On Middle-Class Morality

Some things never change.  One of the delights of studying the last four hundred years or so of history has been to see how so many of our current cultural obsessions are lineal descendants of identical social movements in the England of the 1600′s.  One suspects that these movements themselves were lineal descendants of older movements, obscured by the amnesia of a race that, like a child or an animal, is conscious only of the present.

Consider middle-class morality.  The Puritan movement was a reflection of a class identity.  It was most popular among what might have been England’s lower middle class.  Artisans, tradesmen, shopkeepers… these were people who worked hard, had enough money to be literate, and therefore read the Bible.  They took pride in their work, but also their independence and their liberty.  They were no peasants, or even yeomen, tied to the land.  They were free Britons.

Puritanism answered the psychological needs of this class perfectly.  First, any movement symbolizing the ethos of this class had to convey a sense of superiority.  Though the middle class was hard-working, it also suffered a constant sense of inferiority in class-conscious England.  Sure, the English artisan was proud of his work, and he was no beggar, but he still had to remove his cap and bow to the peer of the Realm, and he was constantly having his face rubbed in the prosperity of the merchant or the doctor of law.

But wait!  Because the artisan was a Puritan, he was divinely elected for eternal salvation; ultimately, he would spend aeons laughing at the Catholic/Anglican/deist/atheist/infidel upper class roasting in the pits of hell.  The Puritan was predestined and chosen.  He was God’s chosen.  Inferiority complex: solved.  What’s next?

Well, there’s the troublesome issue of money… no matter how well the green-grocer did, he would never be able to clothe his wife in extravagant raiment or entertain his friends on silver plate.  What’s more, to maintain his status, he had to work hard; he couldn’t fritter away his time or his small capital in gambling, drinking, and whoring about town.  Good thing, then, that all of these things are sins that send you to hell forever.

This is of course another nail in the coffin of the inferiority problem.  The Puritan could take endless pride in his somber, pauper-like existence, devoid of the joys and delicacies of life, because he was living according to God’s code, and all of those vulgar displays of wealth that so infuriated him were sins that would send their perpetrators straight to hell.

It’s hard for this bigot – evidently an apologist for the immoral upper class – not to see a direct parallel between the Puritans of yore and the atheistic humanists of the modern middle class.  Your average young, obnoxious member of the middle class gives up meat and hot showers because they’re bad for the environment.  He gives up white bread and soda because  they’re bad for your health.  In the ideal world, he thinks, these things should be outlawed for everyone (think blue Sundays, but every day of the week), or at least saddled with a punitive vice tax.  If you show him that local vegetables are actually more harmful to the environment than imported meat, his rationale shifts (it doesn’t matter what to, does it?).  If you point out to him that his annual plane trip wipes out all of the environmental savings of his asceticism, he shrugs his shoulders and asks how he should live without his family.

But he gets a great sense of superiority from the fact that he drinks tea instead of wine, and eats tofu instead of red meat.  He will tout the endless health benefits, and then wonder why his nursing wife is anemic.  For the greatest weapon of the Puritan, ancient and modern, was his unshakable sense of certainty in his own predestination.  He can cite to you a thousand Bible passages scientific studies that explain why his lifestyle is the one true one and all others are evil.

The eternal frustration of the Puritan is the sense of inferiority that none of his asceticism can quite erase.  His Honda Fit, though oh-so-fashionable (if you have wide-rimmed glasses, you’re still scum without a Fit), still leaves him with a feeling of unease when the bankers’ BMW purrs down the street.  Sure, he’s been happily monogamous with his girlfriend for ten years, but since they’re such excellent awesome people, they’ve waited until now to get married, not even needing to make promises to each other because they have such character.  Nonetheless, she has wide-rimmed glasses too, and he probably envies the way his buddy that went to law school bags a new secretary every week.

What really offends the Puritan, though, is the notion that anyone but he contributes to the betterment of mankind (unless it’s a minority… their mere existence improves mankind).  You see, our modern-day Puritan works for a non-profit, or maybe a hip start-up with an important message, or maybe he walks the ivory halls of academia.  Either way, his job is pure.  He hasn’t “sold out”.  That’s what the bankers did, and the lawyers.  Those reprobate souls can only pursue their own selfish good, and only through evil means.  Consider the recent financial crisis… this was a gigantic conspiracy where everyone from the lowliest analyst to the drunkest vice-president knew that they were peddling crap and that it would fall into somebody else’s backyard.

