Ideas

by Peter Watson

  The second knock-on effect of the Easter controversy was the development of a new form of literature which, although largely forgotten now, was for centuries the most sacred form of all writing after the Bible itself. This was the computus. Computus, as a word, originally meant more or less what it means now–any kind of calculation. But in the Middle Ages it referred exclusively to the set of tables, compiled by mathematicians, which predicted the date of future Easters. These tables were sacred for reasons that were obvious to the medieval mind: the movement of the heavens was the most important and awesome mystery facing humankind and the fact that the rhythms of the sun and the moon could now be harmonised meant that God had revealed–to mathematicians at least–part of his grand design for the universe.88 The attempts to date Easter had therefore caused a major mystery of the heavens to be revealed to humankind. For the faithful, this was another sign that Christianity must be true.

  Between Augustine and the Easter controversy, the character of Christianity changed decisively, according to such historians as Peter Brown and R. A. Markus. During the years of persecution, with martyrdom so widespread, and with early (poor) Christians expecting the Second Coming at any moment, there was less emphasis on this life, on the Bible, on liturgy, on art. This was the era of the cult of the saints, which grew out of martyrdom, and in which saints and saints’ relics were regarded by Christians as the main stimulants to faith and proof of Christianity’s power and veracity, and yet which many pagans looked upon with horror. For these early Christians, chastity, self-denial and monasticism were the ideal. However, between say 400, roughly when Augustine was writing, and the 560s, when the last vestiges of paganism are recorded, Christianity came to terms with sex, and turned itself into a more communal–and more urban–faith. As the Second Coming receded in importance, as it seemed less and less likely to be imminent, the Bible came to the fore, the Christianisation of time helped the liturgy to expand throughout the year, and the Christianisation of geography, especially the eastern Mediterranean, created a raft of holy sites, pilgrimage routes, and with it a greater sense of history. The church’s communal and urban character was helped by the depredations of the barbarians and Christianity began to take on a form recognisably similar to today.89

  Whatever Christianity’s true role in the decline of the Roman empire, German historians in particular have favoured Gibbon’s idea that the barbarians were the main event. They have conceived the so-called Völkerwanderung, ‘the age of barbarian invasions’, which, they argue, was the chief element in this era of history and produced a significant twist on Graeco-Roman classical civilisation.90 Combined with Christianity, they say that this was ‘a cataclysmic event, a sharp break in European history’.91 This view is supported by the very simple–but undeniable–observation of A. H. M. Jones, who points out that the whole of the Roman empire did not fall in the fifth century: it continued to survive in the east in what we know as the Byzantine empire, until the Turkish conquest in the middle of the fifteenth century.92 These observations are important, says Jones, ‘for they demonstrate that the empire did not, as some modern historians have suggested, totter into its grave from senile decay, impelled by a gentle push from the barbarians. Most of the internal weaknesses…were common to both halves of the empire’.93 If Christianity weakened the empire internally, since the religion was stronger and more divisive in the east, why did the west fall and the east continue to stand? The main difference, as Jones saw it, was that ‘down to the end of the fifth century…the East was strategically less vulnerable and…subjected to less pressure from external enemies.’ In short, the barbarian invasion was the main cause of the fall of Rome.94

  ‘The origin of the word barbaros is early Greek, and it gained three central meanings in the course of classical antiquity which it has retained to the present day: an ethnographical, a political and an ethical definition.’95 For example, Homer used it in the Iliad, referring to the Carians in Asia Minor; he said they ‘spoke barbarically’. He meant he could not understand them, but he did not describe them as ‘mute’, as others in antiquity would dismiss foreigners, nor did he liken their language to ‘the twittering of birds or the barking of dogs’, as many others did, from China to Spain.96 As time passed, however, the Greeks’ view of themselves changed as their successes in philosophy, science, the arts and government began to ripen. They now started to think of themselves as the ‘ideal people’ and their enemies as lesser souls. In 472 BC, during the Persian wars, Aeschylus dismissed the enemy as ‘barbarians’ partly because ‘they spoke like horses’, but mainly because he thought their political traditions were primitive–they were little more than slaves subjugated to an oriental military tyrant, and did not enjoy the freedoms of the Greeks.97 ‘Barbarian’ was no longer a neutral term, but an insult.

