Members need to revise their old “medieval bad, Renaissance good” prejudice.
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On the Enlightenment, Wez, I don’t see it as an awakening from medieval attitudes but from early modern attitudes, namely the religious fanaticism and oppression of the 16th and 17th centuries.
Too many people lump these dark times (witch-hunts, religious wars) with the long-gone Middle Ages, which the early modern period had destroyed the best of and made worse the worst of.The Enlightenment was important for breaking the power of the Counter-Reformation Church and producing so many materialist thinkers. These thinkers may have been bourgeois or aristocratic, but so what? Only a fool would claim that their class position invalidates materialist logic.
Yes YMS. We must think in terms of the world rather than of a closeted Europe, which was in fact never the case.
From the time of the Great Schism in 1054, western Europe continued to change. The Age of Chivalry is often dismissed as an adventure of the feudal ruling class alone, but it nonetheless marked a break with purely religious thinking. This did not happen in the lands ruled by the Byzantine Church and emperors and, where Eastern Christendom fossilized, Western Christendom had embarked upon transformation in the realm of both material change and ideas.The medieval explorers and travellers are largely ignored, except for Marco Polo, by our conventional education, in favour of the later early modern travellers whose purpose was of colonialism and conquest. This was not the case of the medieval travellers to the Far East. Their priority was firstly to become allies and friends of the Mongols (who had sacked Poland before vanishing as fast as they had appeared) and so forestall Europe becoming the Khan’s next victim. Polo was one in a constant stream, both ways, along the Silk Road. And also by sea. Franciscan friars reached Sumatra, Java, Vietnam, Borneo, and their friaries peppered the coast of Yuan Dynasty China, all by the early 1300s. Peking had a Catholic archbishop by that time, whilst Chinese Nestorian monks travelled in the opposite direction, one meeting king Edward I of England at Bordeaux before travelling on to Rome.
TM – Do you not believe that there was a loss of material culture in Europe after the fall of the western Roman Empire? An example of this is the crusaders’ lack of medical knowledge compared with that of their Muslim opponents? Also didn’t the crusaders see the Mongols as an incarnation of ‘Prester John’ who would save the Kingdom of Outremer?
Prester John stories were very popular but there was real fear of the Mongols too. The interesting thing is that we don’t see any racism. Perceived differences are purely religious, and that of course was true of the Crusades, but colour didn’t come into it.
The Crusades were bloody, and there can be no doubt that it was better to fall into Saladin’s hands than the Latins’. Yet there were customs which are less well known.
The Templars in Jerusalem reserved space for Muslims to worship. It was also forbidden to mock any Muslim, and soldiers were subject to punishment for doing so.
There was more distrust for Greek Christians, who were schismatics.Of course there was a loss of material culture at the fall of the old Roman empire, baths for instance. The Crusades in fact brought into western christendom Arab knowledge, but so did the 12th century renaissance, via the Moorish kingdoms of Spain. The monasteries gave us the codex, the spined book, which at last freed readers from the inconveniences of the ancient scroll. Volumes could be bigger. They also gave us minuscule script, instead of having to write always in capitals, and separated words.
Knowledge that was lost was regained, medical knowledge too. The 16th century reformation lost us a lot more than the fall of Rome did!By far the greatest loss was the destruction of the Alexandrian library and other Eastern libraries, but you cannot lay this at the door of western christendom or the Middle Ages.
https://www.arabnews.com/node/225932
Who destroyed the library at Alexandria ?
https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria
The burning of Rome was blamed on an emperor and it has been discovered that it was done by the Christian leaders and one of them was Paul and he was a member of the Herodían family and they were looking for him like a criminal that is the reason why they killed, they did not kill him because he was a Christian
We also have to specify what we mean by the fall of the Roman Empire. For one thing, it was already a Christian empire. Paganism was outlawed by Theodosius.
As far as Rome was concerned, the capital was moved to Byzantium by Constantine. Are we to suggest that the ferocious police state of Byzantium was “civilization”, and the migratory tribes that captured western Europe were “barbarians”?If the fifth century marked the “fall of civilisation” there were very many who would rightly have cried GOOD! Thank goodness Rome is over!
In the next century the civilised sociopaths Justinian and Theodora attempted the reconquest, for Roman “civilisation”, of the western Mediterranean … And Procopius tells us what they were like!
Capitalism at the very beginning had very advanced thinkers and most of them came from the Enlightenment period
It was St. Cyril of Alexandria who stirred the Christians to attack the library and kill Hypatia.
By that time the basic principles of the primitive christians did not exist any longer
Engels had a different opinion about the Primitive Christians. I met several Jesuit fathers who had the same principles of the Primitive christians
It’s also worth thinking about things like the Central African kingdoms:
Such as the Empire of Ghana or the Kanem-Bornu Empire, etc. which were sophisticated polities with iron working. They were not, contrary to the European mythology of the ‘Dark Continent’ a far away mysterious place, the spread of Islam shows the extent to which they were connected with other parts of the world (famously, a Ghanaian Emperor making Haj trashed the then world economy he brought so much gold with him).I remember Basil Davidson’s series AFRICA in the 1980s, which was excellent.
The idea of the “dark continent” was a later, colonialist, image. Ethiopia, as a Christian country, was very much part of christendom’s orbit. There were Nubian crusaders fighting alongside Richard Coeur de lion, namely one who was canonised by the pope.
North Africa, of course, as part of the Roman Empire, was very much part of Europe’s knowledge and experience. St. Augustine was African. Egypt was an important contributor to “Dark Age” theological disputation, and Alexandria was (still is, in fact) a papacy.
Writers such as the 12th century knight Wolfram Von Eschenbach, the first European novelist in the proper sense, show us the equality between Christian and Muslim nobles. They regarded each other as equals, and, if often enemies, they were no more so than Christian lords often were to one another. The code of chivalry operated across the religious divide, and there is romantic love between the sexes of both.
Eschenbach’s hero Gahmuret fights for a north African Muslim princess against Christian forces attacking her lands and has a child with her, who joins King Arthur’s court. Another hero, Willehalm’s sweetheart is a Muslim queen.
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