Of course, the modern-day Puritan hates the rich so much because he’s almost one of them.  He might have a sister in law school (she’s studying to become an environmental lawyer, you know, the not-sinful kind), and anyway, he himself is hoping to earn a substantial chunk of money someday ($100k isn’t that much, not enough to send you to hell at any rate).

In short, the Puritan doesn’t get out much, doesn’t have much fun.  But he’s better than you, and he hates you for it.

Titus Oates – Story of Civilization VIII.viii.v-VIII.x.iv

Following the Restoration of the Stuart line to the throne of England in 1660, there was an extended and boring struggle between the by now predominantly Protestant people of England, and the few remaining Catholic apologists, who had a sympathetic ear in the ambiguously Catholic Charles II.

In 1670, Charles signed with Louis XIV the Treaty of Dover, by which he committed himself to alliance with Catholic France and the restoration of Catholicism in England.  Meanwhile, he issued a “Declaration of Indulgence” which loosened and abated the governmental persecution of non-Anglicans, including Catholics.

This development, as well as the Catholicism of Charles’s brother James, led the English people to fear a Catholic or “Popish” plot to restore Catholicism (which, ironically, as we have just mentioned, is precisely what Charles himself intended).  The fears manifested themselves in one Titus Oates.  This man appeared before the King and testified that there was a Jesuit plot to assassinate him, elevate his brother James to the throne, and impose Catholicism on England by the sword.  Charles considered the matter absurd, and laughed to Oates’s face at some of his claims, but Charles’s Privy Council took the matter more seriously, and at the behest of Parliament, a full investigation was unfolded that lead to the execution of numerous powerful Catholics.  The prosecutions did not cease until one of the chief judges overseeing them caught Oates in an obvious contradiction.

If these events sound familiar, it is probably because of their close resemblance to the Red Scare and the McCarthy era.  What’s more, they resemble any number of spurious claims of imminent threats to our nation in the modern era, from the WMDs in Iraq to the birther movement to the efforts by gay teachers to “recruit” students.  Like all of these efforts, although Titus Oates’s testimony was completely fabricated and ultimately shown to be so, his efforts succeeded in tarring the legitimate, legal pursuit of the toleration of Catholics with the taint of treason.

What’s striking about the Titus Oates affair is that in the entire Story of Civilization, this is the first clearly documented instance in history of a fabrication of this nature, one of sufficient power and popular backing to crystallize the zeitgeist of a xenophobic, disenfranchised minority.

What’s also striking is that the people who Titus represented where an amalgam of the ascendant Puritans, Anglicans, and anabaptists (Baptists) in England, as against the Catholics.  These same populations would be some of the first to settle America, and the modern disaffected WASPs are both their intellectual and blood heirs.  Can it be that this one ethno-cultural clique, throughout recent history, has achieved and maintained power through a continuous line of hypocrisy, self-deception, and outright lies?  Doubtless, history is not so simple, but it is hard not to wonder whether Joseph McCarthy, George Bush, or even Betsy McCaughey did not learn a thing or two from Titus Oates.  It is also tempting to wonder how future historians, forced to condense the goings-on of four hundred years into two or three pages, may condense the Titus Oates affair and the Puritans of seventeenth-century England with the Red Scare and the Protestants of twentieth-century America.

Story of Civilization VIII.vi.i-VIII.viii.iv

Dutch history holds a peculiar intrigue for me.  From 1550 to 1750, the Dutch were extraordinarily productive in several areas.  They produced Rubens, Vandyck, Hals, Rembrandt, and in the minor artist Jacob van Ruisdael, some of the most profound landscape painting that our historical journey has yet shown us.  (Consider his “Wheat Fields“.)

As previously discussed, they also produced the first substantial, lasting religious toleration since the Reformation – although the neglected Poland produced substantial religious toleration, it turned out to be fleeting – and the first republican government outside the cantons of Switzerland – although again, this government flourished under what was essentially the one-man rule of Johan de Witt.

But the thing that really caught my eye in Durant’s history of the Dutch during the age of Louis XIV was the re-occurrence of the dikes as a military tool.  Durant originally cited the dikes as a decisive element in the victory of the northern, Protestant states of the Netherlands in their war for independence against Spain.  The armies of William of Orange had suffered substantial defeats throughout the war, but the Spanish generals were unable to make military progress against the northern states because, according to Durant, Dutch guerillas called the Beggars of the Sea unleashed the dikes to halt the advance of the Spanish troops.