  The meaning changed again during the Hellenistic period, when Greek culture and Roman government existed alongside each other in the eastern Mediterranean. Now, as men began to be judged by their humanity, according to their ethical and social habits, rather than by their military exploits, the term barbarian came to mean people who were raw, uncultivated, cruel.98 According to Arno Borst, this was how Cicero understood the word ‘barbarus’, which is why the literate, Hellenic-educated Romans maligned the Christians, calling them primitive, enemies of the empire, barbarians. (The early Christians were proud to accept the insult: ‘Yea, we are barbarians,’ said Clement of Alexandria.99)

  All of this, however, paled alongside the invasions of the Germanic peoples which overran the newly-Christianised Roman empire in the fifth century. The term barbarian was not only revived but ‘magnified into the satanic’. ‘The advancing Germanic tribes spoke incomprehensible dialects, had military power, were as robust as peasants and disdained urban civilisation; and their pagan superstitions rejected Christianity.’100 The attitude of Christian Romans was summed up by Cassiodorus, around 550, who found a hidden meaning in the very word barbarus: it was, he said, ‘made up of barba (beard) and rus (flat land); for barbarians did not live in cities, making their abodes in the fields, like wild animals’.101

  The very idea of the ‘Middle Ages’ as a ‘dark’ period of history was first expressed by the Italian humanists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374), for example, confessed to ‘a stronger attachment and a closer spiritual kinship’ with the great classical writers than to his more immediate medieval predecessors.102 ‘The disdain he expressed for the allegedly idle speculations and bad Latin of medieval authors soon became the fashionable slogan of the humanist movement.’ The first man actually to use the term media tempestas, or Middle Age, was Giovanni Andrea, bishop of Aleria in Corsica, in a history of Latin poetry, published in 1469.

  Our view of the dark ages is now somewhat different. The densest of the medieval centuries, between AD 400 and AD 1000, are recognised as the true dark ages–and dark for two reasons. One, because comparatively few documents survive to illumine them. Two, because so few of those monuments of art and literature as do survive can be considered as major achievements. But Europe by the thirteenth century, say, boasted great cities, thriving agriculture and trade, sophisticated government and legal systems. There were many universities and cathedrals spread across the continent, and copious masterpieces of literature, art and philosophy to rival those of any other period. The chronology of the ‘medieval millennium’ therefore needs to be adjusted accordingly. We now recognise the early Middle Ages (the dark ages) and the high medieval period, when many of the foundations of the modern world were laid down.

  Just how dark these dark ages were is instructive. The true medieval mind was very different from our own way of thinking. Even Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor and the greatest of medieval rulers, was illiterate.103 By 1500 the old Roman roads were still the best in Europe. Most of Europe’s major harbours were unusable until at least the eighth century.104 Among the lost arts was bricklaying: ‘In all of Germany, England, Holland and Scand
inavia,’ says William Manchester, ‘virtually no stone buildings, except cathedrals, were raised for ten centuries.’105 The horse collar, harness and stirrup, all invented in China, much earlier, did not exist in Europe until around 900. Horses and oxen, though available, could hardly be used. The records of the English coroners show that homicides in the dark ages were twice as frequent as death by accident and that only one in a hundred murderers was ever brought to justice. (The threat of death was also widely used in the spread of Christianity. In conquering Saxon rebels the emperor Charlemagne gave them a choice between baptism and execution. When they hesitated, he had 4,500 beheaded in a single morning.106) Trade was hampered by widespread piracy, agriculture was so inefficient that the population was never fed adequately, the name exchequer emerged to describe the royal treasury because the officials were so deficient in arithmetic they were forced to use a chequered cloth as a kind of abacus when making calculations.107 As well as being dangerous, unjust and unchanging, the medieval way of life was also invisible and silent. ‘The medieval mind had no ego.’ Noblemen had surnames but this was less than 1 per cent of the population. Because so few inhabitants ever left the village in which they were born, there was in any case no need. Most of the villages had no name either. With violence so common it is no surprise to learn that people huddled together in communal homes, married fellow villagers and were so insular that local dialects developed which were incomprehensible to people living only a few miles away.

