DARK AGES on cable was surprising blunt about behavior of nobles--compared them to Tony Soprano

[yurbud]

"Nobles" would build a fort, then send their private army out to terrorize the locals into submission. Kind of like the vikings only locally based. They said it got so out of hand the Vatican had to tell the knights to ratchet down the abuse.

It also reinforced the observation that wars did little or nothing for the average joes except possibly paying more tax or losing their life when they are sent to fight for the king. And of course going back to Roman times, they were told they were fighting some threat to the kingdom, not just helping a rich guy do a hostile take over.

Things haven't changed that much.

[Kagemusha]

1. Uhhhhhhhh.... where did we get the idea that the Church didn't squeeze the poor?

Since when? Just wondering.

[yurbud]

2. maybe that's why they didn't like nobles over-doing it--competition. I'm no fan of the church then

either.

[Kagemusha]

4. Absolutely, the competition factor was no small part of that.

Having said that, it's not like I think that there aren't a lot of people of meagre means who wouldn't have done the exact same thing to their fellow man if they'd had the power to do so.

[rucky]

3. When was this on? What channel?

sounds cool. maybe they'll re-run it.

[yurbud]

5. cable is like Groundhog Day. I can't remember which channel. two hours and called "Dark Ages"

[Richard Steele]

22. The History Channel. Pretty safe bet that they'll rerun it many times. nm

[SharonAnn]

6. That's partly why the Church sent them on Crusades. Had to do something

with all of these unemployed, armed men who were trained for fighting.

It gave them someplace to go and something to do.

I think history is really made up of what society did to occupy young men. If they weren't employed, they were looking for trouble. Kind of like today.

In today's war-torn, impoverished regions, the young, healthy men with guns always have enough to eat.

[xchrom]

11. it was the habit to occupy young men with war.

it also killed quite a few off -- and that had benefits as well.

we still do it -- but we are perhaps more convoluted with our reasons.

we've also made it more available for more people to make big bucks off of.

back before civilization -- the old men and women of the village just wanted get those trouble makers out of their hair -- it became too much of a habit.

[RestoreGore]

19. And here I thought it was to find the Holy Grail ;-)

[Nikki Stone1]

20. "I think history is really made up of what society did to occupy young men." WOW!

Great point. I think you've hit the nail on the head.

[demnan]

7. It was on History Channel, if anyone wants to see it

I recently just re-watched "The Name of the Rose" which took place in the 14th century, somewhat after the Dark Ages but here is the case in point:

A scene at the monastary shows the monks throwing out garbage onto the grounds. Sean Connery's character, a Francsican monk, says sarcastically, "I see another generous donation to the poor".

Later in the movie a noted cleric is dragged over a precipice by the "unwashed masses".

So here is a question, did the common people start to propser and build guilds because all the noble idiots were off sacking the Middle East instead of sacking them? Could they have improved, not because of what was brought back, but because of what was taken away in the first place?

[bleedingheart]

10. I didn't like it..

I addressed this in the World History Forum.

The Dark Ages series gave a very poor overview of history and in my opinon had more money invested in "re-enactments" rather than in telling history.

Your question is a good one, however if anything there were guilds prior to the Crusades but it depended upon whether the region in question was given enough peace time to recuperate and build business/farms..etc

I have a good book on the history of family life in that period and to be honest it wasn't as "dark" as people think.

[bleedingheart]

12. I also want to add that the term "dark ages" is inappropriate and most

historians refer to the period as the..

Early, High and Late Middle Ages.

[Bridget Burke]

15. What "history"? (I'm agreeing with you.)

People living in the country didn't notice that many changes. Their lives weren't that great under the Romans, either. City folk has some difficulties--but most "barbarians" just did a bit of looting & moved on--or moved in & wanted tried to become civilized themselves.

Notice that Byzantium was mostly ignored. Yeah, there was that area over on the right side of the map where things weren't Dark at all. But that side of the Empire doesn't count, to many scholars.

Of course "How the Irish Saved Civilization" included a bit of blarney. But not everyone was "helped" by the Romans. So they didn't miss them.

There was another show last night on the Vandals, part of the continuing "Barbarians" series. Look--historians shouldn't call every non-Roman group "barbarian." They had names.

Gave up on both shows to continue reading R A Lafferty's "Fall of Rome"--a seriously Out Of Print volume written by a master of weird speculative fiction. This blogger's read it, too.

R.A. Lafferty I remember best for 'The Fall of Rome,' which while certainly not Sci-Fi was the wildest thing he ever wrote. It was an extraordinary reimagining of the struggle between Emperor Theodosius (the one who made Christianity official), his general Stilicho and his gothic soldiers led by Alaric. Lafferty dove headfirst into some very difficult sources about the late fourth century Roman Empire, read most of them in Latin, absorbed them completely, and then spit them out in an interpretation so convincing that you knew it must have been true. Now that I am a 'real' historian of that period, I still acknowledge it as one of the basic building blocks of my own historical sense of the period. It taught me what an historical _imagination_ can do when given its head.

http://clawoftheconciliator.blogspot.com/2006/04/science-fiction-fantasy-and-faith-part_03.html

I may check in to the World History Forum.

[bleedingheart]

16. You are completely correct concerning the lives of peasants

they led a hard scrabble life whether the Romans, Franks, Vandals, Ostrogoths, or Visigoths were in charge.

I thought their treatment of Justinian was poor. He considered fleeing the city, however Theodora and others including Belisaurius convinced him other wise. By the way to ignore Belisaurius was interesting....he was a key reason why Justinian's campaigns were successful.

Additionally, Theodora was an early feminist...and campaigned for the rights of women and did help to change the laws to aid them.

