March 28, 2023 • 23 mins
Dr. Christopher Bellitto begins our journey through the Middle Ages by laying out the timeline and geography for Medieval civilization. Plus, he explains what “The Dark Ages” really means.
Half-Hour History: Secrets of the Medieval World is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors, anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:33):
This is half hour History, Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. I'm not a professor, but
I do sound like one, and I'm here to bring
you into the world of half hour History, where we'll
dive into an academic topic that I personally think you're
gonna love. And you don't even have to show up
(00:54):
for class. These series come right to you to listen
to while you're walking, driving, gardening, cooking, practicing falconry like me.
I don't do that, but it's cool if you do.
In this twelve part series, we're going to dig into
the medieval times. No, not the restaurant with jousting tournaments,
actors delivering lines and questionable English accents, and crowds gobbling
(01:17):
giant turkey legs. The real thing. From the Fall of
Rome to the beginning of the Renaissance. We're taking a
trip back in time to that era of chivalry, warring popes,
and the construction of Notre Dame. Doctor Christopher Bulido is
going to lead you on this journey. He's an author
and professor who teaches ancient and medieval history at Kane University,
(01:39):
my alma mater. That's actually true. In this first episode,
Chris will explain the times in medieval times and what
it was like to live in the Dark Ages. So
light a candle and Chris will take it from here.
(02:05):
What we're going to try to do is give a
picture about a thousand years of history that's full of
cartoon characters, full of conventional wisdom that often is very wrong.
And so what we're going to try to do to
begin is simply ask ourselves, when we're the Middle Ages,
where are they in history? Is that the same thing
as the Dark Ages and the Dark Ages? If the
(02:26):
Dark Ages were so bad, how did we end up
with Gothic cathedrals, with universities, with Francis, with Claire, with
a Bernard of claire Vaux. How did we have this
flowering of nights and chivalry? How did that happen? If
things were so bad? Well, what we're going to find
is that medieval Europe was kind of the first original
multicultural civilization. And we're going to take about a thousand
(02:49):
years from roughly the Fall of Rome about five hundred
a d or CE, and I'll talk about those distinctions
in a minute to about fifteen hundred, so from the
fall of Rome to roughly Columbus who sails the Ocean
Blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two, or Martin Luther
who posts the ninety five theses in fifteen seventeen. Then
(03:10):
one thing that I want to be clear about is
that we will have names and dates and places, but
I'm far more interested not in names and dates and places,
but in movements, in ideas. Can we get a sense
of what it is that the Middle Ages was about?
What was it like to live in that period? What
(03:31):
did these people care about? What were they willing to
live and what were they willing to die for? And
that tells us about their values. So we're going to
begin by looking at what happened after Rome fell, and
I believe it really transformed, and we'll talk about that
a little bit more on topic two. Then we're going
to look at a recovering period during what's called the
(03:53):
Carolingian Renaissance around eight hundred under Charlemagne. Then things are
going to slow down a little bit more, and then
there's going to be this explosion of activity around ten
to fifty or eleven hundred, where universities come together, guilds
come together. There's a spiritual reawakening called the twelfth century Renaissance,
where popes and emperors and kings are fighting for ultimate authority,
(04:15):
and everything goes really well until about thirteen hundred and
thirteen hundred the bottom falls out. Everything that could go
wrong did go wrong. It's like the nineteen thirties Great
Depression running for about two hundred years. The papacy is
in Avignon, there are three popes, there's the Black Death.
The superpowers of England and France are fighting a war
(04:36):
called the Hundred Years War. It's just awful. So that's
the big kind of canvas. So ask yourself when I
think of the Middle Ages, when I think of medieval Europe,
what verbs come to mind? What nouns come to mind?
What images come to mind? And one of the first
things people ask is, well, isn't this phrase going medieval?
(04:57):
Which is shown up on YouTube videos and it's shown
up on T shirts and movies going Medieval? It has
this image of this repressive, monolithic, homogeneous population, a population
of superstition and religious fanaticism that was against science and rationality,
(05:17):
and of course these are all caricatures, and that's not
what this course is about. We do find within that
thousand year period, as I've already mentioned, some periods that
were better and some periods that were worse. Highs and lows,
ebbs and flows. Well, we find that in our own lives.
We find that in American history. We shouldn't be surprised
at that. And yet we also have this very at
(05:39):
the same time that we have this notion that going
medieval is bad, we have this very romantic notion of
the Middle Ages. Most of us have been to Gothic
cathedrals in Europe or Neo Gothic cathedrals in our own communities,
and these are churches that were built usually after eighteen fifty.
