It does not help that Middle Ages cover about 1000 years and very different civilizations. This is a huge span of history. From someone who was alive in 1500, the age of Huns, Avars, Vikings and Pechenegs was more distant than first spaceflight.
But Early Middle Ages were pretty bad in a lot of Europe, there is no way around it. The combination of large scale attacks and primitive agricultural technology was deadly.
Last year I read an article by Czech archeologists who excavated two old burial grounds in Southern Moravia. One was dated approximately to 850-950 AD, the other between 1100-1150 AD. They were just a few miles away from each other. Both were peasants' cemeteries. But the average age of the buried adults grew by 11 years in the meantime. That is a big chunk of extra life, caused by "less war" and "more food".
> The combination of large scale attacks and primitive agricultural technology was deadly.
The thing is, this depends a lot on which side of the attack you are on! In Scandinavia, the early middle ages (called the Viking Age) was a golden age in terms of political power and influence and also a high point of art and culture.
In history there are always many sides, and often they are glossed over in the overarching narrative. For example the fall of Rome was clearly a cultural setback for Italy (which is of course why the narrative of The Renaissance originated there). But was it also a setback for the subjugates areas like France, England which now became independent?
Rome continued to prosper centered in Constantinople, but had a large setback when it was plundered by the crusaders and Venice, leading to the balance of power tipping back to the Italian states - hence the "rebirth".
Saying early middle ages was "bad" or "good" really depends on how you anchor the narrative. Same with the renaissance(s).
>But was it also a setback for the subjugates areas like France, England which now became independent?
Now England got to be attacked by a variety of other raiders. We actually don't know a huge amount about the early Medieval period in England. A lot of it comes from a handful of ecclesiastical records and the survey that was done after the Norman (French) invasion in 1066. Also a few discoveries, most notably Sutton Hoo.
But we don't even know if King Arthur was a real person or not. In contrast to the Roman Empire, very little came down to us from Northern Europe.
In fact, the existence of written history is a pretty good indicator of the degree of chaos.
It wasn't just Italy that suffered with the collapse of the Roman system. Written history nearly disappeared from Spain, North Africa, France, Belgium, England, the Balkans, etc...
The notable difference is, of course, the surviving East Roman Empire, which continued for another 1000 years. The contrast between conditions in former Roman Western Europe, and the East Roman Empire very much highlight the degree of collapse that occurred.
There is more information about the 300-1000 period than is commonly assumed. It’s not as solid as earlier or later, but people have done a lot of research and analysis and it is no longer the “dark ages”.
If you follow the British History podcast, he covers this period in a lot of detail. What we don’t know can be frustrating but what we do know is illuminating.
https://www.thebritishhistorypodcast.com/
The middle ages were a terrible time for India. The Islamic Conquest put a definitive end to a relative era of peace and took India to the dark ages. Most Indian kingdoms were soft (Buddhism was the prevalent religion) and fell like ninepins to hardened invaders.
As we are talking about an entire millennium, the middle ages were a terrific time for India, containing multiple centuries that are considered golden ages with the Gupta Empire and the Chola dynasty.
Both statements are true and false, it's meaningless to generalize to that degree.
Dark ages for India during Mughal Empire? You must be kidding right or you are in denial.
Mughal dinasty is probably the richest Indian dinasty and most probably the richest dinasty ever comparable to Byzantine empires. The older Indian dinasties before Moghul are not that rich or successful otherwise tourists will be visiting their buildings like pyramids in Egypt or Aya Sophia in Turkey.
We are talking far before the Mughal Empire. Most older Indian dynasties were utterly demolished by invaders. Islamic Conquerors deliberately made it a point to demolish them - temples, libraries, etc.
It is not surprising that Mughal Empire was rich for the ruling class. It imposed the Jizya tax on non-muslims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizya
Mughal empire started probably just after the Middle age but there were several separate Sultanates namely Gujarat, Bengal and Delhi. These were very rich Sultanates probably not as rich as the Mughal empire because they were smaller, but they were rich Kingdoms nonetheless even by modern standards. India was not at that time in dark ages, by any stretch of imagination. They probably economically fare much better than India nowadays, and you would not call India now as dark ages, would you?
The jizya is tax for non Muslim and for Muslim they have got zakat and other normal taxes. It is not like Indian do not have any tax nowadays.
The Muslim texts of the Delhi Sultanate era treated Hindus with disdain, remarking "Hindus are never interesting in themselves, but only as converts, as capitation tax payers, or as corpses".
"The Muslim commanders of Delhi Sultanate regularly raided Hindu kingdoms for plunder, mulct their treasuries and looted the Hindu temples therein"
It was certainly one of the dark ages, unless you happened to be an Islamic conqueror! Comparing that era against modern India is hopefully a joke ? Perhaps you only meant to compare Muslim Nobles in that era against modern Indian citizens ? (Even then the life expectancy was lower). Being a Hindu citizen in that era meant you (and your family) could be enslaved for any reason and your village/town slaughtered to the last man, your template desecrated and looted. There are thousands of such documented cases.
Oh, btw, the Zakat tax in that era was negligible compared to Jizya. Can dig up several sources on this too, if needed. If you didn't pay Jizya, you were killed or enslaved. You were freed from Jizya only if you converted to Islam.
I am not sure you understand the meaning of dark ages. India as a nation and subcontinent not only doing fine at the time but also thriving[1]. This prosperity period is carried over to the Moghul dinasty as some historians considered its beginning as part of Medieval India.
Dark ages meant that there is a sharp decline in the quality of life especially in the knowledge and scholarly departments.
If the Sultanates are really bad as you have described there should be no Hindu left in the India sub-continent but the last time I checked they are still the majority. The Sultanates can easily pull a Spanish Inquisition style by killing or forced conversion. They can drive away the Hindu away like what the Spanish Christians did during inquisition to the Muslim and Jews by not spare anyone of them and eliminated all the mosques and sinagogues from Spain[2].
India at that time had lost most of its accumulated scientific and technological knowledge - burnt and destroyed by Islamic Invaders, suffered extraordinary cultural and education decline (destruction of temples, gender equality) and had an enslaved and subjugated populace. There was extraordinary loss of life and population declines.
It fits all metrics of a dark age. A distinct minority of the population being prosperous does not repudiate this.