I thought it sounded reasonable enough at the time that, as a one-time military strategy, this might work.  But when the dikes emerged again as the decisive element in stalling the advance of Louis XIV through the Netherlands in his quest to extend French territory to the Rhine, I raised an eyebrow.  How, precisely, could these dikes be the solution to every Dutch military problem.

The answer is fascinatingly complex and ingenious.

Regicide – Story of Civilization VII.v.i-VII.viii.xi

The history of England after Elizabeth and Shakespeare is the story of decaying social stability, and the relentless maneuverings of nobility for power.  Ultimately, it leads to the execution of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell, who led a revolt against Charles due to Charles’s apparent Catholic sympathies and oppressive taxation.

Of course, the true story is not so simple, and yet much simpler.  The socio-cultural-economical forces that rebelled against Charles were indeed fighting in the name of a Puritan/Calvinist ideal of protestantism far removed from Charles’s Anglican faith, which was almost Catholic.  But the leaders and instigators of the rebellion, and its figurative head, was the British Parliament.  Charles, after Parliament had voted to strip him of many of his ancient prerogatives, and had prosecuted and even executed some of his closest counselors, declared several leaders of Parliament to be guilty of sedition, and attempted to arrest them.  They fled, and the rest of the Parliament, fearing for its own collective neck, quickly dissolved and began to raise armies.

Oliver Cromwell only became a major figure once the fighting began.  He turned out to be the most effective general on the Parliamentary side of the conflict.  Ultimately, Charles was defeated, but even at this late point, there was not a thought of regicide – only of a resolution of the forces that had brought Parliament to such discontent in the first place.  As the leaders of Parliament negotiated with the captive Charles for a more limited, constitutional monarchy, Charles struck a deal with Scottish armies (for Scotland had been legally inherited as an English realm by Charles’s father) to restore him to power regardless of Parliament, on the basis of a simple deal with the Scottish parliament.

The British Parliament, now recognizing itself to be in severe danger, continued negotiating with Charles, hoping to save its own position in the event that the Scottish armies could forcibly restore Charles to power.  And so we come to the point: the reason that none of this worked out, and that none of these negotiations succeeded, was quite simple.  It was an ancient tradition that, upon a monarch’s ascent to a contested throne, or successful survival for an attempted coup, all those who had opposed him were to be executed.  The Parliament itself seems to have hoped to avoid this fate, but the leaders of the army, and particularly Oliver Cromwell, were convinced that upon Charles’s restoration, a general slaughter of the Parliament’s armies would ensue.

For this reason, Cromwell and the army, and the members of Parliament representing them, vociferously opposed any attempts to reach a settlement with Charles.  Instead, once the Scottish forces were defeated, they proposed to try Charles for treason.  The overwhelming majority of the members of Parliament thought this measure radical, and refused it.  The army, continuing to fear for its own survival, ejected all members who opposed Charles’s trial, bringing Parliament from its pre-war size of five hundred down to roughly fifty.  The fifty nominated a jury to try Charles, and by a slim majority, this jury found him guilty and voted him to death.

So, in brief, Charles was tried and executed by a totally illegal court operating as a front for an army, led by Cromwell, that had two choices: to permit the legitimate operation of Parliament to restore Charles to power, leading to its own slaughter, or to kill Charles, violating nearly sacred traditions, and against the will of the English people.  It would have taken a group of leaders principled beyond all human precedent to induce the army to the former choice!

In conclusion, the regicide itself did not reflect the forces that had initiated the rebellion, but rather a simple will to survive on the part of a few rebels.  Ignoring all historical precedent – for the moment – one could imagine that, absent the principle outlined above whereby all rebels must always be executed, there is absolutely no reason why the execution of Charles could not have been avoided.  Popular will did not call for it.  Parliament did not wish to allow it.  Charles himself was probably willing to make enough concessions to eventually retake the throne.  Only the will of Cromwell and his fellow leaders caused the trial and execution of Charles.

I say all this not merely to review history, but to reflect on its nature.  It sometimes seems that history is written in blood; our next post will deal with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  It is of course impossible to imagine what I hypothesized above, that Charles could have promised not to kill the rebel leaders upon re-ascending the throne.  Even if he could promise it, he would not have been believed, and even if he were believed, he would have gone back on such a promise anyway.  But is it not a shame that this must be human nature?  Death is horrible, for it is absolute and eternal.  To wreak death on another human being is the final, most horrible statement of hatred, for it is irrevocable.  And yet throughout history, death is a panacea.  Was religious ardor in this era so great that death was not feared, in confidence of Heaven?  I doubt it; men were probably as secretly skeptical in this age as in ours.  They killed each other on precedent, and because of the law that one must kill or be killed.  This was Cromwell’s imperative.

