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“The book that follows is not a history in the normal sense, but, as the subtitle explains, the history of a controversy. The controversy in question is the one which has raged for many years around the question: What ended Roman civilization and brought about the Dark Ages?” |
More at New English Review.
“Plus la change, plus c’est la meme chose”…
I’ve always held some hope that this age would be different from all the rest, that maybe the Information Age would break the cycle of history. We could finally have the means to learn from past mistakes.
Faint hope, really…
Perhaps it was my inquisitive nature but for whatever reason this period 8th to the 10th centuries have always interested me.
My take is that the Dark Ages were not so much dark but had been made deliberately dark….by the centralized Roman Church.
This was the period when a secular as well as theological 300 year war was fought with the Roman Church the ultimate victor. The Nesterians and Knostics were actually more dominant at the beginning of the struggle but not centralized. The suppression of the history, of that period, was needed to conceal the very unchristian conduct by the Roman Church. The victors write the history.
This was the period wherein the Merovingian s were destroyed by intrigue to be replaced by the Carolingian s, and the Cathars of Southern Europe were destroyed by what amounted to genocide, a genocide so thorough that no texts of the Cathars survive……to further the dominance of Roman Catholicism.
The re-flowering of culture in the 10th century was the post bellum of that struggle. The Crusades in the ME and Baltic were after echoes of that struggle or the expansion of that Roman dominated “Christendom”.
The Viking period served to prolong the process…..by much the same process that Barbary Piracy affected the Mediterranean. The difference between the 2 very separate invasions was that somehow the Centralized Church succeeded in Christianizing the Vikings…..the success of which coincided with the rebirth of what can be styled civilization. This period also marked the beginnings of the Reconquista in Spain……a long crusade by another name.
The deliberate destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria was not an anomaly but SOP for the Caliphate….a process of Arabization that ended with the rise of the Ottomans……which ironically conquered the Caliphate by being more barbaric than the arabs.
An interesting thesis — that the real destroyer of classical civilization was not Christianity (as Gibbon wrote in Decline and Fall of the Romain Empire) but rather Islam.
The Arab conquests completely rubbed out Greco-Roman civilization in the East. In the West the germanic tribes eventually picked up on Islam’s ideas of holy war and central religious theocracy, neither of which was a part of early Christianity.
@ sasquatch:
You are reading far too much in terms of Church influence during the “Dark Ages”.
The reason they are called Dark Ages is because the germanic tribes like the Huns managed to almost sack Rome until they were bought off. Secondly, the Vandals had free reign through most of North Africa, where St. Augustine was starved and sacked in Hippo 430 AD.
Meanwhile, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths were running rampant through modern day Spain and Italy through to 553AD.
The Augustinian and Benedictine monastic traditions were the ones trying to preserve learning during this period, hardly the ones trying to sack the cities.
This was closely followed by the muslim invasions and their decisive defeat at the Battle of Tours with Charles ‘the Hammer’ Martel. It was after the battle 732AD which allowed St. Boniface with the relative peace to attend to the germanic tribes.
This period was no where near the kind of Church dominance suggested, which may have been more characteristic some 800-900 years later.
Christians of the time were somewhat preoccupied with not getting their throats slit…
As for the Gnostics see Elaine Pagels the “Gnostic Gospels” which basically verifies the Church take on the Gnostic assertion of ‘special knowledge’ required.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group “True North”
Mad Mike
Yup. As Mark Steyn avers in After America. The last 60 years pales in comparison to the first years of the late 19th century till the early 60s. From steam trains to private cars. Balloons to Jet air traffic. A landing on the moon, to the exploration of most of the land surface of earth. Penicillin to the Polio vaccine. Heart surgery to electronics it excelled in inventiveness
What has the last 60 years given us?
Luddite environmentalism. Suppression of invention, by regulation. Corporate welfare monopolies. That are static. Drug companies that don’t strive for excellence but the status quo.
A medical stew that rivals medieval proportions in the name of equability. Getting less effect by the year. A space program demolished. Even sci fi is dying as a medium.
Progress used to mean going for ever greater means of controlling our growth. Now it means stifling any innovation.
The excitement of discovery has left us for the drudgery of materialism without advancement.
Nobility itself has become a curse.
Only Computers which where known even in the 19th (Difference engines) century have improved with our phones by the satellites put up in the 60s. Even our cars have not improved much for almost a century.
