Story of Civilization – IV.xxvi.iv – IV.xxxii.v

The story of the Middle Ages is in large part the story of the Roman Catholic Church.  But what exactly was the Church?  It was not a state, though at times it acted like one.  It was not merely a religious organization, as we currently understand the concept.  Nor was it a cultural or ethnic collective, for it contained within it a broad range of Western European cultures.

I would posit that there is in fact no single word that can describe the Church of the Middle Ages, that it was an entity unique to history.  It was unique both in the breadth and depth of its influence on the peoples under its control, and in the relative lack of civil control it exercised relative to what would be usual for an entity of its size and power.

Perhaps the key to understanding the nature of the Church lies in the tangled webs of the feudalistic power structure.  Feudalism revolved around lords, who controlled the land, and vassals, whom the lords permitted to use the land in exchange for allegiance.  (Cf. Wikipedia.)  A lord himself could be holding lands “in fief” from another lord, and be his vassal.  In fact, almost all lords were vassals, at least in name, to some higher lord; the Pope and a few kings were the only exceptions.  Lords were responsible for the internal peace and external security of the lands under their control.

A common practice was for a feudal sovereign to give his lands as a gift to the Pope, and become the Pope’s vassal, in exchange for Papal support, usually in the form of a declaration of the sovereign’s righteousness in a war against his neighbors.  At one time or another, it seems that nearly every sovereign in Europe resorted to this tactic (e.g. Portugal).  The consequence was that, in theory, the Pope exercised secular power over much of Europe, although the giving and taking of Papal fiefs was frequent enough that at no time did the Pope come near to complete control.

Such power was theoretical at best; it is not clear that the secular power that came theoretically with Papal suzerainty was ever exercised with much success beyond the Papal States.

This is not to say that the Pope had no power, or even little power.  If money is power, the Pope was for much of the Middle Ages the most powerful man in Europe, by far.  The Church directly owned huge fractions of land in all of Western Europe, ranging from a fifth (England) to half (Livonia), and on lands that it did not own, it received the tithe, or tenth part of the revenue.  These lands accounted for the local revenues of the Church, and may have paid the expenses of the Church’s numerous charitable works, and the building of its monasteries and cathedrals, the latter of which are perhaps the grandest cultural achievement of the Middle Ages, or perhaps any age.

But the true power of the papacy rested, I think, in the revenues that went directly to the Pope.  He siphoned from various sources of local revenue, and had his own revenues as well.  What is important, in the end, is that his income is estimated to have been greater than that of all of the lesser sovereigns of Europe combined.  It was this income that tempted so many popes into wars, crusades, and power struggles.

This was the nature of the papacy, but what was the nature of the Church itself?  The theological and ethical elements of Catholicism were as important in the Middle Ages as ever, and local priests and monks propounded constantly the doctrines of what might be called traditional Christianity; indeed, one of the few virtues of the modern Catholic Church is that it has functioned remarkably well to preserve these doctrines relatively unchanged.  The most striking figures of this local dissemination of Catholic doctrine were the mendicant saints, of whom the most prominent example is Francis of Assisi.  Saint Francis lived a life of extreme poverty and asceticism, preaching the faith both by word and example, and following what he regarded as the simplest essences of Jesus’ teachings.

Not all saints were as benign as Francis.  Saint Dominic was one of the prime movers of the Inquisition.  Perhaps it was merely the juxtaposition of two unrelated stories playing tricks on my mind, but as I read the story of Saint Dominic, I could not help but compare it to the story I had just read of the remarkable escape of a New York Times reporter from the Taliban.

Indeed, perhaps the Taliban is the closest modern analogue of the Church of the Middle Ages.  Like the Church, the Taliban, according to Mr. Rohde, exercises both secular and religious control over a large area of Afghanistan/Pakistan.  Without speaking of the higher echelons, at the lower echelons, the Taliban and the Church look remarkably similar.  The vast majority of the subjects are simple people of faith; the actual footsoldiers of the faith, be they inquisitors, monks, priests, or mendicant saints, or alternatively, soldiers, guards, and insurrectionists, have diverse motivations, but share several things in common: they are usually young men, removed from what might be regarded as the normal occupations of youth, and in particular, social intercourse with young women.  The Inquisition inflicted similar terrors in some localities that the Taliban inflicts on the civilians of its own state today, to wit constant fear and occasional violent death.

As I have remarked previously, the great sin of modern Christianity is hypocrisy; the great sin of modern Islam is the violence it commits in the name of faith.  As I have said before, in truth, Islam is a religion of violence, but perhaps hypocrisy is the lesser of the two evils.  It is to be hoped that Islam will soon mature, with wealth, from a religion of violence to a religion of hypocrisy.

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.

Story of Civilization – IV.xi.i – IV.xv.ii

The most remarkable thing about Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages is its fall.  The natural comparison is to the fall of the Roman Empire, but as Durant points out, the Roman Empire fell over a period of hundreds of years, and over the course of this time, the barbarians lived for so long in such close proximity to the Romans that by blood and by culture, many of them were half-integrated when Rome was sacked.  The Islamic civilization centered about the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, by contrast, fell in a mere forty years, and in that time the invading Mongols absorbed very little of Arab culture.  The fall of this civilization, then, is without precedent in history.

