Medieval European History

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Many thanks! Very educational points.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

My last post was a bit too darn long to put together, so I'm going to try and make the next few nice and short.

The Transition to the High Middle Ages

Koenigsberger outlines how the situation gradually changes in the western kingdoms. A few key points:

Agricultural advances.

• Iron tools help with the development of the iron plough, which is used in lands with darker, heavier soil. Such  plough require 6-8 oxen to pull though, and this is a reason for the distinctive long but narrow 'medieval' fields. They require less turning for the oxen. In places like Italy though, with their easier to till soil, wooden ploughs were still used, and the old square shaped fields remained common.
• Iron tools also helped with the spread of windmills. Watermills were a relatively old technology, but the newer and more sophisticated invention of windmills allowed for mechanised grain milling to be conducted in more places, such as flat lands like Flanders / Netherlands regions. Of course, as Jubal and I have experience with in the game Vintage Story, this mechanical power could also be used in smithing!
• The 3 field fallow system spread. Gradually farmers learned that you could grow things like beans to put nitrogen back into the soil, so rather than 2 fallow years and 1 productive year, you could have 2 productive years, and 1 fallow year. This meant quite a bit increase in how much food you could get out of the soil. Although Koenigsberger also notes that this technique did tend to exhaust the soil faster. It was still effective, but not as huge an improvement as we might think. It depended more on the quality of the soil.
• Expansion into more areas also allowed for an increase in food supply. A famous example would be the work of the Dutch and the dyke system later, but clearing of forests, draining of marshes etc. were part of this process. The limits of expansion were beginning to be felt by the 13th century though.

Economic advances

• The spread of silver coinage (more silver mines) made it easier for people to trade, and therefore specialise in different things. You see more people who might still be small farmers, but also they produce things like boots or clothing and sell them in their shop. I believe this is what Manor Lords tries to show with the way 'burghers' were still in many cases still farming their own food out the back too, given the long strips of land that were used.
• An extra level of specialisation begins to emerge. Architects, sculptors, scribes, teachers. These people were often itinerant, because there is not enough demand in any one place to support them long term. So while the common people were relatively less likely to roam about (with the exception of pilgrimages, which gradually became more popular), there was a class of international people who worked around the continent. These people often knew each other, and used Latin as a living language. This helps to set the scene for the coming renaissance movements.

Urbanism

• Agricultural advances mean a greater population, and specialisation and trade help foster the return of urban areas. Places like London, Paris, Bruges, Milan and Florence start to turn into little cities. (By the 14th century Paris apparently boasted around 80,000 people, with London at around 30,000 I think.)
• Cities started to develop their own laws, independent of the feudal system. This is something I didn't really appreciate before. It makes sense, in that merchants and other 'citizens' of cities needed a certain relative freedom from those older obligations (including things like trial by combat!) in order to be able to do their business. In places like Italy, this progresses to the point of cities really becoming their own 'city states'. I get the impression that while this was more of an Italy thing, still the relative legal independence of cities was something that was found to some degree throughout Europe. This is also where we see the development of fraternities or brotherhoods of different sorts, trade unions, guilds and so on. A different kind of bond between people could exist in this spaces than the feudal bonds of liege and subject.
• The (although still modest) growth in wealth allowed for the building of great castles, monasteries, churches and cathedrals (warfare and worship of God were high social priorities for spending any surplus wealth). The itinerant specialist builders mentioned above developed their skills, and constructed the great "Romanesque" (pre-Gothic) buildings. These are dominant in the 11th and 12 centuries. This is a pan-European style, the first to emerge it seems following the collapse of the Western Empire. This speaks to the international / itinerant nature of the specialist builders of this time.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Another entry. This time I'm going to focus on the Crusades. This is largely from a dedicated section, but there are other related bits and pieces from later sections in here too, which makes sense because the period of the crusades is quite long and overlaps with so much else that is going on:

• I wasn't aware there were so many of these as distinct moments. Wikipedia lists nine major ones. But it seems there is disagreement on how many there really where. Some might argue that two 'crusades' should actually be understood as an ongoing larger one, for example. I believe the major ones were declared / launched by the Catholic church, but it seems as though this is not required by historians as a condition on something constituting a 'crusade'. Moreover, if I understand correctly, each 'crusade' was not always directed at a specific target (like recapturing the Holy Land). Sometimes it could be closer to a kind of church sanctioned open season on non-Christians in broader regions. This makes the history of the crusades a bit messy.