Where are our colossus’s, like Tesla, Ford,Fermi,Oppenheimer, Dysons, Clark,an Einstein? With a whole host of visionaries, scientists plus scholars?
I’m afraid our Periclean age has passed us by. They are rare these epochs filled with genius. It was bound to die. We can hope perhaps for a Silver age or bronze. The gas unfortunately for this eon, has run out.
This was supposed to be the age of the Jetsons. It becoming more the era of the Flintstones. Where in total regression.
faint heats with little hope & no rising dawn to excite the mind.
When you get away from the Eurocentric viewpoint, the argument against Islam being a civilizing factor becomes even weaker. According to Indian historians, the genocide that took place in India would make most others look like child’s play in comparison. Look at a map and explain Indonesia being the world’s largest Islamic country and having no history prior to the Muslim conquest. It’s possible to learn about what occured in India. Indonesian history has been erased. The difference being that Hindus put up a fight while Buddhists quietly disappeared into the umma.
I look forward to reading this book.
It’s indeed an interesting thesis, but fundamentally it’s rubbish. The collapse of a civilization as widespread and complex as that of the Greco-Roman is far too complex to be attributed to any one single factor. Far more important factors were several very large plague outbreaks during the period, substantial economic change through shifting trade routes, changes in land ownership, obsolete technology, bureaucratic ossification, and religious schism within the eastern Christian church.
Probably the single most important factor was the 5th Crusade, which Scott completely ignores. His main thesis is contradicted by the fact that militarily, politically, economically the Eastern Roman Empire was stronger early in the 11th Century than it was at the end of the 6th Century.
He finds it odd that there are no archaeological remains from the 6th-9th C. First, he’s not looking in the right place. There are enormous works in the ERE, mostly in the form of fortifications, harbour construction and roads. In the former Western Roman Empire there’s nothing. Typical was London. It went from being a large city of about 50,000 in the late 4th C to being completely abandoned and depopulated in the early 7th C. The same pattern was replicated all over western Europe, not because of the Arabs but because of the waves ofGermanic invaders. Rome lost about two-thirds of its population in the wars in Italy in the 6th C.
In short, Scott is trying to shoehorn his theory into place where few of the physical facts on the ground support it and most contradict it. He might understand this if he paid more attention to military and economic factors and events.
Classic Marxist historic revisionism done for a political purpose.
Have the left realized they are in bed with sheiking bloodlusting throwback maniacs and the Islamist genetic record of blood letting needs a little historic “house cleaning”
cgh, in your opinion, is there a more comprehensive book than the above that attempts to answer the question: What ended Roman civilization and brought about the Dark Ages?”
Ken, comprehensive? That’s a very good question. Short answer is no.
There are a number of works that illustrate various aspects of the problem. Gibbon was right in one sense. Christianity was a major contrbuting factor for two reasons: 1. it destroyed the basis of Roman civic moral authority; and 2. it created very large religious wars and internal conflicts which were to divide the Empire for the following millenium. This was the key reason why Egypt and Africa were lost in the 7th C. They were mostly Iconoclast, whereas the rest was largely Orthodox. The repression of Iconoclasm under Justinian and Heraclius was so severe that even Arab conquest seemed a better alternative.
But Gibbon overstates it in my judgment. There are many other factors just as important. One of the largest was shifting trade pattersn. The rise of Venice and Genoa in the 12th C destroyed Constantinople’s commercial dominance in the Mediterranean. It no longer controlled the carriage trade between Europe, the Middle East and east Asia.
Shifting land ownership patterns were critical as well. Rome and the later ERE were both highly dependent upon small free farmers as the source of recruits for their large professional standing imperial armies. However, remorselessly they disappeared, being unable to compete with large slave-operated plantations. In short, the aristocracy squeezed out the free peasantry. By Augustus’s time in the 1st C AD, most Roman army recruits were coming from veteran colonies in southern France, Spain and northern Greece. By the end of the 11th Century, for the same reason, the ERE was mostly relying on hired mercenaries, lots of Germans, ex-Vikings, even a load of Anglo Saxon exiles after 1066.
You can support a nation based on mercenaries, but only if you pay them, and that’s where the loss of commercial power becomes even more important.