What truly distinguishes this event is its bloodiness.  In fact, according to Durant, the destructiveness of the Mongol invasion of the Middle East accounts for the relative poverty of the region to this very day.  The Mongols, when they attacked, executed entire cities, building piles of skulls with the severed heads of the inhabitants.  They totally destroyed the temples, libraries, and other repositories of knowledge.  They did not even resettle the areas under the dominion of the destroyed cities, leaving entire areas barren and untended.  In this way, what had been a populous area became empty, what had been the most knowledgeable civilization in history became ignorant, and what had been a verdant garden became the desert of today.

Another interesting note is that the sheer genocidal magnitude of the Mongols’ behavior recalls only one other era in history: the era of Assyrian conquests.  The Assyrians – and Jews and other Semitic tribes of the area – have tales of cities being wiped out in just the same way as the Mongols did.  One need look no further than the Bible.  What is it about this region that impelled people to such bloodshed?

Story of Civilization – IV.vii.iv – IV.x.iv

Here, Durant introduces the Muslim religion.  Anyone who says that Islam is a religion of peace doesn’t know what they are talking about, or is lying.  Islam was born in a sea of blood.  Its early history is clan-based or tribal warfare, vendetta, and murder.  Even after Mohammed died, Islam was a religion of violence.  One of its signal contributions to history was what is probably one of the greatest military achievements of the millenium: the Arab conquest of all lands south of the Mediterranean from Morocco to the Indus.

The Arab conquest is as interesting as many other surprising military events in history.  I found myself asking the same question of the Arab conquest that I asked of the Roman conquests in “Caesar and Christ”: how did they do it?  What made them so good?  In the Roman case, it turned out that the Roman legions had a relatively more dynamic formation than the Macedonian phalanxes that they opposed, allowing them to triumph by quickly adjusting tactics.  As it happens, this post suggests that the Arabs similarly turned mobility and dynamism to their advantage.  By having a force composed predominantly of cavalry, they were able to harrass their enemies with feints and scouting maneuvers until they discovered a point of weakness, at which point they could use their horses’ speed to coalesce on the weak points and concentrate attacks on them.  Presumably, the Arabs were not the first to discover the usefulness of cavalry; we have seen the Gothic tribes use similar tactics against the Roman legion, but perhaps such tactics had not yet achieved dominance in the Roman world itself.

In any case, the intricacies of warfare should not distract from the greater point: much of Islam’s early glory comes from religiously-motivated violence.  In fact, early Islamic violence was not motivated merely by faith in Mohammed in general, but by the specific promise that a death on behalf of the prophet would guarantee acceptance into paradise.  In one of the very first episodes in Mohammed’s story, after having preached Islam in Mecca and earned the enmity of the cults there, Mohammed fled to Medina.  The citizens there had offered him their protection, asking only what they would get should they die at the hands of the angry Meccans.  Mohammed promised them paradise.

Such promises were not merely given for the potential of death in defense of the prophet.  Later, in Medina, Mohammed personally led numerous raids on the trade and agriculture of the surrounding communities, again promising paradise to those who died in these raids.  Mohammed also assaulted – and exterminated – several neighboring Jewish tribes, on the concern that they might come to the aid of his enemies in Mecca.  His warriors were motivated by promises of paradise.  Again, these were not wars of defense, except under the most liberal definition of defense by attack.

Nor was Muslim violence confined to unbelievers.  The early history of Islam is rife with internecine strife, which lives to the modern day as the fight between Shia and Sunni.  One episode from Durant will inspire the imagination to understand this early history:

“Abdallah, made governor of Syria, managed the matter with humor and dispatch.  He announced an amnesty to the Umayyads, and to confirm it he invited eighty of their leaders to dinner.  While they ate, his hidden soldiers, at his signal, put them all to the sword.  Carpets were spread over the fallen men, and the feast was resumed by the Abbasid diners over the bodies of their foes, and to the music of dying groans.  The corpses of several Umayyad caliphs were exhumed, the almost fleshless skeletons were scourged, hanged, and burned, and the ashes were scattered to the winds.”

The point of these stories is not to malign Islam.  I have the highest respect for any individual who takes a set of premises – even be they religious in nature – and rigorously, logically applies those premises to his life, and follows them to whatever conclusions to which they may lead him.  I simply think it unfortunate that Islam should be misrepresented by its followers – such as here – in an effort to win… what?  Support?  Understanding?  Sympathy?

I can even accept someone who wishes to be a hypocrite, who wishes to call himself a Muslim but practice a religion solely of peace, so long as he admits that this is what he will do.  I will pick no quarrel with someone who acknowledges the violent and bloody history of Islam, starting with the Prophet himself, and then says, “I choose to call myself a Muslim, but I will not accept all of the teachings of the prophet, only those that please me, and allow me to conform with the secular mores of my time and place.”  I only ask that if this is what one will do, that he say so, that he admit that he cares not about premises, that his ultimate concerns are secular, or at least predetermined spiritual mores, and that he will use even the most tortured logic to get from any premise to his conclusion.