Popular conceptions of World History can be rightly accused following something of a formula.
And among slavish gossip circles about the sex lives of famous monarchs is an insistence that
the Medieval period is either dumb and boring or solely interesting by virtue of how abysmal
it was. Thus follows the utter grimefest of the Fantasy genre. But I can’t quite blame
popular media for working off of a shared set of assumptions which in turn endlessly reinforce
themselves, nor is it fair to call this a recent trend: as Petrarch called post-Roman history The
Dark Ages in the 1330s, and Giorgio Vasari first coined the term Rinascita in 1550. So by their
hot-takes combined, this concept of “Rome Good, 15th-Century-Italy Good, everything else Trash”
seemed to stick, leaving the insultingly-titled Dark Ages as the elevator music between the
long-dead glories of the Classical World and the hot new Renaissance. And at that point,
why hold back? Just call it the DORK Ages to show us how you really feel. And far be it from
ME to lecture anyone for liking the classics, but the character-assassination of Medieval
history goes too far when its most defining traits are Darkness, murder, sex, and religious
corruption — sometimes in that order.
And I’d be willing to bet that, at least in the English-Speaking world,
this common image results from our suspiciously narrow focus on a very small slice of geography:
namely, whatever is in a 500-mile radius of London. That nets us The Isles,
France, Germany, and the gentle implication of Scandinavia. This shouldn’t be too surprising,
we tend to know our own histories best, but it’s a little odd that this tunnel vision
only applies from 500 to 1500 AD. And that has some pretty goofy consequences, like people
rightly praising the unique setting and folkloric inspirations behind The Witcher when that’s just
Fantasy-Poland. My guys, Poland is great, but if Poland counts for exotic then we need to
re-evaluate some stuff.
Okay but what am I on about here? Essentially, what we ignore and what we choose to glamorize
in the Medieval period are a disservice to history and to ourselves. Now, there’s a lot
of ground to cover and a lot I’m sadly going to skip, but in attempting to take a far-reaching
and diverse survey of the Middle Ages in order to show how they weren’t that Dark at all,
let’s do some history.
First off, the most glaring counter-point to the myth of medieval squalor is China. For
eight centuries out of the millennium it operated a unified imperial dynasty, which was a new record
for stability and peace. And while the state was prosperous and the cities were dazzlingly ornate,
the real accomplishment was in their cultural advancements. During the Tang Dynasty, China’s
three main religions of Taoism Confucianism and Buddhism began to enmesh within each other,
resulting not just in developments like the Taoism-inspired Zen Buddhism, but combining into
a complex mythological canvas, upon which stories like Journey To The West would later be told. This
innovation was followed by a tune-up for the governing bureaucracy during the Song Dynasty,
as well as a bunch of cool inventions like movable-type printing and paper money.
And speaking of money, trade relations with the outside world picked up substantially after the
turn of the millennium, especially in the Yuan period. This was actually a Mongolian dynasty
who conquered China in the 1200s, and in the following century was famously recounted by
Marco Polo as prosperous beyond imagination. The rapid expansion of the Mongol empire revived the
ancient silk road, spreading trade and culture across central Asia and over to the Muslim World.
Now, unlike China’s continuity and evolution,
the Abrahamic religion of Islam was remarkably new, and a distinct civilization had formed around
it impressively quickly. In just a few centuries after Holy revelations in early 600s Arabia set
things in motion, the Muslim faith filled the map from the Mediterranean all the way to the Indus
Valley, unifying diverse people and disparate states in one pervading culture. And from the mid
700s onward, that culture was in its Golden Age, where Faith found an eager ally in Scholarship.
Muslims living among the vibrantly-multiethnic cities of Al-Andalus or along the ancient
valleys of the Nile were brushing shoulders with some of the sharpest minds of the day,
but nothing compared to the magnificent Abbasid capital of Baghdad, where the legendary House of
Wisdom catered to seemingly every art and field of study: from theology to science and math to music.
Fortunately for the Golden Age and everyone who prospered from it, there’s a real resilience in
a culture of many countries, as the Muslim world endured civil wars, Caliphates supplanting each
other, invaders in the Levant and Iberia, and even the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, but
remained prosperous, cosmopolitan, and studious for centuries to come. From its vantage across the
Mediterranean, Christendom had much to envy in the Islamic world, but a few enterprising states did
their best to narrow that gap.
So, I now cordially welcome you to the VENICE portion of the video. If you didn’t see this
coming, then HI welcome to the channel, hope ya like Domes. See, the Republic of Venice was a
small but powerful state that grew fabulously wealthy because of their rare eagerness to do
business with Muslim colleagues. All’s they had to do was shake some hands, sell some goods,
and then figure out what to build with their mountains of cash. And their government’s enviable
consistency ensured they stayed a fixture of Mediterranean trade for a millennium. But at home,
Venice kept firmly to their familiar Christian culture, unlike their southern neighbors in
Sicily. From the 1000s, Norman newcomers built a gorgeous society from the mix of Lombard, Latin,
Muslim, and Byzantine people in the south of Italy. The talents of this diverse cast
are still seen in Sicilian architecture, which celebrates the kinship of Islam, Catholicism,
and Byzantine Christianity. Fittingly, Sicily and Venice both could trace their roots to the still
very much alive Eastern Roman empire, ruled from the incomparable city of Constantinople since
the 300s AD. This part of the empire, called Byzantine by later historians, survived all
the turmoil that sank the West and continued the language, literature, and towering grandeur of the
classical world, but here under the banner of Christianity. Although most Europeans sneered
at Byzantine decadence, I maintain they were just jealous, nearby Slavic groups gladly threw in with
the Eastern church.