As to plagues, there were several of them. A huge one swept through the ERE in the early 6th C in the wake of Justinian’s reconquest of Africa and Italy. It was a disaster, killing more than 20% of the total population. There were others later including a rather bad one in the 11th C, but nothing to match the disaster in the 6th.
Scott mentions the Roman-Persian war late in the 6th C, but greatly understates it. It went on for more than 30 years and was incredibly destructive in both property and lives to both sides. The total fatalities and general devastation were greatly in excess of anything the ancient world had known since the Gothic invasion of 250 AD, and that was more highly localized than the 6th C events. Essentially both Empires were utterly drained. The Arabs, which formerly had been casually swatted by both sides when they became a nuisance, found little more than a howling wasteland to oppose them.
The critical and final disaster for the ERE was the 1204 sack of Constantinople by the 5th Crusade. The ERE was split into three small quarreling principalities. One of them eventually conquered the others and retook Constantinople by about 1240 or so, but the Empire had been completely gutted in wealth and population. The only reason why the conquest by the Turks would wait another two centuries is because they had been devastated by two Mongol invasions during that century.
All of these things I’ve picked up through many years of reading a host of things from large histories to detailed scholarly monographs to military texts. There is nothing I’ve encountered which has effectively and comprehensively put it all together.
One other last point to mention. Individuals really do matter in history, contrary to scholarly thinking over the past 40 years. The ERE had an utterly incompetent series of rulers, mostly female by the way, through the latter half of the 11th C. Their mismanagement directly led to the conquest of Asia Minor by the Turks in 1071. The Comneni were able to put much of it back together, but it was temporary. The Roman Empire’s strength was always that defeats on the battlefield were always overcome by strong government and a unified population.
This was largely destroyed by internal struggles over imperial succession, increased impoverishment of the lower classes, destruction of the free peasantry from economic causes, religious dissent, and failure to compete economically with the rising commercial and trading strength of the western Europeans.
I’ve dealt here mostly with the ERE. The fall of the western empire 1000 years before was from the same causes. Internal rot, corruption of the governing processes, economic collapse through plague and warfare, religious schisms and a dwindling rural free population were all the contributing causes.
Just to give a simple illustration. Roman cities were sufficiently large that they needed remote water supplies, acqueducts. Most of these were destroyed by the various barbarian invasions. Virtually overnight, a city becomes uninhabitable for much of the population. So they die, move away or are enslaved.
Well I clicked on the link and bought the book,and another as a little thank you to Kate for this blog.
I will opine later, after having read it.
My goodness.
“Part of the difficulty, according to Spengler, is that both European and Islamic civilizations are going bust simultaneously.”
http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/01/25/the-new-normal/#more-20142
Spengler here:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/ML13Dj05.html
Thanks cgh, that was a great summary of all the factors affecting this period and no doubt also led to the rise and fall of other empires. It is unfortunate that no one has tackled the topic in all the factors in one publication.
Climate changes, plagues, trade pattern changes and the other moral, economic, military and social factors you mention, I believe there have always been a multitude of factors in the rise and fall of empires in the past. It is never one factor.
An example of some of some of these factors led to the birth of the Hanseatic League and ultimately to its slow decline. Even today there are vestiges remaining. Some could say that the EU is a successor in some ways.
The Mongol invasions of western Europe were not stopped by feats of arms and could be somewhat of an exception, but the simple reason of a leadership succession after Genghis Khan’s death. The Mongols army left for home practically overnight.
I have Gibbons and I expect that this book might possibly be a good addition to my library if for no other reason than to get a different even if narrower perspective.
We ignore these factors at our peril. The US ceding economic dominance to China could be a contemporary factor.
cgh
As to plagues, there were several of them. A huge one swept through the ERE in the early 6th C in the wake of Justinian’s reconquest of Africa and Italy. It was a disaster, killing more than 20% of the total population. There were others later including a rather bad one in the 11th C, but nothing to match the disaster in the 6th.
Your correct but I think that Justinian’s mad plan to reunify the Empire, both East & West . By military adventures by Belisarius ( perhaps one of the greatest generals ever) destroyed Southern Italy to the point its still effected to this day.
Your correct also about the ERE recruiting Vikings & others to fight. It was one of the reasons they invaded Northern Europe & caused untold havoc, till the rise of the Normans. Arabs did destabilize Europe as well, but with help from slavers, but population decline had a lot more to do with it. I don’t agree Christianity played that big a role. If it has why would Constantine’s successor make it the official religion of the Roman empire? Doing that just made Christianity corrupt, by opportunists joining the Church. If you read the NT, it explains quite well that Christians where to pray & follow the government leaders unless it meant denouncing Messiah. Christians till that point had only house churches or meet in catacombs.