In the United States, there was a neo Medievalist movement
from eighteen fifty to about nineteen twenty where people became
(06:01):
fascinated with the Middle Ages. And it's because people were
traveling to Europe and they were seeing the Church of
Notre Dame and gargoyles, and they wanted to bring that
back to the United States and replicate it. We should
also note that yes, we are talking about Western Europe,
which was dominated by Western Latin Christianity, but we're going
(06:21):
to take detours to the east. We're going to be
going very shortly to Byzantium in the east, to Constantinople
or modern day Istanbul. And we must remember that Christianity
and Islam we're in contact with each other, and yes,
often conflict with each other, from very very early in
the Middle Ages, from just about the time that Muhammad
(06:42):
dies in six thirty two, the very beginning of our period.
So I want us to look at this medieval period
as both Christian and Muslim and Jewish as well, and
we're going to see where Judaism comes into play. My
goal for you is that after we've done these twelve topics,
when somebody says Middle Ages or Medieval Europe, you're going
to be able to put that in a place in
(07:04):
your head. I know somebody who always asks the question.
Something is on the history channel, or you see a
piece of art, and she always asks it happens to
be my wife. She always says, is this before or
after Columbus? And whatever that answer is enables her to
put that material in a certain place in her head.
And on a map. So I want you to be
able to understand the major periods, the major people, the
(07:26):
ideas and the events of the Middle Ages, not history
as one damned thing after another. This happened, and this happened,
and this happened. Though, I do want you to have
a sense of the early, the High and the late
Medieval period, but more a sense again medieval imagination or
medieval culture or medieval civilizations. I want you to understand
(07:47):
fundamental vocabulary, fundamental chronology, and fundamental geography. And I want
you to have a broader perspective. Yes, as I've said,
the Middle Ages, we're going to see through the eyes
of medieval Christianity. But history that is just top down,
that's important and women doesn't work for me, it doesn't
(08:08):
work for you. A big change in the way that
Americans see history occurred in nineteen ninety when PBS aired
The Civil War by ken Burns and The Civil War
by ken Burns was a documentary that looked at the
Civil War. Yes, Grant Lee, Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, but also
you and me, the everyday soldier, the letters he wrote
to his wife, the letters that the wife wrote back
(08:30):
trying to locate her husband's body, perhaps if he was
killed in battle. So we're gonna try to marry top
down and bottom up history, and so that means we're
gonna have Muslim voices, Jewish voices, Byzantine voices, dissenting voices,
people who weren't buying into the medieval dominance Christianity. And
these folks are known as heretics and wives talk about
(08:52):
them later. And when you take all of them and
lay them on the table, you see immediately that the
Middle Ages was not homogeneous but heterogeneous. That it was,
as I said before, multicultural and in its own way.
Even though it's only talking about the medieval the Mediterranean
basin and medieval Europe, North Africa and the area of
(09:14):
the Holy Land, it is global in their context. And
so what's the influence that medieval Europe had and continues
to have on society. We'll see that as we move along.
And I'd also like to provide a roadmap for future study.
Let's talk about chronology for a few minutes. So I
mentioned earlier the phrase BC and a D. Now a
(09:34):
D is a Christian way of telling time. It stands
for the Latin phrase anno domini or the year of
our Lord, and that dating wasn't put into place until
about five hundred years after Jesus by a man named
Dionysius Exiguus and odd name Dennis the Slight or Dennis
the Short, who decided to take all of the calendars
(09:55):
of the ancient world and make one that made sense
for Christians. And so we started with the birth of Jesus.
There actually is no year zero, and Dionysius Exiguus was
counting a little bit off, so Jesus was actually born
six or five or four BC, which sounds strange to
our ears because BC stands for before Christ, doesn't it.
But it was a mistake. So BC a D. Now
(10:18):
that's a very Christian way of counting, And so some
folks have substituted CE common Era for a D and
b CE before the Common Era for BC. Now, generally
I use BC and a D, and I mean nothing
by it except that it's the way that I was trained,
and it's in my DNA, so I'll try to use
(10:39):
one or the other, kind of like saying his or hers.
Now right away, when we talk about chronology, we have
to talk about this phrase the Dark Ages, where does
that phrase come from, Well, actually comes from the end
of the medieval period in the fourteenth century, and it
comes out of the mouth of a famous Italian humanist
by the name of Petrarch. He wasn't the first one
to use this phrase Middle Ages, but he was kind
(11:02):
of the most important person around and people listen to him.
