Contesting the Middle Ages

Debates that are Changing our Narrative of Medieval History

John Aberth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317496090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Contesting the Middle Ages is a thorough exploration of recent arguments surrounding nine hotly debated topics: the decline and fall of Rome, the Viking invasions, the Crusades, the persecution of minorities, sexuality in the Middle Ages, women within medieval society, intellectual and environmental history, the Black Death, and, lastly, the waning of the Middle Ages.

The historiography of the Middle Ages, a term in itself controversial amongst medieval historians, has been continuously debated and rewritten for centuries. In each chapter, John Aberth sets out key historiographical debates in an engaging and informative way, encouraging students to consider the process of writing about history and prompting them to ask questions even of already thoroughly debated subjects, such as why the Roman Empire fell, or what significance the Black Death had both in the late Middle Ages and beyond.

Sparking discussion and inspiring examination of the past and its ongoing significance in modern life, Contesting the Middle Ages is essential reading for students of medieval history and historiography.

1
If a German Migrates into your Empire, do not be Alarmed

The decline and fall of Rome

It was a dark, cold night in March. I was stranded at the four corners intersection in the sleepy little town of East Warren, Vermont. I was locked out of my car, which was still running (don’t ask me why or how). I knocked at the only house on the corner, but no one answered. In my desperation, I decided to flag down the next car that came along, which happened to be some tourists from Massachusetts.

“Help me,” I said, “I’m an absent-minded history professor, and I’ve locked myself out of my car!”

“How do we know you’re a history professor?” they asked, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Test me on anything you like”.

“Explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire in five minutes!” A half hour later, I was back at the intersection, breaking into my car with the help of a professional locksmith from Waitsfield, where I had been dropped off by my new friends from Massachusetts.

The above is a true story that really happened to me, and I retell it on occasion to demonstrate the practical utility of the subject of history. “So history can actually save your life,” is the concluding punch-line of my story. But it also illustrates another truism: The enduring fascination that people have with the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. A large part of the reason for this fascination, I believe, is that it serves as a bellwether for our own, more modern empires.

Did Rome fall or was it transformed?

Attempts to explain the decline and fall of Rome are legion and ancient, to pardon a pun. The most famous remains the classic work by the English antiquarian, Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. Gibbon’s fame, however, rests entirely on his prose, for his explanation that Christianity sapped the martial spirit, vigor, and personnel of Rome is almost universally rejected these days by historians. Since Gibbon’s time, plenty of other contenders have stepped forward to answer this age-old question. Two and a half decades ago, a German scholar, Alexander Demandt, compiled no less than 210 explanations, arranged from A-Z, in his book, The Fall of Rome.¹ Some of the more silly, outrageous, or even offensive (at least to our modern sensibilities) of the reasons cited include: “abolition of gods,” “bolshevization,” “communism,” “decline of Nordic character,” “excessive freedom,” “female emancipation,” “gout,” “homosexuality,” “hyperthermia,” “impotence,” “Jewish influence,” “lack of male dignity,” “lead-poisoning,” “moral decline,” “negative selection,” “orientalization,” “prostitution,” “public baths,” “racial degeneration,” “socialism,” “tiredness of life,” “useless diet,” and “vulgarization”. Indeed, if I had attempted to reel off all 210 of these explanations to my saviors from Massachusetts, I very much doubt if I would be here today.