The slaughter of Indians in that era even exceeds the Spanish Inquisition. There were regular massacres of over >100K folks after a city surrendered. (Ex: Ghiyas ud din Balban of Delih Sultanate).
The population of Delhi under the Delhi Sultanate was utterly exterminated by Timur. It took another century for the population to recover. He killed 17 million people in his campaign.
I think the myth that is the original article is referring to is probably your version of India dark ages story not the European dark ages story.
Believe it or not, Timur probably killed more muslim in his entire campaign than non Muslim.
The Delhi Sultanates created the Hindustan languages and started the Indo-Islamic architecture that reached its zenith during the Mughal Empire[1]. The Delhi Sultanate is also noted for its integration of the Indian subcontinent into a global cosmopolitan culture[2]. The Sultanate is a few forces in the world that has successfully repelled the Mongul catastrophic invasion. FYI, Mongul successfully decimated Baghdad of Abbasid empire and burnt it to the ground including the largest library known to the world at the time.
History is a bitch in the hands of the current political arrangement. There are indisputable historical facts about things in the past that have happened - wars, civil conflicts, inventions, works of art. Then there are endless possible interpretations and viable (but not provable) causal relations between the facts. Heck, we can't even identify the proper causal relationship for events happening around us right now. Then how about going N centuries back and trying to reason about the involved parties and their intents? We don't know what conversations took place between them, what their internal agenda was, etc.
"Heck, we can't even identify the proper causal relationship for events happening around us right now. Then how about going N centuries back and trying to reason about the involved parties and their intents"
Part of the reason we do not understand much of today, is that much is done behind closed doors.
So historians does have an edge when trying to make sense of an event 80 years ago with (allmost) all relevant documents now open and the people dead, than trying to make sense of an event 5 years ago, with people involved still trying to influence every investigation etc.
Going further back in time, especially to a time with no or burned down archives, is harder, agreed.
Documents and other preserved artifacts are often a very "low-res" view of what actually drives the course of events. Even with a well-ordered chronological archive of documents, there are far too many dots to connect between any two of them. Connecting the dots ultimately comes down to interpretation and creating a narrative. And narrative-based history is almost always wrong, deceptive and politically-inspired.
There were a lot of satirical conspiracy theories involving the Clintons, Epstein, Israel, etc. Some of them were actually quite funny and managed to have no obvious conflicts of interest in them. In 100yr when someone not knowing the context reads them the satirical part may be lost.
> But Early Middle Ages were pretty bad in a lot of Europe, there is no way around it.
I recommend anyone who is interested in this topic watch Paul Freedman's "The Early Middle Ages, 284--1000" Yale course lecture videos, which are free online.
The black death also created a massive redistribution of wealth. Labor wages went up, the power balance between lords and peasants shifted and power institutions were decimated.
Who knows about this particular burial ground, but large chunks of Europe did go through a 'rough spot' (cities depopulating, total population declining, industries collapsing, ...) in late aniquity/the early middle ages that took centuries to recover from.
Sadly, there's this unfortunate tendency to over-correct in the opposite direction when trying to clear up popular misconceptions...
With no more invaders coming across the fields, killing indiscriminately, trampling down wheat and rye, burning villages down and stealing your meagre reserves of food, you and your kids have much better chances to survive.
Magyar (proto-Hungarian) raids of the early 10th century were pretty destructive in that corner of the world.
Life of peasants greatly improved in Western Europe after the 14th century due to plague killing half of the population, leaving to survivors more land and food and scarcity of work force. And then later in 15th century with the invention of printing the literacy and education became available to common people which again significantly influenced and improved their lives.
Just nitpicking here, but I don't think "literacy and education became available to common people" in the 15th century. In fact, for quite some time after Gutenberg's printing press was invented (or reinvented, depending from what cultural angle you look at history) it was common practice for States and catholic Church to legally prevent people from printing stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_patent
Depends on the country I guess, the Venetian Republic seems to had more than 150 presses by 1500, the most famous of publishers Aldus Manutius printing 30 thousands of inexpensive “pocket editions” books in just 5 years ("six titles a year for the next five years", at 1000 copies per edition) according to Encyclopedia Britannica https://www.britannica.com/topic/publishing/The-medieval-boo...
Interesting! Thanks for sharing. I still would not say 30K books is "available to common people" (most of whom could not read), but i was definitely not aware Venice had such a policy so early in history.
That doesn't seem to be the case. Although agricultural peoples were often shorter, ancient peoples who were less settled frequently had better bone density than moderns and were as tall. In both cases, most people were in much better shape than the average modern human.
Look at the athletic stunts performed by the Greeks, from the professional athletes to the runners to the rowers. Trireme rowers outperformed modern Olympic rowers.
I think you could pretty safely pit the average human being from pre-modern times and they would embarrass almost anyone except top athletes from today in physical fitness tests, and some of the better specimens would almost certainly be competitive even with those.
Are you seriously implying that before there were marathons, the capability for long-range running didn't exist (or existed much less)? Athleticism as a general activity has increased because it's a leisure activity (as in, something you do when there's not anything really important to do), so it makes sense that there's a dramatic rise in it when we're unquestionably in an abundant time.
It probably was the case that the average person in a world where you had to walk everywhere was fitter than the average person in a world where you don't.
This doesn't tell us anything. Assume a normal distribution of running speed among people who seriously practice running. Assume precision timing instruments were invented in the last couple hundred years.
What we would expect to see, even if physiological conditions haven't changed at all, is a steady decline in record mile times as you sample more and more people on the right side of the distribution, until eventually better times require more and more extreme, rare outliers and average times between records begins increasing.
That does not mean that the fastest mile ever was run in 1999, or that athleticism is increasing, or anything. (It might be. There are certainly more people training for specifically competitive athletic reasons than ever before.) But it would not be surprising to learn that the fastest mile ever was run 2000 years ago.
Consider this footprint analysis of a random Australian aboriginine. [1] They calculate him as running at 23mph, which is comparable to Usain Bolt's record setting average speed of 23mph in a 100m sprint. Did we get lucky finding the footprints of one of the fastest Australians in history? Maybe. Or maybe he just wasn't that unusual in an environment where people ran a lot.
I'd be willing to bet that about 95% of that is environment. Like it or not we're basically the same people, just have more resources (in most countries) than back then. I would venture their better bone density was simply unless you were wealthy you -had- to work and usually that involved physical labor, only a few artisans, the rich, academics, etc got out of it.
