‘real world’, as practical illustration of God’s design. The evangelical life encouraged proliferation of the force of worship. Christian life was no longer solely penitential and withdrawn. The rise of towns and the proliferation of non-feudal forms also acted to undermine monastic prestige. Evangelicals naturally found a home in secular institutions, for the gospel requires preaching to a new audience. It was to justify its existence and its truth that the church planted itself in the world. The 12th-century return to gospel guaranteed Christian presence in the world and guaranteed it would be of the world, evidence of Christianity’s ability to adapt. When Aquinas later defined transcendence of grace by invoking Aristotelian nature, he illustrated theological appreciation for nature, apostolic appreciation of man, and humanity’s appreciation of the church.

Lay apostles of the mendicant orders developed among the marginal townspeople of the new urban centers. Unlike monks and prelates, the mendicants were at home with the working poor. This dynamic led to translations of the Bible into vernacular, and also expanded monastic interpretations into apostolic views of scripture. The mendicants were the founders of the universities. This Biblical theology connected the literal and the spiritual in ways the monks of allegory and symbolic idealism had not. The master of the school had three values: to explicate, to dispute (to the resolution of questions), and to preach. The mendicants also developed a ‘scientific understanding’ of scripture by direct study of texts of the Bible.

The popes struggled to bring the mendicants under effective authority of the church, since the mendicants were developing their own rules of order based on theology. Pope Alexander III and Innocent III developed pronounced cultural views of elements of Christendom: ethnic, cultural, and political. But the state jurists were desacralizing the rulers – authority needn’t lie in the church. The mendicants were more at home than the conventional orders with the duality of church-state relations. Again, the model of Constantine was replaced by Charlemagne.

The 12th century saw the rise of the distinction between the cloistered theologian and the scholar (often, to be sure, the scholar of theology). Key steps in the professionalization of theology included faith fashioned into science (i.e., reason used to order faith, or pointed up that which requires faith). Traditional expressions took on an intellectual character. The question required that each competing alternate must have valid arguments. This pointed to independence from texts. Problems and solutions independent of text pointed to the summa. The scholastic quaestiones were different from Socratic interrogation or Platonic reduction and later Cartesian doubt and Hegelian dialectic. But there was no such unity (i.e., completeness) in canon law. The transition from monastic to scholastic theology marked a new intellectual age. The world of monks was a symbolic cosmos; especially post Aristotle (i.e., the discovery of nature), the scholastic world encompassed studies featuring rationally developed views of man and nature. Anselm and Abelard were the fathers of scholasticism.

In sum, the Christian faith and the church of the 12th century provided different currents within monastic, scholastic, canonical, and apostolic milieu. The autonomy of man and nature did not shatter the Christian world; Scripture remained primes inter pares. The balance of tradition and progress, of doctrinal and institutional development, was exemplified by the Fourth Lateran Council. The integrity of Christian faith was not jeopardized by the rationalized basis of theology, the new influence of the apostolic, or changing social mores. The foundations were laid for the great scholastic systems of the 13th century.