There is evidence also from Bede’s writings a deadly bromide hit England around his time. Killing a huge swath of the English population. It may have been an arsenic laced meteor from the description. This laid open the Northern reaches to Saxon attacks.
Frankly from my point of view it was a lot of Causes just like today.
Ah yes, many complexities!
From the perspective of the Eastern Empire, the Roman Empire did not end, until it was overrun in 1453 by Mehmet II and his Turks (we’ll ignore the little unpleasantness with the Franks and the Venetians in 1204). As for Muslim thinking, it was anything but static – very open in the first few centuries, with the first Abbasid Caliphs actively encouraging Greek philosophy; but then closing off, until after al Ghazali it reached the rigidity which characterises it today. I am drawing on “The Closing of the Muslim Mind”, by Robert Reilly, principally, but also on “The Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition”.
Hmmm – I should have read cgh’s posting more carefuly before posting myself. Apologies to all.
One of my main criticisms of Gibbon is that his research was impaired by the age he lived in.
The recent CO2 AGW hoax has had one major benefit…more attention is given to climate.
IMHO the major factor in the decline of the Western roman Empire was the end of the ROMAN WARMING PERIOD. This had 2 results:
1)crop failures in the WRE, crippling the WRE economically.
2) the cold instigated a mass migration from the central Asian plains. These were the invaders seeking greener pastures or simply to escape the pressure of those behind them.
The cooler climate had another effect….the various plagues had a greater effect on a population already weakened by malnutrition.
The effects of the central Roman Church were cumulative during the dark ages….the well hidden, secular religious struggles of the DARK AGES transformed the non-entity Roman bishopric to a powerful, feudal, transnational institution which wielded much secular power. This process was aided by Charlemagne who was non-the-less not enthusiastic about the Roman Church’s new influence…it has been written that had he known, he would have skipped Easter Mass to avoid giving the Pope the position of crowning him HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR…800AD.
Nature abhors a vacuum….the ABASIDs exploited the vacuum left by the weakened Persians and Byzantines. The Ottomans exploited the weakness of the ABASIDs.
The VIKINGs exploited the political vacuum of Northern Europe.
Climate was the factor in the overpopulation that spurred the expansion of the Vikings and the Mongols…..and the following cooling spelled their decline.
Climate was a big factor in the collapse of the various Mongol Hordes….the Moguls of India were the survivors…likely because the LIA had a reduced effect on India.
I’ll never have the depth of understanding or knowledge of that period that those above possess.But what intrigued me about the info in the link was the application of past events to today.It brought up a few questions.
What if we are now at the pinnacle of civilization? Are we aproaching another’Dark Ages’ brought upon by oppressive and repressive gov’t control? Is the growth of islam to be accepted,encouraged,disabled,or is it even relevant? The same question can be applied to the enviromental movement,and to government.
Are we the best we can be? I don’t mean faster computers , cheaper energy,or even medical advances.I mean that we may have reached our goal but we don’t realize it.
Where do we go from here?
“But the Arabs had merely been go-betweens, preservers and transmitters of the heritage (i.e., of Classical Greek philosophy) up into Europe. They had little scientific originality or creativeness of their own. During the centuries when they were the sole keepers of the (Greek) treasure, they did little to put it to use. […]
“It is a curious fact that the Arabic-Judaic tenure of this vast body of knowledge which lasted two or three centuries, remained barren; whilst as soon as it was reincorporated into Latin civilization, it bore immediate and abundant fruit.”
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, Chapt. 3
Ken, if you want to do it extensively and systematically over a long time, Gibbon is the place to start. Two reasons: 1. he’s the first to look at the overall sweep of the Empire post-Caesar; 2. In writing his history he essentially invented large parts of the modern English language as embodied in scholarly writing. It’s slow going, very dense writing, so I took my time finishing it.
Regarding the Mongols, you’re absolutely right. There was nothing capable of stopping the Mongols in 1241. They conquered Europe’s largest and strongest nation, Poland, in just six months. The rest, Germany, France and Italy would have taken no more than another year or two. If Ogotai Khan hadn’t died, thank God for alcoholism, we’d be speaking Mongolian to this day, and like Russia have a long tradition of tyrranical government.