That’s environment not genetics. History gave modern athletes their baseline, and Science is what’s breaking records.
English longbows for example had much higher draw weights than modern bows so the strongest archer of all time presumably lived hundreds of years ago. The critical difference is effectively nobody is training for that kind of draw strength.
> genetically, we were just as capable (if not moreso) before modern times
They're claiming that, but on what evidence? Comparative measurement is very difficult, but at least with skeletons you can measure height. Which has increased.
Height is largely a function of diet. We very much eat better, but historically you find average heights very quite a bit over time with people getting taller and shorter based on the food supply.
Popular culture is full of historical myths, another popular one is about cruelties of Holy Inquisition. Inquisition is painted ("The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco and others) as some sadistic group of catholic priests who were chasing innocent woman, torture them and then burn.
The truth is that Inquisition aim was exactly opposite: to stop chasing and burning innocent woman (and man) by all kind of petty lords and civil "courts" who used witchcraft accusation to get rid of opponents. This was done in the name of Catholic Church so Rome decided to do something about this and stop that practice by introduction of pretty modern standards of court proceedings - this way Inquisition was born.
Inquisition was punishing heavily those who gave false testimony and that cut number of witchcraft cases significantly.
In addition the punishment for heresy was rarely death penalty (about 1,5% of cases), which is less than 5 thousand executions during several centuries of Inquisition activity. Typical punishment was fasting, scourging or pilgrimage.
Coming back to Umberto Eco writing, he described in "The Name of the Rose" Dominican friar Bernard Gui as some bloody, mindless, cruel madman, medieval version of Doctor Mengele. While the truth was exactly the opposite - he was a decent and educated man.
Obviously historical research and facts are much less interesting than Eco pop writing, but we live in the pop age and believe in the pop "truths" so this is not a big surprise.
I suspect you are getting into some myth-making yourself here. The inquisition was not originally focused on witch-hunting, it was focused on heretics - people challenging or denying the the doctrines of the Church. Bernardo Gui and The Name of the Rose is 14th century, while the large scale witch-hunts only started in the 15th century with the publishing of "Malleus Maleficarum".
> The truth is that Inquisition aim was exactly opposite: to stop chasing and burning innocent woman (and man) by all kind of petty lords and civil "courts" who used witchcraft accusation to get rid of opponents.
I suspect you made that up, given the anachronisms in your account. Do you have any legitimate source which confirm this narrative?
Bernard Gui was certainly an educated man, and he is described as as such in Name of The Rose. He also was responsible for a lot of torture and death, persecution of Judaism and so on. You can consider this "decent" or not pending on your personal values. The Name of the Rose Eco actually has a reasonable good treatment of the philosophy behind the heretic movement and the inquisition, despite the book being fiction.
Alonso de Salazar Frías has been given the epithet "The Witches’ Advocate"[1] by historians, for his role in establishing the conviction, within the Spanish Inquisition, that accusations against supposed witches were more often rooted in dreams and fantasy than in reality, and the inquisitorial policy that witch accusations and confessions should only be given credence where there was firm, independent, corroborating evidence. He was probably the most influential figure in ensuring that those accused of witchcraft were generally not put to death in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Spain. The Spanish Inquisition was one of the first institutions in Europe to rule against the death penalty for supposed witches. Its Instructions of 1614, which embodied Salazar's ideas, were influential throughout Catholic Europe.
> The truth is that Inquisition aim was exactly opposite: to stop chasing and burning innocent woman (and man) by all kind of petty lords and civil "courts" who used witchcraft accusation to get rid of opponents. This was done in the name of Catholic Church so Rome decided to do something about this and stop that practice by introduction of pretty modern standards of court proceedings - this way Inquisition was born.
This is really not true. Handling Witchcraft trials better had absolutely nothing to do with why the Inquisition was established. Its original and foremost job was to stomp out heretics (and later, in Spain, Muslims and Jews) in an organized and efficient way. If anything, it used torture more than had previously been common.
But yes, it established standard procedures that were much less arbitrary and gave some rights to the defendant.
> In addition the punishment for heresy was rarely death penalty (about 1,5% of cases), which is less than 5 thousand executions during several centuries of Inquisition activity.
The main reason was that the death penalty was only given to unrepentant or repeat offenders.
> The main reason was that the death penalty was only given to unrepentant or repeat offenders.
And even then in their spiritual world view the auto-da-fé was a last ditch effort to persuade the condemned to repent. It gave the sinner a taste of the eternal fires awaiting them and time enough to make an act of perfect contrition and be saved from hell.
It wasn't that simple. The problem of the conversos was a major political problem. This didn't happen over night. Jews had occupied many high positions in Spain and following the ultimatum that Jews either convert or leave, the widespread belief among the populace that many of those converting were merely simulating conversion simply to remain in those high positions was a threat to social order and probably even an existential threat to a Spain just recovered from Islamic Moorish rule. The Inquisition set out to determine whether these claims were true in a process that was actually much more just than was the norm during that time period.
This part of pop culture is interesting in that it all started with vivid depictions of torture and murder mass printed by the protestant Dutch (the depictions were made up but taken as truth)
This cultural trait of the west has remained intact until today. Popular TV still reinforces these claims from time to time
Just to be absolutely clear: The inquisition absolutely did torture people and condemn heretics to be burned at the stake. This is certainly not a myth.
But protestants did use this a propaganda against the Catholic Church.
Those accused of heresy were sentenced at an auto de fe, Act of Faith. Clergyman would sit at the proceedings and would deliver the punishments. Punishments included confinement to dungeons, physical abuse and torture. Those who reconciled with the church were still punished and many had their property confiscated, as well as were banished from public life. Those who never confessed were burned at the stake without strangulation; those who did confess were strangled first. ... In the beginning, the Inquisition dealt only with Christian heretics and did not interfere with the affairs of Jews. However, disputes about Maimonides’ books (which addressed the synthesis of Judaism and other cultures) provided a pretext for harassing Jews and, in 1242, the Inquisition condemned the Talmud and burned thousands of volumes. In 1288, the first mass burning of Jews on the stake took place in France.
