Dark ages

Factual Questions
41

This is an interesting thread and I believe that many of the issues brought forth, especially by Manda JO, are important. I would also like to add another potential date to the transition from the “Dark Ages” to the “Middle Ages.”

After the wave of plagues and invasions of the 6th through 10th centuries, the population of Europe slowly began to rebound. The result, eventually, was a return to a more urban form of life. The growth of towns and eventually cities implied the concentration of wealth in discrete areas rather than being held in land or being dispersed widely throughout Europe.

Cities required craftsmen and craftsmen eventually developed guilds who began to exchange information and people between towns. Also, towns and cities provided merchants with relatively safe locations for them to concentrate there wealth, thereby facilitating the resurgence of long distance trade and the development of proto-banking institutions in places like Italy and the Lowlands.

Additionally, the growth of cities allowed universities to develop. Although such institiutions were originally ecclesiastical in nature, they eventually took on an urban, guild-like cast. Eventually, most of the scholars they produced served as bureaucrats in the courts of developing principalities in Europe, rather than as clergy. The implication is that no longer did the church have a monopoly on the mysteries of literacy and the science.

Finally, I think that towns and cities allowed people who lived there to develop a sense of identitity with their fellow citizens that existed virtually nowhere in Europe in the “Dark Ages.” I think that it is the early identification with the town that eventually becomes (many centuries later, of course) European nationalism.

42

Paradocs said:

I have no arguement with that. The only point I had been disputing was the seemingly common supposition that during the Middle Ages the Church- as an institution- had a general, and intentional policy of suppressing intellectual inquiry in areas other than theology,(well in politics too if it was counter to the Church’s interests).

By no means am I trying to be an apologist for the Church, nor to suggest that the time period was a heyday of scientific achievement. Your point regarding the consequences of elevating theology to “The Queen of Sciences” is certainly valid, but those consequences were surely an unintended byproduct of misplaced priorities and not a deliberately sought goal.

And yet some did- without being suppressed by the Church.

Yes again- if you mean “quite apart from supposed overt suppression of science.”

Coincidently, I’ve just started reading Niles Eldredge’s The Triumph of Evolution. He says in his introduction “I agree my colleague Martha Wertheim is right when she says that in Western culture, historically speaking, the supposed warfare between science and religion has been greatly exaggerated.” And I believe an examination of the historical record supports Eldredge and Wertheim. As I’ve said before, the belief that when the Church was in the saddle it must have been deliberately suppressing Science was the result of trying to read back into the Middle Ages an aspect of the Church which occurred at a later date.

43

Tomndebb, I submit that your views of historical cause/effect and motivation/explanation are a little obscure. I can’t tell if you differentiate at all between the motive for an action and the public explanation for it. For example, in your comment about Socrates you say:

I agree that Plato spun some propaganda into the entire issue, which is why I wrote Socrates/Plato in my post above, and not merely Socrates. The explanation quoted above is reflective of the official and simplistic Athenian explanation, except that Athens had a problem with at least two of Socrates’s “students”, not just one. Socrates was nailed because the Democrats despised the “students” Critias and Alcibiades, and because they saw the accusation as an opportunity to rid themselves of the most dangerous critic of democracy in ancient Greece. Dangerous not because of his power or influence, but because of his eloquence.

It is ridiculous to believe that Socrates was condemned for any other reason, especially since, at the risk of his own life, he did not directly support any uprising and he also disobeyed an order from Critias; it is obvious, and it was more than obvious at the time, that Socrates was not a power-hungry, greedy, or even evil man. The ambitions of any of his students were merely poor excuses to remove Socrates, and not reasons for trial–witness the resistance in the population of Athens at his condemnation. This sort of indirect judgement–a farcical trial–is similar to the Galileo case. The difference is that Socrates chose one path (stand fast), and Galileo the other (recant). Obviously, both choices have their merits.

