Posted on 08/09/2006 5:44:39 AM PDT by Marius3188
Read the book and say that!!
The world would be a lot better place without white men, I'll tell you that, them and their evil science and their evil industry and their evil medicine. Why, I'd rather be a naked, hunting-gathering savage, with a life span of 24 years, than have white men around, yessiree! </sarc>
Check your assumptions. The Franks weren't a "small group", weren't "uncivilized", and weren't "wandering" anywhere. They were the native population, descended from the Gauls, with a long history as a Kingdom under the Merovingians.
What's amazing is that a small group of uncivilized barbarians out of Arabia could destroy, subjugate and co-opt the heart and cradle of Christianity, from Anatolia through Alexandria.
And, best of all, we here at FR are NOT embarrassed to use the term "DARK AGES" because, as it happens, the climatological disaster that occurred circa 538AD actually darkened the skies.
The term doesn't derive from some climatological occurence. It derives from Victorian era historians, like Gibbons, who romanticized the Roman empire. Well, guess what? The Roman empire never "fell". It simply broke up into successor states and dwindled away, starting with Byzantium. and ending with the Visigoths absorbing the pitiful remains. In fact, one of Charlemagne's claims to authority was as the rightful successor to Rome, by authority of the Pope.
It's not a matter of "glorifying" the Franks; it's a matter of giving them, and the rest of early medieval Europeans their due. There wasn't some blank spot located between Rome and the Crusades, where time stood still.
BTW, there was no "blank spot" either ~ just very few people. And, according to contemporary accounts the skies were noticeably darker and the Sun was always red.
According to the Bretons their first forays into Brittany (as they fled Brittain to escape the invading Angles and Saxons) revealed that no one lived there.
Their own traditions were that people lived there ~ but, alas, Merlin was forced to replant all the vinyards since without people domesticated grapes had disappeared from even the Breton march state now known as the county of Beaujolais.
I'd just bet you are one of those people who continues to believe that all that happened was the fall of Rome. In reality, Rome fell nearly a century before this event. People North of Rome began having a very difficult time making a living and finding enough to eat. Virtually every burnable thing was consumed by fires as folks sought to get warm and evade death.
To the South they had the Plague of Justinian.
Now, about the handful of Arabs, they were far from being uncivilized or few in number. In fact, the early Moslems readily converted the population of Petra and drew on the largest extant population base in the Middle East (outside of the city of Byzantium).
They also paid salaries to Byzantine armies who converted to Islam en masse.
Maybe so. Wiki attributes the term to Plutarch. But he still used it as a pejorative comparison to the glory of Classical Rome. The article goes on to restate my position: that "Most modern historians dismiss the notion that the era was a "Dark Age" by pointing out that this idea was based on ignorance of the period combined with popular stereotypes: many previous authors would simply assume that the era was a dismal time of violence and stagnation and use this assumption to prove itself."
It has nothing to do with the weather or population.
Were you aware that the Welsh annals of the kings (of the Britons) which contain all that marvelous stuff about King Arthur also have an accounting of the initial stages of the Dark Ages ~ right there about 538-540 AD too ~ crops failed, it got cold, trees lost their leaves, people starved, the whole land was laid waste.
And that's the good part.
Bet you thought those guys were telling fairy tales.
Modern historians are, at best, a tertiary source, particularly when it comes to comparing their "opinions" against primary facts, to wit, tree rings.
So, clear your mind of all those "modern historians say" cobwebs and accept the fact that modern science tells us how it happened even if it cannot yet differentiate between the breakup of a comet and an explosion of Krakatoa.
Bill Bennett's book "America The Last Best Hope" says Columbus was a great man, but the last thirteen years of his life "detracted" from his accomplishments.
You say inconsequential and 50 years old..... the topic of the thread would indicate it was prescient.
The Catholic Church was drug through the Inquisitional mud.....is that the problem?
As everybody knows the Galicians controlled ALL of the North Coast and most of the West Coast of the Iberian peninsula. Celt-Iberians controlled the interior. A variety of other people controlled other sites, and depending on the ebb and flow of fortune and disease, different regions dominated at different times.
However, the use of the word "Spain" is an affectation in the English language that allows us to refer to what is quite clearly a socio-political region as well as a geographical expression.
You can call it Iberia or whatever you wish, but we all know where it's at.
And no, the Visigothic Kingdoms weren't really serious entitites ~ Galicia, though was, as were the three states founded by King San Cho Noe I ~ Castile, Leon and Carvajal.
Together, through time, those three states wrested "Spain" from the hands of the Moors and others, and all of that was done without the assistance of the English.
Who referred to the "King of Spain"? I refered to the "Governor General".
No, it doesn't. It has to do with denigrating the period in comparison to Classical Rome. The concept you seem to have of "conditions were so primitive outside of Spain that I doubt "Europeans", as a whole, could come to a resolve about anything other than building more dongeons" is simply in error.
The idea of five hard years in the mid-500s determining what the Franks were doing in 730 is silly. A longer "small ice age" in the 16th through 18th centuries didn't stop the Renaissance and Enlightenment, nor did the massive die off of population in the plague years stop late Medieval civilization. In both cases the hardships spurred new social development.
It's not a "mini ice age" Fur Shur.
He was a white male....so he had to be a bad guy..
The Chinese got off the dime faster ~ only took them 300 years to do a fundamental economic recovery.
Boys at Mecca were virtually untouched by the whole thing, but Byzantium seems to have had one serious economic catastrophe for about 80 years.
Yup, most of Europe was pretty much like Africa circa 1300 ~ but even worse ~ the only folks left were those who lived on or very near the ocean; e.g. the Friesians, the Irish, the coastal Britons, the Sa'ami, the Romans, etc.
It took quite a while to repopulate the Continent and retrieve civilization from the ruins.
Excuse me. Post number 97- the "Moslem governor of Spain" There was no such place.
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