In 1481 the Inquisition started in Spain and ultimately surpassed the medieval Inquisition, in both scope and intensity. Conversos (Secret Jews) and New Christians were targeted because of their close relations to the Jewish community, many of whom were Jews in all but their name. ...
First, they arrested Conversos and notable figures in Seville; in Seville more than 700 Conversos were burned at the stake and 5,000 repented. Tribunals were also opened in Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia. An Inquisition Tribunal was set up in Ciudad Real, where 100 Conversos were condemned, and it was moved to Toledo in 1485. Between 1486-1492, 25 auto de fes were held in Toledo, 467 people were burned at the stake and others were imprisoned.
> Coming back to Umberto Eco writing, he described in "The Name of the Rose" Dominican friar Bernard Gui as some bloody, mindless, cruel madman, medieval version of Doctor Mengele. While the truth was exactly the opposite - he was a decent and educated man.
Education and cruelty are not in opposition. And decency toward some people or in some situation is not in opposition to cruelty toward other people. The same guy who was great diplomat and writer, could also convict 636 individuals of 940 counts of heresy. And that involved torturing quite a few people.
So even if he was more lenient then some other guys, if you are around the situation where he is torturing, he will come across as cruel, cause that is what he does.
>So even if he was more lenient then some other guys, if you are around the situation where he is torturing, he will come across as cruel, cause that is what he does.
That is applying our modern standards to historical figures more or less. We should view history through a contemporary lens for a better picture of the different driving factors and their effects.
> That is applying our modern standards to historical figures more or less. We should view history through a contemporary lens for a better picture of the different driving factors and their effects.
That is actually not. Through contemporary lens, the contemporary person being tortured or someone who is close to that person, is in fact perceiving you as cruel.
Factoring in writing and diplomacy done in other situations is literally applying different standard.
The contemporary view as in how the populace at the time viewed it, not the condemned person.
There are a lot of practices in our prison system today (both inside the US and in other industrialised nations) that some people find questionable, but much of the populace accept. This window is constantly moving over time.
But the books the whole thread is about are written from the point of view of "someone who is close to that tortured person". It if point of view of third party witness of inquisition, not from the point of view of diplomat.
And they did perceived that as cruel and had emotional reaction to what is happening.
Moreover, if you want to know what "populace thought" you cant just decide to ignore some people.
Inquisition meant still burning or torturing people to death - or threatening of doing so, if they continue to speak heresy, like "the earth moves around the sun".
(Galileo and the Inquisition)
Inquisition (which still exists today! only with no physical authority anymore) might be a bit missrepresented in their thirst for blood - but the harm they done over the centuries to free thinking and therefore advancement of science and technology and therefore progress of humanity as its whole - is something on its own validating their bad reputation.
No, the Spanish Inquisition strictly forbid torturing people to death (death only happened when people were condemned to it). There were, in fact, regulations that required to not provoke any bleeding (even just a drop) during the torture -you can cause severe damage without bleeding of course-, and the process had to stop if it happened. A person was dedicated to oversee the entire process and stop it in these cases.
What people often misses is that these tortures weren't anything special at the time. The right to not be tortured is quite modern. The Inquisition just took a look at what the existing institutions were doing, and imitated it (regulating the entire process in the way: there were only three types of torture methods allowed, for example)
The Inquisition wasn't an unified entity either - Galileo was condemned by the Roman Inquisition, but the Spanish Inquisition didn't have any problem with his theories and didn't forbid his books.
Sorry, but for me burning to death is torturing to death.
And I am aware, that the real inquisition was much more restrained, than their image - but it doesn't change anything for the better, of what they did.
They represented the highest authority in terms of what was allowed to be thought and said. And they did use tortue and execution to cement their authority. Basically killing scientists for doing science. And stopping people to become scientists in the first place, as everyone knew what happened to free thinking scientists. Rather work your field, peaseant - or pray your prayers low monk.
I cannot see anything positive in that institution.
That's false. More like confronting Catholicism, but even monks did science.
How do you think cathedrals were built in Middle Ages? Weapons? Armory? Trebuchets? Astronomics to sail to "The Indians"?
Monks were very faith-obsessed but not ultimately dumb to power.
Also, the School of Salamanca (around Don Quixote era) was the roots of Humanism.
Because when every research that you do, has to align to the literal words of a big book, under the explicit threat of burning at the stake - it is surprising, how much progress was possible despite of it.
Do you know Galileo received a pension from the church? Galileo had many admirers among the clergy, including the pope himself, yet by publishing a book he broke an earlier agreement on not teaching his theory and this wasn't taken lightly. A modern analogy would be to break an NDA.
Yes, it follows from the definition of analogy. Perhaps you are thinking of equivalence instead? In that case you are correct that the two are not equivalent.
> Inquisition meant still burning or torturing people to death - or threatening of doing so, if they continue to speak heresy, like "the earth moves around the sun".
A perfect example of the tidy little "big bad Church vs. SCIENCE (tm)" fables that refuse to die. The first problem with your statement is that somehow heliocentrism is heretical. Show me where this contradicts dogma. You can't because it's not true. A moment of reflection should make it obvious that it is utterly irrelevant, from a theological perspective, whether the ball of burning gas revolves around the rock or the rock resolves around the burning ball of gas. To claim that because the Bible uses language that speaks of the sun rising and setting, it must mean that such trivialities are theologically important is as absurd as claiming that geocentrism is widespread today because we still use that language. This is phenomenological and descriptive language that is only used as an occasion to convey some other point, not a scientific explanation. Common sense is easily blinded by bigotry.
> (Galileo and the Inquisition)
This whole "affair" actually lasted decades and really had nothing to do with heliocentrism. Galileo had made political enemies and was known for his harassment and vicious remarks directed at people in power, who, btw, were slow to anger; it took decades for him to finally be put under...house arrest overlooking the Vatican gardens. Seems pretty mild esp. given the witch hunts taking place in Protestant northern Europe at the time.
> Inquisition (which still exists today! only with no physical authority anymore) might be a bit missrepresented in their thirst for blood - but the harm they done over the centuries to free thinking and therefore advancement of science and technology and therefore progress of humanity as its whole - is something on its own validating their bad reputation.
Not this again. Show me where the brave, good, noble men of SCIENCE (tm) were prevented from climbing the hills of PROGRESS (tm) by the big, bad, mean old Church? If you peer a little more closely at the stock examples (Bruno is one), you find nothing of the sort. You find no such trend. This is a historically illiterate trope that, frankly, is embarrassing.