Now back to Galileo. I don’t think anyone honestly believes that Galileo was accused of anything other than heresy for treating the Heliocentric theory seriously. Galileo’s condemnation was a complete travesty, and even the Church later admitted its errors in this case. It was not a case of Galileo versus the Pope and others he insulted; it was strictly speaking a case of Science versus Doctrine. It took a while, but the Church eventually realized that hanging on to doctrine by the use of such force is inappropriate and does not produce valid arguments for truth. If that sounds doubtful after this long thread, I would like to quote the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the issue:

“Galileo’s own views on the relationship between scientific research and biblical interpretation have been endorsed by the Vatican since 1893. In 1979 Pope John Paul II reiterated this view and stated that Galileo had suffered injustice at the hands of the church. A statement by the pope before the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1992 is interpreted by some as a rehabilitation of Galileo.”

The Church opensly admits that the nature of this case was foul and that Galileo’s views on scientific research were correct. Today, the Christian Church is actually quite good at acknowledging its mistakes, having lost its medieval fierceness and power-grip. Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic & Copernican was eventually removed from the Vatican’s list of forbidden books in 1835.

Galileo (Science) was right, the Doctrine was wrong, and the Doctrine (in this case the Church officials) punished him unjustly for pursuing paths dangerous to Doctrine. If they had wanted to punish him for scientific inaccuracy why did they bother with the whole extended heresy spiel? Sounds reasonably similar to the Socrates/Plato situation to me.

About the dark Ages (and it’s about time): I will agree with most others in this forum that this discussion is about the Dark Ages and why they were dark, and not about Galileo, who did not quite live in the Dark Ages. However, as mentioned above, the Church exercised considerable power on several aspects of life, and in my opinion this power was most obvious in the case against Galileo. The other aspects included medicine: the Church was responsible for perpetuating various superstitions about healing, such as “it’s God, angels, Prayer, and Holy men that will heal, not medicine”. The medical achievements of Christian Europeans as a population, caught in the vice of the Church, were really not very impressive prior to the 1500s (by which time, lo and behold, the grip of the Church was no longer fully able to contain the march of controversial progress.

In addition to the medical/scientific argument, the Church had its own taxation system and was downright predatory when it came to procuring land. The ruler was seldom someone interested in the lower classes, and they were seen mostly as the producers of food & goods as well as the people the tax-man went to visit when the coffers needed to be filled. Add to this the unfavourable conditions of the time, such as the outbreaks of various plagues, the lack of available learning institutions, the absence of well-balanced and working governments, the history of European warfare, and the “mini ice-age”, and it is easy to see why Europeans were in quite a problem for so long.

44

good discussion. I also appreciate the corrections to my generalized statements. I certainly do understand that history is more complex than commonly understood. It’s good to get out the details. (to this SD inquisition :), I confess that my forte is engineering/astronomy/science, not history)

One quick question…didn’t the Church also include Galileo’s works on the list of “do-not-read-or-else-burn-in-hell” for centuries?

45

and

Sorry, I disagree with these statements.

First, there was no Doctrine that Galileo violated. This has been pointed out by church officials (including dissenting judges at the trial). The statement that the trial was a travesty is accurate, because it was a political trial, not because it pitted religion against science. The heresy issue was the club that Galileo’s political opponents used to beat him. The church did not ever charge anyone else who published on the subject with heresy, only Galileo.

Secondly, Galileo was not “right” in the sense that he had proved his point. The church had already said that it would accept his heliocentric theory as a valid hypothesis in competition with the Ptolemaic geocentric theory. Galileo insisted that his theory be declared True when he could not prove it. (Look again at my statment regarding Continental Drift. We now have a sufficently detailed explanation of (and evidence for) Plate Tectonics that allows us to say that Continental Drift occurs. In 1950, we did not have either the Plate Tectonic theory or sufficient evidence of actual drift. Regardless that we now know that Continental Drift occurs, it would have been irresponsible to teach Continental Drift as Truth in 1950 because it had not been proved. Galileo took the position that he could stand in 1950 (1632) and demand that Continental Drift (heliocentrism) be taught, despite the fact that he had no proofs and none would be available for another 15-20 (206) years.)
Phobos, Galileo’s publication on the heliocentric theory was placed on the Index Librorum Proscriptorum in 1633 and removed from it in 1741. The Index is a list of books that are not to be disemenated to the general public for fear of their corrupting influence, although scholars are still allowed to read them “if they are careful.” It’s a bad idea and the rules regarding the Index were dropped in the early 1970’s (athough there is some clerk in the Vatican who maintains a list of books that ought to be on it).

