History Note:
The Middle Ages
11 February 2015
The Middle Ages. It’s curious, isn’t it, that we go on bundling the centuries between the Fall of Rome and the Renaissance (the rebirth of Rome) as “the Middle Ages,” as though that in-betweenness were a of characteristic of the period, which of course it can’t have been. We can see it in retrospect, but it was unimaginable to people alive in those days. And, really, is “middle” the best that we can say of it? (Not that I am about to suggest an alternative.)
Judeo-Christian/Greek. The Middle Ages witnessed the development of an intellectual orthodoxy — something new under the sun. There was, of course, a religious orthodoxy, also developing, but by the Thirteenth Century, this religious orthodoxy — a matter of liturgical observances, monastic regularities, relations between the clergy and secular leaders, and so on — was permeated by the intellectual abstraction that we call philosophy. The flower of this permeation was the theology of Thomas Aquinas, still largely the orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic Church. It was only partially religious, or rooted in Scripture. Structurally, it was broadly Greek, reflecting the absorption of the various Greek philosophies of Antiquity. But while Scripture was settled, the Greek element was not. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Greek contribution was Platonic in nature, because neo-Platonism was at the time a vital alternative to Christianity as a way of looking at the world. But, a few centuries before Aquinas, the very different worldview of Aristotle took hold of the Western imagination. Where Platonism counseled withdrawal from a corrupt and secondary world of the senses, Aristotelianism embraced experience, and it fanned such intellectual enthusiasm that Thomas was able to place the Jewish God Jahweh as the Prime Mover of the universe, outside but encompassing Creation, and to analyze Christ’s sacrifice in terms of Aristotelian categories.
The union of the Judeo-Christian religious and spiritual tradition with the motley Greek philosophical tradition was never stable, and it never had the consent of both families, as it were. Plenty of religious thinkers dismissed Thomas’s theories as presumptuous, and his books were even burned as such. On the Greek side, opposition took the form of needling speculations on ever-less meaningful topics. (This was when angels dancing on pins began to be counted.) Neither tradition altered the other in any essential way. But, for a moment at least, the pursuit of Judeo-Christian/Greek intellectual orthodoxy (now deep-frozen as unalterable Catholic dogma) was what young people call hot. And it cooled not to ashes but to iron.
Europe and Geography. At the Fall of Rome, Europe was a frontier, much of it unsettled by Christians. A thousand years later, it was a hive of nation states and the center of burgeoning empires. If there is a good book out there about this transformation, I’d like to see it. I’m familiar with many of the pieces, but it would be enlightening to see a historian focus on a general arrangement. The work of Norbert Elias comes to mind, but Elias was a sociologist, not a historian. He was interested in cases, whereas I’m interested in flow.
I’d also like to see a history of Europe that muted the sovereign boundaries and highlighted instead the relationships among great cities, and between cities and what Jane Jacobs called their hinterlands. These cities paid for and exploited sovereign defense systems; their taxes supported royal militaries, which in turn increasingly supported the interests of urban populations. However, after the French Revolution, which effectively substituted Paris for the head of state, sovereignties were refitted with mechanisms favoring the influence of the hinterland: almost every American state capital is, by design, a hick town. Reaction is always anti-urban and anti-cosmopolitan.
Whereas imperial expansion was usually violent, sovereign expansion quite often depended on dynastic consolidation via marriage. The disparate peoples brought together by a marriage were allowed to think that they had not been conquered. Patterns of consolidation (and dissolution) are fascinatingly varied. There are three models: the Hapsburg, the French, and the Italian. The Italian model is of course one of dysfunction: with the celibate pope shut out of marriage at the center of Italian affairs, the lesser powers of the peninsula (among which the bizarre example of Venice ought not to be counted) were thrown back on factions and fighting.
The French model was always centered on a geographical kernel, first the Ile-de-France and later the regions surrounding it (Touraine, Champagne, &c). Throughout the later Middle Ages, much of France was in English or Burgundian hands. The English experience taught a lesson that no one wanted to learn. Of the so-called “Atlantic Isles,” the only region that England was able to subdue was the nearest, Wales. Scotland lay too far from the settled parts of England for conquest and occupation; it eventually came to England by the marriage route. England’s rule of Ireland has never not been contentious. Similarly, English possessions in France, also separated by the sea, required constant military maintenance.
In fact, the English is an early example of the Hapsburg model of dynastic expansion. As emperors in Vienna and kings in Madrid were to discover bitterly, the English came into their French possessions by dynastic, relatively peaceful means but could not hold onto them, because geography intervened, just as it did to prevent the military conquest (once and for all) of Scotland and Ireland. The Burgundian expansion, which would be so important to the Hapsburgs, was essentially an example of the French model. It expanded by marriage and inheritance — and no small measure of guile. Unlike France, however, Burgundy — as the congeries of provinces running from the banks of the Saône to the Frisian islands is known to students of the Late Middle Ages — lacked a metropolitan center, and with it, a territorial focus. Burgundy was an early example of international activity, for it united territories within the sovereignties of France and of the Holy Roman Empire. (Burgundy was indeed the ghost of the vanished third realm contemplated by Charlemagne’s heirs, Lotharingia.) When Charles the Rash died without male issue in 1477, Louis XI of France and Maximilian of Hapsburg swiftly divided his parcels between themselves, and “Burgundy” was no more.
How ironic, then, that the richest part of this old Burgundy — Holland — proved to lie beyond the powers of both Hapsburg branches. When it finally broke free of Spanish tyranny, it did so as a Republic; but it promptly spawned a dynasty, the one that rules today’s kingdom. Dynastic or any other kind of expansion is not longer to be contemplated by the nations of Europe.
France today is pretty much the France of Louis XVI. Officially, it sees itself as a Platonic perfection: L’Hexagone. It is divided into départements and régions of roughly the same geographical size, and, in theory, all of these units are equal. In fact, of course, most of them are hinterlands. Without having studied the matter, I venture to guess that an unusually high percentage of educated French citizens live in metropolitan areas, with a stratospheric concentration in Paris. To what extent is the stability of geographical France maintained — or contested — by the flow of resources (such as educated citizens) from the hinterlands to the cities and back?
Geography may also explain the absence from our modern maps of a sovereignty encompassing what used to be the County of Toulouse, in the South of France, and Catalonia, still part of Spain. As vibrant as cultural connections between these two regions were in the Middle Ages, they remained divided, rather bluntly, by the Pyrenees.
Medieval Empires. A promissory note: I am out of time for today. I shall say only that there were three empires in medieval Europe. The first was the Holy Roman Empire, established by Charlemagne and Leo III in 800. The second and third were rough contemporaries: the kingdoms of the Holy Land during the Mediterranean crusades, and the territories of the Teutonic Knights around the Baltic. Geography may be said to have determined the life span of each; nothing is left of any of them today — except bad memories.