But in recent years, many historians have sidestepped altogether the question of when Rome fell and why by challenging whether Rome fell at all. Instead, most historians these days speak of a “transformation” or “slow transition” from classical to medieval sensibilities and generally avoid the terms “fall” or “decline,” which, if they use at all, they put into quotation marks to emphasize their reservations.² Therefore, the question nowadays is no longer why Rome declined and fell, but, did it in fact do so? This is obviously a fundamental rethinking of the very terms of the debate.³

Perhaps the first historian to question the decline and fall of the Roman Empire was the great Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, whose Mohammed and Charlemagne was published posthumously in 1935. In this seminal and summative book, Pirenne argued that the Germanic successor kingdoms set up after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in the late fifth century preserved much of Roman culture and institutions, so that there was a great deal of continuity extending down until at least the seventh century. Thereafter, however, the rise of Islam severed most of the Mediterranean world—including Spain, North Africa, Egypt, and Palestine—from its connections with the rest of the former Roman Empire to the north, so that by necessity the great Germanic ruler, Charlemagne (reigned 768–814), was forced to reconstitute the empire as an exclusively European state, confined by physical boundaries that hold true almost to this day, with a center of gravity that naturally shifted northward and westward to fall along France, Germany, and northern Italy, reaching its terminus in Rome. If Charlemagne had indeed given birth to Europe, then it was the founder of Islam, Muhammad, who had served as midwife: To quote perhaps the most famous phrase from Pirenne’s book, “without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable”.⁴ Pirenne also claimed that it was not until Charlemagne that the real break with Roman antiquity occurred and the Middle Ages truly began, with a genuine assimilation now emerging of Roman and Germanic cultures.

These days, Pirenne’s thesis has been challenged and replaced, largely owing to advances in archaeology. Much of this evidence seems to indicate that the rise and expansion of Islam beyond the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century was a symptom, rather than the cause, of the collapse of the Roman Empire, which was largely complete by the end of the sixth century.⁵ But an interesting variation on Pirenne’s thesis is that Islam, far from cutting off Europe from international trade, actually stimulated its revival (particularly in slaves) during the reign of Charlemagne, whose commerce with the Abbasid dynasty based in Baghdad was evidenced by the importation of silver and the issuance of a heavier, silver denarius or penny as the standard currency. Only with the decline of Charlemagne’s empire after his death in the ninth century do we see the real beginnings of economic stagnation in Europe and therefore the catalyst for an inward-looking, decentralized feudal-manorial system that heralded the dawn of the Middle Ages.⁶ Recent evidence for the ongoing demographic impact of the First Pandemic of plague between 541 and 750 (made possible by a continuing trade, especially in grain, which transferred infected rats and fleas) has tended to reinforce this view.⁷

Even though the Pirenne thesis no longer dominates academic debates, its argument for a long transformation, rather than the decline and fall, of ancient Rome into early medieval society has been taken up wholesale by the supplanting concept of “Late Antiquity,” which argues for the gradual evolution of Europe independent of the concurrent rise of Islam. This term was first introduced by early twentieth-century German historians as Spätantike, but the label was popularized in English since the 1970s by the Irish historian, Peter Brown. Brown was able to fashion Late Antiquity, generally defined as extending from c. 200 to c. 800, as its own distinct period by emphasizing the vitality of the early Christian Church.⁸ In the latest edition of his textbook, Brown emphasized “micro-Christendoms” and “symbolic goods” to make the point that “applied Christianity” at this time continued to thrive in spite of the fall of Rome as a center of empire and in spite of the economic collapse of its trade and industry.⁹ He also stressed the dynamic interplay between Christian institutions and the emerging “barbarian” kingdoms, as well as the fluid cultural and ecological integrity of the Mediterranean world, even in the midst of its political and economic fragmentation. All this was meant to counter Gibbon’s portrayal of late classical Rome as a decadent phase of history, or of the early medieval period as a “primitive” time or a “Dark Ages” of cultural decline and despair. It should be obvious by now that in Brown’s schema, religious, and cultural considerations were paramount and were accorded priority above all other factors, an approach that he owed ultimately to a French method of historical enquiry known as the Annales school of “cultural anthropology”.¹⁰ The acceptance of the Late Antiquity thesis, at least in academic circles, is indicated by the title given to a major research project funded by the European Science Foundation, “The Transformation of the Roman World”.¹¹