46

A list of forbidden books? Sure sounds like suppression to me.

Let’s not suppress history as well as science, lest we fail to learn from past mistakes.

47

Abe, I think you are far too cynical about the role of the church in the lives of medieval people. Additionally, I feel you are guilty of analyzing historical societies and institutions with twentieth century standards and from a twentieth century perspective that I don’t feel is appropriate. The principal concern of the church in the Middle Ages, after all, was to minister to the soul of the individual not to the body. Mortal life was transient, but the soul would live forever be it in heaven or hell. And in a time and place where conditions for life could be extrordinarily tenuous, what little solace people might get in life might well have come from the belief that their soul might live forever in bliss in heaven.

That may not be something that I believe or that you believe, but to denigrate it is unfair. The medieval Church included lay clerics who may not have been entirely literate, they may not have been as sophisticated in their interpretations of the scriptures as you or as theocrats making church “Doctrine,” but they were on the front lines of saving immortal souls. That sort of commitment earns my respect, at least.

I am also not convinced that the church and “rulers” had a predatory approach to the acquisition of land and to taxation. In those limited areas in which feudalism existed, the church gained land according to fairly standard feudal bonds (the principal difference being that clerics were not obligated to provide military assistance). In such societies, peasants were obligated to overlords for portions of their crop yields; in return they were given protection and a ready-made avenue for the resolution of disputes. The brimming coffers filled with coin to which you allude, rarely existed before the early modern period and by then they were quickly depleted by war. Good feudal administrators, be they lay or ecclesiastical, had a decided interest in insuring that areas over which they had fealty remain healthy; it did not pay to tax a village into oblivion. Although paying taxes sucked as much 1000 years ago as it does today, I would argue that the peasantry received something for the crops they returned to overlords.

Finally, I date the “Mini-ice Age,” plagues that swept through Europe in the 14th through 18th centuries and the rape of the countryside as a result of European warfare to well after the end of the “Dark Ages.” All occurred after the establishment of the Hanseatic League, the voyages of Marco Polo to China, the establishment of regular overseas trade between the Mediterranean and northern Europe and the foundings of the Sorbonne, Oxford, Cambridge, and the Universities of Heidelberg, Bologna and Salamanca. I do not think it is appropriate to characterize Europe after 1200 or so as an intellectual backwater.

48

Or’n’ry Oscar wrote:

The first outbreak of the Plague in Europe was during the 6th century. See the link below:

http://history.idbsu.edu/westciv/plague/02.htm

As for warfare, I suspect Abe was referring to the warfare waged by the various Germanic tribes and other “barbarian hordes” against the remnants of the Roman Empire, as well as the subsequent wars among the various chieftans of those tribes. Viking depredations deserve a mention as well.

I think you are right about the so-called “Little Ice Age,” which, IIRC, hit around the turn of the 16th century.

49

Spoke,

I agree that the plague first swept through Europe in the 6th century. However, between then and the 14th century, it was not a great problem in Europe. That is one of the reasons that its return in the 14th proved so lethal.

I will grant that Vikings and various other invaders affected some parts of Europe during the “Dark Ages.” Their effects, in terms of wide ranging destruction of crops and killing are minimal when compared to the damage done later, though. During the Italian wars, the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War and various other wars of religion during the early modern period, larger organized, institutionalized armies using gunpowder weapons caused significant measurable population declines that are not comparable to the age of the Vikings.