If anything the structure of the tribes of Gaul was part of the reason the region suffered so much infighting. They briefly touched on this but did not discuss it in detail. When a father died, his property was divided amongst the male heirs. This splintering of empires (even Charlegmagne broke up his empire)..led to fighting amongst siblings and other heirs.

Not that primogeniture guarantees peace, because you need only look to the Byzantine empire to see that having the eldest succeed to the throne could create a web of intrigue at the court and ended up being the reason why many emperors of Byzantium and even the Caliphs murdered their own siblings or crippled them in order to prevent them from being a threat. However the people were spared open warfare and the unrest...it just made the court life dangerous.

[Bridget Burke]

21. It's impossible to cover such a huge topic on one show.

How about a series, with each episode focusing on one area? This could use Better History & still produce real entertainment. Intrigue? You bet.

I joined you in shouting "Where's Belisarius?" Count Belisarius by Robert Graves was a fascinating story about the era.

[muriel_volestrangler]

14. One theory is that the Black Death changed the balance of the economy

With about a third of the population suddenly dead, labour became in short supply, and ideas of 'serfdom' had to go out of the window - a landowner had to deal with workers more fairly if he wanted his fields worked on.

[Lisa]

26. that's what Terry Jones (and other previous scholars) suggest

Not only did peasants gain more leverage for negotiations, but women worked in non-traditional roles. (I seem to recall a medieval manuscript with illustrations of a woman constructing something from bricks and mortar? Could be fictional symbolism, I suppose, but the artist does seem to suggest that she knows what she's doing.) Besides the fact that it wasn't that unusual, even prior to the Black Death, for women to take over managing estates, etc., while their husbands were away fighting for the king. Jones suggests that attitudes about women in power shifted when the population recovered from the epidemics ... and got even more entrenched during the supposedly more advanced and progressive Renaissance and Enlightenment eras. (And the image of the fragile "damsel in distress" is a Victorian Romantic creation.)

Jones's book "Medieval Lives" was quite interesting, and discusses medieval attitudes towards serfdom, women, and science.

[bleedingheart]

8. The Vatican was only concerned about the knights killing one another

because the constant fighting amongst themselves was weakening their resources.

Later tournaments would take the place of the real battles...but even the Mother Church cracked down on that. King Henry II of France was killed in a jousting tourney when a large splinter of wood went through his eye piece and entered his brain...he died in agony the next day.

The Crusades were both religious, business, and busy work...

1. Religious - free the holy land..blah blah blah
2. Business - The Middle East was wealthy and ripe for plunder and they even plundered Christians..and equal opportunity plundering.
3. Kept the Europeans busy killing other people rather than themselves.

[fidgeting wildly]

9. D'oh! I wanted to watch that and forgot it was on.

In case anyone else wants to catch the rerun, I just checked the schedule. It's on the History Channel. Times are Eastern.
3/10 8 p.m.
3/11 12 a.m.
3/11 5 p.m.

[bleedingheart]

13. I would recommend a trip to the library over that series

get some really good books on the period, curl up in a chair and you will learn far more.

If the series was meant to stir people's interest in the subject..that would be one thing but that series did not provide enough information or insight.

I love history and these types of programs make me cringe.

[fidgeting wildly]

27. Thanks, but I studied history in college.

I know the usefulness of books and have read several good ones. I'm one of those people who enjoy these programs.

[HamdenRice]

17. Wanna know where the word "knight" comes from?

I only caught a few minutes of the program, but some of the comments on this thread are interesting.

I think there is a little confusion over the role of "lords" and "knights."

The word "knight" comes from the same root as the Dutch/Germanic word "knecht" (the gh like ch in Dutch was actually pronounced in the original word) and means "servant."

A knight was a hired bully, kind of like a mafia "foot soldier" or a Japanese samurai.

It was the lords who made war on each other, and the knights loyally carried out the battles. But the knights themselves had little say in the politics of those fights.

Knights eventually elevated their status through art and culture (much like the samurai did) by creating a cult of noble-like behavior and courtly love. They raised their status from fighting slaves to gentlemen. But they always were in the position of pledged loyalty to a "real" nobleman or "lord."

Generally, the serfs and peasants were not part of the war fighting capacity of lords, except in extraordinary occasions.

Some of the crusades were wars of lords and knights, but for complicated cultural reasons, a few of the crusades mobilized commoners to go to the middle east. These tended to be disastrous, because medieval militaries did not have the logistics to support mass armies.

[yurbud]

23. sort of like the mafia migrates from street crime to legit business or in the case of opium trade...

vice versa.

[RestoreGore]

18. The only thing that has changed about us over the centuries are the clothes we wear

And that truly is a sad statement.

[Lisa]

24. and guess what Bush's ancestors were up to back then!

"Local historians and genealogists in Wexford have discovered evidence to suggest that President George W. Bush is a direct descendant of Strongbow, the nobleman who led the Norman invasion of Ireland.

The president is also believed to be a direct descendant, through 30 generations, of Dermot McMorrough, the King of Leinster, reviled in many Irish history books as the man who betrayed his island for personal gain."

http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2005/0126/index.html
http://richarddelevan.blogspot.com/2005/01/bush-to-invade-leinster.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1399353,00.html



Yes, yes -- I know it's unfair to compare people with their ancestors from way back. For one thing, "Strongbow" (as his defenders argue) was a pretty good leader and didn't leave all the fighting to others.
http://theanchoressonline.com/2005/01/27/oh-look-bush-is-irish-too-but-of-course-bad-irish/

[yurbud]

25. I was going to say it isn't strongbow's fault that his gene pool pinched off a loaf like W.