• Koenigsberger mentions that it was Christian Spain / Iberia where the initial concept of a religious (Christian) crusade developed, speculating that the inspiration might have come from that of the Muslim 'Jihad'. I don't see a reference to this in the Wiki on Crusades, and I wonder what consensus has formed on this since then.
• The first major pogroms against Jewish peoples in Europe occurred as a result of / as part of a crusade. I was not aware of the connection between these two, but it makes sense.
• Koenigsberger notes that the capture of the holy lands would likely not have been successful if it were not the case that the Turkish princes were fighting among themselves over the remains of the Seljuq empire.
• Apparently at its peak there were around 100,000 Latin speaking people living in the Holy Lands as a kind of quasi-colonial outpost that lasted nearly a century.
• It was interesting to see the contrast between the violence done by the crusaders who successfully captured the Holy Lands, and the restraint of Saladin when he retook them a hundred years or so later. Koenigsberger mentions the regard Saladin enjoyed in Europe for this 'chivalrous' behavior, and how Dante (as a mark of respect) has the muslim Saladin occupying purgatory in his Divine Comedy. "I saw great Saladi, aloof, alone."
• Connected to the above, I think it is another one of those historical moments where the factual barbarism of Europeans contrasts sharply with modern European / Western myth making / self-aggrandisement of itself as civilised vs. the barbarian other. 
• I wonder how the history of the world might have differed had Saladin or a Saladin not occurred. With enough time, would a new culture have developed in the east, similarly to how the Germanic tribes created new cultures through marriage and time in the west? Or was this always precluded by religious differences? The Germanic tribes Christianized after all, which made cultural blending far more simple.
• Koenigsberger mentions that one of the positive outcomes for Europe was that having a lot of surplus 'quarrelsome' young men go to the Holy Lands to live / die made everything generally more peaceful in the west. Which is kind of amusing. How much of war and violence in micro-scale or macro-scale is an outcome of / powered by the energies or 'will to power' of young men in general (and here by men I don't mean to be reductive in speaking of some 'biological' concept, hormones, or whatever, nor to exclude the biological, but being inclusive here of the political / cultural institution of men.)
• There is some mention of Catharism, and how the Church's fight against it spiralled out into a great deal of violence in the Albigensian Crusade. This is a very interesting (read, terrible) bit of history I wasn't familiar with. For example, the massacring of the the entire population of the city of Béziers. In reading of such stories as this and the massacres in the Holy Lands, I wonder more broadly about the nature of massacres. Of the above point about the violent capacities of (young?) men, and the nature of evil. The massacres of civilians by the Romans. Of more modern such events, and so on. It seems like a recurring theme over the course of human history, but given with different variations.  Of course, this event was not new in terms of violence being directed against innocent people in the name of Christianity. But what does appear to be new here is the way this directed, 'religious' violence was now occurring within the Christian west, against the Cathars, Jews, and other 'heretics', where once it was targeted at Pagans on the frontiers. Here Koenigsberger notes that we see the beginnings of the dark period of the Inquisition. I'm also wondering about parallels with the modern concept of Imperial Boomerang, where once violence is sanctioned on outsiders, it eventually 'comes home'. Hmm.. (Above, I say 'religious'. I don't want to imply that literally 'religion' itself (however we define this) is the cause of this violence. I really am not a fan of this line of argument that we saw in recent decades among prominent atheists. This is a different subject, but to begin with what we categorise as 'religious' is very difficult, particularly in a time of history such as this, where 'worldly' and 'religious' concerns and understandings are intertwined as they are.
• Catharism itself is really interesting too (I feel like I am saying that -everything- is interesting, but there is so much in history that stimulates the intellect isn't there. When one is in the right mood and looking for connections / growing one's understanding.)
  
  

  By reputation, Cathars believed that human souls were the sexless spirits of angels trapped in the material realm of the evil god. They thought these souls were destined to be reincarnated until they achieved salvation through the consolamentum, a form of baptism performed when death is imminent. 
  
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism
  
   

  I unknowingly learned a little bit about Cathar-like beliefs when playing The Seance of Blake Manor a few months ago (incidentally, a great game that I thoroughly recommend.) Relevant spoilers for a character in the game:
  
  
  Spoilers for The Seance of Blake Manor

  There is a Catholic priest character, named Lorcan Sinnot. It is revealed (or, rather, it can be revealed, if the player succeeds with this quest line) that he is actually a 'gnostic' who believes all of humanity is "trapped in the Black Iron Prison." This is actually a Cathar belief. The wiki calls Catharism 'pseudo-Gnostic', so certainly it is also the reverse, in that Cathar beliefs have a 'gnostic' character. Still, from my cursory look at it, I believe this specific idea of humanity being trapped in a prison created by an evil one seems to be specifically a Cathar-version of Gnostic thinking. Again, interesting! I do now want to learn more about Gnosticism, and the Cathar heresy
  
  
  Similarly, there is the heretic with gnostic beliefs in Pentiment, Vacslav.
  
• Another thing the crusades helped to foster was the growing dominance of the Italian city states over trade in the Mediterranean. Although simply walking to the Holy Lands was possible, it was difficult. Many died on the way over, and this did lead in at least one case to the outright collapse of an army. There was also Constantinople to contend with. An alternative was to take boats over and arrive much more speedily. Then once established the colonies there were supplies to deliver, wealth to extract, and soldiers, pilgrims and settlers who wanted to come and go. This meant an increased need for shipping, and Italy primarily fulfilled that need. This was an impetus for certain related financial / economic developments that we can discuss in the next post that would have significant ramifications for the course of European history (proto-capitalism, mathematical-rationalism).
• What else? Hmm.. I think lastly, I learned about the Crusaders (in Crusader #4) sacking the city of Constantinople (1204).  Koenigsberger has mentioned this in parting, but I haven't reached the part of the book where he deals with this properly yet. Still it seems worth mentioning here. He has noted that this action contributed to the eventual ability of the Ottomans (Turks) to subsequently end the Byzantine empire and strike further into Europe / the Balkans. It's ironic that it was the western Christians who ultimately brought about the end of the Eastern empire, which had functioned for so long as a bulwark against non-Christian forces pushing into the continent from the east. Another bit of history I was not familiar with.
• EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to mention another part of this story: the formation of the knightly 'holy orders' such as the Knights Templar and the Hospitallers (the Order of St John). Incidentally, we have a national 'priory' of St John here in Australia which provides ambulance services in various states, including here in Western Australia. One of those bits of history that jumped out at me after reading about the Hospitallers. Apparently the Order of St John was constituted in 1888, and does indeed trace itself back to the Hospitallers.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Oops, and over a week went by. I'm still reading, but I'm finding it hard to get any time to write about. Still, that's unlikely to change in the near future. So I'll try and write a bit more tonight.