Revnant, also quite right. The Justinian reconquest was a disaster and ruined most of what was left of the Roman world in Africa and Italy. It bankrupted the Empire, spread plague like mad and left it in poor state to reist the Persians just 30 years later.
Just like baking bread, this recipe had many necessary ingredients.
Sasquatch, there are two things here. You’re quite right that climate played a large influence in crippling the Mongols, particularly in central Asia. However, the Mongols had a highly unstable political system. It may have worked for nomadic tribes but was utterly incapable of managing an empire. Every Mongol succession was settled by civil war among the hordes. They disintegrated on an organizational basis, whereas the crude European monarchies did not.
Wally, I think every generation has asked the question you asked here. Personally, I doubt that this is the be-all and end-all. Living is not about goals, it’s about the journey itself. Moroever, if nothing else, I’m reminded of Robert Heinlein’s adage; “One planet is too small a basket for all of humanity’s eggs.” There’s a big fascinating universe out there, and we haven’t even opened our front door.
cgh
I apologise for my thoughts, when I read Kens post I thought, here we go.
Having read some of the comments over the years I was expecting a view from the “typical” western european view point of military history. Hence my apology.
The following comments from all since confirm yet again that Kates site is definitely read by more than the knuckle dragging looneys of the “intellectual” left.
I’m not quite as well read as yourself, Ken and Revnant appear to be, but I hope I have a few more years in which to learn.
I base my thoughts on time spent in some “difficult” areas and reading done into the same places history and my thoughts that how often, much, we as a society at any given time tend to judge other societies by our own values and pre-disposed ideas.
My own thoughts are that the early Christians of the first century after Christ, not only spread Christianity rapidly throughout the Jewish Diasopa and also thoughtout the then known world as the Romans had brought new levels of communication and travel. Being that much closer to the events they would still be recalling the message of Christianity as retold from first and second hand accounts and before the corruption of the word started to manifest itself into the main stream. (A bit like imagine trying to deny the holocaust in the C20th,) I think therefore the ‘new’ religion would have been much more what commentators would today call extreme. Its great message of hope, peace and submission would indeed leave many to die as martyrs in the true original sense of the word. This coupled with the moral collapse within the remaining pagan Roman empire left the main land mass of the ERE open to a new blood thirsty nihilistic creed its only opponents laying down and surrendered their heads to the glory of a greater God. And die they assuredly did because allowing them to live would have given them mortal supremacy, those that were of a weaker or unsure faith or nature submitted to the new order and eventually succumbed a few generations on becoming assimilated.
Meanwhile what many over look is the huge flight of humanity up and away, either stay and be killed or flee up and over the Caucus, this push of people and I suspect it was a huge amount of peoples over what would turn out to be a long period of time, both displaced and the displaced resulted in a domino effect that saw its effect ripple throughout out Central and northern europe as a direct result of the push up through what we now know as the area of the Slavic peoples, in turn pushing those ingenious peoples further west, that in itself leading to inter ethnic conflicts.
Of course as many not just here have said, nothing is that simple, throw in some natural vagaries of weather the decline in society and speed of what would have been pandemics and the lost of some bread basket regions as the HRE collapsed and the ensuing chaos can be nicely transposed into the modern day.
Surely only one of our weaknesses is that the propensity to want to believe that nothing changes or that changes happen incrementally slow.
As we all, I think here know the lack of understanding and learning from history is going to condemn another few generations yet.
And yes its a book I’m looking forward to reading.
wallyj, as cgh and sasquatch say and say it well, it is never one thing that brings a downfall and quite often the more important factors that lead to a downfall or a major shift are not even that apparent and require study to bring to light.
For example, my ancestors left the Gdansk area for Imperial Russia in 1789. Thousands of other middle European families from the Baltic to the Balkans also left for the free lands and generous terms given by Tsarina Catherine II. Why did they leave a comfortable, for the times, region pioneer in wild lands only recently conquered from Tatars? Some ancestors of these immigrants claim religious persecution, but this is not true or if it was, it was minor. They left because of a major shift in economics. The individual tradesman was being displaced by the onset of the industrial age. By the late 1700s it was almost impossible for the mom and pop spinning wheel maker to compete.