I stick with my date for the Little Ice Age. Brian Fagan has recently evaluated much of the literature in Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations, esp. pp. 181-201.

50

Abe, I wasn’t aware that monogamy would give you less chances to have sons. :slight_smile:

Having a son myself, and having one wife, I didn’t find it hard. It’s not too difficult, really.

51

I just wanted to mention that in the early mddle ages/dark ages many monastaries/bishoprics were actually enfeoffed to local lords; Viking invaders headed to the monastries as soon as they hit land, and the weak church (it was very decentralized in the early middle ages) could not defend them. Thus, there was a long period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Cluniac Reforms of the 10th century when each little part of “the church” was more or less subjugated to the local thug, I mean Lord. Although many documents urging Papal supremacy were circulated at this time, the truth ws that even the papcy was a babble passed around amoiung the two or three leading families of Rome, and certainly had no real imediate influence outside of Italy. The Papacy, and thus “the church” did not really begin to consolidate its power until the Ottonians and the Investiture crisis. In the Dark Ages it was disunified and incapable of suppressing anything effectivly.

I would recomend Brian Tierney’s Western Europe in the Middle Ages" as an excellent introduction to this period. it is the widley accepted upper university-level textbook for the period, although I feel compelled to mention that my history professor is curredtly working with another major textbook publisher to put out a competing book, which should be avalible in a year or so.

52

I agree. The church has never been the ultimate bastion of academic freedom or of freedom of expression. There are far too many examples of the church preventing discussion or silencing people (sometimes through horrible torture or its threat).

However, in a complete reading of history, I do not find support for the simplistic equation church=suppression=ignorance that is sometimes expressed. I doubt that many posters who have participated in the Galileo discussion, here, are prepared to change their opinions. (I’m guilty as charged.) However, the very fact that there are fairly divergent views on both the interpretations and even of the facts of the case regarding Galileo should indicate that simplistic answers are probably incomplete, at best.

53

Saint Zero said:

While I discount the likelihood of the hypothesis Abe cited, the premise you question is certainly valid. With the childhood mortality of those times it was not uncommon for a landholder to have no sons survive him. Having legitimate heirs by other wives would have reduced the odds of that happening. However, as I understand it, it would have been the King who claimed the land in most cases of a childless landholder.

54

Remember that many laws of inheritance stated explicitly that only a male heir could inherit (or even hold) property. If there was no male heir, the Church was often able to claim the lands of the deceased for a higher good. As far as I know the ruler did not have precedence by law on this point, but I am sure that many rulers could have used force to obtain these freed-up lands. In theory, the lands went to the Church. In practice, well, I wasn’t there!

It was years ago in an anthropology book where I first came across the hypothesis that the Church pushed for strict monogamy around the 3rd and 4th Centuries (as I recall) in order to snap up the lands of property owners who died without suitable male heirs. Male infants have always had a higher mortality rate throughout the ages than female infants (this is still true today). Having only one wife effectively cuts down on the chances of producing a surviving male heir. Having three wives on the other hand, would multiply by three your chances of having at least one surviving male heir.

55

I don’t want to sound like the Antichrist here, and I certainly do not contest the fact that the majority of the Church must have been well-intentioned clerics busy helping people, transcribing books, or tending their gardens (of course, there were the fanatics, the zealots, the war-crazy, the power-hungry, the Templars, Hospitallers, etc. as well…). My real problem lies with the excessive power wielded by the Church on a political level, and hence in the upper echeleons of Church organizations. Why should the Church have been allowed to go after Galileo at all? Why were so many of the top officials of the Church so rich for so long? Why the hell were the various Inquisitions ever allowed to take place? The answer seems to be “Excessive power”.

As far as I am concerned, and I agree that there are obviously many opinions on this, Galileo proved with his telescope and calculations what Copernicus proved with his remarkable intuition and intelligence.

Copernicus: his heliocentric theory accounted not only for the apparent motion of the sun, which is otherwise difficult to reconcile with what the Greeks already knew about the sphericity of the Earth and astronomy, but it also accounted for the curious “retrograde” orbits of some Planets. Without heliocentrism the planets would have been wobbling back and forth on their paths in a very curious manner.