Constantinople can claim credit for a few key conversions to Christianity: winning over the
Bulgarians in 864, the Serbians in 870, and the vast Kyivan Rus in 988, bringing much of eastern
Europe into its religious, cultural, and political orbit. To Catholicism’s credit, they had converted
the incoming Franks and Germanic tribes several centuries back, and soon after got The Isles,
then Poland later on in 966, and finally the fearsome Scandinavian Vikings. But whereas
Byzantine Christianity had an empire at its back, this all was a lot for the Catholic Pope in Rome
to organize from a city that had become very small after the western Empire fell, so they got clever:
creating an international administration of clergy and monasteries that let the church
maintain religious authority across distant lands and kingdoms it didn’t directly control.
The other swerve was that, if Rome no longer had an empire of its own, why not just order one.
And at the turn of the 9th century, such was the thinking of Pope Leo III, who recognized that the
Frankish barbarians who arrived 4 centuries earlier had actually become quite competent
rulers, with a dominion recently expanded from Gaul now to Germania and into Italy itself.
And these Frankish kings of the Carolingian dynasty had long been allies of the Pope,
so in 800 he crowned Charlemagne, the biggest of Charles’es, as Emperor of the Romans. This
sets up a fascinating dynamic where the religious authority in Rome presides over a vast network of
monasteries across Europe while also having an entire political state at its service,
and this also benefits the Emperor, because the notion of Christendom as a cultural tie that binds
all Christian people and states is exceptionally fertile ground for an empire. Leo and Charlemagne
considered this a continuation of the Roman Empire, which, though cute, is fully untrue,
so while historical habits force us to call this the Holy Roman Empire, consider this instead as
Imperial Catholicism: a dominion spanning the state itself and the religious authority of
the Pope. Unfortunately for the Carolingians, the kingdom split between three sons in 840, sending
France and Germany on separate trajectories, but the idea of Christendom’s Empire was still so
potent that Pope John crowned King Otto of Germany as Roman Emperor in 962, creating
a state that would endure, evolve, and ultimately rule over central Europe for nearly a millennium.
This was not without friction, as Popes and Emperors spent centuries jockeying for authority
over the other (often with bloody outcomes), and political cohesion did not come easily.
Various bouts of royal weakness benefitted the many small states of Germany and northern Italy,
making the empire fertile ground for an array of functionally-independent city states.
Elsewhere in the Christian North, centralized
states were tricky to build, as Charlemagne’s Carolingian dynasty lost hold of France in
the face of internal strife and constant Viking raids, even resorting to giving one Viking lord
a duchy in Normandy in the hope he’d stop making a mess. After ascending to the French throne in 987,
it took 2 centuries for the Capetian dynasty to meaningfully control anything beyond Paris, so
“France” didn’t look like France until nearly 1600. As in Germany, local lords across the
kingdom tended to do as they pleased, but another confounding factor for France was, of course,
England. The Isles started their medieval era with migrations and missionaries from the mainland, and
had consolidated into two-dozen or so states by the 800s, just in time for the Vikings to arrive.
This was bad news for the gorgeous and richly ornamented monasteries in Britain and Ireland,
and two centuries of Anglo-Viking wars made kingdoms unstable, but it culminated in
England’s conquest by William of Normandy. This in turn kicked off a flurry of castle-building,
innovations towards parliamentary government, steady progress in conquering more of the Isles,
four long centuries of slapfighting with France, and the endlessly-dramatic War of
the Roses. British history would become somewhat of the model for how we see the medieval period,
thanks in no small part to the historical plays of Shakespeare: who characterized states by the
conflicts they faced and the great kings who fought them. In Northwest Europe,
this wasn’t strictly wrong, but it gives a very narrow perspective: glory for the kings,
toil for the rest.
As we zoom back out, we see the middle ages were brutal, wars were frequent, states were fragile,
life was harsh – but so too is every square inch of planet earth since the moment Bruce
the single-celled life-form first sprung into existence. That can all be true right alongside
the endless beauties of human civilization. We accept the Roman world as a disease-ridden
murderfest and a staggering accomplishment of culture, and once we see the medieval world the
same way, we unlock a tremendous wealth of history to explore. Because along with all that conflict
came four waves of massive cultural advancement: first Islamic Golden Age, then the Carolingian and
Ottonian renaissances following the start of their empires, and then the 12th Century Renaissance:
which brought on vernacular literature, gothic architecture, early rediscoveries
of classical culture, and the creation of European universities. The Medieval World began at the dawn
of Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic cultures, and transformed them into international civilizations,
developing beautiful traditions of artistry and literature that still uphold European and
Mediterranean societies today. All that to say The Dark Ages is a myth perpetuated by Big Renaissance
to sell you more paintings.
Thank you for watching. Organizing multiple continents over a thousand years into one
coherent script was certainly A Challenge, but I hope this video can give you an anchor-point
for further learning about the Medieval world. Most of the topics discussed here also have their
own entire videos, so check out the links in the description for more on those. And I’ll see you
in the next one.