And here's what's going on. Petrarch is living in the
thirteen hundreds. He's gone to Avignon in southern France, where
he sees a papacy that is full of greed and
full of graft, and it's very depressing because the papacy
is supposed to be in Rome. He calls it the
Babylonian captivity of the church or the Babylonian captivity of
(11:25):
the papacy, and it kind of gets him down. And
he's a humanist and humanists in the Renaissance who are
interested in looking back and recapturing Greco Roman learning and
kind of transporting it to a future world where there
would be another Golden Age. Right, So if there's a
golden age in the past and a golden age to come,
we must be stuck in the middle. And an Italian
that means medio avo and in Latin it's medium avum
(11:48):
and it becomes English as medieval M D E v
I L which is, I guess kind of half bad
and half good. But it gives you the sense that
we're kind of stuck in the Middle Ages, right, Even
when people talk about their lives, you know, they talk
about that that Middle Age is slump that you go
through your forty or your forty five, and you say, geez,
is this it? So that's kind of what Petrarc is
(12:10):
talking about. And then a little bit later, now Petrarch
is kind of on the leading edge of the Italian Renaissance.
We're going to be talking about the twelfth century Renaissance
in Topic eight and a Carolingian Renaissance soon enough in
the year eight hundred. There are many renaissances in history,
but the Renaissance that everybody talks about Italians running around
and tights Michelangelo da Vinci, which is fourteen hundred, fifteen
(12:32):
hundred and sixteen hundred. Those folks were recovering Greco Roman
learning and what they wanted to do is say what
we're doing is enlightened, and it's new and it's better.
And if you want to do that. What are you
going to do? You're going to trash the centuries that
came before you. So thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred not
a great period of time, but it's only two hundred
years of the thousand year period that we call the
(12:53):
Middle Ages. And so that kind of depressed period tainted
the entire Medieval period, and that's where the phrase the
Dark Ages comes from. To the break, we go to Rome.
Plus you've heard of Henry the Eighth, but who's Henry
(13:13):
the Navigator. Let's look a little bit more closely. Let's
break down the early, the High and the late Medieval period.
(13:34):
So the Early Medieval period is from about the fall
of Rome in the year four seventy six. Yes, that
period is dimmer than the Roman Empire, but it wasn't
without its bright lights. Right in the middle of that period,
from about four seventy six to ten fifty is bang
eight hundred, the Carolingian Renaissance. So what Western Latin Christianity
(13:56):
is a bit in the duldrums. Islam is exploding in
this culture. Then the High Medieval period roughly ten fifty
thirteen hundred, and this is the flowering when people go
to communities in Europe, a city like Prague, which is
a medieval jewel, a city like Sienna, which is a
(14:17):
medieval jewel. What they're thinking of when they think of
the Middle Ages is that period. They're thinking of Gothic
and Neo Gothic communities, They're thinking of cathedrals, they're thinking
of Notre Dame, and they're thinking of chivalry and knighthood
and the romance of Arthurian legends. That's what people have
in mind. And then the collapse, as I said before,
(14:37):
of the late Medieval period, roughly thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred,
about two hundred years, about as long as the United
States has been around since seventeen seventy six. And that's
the period of the Avenual Papacy, the Great Western Sism,
the Hundred Years War, and during the Hundred Years War
from about thirteen fifty to fourteen fifty smack dab in
the middle of it is about a thirty year civil
(14:59):
war in France. Can you imagine the American Civil War
being fought not for four years, but thirty years In
the midst of World War Two, which was fought not
for about ten years but for about a hundred years.
It's an absolute mess, economic troubles, peasant revolts, and of
course the Black Death. Let's talk about where we are
(15:20):
on the map. And to do that, to talk about
medieval Europe, we need to talk about the Roman Empire.
So now I took a map of the Roman Empire
and I laid it down, and I wanted to say,
how big was the Roman Empire. Well, if I took
a map of the continental United States and laid it
(15:40):
on top of the Roman Empire, they'd be roughly the
same size. So if you can imagine a map of
the United States without the Mediterranean in it, We've got
the Mississippi, we've got Salt Lake, but we have nothing
like the Mediterranean. Pretty much the shape and size of
the continental United States, which is roughly a rectangle, is
(16:00):
the shape and size of the Roman Empire. So Rome
never got to certain areas that in fact experienced a
very vibrant Middle Ages. So Rome never got to Ireland,
Rome never got to Scandinavia, so very roughly this would
(16:20):
be North America would be Canada. Rome never got quite
that far, and Rome never got south of the Sahara,
so not into Mexico or Latin America or South America. Now,
Islam is a very important player. Almost immediately at the
beginning of the Middle Ages. Islam is going to take
(16:43):
control of what we call the modern Middle East and
North Africa north of the Sahara after about six fifty
and so if you look again at the Roman Empire,
maybe have that map of the United States in mind.