For reference, here's an excerpt of Galileo's Papal Condemnation of 1633:
> We say, pronounce, sentence, and declare that you, the said Galileo, by reason of the matters adduced in trial, and by you confessed as above, have rendered yourself in the judgment of this Holy Office vehemently suspected of heresy, namely, of having believed and held the doctrine—which is false and contrary to the sacred and divine Scriptures—that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move from east to west and that the Earth moves and is not the center of the world; and that an opinion may be held and defended as probably after it has been declared and defined to be contrary to the Holy Scripture; [...]
Catholic thinkers have been building a revisionist conternarrative to the prevalent "age of reason" narrative. The counter narrative is that the Church was actually the ones promoting science, Galileo was just being an asshole, and the inquisition was really a fair and decent institution which only tortured lightly and only burned people when it was absolutely unavoidable.
But yeah, I am surprised how prevalent this thinking is here on HN.
I don't entirely understand how burning some people to death and torturing others was supposed to encourage the rest to behave in a more civilised way.
The Inquisition was the first attempt at having a fair trial in an age of summary, brutal executions
Only the church had the moral authority to step into the void used by kings and lords to have justice their way
Burning and torture did occur, but what is missing from pop culture is that it also happened in a greater scale in territories not controlled by the Inquisition
> The Inquisition was the first attempt at having a fair trial
Except where it wasn't. Philip IV of France specifically sanctioned torture to obtain specific confessions of defined types of heresy, in order to support his wish to deband the Templars, allowing him to sieze their land, gold and other assets. This was done in the name of the Inquisition. Later Pope Clement V tried to step in and moderate things somewhat. Many Templars recanted their earlier confessions.
Also "popular" trials were worse than the Inquisition, far, far worse.
Do you know these countries today where they kill you in a horrible way for just stealing a hen? Heh, that was nothing about what would happen to you in the Middle Ages and later.
People is delusional, as if the common Medieval folk was any better than the ruling powers. Hint: it wasn't.
It's also inextricable from the "holy wars" between the Catholic Spanish monarchy, the Muslim states of Spain, and the Jewish population of Spain. The expulsion and forced conversion of Jews was a foreshadow of the Holocaust.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institite of Anthopology, Human Heredity and Eugenics is the place responsible for conducting the scientific racism used by the nazis to justify the holocaust.
At that place, they studied the work of American eugenicists, like the founding president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan. And they received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York.
Religions used to be a lot less tolerant of each other and anti-judaism was a thing in Christianity all over Europe. Comparing the Holocaust to anything other than the Holocaust can only serve to downgrade the severity of the Holocaust
I think there is value in acknowledging that the holocaust wasn't an isolated event but has centuries of context. Multiple times the only thing saving us from a holocaust-like event was that we didn't have the technical means and infrastructure to do it.
That doesn't make the holocaust less bad, if anything it means we have to be even more vigilant to make sure it doesn't happen again
I think that the Holocaust can't be compared to any event in history because the cold blooded mass murder of innocent civilians, including women and children is unprecedented. It's my opinion of course. I tend to get uneasy when people compare the Holocaust with other events because more often than not they have political motives and using the Holocaust as a comparison only serves to attack the compared idea/group of people. This is very unfair to the victims of the Holocaust. I repeat, it's just my opinion
> The expulsion and forced conversion of Jews was a foreshadow of the Holocaust.
That's quite a leap...and historically illiterate.
In the Middle Ages, the Jew was primarily a theological concept, not a biological or ethnic one. To be a Jew was to be someone who rejected Christ. In the New Testament, "the Jews" as described as those who called on Jesus to be crucified. Now, who are "the Jews"? After all, Jesus was a Jew. His mother, Mary, was a Jew as were the apostles (from whom we receive the gospels themselves) as well as the many Jews who became the first Christians. Obviously, "the Jews" refers to those who took the negative theological position. The moment you convert to Christianity is the moment you stop being a "Jew" in the theological sense. The Nazi concept of the Jew was entirely biological and racial. You couldn't stop being a Jew simply because you assimilated into some other culture or adopted a different religion.
Now w.r.t. the Church's historical position toward the Jews, I suggest you look at the papal bull Sicut Judaeis[0]. To quote the Wikipedia article:
The bull forbade Christians, on pain of excommunication, from forcing Jews to convert, from harming them, from taking their property, from disturbing the celebration of their festivals, and from interfering with their cemeteries. [...] The Bull said that Jews should be treated equitably and justly, that their property rights should be protected, and that they should keep their own festivals and religious practices.
(Worth adding is that Christians were at times also at a "disadvantage" given the universality of Christianity. For example, Christians were forbidden from engaging in usurious transactions with anybody, while the Talmud only forbade Jews from doing so with other Jews: Gentiles were fair game.)
The forcible conversion of Jews in Spain was in fact one of the first points where Jews were treated as a racial rather than religious category. There's a bit of detail on this in the Wikipedia page for Limpieza de sangre:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limpieza_de_sangre
Some of this happened more towards the Renaissance than the middle ages, of course, but it certainly disproves this rosy and ahistorical view of the Spanish Inquisition.
> Now w.r.t. the Church's historical position toward the Jews, I suggest you look at the papal bull...
You could also look at what the Church actually did towards Jews, for example in Spain.
It is both hilarious and chilling that you justify the persecution of Jews with Christians being "disadvantaged" in comparison because they couldn't lend money at interest.
Well, the Spanish Inquisition didn't need to make up "witches", they had real Jews to burn.
(And they were supremely effective - they expelled, converted, massacred or exterminated the entire Jewish population. And then killed every one of them if they dared to convert back.)
No it didn't. Jews were often discriminated against in various ways, but weren't generally forces to convert under pain of torture. The Spanish Jews fled to other countries.
Basque here. I can relate to Zugarramurdi's witch hunting case, but compared to protestant countries' cases, that's nothing.
I'm tired of propaganda.
On the heretics, that happened across Europe... and the damn whole world.
But as I said, for its age, the Inquisition was born as a grant seeking institution, not the reverse.
Do you want something worse than the Inquisition? Search for the village idiocy generated mobs and trials, and you'll be "amazed" on how "kind" and "lovely" was that.