It is a miracle that in our own era, some people have become so “civilized” that they no longer view death as a panacea.  How is it that we have gradually, by degrees, been able to back down from the precedent, to not need to answer every threat with death?  Perhaps it is the atomic bomb that has matured us; perhaps it is America’s own unique religious history that has acted as a beacon to Western civilization.  Or perhaps it is only the spread of knowledge.  Whatever it is, I think that our ability to solve our own social problems without resort to killing is history’s greatest gift to us, and one that we should reflect carefully and vocally upon before we do resort to killing (as in the Middle East now).

English vs. French – Story of Civilization VIII.i.i-VIII.i.viii

English vs. French here will cover the differences between the English Civil War and the French civil war called the Fronde.

Both wars were backed by similar concerns: outrage over oppressive taxation and what was felt by the business class to be incompetent management of the national economy. In both wars, the targets of popular outrage were the chief ministers of the king. For the English, these were Thomas Wentworth and William Laud; for the French, it was Cardinal Mazarin, the successor of Richelieu.

So given these similarities, why was it that the English Civil War resulted in the beheading of a king, while the French civil war ended in a pacification that led directly to one of France’s greatest eras? Perhaps we may merely list the differences, and not be condemned if we suppose that these are the answers.

First, the English Civil War had an underlying religious component that was entirely absent from the Fronde. Specifically, many of the dissidents were Puritan-leaning, as against the Anglican (almost Catholic) government. By contrast, in France, the dissident religious element, the Huguenots, had been quelled by Richelieu’s ruthless military suppression at the siege of La Rochelle. Subsequently, Richelieu broke the back of Huguenot military inclinations by granting the Huguenots terms of such generosity that, given their military defeat, they could not refuse: access to all offices in France, complete religious freedom, and the sole condition that Catholic worship be permitted in Protestant-dominated cities. Whereas in England the capital was the touchstone of Protestant discontent, perhaps because of Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Paris was enraged on entirely secular grounds.

Second, Louis XIV may have escaped the fate of Charles I merely by having been too young. Given the regency of Mazarin and Louis’s mother, these suffered the brunt of the popular outrage, while Louis was almost pitied for the incompetence of his regents. After the suppression of the Fronde, the streets of Paris resounded with cries of “Vive le roi!” – though perhaps this was merely out of a sense of self-preservation. Charles, of course, had been ruling intractably for many years, and could plead no such excuse.

Third, and cited by Durant as the critical element, the French revolt failed to receive the support of the most powerful noble in France, the Great Condé. Instead, this able general sided with the royalty. The greatest general of the English Civil War was Cromwell, leading the revolt.

The third element is most puzzling to us. Following Tolstoy, we are inclined to think of wars as massive and bellicose movements of people animated by some cultural or ethnic difference to shed each other’s blood. How could the whim or ability of one man have such force of the movements of a human tide? Surely the Condé was merely, again, following Tolstoy, a Napoleon-ic figurehead? Of course, our suggestion that Louis escaped Charles’s fate merely by being young is no better an explanation than that the Great Condé was great.

But perhaps there is something in that religious explanation. Protestantism, wherever it arose, was nothing more than the expression of cultural, class, and ethnic differences. In England, Puritanism, like Calvinism everywhere, was the expression of the labor, artisanal, trade, and business classes of their own peculiar ethos; in England, the fight of this class for expression took the form of the English Civil War. In France, it instead took the form of the French Wars of Religion, which were a forty-year bloodbath in which, as in England, the Calvinists revolted against the government. Because it was expressed directly as a revolt on religious principles, the resolution of the Wars of Religion brought no resolution to the other problems that the revolt expressed (oppressive taxation and incompetent economic administration).

The Whimsy of History – Story of Civilization VII.v.i-VII.xxiii.vi

Life encroaches, and our great enterprises fall to ashes. So it is that with so many flies buzzing about our carrion flesh, it is all we can do to keep reading, let alone keep thinking. This note on the Story of Civilization, like much else in life, could be titled “Multum in Parvo”.