What this means is that typically in a history course today, students are taught that a range of long-term social, political, and economic problems were responsible for the empire being transformed into something that would have been unrecognizable in the time of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor (r. 31 B.C.–14 A.D.), or indeed even during Rome’s golden age of the Five Good Emperors (r. 96–180 A.D.). Therefore, Rome’s decline and fall is itself transformed into a gradual, lengthy process that took as long as two centuries to complete. It very much implies that the empire’s fragmentation into “successor kingdoms” ruled by “barbarian” or Germanic tribal chieftains was an inevitable outcome, something that no Roman could have done anything about. It turns the Germans who took over the empire into rather inoffensive occupiers who, instead of invading or sacking Rome (as they most assuredly did in 410 and 455), are now shown to have been invited in as part of an accommodation process that would produce military allies (foederati), who were badly needed as Rome began to suffer manpower shortages at this time. Instead of rampaging, pillaging, and plundering across the empire, Germans migrated, which is usually shown on maps complete with routes supposedly taken by each tribe, whether this be the Vandals (down into North Africa), Visigoths and Suevi (to Spain), Ostrogoths (Italy), Saxons (Britain), or Burgundians, Franks, and Alamanni (France, southern Germany, and Switzerland).

However, it must be emphasized that scholars these days argue that the German migrations and identities were far less coherent and chronologically hide-bound than these rather outdated maps, as well as modern myths of national formation, would suggest. Instead, tribes that poured across the borders of the Roman Empire such as the Goths, Franks, and the Alamanni, “were composed of groups speaking a variety of languages, following various customs, and identifying themselves with varying traditions”.¹² Moreover, such tribal identities inevitably changed over time, so that it makes no sense to speak as if “the Franks of 700 were exactly the same as the Franks of 350”.¹³ Those tribes that endured and were successful in setting up successor states in the fifth and sixth centuries, such as the Franks, assimilated much of Roman culture in terms of law, religion, and administration.

It is even argued that Germans did not actually take over Romans’ land when they appropriated various parts of the empire, but rather only their tax revenues, which Roman curiales, or upper-class denizens of the cities, no longer wanted to collect anyway.¹⁴ In addition to emphasizing continuity and gradual change, the modern version of the migration thesis is certainly a more politically correct way to portray Germans than as berserk-eyed, invariably destructive “barbarians”.

Historians are also attracted to Late Antiquity’s theme of transformation because, while it may not be the dawn yet of a fully-fledged Middle Ages, it does encourage tracing some typically medieval institutions, such as feudalism and manorialism, back into earlier centuries, when they first put down their roots. For example, the comitatus (meaning “company” or “armed group”) of Germanic warrior chiefs and their followers, such as were described by the Roman historian Tacitus in his Germania (written c. 98 A.D.), are here portrayed as leading eventually to the feudal bond between a lord and his vassal, particularly in terms of the loyalty and military service that was expected. The withdrawal of wealthy Roman senators and aristocrats to their manor houses and country estates, where they provided

Map 1.1 An often-reproduced map of the supposed migrations of the Germanic tribes, now considered too neat and pat to reflect reality

protection from both German marauder and Roman tax collector alike to the coloni (meaning “farmers” or “cultivators”) at the cost of their land and liberty, is seen as the precursor of serfdom or villeinage, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of maps
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 If a German migrates into your empire, do not be alarmed: The decline and fall of Rome
• 2 From the obscurantism of the Northmen, O Lord, deliver us!: The Viking invasions
• 3 God wills it! (or at least the Pope does): The crusades
• 4 I’m a Jewish, heretic, leper, but don’t hold that against me: Persecution of minorities
• 5 No sex please, we’re medieval: Sexuality in the Middle Ages
• 6 Hail Mary and Eve: Women in medieval society
• 7 The man who tore his eyes out over unity of form: Intellectual and environmental history
• 8 Ashes to ashes, we all fall down: The Black Death
• 9 Always look on the bright side of death: A waning of the Middle Ages?
• Conclusion
• Index