Looking still at around the 12-13 centuries...

Something I found interesting that Koenigsberger draws attention to is how early we see the origins of capitalistic enterprise. Even at this early point, when looking for example at the wool trade, we find people in Flanders (I think is one location) doing things like buying fine wool from England in bulk, then paying people to card and spin it within their own homes, then taking that and having it woven by someone else, then taking that and selling it. A kind of 'vertical integration', where they had control over the workers to the extent that they were in cases forbidden from taking on jobs from others. Similarly something like this occurred in Italy (I think Florence) with 'wool guilds'. We have a kind of 'proletariat', but without any factories.

My original understanding of guilds was of a fellowship of craftsmen, who provided communal aid to each other and their community, and controlled things such as who got to be recognised as a 'master', what prices people could charge, and so on. And this is something that becomes more prominent as we move further along. But guilds could also be effectively cartels of a sort, run by wealthy people to stitch up markets and control labour. So it was apparently with some of the wool guilds.

Yes, this kind of 'proto-capitalism' impacted only a very small percentage of the working population. This is the age of the agrarian economy. But still the fact that it is very much visible this stage was interesting. And we can see it already beginning to spread into other areas that required a significant amount of money, such as mining, or ship building.

Italy in particular was perhaps the most important hub of such activities, because of its dominance in trading (and recall previously that the Italians received a boost here in facilitating movement of people and goods for the crusades). But the reason the Italians defeated their rivals for securing this trade, according to Koenigsberger, was because they had the

most sophisticated commercial techniques; different forms of partnership which allowed them to raise the large amounts of working capital needed for the ships, provisions, goods and wages in overseas ventures that might last many months.

With these partnerships, it was important that merchants be able to ensure each partner could receive the profits or carry the losses of a venture. And so, here we see the origins of 'double entry book keeping'. There is a book specifically about this apparently. Apparently the inventor (called the founder of accounting and book keeping) was one Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk, and a mathematician who taught mathematics to Leonardo Da Vinci of all people.

I want to quote another particularly interesting part here:

With the development of the new commercial techniques there developed also new attitudes of mind. Rational calculation of economic enterprise, a numerical, mathematical, assessment of possibilities; and rational mathematical, commercial methods came to be seen as the recipe for success.

We can draw a link between the coming intellectual renaissance, and the growing rational frame of mind among the intellectuals, and the commercial activities, accounting and banking that was taking place. Following from this, you could make the argument (although Koenigsberger does not say in so many words) that indirectly, the blood spilled by the crusades contributed down the line to the development of rationalist philosophy.

A closing thought: I am reminded of something Koenigsberger does say later in the book about a different case: "The achievements and the tragedies of European and human history cannot be easily separated." (p 279) How true.

On the one hand, if we look to anything we consider "good", and we find great harm. Yet also strangely, when we look at many terrible things (the crusades, or the black death), we can find some positive outcome down the road. There is no point at which we can really draw neat lines and isolate these elements entirely. Instead we see good and evil feeding into each other in a kind of dialectic of unintended and unknowable consequences.

It's like that Treehouse of horrors short in the Simpsons.

Shopkeeper: Ah, perhaps this will please the gentleman. [picks a Krusty the Clown doll] Take this object, but beware it carries a terrible curse.
Homer: [worried] Ooooh, that's bad.
Shopkeeper: But it comes with a free frogurt.
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Shopkeeper: The frogurt is also cursed.
Homer: [worried] That's bad.
Shopkeeper: But you get your choice of topping.
Homer: [relieved] That's good.
Shopkeeper: The toppings contain potassium benzoate. [Homer stares] That's bad.
Homer: Can I go now?

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

OK, an quick entry focusing on just one element: something I didn't cover earlier when I spoke about the transition to the high middle ages: Internationalism vs Regionalism.

This has been another really interesting part of learning about medieval Europe. In the early middle ages, there was a strong tendency towards internationalism for a small section of the population.

For example, specialised craftspeople (such as stone masons) often needed to be itinerant, because there was only so much work for them in any given region given the relatively small size of the economies (particularly in the western and northern kingdoms). Once a cathedral was completed, for example, you'd move on to the next place where a project needed more help. And that next place could be in an entirely different part of Europe.

The literate class in the west (scribes, priests, merchants, and such) also shared a common language in Latin, which they not only wrote, but spoke. In part they were simply inheriting the literary culture of the empire. In part, it was also a result of the internationalism and of the Catholic church. But also, this internationalism again here reflected the underdeveloped nature of the regions. Regional populations and economies were still too small for them to really function as intellectual or artistic hubs in and of themselves.

In other words, the loss of the urban centres in the west - which only very gradually built up to having populations in the tens of thousands - the smallness of the regional economies, these conditions fostered a certain internationalism among artistic and literate people out of necessity. This internationalism contributed to the development of a kind of post-Roman, pan-European culture. For example, a 12th century cathedral built in France and a 12 century cathedral built in Germany could look very similar.

Yet as we move into the high middle ages, regionalism begins to gain dominance. Not to the exclusion of internationalism, but it is now a countering force. As regions began to increase in population, as they grew wealthier, they developed their own kind of gravity, as it were. More craftspeople and intellectuals could work within the borders of a given place. More books were written in regional languages. More intellectuals could find learned company to collaborate with or study under without having to head to Italy or Paris.