I pass by a fascinating age in European history – which has produced, among other things, what might be the most profound painting to date, including the likes of Murillo, Velazquez, and Rembrandt – only to note something entirely new to history that occurred in this era. Of course, each of these words must have its proper emphasis and definition. When I say “new to history” I mean “new to accurately recorded, reliable history that actually happened for sure”, not “that never happened before” since it surely did.

This is the whimsy of history: small events leading to great outcomes, tiny discrepancies yielding unexpected outcomes. There are two that I have noted in this period.

The first is the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. In brief, the the royalist Catholic and rebel Huguenot factions in France had been fighting for nearly half a century. When Charles IX acceded to the throne of France, he made peace with the Huguenots by marrying his sister to one of their leaders, Henry of Navarre. As time went on, Charles, a young man, came increasingly under the influence of Henry and one of the Huguenot generals, Coligny, who was not acting as Charles’s adviser in statecraft.

The Catholics, already upset by Charles’s closeness with Coligny, were further upset when he advocated military assistance for the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands. Eventually, Charles’s mother, a fervent Catholic, argued to Charles that Coligny and other powerful Huguenots were plotting the overthrow of all Catholic elements in the government. She faced Charles with the suggestion that either the Protestants would assassinate her, or they must be assassinated first. Charles, after much badgering, agreed, and in despair at ordering the assassination of his close friend Coligny, cried out something to the effect of “Kill [Coligny] if you wish; but you must also kill all the Huguenots, so that not one is left alive to reproach me. Kill them all!” The Catholic faction took him at his literal word, closed the gates of Paris, and over the next several days, slaughtered five thousand Huguenots in the city.

This was a momentous event at the time, met by leaders of other countries with shock and horror or gratitude and congratulations, depending on whether they were Protestant or Catholic. In terms of slaughter of unarmed civilians, the event appears to be unprecedented by any contemporary events for a city not invaded by a foreign army, and appears to surpass even the pogroms against the Jews in sheer density of slaughter.

The event raised tensions between Catholics and Huguenots for decades, and conceivably led to the assassination of Henry IV decades later, for committing the same crime against Catholicism for which Coligny had been assassinated: the contemplation of aid to the revolt in the Netherlands. And all of this could have been avoided had Charles, in his state of agitation, cried out anything other than “Kill them all!”

Of course, perhaps it could not have. The murderous propensities of the Catholic-Huguenot strife had led to plenty of bloodshed before, and the tension between the two factions within Paris perhaps required a resolution of some sort. But it is easy to conceive that Charles could have exiled prominent Huguenots – or all Parisian Huguenots – or could have placed additional restrictions on Protestant worship within the city, even invited in the Inquisition.

The other strange event was an outcome of the revolt in the Netherlands. The revolt had been carried on primarily by a vocal and militant Calvinist minority in the northern cities of the Netherlands, with close ideological kinship to the English Puritans, the French Huguenots, and the Scottish and Swiss Calvinists. The amazing thing about this Calvinist minority was its power in proportion to its size. Durant estimates the Calvinists at less than five percent of the population even in the northern Protestant part of the Netherlands, and yet the managed to carry all before them, defeating massive Spanish armies on land and sea (admittedly with a couple helpings of guerrilla warfare, now called terrorism), and carrying their own unwilling countrymen with the revolt.

Once this minority emerged victorious, they put in place a series of laws severely restricting the free exercise of other religions in the Netherlands. The problem was that with only five percent of the population adhering to Calvinism, the laws were utterly unenforceable. Other religions continued to hold their services, but, because they lacked political power, could never enforce their own versions of intolerance. The result was that Calvinism, Catholicism, Lutheranism, with Calvinism lacking the manpower to be intolerant, and the other religions lacking any power whatsoever. In the end, religious freedom emerged out of this contradiction.

Of course, it will again be argued that there were other factors (there always are). The Netherlands was at a geographical crossroads between Catholic France, Anglican England, Lutheran upper Germany, and Calvinist Switzerland. Furthermore, they were a trading power, whose docks were open to merchants of every country and creed; as religious intolerance only opposed commercial prosperity, the Netherlands made their choice early in their history, and on the side of prosperity. But even if such things led to similarly tolerant behavior in neighboring Calais, or neighboring German cities, or even London, it was only in the Netherlands that they could become, in effect, the policy of a nation, and the intolerant, power-holding Calvinist minority, balanced against the silent, stubborn masses, was the tool by which this policy was born.