What's happening is that Muhammed is born about seventy We're
(17:05):
not quite sure, and he dies in the year six
thirty two, and from six thirty two to seven thirty two,
Islam takes control of the modern Middle East. Okay, so Syria, Lebanon, Israel,
West Bank, the Gaza Strip, all of that area there.
Saudi Arabia goes as far as Constantinople, but can't beat Constantinople,
(17:30):
so comes back down and takes out North Africa. Now,
North Africa was the Bible belt of early Christianity, and
right there was Alexandria, one of the richest scholarly areas
in time, and then goes all the way up to
what we today called Morocco, jumps the Straits of Gibraltar,
gets into the Iberian Peninsula. That's that box. If you
(17:53):
will that's modern day Portugal, and Spain jumps the Pyrenees,
goes pretty far into Goal or modern day France, and
gets pushed back, and then Islam controls most of Spain
for about three hundred years, and the Christians push Islam
down from north to south in a movement called the
(18:14):
Reconquest until ten eighty five to Ledo falls, And that's
a really important moment because Toledo had been an important
capital of Islamic Spain and then all the way down
until fourteen ninety two. So you can't talk about medieval
Europe and not talk about Islam, and particularly Islamic Spain,
because that's where there's a lot of inter religious dialogue guests,
(18:35):
but also a lot of inter religious conflict. And we'll
see how Christians, Jews, and Muslims negotiated all of that,
because without that Muslim interaction you never would have had
Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, because Thomas Aquinas is
reading ancient Greek and Roman texts, primarily Greek texts through
(18:57):
Arabic translations back into Latin, because Islam never lost contact
with that ancient Greek past, whereas Western Christianity and Western
Europe did, in fact lose contact with the Greek and
became more Latin. But let's not think that medieval Europe
(19:19):
was entirely closed in on itself. In fact, there was
quite a lot of contact between West and East, and
the place that was kind of the hinge of all
of that was Italy. So if you think of the Mediterranean,
there's Italy the boot sticking out, basically dividing the Mediterranean
from the Western Mediterranean into the Eastern Mediterranean. And Italy
(19:42):
doesn't make its money making grain and harvesting huge numbers
of vegetables and fruits. Now, Italy makes its money trading.
Italy makes its money on the water. Now. The interesting
thing is that the best seafarers in the Mediterranean, and
the Mediterranean is a very dangerous place. Lots of currents,
(20:02):
there's lots of winds, it's very tight are Muslims. So
Italians and Muslims from the very beginning are in economic
contact with each other, economic partnership with each other to
transport goods back and forth, basically on Muslim ships. And
those Muslim ships had Muslim sea captains, but they were
(20:23):
often backed by Italian money and the people who were
coming up with the money tended to be Jewish bankers,
so you see a very nice mix of these three
fates there. Also in the West, Christians had been going
off on pilgrimage to the East to the Holy Land,
(20:43):
very often six hundred, seven hundred tails off and then
it really picks up again around one and eleven, and
that's where the Crusades take place. And while we often
look at the Crusades as this awful period of conflict,
and we certainly will be looking at it in those terms,
it was also a period of exploration and logistics because
(21:04):
you had to move the armies from one place to another.
So navigation is getting better, and the West Western Christianity
is exploring its area, and of course there's a big connection.
Even further in the High Medieval period, you have Marco
Polo taking the Silk Road past the modern Middle East
(21:25):
all the way all the way into China, and Marco
Polo is living around twelve fifty to about thirteen twenty five,
so part of that real flowering, and so that makes
this a fascinating period of cultural exchange, not just Latin
West and Greek East, but Latin West, Greek East, and
(21:46):
even further to the Far East, through the ancient Near
East and the Far East as well. And one of
the really interesting people in this period, one of those
people whose names you never heard of, but history would
have been different without him, is a fellow named Henry
the Navigator. He was a king of Portugal. And one
of the interesting things about Henry is that even though
(22:06):
he established the school for navigation, the West Point and
Annapolis wrapped up into one for navigation, he never left Portugal.
He allowed other people to leave Portugal. But what he
did was he gathered together a school of navigation that
drew on Muslim science, Muslim math, Muslim astronomy to create
(22:28):
new and better maps. And every single person who sailed
from about fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred and that great
age of discovery or exploration had gone to Henry the
Navigator's school, or had somebody on his ship who had
gone there. And it's because of that man that Henry
(22:48):
the Navigator began to allow people to push off the
coast of West Africa and then off into the into
the Atlantic, and then off all the way to North America.