This regionalism also had political implications. In the early middle ages, the 'universalist' claims of the imperial title or the Church were dominant. And the Church worked hard to secure its power as something standing above that of empire, working within that framework. Yet as kingdoms grew in power, they could more easily assert their own independence vis. the universalist claims of the Church. This lead in one instance to the French crown squaring off against the Papacy at the opening of the 14th century, with agents of the French king actually capturing and mistreating the then pope such that he died. The Papacy was subsequently moved to Avignon for nearly 70 years, with all 7 popes of that period being French! (Although that I understand that doesn't mean the Papacy was rendered entirely subservient to the French crown, and that Avignon / southern France at that time was a relatively independent region politically and culturally.) This is for Koenigsberger quite symbolic of the growing power (economic / political / intellectual) of the regions.

Some of my own general thoughts on the above phenomena:

In my own mind, I realised I tended to think of 'internationalism' in an overly simplistic way, whereby regional economic development leads to greater specialisation, which leads to greater trade between regions, and in turn fosters an interchange of people and ideas. From this perspective, Europe should be more 'international' as we move into the middle ages, not less. While this may have been true in terms of trade, intellectually and culturally it was (in certain respects if not entirely so) the opposite! And this is really instructive. The viability if you will, of a place to stand on its own feet, culturally, artistically, intellectually, can mean it can afford to be less connected, less international in outlook. (Naturally, this is a complex subject, and there are countervailing tendencies at work. With the printing press, for example, we see an enhancement of internationalism thanks to the ability of people to more easily read what those in other places are writing.)

And indeed, if you look at the world today, you see plenty of examples of this. The Dutch, for example, are famously good at speaking English. And well they should be, given they are a small country. They cannot expect to get far speaking Dutch outside of the Netherlands. Similarly their large companies are very international. I doubt you would be getting a job at one if you spoke no English! In France though it's a different matter. You can get along pretty nicely culturally and economically (and even travelling to quite a few places, like ex-colonies) speaking just French. You could also contrast the international, export-oriented nature of South Korea's music industry to the domestic consumption-oriented music industry of Japan, which has twice the population. Or consider how China's cultural exports in the form of film and music largely remain restricted to their own cultural / linguistic sphere. In part because they can afford for this to be the case. China is big enough. There's no need to sell movies to Americans.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

OK, baby is asleep! Another history post before I go back to work.

Let's talk Russia, as that's fresh on my mind. I wonder if Jubal might have some thoughts on this one too given the historical link between Russia and Byzantium.

Koenigsberger goes into some detail in a few sections on how Russia's social / political structure came to differ fairly markedly from what we see in the west. More specifically, he is offering a kind of explanation of how Russia came to be particularly dominated by autocratic government. I'll list his points below. But by all means I am also keen to hear any counterfactuals or qualifications. I wonder to what extent his analysis holds up today, and how much it may be coloured by the politics of the time in which the book was written (still prior to the fall of the Berlin wall).

But, assuming for now the premise: "Since the medieval period, Russia has been more autocratic than western Europe." Why does Koenigsberger think so? (And again here, we are initially speaking also of 'Russia' before 'Russia' even really exists, so there's an ambiguity here.)

First, early on, there is the form that Christianity took. Koenigsberger mentions Cyril and Methodius, two Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries who went to spread Christianity to the Slavic peoples. For the purpose of translating the bible, they devised a new script known as Glagolitic. This was a precursor to Cyrillic, which incorporated some Glagolitic elements. Koenigsberger point out that Christianity in Slavic regions at this time was received through this filter of what was translated, and what was translated was very scarce. There was lack of access to the kinds of pagan literature or theological commentaries that helped lend more ambiguity or nuance to Latin Christianity. This contributed to Slavic Christianity being relatively more dogmatic or conservative.

Second, the impact of the Mongols. The Mongols were able to dominate Russian territory for quite a long time (I think for some 200 years). Koenigsberger does not develop an argument about any general cultural impact of this (although he notes a few things that the Russian princes learned through collaborating and/or fighting with them, such as the importance of information networks). But something he did point out that I thought was interesting was the significant migration of peasants it caused. For a long time, Moscow was not a particularly developed area. It is remote. It is cold. People were living further down on the plains around the big rivers. But with the coming of the Mongols, many moved further north into regions that were only rarely attacked by Mongol raiding parties. Moscow was once such place. This is not the only reason it turned into a great capital - this was also a political achievement - but it was an important element. However, while these peasants were welcomed into the region, they weren't integrated into the kinds of reciprocal duty / obligation relationships you often see in feudal Europe. They were more or less at the mercy of the Princes.

Third, the lack of separate city-based power units. Something I learned early on this book was how in the west larger cities came to operate under different rules to the rest of a kingdom. Quite early on, cities developed a degree of autonomy, and people living there understood their relationship to each other separately to their relationship as a vassal to their lord. Yet Koenigsberger claims that this kind of 'civic identity' and political / legal independence didn't get a chance to take root in Russia. Novgorod did hold its own for a while, but was eventually conquered and subjugated underneath the rulers in Moscow. Koenigsberger also contrasts how, while houses in western European cities would front on to the street, houses in Russian cities would face inwards towards their own courtyard, and often be surrounded by fences. He suggests this was reflective of that lack of 'civic' mindedness.