Indeed. The Inquisition was actually innovative in the sense that it made courts more fair. You have to view these things in historical context. The events that motivated the Spanish Inquisition were, of course, a complicated political matter, too, but people don't like complicated things when all they want is an indictment and heads to roll. Such is bigotry.
In general, these sorts of myths were often the product of anti-Catholic propaganda produced long after the events in question happened. Both Protestants and Enlightenment figures had a vested interest in spreading vicious lies about the Church and they did so gladly.
The article misses to mention an important work on this topic. I mentioned it earlier on a different thread[1]; re-posting it:
Little over hundred years ago, the dashing Dutch Historian Johan Huizinga wrote a book called: "The Autumn of the Middle Ages", with the subtitle: "A study of the forms of life, thought and art in France and the Netherlands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries".
In it, Huizinga attempts to debunk some myths about the Middle Ages:
"[...] Huizinga presents the idea that the exaggerated formality and romanticism of late medieval court society was a defense mechanism against the constantly increasing violence and brutality of general society. He saw the period as one of pessimism, cultural exhaustion, and nostalgia, rather than of rebirth and optimism."
The original English translation is hard to read as he refers to many paintings in it, but no pictures. Luckily, on the book's hundred-year anniversary in 2020, a new, English translation (a tad expensive, though) with 300 full-colour illustrations was released[2].
The secret we all know is that governments, countries, laws, they’re all just a bunch of stuff we made up. They exist only as long as we all keep agreeing they exist, and act accordingly. Far more than Tinkerbell, regimes and governments need us to believe in them or they die. Sometimes this death takes the form of people just ignoring old structures, like in the Hellenic age when a remote Greek colony might hear from the founding city so infrequently that it starts ignoring the empire and just makes its own government. A more common consequence when people stop believing in governments is that some rival will take advantage of that lack of confidence, and rise up to claim power instead, whether through an electoral primary challenge or a bloody civil war. For this reason, regimes to work hard to gain legitimacy, that is to acquire any and all things that make people agree the regime is real, and has the right to rule.
Power is self-reinforcing too. A revolutionary stands a chance only if their ideas can be subsumed into a vision of greater prosperity for a nation; they can bring a narrative of greater freedom and liberty, but they must also show how it fortifies the institutions that already exist.
Sort of relevant is the Euthyphro dialogue, and the nature of piousness. "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?"
Great quote. Civilization is a spell that we're under. All true political power is built on belief strong enough to enable coordinated action. This flies in the face of the modern conception of politics which views everything as the result of coercion or the state's monopoly on violence.
I'm surprised by your surprise. This goes on every day around the world, with coups and challenges to the right of rule by this or that institution or personality (Venezuela, Lybia, Syria...).
This is also why controlling the propaganda channels (state radio, tv etc) is so important for takeovers.
Renaissance was a golden age for some things like arts, not necessarily for life conditions. Who said that?
Commerce, liberation from the feudal lords and the Church are the staples of Renaissance that set the basis for the following western world development.
But there was more: by claiming that the Renaissance—and all its glittering art and innovation—was caused by individualism, Burkhardt was really advancing a claim about the nature of modernity.
All the text is an ellaborate argument against this. He's framing it as if it's a historic simplification to promote this value.
Why is it a fallacy? Because Renaissance was brought by a number of factors and several of them had in common that they were more on the individualism side than what existed in the middle ages.
So what does he does to undermine this wide consensus? He invents some conspiration to appropiate Renaissance spirit, idealize it and use it to promote some agenda. That's called projection, BTW.
Middle ages weren't so bad? In what sense? If you take it to mean material life conditions, it could be right. But it was a millenium with an oppresive military/theocratic system that for the most part stalled all progress in the western world.
When the civilization started to get rid of that yoke of course it caused bloodbaths, revolutions and all kind of disasters.
Question is, would have been it better to keep the old regime around?
The "old regime" or "L'ancien régime" was the term for the pre-revolution government used after the French Revolution. Perhaps you are conflating the Renaissance with the age of enlightenment/revolutions? They are different eras.
The Enlightenment is in many ways a counter-movement to the ideals of the Renaissance. For example the Renaissance was characterized by absolute monarchy like Louis XIV, while enlightenment and the revolution was countermovement to the autocrat ruler.
Kings promoted cities as a tool to concentrate power and debilitate intermediate feudal lords. But that temporary alliance could not last, once the basic idea that the power comes from God was undermined and bourgeoisie raised.
I wouldn't call that "a counter-movement" because it seems exactly the opposite: one idea that keeps pushing ahead until it's taken to its ultimate consequences. It would have been impossible to have a middle class revolution when there was no middle class.
If there's a single factor that explains the changes between Quattrocento and Enlightenment is commerce. It was almost completely absent in the Middle Ages.
I found that article completely infuriating. I am not a young person, and I can tell you that I have never heard anything like the "myth" that the article posits. I'm sure that the actual historical Renaissance doesn't live up to the myths of cultural rebirth, but I have literally never heard anyone say anything about life expectancy, or lack of plague. If anything, when I picture the Renaissance, I picture it happening against a backdrop of wars between the Italian city-states, in an era of advances of military technology. To pick a pop culture example of this is "Da Vinci's Demons", which begins with Da Vinci inventing some kind of super-gun for use in a war within Italy.
Seeing this kind of fake myth constructed before my very eyes has made me wonder how many of these stories of "People used to think this stupid thing, but now we know better" I've fallen for over the years.
I am older I guess and the middle age as dark time and Renaissance as light in the end of tunnel does roughly sounds like what it was talked about when I was learning about it all as kid.
If it was just about overblown myths of a rebirth of classical knowledge, then that would be one thing. But the post claims that a bunch of myths of everyday life in the Renaissance that simply don't exist.
"In this interpretation of history, God determined everything that happens, as the author of a story determines what happens."
Just a note about the bit about divine providence. It doesn't quite work that way and is not the Catholic understanding. Given free will, human beings are able to choose against their own good, they are able to behave in evil ways, so divine providence cannot be responsible for EVERYTHING because that would both contradict free will (and introduce contradiction into God, something we see in Islam) and make God the author of evil. Divine providence must be understood as something involving both active and passive will. That is, God wills the good and only the good, but permits evil because he has chosen to create free agents. However, the divine plan takes into account the evil of free agents, and in permitting it, makes use of it for some good end. Thus understood, Satan, in his rebellion toward God and the divine plan, is nonetheless serving God in a sense because his evil is exploited by God, so to speak, to produce good and further the plan.