  The descriptions which the Roman writers left of the peoples of temperate Europe had some definite limitations. They were generally written in a military context, and they were written as outsiders–none of the Latin authors ever lived in an Iron Age village, nor did they travel among foreigners as merchants. They perceived a fundamental difference between their literate civilisations and the barbarians but they drew two different conclusions. At times they portrayed barbarians as uncouth, uncivilised savages, exceptionally strong and wild, and childlike in many respects. Caesar observed that the Germans were less civilised even than the Celts, lived in smaller communities, in landscapes less transformed by cultivation and had less highly developed religious practices. They had no permanent leaders but elected temporary chiefs for military escapades. The further north these people lived, the more extreme they were. At other times, however, they were idealised as simple, noble people, unspoiled by sophisticated lifestyles.108

  When the classical texts were rediscovered in Renaissance times (see below, Chapter 18), preserved as copies in European monasteries, their descriptions were accepted as objective accounts but, as Peter Wells has shown, there are now good grounds for querying this. The main thrust of Caesar’s account, for example, is that the Germans lived east of the Rhine and that the Celts lived to the west. Yet there is no reason to suppose that either the Celts or the Germans felt that they belonged to a common people, or that they saw themselves as members of a super-regional population. Caesar’s reliability may be gauged from his description of the unusual creatures in the German forests, among them the unicorn and the elk, ‘an animal without leg joints’. Because this meant the elk could not raise itself from the ground, and had to sleep standing up, the recommended way of catching one was to saw part-way through a tree. Then, when the elk leant against the tree, it fell over, and the animal fell with it, becoming easy prey.109

  Our understanding of the early Middle Ages is in fact now a mixture of nineteenth-century philology and late twentieth-century archaeology. The terms ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ are artificial creations by philologists based on a study of known languages from later times: Breton and Irish, for Celtic; English, German and Gothic for German. As Patrick Geary puts it, ‘Barbarians existed, when they existed at all, as a theoretical category but not as part of a lived experience.’110 In the case of Celtic languages the earliest traces are inscriptions written in Greek in southern Gaul, as early as the third century BC. Personal names are mentioned and they are very similar to those mentioned by Caesar two hundred years later.111 So far as Germanic is concerned, the earliest evidence comes in the form of runes, short messages written in characters made up of straight lines, and dating from the end of the second century AD.112 The distribution of early Celtic in Gaul, and runes in northern continental Europe, do suggest a general geographical distinction between those who spoke Celtic and German at the time the Romans extended north and west. Herodotus said that the Keltoi lived around the headwaters of the Danube (i.e., in the Alps in what is now Switzerland) and archaeology has linked them with the culture known as Early La Tène. This was discovered at the east end of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland in the run-up to the First World War. Excavations revealed a predominantly wooden culture: wooden piles (the remains of houses?), two timber causeways and a quantity of tools and weapons of bronze, iron and wood. Several objects bore curvilinear patterns which have since become the hallmark of La Tène art everywhere from central Europe, to Ireland, to the Pyrenees.113