And then eventually, of course, Magellan is going to circumnavigate
the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific and then
all the way back again. Next week on Secrets of
(23:14):
the Medieval World, did Rome really fall or did it
just sort of implode? Half hour history Secrets of the
Medieval World from One Day University is a production of
iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show,
(23:36):
leave a review in your favorite podcast app, and check
out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history, pop culture,
true crime, and more. School of Humans
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors, anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:33):
This is half hour History, Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. I'm not a professor, but
I do sound like one, and I'm here to bring
you into the world of half hour History, where we'll
dive into an academic topic that I personally think you're
gonna love. And you don't even have to show up
(00:54):
for class. These series come right to you to listen
to while you're walking, driving, gardening, cooking, practicing falconry like me.
I don't do that, but it's cool if you do.
In this twelve part series, we're going to dig into
the medieval times. No, not the restaurant with jousting tournaments,
actors delivering lines and questionable English accents, and crowds gobbling
(01:17):
giant turkey legs. The real thing. From the Fall of
Rome to the beginning of the Renaissance. We're taking a
trip back in time to that era of chivalry, warring popes,
and the construction of Notre Dame. Doctor Christopher Bulido is
going to lead you on this journey. He's an author
and professor who teaches ancient and medieval history at Kane University,
(01:39):
my alma mater. That's actually true. In this first episode,
Chris will explain the times in medieval times and what
it was like to live in the Dark Ages. So
light a candle and Chris will take it from here.
(02:05):
What we're going to try to do is give a
picture about a thousand years of history that's full of
cartoon characters, full of conventional wisdom that often is very wrong.
And so what we're going to try to do to
begin is simply ask ourselves, when we're the Middle Ages,
where are they in history? Is that the same thing
as the Dark Ages and the Dark Ages? If the
(02:26):
Dark Ages were so bad, how did we end up
with Gothic cathedrals, with universities, with Francis, with Claire, with
a Bernard of claire Vaux. How did we have this
flowering of nights and chivalry? How did that happen? If
things were so bad? Well, what we're going to find
is that medieval Europe was kind of the first original
multicultural civilization. And we're going to take about a thousand
(02:49):
years from roughly the Fall of Rome about five hundred
a d or CE, and I'll talk about those distinctions
in a minute to about fifteen hundred, so from the
fall of Rome to roughly Columbus who sails the Ocean
Blue in fourteen hundred and ninety two, or Martin Luther
who posts the ninety five theses in fifteen seventeen. Then
(03:10):
one thing that I want to be clear about is
that we will have names and dates and places, but
I'm far more interested not in names and dates and places,
but in movements, in ideas. Can we get a sense
of what it is that the Middle Ages was about?
What was it like to live in that period? What
(03:31):
did these people care about? What were they willing to
live and what were they willing to die for? And
that tells us about their values. So we're going to
begin by looking at what happened after Rome fell, and
I believe it really transformed, and we'll talk about that
a little bit more on topic two. Then we're going
to look at a recovering period during what's called the
(03:53):
Carolingian Renaissance around eight hundred under Charlemagne. Then things are
going to slow down a little bit more, and then
there's going to be this explosion of activity around ten
to fifty or eleven hundred, where universities come together, guilds
come together. There's a spiritual reawakening called the twelfth century Renaissance,
where popes and emperors and kings are fighting for ultimate authority,
(04:15):
and everything goes really well until about thirteen hundred and
thirteen hundred the bottom falls out. Everything that could go
wrong did go wrong. It's like the nineteen thirties Great
Depression running for about two hundred years. The papacy is
in Avignon, there are three popes, there's the Black Death.
The superpowers of England and France are fighting a war
(04:36):
called the Hundred Years War. It's just awful. So that's
the big kind of canvas. So ask yourself when I
think of the Middle Ages, when I think of medieval Europe,
what verbs come to mind? What nouns come to mind?
What images come to mind? And one of the first
things people ask is, well, isn't this phrase going medieval?
(04:57):
Which is shown up on YouTube videos and it's shown
up on T shirts and movies going Medieval? It has
this image of this repressive, monolithic, homogeneous population, a population
of superstition and religious fanaticism that was against science and rationality,
(05:17):
and of course these are all caricatures, and that's not
what this course is about. We do find within that
thousand year period, as I've already mentioned, some periods that
were better and some periods that were worse. Highs and lows,
ebbs and flows. Well, we find that in our own lives.
We find that in American history. We shouldn't be surprised
at that. And yet we also have this very at
(05:39):
the same time that we have this notion that going
medieval is bad, we have this very romantic notion of
the Middle Ages. Most of us have been to Gothic
cathedrals in Europe or Neo Gothic cathedrals in our own communities,
and these are churches that were built usually after eighteen fifty.