I know it is off topic, but the last sentence in my last comment may give a clue as to where events might go. Future historians will know when the turn came.
cgh, thank you. I have Gibbons, but it has been over forty years since I read it. I should probably read it again, as I suspect that there may some factors he touches on that may be relevant today.
I was hoping that you might be aware of some works of a similar stature and are more comprehensive.
Forgive my error in the 6:23 comment. SB a “to” between region and pioneer.
I am amazed at the depth of knowledge displayed in these comments. I have learned a lot, and there is not a lot I could add other than personal observations. A decade ago I spent a two week honeymoon in Paris with my new wife and spent most of the time wandering around art galleries and museums. What struck me was the fact that art and technology did not get back to the classical Greek and Roman level until the Renaissance. This is clearly visible when examining artefacts from that time. At the time I recall thinking it was at least partly a result of plagues. You can’t loose 20 or more percent of your population without total economic and social collapse. In an era when skills and knowledge were passed down through the generations, having a large percentage of your population die suddenly will be catastrophic.
Thanks for the link to the review Kate. A very interesting approach to the causes of the Dark Ages.
I think though that rather than try to decouple the climate collapse idea from the Arab invasions of the Middle East and North Africa, it migh be more fruitful to look at the two ideas together – as in the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization was a result of the climate deep freeze, and the Arabs took advantage of the collapse in their conquests.
DSV, Interesting comments. But here’s the thing. My analysis looks only at the political impact of Christianity, not the content of its message. In the Roman world, its political impact was enormous, for this reason.
Rome had hundreds of religions within the Empire, most of them practiced by various minority and ethnic groups within the City itself. The Imperial government was tolerant of all this. The Empire didn’t care what gods you worshipped as long as you obeyed the laws and paid your taxes.
But Christianity was different. Unlike the pagans, Christianity insisted that it was the only true religion worshipping the only true god. The political consequence of this was the insistence that all of the pagan beliefs and creeds be stamped out. This meant that for the first time ever in Rome’s history religious conflict was introduced within the Empire.
This is Gibbons’ main thesis, and he’s right. Certainly the Roman sources at the time largely show this. Is it the single dominant factor as Gibbons suggests? Probably not. But what it did was reinforce racial, ethnic and national divisions which already existed within the Empire.
So why did Constantine do it? Break the traditional pattern of Imperial government ecumenicalism? Again the contemporary sources largely agree. Constantine in the 330s was one of a number of military leaders in contention for ruling the Empire. His leading opponent, Licinius, had a large Christian population within his territory, mostly Asia and Palestine. It was a way to disaffect the locals from Licinius, and it was successful.
In short, making Christianity the state religion of the Empire was a ruthless but effective political ploy by a would-be Emperor to seize power. It’s worth noting that Constantine himself never converted until his deathbed. Whatever he was, he was NOT a true believer.
But his successors would suffer the consequences of Christianity as a state religion. As the religion schismed within itself,again largely along geographic, social and ethnic lines, so too did the Empire, and it was the end of the Diocletian imperial governing system. Only one region was ethnically united enough and economically strong enough to survive the next two centuries, and that was what we now call the Byzantine or East Roman Empire.
Doug, climate change was a part of it, but only a part. A strong Roman Empire of two centuries earlier under the Antonines would certainly have weathered these evets. They overcame equally traumatic events in the 2nd and 3rd C. But 200-300 years later, Rome just wasn’t what it used to be.
Minuteman, that’s a very acute observation. And there’s a good reason for it. In one of my earlier posts here, I noted that the cities in Western Europe were largely destroyed by the barbarian invasions, mostly as a result of things like infrastructure collapse.
During the height of the Empire, literacy in western Europe was something between 5-10 per cent of the total population. During the Dark Ages literacy fell to about 1 person per 100,000. If basic literacy was lost, then so too were all of the artisanal skills which require an urban environment.
And in some areas the decline continued throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. By the 16th Century, for example, Rome, a city which housed 3 million people during the Empire, had shrunk to a population of less than 50,000. London vanished entirely for nearly 500 years. Some cities particularly in Spain and southern France vanished permanently.
Why would I buy a book that does not claim to be the preeminent POV ? You read it and are instantly dumber than if you didn’t read it!
I did buy the Book. The question was a Quest of mine about 25 years ago after visiting Bath in England.. The whole Irish Monk, RCC, Etc.