Fourth, the later subjugation of the Church under the government. Koenigsberger claims that secular / religious tension in Latin Europe - or to put it differently, the power struggles between the Catholic Church and the different kingdoms - was a source of 'dynamism' that worked against autocratic tendencies / mentalities. Meanwhile, Russia followed the lead of Byzantium, in linking Church and state much closer together. Later, they gained increased independence from the Patriarch of Constantinople, and understood themselves as an independent centre of Orthodox Christianity, like a kind of 'new Byzantium'. Then in the 18th century the Russian government formally took over the Russian Orthodox Church, such that it was like a branch of the state.

So to sum up, we have...

1. An early tendency towards dogmatic interpretations of Christianity.
2. Migrations away from the mongols enhancing the power of the princes vis the peasants.
3. A lack of independent cities.
4. Subjugation of the Church under the government.

I think for Koenigsberger these factors set the scene for what would come later with the empire and then the Soviets.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Huzzah, huzzah. I have at last completed my read of Koenigsberger. I think it took two and a half months to work through a little under 400 pages, but given the newborn baby and also returning to work (and time spent learning book binding) I think that's not too bad a pace at all.

I don't think I can finish all my thoughts up in one post, and I feel I have skipped over much and can't (shan't!) really try to provide a comprehensive summary. But let's see what I can still dredge up from the past few sections, going over The Black Death first, and then The Later Middle Ages, before discussing the final chapter on the Italian Renaissance. I might then close with some Final Thoughts or something. So that's four more posts including this one! Onwards.


The Black Death

So, the great plague (1348-50) apparently wiped out 30%-60% of all Europe? It seems this number has not been significantly revised since Koenigsberger's book came out. Globally 50 million or so died. Which is quite shocking indeed.

Here's some things Koenigsberger has to say on it:

- Spread into Europe from the Asian continental interior via eastern trade routes.

- The growth of the cities (and their unsanitary conditions) helped hasten the spread.

- Of course, this had a huge psychological / cultural impact. He does not expand upon this too much, beyond mentioning a few quotes from the time, the flagellants, and (if I recall) how it is reflected in art and writing. There's an online article that looks at this in a little detail here.

The trauma of the Black Death gave rise to the most popular artistic channel for the representation of death, the Dance of Death. There are indications that first the dance macabre was performed, then poetized, and finally painted. Before the15^th century, the Dance Macabre was traced on walls of churches and charnel houses across Europe, gathering in its train rich and poor and young and old, exemplified by the fresco of Eure-et-Loir. In Europe every victim was danced off to hell no matter what: sudden death was escalated to sudden damnation (Binion, 2004). The dance macabre, based on folk superstition represented by the skeletons themselves, or accompanied with the living had a second social and spiritual lesson, that death is always coupled with the living. In the dance of the death, the corpses often tug or draw the living to death (Cohen, 1982) (Fig. 5).

The Triumph of Death" (Dutch: "De triomf van de Doods"). By Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569 CE). Oil on panel. Made c. 1562 CE.

- Many villages were altogether wiped out. Hundreds in total it seems. Cities also grew smaller and poorer. Overall the population took centuries to recover to where it was prior to the great plague (although population growth had been stalling prior to it, with Europe already seemingly hitting the limits of what could be secured from the land with the technology / techniques available at that time. There was also a great famine prior to the black death.)

- Economically / politically / socially, the drop in labour supply increased its value, decreased the value of land, and also helped to decrease the cost of things like clothing. So while this was a catastrophe for people, there was also a positive legacy with respects to the material conditions of the common people and their descendents.

- The above shift in turn helped to hasten the demise of feudalistic relations. The increased value of labour meant it was easier for serfs to find better conditions (and free or very cheap land) in other regions. The lords / land owners were incentivised to compete for labour, hastening a shift towards (if I understand rightly) the end of serfdom in general. Peasants increasingly came to have "permanent, inheritable tenures" or temporary yet "usually long-term" leases. Koenigsberger emphasises that this development was already underway, with the plague simply hastening it.

- And furthermore, this shift in relations helped to further fuel the rise of popular revolts, that would continue to occur throughout Europe until their culmination in the age of the great revolutions in France and Russia. The first big regional revolt hit maritime Flanders between 1323-1328, twenty years prior to the Black Death. But in the years following we see such cases increase. For example, with the peasants revolt in England in 1381. One of the cries of the peasants at this time was for an abolition of serfdom. It might seem strange that the situation could be improving for the peasants, and yet this lead to revolts. Yet I suppose psychologically? the expectations for a better lot were now possible, and this was what lead to clashes with the elites. Koenigsberger says that "modern sociologists" refer to this as "disappointment of expectations in a generally improving situation."

- These revolts took on a religious character (or utilised Christian thinking to critique the status quo.)

When Adam delved and Eve span
Who was then the gentleman?

(1381 - the England Peasants.)

This was quite alarming for authorities: "Obedience to authority was central to all morality, and rebellion was the fruit of the most deadly of the seven deadly sins, pride."

-  Still, it was not until the 15th-16th centuries that the scale of these revolts really became serious for authorities.
 
- It was not just the relation of liege lord and serf that the plague impacted, but also the relation between lord and vassal. But this was also an acceleration of a trend already present. Here we see the rise of what some historians have called "bastard feudalism", where money was paid in lieu of military service. This was a shift towards a relationship of "patron and client", rather than lord and vassal. This was highly flexible and adaptable, but also more open to corruption.

- The plague struck repeatedly in waves until as late as the early 19th century! Judging purely from this fact, I imagine that (apart from gradual spread of immunity), the improved sanitation of cities by this period helped to put a stop to it. But I'm just guessing.