Galileo: When he aimed his telescope at Jupiter and observed that system, with its orbiting moons, he was able to devise the workings and plausibilities of the greater system that Copernicus had envisioned. Then, again with his telescope, he discovered the phases of Venus, which could only be explained sensibly by the use of a heliocentric system. He also made several important discoveries using the pendulum method. This evidence together with the work of Copernicus and further calculations forms a pretty damn good case for heliocentrism–yet it was all rejected by the Church for as long as Galileo lived and a good while after he died.

This strikes me as a precursor to the O.J. Simpson trial: wasn’t it ridiculous how, in spite of all the evidence provided, the O.J. defense kept arguing that more evidence was needed? How much more evidence did the Church need before admitting defeat in the argument?? Wait–Doctrine might be involved here, that same beast that decided you were a witch if you floated in a pond, and innocent if you drowned?

The issue of stellar parallax is a particularly obnoxious one to raise, because stellar parallax was not observable at the time of Galileo.

Lunar parallax was observed and calculated in 190-150 BC.

Solar Parallax was not observed with any reasonable accuracy until 1672!!

Stellar Parallax was practically a lost cause until the introduction of the photographic method in 1903! Wasn’t the Church asking a bit too much of Galileo in 1633??? To observe stellar parallax two things are required: an accurate and powerful telescope, and a sufficiently wide baseline. The telescope Galileo had was not sufficiently accurate nor powerful. The Church’s requirement of stellar parallax was an O.J. Simpsonism, a term I coined 2 seconds ago and which means: “an excessive and unnecessary request for evidence that, owing to difficulty or impracticality in gathering the evidence, may affect a debate along lines planned by the party making the request”.

Galileo filled many of his books with calculations derived from a large number of thought and real experiments that prove his points. This point was contested, but eventually proved when Galileo’s notes were found. He wrote mathematical assertions in his book and avoided writing about many of the experiments themselves because in his day mathematics was already one of the most assertive scientific languages. The Church was presented with all the proof required to make at least a preliminary hypothesis, but someone in the Church organization had made a decision on Doctrine before Galileo put pen to paper. Do we need to blame the Church as a whole if the actions were those of a handful of men, as could be possible? That depends on how accountable the Church is for the actions of its more powerful members–I for one believe the Church should be accountable, especially after it failed to do anything about this travesty for several years.

Finally, very recently in this Century, the church formally admitted its error in forcing Galileo to deny the evidence of his own senses. The Church employed the wrong methods, and they acknowledged it. I’m not sure where the anti-Galileo apologies are coming from, but they do not seem to be coming directly from the Church, the body that has the most records on its activities and that has already admitted its errors. Galileo was not endowed with a perfect character but his experiments, calculations, and conclusions were certainly not incorrect or inconclusive. They were merely in need of some refinement.

After having examined a number of sources as well as many of the very illuminating posts on this thread, my conclusion remains: in the Galileo issue the church was most definitely guilty of suppressing valid science.

PS: Apologies for my blunder concerning the Mini Ice Age; it did indeed start in the 1500s or thereabouts, and not earlier.

56

I think Manda JO raises a valid point here. It is my impression that during the Dark Ages the Catholic church was not yet powerful enough or centralized enough to repress much of anything. In the early part of the Dark Ages, it was not yet even universally accepted that the bishop of Rome (i.e. the Pope) was the supreme head of the Church.

The book How the Irish Saved Civilization contains a number of anecdotes describing how various Irish monks/scholars essentially thumbed their noses at the Pope, the power of Rome, and the authority of ecumenical councils.

Speaking of the Irish, they provide a good example of how the Church (at least in its decentralized form) could actually promote the advancement of knowledge (or at least its preservation). Were it not for the Irish monks, most or all of Latin literature (i.e. Roman literature) would have been lost. (An earlier poster pointed out correctly that various Greek writings, as opposed to Latin works, were also preserved by the Muslims and by the Jews.)

