The Triumph of Christianity (27 page)

Meanwhile in the East, the Ottoman Empire was fully revealed as “the sick man of Europe,” a decrepit relic unable to produce any of the arms needed for its defense, which highlighted the general backwardness of Islamic culture and prompted “seething anger”
⁷⁴
against the West among Muslim intellectuals, eventually leading them to focus on the Crusades.

Thus, current Muslim memories and anger about the Crusades are a twentieth century creation,
⁷⁵
prompted in part by “post–World War I British and French imperialism and the post–World War II creation of the state of Israel.”
⁷⁶
It was the last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire to rule with absolute authority, Abdulhamid II (reign: 1876–1909), who began to refer to European Crusades. This prompted the first Muslim history of the Crusades, published in 1899. In the introduction, its author, Sayyid Ali al-Hariri, noted that “the sovereigns of Europe nowadays attack our Sublime Empire in a manner bearing great resemblance to the deeds of those people in bygone times [the crusaders]. Our most glorious sultan, Abdulhamid II, has rightly remarked that Europe is now carrying out a Crusade against us.”
⁷⁷

This theme was eagerly picked up by Muslim nationalists. “Only Muslim unity could oppose these new crusades, some argued, and the crusading threat became an important theme in the writings of the pan-Islamic movement.”
⁷⁸
Even within the context of Muslim weakness in the face of the modern West, Islamic triumphalism flourished; many proposed that through the Crusades the “savage West... benefited by absorbing [Islam’s] civilized values.” As for crusader effects on Islam, “how could Islam benefit from contacts established with an inferior, backward civilization?”
⁷⁹

Eventually, the brutal, colonizing crusader imagery proved to have such polemical power that it eventually drowned out nearly everything else in the ideological lexicon of Muslim antagonism toward the West, except, of course, for Israel and paranoid tales about the worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

Conclusion

T
HE
C
RUSADES WERE NOT
unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. The Crusades are not a blot on the history of Christianity. No apologies are required.

P
ART IV
Medieval Currents

Chapter Fourteen
The “Dark Ages” and Other Mythical Eras

L
ET US NOW RETURN TO
earlier times and the fall of Rome. For centuries it has been the common wisdom that after the fall of Rome came the
Dark Ages
—many centuries during which ascendant Christianity imposed an era of ignorance and superstition all across Europe. In her long-admired study of medieval philosophers, Anne Fremantle (1909–2002) wrote of “a dark, dismal patch, a sort of dull and dirty chunk of some ten centuries, wedged between the shining days of the golden Greeks... and the brilliant galaxy of light given out jointly by those twin luminaries, the Renaissance and the Reformation.”
¹

The Italian humanist Petrarch (1304 –1374) may have been the first to call “the period stretching from the fall of the Roman Empire until his own age as a time of ‘darkness,’ ”
²
an anti-Christian judgment that has echoed down the centuries. Voltaire (1694 –1778) described this long era as one when “barbarism, superstition, [and] ignorance covered the face of the world.”
³
According to Rousseau (1712–1778), “Europe had relapsed into the barbarism of the earliest ages. The people of this part of the world... lived some centuries ago in a condition worse than ignorance.”
⁴
Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) also proclaimed that the fall of Rome was the “triumph of barbarism and religion.”
⁵
More recently, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) lent his authority to the matter, writing in the illustrated edition of his famous college textbook: “As the central authority of Rome decayed, the lands of the Western Empire began to sink into an era of barbarism during which Europe suffered a general cultural decline. The Dark Ages, as they are called... it is not inappropriate to call these centuries dark, especially if they are set against what came before and what came after.”
⁶

As Russell suggested, the prevailing ignorance during the Dark Ages seems magnified by contrast with the Renaissance
.
Being the French word for “rebirth,” Renaissance identifies the era beginning at the end of the fourteenth century when Europeans rediscovered long-forgotten classical learning, thereby causing new light to break through the prevailing intellectual darkness. According to the standard historical account, the Renaissance occurred because a decline in church control over major northern Italian cities such as Florence
⁷
allowed a revival of classical Greco-Roman culture. Furthermore, this new appreciation for knowledge, especially for scientific knowledge not hobbled by theology, led directly from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment
.
Also known as the “Age of Reason,” the Enlightenment is said to have begun in the sixteenth century when (aided by the Reformation) secular thinkers freed themselves from clerical control and revolutionized both science and philosophy, thereby ushering in the modern world. To quote Bertrand Russell once more: “Enlightenment was essentially a revaluation of independent intellectual activity, aimed quite literally at spreading light where hitherto darkness had prevailed.”
⁸

To sum up: Western history consists of four major eras: 1) classical antiquity, then 2) the Dark Ages when the church dominated, followed by 3) the Renaissance-Enlightenment which led the way to 4) modern times.