Freedom, Violence, and Art – Story of Civilization V.vii.i-V.xi.v.1

Often, discussions of freedom are quickly hijacked by the argument over precisely what type of freedom is being discussed.  For instance, in America today, you may love freedom, but is it the freedom to not have to worry about healthcare, or the freedom to not pay excessive taxes to the government?  Similar questions have occurred throughout recent history: in apposition to free enterprise, freedom of property, and freedom from oppressive regulation are freedom to work, freedom from poverty, and freedom to unionize.

These questions are not unique to our time.  Historians often say of Renaissance Italy that it was the freedom of the city-states that stimulated the great flowering of the arts that then occurred.  But which freedom, precisely, do they mean?

In the most trivial answer, the freedom that mattered was the freedom of the city-states themselves from outside rule.  Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Siena were all independent fiefs, practically free, if not technically so, from the encroaching kings, emperors, and popes of their time.  Economically, this meant that each city acted as the capital of its associated lands, receiving their taxes and their goods, and passing them on to no higher authority.

This map of Italy, actually from 1796, hints at the divided nature of the country during the Renaissance. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was actually the Republic of Florence, the Duchy of Parma occupies approximately what would have been Milanese territory, and numerous smaller principalities, such as Ferrara and Siena, would at times have been independent.

Consider, by contrast, Rome during the Empire: prosperous cities and territories grew up repeatedly, but in the end, all were ransacked for the beautification of the capital.  When the method was not taxation or tribute, it was graft; the imperial appointees -native to Rome – would travel to a province, govern it for a few years, gather great wealth, and then leave with it for Rome.

In Renaissance Italy, with no imperial monster to feed, local concentrations of wealth were broken up but little, and the governors of each city-state, having collected the wealth that seems to be the eternal appanage of power, had nowhere to go with it but home.  This is reflected in the art patronage of the time. During the 1400s and 1500s, the greatest patrons of art were almost exclusively the government and the Church.  The Medicis in Florence, the Estensi in Ferrara, the Gonzagas in Mantua, and even Lodovico Sforza in Milan were all both premier patrons of the arts in their cities, and the dictators of said cities.

One is inclined to wonder whence came the great wealth of these dictators.  Other questions also arise.  Might the proletariat have done better under the oppression of a papal legate than under the freedom of the independent dictators?  Perhaps not; in addition to being artistically fertile, one of the signature characteristics of the Renaissance city-states was their patriotism.  Nonetheless, it seems clear that freedom from outside rule meant, in practice, the freedom of local rulers to cull for themselves whatever wealth they could extract from their territories.

Freedom from outside rule, in a way, also meant freedom from supervision, freedom from law.  This resulted in another notorious characteristic of the Renaissance city-states: their violence.  The Medicis and the Sforzas had to fear violent insurrections from time to time, but they were by no means the worst.  In cities like Verona under the Scaligeri, Perugia under the Baglioni, and others, rule was by families or factions whose sole claim to power appears to have been violence; so numerous are the stories of murder and midnight coups in these states, that, through the clouded vision of history, one could almost characterize the form of government as gang rule.

And so freedom can mean many things.  We must especially beware of those who would use freedom as a banner under which to usher in any number or variety of changes that in actuality have little to do with freedom.  When, in an effort to oust Lorenzo de’ Medici his opponents attempted to assassinate him, while running through the streets proclaiming freedom, the only reasonable interpretation of the freedom they offered was freedom from Lorenzo, and freedom for themselves to oppress the people in his stead.  The people responded accordingly, and killed them.

Story of Civilization – IV.xxv.ix – IV.xxvi.iii

In later volumes of The Story of Civilization, France will become a predilection of Durant.  Indeed, if we were to take him as our sole source of history, we would be inclined to the view that we owed nearly all of the graces of modern life to France.

In The Age of Faith, France takes its first strides toward greatness, and in the present section, France experiences its first taste of world preeminence as an independent power.  Philip Augustus, king of France from 1180 to 1223, was primarily responsible for this rise.  The subsequent decline – at least in relative influence – during the Renaissance can probably be attributed to the disastrous kingships of his successors Louix IX, Philip III, and Philip IV.  Philip Augustus conquered new territories for France, Louix IX gave that territory away to appease his neighbors and emptied the treasury for charity, Philip III tried to conquer new territory but failed through misfortune and incompetence, and Philip IV went to war with the Pope, the Jews, and the Templars in an effort to restore the treasury.