But if God created free will knowing that humans (and angels) would choose evil... how is he resolved of responsibility? Either he is the source of everything, or he isn’t.
I was a history major in the 1990's, at a rather modest public college (in the U.S.), and we were fully disabused of this myth. In fact, even in my survey course this myth was addressed.
If this myth is still going on, it's because everything is so oversimplified in high school (arguably, with good reason), and few people ever go beyond that. Historians have long since moved past Burkhardt.
I think there is a high chance we will see an innovation 'boom'.
After and during the space race, a lot of side technologies were invented. There was a sense of purpose and urgency that set a lot of industries forward and created innovation.
I think we might see something similar in medicine in the coming 5 years.
But comparing Covid to the black death is a bit of a stretch, imo.
From the article: "in short an era which—if you had to be stranded in some other epoch of history—you’d be likely to choose."
This seems like quite a ridiculous requirement, as first there really was no such era ever globally applicable, it depended not just on epoch, but very much if you were lucky to be born in certain location and in certain family/status/religion/ethnicity/race. And even then, even if you could pick exactly who you'll be, it's still very unlikely that any modern person would really enjoy any old times if the criteria is "safety", "stability" or "days when hard work pays off" from a perspective of a modern person living in the industrial age. It's just not comparable.
When we discuss if one epoch was better or worse, question is was it better than the previous one, not what modern people would think of it ("on average it would suck to them" is the correct answer for pretty much any previous period of time more than 50 y/a).
And Renaissance was a time of many improvements, not necessarily in safety or stability or hygiene, but it was marked with the beginning of Humanism as a philosophical stance, and wealth accumulation in aftermath of the plague, which together resulted in a new investments and vigor in education and art and science, and the whole attitude toward people's lives and importance of educations - and that just had to influence and add some value to the lives of commoners too. Even though living conditions in general were not significantly different to "the dark ages", especially when looking it from todays perspective, they still lived in time of great progress and increased liberties.
The article is written on a false premise. Each new era shakes the social foundations of the previous one, and life for the average person doesn't get better immediately. What we, in our distant collective memory remember is the great thinkers and the revolutionaries who laid the foundations for a new order. If you took a sociological perspective for the situation back in the day, you would see a divided society, violence and uncertainty.
Not disagreeing with your conclusion, but wasn't one of the takeaways of the article that there are no "eras"? "Eras" are arbitrary delineations when in fact change is incremental. Doesn't part 2) of the essay explain how "golden era" was "invented" by scholars post-hoc, and later coined "renaissance"?
True, but the great thinkers and revolutionaries (and artists, architects, etc) don't just happen to flourish in one age on random, they're the result and a part of a massive change in society that provides the right environment in the right moment for a "golden age" to happen. Gutenberg's invention of press was probably one of the biggest triggers of civilization change since the invention of farming, all of the sudden knowledge and information became available and started to flow freely between millions of common people, and between different countries which was super important as traveling was hard and slow and unsafe back then. It was like the Internet of that time.
I don't disagree with your end point but man are your statistics a mile off...
COVID is somewhere around 1 to 2% (you're off by a factor of 10). And a large part of that reason is treatment. Thus you can't really compare the black death from the medieval period to COVID now considering treatment has gotten better (thankfully, because the 14th-century plague would have between 80% and 100%(!!!) mortality rate depending on the strand).
Since the Bubonic Plague is still around, we can make estimations about how deadly it is given modern treatments, and it's at around 11%. Which, by the way, is lower than some modern outbreaks of coronavirus like MURS (we're fucking lucky that the virus that escaped quarantine is "only" 1-2%).
If you want a really scary fact about the black death, it's that we've already had outbreaks of drug resistant forms in Madagascar. If that were to become the next pandemic then I think we'd all be fucked. Luckily the plague is easier to quarantine than coronaviruses because plagues have a shorter incubation time (that might not be the right term) so people show symptoms earlier and thus are less likely to have asymptomatic periods where they're unknowingly spreading the disease.
The black death fatality rate of 50% was of the entire population, not the case fatality rate.
Though you have a good point about it being lucky about this virus only having a CFT of around 2%. The next pandemic could be a lot worse, especially if we start to get untreatable bacterial diseases with CFT of 20+%.
I often hear how bad antibiotic resistant bacteria may be but how much of a pandemic potential do they have?
It seems that once you remove the antibiotic, the resistant strain is quickly outcompeted by the one that is not. And it seems to match the fact that you typically find resistant strains in places with lots of antibiotics, like hospitals and countries where people and livestock are given antibiotics when they shouldn't, but not that much elsewhere.
I suppose we don't know exactly where it will end, but we do know that lots of strains are constantly developing resistance to more and more forms of antibiotics, and that it gets progressively more expensive to develop new antibiotics that still work.
According to wikipedia: "According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, three hundred and fifty million deaths could be caused by AMR by 2050"
In the United States, as of the time of this posting, 564,000 people have died to COVID, and we've had 31,400,000 cases, which puts the case fatality rate at 1.8%.
Yes, case fatality rate is 1.8% but infection fatality rate is quite a bit below 0.5% (the exact number is unknown since no one in the US is doing random testing properly). Bubonic plague infection fatality rate was 50-70%, so over 100x larger.
Also, it's quite suspicious that Japan has the highest IFR in the world, with the gap over the average much larger than can be explained by population age. Especially strange since Japan has some of the best medical systems in the world, and has not (yet) exceeded the capacity of its hospital system.
I honestly think there is a case for removing this post as misinformation. At least adding a note or something. In general I'd expect the level of conversation to be higher on HN than this. 0.2% is a ridiculous and dangerously bad bit of misinformation that continues to be put out.
The decadent heights of empires are also often times of great technical, scientific, and philosophical achievement. As politics becomes more and more of a dumpster fire, the availability of resources enables great things.
America and her empire is starting to look like that. Our presidents are likely to continue to include a lot of con men and celebrities and every aspect of our political system seems to be becoming more decadent, but we are building fleets of spaceships and are coming up on 3nm feature density for microprocessors.
But if politics were less of a dumpster fire, there would be even more resources to enable great things.