For several centuries that has been the fundamental organizing scheme for every textbook devoted to Western history,
⁹
despite the fact that serious historians have known for decades that this scheme is a complete fraud—“an indestructible fossil of self-congratulatory Renaissance humanism.”
¹⁰
It is appropriate to use the term
renaissance
to identify a particular period in the arts when there was renewed interest in classical styles, and to distinguish this period from the Gothic or the Baroque. But it is inappropriate to apply this term to identify the rebirth of progress following the Dark Ages because there
never were any Dark Ages
!

The Myth of the “Dark Ages”

I
RONICALLY, THE MOST BENEFICIAL
factor in the rise of Western civilization was the fall of Rome! Like all of the ancient empires, Rome suffered from chronic power struggles among the ruling elite, but aside from that and chronic border wars and some impressive public works projects, very little happened—change, whether technological or cultural, was so slow as to go nearly unnoticed. This prompted the distinguished Roman engineer Sextus Julius Frontinus (40–103
CE
) to note that “Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further developments.”
¹¹
Instead, as the centuries passed most people continued to live as they always had, “just a notch above barest subsistence... little better off than their oxen.”
¹²
Of course, as much as half of the population of the empire consisted of slaves who, in effect, were oxen. But even most free Romans lived at a bare subsistence level, not because they lacked the potential to achieve a much higher standard of living, but because a predatory ruling elite extracted every ounce of “surplus” production. If all production above the bare minimum needed for survival is seized by the elite, there is no motivation for anyone to produce more. Consequently, despite the fabulous wealth of the elite, Rome was very poor. As E. L. Jones noted, “emperors amassed vast wealth but received incomes that were nevertheless small relative to the immensity of the territories and populations governed.”
¹³

When the collapse of the Roman Empire “released the tax-paying millions... from a paralysing oppression,”
¹⁴
many new technologies began to appear and were rapidly and widely adopted with the result that ordinary people were able to live far better, and, after centuries of decline under Rome, the population began to grow again. No longer were the productive classes bled to sustain the astonishing excesses of the Roman elite, or to erect massive monuments to imperial egos, or to support vast armies to hold Rome’s many colonies in thrall. Instead, human effort and ingenuity turned to better ways to farm, to sail, to transport goods, to conduct business, to build churches, to make war, to educate, and even to play music. But because so many centuries later a number of examples of classical Greek and Roman public grandeur still stand as remarkable ruins, many intellectuals have been prompted to mourn the loss of these “great civilizations.” Many who are fully aware of what this grandeur cost in human suffering have been quite willing even to write-off slavery as merely “the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement.”
¹⁵
To put it plainly, for too long too many historians have been as gullible as tourists, gaping at the monuments, palaces, and conspicuous consumption of Rome, and then drawing invidious comparisons between such “cosmopolitan” places and “provincial” communities such as medieval merchant towns.

In any event, there was no “fall” into “Dark Ages.” Instead, once freed of the bondage of Rome, Europe separated into hundreds of independent “statelets.”
¹⁶
In many of these societies progress and increased production became profitable, and that ushered in “one of the great innovative eras of mankind,” as technology was developed and put into use “on a scale no civilization had previously known.”
¹⁷
In fact, it was during the “Dark Ages” that Europe took the great technological and intellectual leap forward that put it ahead of the rest of the world.
¹⁸
How could historians have so misrepresented things?

In part, the notion that Europe fell into the “Dark Ages” was a hoax perpetrated by very antireligious intellectuals such as Voltaire and Gibbon, who were determined to claim that theirs was the era of “Enlightenment.” Another factor was that intellectuals too often have no interest in anything but literary matters. It is quite true that after the fall of Rome, educated Europeans did not write nearly as elegant Latin as had the best Roman writers. For many, that was sufficient cause to regard this as a backward time. In addition, during this era only limited attention was paid to classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle, and that too was taken as proof of widespread ignorance.