The most remarkable of these kings is Louix IX “The Saint”.  The quotation marks are unmerited, as after his death, the Catholic Church made him an official saint.  It is said that when one of his subjects complained that his religious devotion made him unfit to be king, he merely agreed with her, showing the same complaisance that he showed to the hostile neighbors snapping up his territories.  Aside from the money he spent on the poor, he spent vast sums purchasing forged Christians relics (e.g. Jesus’ crown of thorns, miraculously preserved for a millenium) and on two pointless crusades.  The true Christian would not be fit to be a king.

The last several chapters have been a bit of a drag.  Durant has passed through the history of nearly every European country from Portugal and Ireland all the way to Russia, Hungary, and Byzantium, detailing the major political developments in each country from 600 – 1000.  I would dare so almost nothing of great interest happened during these Dark Ages.  Having completed the cycle, Durant has begun it again, reciting the political history from 1000 – 1300.  Can anything be gleaned from this recitation of wars, kings, and laws?

There is one generality that I have observed: most government is monarchy, although the Pope directly controls some areas, and some cities achieve the status of free communes, or even, in some cases, oligarchies (cf. Venice).  Monarchy being the most abundant form of government, Europe of this time experiences it in all gradations from the weak feudal king to the absolute tyrant.  What is interesting is that in not one of these governments – not the strong kings, the weak kings, the communes, nor the oligarchies – not in one is there any mention of divine right.  In this most religious of times, most governments based their claim to power on frankly on might, commercial advantage, or political connection.  Portugal, for example, was the product of a naked power grab by a Burgundian knight, Henry, who was involved in the crusade against the Moors in Spain.  Henry sought independence, and over several generations, the matter was disputed, until it was submitted to the papacy for arbitration.  The Pope initially decided against Portuguese independence, until the Portuguese king offered Portugal as a papal fief.  Under the influence of this bribery, the Pope declared Portugal independent.  In this way Henry, by strength of arms, and the Pope, for political considerations, created a new kingdom.

I find it interesting that not only is God not cited in the political history, but neither is the good of the people.  Between the divine right of kings, and the divinely-granted rights of the people (cf. our own Declaration of Independence), most political theory after 1700 ultimately traced the origins of government back to the rights of either kings or people.  But in the Middle Ages we hear nothing of this.  Perhaps the people of this age were simply more practical, or too busy to care.  In the Middle Ages, as at every other time in history, there were many poor, few rich, and an ambitious middle class; what does the form or shape, of the government matter?  The oligarchy of Venice was the result of a totally illegal move by the merchant class wherein it declared itself alone able to hold Venice’s offices, and then murdered the leaders of the opposition.  Nonetheless, it ruled as well as, if more venally than, any other government of the time.

As a student of political history, and an eternal idealist, I would like to believe that political philosophy, and the ideas underlying a government, matter very much.  The Middle Ages do not support my case nearly so well as the histories of Greece and Rome.  Perhaps the firey idealism and vigorous political cultures of these older civilizations are the reason that, in the popular imagination, history is a vast dross from Caesar to George Washington.

Story of Civilization – IV.xx.vi – IV.xxii.ii

Chapter XXII is primarily an overview of life in feudal Europe from 600 to 1200.  In many ways these years were truly the heart of the Dark Ages.  Technological and cultural progress were at a minimum.  Even monasteries did naught but preserve the writings of previous ages.  Religion exercised an iron grip over what little time there was for thought amid toil and barbarian violence.  All in all, it does not seem to have been a fun time to be alive.

And yet, Durant sees a great accomplishment in this period.  The toil of the Dark Ages, he says, produced modern Europe.  The relentless fight against drought and famine, the impositions of the corvée (forced labor by peasants for the construction of public works, such as the drainage of marshes or the building of roads), and especially the discipline brought to these works by monastic labor all made what was once a jungle into a hospitable farmland.  How to test Durant’s assertion?  If all the industry of the medieval peasant was constructive, we would expect the amount of population that the land of medieval Europe could support to have increased from 600 to 1200.  Wikipedia be praised, this appears to be true: extremely rough estimates suggest that the population of medieval Europe may have tripled over this time period.  This is a massive expansion, and must have required much development, or much additional infrastructure to support so many more people.

Two important caveats exist.  First, the population at the start of the period was a minimum caused by plague and the devastation of what infrastructure had supported larger populations during the Roman Empire.  Second, the population at the end of the period was at a maximum that would precipitate Malthusian revenge, which is to say that it exceeded the capacity of the land to support it.

