OK, can everyone please stop regutrgitating the popular myths about the Middle Ages?

[Odin2005]

Medieval history is an interest of mine so I always get irked when a well-meaning fellow non-believer says some historically ignorant thing like saying that people thought the Earth was flat, or that there was no technological or scientific advancement during the Middle Ages. Medieval agriculture had numerous advances over Roman-Era agriculture, most notably the 3-field system and the havery plow that turns the soil over. That stereotypically Western device, the mechanical clock, was invented in England in the 1200s. Medieval Scholastic philosophy was obsessed with reason and logic. Optics emerged as a field of study during the Middle Ages. A few thinkers had ideas that came close to full-blown calculus.

[rug]

1. Good post.

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[MrModerate]

3. OK, I promise. I'm not sure who you hang out with and why they would . . .

Regularly misstates historical verities, but I'll try not to be one of them.

[Odin2005]

4. In the usual flamewars one of us non-believes inevitably pulls out the...

...stereotypes of the Middle Ages as a rhetorical bludgeon and our side should really not resort to ignorant non-sense like this:



Whoever made this graph is truly historically ignorant both on technology and knowledge in the Middle Ages AND the Classical world.

[MrModerate]

5. Yep, that's a pretty dumb graph. Not the least of which is . . .

Labeling the period "The Christian Dark Ages."

[Deep13]

11. True, the dark age was between say 400 and 800 CE depending on the area.

My understanding is that a dark age is simply a period in time with few surviving records. There was also a Greek dark age following the collapse of Mycenaean civilization and the rise of classical Greece.

[MrModerate]

6. On a related topic, I recently downloaded Manchester's . . .

"A World Lit Only By Fire," which I read in paper form years ago, and which as I recall paints a pretty bleak picture of the Dark Ages generally -- including a repressive church (but which was only one of many challenges people faced between the fall of Rome and the beginning of the Renaissance).

I think it is fair to say that the fall of Roman and allied civilizations did mark a discontinuity in "human avancement" in Europe (basically in the Roman Empire) -- presuming one even believes that advancement is inherent in human affairs and the arrow always points forward.

[Odin2005]

9. IMO the Roman Empire in the West was an anomaly, an unsustainable edifice.

Western Europe outside of Italy and southern Iberia did not have the social development to sustain large, bureaucratic states on their own before about AD 1000, urbanization in northern Roman Gaul, for example, was almost entirely around administrative centers, and when the political edifice of the empire collapsed so did the cities because their purpose disappeared. In contrast when Europe started to re-urbanize around AD 1000 it was around centers of commerce and manufacturing, leading to truly sustainable urban communities.

The loss of knowledge in the West was almost entirely because of that, not religion. Byzantine Christianity was just as doctrinaire and dogmatic as the Catholic Church, but the Byzantines never lost the knowledge of the Ancients.

[MrModerate]

12. Slow to respond, primarily because I agree with you . . .

Those areas were the outskirts, and when the center fell, there was no unifying principle. The Eastern Empire/Byzantium had much more robust interactions (cultural and economic) with the rest of the civilized world.

Interestingly, I lived in Romania for a year or so in 2004-2005, and their academics' take was that Roman Dacia collapsed at about the same time as the Western Empire, partly due to pressure from "barbarians" from the northeast.

[onager]

7. Not the way I saw it...

That started as a discussion about the Church suppressing SCIENTIFIC knowledge during the Dark Ages - not human knowledge in general.

Then, as usual, the believers hijacked the topic - this happens all the time, whenever the Dark Ages come up. Suddenly we were being accused of saying NO human progress was made during the Dark Ages.

Those are two very different subjects.

And BTW - please return the favor and quit regurgitating old fables about the destruction of the Alexandria library. I lived in Alexandria for 4 years, and lugged many books back home with me about the history of the city. Some are collections of academic papers, with historians all over the world arguing about what happened to the Library. It's still a very murky and contentious subject.

You mentioned 4 suspects in the destruction of the Library. Three were correct, at least partly. But the old yarn about the Muslims burning the Library originated with a Xian kook in the 12th century. And it is, word for word, exactly like a Xian myth about the burning of the library at Baghdad - "If the books agreee with the Koran, they are superfluous, and if they disagree they are heresy," etc. etc.

From what I've read, the commander of the Muslim army that took Alexandria in 642 CE, Amr bin Al-Aas, was an educated man and a poet himself. He gave orders that his soldiers were to leave the city and its residents unmolested, including the large Jewish population of Alexandria. He made Jews and Xians pay a special religious tax, but that was always imposed on all non-Muslims.

Last and final note, honest - nobody ever mentions the event that probably did more than anything else to destroy the Library in July, 365 CE - a 9.3 magnitude earthquake that struck Crete and the Greek coast.

The quake sent a wall of water barreling across the Mediterranean, straight for Alexandria. Descriptions of this tsunami sound eerily like the one that clobbered Indonesia in 2004 - the water receded, and delighted Alexandrians ran out to grab stranded fish and loot suddenly beached ships. Then the water came back, with enough force that boats were driven inland onto the roofs of two-story buildings.

Alexandria's Royal Quarter, which included the Library, was located near the coastline and the damage to the complex must have been massive. In recent years, underwater archeologists have started to uncover remains of the Royal Quarter. So maybe we'll see part of the Great Library re-surface before long. I sure hope so.

[Odin2005]

8. Thaks for the info on the Library of Alexandria!

As for science and the church, IMO there was really no "science", as distinguished from other areas of knowledge, before Galileo and Descartes. "Science" before those 2 was mostly anecdotal observations, speculation, and natural history. Those things did not become true Science until Galileo and his peers enshrined experiment, which was previously neglected, as all-important.

And the Church actively suppressing knowledge did not occur very much before the Counter-Reformation and the invention of the printing press, before the 1500s as long as you were careful in labeling your ideas as "speculation" you were fine. In fact one of the most important proto-scientific figures of the Middle Ages was a bishop himself, Nicolas of Oresme, who discovered Inertia and essentially demolished Aristotlian Physics 200 years before Copernicus.

[Warpy]

10. I'd often wondered if the earthquake and tsunami had done the deed

while admitting the possibility that different sects probably did vandalize each other's books. The mathematical texts would have been left by all of them, numbers making the average believer's brain hurt.

Part of the reason the Dark Ages were Dark is because for the first 500 years or so, there was precious little literacy outside the church. Warlords were too busy battling and intermarrying to establish territories to give academics much notice and literate monks and other clerics were too self effacing to write much beyond the goings on of the warlords, giving us at least a sketchy history. The church didn't suppress knowledge so much as filter it through its own myopic perspective, simply considering too much of it irrelevant.

It's really too bad because I'd love to see documentation of increasing food supplies due to agricultural innovation and the founding of artisan guilds, one feeding the other and both leading up to the Renaissance.