57

Well I’m certainly not going to admit to being old enough to speak firsthand either :slight_smile: However, I’m fairly sure that I have read that The Crown took jurisdiction- by law- in cases of landholders dying without heirs… at least in England and France. I guess I’ll have to try to research this to clear it up. It is likely that in the case of lands that were already church lands in title but enfeoffed to a lay vassal the situation would apply.

This is why I am skeptical of the hypothesis. In the 3rd century the Christians were a persecuted minority- why on earth would the Roman government write inheritance laws to favor them? Even if the Church managed to acquire land somehow at that time it would probably have been confiscated during one of the periodic campaigns against Christians. During the 4th century, from Constantine on, the Emperors favored the Church, and did grant it some lands, but they didn’t rewrite Roman inheritance law for them.

On the other hand, western Christianity had adopted the standard of strict monogamy by the time period you cite. Thus, the practice predates any possibility of gain from the mechanism you propose. The hypothesis I’ve heard as to the origin of Christian monogamy was that it was the standard practice in pagan Rome. The Christians followed it because - (1) most of them brought this standard with them when they first joined the Church, and (2) the Church did not want to give the government any more pretexts for persecuting them, which advocacy of polygamy might have done.

58

Abe, I had not intended to post to this after my posts of last night. I figure we’ve all laid out most of our facts (or our views of the facts) and we can let the rest of the readership draw their own conclusions.

However, at the risk of nudging this toward GD (where I do not think it belongs), I do have to repond to your O.J. Simpson comments.

I am troubled by your analogy, first, because O.J. is swiftly joining the “H” name as a discussion killer. Throw O.J. at your opponent and walk away the victor. The thread had been intense but courteous to that point and given the tenor of all the responses to this thread, I do not presume that that was your intention, but it did trouble me.

More importantly, the O.J. analogy bothered me because it is flat out wrong. Stellar parallax is not an attempt to “raise the bar” by dragging out additional criteria to meet after all the other arguments are on the table.
Stellar parallax is the bar.
This was not a last minute argument thrown out by the church, (most of whose judges might not have understood it), it is the single method to determine that the earth moves as predicated almost 2,000 years prior to Galileo’s battles. It is unfortunate that Galileo did have have the equipment to provide evidence of stellar parallax, but that is hardly the fault of those who wished him to prove his theory. If one wants to assert that the Earth moves, one has to be able to establish that the Earth occupies two different locations at two separate times. This principle (asserted as long ago as Aristotle) still stands as true.
The Ptolemaic system worked. The calendar was successfully determined, eclipses and other astronomical events, were all successfully predicted and recorded using Ptolemaic rules. Without absolute proof, Galileo’s system certain was supported by Occam’s Razor, but it was not established as True, which is what he demanded of the Church.
A stellar parallax was found in 1838. Prior to that, Galileo’s theory had not been proven true any more than Darwin’s theory had been proven true at the time of his death. Darwin’s theory needed the widespread dissemination of Mendel’s genetics and the work of the neo-Darwinist before it could be concluded to be True. Are you claiming that scientists should have bowed down and accepted Darwin’s work when the evidence to support it had not been developed? It is unfortunate that Darwin did not stumble over Mendel’s work earlier, but you cannot claim that it was “unfair” to reject Darwin in 1890 when there were legitimate competing claims and the evidence provided by Mendel had not been published. Nor can you claim it was “unfair” to demand proof form Galileo when hew was demanding acceptance without proof.

That is not “raising the bar.”

59

I was wondering if someone could clear something up for me. I remember reading, I am not sure where, that the Church forbade the translation of the Bible from Latin for the longest time.

Is this true, and if so, wouldn’t this qualify as withholding of knowledge?

60

The church declared that the translation to the common or vulgar tongue (at that time, Latin, and that version is now called the vulgate) was the “official” version of Scriptures.

This is, indeed, a suppression of knowledge.