In the United States, there was a neo Medievalist movement
from eighteen fifty to about nineteen twenty where people became
(06:01):
fascinated with the Middle Ages. And it's because people were
traveling to Europe and they were seeing the Church of
Notre Dame and gargoyles, and they wanted to bring that
back to the United States and replicate it. We should
also note that yes, we are talking about Western Europe,
which was dominated by Western Latin Christianity, but we're going
(06:21):
to take detours to the east. We're going to be
going very shortly to Byzantium in the east, to Constantinople
or modern day Istanbul. And we must remember that Christianity
and Islam we're in contact with each other, and yes,
often conflict with each other, from very very early in
the Middle Ages, from just about the time that Muhammad
(06:42):
dies in six thirty two, the very beginning of our period.
So I want us to look at this medieval period
as both Christian and Muslim and Jewish as well, and
we're going to see where Judaism comes into play. My
goal for you is that after we've done these twelve topics,
when somebody says Middle Ages or Medieval Europe, you're going
to be able to put that in a place in
(07:04):
your head. I know somebody who always asks the question.
Something is on the history channel, or you see a
piece of art, and she always asks it happens to
be my wife. She always says, is this before or
after Columbus? And whatever that answer is enables her to
put that material in a certain place in her head.
And on a map. So I want you to be
able to understand the major periods, the major people, the
(07:26):
ideas and the events of the Middle Ages, not history
as one damned thing after another. This happened, and this happened,
and this happened. Though, I do want you to have
a sense of the early, the High and the late
Medieval period, but more a sense again medieval imagination or
medieval culture or medieval civilizations. I want you to understand
(07:47):
fundamental vocabulary, fundamental chronology, and fundamental geography. And I want
you to have a broader perspective. Yes, as I've said,
the Middle Ages, we're going to see through the eyes
of medieval Christianity. But history that is just top down,
that's important and women doesn't work for me, it doesn't
(08:08):
work for you. A big change in the way that
Americans see history occurred in nineteen ninety when PBS aired
The Civil War by ken Burns and The Civil War
by ken Burns was a documentary that looked at the
Civil War. Yes, Grant Lee, Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, but also
you and me, the everyday soldier, the letters he wrote
to his wife, the letters that the wife wrote back
(08:30):
trying to locate her husband's body, perhaps if he was
killed in battle. So we're gonna try to marry top
down and bottom up history, and so that means we're
gonna have Muslim voices, Jewish voices, Byzantine voices, dissenting voices,
people who weren't buying into the medieval dominance Christianity. And
these folks are known as heretics and wives talk about
(08:52):
them later. And when you take all of them and
lay them on the table, you see immediately that the
Middle Ages was not homogeneous but heterogeneous. That it was,
as I said before, multicultural and in its own way.
Even though it's only talking about the medieval the Mediterranean
basin and medieval Europe, North Africa and the area of
(09:14):
the Holy Land, it is global in their context. And
so what's the influence that medieval Europe had and continues
to have on society. We'll see that as we move along.
And I'd also like to provide a roadmap for future study.
Let's talk about chronology for a few minutes. So I
mentioned earlier the phrase BC and a D. Now a
(09:34):
D is a Christian way of telling time. It stands
for the Latin phrase anno domini or the year of
our Lord, and that dating wasn't put into place until
about five hundred years after Jesus by a man named
Dionysius Exiguus and odd name Dennis the Slight or Dennis
the Short, who decided to take all of the calendars
(09:55):
of the ancient world and make one that made sense
for Christians. And so we started with the birth of Jesus.
There actually is no year zero, and Dionysius Exiguus was
counting a little bit off, so Jesus was actually born
six or five or four BC, which sounds strange to
our ears because BC stands for before Christ, doesn't it.
But it was a mistake. So BC a D. Now
(10:18):
that's a very Christian way of counting, And so some
folks have substituted CE common Era for a D and
b CE before the Common Era for BC. Now, generally
I use BC and a D, and I mean nothing
by it except that it's the way that I was trained,
and it's in my DNA, so I'll try to use
(10:39):
one or the other, kind of like saying his or hers.
Now right away, when we talk about chronology, we have
to talk about this phrase the Dark Ages, where does
that phrase come from, Well, actually comes from the end
of the medieval period in the fourteenth century, and it
comes out of the mouth of a famous Italian humanist
by the name of Petrarch. He wasn't the first one
to use this phrase Middle Ages, but he was kind
(11:02):
of the most important person around and people listen to him.