Another factor contributing to the myth of the “Dark Ages” is that in this era there no longer were large cities having hundreds of thousands of residents, as had ancient Rome and Alexandria.
¹⁹
It seemed obvious that high culture could not have been sustained in the small communities of Medieval Europe—in the year 1000 there were only twenty thousand inhabitants in Paris, not many more in London, and Rome had shrunk to fewer than thirty thousand.
²⁰
But perhaps the most important factor in the myth of the “Dark Ages” is the inability of intellectuals to value or even to notice the nuts and bolts of real life. Hence, revolutions in agriculture, weaponry and warfare, nonhuman power, transportation, manufacturing, and commerce went unappreciated. So too did remarkable moral progress. For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the “Renaissance” it was long gone. But what is truly difficult to explain is how the creators of the “Dark Ages” myth could have overlooked what would seem to have been their chief interest: high culture. Nevertheless, they missed or dismissed the enormous progress that took place in music, art, literature, education, and science.

I have written at length elsewhere
²¹
on what truly took place during the mythical era of the “Dark Ages.” Here a summary will suffice.

Progress in Technology

T
HE
R
OMANS MADE LITTLE
use of water or wind power, preferring manual labor performed by slaves. In contrast, an inventory conducted in the ninth century found that one-third of the estates along the Seine River in the area around Paris had water mills, the majority of them on church-owned properties.
²²
Several centuries later there was one mill every seventy feet along this stretch of the river!
²³
Meanwhile across the channel, the
Domesday Book,
compiled in 1086 as a forerunner of the modern census, reported that there were at least 5,624 water-powered mills already operating in England, or one for every fifty families, and this is known to be an undercount.
²⁴
Among many other things, mills such as these mechanized the manufacture of woolen cloth and soon enabled England to dominate the European market.
²⁵
Many dams also were constructed during the “Dark Ages”; one at Toulouse, built around 1120, was more than thirteen hundred feet across and was constructed by driving thousands of giant oak logs into the riverbed to form a front and rear palisade, which then was filled with dirt and stone.
²⁶
In similar fashion, “Dark Age” Europeans excelled at bridge building. Recently, underwater archeologists discovered the timbers that once had supported a bridge more than five hundred feet long across the Shannon River in Ireland. Tree ring evidence revealed that all of these timbers had been felled in 803.
²⁷

During this era, Europeans also harnessed the wind. They not only used windmills to power the same equipment as did water mills; they also used them to reclaim huge portions of what are now Belgium and the Netherlands by pumping out the sea. Tens of thousands of windmills devoted to this task worked day and night throughout most of the “Dark Ages.” Indeed, by late in the twelfth century, western Europe had become so crowded with windmills that owners began to file lawsuits against one another for blocking their wind.
²⁸
(Europeans in this era sustained well-organized courts and a host of lawyers, although the latter may not have amounted to progress.)

Meanwhile, agriculture was revolutionized.
²⁹
First came the shift to a three-field system wherein one third of the productive land was left unplanted each year while continuing to be cultivated (to remove weeds) and fertilized. The result of this renewal of the land was far greater production. In addition, the invention of the heavy plow permitted far better cultivation of the wetter, denser soils north of Italy, and the introduction of the horse-collar permitted the replacement of slow oxen teams with teams of horses, thus at least doubling the speed of cultivation. Selective plant breeding also began in the monasteries resulting in more productive and hardy crops. Altogether these “Dark Ages” achievements fed a larger population much better.

Also of immense importance was the invention of chimneys, which allowed buildings and homes to be heated without needing holes in the roof to let out smoke while letting in rain, snow, and cold air. Another revolutionary innovation was eyeglasses, which were invented in about 1280 and almost immediately went into mass production thus allowing huge numbers of people to lead productive lives who otherwise could not have done so.
³⁰
In 1492, when Columbus set out on his first voyage west, eyeglasses still were known only in Europe.

Prior to the “Dark Ages,” there was no heavy cavalry. Mounted troops did not charge headlong at a gallop, putting the full weight of horse and rider behind a long lance. The reason was the lack of stirrups and a proper saddle. Without stirrups to brace against, a rider attempting to drive home a lance will be thrown off his horse. The ability of a rider to withstand sudden shocks is also greatly increased by a saddle with a very high pommel and cantle—the latter being curved to partly enclose the rider’s hips. It was not Rome or any other warlike empire that produced heavy cavalry: their mounted troops rode on light, almost flat, pad saddles, or even bareback, and they had no stirrups. Consequently, these mounted warriors could only fire bows, throw spears, or swing swords. They could not bowl over their opponents. It was the “barbarous” Franks who, in 732, fielded the first armored knights astride massive horses, and who slaughtered invading Muslim forces on the battlefield of Tours when they charged them behind long lances, secure in their high-backed Norman saddles and braced in their revolutionary stirrups.
³¹
Nearly four centuries later, when the knights of Europe confronted Muslim armies in the Holy Land, nothing had changed. The crusaders still were the only ones with stirrups and adequate saddles. They also were the only ones with crossbows.