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Woops, and another two weeks pass! I better push ahead on finishing this series before my few remaining impressions have been scattered to the wind.

OK, as per the program I laid out... let's talk The Later Middle Ages (1300-1500s) for a bit.

I think I've already mentioned quite a few things that overlap with this subject. Particularly in the last post on the impact of the black death on speeding up the shift away from feudalism. But also in the discussion about regionalism growing stronger over the earlier internationalism, and the way in which Italy was beginning to transform economically and culturally (we will come back to that when talking about the renaissance of course).

This is a topic that I want to focus on when I get around to final thoughts, but naturally enough the beginning of the "early modern" period is somewhat arbitrary. Or perhaps it is better to say, it is a gray distinction. To say that there is a "modern" and an "early modern", vs a "middle ages" and "late middle ages" is meaningful and useful. But people at the time understood the changes that were happening slowly (some aware sooner than others), and used different framing. Certainly, nobody flipped a switch and changed peoples minds or conditions of living overnight. The later middle ages is a time when already there is much that can strike us as quite modern, or at least, much that is already on the way towards a new form of living and thinking.

One example of the above point would be the rise of representative government. A subject which Koenigsberger spends a bit of time discussing. I am going to skip this topic. It's important I grant, but fairly complex. I'll simply note that, as feudal relations changed, so did means of gathering money (see above black death subject). Kings sought to enlist the aid of legislative bodies to tax people in new ways. And once these bodies were granted the status and autonomy to do so, they "took on a life of their own". The ways in which representative government was established, and the extent to which it wrested power from the monarchies, would vary in country to country.

What I want to focus on instead is technology. Something that had a decisive impact in shifting the conditions of peoples lives, as well as their access to information (and from this, their understanding of politics, religion and the world).

Here are the big ones:

- The Carrack (lanteen sails integrated with square sails). Lanteen sails are those triangular shaped ones that can tack against the wind. In the classic big ships of the Napoleonic era we see them at the front and back of the rigging, although sometimes they can also be rigged up high.) They apparently work more in the form of an airplane wing, with the airflow "pulling" at the sail. Apparently lanteen sails were developed by the byzantines, who drew on the techniques used in Arab dhows (and Koenigsberger  suggests that these in turn were probably inspired by Chinese junks. I wonder if this has been demonstrated clearly in the decades since publication.). Although I studied sailing (with a decent amount of actual practice) in high school, I had forgotten this term (or never properly learned it!)

Forward facing square sails, meanwhile, are those where the wind simply "pushes" at the sail. These are more powerful, but also more restrictive. Best when you have the wind at your back (think, the sails of the Romans, the Greeks, and the Vikings).

In the 1200s, the carrack was born. This was a ship that combined lanteen sails and square sails. A precursor to the great ocean going Spanish and Portuguese caravels of the age of exploration. This was a ship that could travel more efficiently than any previously made. All that it needed now was a means of navigation...

- The magnetic compass.

Here comes another decisive Chinese invention (if we grant that the inspiration for lanteen sails were also originally from Chinese junks). Apparently it dates back to Han dynasty China (2000 years ago), where a kind of "lodestone" was used for land navigation. Over time this was refined to a magnetised needle (1000 years ago), with use in maritime navigation mentioned by the 12th century. A hundred years or so later they began to be adopted in Europe.

Combined with the carrack, the Europeans now had the means with which to travel around the entire world.

- Gunpowder

Yet another Chinese invention. Although the military applications were apparently refined in the Arab world. Naturally the military applications are what we can readily imagine. Canons gradually (and then quite suddenly) changed the face of warfare, and the usefulness (and shape / form / function) of things like castles / forts. Yet what I didn't appreciate was the manner in which this new technology helped to usher in changes in the making of metals and chemicals. Sophisticated "mechanisms, cogwheels, gears, suction pumps" etc were all spurred on by this development. Downstream of it we find the power-driven bellows (around 1400), which allowed for iron to be fully melted for the first time (instead of reducing it to blooms that had to be beaten into shape I think). This laid the path for cheap, mass produced iron. Truly a society-transforming development. That said, iron continued to remain relatively scarce and expensive for centuries.

- Paper. Eyeglasses. Printing.

Koenigsberger treats these three together, due to their interrelated nature. With paper, we have yet another Chinese invention. Eyeglasses, an Italian one. Printing? Of course, first invented in China. Yet its separate re-invention in 15th Germany seems to have been unrelated. With these three inventions, it now became possible to mass produce books. An event Koenigsberger refers to as: "...the greatest advance in human communications since the invention of writing."

Again I certainly learned something here. For while of course one impact of this development was the availability of texts, which is obvious enough, something somewhat less obvious that I did not appreciate was how it helped to standardize the texts themselves. This meant that "for the first time" readers could feel that they were actually reading what the author had written, and not the cribbed, 2nd, 3rd or 4th hand, annotated or misunderstood version of a thing. This meant that: "International dialogue on religious, philosophical, scientific and literary topics underwent a 'quantum leap' in volume and intensity."

So, initially in the European early middle ages we had an internationalism, born of necessity, where itinerant intellectuals would converse in Latin. A small community sustained by the whole (western) continent. Then, in the high middle ages, we see the rise of regionalism, and separate regions become capable (intellectually and economically) of sustaining their own "centers of gravity". Then, in the late middle ages, internationalism makes a come back, via the printing press, and the capacity for everybody to have access to the same books.

Another impact of this development was the accessibility of literature (in pamphlet form) for "the common man", concerning religious topics, or political topics. We can readily imagine the way that this helped spur the protestant reformation of the 16th century.