I am inclined to think, however, that these caveats do not substantially weaken the overall point, and that the expansion of population did indicate an expansion of the ability of the land to support people.  Speculation on demography is based in part on numbers of settled villages and similar statistics.  The abandonment of a settlement is not necessarily the result of a failure of the land… particularly considering the Black Death, if a village was wiped out, there would be nothing to prevent people from moving right back in and living off of that land, technically speaking.  The success of a Malthusian element like the Black Death may owe as much to the vicissitudes of bacterial evolution as to the inevitability of the Malthusian cycle.  It may, to be sure, have been triggered by the population’s achieving a critical mass that could not be safely exceeded without advances in public health, but again, the lack of public health infrastructure does not mean that the infrastructure that had been developed, in terms of drained marshes, cleared forests, cultivated land, drilled mines and wells, etc., was in any way flawed or unimportant… it’s just that public health was a rate-limiting component to advancement.  If clean water, vermin control, and well-spaced dwellings had been instituted before all of these other developments, the population crash might have come from famine, or more likely, the sort of standard of living-induced decline seen in Europe today.

Seen from this perspective, Durant may very well be right that modern Europe owes much to the toil of the Dark Ages.  Durant’s term for the period, “The Age of Faith”, is not so pejorative as it may seem at first blush.  What faith in the future it must have taken to perform such exhausting labor.  What faith to invest so much for the sake of generations to come!  What faith in the goodness and desserts of future men!

Story of Civilization – IV.xviii.ii – IV.xx.v.2

At times, as in the conquest of Greece by the Romans, military history can seem like destiny.  The Roman civilization developed and ruthlessly employed a superior fighting method to conquer a civilization whose military methodology, like its culture, had grown old.  Rome conquered Greece, and then ruled the world for half a millenium.  The rest, as they say, is history.  In this way, military history is history, and the consistent superiority of one army, one general, or one method over another becomes the superiority of a nation or people over another.

By just the same principle – that military history is history – the vicissitudes of battles, the tricks of fate, can also become history.  It is this, I think, that made the world Christian, or at least stopped it from becoming Muslim.  After the rise of Islam, which, as discussed earlier, is a pointedly militaristic religion, Muslim armies conquered much of the civilized world, rapidly moving outward from Arabia to conquer eastward to the Indus, and westward through Egypt, across the southern Mediterranean coast, and up into Spain.  The Muslim armies also moved northward, spreading with their religion into Turkish lands.  In every direction, the seemingly liquid flow of the armies was stopped only by geographical obstacles: the Pyrenees, the Sahara, the Indus, the Himalayas, the Russian steppes (and the Mongol hordes).

In one direction alone did the Muslim armies not expand: northwesterly, through Constantinople.  The city was ideally situated for defense, with only one side exposed to land, and surrounded on the other three by the waters connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.  Through Constantinople’s peninsula lay the only practical land route from the Middle East to Europe, and through the waters dominated by this peninsula, the easiest sea route.  In Durant’s telling (and Wikipedia’s), though, geography alone did not save Constantinople from the Muslim armies.  Technology, instead, was the deciding factor.

For Byzantium had Greek fire.  In an age when fighting was decided by swords, spears, and anything else blunt or sharp you could hit your enemy with, the Byzantines were among the first to pioneer the use of incendiary devices.  Greek fire, the composition of which is now unknown, was primarily used by the Byzantine navy.  Shot from pressurized jets mounted on Byzantine ships, the fire was a deadly incendiary to the wooden navies of ages past.  In many engagements over several centuries, the devastating effects of Greek fire allowed small and hastily improvised Byzantine fleets to destroy massive Muslim fleets.  The Byzantines recognized their debt to their Greek fire, and as a consequence, kept the secrets of its composition closely guarded.  They were so successful that it is to this practice that we owe our current ignorance of the nature of the incendiary.

Considering the success of the Muslim armies on every other front, and their seeming unstoppability, it staggers the mind to imagine how history might look if this tiny civilization jutting into the Sea of Marmara had not been the sole possessor of Greek fire.  After Constantinople, the Muslim invaders would have faced little organized resistance in the chaotic and poorly-developed areas to the west.  They would have run roughshod over all and sundry until reaching the Alps.  To the south, Italy was not united and in little condition to resist.  To the north, Germany was a mere collection of Gothic tribes, and to the northwest it seems doubtful that the weak Carolingian kings of France, absorbed in fighting off Northern invaders, would have provided much resistance.

It is amazing the tricks that history can play.

Edit: Carolingian kings, not Merovingians… I was off by hundreds of years in my description of France.