Thomas_More
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When I was on the Yahoo Groups forum the vitriol was so bad that I left the party for several years.
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.
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!All I have to do to see people living as you describe is get a bus across town. I don’t need to travel abroad to see it.
There will be many deaths this winter from cold in this, the “imperial core”, and also suicides by people unable to make ends meet.
And even closer to the core, in the U.S., miles of tent cities of the homeless, freezing to death. And those in the slums not much better off.
I don’t see Putin huddling there, no more than Truss or Peskov, Biden or Lavrov or Hsi.“Or it might just be that there are around 1 billion people living in the collective west. A collective west that is lording it over all the rest.”
I wasn’t aware that I, as one of the one billion of the collective west, was lording it over anyone. I don’t even lord it over my cats. But I see that the one billion, only 1% of whom are capitalists, if that, are, all of us, in TS’s eyes, an enemy to be obliterated in the interest of the Russian ruling class!
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.
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.
Why would I reject the Stone Age etc? I am only rejecting the disproven view that the Middle Ages were a period of ignorance and stagnation between the so-called golden age of ancient Rome and the 15th century Renaissance.
Did you know that the Renaissance reversed the progress of women, and that witch-hunting was a Renaissance invention? Racism too.
Did you know that Rome was never sacked by the Goths, and that it was the Vandals who abolished the bloody Roman “Games”?
Yes, in many ways I consider modern capitalism a far worse dark age than many aspects of the Middle Ages.
I think you will like THE TRAGEDY OF LIBERATION by Dikotter. There is a photo of Chinese youths made to carry an ocean of portraits of Stalin.
Wikipedia:
The Harvard professor Charles Homer Haskins was the first historian to write extensively about a renaissance that ushered in the High Middle Ages starting about 1070. In 1927, he wrote that:
[The 12th century in Europe] was in many respects an age of fresh and vigorous life. The epoch of the Crusades, of the rise of towns, and of the earliest bureaucratic states of the West, it saw the culmination of Romanesque art and the beginnings of Gothic; the emergence of the vernacular literatures; the revival of the Latin classics and of Latin poetry and Roman law; the recovery of Greek science, with its Arabic additions, and of much of Greek philosophy; and the origin of the first European universities. The 12th century left its signature on higher education, on the scholastic philosophy, on European systems of law, on architecture and sculpture, on the liturgical drama, on Latin and vernacular poetry…[7]
THE DARK AGES, AN AGE OF LIGHT.
Amazon:
The Dark Ages have been misunderstood. History has identified the period following the fall of the Roman Empire with a descent into barbarism a terrible time when civilisation stopped. Waldemar Januszczak disagrees. In this landmark 4-part series Waldemar argues that the Dark Ages were a time of great artistic achievement, with new ideas and religions provoking new artistic adventures. He embarks on a fascinating trip across Europe, Africa and Asia, visits the world s most famous collections and discovers hidden artistic gems, all to prove that the Dark Ages were actually an Age of Light’. In the first episode the viewer will discover how Christianity emerged into the Roman Empire as an artistic force in the third and fourth centuries. Waldemar explores how Christian artists drew on images of ancient gods for inspiration, and developed new forms of architecture to contain their art. The second episode is dedicated to the Barbarians . Focusing on the Huns, Vandals and Goths, Waldemar follows each tribe’s journey across Europe, and discovers the incredible art they produced along the way. Along with Christianity the Dark Ages saw the emergence of another vital religion: Islam. This is the focus of Episode Three. Waldemar examines the early artistic explorations of the first Muslims, the development of the mosque, and their scientific achievements. In the final episode Waldemar looks towards the North of Europe. The Carolingians saw themselves as successors to Rome, reflected in their art. Elsewhere, the Vikings were constructing long ships with intricate decoration, and marking their territory with powerful rune stones.