The impact of China...

Looking at the above, it seems as though the impact of Chinese technology on European history at this time is really quite profound. It lead to the expansion of the external frontiers of the ocean, and the internal frontiers of the mind via written communication. It also helped transform material conditions via metallurgy and chemistry, with the development of clockwork mechanisms, iron smelting, and so on.

Of course, these developments in turn also helped bring Chinese thinking to Europe. With their new sailing technology, the Jesuits could reach the "far east", and began to bring back and translate intellectual works. These ideas then could be disseminated via paper, beginning to reach the intellectuals of Europe in the 17th century. It's a funny thing to think that the technologies of China, running ahead, then in turn became a vehicle by which the thinking of China could be disseminated.

Incidentally, here's a book I'd like to read at some point looking at the impact of Chinese thinking on Leibniz. Now of course as you know, the binary system itself, which I am using right now to type these words on a computer (or you, to read them - if anybody is reading this haha) was invented by Leibniz. But this binary logic was arguably inspired by his reading of the I Ching.

But that is another topic! Onwards.

[Jubal]

Oh wow I'm a lot behind on this. Some random thoughts on the remainder:

Transition to the High Middle Ages

• Worth thinking about what we mean when we say things like Pan-European in terms of trends, because a lot of the time it's very much Pan-Western-European.

The Crusades

• Note that it wasn't just Turkish princes who were fighting amongst themselves during the Crusade period: there were Christian Armenian minor rulers and other local potentates in the mix as well.
• What is or isn't "The Seljuk Empire" is complicated. The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and the Seljuks in Persia last well after the First Crusade
• It may be true that if the entire region had been unified the First Crusade would have failed, but also that wasn't necessarily very common in any case.
• The "what if Outremer had lasted" thing is sort of interesting but should be taken in the context that this region had then and has now lots of religious minorities: the Druze, Maronites, etc are still decidedly separate cultures that have lived side by side but remained separate for centuries, so I don't think one should necessarily assume cultures naturally blend over time (though they do learn from each other and adapt and individuals inevitably move between them).
• The "quarrelsome young men" reading of the Crusades has generally fallen out of favour. Crusading was really expensive, and often it was actually senior members of families who went not the young landless sons that were treated as a more major explanation when Koenigsberger was writing.
• The Sovereign Military Order of Malta are perhaps the largest descendant of the Knights Hospitaller, and still has a formal special auxiliary volunteer corps which operates within the Italian army, with a focus on medical functions. In the mid 20th century they also briefly had an air force due to trying to circumvent some post-WWII treat shenanigans.

The C12-C13

• I'd argue that one of the things we should learn about things like capitalism is that elements of it have existed in lots of human societies: the thing that makes a society capitalist is that privately held capital becomes the dominant mode of deciding who makes economic control and investment decisions. Capital - in the strict sense of the ability to invest - happens in any human society that has enough investment to do so. The USSR had capital, but the capital was held by the state and decisions on its deployment were made by the state: capital is universal, capitalists are culturally specific.
• The most interesting lack for me in this post re development of thought and commerce is how much is coming in already from re-engagement with ancient text and how much is coming in from engagement with Byzantium and the Arabic world. One of the things I'd strongly think of as being associated with this period is the development of Scholasticism in the proper sense, the re-engagement with Justinianic law in the west and its adoption as one of the "authorities" (texts which in the Scholastic tradition could not be wrong, such that if they appeared to disagree you could create some really interesting and sometimes legally productive mental gymnastics to bring them into agreement).

Internationalism and regionalism

• Yeah, this is a really interesting/productive area of thinking especially re cultural production.
• That said, thinking about the depth of internationalism is interesting. The later Middle Ages develop regional cultures, but the stuff that is internationalised drills a lot deeper into society. Obvious examples: early medieval bishops can make saints and endorse other bishops without recourse to Rome, both things that would be out of the question by 1500 and ever since that point. There may be more of a regional counterbalance, but the later medieval church is trying to do so much more in terms of building a shared dogma and belief system that actually reaches down as far as the laity. The early medieval Church would certainly have had wildly more heterodoxy in it (heterodoxy being "not officially believed in but not actively treated as heresy"), because the lines for correct belief were much looser at that point.
• There are some lovely examples of that medieval internationalism around the place: one of my favourites being the poem of Pangur Bán, which I've seen the original of, which was written by an Irish monk living in Constance in the C9th. Some communities travelled a long way even outside that sense of intellectual internationalism, though - it's not always clear why e.g. Armenian clerics turned up in bits of medieval Western and Northern Europe in this period, but there's plenty of records of it occurring.

Russia

• I'm not a Russia specialist, but I'm a little sceptical of Koenigsberger here (who I don't think was any more a Russia specialist than I am!).
• Russian clerics throughout the Middle Ages could have used (and did use) Cyrillic, but the real international ecclesiastical language for them was Greek, which they absolutely weren't cut off from and which provided at least as rich a vein of ancient and philosophical texts as Latin. I don't think the argument that Slavic languages led to them being cut off really stands up to what we know about their extensive international engagement.
• I don't know about peasant movements in Russia in this period, but it would seem strange if there was a large movement of peasants primarily due to Mongol raiding (as opposed to, say, climatic shifts): the Steppes already had raiding steppe peoples well before the Mongols ever turned up. It's not clear to me why the Mongols would be such a huge change here (they were absolutely meaningfully different as an army, but an efficient army and an inefficient one raid poorly defended peasants in fairly similar ways). I'd buy more the idea that urbanites fled to new centres as the Mongols targeted major settlements.
• The more effective subjugation of church by state is a thing, though I think it becomes decidedly more effective in the Early Modern period and I think Koenigsberger may be reading that backwards into the Middle Ages a little. It's important to note than any of this centralisation stuff is really happening at the post-Mongol tail of the Middle Ages, and the 'Third Rome' theory of Moscow as a grand religious-political centre is a 16th century idea.
• I'd need to think about this some more, and this reminds me I should read more on this period, I have a decent more recent book on Medieval Russia by Janet Martin but it's a while since I read that and even that was written in 1995.