I guess I will do it all again and be even dumber.
cgh Thank you
And I took your point, I was thinking more on my 10 pen’th having posted it and as always its a question in any correspondence of how much to write and what to not add. I based most of my observations on a combination of things and one of the strong influences here was personal observations.
Being a citizen/resident of the UK with a rather large footprint I have increasingly noticed with age a phenomenon that seemed to confirmed my view. It is I guess antidotal but it is unescapable.
Returning to the UK as I do after time away it becomes increasingly obvious the huge change taking/taken place in society and its the same change as I see in Denmark and saw in the Nederlands 10/20 years earlier whilst conversely society in other countries to the periphery become enriched, NZ, Aus and I guess we can add Canada though I don’t have any personal antidotal evidence for Canada.
What I’m talking about is that the transit from the UK, Nederlands and much of “Protestant” northern Europe of what we I guess we could call “believing” christians, those that actually live their lives according to their belief has now trickled to nothing. The reason being if you want to find them its easy they don’t live there anymore they live in their new adopted countries.
As I have been told many times by those “expats” they have moved to places where they are not hounded, ridiculed and have to hide their beliefs, places they don’t fear quite as much the indoctrination of their children and so many more reasons.
Well what are they taking with them, its the same as the flight of the Jews, it takes a culture of hard work and honest toil, it takes self reliance, industry and enterprise, and it takes learning.
This is also how civilisations eventually collapse, and I conclude that has been the same over the millennium, try to get anything done in the UK, in Europe, or laughingly in the Middle or Near East, or in Asia Minor, if it happens its not coming from the indigenous population.
All you are left with is what is now left in Western Europe, a sick malaise and the rampant rise of Islam through conversion, and dhimmification on an exponential curve.
As many have commented in the past a moral vacuum.
Great topic with good contributions.
“From the perspective of the Eastern Empire, the Roman Empire did not end, until it was overrun in 1453 by Mehmet II and his Turks” Correct. May 29, 1453 to be exact.
If you want a perspective somewhat different than the Gibbon take, National Geographic has an excellent article about the Eastern Empire in its December 1983 edition. Here’s a few words: “Eastern star over Europe’s Dark Ages the Byzantine civilization, centered on Constantinople burned bright, preserving the heritage of Greece and Rome and spreading Christianity across a vast realm”.
It was indeed a star, Nold. At a time when in the Middle Ages the largest European cities had no more than about 50,000 population, Constantinople had over 3/4 of a million.
There are many different views on the ERE. Gibbon is just the place to start. And I agree with you about his conclusion as well. The ERE was far more than just a superstitious afterthought that Gibbon makes it. More than anything else, it was for many centuries the invincible obstacle that neither Muslims from the Middle East or barbarians out of Ukraine and central Asia could surpass.
DSV, I agree with you; Europe has indeed lost its way. I think we both agree that it’s not because Muslim immigrants have taken it so much as decades of socialism and a host of other “progressive” policies have ruined it. Like ancient Rome, it’s crashing because of its own policy failures.
Roman history is vitally important to me. Rome invented all of the legal, constitutional and economic structures that we use today. It wsa the first military system to have a professional national standing army. Representative republic was invented by Rome, much more stable than the direct democracy of the Greeks. Rome invented banking systems, credit systems, the concept of the corporation. It largely invented public infrastructure as a state undertaking, not just the initiative of any particular king’s whim. It invented the legal structure of the court, with prosecution, defence, presumption of innocence, standards for evidence, the process of appeal.
Its public infrastructure was unmatched by any European state until at least the late 18th century, with huge water supply and sewage systems, organized fire protection, government standards for road construction and maintenance.
It is reasonable to say that never until perhaps the late 18th, early 19th centuries was the life of the average citizen as prosperous as the standard of living that Rome achieved. Certainly average nutrition and life expectancy greatly exceeded that of Europe until about 200 years ago.
And because its basic government and legal structures are so familiar to us, what happened to Rome matters, a lot. Because their eventual collapse can show us how our system can collapse.
cgh, I share your interest in history. The examples you have provided should give pause to those who think the destruction of our modern world is no big deal because something else will replace it. All sorts of things are lost when the barbarian destroys the center. Another example of something that was lost for a long time? The Romans were expert at building with concrete and brick and try as they might builders were unable to duplicate Roman techniques until the late 19th century.