Posted on 10/28/2016 8:01:09 AM PDT by Lorianne
Once dissed as The Dark Ages, the Medieval Era is more properly viewed as a successful adaptation to the challenges of the post-Western Roman Empire era. The decline of the Western Roman Empire was the result of a constellation of challenges, including (but not limited to) massive new incursions of powerful Germanic tribes, a widening chasm between the Western and the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), plague, an onerous tax burden on the non-elite classes, weak leadership, the dominance of a self-serving elite (sound familiar?) and last but not least, the expansion of an unproductive rabble in Rome that had to be bribed with increasingly costly Bread and Circuses.
In effect, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire ran out of time and money.The Grand Strategy, successful for hundreds of years, relied heavily on persuading "barbarian" tribes to join the Roman system for the commercial and security benefits. This process of integration worked because it was backed by the threat of destruction by military force.
The Empire maintained relatively modest military forces given its vast territory, but its road system and fleet enabled relatively rapid concentration of force to counter an invasion. It also maintained extensive fortifications along active borders.
All of this required substantial tax revenues, manpower and effective leadership, not just for fortifications, the army, roads and the fleet, but to maintain the commercial and political benefits offered to "barbarians" who chose integration in the Empire.
Once the military threats proliferated and the benefits of Imperial membership eroded, the Grand Strategy was unable to maintain the integrity of the Imperial borders.
As tax revenues and the bureaucracy they supported imploded, security declined, reducing trade and communications. This unvirtuous cycle fed on itself: reduced trade led to reduced tax revenues which led to phantom legions that were still listed on the bureaucratic ledgers but which no longer had any troops.
The collapse of the Western Empire was a process, not an event. Key organizational infrastructures that endured through the Medieval era--for example, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian Churches--gained traction in the waning centuries of the Western Empire.
Monasteries offered islands of scholarship and literacy and in many cases offered security via fortifications.
As trade diminished along with secure trade routes, self-reliance became the order of the day outside the borders of the Byzantine and Persian empires.
Though political leadership shifted with the latest invasion from the steppes of Eurasia, the two branches of Christendom slowly converted many invading groups or consolidated existing Christian powers into alliances that bound together diverse groups and proto-states.
These alliances were typically contingent and temporary, as today's ally became tomorrow's enemy, or vice versa. Despite the shifting loyalties of constant invasion and warfare, the Byzantine Empire endured and Charlemagne (and others) in Western Europe established the fractured but still effective Holy Roman Empire.
Much was lost when the Western Roman Empire collapsed, but islands of literacy, learning and security arose despite the constant conflicts and threats of invasion. Venice offers one example of a small city securing trade routes with commercial centers that then funded a regional empire.
The tidiness of the old Empire could not be reinstated. The adaptations were as messy and untidy as the challenges that swept in from the steppes and forests.
So please don't diss the Dark Ages. Yes, the Roman baths, coliseums and political /social order fell into disrepair, but new ways of coping emerged that were as contingent and untidy as the era's multiple challenges.
New modes of production and new social /political orders do not arise fully formed. They are pieced together by trial and error and numerous cycles of adaptation, innovation and failure.
bkmk
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Also, we forget that from the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire to the 1300’s, Europe experienced warmer than usual summers—and as such, agricultural production stayed stable, which meant starvation was not an issue.
The real problem is that leftists and anti-christian bigots have seized acadamia and have revised the history to blame everything on Christianity, particularly the catholic church and to make Europe and eventually America to be the worlds sewer rather than blaming barbarian plundering, corrupt politics in Rome. Add to this, despotic feudal lords and chieftains that made them selves above the law and God and the church, prevailing ignorance and superstition in medieval peasants along with man's sinful nature.
The liberals would make out Christianity and the west to be the cancer of the world while elevating every other culture and religion especially Islam.
GREAT read. Very prescient.
“Rome wasn’t sacked in a day” - P2
Hmmm. Trade as the antidote to self-reliance... Things just became clearer to me.
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There’s a French historian named Régine Pernoud who’s written a number of excellent books about the Middle Ages; most of them are available in English. The best is “Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths.” She’s also written bios of Jeanne d’Arc, Hildegarde de Bingen, the Crusaders, Templars, etc.
dark ages matter
The medieval system of serfdom establish by Charlemagne and the Franks has lasting effects to this day. Here is a cool site I found about the “Hajnal line”. This line marks the furthest eastward expansion of the Frankish system of serfdom, and to this day, areas east and west of the line display different patterns when it comes to marriage, child rearing, education levels, and many other important factors in society:
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-on-the-hajnal-line/
It’s amazing how much disinformation one learns in school. We were told not much happened except the terror of the Vikings in the Dark Ages. As an adult reading on my own I learned that there were so many pivotal events in the Dark Ages. Charles Martel stopped the barbarians Islamics in France for one. But there were many accomplishments for mankind and we actually know a fair bit about that time period.
The article never mentions the Muslims. It was the Muslim invasions that destroyed much of “classic” civilization, which was making a comeback in the 6th century.
Muslims destroy the productive areas in North Africa, the Middle East, and into Asia.
See Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited
https://www.amazon.com/Mohammed-Charlemagne-Revisited-History-Controversy/dp/0578094185
European lost most literacy because they lost access to cheap writing material, papyrus. They had to use parchment, about 100X as expensive.
I see a big factor in the decline and fall of the western and eastern Roman empires being the decline of the small independent farms which had provided the manpower for the citizen army.
In the west, the influx of slaves into Italy put the small farms out of business.
In the east, the growth of large estates in Anatolia did the same to the farmers there.
That’s the parallel to the decline of the middle class in the US.
“The article never mentions the Muslims.”
Yeah, I noticed that and you beat me to the post noting such. Kind of erodes the credibility of the author and article...
“The article never mentions the Muslims.”
Yeah, I noticed that and you beat me to the post noting such. Kind of erodes the credibility of the author and article...
To be fair, the “standard model” of the middle ages ignores the enormous impact of the Muslim conquests and continuous warfare/piracy in the Mediterranean.
The Mohammed v. Charlemagne is a more recent, and I think, does a much better explanation of what happened than the “standard model” does.
The “standard model” was developed whil anti-Christian sentiment was growing, and intellectual wanted to show that “all religions are equal” or superior to, Christianity. So the just ignored evidence to the opposite.
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