And here's what's going on. Petrarch is living in the
thirteen hundreds. He's gone to Avignon in southern France, where
he sees a papacy that is full of greed and
full of graft, and it's very depressing because the papacy
is supposed to be in Rome. He calls it the
Babylonian captivity of the church or the Babylonian captivity of
(11:25):
the papacy, and it kind of gets him down. And
he's a humanist and humanists in the Renaissance who are
interested in looking back and recapturing Greco Roman learning and
kind of transporting it to a future world where there
would be another Golden Age. Right, So if there's a
golden age in the past and a golden age to come,
we must be stuck in the middle. And an Italian
that means medio avo and in Latin it's medium avum
(11:48):
and it becomes English as medieval M D E v
I L which is, I guess kind of half bad
and half good. But it gives you the sense that
we're kind of stuck in the Middle Ages, right, Even
when people talk about their lives, you know, they talk
about that that Middle Age is slump that you go
through your forty or your forty five, and you say, geez,
is this it? So that's kind of what Petrarc is
(12:10):
talking about. And then a little bit later, now Petrarch
is kind of on the leading edge of the Italian Renaissance.
We're going to be talking about the twelfth century Renaissance
in Topic eight and a Carolingian Renaissance soon enough in
the year eight hundred. There are many renaissances in history,
but the Renaissance that everybody talks about Italians running around
and tights Michelangelo da Vinci, which is fourteen hundred, fifteen
(12:32):
hundred and sixteen hundred. Those folks were recovering Greco Roman
learning and what they wanted to do is say what
we're doing is enlightened, and it's new and it's better.
And if you want to do that. What are you
going to do? You're going to trash the centuries that
came before you. So thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred not
a great period of time, but it's only two hundred
years of the thousand year period that we call the
(12:53):
Middle Ages. And so that kind of depressed period tainted
the entire Medieval period, and that's where the phrase the
Dark Ages comes from. To the break, we go to Rome.
Plus you've heard of Henry the Eighth, but who's Henry
(13:13):
the Navigator. Let's look a little bit more closely. Let's
break down the early, the High and the late Medieval period.
(13:34):
So the Early Medieval period is from about the fall
of Rome in the year four seventy six. Yes, that
period is dimmer than the Roman Empire, but it wasn't
without its bright lights. Right in the middle of that period,
from about four seventy six to ten fifty is bang
eight hundred, the Carolingian Renaissance. So what Western Latin Christianity
(13:56):
is a bit in the duldrums. Islam is exploding in
this culture. Then the High Medieval period roughly ten fifty
thirteen hundred, and this is the flowering when people go
to communities in Europe, a city like Prague, which is
a medieval jewel, a city like Sienna, which is a
(14:17):
medieval jewel. What they're thinking of when they think of
the Middle Ages is that period. They're thinking of Gothic
and Neo Gothic communities, They're thinking of cathedrals, they're thinking
of Notre Dame, and they're thinking of chivalry and knighthood
and the romance of Arthurian legends. That's what people have
in mind. And then the collapse, as I said before,
(14:37):
of the late Medieval period, roughly thirteen hundred to fifteen hundred,
about two hundred years, about as long as the United
States has been around since seventeen seventy six. And that's
the period of the Avenual Papacy, the Great Western Sism,
the Hundred Years War, and during the Hundred Years War
from about thirteen fifty to fourteen fifty smack dab in
the middle of it is about a thirty year civil
(14:59):
war in France. Can you imagine the American Civil War
being fought not for four years, but thirty years In
the midst of World War Two, which was fought not
for about ten years but for about a hundred years.
It's an absolute mess, economic troubles, peasant revolts, and of
course the Black Death. Let's talk about where we are
(15:20):
on the map. And to do that, to talk about
medieval Europe, we need to talk about the Roman Empire.
So now I took a map of the Roman Empire
and I laid it down, and I wanted to say,
how big was the Roman Empire. Well, if I took
a map of the continental United States and laid it
(15:40):
on top of the Roman Empire, they'd be roughly the
same size. So if you can imagine a map of
the United States without the Mediterranean in it, We've got
the Mississippi, we've got Salt Lake, but we have nothing
like the Mediterranean. Pretty much the shape and size of
the continental United States, which is roughly a rectangle, is
(16:00):
the shape and size of the Roman Empire. So Rome
never got to certain areas that in fact experienced a
very vibrant Middle Ages. So Rome never got to Ireland,
Rome never got to Scandinavia, so very roughly this would
(16:20):
be North America would be Canada. Rome never got quite
that far, and Rome never got south of the Sahara,
so not into Mexico or Latin America or South America. Now,
Islam is a very important player. Almost immediately at the
beginning of the Middle Ages. Islam is going to take
(16:43):
control of what we call the modern Middle East and
North Africa north of the Sahara after about six fifty
and so if you look again at the Roman Empire,
maybe have that map of the United States in mind.