The Black Death

• "It might seem strange that the situation could be improving for the peasants, and yet this lead to revolts." - it can also often be that breaches of the societal order become more common on the part of the aristocracy in these situations. If you won't leave anyway because there's no better deal available, there's no incentive for the landlord to take measures to stop you doing that or to squeeze harder on rents and duties, or try to get control over more of the land that was previously common land, to try to retain his lifestyle. So opportunity can for a lot of individuals mean backlash from the elites.
• "These revolts took on a religious character (or utilised Christian thinking to critique the status quo.)" - I think the latter is very important here. Christianity is the language of thinking for Europe in this period and that includes political thought and how it's imagined.

The Later Middle Ages

• I've kind of got less to say on the movement of Chinese technology, except to note the importance of not just the technology reaching, but also its refinement and application to problems. Famously, Europe invented open-valve steam power in the Roman period, but it wasn't until a situation came around where it was used next to a big source of fuel that needed such an engine that it was refined (as happened in C17-18 coal mines).
• I wonder (and I'm speculating way out of my area here) if gunpowder is sort of a similar case: fireworks and rocketry and hand cannon are developed in China, but it's the Ottomans who develop the arquebus and western Europeans who develop the matchlock. Might this have been because western elites fought from the front more, meaning there was more incentive to develop accurate firearms that could pierce heavier armour?

[BeerDrinkingBurke]

Thanks so much Jubal! Very enlightening as always!! Particularly appreciate your highlighting of those areas where you think Koenigsberger is out of date / speaking speculatively. 

Your definition of capitalism seems very reasonable to me. Concerning its universality, it seems to me that the "ability to invest" also presupposes a certain kind of social system where "profits" can be returned on "investments". And that this connects with matters such as religious / social structures, debt and money, land ownership, etc. When does "wealth" turn into something that can be freed up from other constraints and used purely to acquire more potential wealth? It seems like something different to, for example, the amassing of land by ancient elites by taking advantage of their wealth and the power it gave them over indebted peasants in a bad harvest year. If we compare the wool merchants of Flanders to, for example, silk merchants in China in a similar period, what differences might exist? I -suspect- that one difference would be the way in which permission to create silk (among many other products) was regulated by the government, a kind of "award" given to certain families that was linked to relations we might somewhat problematically refer to as "feudal" - in other words, non-financial relations of mutual benefit / obligation. 

[Jubal]

I'd say that profit can be returned on investment in almost any economic system. Amassing land doesn't count, you're right: land isn't really a capital good, it's a resource. But in the simplest sense, a spade is a capital good, as is an Archimedes Screw or a Shaduf. These are durable goods that contribute to further productivity, and in early - even pre-currency - economies elites often do control some of these sorts of investments. If your local Big Man Elite or Temple Elite owns some land and controls the people who farm it, and they direct those people to build an irrigation system, that's capital investment in its most basic form, and they get the profits in the form of increased or less fragile agricultural output.

So the question then becomes one of who gets to control that sort of investment and why. Money can only be used for investment insofar as there's a social contract allowing it to buy capital goods: it's always the capital goods themselves that are the actual point of capital investment. In this sense the transition to capitalism is one where a) capital ownership becomes more important and rentierism/rent-seeking less important (though still enormously important) in the economy, and b) direction of capital is done by capitalists, people who get to own capital goods through a state-constructed legal framework and have a legally defined system to let them fungibly expend their profits on more capital goods. In broad terms I think point a is driven by technological shifts, point b is driven by the specifics of the societies developing capitalistically, though these things obviously interact.

But that doesn't mean all the other societies don't have capital and investment: it's just directed in different ways by different people, and in premodern societies it's often less dominant. The granting of a silk production license for example isn't the bit of the process that involves capital - setting up an actual silk farm and buying all the mulberry trees etc is the capital investment. But if the primary bit of the economics is that the person who gets to direct that capital investment is someone who is picked by the state because of a patronage network, then we have a different sort of social structure. Not that what we think of as capitalism ever frees itself from other societal obligations, patronage networks, or most of all rentierism either. Indeed one of its underlying contradictions is that the individual capitalist who is making money by risking money on capital investments is almost always ultimately seeking to create the conditions where they become a rentier who is making money by acquiring legal rights to various things people will always need (eg land/resources/housing/certain intellectual property) and then using those to extract surplus.

And obviously a lot of those people are and always have been a mix of both: we can imagine a moderately wealthy early modern minor aristocrat who uses his hereditary English estate's rents (rent-seeking) to get some surplus, invests that in ships (capital good) to fuel the fur trade in Canada, makes money, and then uses that money plus influence from his London club connections (non-capital patronage) to buy a tobacco plantation in Virginia where he both makes the capital investment in seeds, farm tools, crates, shipping, etc for a tobacco farming business and then can obtain rents from people living in the area he's purchased.

But there's probably a whole other "what is capitalism anyway" discussion to be had here