  Recent anthropological evidence suggests that the very presence of powerful empires themselves cause changes among the people who occupy the fringes. To begin with, says Patrick Geary, barbarians consisted of small communities living in villages along rivers, sea coasts and clearings in forests, from the Black to the North Seas.114 There were clans, with incest taboos, who came together for defence. They had divine genealogies and elected headmen for specific occasions, such as war (‘barracks emperors’).115 They didn’t think of themselves as Celts, Franks or Alemanni, until the empire forced such defensive identity upon them. (Franci, which means ‘band’, and Alemanni, ‘all men’, are Germanic words, which the Romans can only have learned from the groups themselves, or their neighbours.116) The anthropological evidence also shows that, broadly speaking, hitherto amorphous peoples, when presented with a threat, are forced together into ‘tribes’, groups who coalesce around a leader and acquire territorial claims.117 There is some evidence that this is what happened near the edges of the Roman empire. Analysis of pottery, for example, shows that before the time of Caesar the communities of Germany had broadly similar pottery, ornaments and tools, and burial practices, but these varied quite considerably from one (small) region to another. (This is known to archaeologists as the Jastorf culture.118) At the time of the Roman expansion, however, and over the next centuries, this pattern changed and both pottery and burial practices became more uniform along wider regional lines. It appears that the presence of a nearby imperial power did indeed have the effect of ‘solidifying’ the tribes into larger and less diverse units. Around the time of the Gallic wars, at the turn of the second century, new and considerably larger settlements were established, of which Feddersen Wierde and Flögeln, both in Lower Saxony, are well-studied examples. The archaeology also shows that the peoples on the edge of empire began imitating the Romans in their burial practices, interring men with their weapons, even their spurs.119

  About three dozen sites have now been excavated along the frontier of the Roman empire, a broadly north-west to south-east axis, as delineated by the Rhine and Danube rivers.120 This has produced a whole raft of new information about the social organisation of the ‘barbarians’, about their beliefs, their art and their thought. In the first century BC, the barbarians are described by Caesar, and by Tacitus around AD 100, in a very different manner to the way they are portrayed by third-century writers. The earlier authors described smaller, tribal groups of people, inhabiting small localities. The third-century groups are much larger and better organised–tribal confederations. The Romans themselves had helped bring this about: they trained foreigners as auxiliaries, and the empire created a demand for goods, so that provincial centres expanded to cater to this market. Centres such as Jakuszowice, Gudme and Himlingøje grew up, though the best studied is Runder Berg, one of fifty hilltop forts on the border of the empire in south-west Germany. Here the archaeological evidence shows that the fort was occupied by an Alamannic king and his followers. Workshops in the fort produced not on
ly weapons, but bronze and gold ornaments, carved bone objects and gaming pieces. There was also an abundance of late Roman pottery and glassware, imported from Gaul, west of the Rhine and at least ninety miles away.121

  The Celts worshipped in sacred groves or nemetona but did not have elaborate temples to house images of their deities. Dio Cassius wrote that the Britons had sanctuaries dedicated to Andraste, goddess of victory.122 ‘These groves were dread places, held in great awe and approached only by the priesthood.’123 Reconstruction of such places of worship as have been found in the Germanic lands show them to have been modelled on Gallo-Roman temples. At Empel, on the south bank of the Maas river in Holland, metal fibulae and other objects indicate worship of the deity Hercules Magusenus, a typical combination of Roman and indigenous identities. Weapons and horse-riding equipment were left at these sanctuaries. Deposits of objects in water was another variant in ritual. The source of the Seine in eastern France was a site where wooden sculptures of human figures and human body parts were left, dedicated to the pre-Roman goddess Sequana. Wells were centres of ritual in the same way.124 Gods worshipped by the barbarians also included Sirona, goddess of warm springs and healing (Moselle, Rhine; Sul or Sulis in Bath, England), Epona, a Celtic horse goddess, Nehalennia (North Sea coast of Holland), a goddess of seafaring, and the mother goddesses, Matronae Anfaniae and Matronae Vacallinehae, in the Rhineland.125 Tacitus tells us in Germania that the Germans had only three seasons: spring, summer and winter. In fact, they had a six-fold year divided into sixty-day ‘tides’, or double months. The year started at the beginning of winter with a feast equivalent to the Celtic Samhain.126 Runes began to appear in the first or second century AD, the prevailing view now being that this was a deliberate attempt to devise a system of writing comparable to the Latin alphabet, as a result of cross-cultural contact between the barbarians and the Latin-speaking Romans.127