What's happening is that Muhammed is born about seventy We're
(17:05):
not quite sure, and he dies in the year six
thirty two, and from six thirty two to seven thirty two,
Islam takes control of the modern Middle East. Okay, so Syria, Lebanon, Israel,
West Bank, the Gaza Strip, all of that area there.
Saudi Arabia goes as far as Constantinople, but can't beat Constantinople,
(17:30):
so comes back down and takes out North Africa. Now,
North Africa was the Bible belt of early Christianity, and
right there was Alexandria, one of the richest scholarly areas
in time, and then goes all the way up to
what we today called Morocco, jumps the Straits of Gibraltar,
gets into the Iberian Peninsula. That's that box. If you
(17:53):
will that's modern day Portugal, and Spain jumps the Pyrenees,
goes pretty far into Goal or modern day France, and
gets pushed back, and then Islam controls most of Spain
for about three hundred years, and the Christians push Islam
down from north to south in a movement called the
(18:14):
Reconquest until ten eighty five to Ledo falls, And that's
a really important moment because Toledo had been an important
capital of Islamic Spain and then all the way down
until fourteen ninety two. So you can't talk about medieval
Europe and not talk about Islam, and particularly Islamic Spain,
because that's where there's a lot of inter religious dialogue guests,
(18:35):
but also a lot of inter religious conflict. And we'll
see how Christians, Jews, and Muslims negotiated all of that,
because without that Muslim interaction you never would have had
Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, because Thomas Aquinas is
reading ancient Greek and Roman texts, primarily Greek texts through
(18:57):
Arabic translations back into Latin, because Islam never lost contact
with that ancient Greek past, whereas Western Christianity and Western
Europe did, in fact lose contact with the Greek and
became more Latin. But let's not think that medieval Europe
(19:19):
was entirely closed in on itself. In fact, there was
quite a lot of contact between West and East, and
the place that was kind of the hinge of all
of that was Italy. So if you think of the Mediterranean,
there's Italy the boot sticking out, basically dividing the Mediterranean
from the Western Mediterranean into the Eastern Mediterranean. And Italy
(19:42):
doesn't make its money making grain and harvesting huge numbers
of vegetables and fruits. Now, Italy makes its money trading.
Italy makes its money on the water. Now. The interesting
thing is that the best seafarers in the Mediterranean, and
the Mediterranean is a very dangerous place. Lots of currents,
(20:02):
there's lots of winds, it's very tight are Muslims. So
Italians and Muslims from the very beginning are in economic
contact with each other, economic partnership with each other to
transport goods back and forth, basically on Muslim ships. And
those Muslim ships had Muslim sea captains, but they were
(20:23):
often backed by Italian money and the people who were
coming up with the money tended to be Jewish bankers,
so you see a very nice mix of these three
fates there. Also in the West, Christians had been going
off on pilgrimage to the East to the Holy Land,
(20:43):
very often six hundred, seven hundred tails off and then
it really picks up again around one and eleven, and
that's where the Crusades take place. And while we often
look at the Crusades as this awful period of conflict,
and we certainly will be looking at it in those terms,
it was also a period of exploration and logistics because
(21:04):
you had to move the armies from one place to another.
So navigation is getting better, and the West Western Christianity
is exploring its area, and of course there's a big connection.
Even further in the High Medieval period, you have Marco
Polo taking the Silk Road past the modern Middle East
(21:25):
all the way all the way into China, and Marco
Polo is living around twelve fifty to about thirteen twenty five,
so part of that real flowering, and so that makes
this a fascinating period of cultural exchange, not just Latin
West and Greek East, but Latin West, Greek East, and
(21:46):
even further to the Far East, through the ancient Near
East and the Far East as well. And one of
the really interesting people in this period, one of those
people whose names you never heard of, but history would
have been different without him, is a fellow named Henry
the Navigator. He was a king of Portugal. And one
of the interesting things about Henry is that even though
(22:06):
he established the school for navigation, the West Point and
Annapolis wrapped up into one for navigation, he never left Portugal.
He allowed other people to leave Portugal. But what he
did was he gathered together a school of navigation that
drew on Muslim science, Muslim math, Muslim astronomy to create
(22:28):
new and better maps. And every single person who sailed
from about fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred and that great
age of discovery or exploration had gone to Henry the
Navigator's school, or had somebody on his ship who had
gone there. And it's because of that man that Henry
(22:48):
the Navigator began to allow people to push off the
coast of West Africa and then off into the into
the Atlantic, and then off all the way to North America.
And then eventually, of course, Magellan is going to circumnavigate
the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific and then
all the way back again. Next week on Secrets of
(23:14):
the Medieval World, did Rome really fall or did it
just sort of implode? Half hour history Secrets of the
Medieval World from One Day University is a production of
iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show,
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