And to me, the politics looks very much like the decadent heights of empires, not just that it's a dysfunctional dumpster fire, but the way it's dysfunctional. It's dysfunctional because it's insane amounts of infighting, as if the country's health and dominance was forever, and so we're free to fight over who gets the wealth, and nobody needs to keep an eye on making sure that the wealth keeps coming. That pattern has historically worked out very badly for empires...
The whole point of the article, that the author has been stressing on about, is how to record functional history, the kind that is useful and practical for future generation to learn from.
- Functional history should entail what works as well as what doesn’t work.
- Also should detail what was gained and what was lost by such event.
- And most importantly, what was the extent of human misery or happiness by not only by society but by various types of individual.
Tall order, but this author does it well (assuming that one is well-read).
"Why is this on HackerNews"! Well, the fascinating topic and the great content coming in the form of the comments of course. I've already learned a large amount from a group I trust way more than giant Wikipedia pages without context/interpretation and casual spam-filled google searches.
I mean just yesterday I was reading a thing that said historians had identified the worst year in human history as being in the middle ages, I'm guessing a lot of other people read it too, so they should work on getting that myth out of their systems.
That year was in the sixth century AD, and while it is considered one of the start points of the middle ages the myth is that the following millennium was just as bleak.
Or you call those event's part of the "the early middle ages." Or just say sixth century. The Renaissance refers to like a fifty year period, comparing that to a millennium middle age is half the problem.
Indeed. But instead, the article comes with the headline Renaissance Life was Worse than the Middle Ages, eg citing life expectancy in Italy in the 1200s compared to the 1500s in support. That can easily lead to new misconceptions.
I'm not sure if it changed to reflect the actual headline, but that is not the current headline. It is a myth that the middle ages were bad, they were both bad and good.
Ah, I did not pay close attention to those. I don't think you can be blamed for a myth spreading as a result of someone not reading the article, but reading and misremembering the section titles.
Not sure which 'you' that refers to. Let me clarify. In the words of the author,
> This post is for you if you’re tired of screaming The Middle Ages weren’t dark and bad! and want somewhere to link people to, to show them how the myth began.
That's not me. I'm the guy who is screaming But things did go to shit after the end of the Pax Romana in a whole number of quantifiable ways, don't just gloss over that!
"You" referred to a generic someone, who in this case was the author.
Neither the people the author claims are the target of the post nor you, cygx, are going to be uninformed enough to develop new myths that pretend the sixth century wasn't shitty. The author can gloss over them as they aren't the topic they want to discuss.
The Middle Ages are usually considered to have started after the "Fall of Rome." Typically referring to the 410 sack of Rome.
As Justinian was responsible for the last attempts to reunify the Western and Eastern Roman Empires, you can also consider his reign to be the true end of Rome and thus the start of the Middle Ages.
There's no true distinction between the ages, and even of you consider the fifth century the "start" you're likely to view the Justinian Plague as one of the "starting points."
obviously any distinction between an age will have to be human made, and not true in the sense of earthquakes or the composition of a molecule.
that said, I doubt anyone thinks the middle ages was all exactly as bleak as the worst year in history, because that would negate the reason for having something you could call the worst year in history.
The Middle Ages were bad. They were a period of enforced authoritarian ignorance dominated by the Roman Church, a period which was "dark" because of the distinct lack of written material in Europe after a Greek and Roman period of oceans of insightful written works.
I haven't been exposed to a mythical Renaissance where poor and working people were comfortable, so I don't really need that refuted. I went to school in the 80s, so maybe it was taught that way before or after.
What the Renaissance marked was the beginning of good times through the breaking of the Church in Europe, which allowed proto-atheism and atheist methods to spread. The Plague brought proto-atheism in that, if not actual open disbelief in the Christian God, there was at least a belief that the Roman Church wasn't a good steward of Europe if God had sent something as terrible and universal as plague. This ended up expressed in the Reformation (a movement against the Church citing its selling of indulgences and its tolerance of Jews as reasons it had lost its legitimacy.) The Reformation created a quasi-personal relationship with God (your monarch chose your worship) which in the hands of the lower-middle class preachers of Protestant areas became actual encouragement of a personal relationship with God.
The Peace (of Westphalia) between Protestants and Catholics created a space where atheism could flourish, because as long as it wasn't blatant, it would easily be mistaken for a weird Protestantism (or in Spinoza's case, a weird Judaism.) When the question again became "Why does this happen?" rather than "Why would God make this happen?", something not seen since polytheism, technology lurched, then raced forward.
Of course the sense of ownership and obligation toward the poor dropped with the rise of atheism, along with a middle-class and courtier expansion created by those in the economic position to take advantage of those new tools. A drop in life-expectancy seems as as inevitable as the new philosophers of a secular ethics of the time are impenetrable.
Life expectancy also dropped along with the industrial revolution. But the technological thought introduced with European atheism, and its quick advancement, made it so that even authoritarian societies run by elites could by accident (and a bit of imperialism) raise the living conditions of the Western working class and poor simply through an excess of resources.
Now after 500 years, our working class and poor are more comfortable than peasants in the Middle Ages. That's the good times. Marx and others eventually came up with few decent stabs at a secular ethics. That's good. If we can figure out a way to combine atheism and obligation to others, we've solved civilization.
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Edit: we haven't yet had the sort of disaster that would break liberalism (not in the American sense), although 2008 certainly got us in the ballpark in a way we hadn't been since the early 20th century. The big question is whether a break with liberalism would lead to a new dark age, or if some secular ethics has gained enough consistency and legitimacy to ultimately take over.
Quarantine measures and lockdowns were in fact successfully used against the plague. Sometimes really harsh ones. Like killing people trying to cross the eastern border of some eastern European kingdoms. Or blocking people in their houses if someone had symptoms, like in Mailand.
But Early Middle Ages were pretty bad in a lot of Europe, there is no way around it. The combination of large scale attacks and primitive agricultural technology was deadly.
Last year I read an article by Czech archeologists who excavated two old burial grounds in Southern Moravia. One was dated approximately to 850-950 AD, the other between 1100-1150 AD. They were just a few miles away from each other. Both were peasants' cemeteries. But the average age of the buried adults grew by 11 years in the meantime. That is a big chunk of extra life, caused by "less war" and "more food".